It was useful information. Useful to know exactly who was sniffing around. Perhaps he had nothing - perhaps he’d found something.
The thought triggered a tingle of excitement.
Perhaps he’s discovered them?
Maybe there was some sort of mutual exchange he could do with this Mr Cooke; information for information.
CHAPTER 33
23 October, 1856
I have slept poorly, worrying about Sam and Emily’s mother. I can understand, for certain types of people, their faith is everything. Hers has been shaken. I have no idea what Preston’s story is . . . whether he genuinely believes he is on a mission for God. I suppose that’s irrelevant. What matters is what Mrs Dreyton believes.
Or should I say, believed. Past tense.
What worries me more is whether she will sow seeds of doubt amongst the others. Whilst I am no fan of peculiar and strict religious sects like Preston’s, it is their faith in him that seems to hold them together. And thus far . . . I have myself found Preston to be a rational and reasonable man.
I am troubled by this situation.
Ben put down his pen and rubbed his hands vigorously together. Even with a woollen scarf wrapped tightly around his writing hand, it was stiff with the cold.
The usually sullen grey sky was broken today, allowing the heartening sight of scant patches of blue - a dash of colour to their monochrome world that he much missed. A weak ray of sunlight speared down from the scudding clouds, dappling the clearing momentarily before racing away across the trees.
His gaze fell upon the pitiful sight of their dead oxen. Under Keats’s supervision, the first few of the dead oxen had been towed a short distance away from the others and butchered for meat. The well-trodden snow around their carved-up carcasses was pink and, amongst the exposed ribcages, a pile of inedible purple and grey organs was steadily growing. Ben wondered how long it would be before that offal was no longer considered inedible.
For the while, food was not going to be a problem. But the collective mouths of over a hundred and twenty people made short work of each carcass as it became available. The mathematics of the situation was inescapably obvious to him already. There weren’t enough oxen to keep them all going through the winter and into spring. At some point, they were going to have to find other food to subsist on to supplement the oxen. Or perhaps reduce their numbers.
It occurred to him that he might not be the only person already making that kind of calculation.
He blew on his hands, cursing the aching stiffness of unrelenting cold. Around the campfire and tucked up in his shelter at night, with the flap sealed tight and the shared body heat of Keats and Broken Wing building up a fug of warmth inside, it was tolerable. But outside, away from any cooking fire, the bitter chill, compounded by the occasional icy gust, was a miserable experience. Ben vowed to travel to warmer climes come the spring and the end of this unfortunate ordeal, and to never again stray from a temperate latitude.
He gazed at the small world of their clearing, like an island amidst a dark, forbidding ocean. There were a few people stirring. Several meagre fires were heating water for a morning bowl of stewed oats. Most families still had barrels of cornmeal and oats previously used as packing insulation for fragile family possessions, but now gratefully being consumed each day for breakfast.
Giles Weyland was offering to share with him a special treat this morning; the last of his coffee beans. There was enough, he said, for a canteen of it. Enough for him and Ben and his girl. They would savour it together, then fill their tummies with stewed oats. Weyland had only himself and his Negro girl to feed and had many boxes of fragile china stuffed with cornmeal packing to get through.
Ben put away his writing things, slipping them back inside his travel trunk in the shelter. He wrapped his poncho around himself and squeezed out again into the scudding sunlight, enjoying a fleeting moment’s warmth on his shoulders and back as a sunbeam raced over him, then up through the trees, towards the craggy peaks above them.
Making his way towards Weyland’s shelter, he noticed that the Negro girl was up already building their campfire, whilst Weyland was spreading out the last of his coffee beans to be roasted and cornmeal to be stewed.
The question had yet to be asked by anyone, and Ben was surprised that no one yet had the answer . . . . . . Is this girl your property?
It was something Ben felt he should have already asked on principle, but had yet to find the right moment and the right way. Whilst he admired Weyland’s southern charm and his unflappable manner, Ben doubted he could, in all good conscience, sit down and eat with a man who believed in the institution of slavery.
As he crossed the ground between shelters to join Weyland for breakfast, and was working out the wording for this delicate question, he caught sight of Emily and Sam on the far side of the clearing.
Both were being led by Mrs Dreyton up into the tree line. By the look of the small canvas sack slung over Sam’s shoulder, they were off to gather firewood together. But there was something about their manner that caught his eye. It seemed to be a furtive departure, Mrs Dreyton and Sam looking back over their shoulders. A terrible thought occurred to him.
They’re not leaving, are they?
They’d die out there, for certain. He stopped in his tracks, and half turned to race across the clearing to them, to plead with Mrs Dreyton to stop this craziness, when he realised neither she, nor Emily were carrying anything and Sam had just the small sack and his gun slung over one shoulder.
Mrs Dreyton might have been quite mad enough to head out into the woods with nothing but the clothes on her body and the shawl around her head, but Sam was quite sensible. At the very least, Sam would have called over to talk to Ben first.
Relax . . . they’re after some firewood, that’s all.
He watched them as they climbed up the slope into the trees. Just before they were lost from sight behind the dense firs, he saw Sam look anxiously back towards the camp. Ben wondered what Sam was glancing at when he noticed Preston and Vander standing side by side just outside their church, silently watching the Dreytons go.
