The Hunger(35)

“Don’t it look kinda like that kid we found on the plain, before we got to Fort Laramie?” Snyder asked. He kicked at Halloran’s terrier when the dog began to chew at a wrist bone. “Quit that! That ain’t right. You can’t have a dog eating human flesh. He’ll develop a taste for it.”

“Quincy, come here.” Halloran looked green. Consumption had whittled him down to his bones. It would be a miracle if he made it another month.

Snyder reached down to pull the bone away from Halloran’s dog. Suddenly, the dog leapt up and bit him. Red welled to the spot immediately.

“Stupid dog.” Snyder brought the wound reflexively to his mouth. He swung a boot at the dog but missed and the terrier lunged for his boot again. Without warning, Snyder leveled his rifle at the dog and squeezed off a bullet, catching the dog in the stomach. The sound the dog made when it was struck was the eeriest thing Reed had ever heard, a high twisted note of surprise and pain that was almost human.

Halloran was a timid man—a sheep, in Snyder’s terms—and wasted by illness, but anger propelled him toward Snyder. His hands found the big man’s shirt front, but Snyder pushed him back easily. “What the hell? What the hell did you do that for?” He looked to the others for support, but Reed averted his eyes. No one was going to challenge Snyder, least of all Reed. He knew how Snyder could get, knew the power in those hands, and had the bruises to show for it.

“That mutt bit me,” Snyder said. “I got my rights. If a dog bites me, I shoot him.”

“He barely broke the skin,” Halloran said. Blood dribbled down his chin from the last bout of coughing. “Maybe I should shoot you.”

Snyder’s open-handed slap caught Halloran on the side of his face and sent him sprawling in the dirt. Reed flinched. Snyder only laughed.

“Quit crying,” he said. “It’ll only land you in trouble.”

What else had Snyder said to him last night? You think you know how the world works, but you don’t know shit. Men like you make me angry. You’re so fucking stupid that you don’t even know how stupid you are.

Halloran rolled off his back onto his hands and knees, his whole body buckling under the force of his coughing fit. Ribbons of bloody phlegm hung from his mouth. Reed was disgusted, and sick with himself, too; he should have stood up for Halloran, but he was too afraid.

Snyder and Elliott started back the way they’d come. Reed stood there, watching Halloran pawing through the dirt to his dog’s side. “Come on, Luke. Leave him.” It was almost dark, and Reed had no desire to fall too far behind the others.

Halloran didn’t even lift his head. “We got to bury him. I can’t just leave him here. Would you help me? Will you at least do that?”

Reed’s disgust twisted into anger. The ground was hard as rock and they had no shovel. Did Halloran expect they would dig with their hands? And there was tomorrow to think about, another day of backbreaking work clearing a trail, and who knew how many such days they had in front of them?

“Leave the damn dog.” Reed shouldered his rifle. “Or you can stay out here by yourself in the dark, see whether there really is something following us.” He was relieved when Halloran got to his feet, and felt a heady rush of guilt, too, which brought the taste of sick to the back of his mouth.

All the way back to camp, he pretended not to hear Halloran crying.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN





Everyone said it was a miracle. It was God’s grace, and proof that they had not been abandoned.

Tamsen didn’t blame them; grace was in short supply, like everything was. And how else could you explain, really, what had happened to Halloran? If she had really been a witch, as everyone said, she might have had an answer. Signs, augurs, charms to keep away the devil, ways of reading the future in the drift of the clouds: There was no power in what she practiced, only attention—increasingly, of the unwanted variety.

But some power had touched Halloran, and healed him.

For a week, ever since his little dog got shot, he had barely been able to lift his head. It was a shame about the dog, but Halloran had let himself get too attached to it. He’d even let the dog nip and bite him for fun, like a parent that doesn’t know how to discipline his children. Halloran was coughing up blood regularly now, though he tried to hide it, and would struggle for breath for hours at a time.

Tamsen had tended to him, even taking him into their wagon since he was too weak even to stay on a horse. She didn’t know why she felt sorry for him; maybe only because he was an outsider, and lonely, and despised, as she was. She’d spoon-fed him broth brewed from mushrooms scavenged by her girls, the only thing he could keep down. She’d made sure from the time the girls were little they knew the difference between a lacy yellow chanterelle and the deadly parasol, and they knew to try nothing before bringing it back first for her approval. (She gathered the poisonous mushrooms herself, when she needed them; she had a good handful of the deadly parasols, carefully cleaned and dried, waiting to be mixed with her homemade laudanum—all of her supplies hidden and stashed away, kept secret from the wagon party.)

Why Halloran had tried to make the trip west, Tamsen couldn’t guess. Halloran hadn’t let on how sick he’d been at the outset, knowing that he wouldn’t be allowed to join, especially as a man with no wagon or oxen, traveling alone, no family members to take care of him. Then again, no one had imagined the journey would be this difficult. Tamsen didn’t know if they were suffering bad luck especially or if everyone who’d made the trip before them had lied: lied in the newspapers, lied in their books like Lansford Hastings (vile, vile man, and mad, too, as it turned out; another reason to resent her husband, who had believed every word Hastings had written). Lured out west to die in the wilderness.