So against George’s wishes, they sent Charlie Burger and Samuel Shoemaker on foot—no saddle horses left—to find Eddy and remind him of the Donners’ earlier generosity. Beg, if necessary. Tamsen almost voiced her objection to the plan, sure more than ever that the shadow creatures were out in the woods, and that this was just another invitation for them to close in. But seeing the necessity, she once again remained silent, choking back the warnings like swallowed smoke. They were sending two men, after all, and both would be armed. They would be safe enough. They had to be.
Tamsen thought wildly that perhaps the men would bring Stanton back with them, too. Even after all the hatred between them—she had certainly moved on ages ago from the longing and the craving she had felt around him in the early weeks of the journey—she still felt something. Despite the way he’d scolded her, almost jealously, after Keseberg came after him with her gun. Stanton was, quite simply, the kind of man you could trust, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that no one did.
In the meantime, Jacob’s older boys started pulling the cargo out of the damaged wagon.
While they worked, Tamsen took the younger children into the field. It was swampy where the wagons stood, but beyond a stand of scrubby pines there was a proper meadow. Tamsen sent the girls to pick wildflowers for her mixtures. As she supervised, she looked to the white-capped mountain range visible in the near horizon, looming larger than ever. It was pretty here, not a bad place to remain for a time, but she thought fleetingly of James Reed. He would have insisted they needed to press on for California, and he would have been right. Winter could close off the passes any day.
She looked again at the gathering darkness of the sky. They were, even now, at the mercy of its whims.
She heard her husband cry out in pain, followed by men’s voices swelling in panic. She ran back to the wagons, calling the children to follow her. She found George kneeling beside the wagon, his face white with pain and shiny with sweat, his arm disappeared behind one of the wheels. Burger and Shoemaker, the two teamsters, had not yet returned with Eddy. The rest of the men had jammed a long branch under the wagon bed and were leaning on the far end.
“Hang on there, George,” Jacob said. He faced the others. “One, two, three—that’s it, put all your weight on it.”
The pole slipped out of position once, then twice, amid a lot of cursing and groaning, but finally the end of the pole bit and managed to hold up the wagon bed long enough for George to free himself, falling backward onto the mud.
He raised his right hand, his left hand circling the wrist for support. Tamsen nearly fainted; it looked like he was wearing a bloody mitten, his hand was so chewed up. It was a paddle of mashed, pulpy flesh drenched in blood. Her husband’s eyes were rolled back in his head, nearly unconscious.
Tamsen dropped to her knees beside him. “Bring me some clean water! Tell Betsy to put some water on to boil! Milt,” she called to one of their teamsters, “take the children away, they shouldn’t see this. And have Elitha fetch the satchel with my medicines and Leanne tear fresh bandages.”
She worked on him for the better part of an hour. Mercifully, he’d passed out so she didn’t need to worry about hurting him further. She cleaned the open flesh with water and then the very last of their alcohol. The hardest part was bandaging it up so that the pieces would heal correctly. She didn’t want to leave him crippled. Jacob paced behind her the entire time while the other hired men moved away, spooked. “We were using the pole to hold up the wagon bed and it slipped,” Jacob explained as Tamsen tried to make sense of the crushed fingers.
The first fat wet drops fell from the sky as she was finishing up. They were not quite rain, not quite snow. “We’d better set up the tents,” Tamsen said to her brother-in-law. “This is as far as we get today.” She wondered, but didn’t ask aloud, just how far ahead the others had gotten by now.
They hobbled the last remaining oxen to graze and set up the tents under a huge old tree with broad branches that made a natural shelter. They tried to make George as comfortable as possible, propping his hand in place with pillows.
“He’ll be wanting some of your laudanum when he comes to,” Jacob noted.
Burger and Shoemaker still had not returned by the time the sky had completely darkened. Tamsen tried to banish the worst from her mind. They had a rifle; no shots had been heard. Surely if they’d encountered any danger, they would have at least tried to defend themselves.
