The Hunger(33)

Stanton came forward cautiously, all too aware of the rifle pointed at him. “Lansford Hastings? We represent another wagon party. We saw your handbill and expected you would be at Fort Bridger to lead us down the cutoff. But when we reached the trailhead we found your note.”

At this, Hastings’s eyes came to life and settled on Stanton. “Why didn’t you listen? You shouldn’t have come.”

“Look here, Hastings, we came all this way after reading your book,” Reed spoke up suddenly, ignoring the look Stanton gave him. “I don’t mind telling you that it was quite a shock to get to Fort Bridger only to find you’d gone. And that note. I suspect you’re nothing but a charlatan,” Reed said. “How could you write those things in your book if the route—”

“It isn’t the route that’s the problem,” Hastings said shortly. “The cutoff is a difficult passage, but it can be done. I’ve done it.” He shook his head. “It’s something else entirely. There’s something following us.”

The charms tacked to the walls stirred faintly, as if a phantom hand had passed along them.

Stanton frowned. “We know. The men told us. Animals—”

“They don’t know.” Now that Hastings was standing, Stanton could smell him; he smelled like something sick and terrified, a wounded animal. “It’s not an animal, at least, not any kind of animal I’ve ever seen.” His voice kept skipping into a higher register. “There’s no game in these woods—have you noticed? That’s because there’s nothing left. Nothing. Something’s out there eating every living thing.”

“A pack of wolves,” Reed said. But he sounded uneasy. “That’s what we’ve heard, as far back as Fort Laramie.”

“No,” Hastings insisted. “I know wolves. I know how they hunt. This is different. The Indians know it, too.” Hastings let out a laugh that sounded as if he were choking. “They took a boy, no more than twelve, I swear, and left him tied to a tree out in the woods back over the ridge. They just rode off and left him there. Left him for whatever’s out there, feeding. I can still hear him screaming.”

Stanton had heard of men unhinged by the wilderness, by too many years fighting the dark encroachment of the natural world. He wondered whether Hastings had simply come undone. But despite his filth and the way his hands trembled, Hastings didn’t seem crazy.

Terrified, yes. Crazy, no.

“Right after we left Fort Bridger, a little girl went missing,” Hastings said. Now his voice had dropped again, to almost a whisper. “Every man in the party went out to search for her to no avail. And then a couple miles into the woods, we found her body, ripped to pieces, nothing left but the skeleton.”

Stanton thought of the Nystrom boy, and the horrible mess of his body. The face turned sideways, as though he’d just lain in the dirt to rest. This girl had been found miles ahead of the wagon train, the same way they’d found Nystrom. The hairs on the back of Stanton’s neck lifted. The charms stirred again in the stillness. He was sweating. Being surrounded by Hastings’s trinkets agitated him, reminding him of Tamsen. This junk can’t protect you; nothing could protect them. He didn’t know where the thought had come from. But it was true.

“You need to tell your wagon party to turn around. Head for Fort Hall and the northern route as fast as you can. These men won’t let me go or I’d beg you to take me with you. Save yourselves.”

Reed didn’t speak until he and Stanton were well away from the stranded wagon party. “The devil take Lansford Hastings. I’ll never trust another lawyer for as long as I live.” Reed spit on the ground. “Has the man lost his mind, do you think?”

“No,” Stanton said slowly. “No, I don’t think so.”

Reed stared at him. “So you believe this story of monsters in the woods?”

“I don’t believe in monsters,” Stanton said. “Only men who behave like them.”





CHAPTER THIRTEEN





Three days after the conversation with Hastings, they came across the remains of the boy he’d told them about—the twelve-year-old Indian, tied to a tree.

Reed’s hands were raw and so was his patience. It had been a bad passage. He and Stanton had returned to the group and, despite the warnings they conveyed, the group had decided nevertheless to continue on the trail. Patrick Breen and Franklin Graves didn’t like the trail from the start and complained to anyone who would listen, and soon enough Wolfinger and Spitzer and then the rest of the Germans took up the refrain. Reed suspected it was in part because they simply didn’t like the idea of him as captain.

But he’d had little choice but to step up. The news about Lansford Hastings blew all the bluster straight out of George Donner. He had simply looked blankly from Reed to Stanton when they told him, as if he hadn’t understood.

“We’ve made a terrible mistake,” Reed had said bluntly. “We were depending on that man and he’s deserted us. He lied to us. We’ll die out here . . .”

But Donner only shook his head. “I don’t know the way to the Humboldt River from here, none of us does. Perhaps we should turn around. We could take the northern route . . .”

“There’s no time for that,” Reed said. “If we try to take the northern route at this late date, we’d need to winter over at Fort Hall.” It would be ruinous for most families. Few had the money to sustain them over the season, not with the high prices the trading posts commanded. A dollar fifty for a pound of flour, and a family could easily eat a pound of flour in a day. Half the families would starve before spring.