He put an arm around her.
“Get away!” she cried out, trying to shove him back.
“Tamsen, Tamsen,” he began.
“No!” she shouted, crawling now across the snow.
He was so close, and he smelled disgusting, like he was exuding some foul stink through his pores. He grabbed her ankle and she fell to her stomach in the snow.
“I ain’t proud of it, you know,” he said then. His voice was strange, oddly high, and rich with emotion. “But it’s the only way, y’see.”
She tried to kick at him, to wriggle away.
“I’m not going to hurt you, you little bitch. Just like I didn’t hurt the others,” Keseberg said. “Tamsen, just listen to me.” He yanked her, hard.
She was shaking, crying silently, and the skin on her cheeks felt stiff from the frost collecting there.
“Bryant was right about this disease. I should know. It’s in me, like a curse, y’see. But not like those things out there in the night. Not like them.”
“Let me go,” she said hoarsely, trying once again to pull her leg from his grasp.
“Not until you hear me out,” he said. “I did it—I did that—” His gaze fell on Mrs. Graves’s face. “I cut them up, hoarded them, the dead. I had to. We’re out of food, Tamsen. There’s nothing left. They’re all going to die. They would have already if it weren’t for me. I saved ’em all, y’see, Mrs. Donner. It’s because a’ me your daughters are still alive.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They wouldn’t do it on their own,” he said grittily. “They’d never agree to it. It’s unnatural. It ain’t right. But it’s the only way to live. They gotta eat something. We all do. They just don’t want to have to know where it’s from. They keep to the inside, so they don’t have to see it. Don’t have to believe it.” His eyes glittered, as though he was thrilled with the arrangement, and his own heroism.
She knew what he was saying. She wished she didn’t understand what he meant, that she didn’t have to imagine the truth of it.
He was feeding the dead to the living. Human flesh. And they didn’t know.
“My daughters. And Elitha, and Leanne . . .”
“They’re all alive, like I said. Though Elitha’s sick. She might be the next to go.” His eyes moved toward the pile of bodies again, and she realized with another wave of disgust and horror that he was already imagining cutting up Elitha’s body, feasting on it, feeding it to the others. She was dizzy with it; her stomach clenched in pain.
“I been keeping the creatures at bay,” he explained then. “Leaving bits and pieces for ’em. Just enough so they won’t come sniffing around too close to camp. I got it all measured and meted out.” She recalled with sudden clarity how, even just out of Illinois, the other men had already begun to warn against playing cards with Keseberg. He didn’t just cheat, they said—he memorized every hand that was played.
“I know we can make it a month,” he went on, “though we still got at least six or eight weeks before the passes clear enough to haul the remainder of us out. We’ll have to lose at least one more.”
He let go of her and rolled up his sleeve. Even in the darkness, she could see oozing red wounds, claw scratches, bruises, bite marks.
“Whatever them creatures got, it don’t harm me. They can’t infect me. I’m safe. That’s why it’s up to me. It’s only up to me.”
She had stopped crying.
She had started to listen, with an eerie sort of calm, to what he was saying.
“Maybe it takes one demon to keep the others away.” He paused. His eyes glistened with tears now. “Lucifer had been an angel first. I always remembered that.”
* * *
• • •
HE’D FIRST TASTED HUMAN FLESH back in Illinois, learned from an uncle who later disappeared while prospecting out west. He’d developed a taste for it. A hunger for it, really, though he’d kept the lust in check, was repelled by it even as the desire bloomed. He found that the taste of human blood never satiated him, but made the need for it even stronger.
Tamsen swam up to his words through a kind of fog. Had he knocked her out? Had she fallen and hit her head? Or had her consciousness slipped away for a time? It didn’t matter. She was back at the cabin now, without remembering how she got there. Her rifle was gone. No doubt he had taken it. She was sitting in the snow and listing like a broken doll, and Lewis Keseberg crouched next to her, watching her closely as though he was worried about her health.
“I thought you were like me for a while,” he said. “I heard about you back in Springfield. How you lured Doc Williams into your bed, them other fellas, too. I said, there’s a woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go after it.”
“I’m nothing like you,” she said. Her mouth was full of the taste of iron.
“You’re more like me than you think. We take what we want, you and I. We do what we have to do.” He smiled at her, but he was wrong. No one knew that the thing she had wanted for so long that the wanting had cleaved her in two had made her unable to love, almost unable to feel.
No one knew who had first held her heart, and never let it go.
Not even Jory.
For how could she tell her own brother that it had always been him?
“No,” she said now. “I do not take what I want. I am not like you at all. Everything—everything I have ever done has been for others. Has been so my children can be safe. And I’ll prove it to you.”
“What are you saying?” Keseberg asked.
“I’m going to help you,” she said.
* * *
• • •
SHE REMAINED IN HIS CABIN. If she left, if she saw her daughters one last time, she knew she might lose her resolve. That it might break her. So she made him promise never to tell them that he had seen her. Never to speak of what happened next.