“How far away could the rest of the wagons be?” Betsy muttered as she wrung her hands.
“I’m sure they didn’t want to walk back in the wet,” Jacob assured her.
Sure enough, the snow had started to accumulate in a slushy layer. An hour later the wind shifted, cold and dry, and the snow become lighter, fluffier. It was going to pile up, Tamsen could tell.
The hired men slept on one side of the tree, piled into their tent. Tamsen persuaded her Betsy and Jacob to forgo a separate tent and for all the members of both families to make do with one.
“Are you sure?” Betsy asked as she tried to find space for all the children to lie down.
“It’ll be easier to keep warm,” Tamsen said, though that wasn’t the reason. Safety in numbers, she thought.
It had gone quiet around them. The wagon party, at its height, had been over ninety people. Even with deaths, losses, and departures, they’d still been like a moving village. Now, Tamsen glanced around at this diminished group of no more than twenty and felt just how shockingly small they were, facing the mountains, and the winter, and the night. The silence was oppressive—no one even snored. The only thing she heard was the soft hiss of snowfall and the occasional sound of snow slipping off the waxed cotton overhead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Edwin Bryant had been with the Washoe for close to a month now. Though the great Washoe tribe was scattered throughout the mountains and beyond, he’d been brought to a small and highly organized village, which consisted of two dozen bark-wrapped shelters stretched across the red dirt clearing. Lazy plumes of smoke rose above a few of them, burning off the morning chill. Gray sky hung low over it all.
Bryant was feeling better, but with no horse or food, he stood little chance of survival on his own and he was sure the Washoe knew this.
The leader of the small group was called Tiyeli Taba, which—as best Bryant could tell—meant something like “large bear,” because as a young man he had brought down a huge grizzly with a single arrow. Tiyeli Taba let Bryant stay in his galais dungal with his family, shared his food with him. Food wasn’t particularly plentiful, mostly nuts and roots and toasted wild grasses, but they gave him the same portion as the other men. Not knowing when or how he would leave the village, Bryant tried not to think about the life he’d abandoned. He wanted to think it was suspended in time with his fiancée, his friends, Walter Gow, and Charles Stanton all waiting expectantly for him. One day, he would return and life would continue exactly as he’d left it. He wanted to believe this even though he knew it wasn’t likely. Without his letter-writing, he felt untethered, undefined. Anything might happen, and no one would hear of it. Margie might wait forever, never knowing . . .
Each night as they sat around the campfire, Bryant coaxed the elders into telling him their tribe’s folktales. It was laborious as he had to stop the speakers frequently to clarify what was being said and, in the end, he could only guess what they were trying to tell him. Then one day a hunting party returned including a young man, Tanau Mogop, who had scouted for a military regiment and spoke some English. Bryant was overjoyed.
The first evening with Tanau Mogop, Bryant asked him to find out if his tribe knew anything about the prospectors’ camp he’d stumbled on earlier. He had not been able to stop thinking about the collection of bones and skulls in the abandoned cabin. If anyone knew the secret of what had happened in that grisly camp, it would be this village, which appeared to be the
closest. Tiyeli Taba sat meditatively without saying a word, but two of the men, agitated, began speaking simultaneously to Tanau Mogop.
Tanau Mogop turned to Bryant and explained that the camp he’d stumbled on had indeed been built by prospectors and that they’d lived there for over a year, trying to find gold in the river and rocky caves. The tribe had nothing to do with the prospectors, the elders made clear. They would pass close by from time to time to make sure that nothing bad had happened. Occasionally they would leave a pouch of pine nuts or tubers if the prospectors looked hungry. There was still game then, mostly rabbits, and they did not worry that the white men would starve. But then one of the prospectors became infected with the na’it.
“Na’it?” Bryant asked. “What’s that?” He recognized the word, could swear it was the same word one of the other Washoe had used when they first found him by the cave.