It was an odd tableau that had Ben puzzling over it as he arrived beside Weyland, squatting over a foil-lined wooden box in which nestled no more than a fistful of dark coffee beans. The rich aroma of the box wafted across to him seductively and his mouth moistened in anticipation. Savouring it with a deep breath, the odd scene was for the moment pushed far from his mind.
‘Morning, Mr Weyland.’
‘Ah, Mr Lambert,’ said Weyland, looking up. ‘A promise is a promise. Take a seat and I shall roast us these beans.’ He turned to the Negro girl, ‘Violet, bring me the skillet will you, my dear?’
Violet was busy nursing the first flames of their cooking fire. She shook her head. ‘Giles, get it yo’self, you lazy man. Cain’t you see I got my han’s busy tendin’ to this?’
Giles turned to Ben and shrugged with a world-weary flicker of his eyebrows. ‘Pfft, women, eh?’
Ben smiled with relief, glad that he could sit down and join them with a clear conscience. Violet was no slave; that much was for sure.
CHAPTER 34
23 October, 1856
The sun was on the way to its zenith, shining through a gap in the grey sky when he heard the scream. The young man was unsure of the noise at first. Unsure because it was not a sound he normally associated with these woods; a woman’s cry, or a child’s cry in this place was as strange as a bear’s call out on the plains. These wooded peaks were not a place for womenfolk, nor children, nor the old - especially not in the dead of winter.
He heard it again. This time he was certain it was a woman’s cry, not a child’s. The first time had been a sharp shriek of surprise; the second was protracted and drawn out and made the fine downy hair on his forearms rise. The scream endured, a terrible blend of pitiful agony and abject terror, causing him to grimace and adrenaline to instantly flood his body, entreating him to flee like a startled
rabbit or stand firm.
A woman.
He heard a third scream, higher pitched this time.
A child.
The young man knew the only women and children in these woods were the ‘white-faces’, the ones that had lost their way in the mountains. Black Feather said their fate was sealed now; none of them would last until the snows melted. If cold and hunger didn’t kill them all, then the dark spirit they had brought into the woods with them would.
His first instinct was to drop the hare that he was gutting, go find Black Feather and the others, and tell them what he’d heard. But the second cry, the child’s cry, alerted some deeper instinct in him. He couldn’t ignore the innocent cry of a child, not even a white-face child.
His thinking went no deeper than that. He dropped the hare, cleaned the blade of his knife with a wipe across his sleeve and strode swiftly in the direction from which the screams had come. He moved with the athletic agility and speed of a young man whose feet knew the terrain well, intuitively judging from the gentle undulations in the snow, where lay the dips, the bumps, the twisted roots that could snap an ankle.
The woman’s scream came again from up ahead.
This time he knew, from the abrupt and gargling way it came to an end, that it would be the woman’s last scream. He made an approximate best guess from which direction it had come, making allowances for the acoustic tricks the forest could play. He redoubled his pace, his feet flicking lightly through the shallowest snow, stone-stepping across the mounds of firm ground, from one boulder to another, vaulting with graceful agility over the fallen limbs of long-dead trees.
Up ahead he glimpsed, between trunks, spears of weak sunlight lancing down into a small glade and he detected, amidst this world of only two colours, virgin white and deep wooded green - an unmissable splash of bright crimson.
He slowed down the pace to ensure his arrival would be in complete silence, darting forward another dozen yards and then abruptly settling to the ground beneath the boughs of a fir tree. Catching his breath in quiet, controlled gasps, he looked out through the needles at the clearing beyond, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
There was a lot of blood.
Too much blood for whoever had lost it to live. That was immediately obvious to him.
Then he saw her.
Stretched over a fallen trunk, he could make out the body of a white-face woman, her dark clothes stained almost black with the blood spilling from her torso. Beside her, curled up in the snow on the ground, was a child, a little girl, hugging her knees and shuddering - convulsive twitches that racked her body in ebbs and flows.
She was alive - her eyes were wide. But he could also see her mind was gone. Shock had rescued her sanity, taken it someplace else.
He scanned the small clearing, looking for a trace of the creature that had done this.
A bear?
It was possible. Although they slept through the winter, Black Feather frequently cautioned that they could be very easily disturbed and enraged.
He noticed the smooth snow was trampled and flattened across the glade and stained dark with splatters and smears of blood.
Three distinct foot profiles - possibly four - mingled across the glade; a child, a woman, a male, and perhaps another. The story he tried reading in the snow was too complicated. But it was clear that a body had been dragged from the clearing whilst bleeding, leaving a trail that disappeared into the foliage on the far side.
An older mind would have advised caution at this point; he should back away and leave this scene behind him. This was the evil spirit Black Feather spoke of - he could sense it, smell it . . . the white-face evil. Only their evil could be so careless with its bloodletting, so uncontrolled, so savage.
But the young man was alone and too confident and curious to know better. In any case, he couldn’t leave this child - no older than his own sister - to die in the same brutal way as her mother appeared to have done.