That night, after Keseberg had got the fires going, Tamsen mixed together the last of her sleeping herbs—lavender, chamomile, mint, and a few final drops of laudanum. She stirred them into melted ice from the lake’s surface and drank them down, waiting for the sleep to come.
As she began to drift off, Keseberg approached her. “I’ll wait until you’re asleep, like I promised,” he said, and she knew he would keep his word.
“You’ll make sure,” she repeated again anyway. “You’ll make sure it’ll go to them first. You’ll make sure it’ll go to the girls,” she said.
He nodded.
He settled across from her on the floor, waiting, cradling the ax in his arms.
Her eyes fluttered closed and open, closed and open. The cabin was gone. She saw instead those wheat fields outside her brother’s window. The sweep of late summer sky bending low and wide and blue over the swaying grain—waves and waves of it. A whole sea made of gold. She heard children laughing. She sensed the flicker of a feeling she hadn’t known since her own childhood. And at last, she slept.
EPILOGUE
March 1847
James Reed was halfway across the ridgeline when the big bay gelding buckled suddenly underneath him, floundering in the deep snow. For a moment, Reed was afraid they would both go down.
The footing had been treacherous every inch of the way from John Sutter’s fort. If it wasn’t heavy wet snow, it was slippery mud higher than the horses’ fetlocks. A wet, miserable time of year. But there was no choice. Putting off the rescue operation until it got warmer was out of the question. He was afraid he’d already waited too long.
Reed urged his reluctant horse on. A string of men on horseback and supply mules snaked behind him.
Seven days out from Sutter’s, the snow was now chest-deep on the horses. It was clear they could go no farther on horseback; they’d be better off traveling on foot. This meant they could take far fewer of the precious supplies he’d worked so hard to gather,
which troubled Reed but couldn’t be helped. The rest they strung up in the trees to use for resupply on their return. The bundles, swaying high in the branches, looked like misshapen insects’ nests. In that moment, he made himself a promise: When they came back this way, his family would be with him. Margaret, Virginia, Patty, little James, Thomas.
It was the promise of this reunion that had kept him going through his hard months of exile. He wouldn’t have lasted a week if his stepdaughter Virginia hadn’t snuck out of camp to provide him a horse and supplies for his journey. Clever girl. Only thirteen years old and she knew what to do. A cloth bundle contained food from their diminishing store: dried beef, currants, hard-boiled eggs, and the last of the family’s beer in a canteen. He had fought back tears as he thanked her.
“You was always a good daddy to us,” she said to him as she handed over the reins.
When Reed had arrived at Sutter’s Fort in late October, a cold wind was already blowing from the north. Sutter’s Fort was sprawling and strong, with thick adobe walls and cannon—no hole-in-the-wall like Jim Bridger’s place. Sutter had a couple dozen Paiute, Miwoks, and Mexicans working for him, and a steady stream of nearby settlers came in every day for supplies, the post, and the latest news.
Reed had been delighted to find Will McCutcheon at the fort, nearly recovered and working for Sutter to earn his keep. Between the two of them, they talked Sutter into lending them two mules and a few supplies, though Sutter warned them they wouldn’t make it over the mountain.
He was right. The winter had already arrived at the higher elevations. They made it nearly to the pass before they had to admit defeat and turn back.
“The pass will be snowed over until February,” Sutter had told him, and so, when the California Battalion came through the fort signing up men to fight for independence from Mexico, Reed joined them. He had been in the militia during the Black Hawk Wars. He knew how to soldier.
While in Yerba Buena, he spoke at gatherings about the party stranded in the mountains, appealing for donations. It was there he heard that a few survivors had made it to Sutter’s Fort. William Eddy was quoted in half a dozen newspapers, telling of the hardships they faced: starvation, hard snows, and a strange disease that ravaged men and turned them into monsters, the way rabies acted on dogs to make them violent and blood-hungry.
Blood-hungry. Reed thought of the Nystrom boy and Hastings’s deranged rantings and the corpse of the Indian boy found strung up between the trees.
The newspapers said a rescue party was already gathering. He resolved to lead it.
* * *
• • •
AS THEY DESCENDED into the pass, however, Reed saw no signs of cabins, or of any life at all. Even the lake was invisible. All Reed could see was a valley of white; a few sparse pines poked through the long sheet of snow. They looked suspiciously like the top portion of much bigger trees.
As they made their way lower, the black surface of a lake became visible between snowy hillocks. Then: irregularities in the uniform white. A square of brown that might be part of a damaged cabin. Wispy smoke plumes lifting to the sky. A camp.
The last stretch was agonizingly slow. He had to keep his eyes nearly closed against the blinding glare. He fought the urge to run toward it. It would only exhaust him. Discipline had gotten him this far. It would get him the rest of the way.
He saw indications of life, evidence all over of activity, of survivors—but no actual life, no humans, no shouting, no cattle, not a single horse in sight. Big fire-blackened pits ringed the cabins. An echoing sort of quiet.