“It is the hunger. A bad spirit that can pass from man to man. A very old myth among our people, though it had rarely if ever been upheld with proof. But what had happened to the white man . . . it was certainly the na’it. That’s what the elders say.”
“How does this happen?” he asked. “How does this . . . na’it . . . work?”
Tanau Mogop listened patiently to the elders before explaining. “In the ancient tales, the na’it will attack a man to eat him, but we think . . . we believe that sometimes the man survives the attack, only he has been infected with the bad spirit. Before long, he will be na’it, too, and will want to eat the flesh of men.”
Bryant remembered stories he’d read of how the Incas, when first confronted with Spanish conquistadors over three hundred years ago, had mistaken the tall, light-skinned Europeans for gods. Then again, he suspected those stories had been a mere invention of the Spanish. But could the na’it-worshipping Anawai have mistaken a white-skinned stranger with a ravening hunger as the sufferer of a punishment by an ancient evil spirit? Perhaps if they truly had no other context to explain the white man’s sickening behavior . . .
He rubbed his lower lip. Of course, if it was a proper sickness they’d experienced, there might be any number of diseases that could be said to exhibit similar symptoms. Walton Gow had told him of the work of a British researcher, Thomas Addison, on a strange type of anemia. Sufferers of Addison’s anemia, as it was called, were said to rarely, but on occasion, exhibit a desire to consume blood. Bloody meats. Organs. Surely it was conceivable that there were more diseases like this out there that had not yet been studied or fully understood. This na’it might be a variation of Addison’s anemia.
But the coincidence—the similarity to the incident in Smithboro, the man who seemingly had devolved to an animal state, killing livestock with his teeth and bare hands—felt uncanny.
Which is to say, it was just what Bryant had, in some form or another, been chasing all along.
“So it is your understanding that one of the prospectors killed the rest after he was infected with the na’it?” Bryant wanted to be clear. “Killed them”—he thought of the bones he had found, picked clean—“and ate them?”
Tanau Mogop nodded solemnly. “Na’it are never satisfied. Na’it want everything. Kill everything.”
“And you’re saying that this condition is contagious? That it can be passed from a person exhibiting the symptoms to someone who is healthy?” Anemia wasn’t contagious; that meant this might be a new type of disease, a contagion like rabies. A disease that made men desperate for raw meat. Human flesh. And frightened the Indians enough to kill anyone with the symptoms.
Na’it kill everything.
From the galais dungal later that night, Edwin stared into the empty distance and wondered if he would ever leave this place and see his friends again. He was starting to think Margie was a figment of his imagination, marvelous and unlikely, an invisible friend he’d dreamed up to hide the fact that he was a lonely old bachelor destined to die alone.
Tanau Mogop saw him and asked if there was something Bryant wanted.
“I must find my way home,” Bryant said. “Do you think your people could help?”
Tanau Mogop whittled while he thought. “I will ask Tiyeli Taba,” he said at length. It was not a small thing to ask, he explained, because they would have to cross through Anawai territory to get to Johnson’s Ranch.
Tanau Mogop shook his head. “The Anawai were not always this way, though. They only began the practice of sacrifice five or six summers ago. Protection against the na’it.”
Bryant’s hands froze around the arrowhead he’d been honing. Something Tanau Mogop had said began twirling through Bryant’s head, activating a theory, a suspicion, you might call it, that had been nagging at him these last weeks. “Six years ago . . .”
Tanau Mogop nodded and ran the edge of his knife hard against a whetstone. “They do many shameful things, this group. They will choose a man among them to offer up to the na’it, to satiate the evil spirit. But this is wrong. This is what feeds the evil spirit, what gives it strength.”
Bryant could understand this notion, why certain parts of their tribe might have been moved to sacrifice their own people to cannibals, perhaps to keep other cannibalistic men—or monsters, really—at bay.