The long, crooked blade of his hunting knife balanced ready for use in one hand, his other hand easing out the finely crafted flint-bladed tamahakan tucked into his belt, he rose with one slow, fluid movement and stepped out from beneath the tree into the clearing.
He listened carefully as he moved soundlessly. In the distance, echoing noisily through the forest, activity coming from the white-face camp could be heard. The thak-thak-thak of wood being chopped. A gentle breeze disturbed the snow-laden pine branches overhanging the clearing, and powder snow sifted lightly down with a gentle hiss from one bough to the next.
Approaching the shuddering child and the body splayed across the log, he could see more clearly how much damage had been wrought on the woman’s torso. Several deep gashes had opened her belly exposing ripped organs, and tatters of those same organs were draped out across the bark of the tree trunk. The gashes reminded him of the sort of wound a bear could make with one of its powerful front paws. But looking at the spacing and the length and depth of these gashes, it would have to have been a very large bear.
The girl was only a few feet away from him, shuddering and rocking. She didn’t see him; her eyes and her mind were far away.
He slowly reached one hand towards her, not sure how she would react to his touch.
It was then that he heard it.
A deep rasping of breath coming from the edge of the clearing and circling around beyond sight. In the silence of this sound-insulated glade it was deafening, echoing from all sides, a deep, pulsing, hoarse rattling . . . like that of a male buffalo, cornered and exhausted at the end of a hunt, blowing foam out of each nostril.
He noticed a long gun on the ground beyond the girl. He knew how these weapons were used, but not how to feed one. There had been no loud thunder before the screams, and he realised the white-face weapon would still be ready to use, still deadly.
The third white-face, the one that had been dragged away, must have dropped it. Which told him something useful about this creature.
It is a very fast creature. The white-face had no time to fire.
The breathing grew quiet now, as if awaiting his next move, daring him to reach out for the weapon and try using it.
CHAPTER 35
23 October, 1856
Ben heard a voice cry out in alarm, then another. There was a commotion going on outside.
Broken Wing glanced up at him. ‘What isss?’
Ben shrugged. He leaned forward and poked his head out through the flap of their rabbit-hole-like shelter to see what was going on. He saw Mr Bowen’s head poking out from the shelter next door, and, further away, Mr Hussein’s - like curious prairie dogs.
He heard another cry of alarm and the challenge of a couple of male voices. The disturbance was coming from the far end of the camp.
Broken Wing kicked Keats, who was napping. ‘Keatttt!’ he shouted.
Keats grunted unconsciously.
Ben, meanwhile, reached for his medicine box, pulled himself out through the flap and quickly stood up, craning his neck to see what was going on. He could make out a gathering group amongst the far shelters, milling around something or someone. Ben automatically began to head towards them.
‘What’s going on?’ Mr McIntyre shouted out through the flap of his family’s shelter as Ben strode past.
‘I don’t know. I’m just going to see.’
Weyland pulled up alongside him as they crunched across the compacted snow and waded through ankle-deep drifts of fresh powder. The Virginian’s usual measured voice carried a tone of uncertainty as they approached the knot of people.
‘Thought I heard one of them Mormon gentlemen shout something about an Indian.’
They passed the oxen carcasses, entering the Mormons’ camp, weaving their way through the snowed-covered humps of shelters and pushing their way forward through the crowd.
Weyland made his way to the front and stopped dead. ‘Good God,’ he gasped.
Ben followed his gaze. The first thing his eyes registered was Emily, coa
ted from head to foot in blood. She was cradled in the arms of a young Indian man. Ben presumed he was one of the Paiute hunting party encountered a week ago. He looked about the same age as Sam, seventeen or eighteen. The Indian was on his knees, holding as tightly to Emily, it seemed, as he was to life. From a deep, ragged gash that angled down from his left shoulder, across his chest and stomach to his groin, a tangled nest of his entrails had spilled onto Emily’s blood-soaked lap.
He gasped, short and shallow percussive breaths, his eyes glazed.
Mrs Zimmerman knelt down in front of him and reached out for Emily. The young Indian, wide-eyed and in shock, looked uncertainly at her. The woman offered a reassuring smile and nodded.
‘Let me take her,’ she said quietly.
The Indian glanced down at Emily before reluctantly releasing his tight hold of her. Mrs Zimmerman scooped Emily into her arms and stepped back.
‘Thank you,’ she uttered.
The Indian swayed momentarily before collapsing onto the snow, calling out something loudly. To Ben’s ears the words were unintelligible, but he noticed they were the same, over and over.
Keats noisily pushed through the crowd, barking at people to get out of his way.
‘The Indians are still out there,’ somebody in the crowd gasped.
The old guide emerged from the throng and knelt down beside the prone body of the young Paiute. Ben stepped forward to join him, crouching down quickly to examine the wound but knowing - as he had with the Zimmerman girl - that there was too much damage to save the young man. He looked at Keats and shook his head.
The Indian was still chanting something.
Somebody in the crowd muttered, ‘Those dark demons’ve killed the Dreytons,’ and there was a ripple of reaction through the crowd, followed by an outbreak of muttered, whispered prayers amongst them. Whether they were praying for Emily, her family, themselves or for the Indian, he couldn’t tell.