As he moved toward the first cabin, he was touched by a deep and resonating fear—it worked on him like an interior bell, sounding through his whole body. He was suddenly self-conscious in front of the hired men. Afraid he would find his family dead, afraid he would break down. For he loved them—he had to believe that. It was why he was here. It didn’t matter that he’d been sent away in disgrace.
Run away with me, Edward McGee had once said. But Reed had told him no. Edward had been full of rage and hurt, a kind of righteousness that came with youth; he accused Reed of not wanting to abandon his family because he was afraid, but Reed wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t hiding. That was what McGee hadn’t understood. Reed did love them, in his way. Perhaps he sensed that the love they bore him back was different—more enduring, more forgiving—than the kind he’d find in Edward McGee. And in that, he’d been right, hadn’t he?
But Edward McGee didn’t matter now. And what had happened with John Snyder didn’t change things, either. Reed once thought that love was akin to passion, but he saw now that it was something different entirely; that it was, perhaps, a kind of faith.
Given the stillness in the valley, he fully expected the cabin would be empty, that the newspapers had gotten the story wrong, that Sutter had sent them to the wrong place.
He pushed open the door and almost shouted. A cluster of skulls stared back at him from the reeking gloom.
Not skulls—near skulls. People so emaciated they looked like skeletons.
One of them moved and let out a faint groan.
Horror and hope swept through James Reed in a dizzying wave. He’d found them—some of them, anyway. They were alive.
And then a hushed, ragged voice emerged from the darkness. The voice of a girl, young, almost unrecognizable. “Father?”
It was Virginia. His daughter. He could make out her features now, though they’d been ravaged by hunger and transformed—teeth jutting from a drawn face. There was a pause, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to stand the emotion that took hold of him by the throat. But then it was as if a bright light lit him from within, and he felt certain—more certain than he’d ever been in his life—that he did understand what love was.
He fell to his knees and reached out a hand.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Readers familiar with the tragic story of the Donner Party will quickly realize that I’ve taken many liberties in shaping the material for fiction. Names, locations, and dates have remained but much else has been changed to fit the story. I even added a few completely fictional characters: Walton Gow, Edwin Bryant’s mentor, did not exist in real life, although Davy Crockett did have his appendix removed while serving in the Tennessee legislature. Thomas, Elitha’s ill-fated love, is based on John Baptiste Trudeau. I’d intended to use Trudeau but when the plot called for changes that would conflict with Trudeau’s history, I decided to create a new character on whom we could make any demands required by the story. This is why Trudeau doesn’t appear in the novel.
I have Tiffany Morris to thank for a thorough, culturally sensitive read of the manuscript and for providing extensive notes on problematic paradigms and tropes to avoid. It is always difficult to balance historical inclusion of the very real—and often very harmful—prevailing attitudes that existed at the time, in particular toward native peoples and their cultures, and at the same time not to in any way perpetuate or advocate for those views. The often problematic attitudes toward Native American groups demonstrated in some of the white settlers in the text do not reflect the feelings and thoughts of myself or the team.
Even a “reimagining” of a historical event, of course, requires a considerable amount of research. Much has been written about the Donner Party tragedy, which turns out to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because you can usually find the answer to your question if you keep digging; a curse because there’s no end to the amount of material to dig through. If you are looking to learn more about the true-life events, I recommend two books that I relied on most heavily: the superb The Donner Party Chronicles: A Day-by-Day Account of a Doomed Wagon Train (1846–1847) by Frank Mullen Jr. (Halcyon, Nevada Humanities Committee) and Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West by Ethan Rarick (Oxford University Press). Additionally, I was able to absorb some of the flavor of the period from Covered Wagon Wo
men: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840–1849, Kenneth L. Holmes, editor (University of Nebraska Press). I’d also like to thank the staff at the Donner Memorial State Park in Truckee, California, and the Fort Bridger State Historic Site in Wyoming for their hospitality during my visits.
This novel is truly a joint effort, the product of close collaboration with Glasstown Entertainment’s Lauren Oliver and Lexa Hillyer. Thanks also to Glasstown editor Jessica Sit, whose input helped to make this novel what it is, as well as to Lynley Bird and Emily Berge for their careful reads.
Heartfelt thanks, too, to Sally Kim at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the most gracious and capable editor an author could hope for, and to my agent Richard Pine, Eliza Rothstein, and Glasstown’s agent Stephen Barbara for their good counsel and patience. Lastly, thanks to Howard Sanders and Jason Richmond at the United Talent Agency for their work on bringing The Hunger closer to the big screen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph of the author © Suzette Niess
Alma Katsu is the author of The Hunger, The Taker, The Reckoning, and The Descent. She has been a signature reviewer for Publishers Weekly and a contributor to The Huffington Post. She is a graduate of the Master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University. Prior to the publication of her first novel, Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies and is currently a senior analyst for a think tank. She lives outside of Washington, D.C., with her husband.
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