Tanau Mogop had said the Anawai had begun actively worshiping the na’it—had begun making sacrifices to the na’it—five or six years ago. It seemed abundantly clear to him that the resurgence in perceived na’it activity all began around that time—around the same time that Bridger claimed the lost prospectors had disappeared. He pictured the spooky camp, the disturbing signs of cannibalism.
The vanished white prospectors might not have been victims of the disease at all.
They were its originators.
CHAPTER THIRTY
December 1831
Through the window of his grandfather’s manse—one of the more prominent homes in the area—Stanton could see the wide white swath of frozen river that cut through the middle of town. School was closed and children, shrieking with delight, skated close to the banks.
But it was farther down, at a bend that opened up into a wider pond abutting the woods, where he’d promised to meet Lydia. For today was the day they had planned to run away.
When he first arrived, at the very spot where they’d spoken yesterday, he was convinced she hadn’t come at all, had changed her mind or been delayed or too scared.
He heard the gong of the church bell.
Then he saw her. All by herself, this tiny dark figure inching farther and farther out onto the frozen pond, where the ice thinned.
“Lydia!” he called out. “Lydia!” She paused for a second, but she did not turn.
It took him a moment to understand that she had heard him. A second more to realize she wore no overcoat, no hat or scarf. In fact, she appeared to be dressed in her nightgown even though it was midafternoon. He felt frozen in confusion. The blood began to pump furiously in his veins, and he cleared his throat, calling to her again.
She did turn, at last, but from that distance, he couldn’t see the expression in her dark eyes. The only noise she made was when the ice broke underneath her.
In an instant she disappeared.
Stanton snapped out of the trance that had briefly held him—he was dashing through the biting cold before he knew it, the scenery passing in a blur, panic making his ears ring. He must have been screaming, because suddenly there were many footsteps in the snow, shouts echoing off the trees. He ran until two men grabbed hold of him to keep him from following her.
By then, the body had been pulled out of the water. Someone else had gotten there first. Icy water ran off her hair and face in rivulets, the nightgown plastered to her pale blue skin.
For one cruel moment, he thought he saw her eyelids flutter—thought there was still a chance, somehow, that she had lived.
And then, like the surface of the pond itself, the truth finally cra
cked open, and he plummeted.
* * *
• • •
THEY’D GROWN UP almost next door to each other. Stanton’s father was a surveyor and was away often, so he left Stanton and his mother with his father, a prominent minister. It was a strange childhood. Stanton’s grandfather, the Reverend Resolved Elias Stanton, was impossible to please and it seemed he was doubly so with his grandson. Perhaps this was why Stanton became close to Lydia; her house provided an escape. At least, this was his reason in the beginning. As they got older, he fell hard for the girl, who had always struck him as mysterious, even as a child, despite how close they lived.
There was something dark about her soul, something remote and flickering, like a flame in wind, and Stanton, well . . . he was young—too young to understand what had made her that way.
Lydia’s mother had died when she was very young and she lived alone with her father in their big house, bustling with servants. She could be high-handed and people blamed this on her father spoiling her. It was true. She expected to have her way and she exasperated adults to no end, though the person she bedeviled the most was Stanton. It was because she knew he was in love with her—that had to be it.
There had been nothing between them, other than a few frantic kisses stolen in the hallway, or in Lydia’s attic, or behind the house, at the place where the boxwoods grew tallest.
The Lord knows Stanton wanted to do much more than that, but he hadn’t had the opportunity, and, truth be told, might not have known what to do with it if he had. His grandfather and mother had made sure to keep him sheltered from the realities of what occurred between men and women in the dark.
He’d always imagined he would do everything the right way. He would make a man of himself in the world, and would earn Lydia’s love properly. He’d ask her to marry him, and then the fantasies that had begun to bubble within him would become reality. There was a confident ease with which he believed that all of this would come to pass—he trusted his love for Lydia the way his grandfather trusted the firm hand of God.