The Hunger(55)

Bryant made a pillow of dried sagebrush as far as he could from the body in the narrow space. Every time he struck his flint, he imagined the man might sit up, blinking, irritated at having been awoken. He expected he was going a little mad. He had been alone long enough, without company for weeks now. And without food, except what he could scavenge: a tiny fish, a few eggs stolen from a bird’s nest. Mostly, he was getting by on insects and acorns. At one point he’d choked down a handful of roots but they’d given him heaves and he’d thrown up nothing but bile for hours, since there was nothing to throw up.

He drank water but though it filled his stomach, it did nothing for his hunger. After the first three or four days the gnawing had diminished—thank God, it had been like a jaw chewing out from inside him—and he felt clearer-headed, optimistic, certain that starvation had been like a sickness that had slowly passed off. It was another day before he realized he was traveling erratically, circling back over terrain he had passed before. He would wake suddenly in the mud, having lost consciousness without knowing it. He had to rest frequently; he gasped for breath. His heart raced after walking a hundred yards.

He was dying—slowly, at first. Quicker now.

All because he was hungry. All for lack of game, of meat, of food disguised as the flesh of other animals.

The corpse was dark: the color of smoked ham. It was hard to estimate how long he—it, the body—had been dead. Not too long. It smelled of rot but only faintly. The body was barely human anymore, though. His soul was long gone. He was nothing but a shell.

Shipwrecked men survived by eating the bodies of sailors who perished before them, Bryant knew. It was the law of the sea. He’d even heard a story about it once. Something Lavinah Murphy had been saying around a fire back in the early days of their journey, a story about a German shipwreck and the unlucky survivors.

The sagebrush crackled as it burned. The smoke reminded him of Christmas, and Christmas reminded him of goose, and the crackle of sizzling fat, and going to sleep full and happy with the sound of his mother’s laughter in his ears. His eyes burned before he realized he was crying.

No one would know.

No one would blame him.

His hands went to the knife in his sheath.

Through the smoke, Bryant thought for a moment that perhaps the man was not a man at all, but an animal in decay. There was no sin in eating animals.

Why couldn’t he stop crying?

Not because he would do it, but because, at the last second, he couldn’t. He wept because it was no animal, it was a man, and he’d known deep down he would not be able to go through with it. He wept because that meant he would die—probably here, in the cave, to become another rotting corpse warming the air with putrescence.

It was then that he heard noises below the cave: the sound of horses’ hooves clipping stone and the murmuring of human voices, even though he couldn’t make out the words. He looked over the ledge to see four riders slipping through the sagebrush. They were Indians, probably Washoe, given the location, skinny as scarecrows under their old deerskins. Bryant tried to decide if they seemed dangerous. He could tell it was a hunting party, but what kind of luck had they had? Would they try to kill him for food? He pictured a village of emaciated women and children waiting for the hunters to return.

If he did nothing he would die. If he called out he might very well die, but sooner and quicker, impaled or gutted or shot full of arrows.

Bryant stood and waved, shouting to get their attention.

Custom demanded an exchange of gifts, so Bryant gave the Indians everything he could spare. His navy blue bandana, picked out by his fiancée in the general store in Independence just before the wagon train pulled out. The band on his hat, braided leather studded with tiny silver beads. And finally, his waistcoat, which he’d bought from a haberdasher in Louisville with his first paycheck as a newspaperman. With each item he passed to them, the men smiled, each in turn, until they decided who would accept which gift. These gifts earned him a place at the fire and a share of their evening meal: acorn bread, vegetable root dried like jerky, and a handful of mushrooms.

He forced himself to eat slowly so that he wouldn’t get sick. He bowed his head to each man in turn to show his gratitude.

They seemed to know the words he’d learned from the Shoshone, and he augmented this limited vocabulary with gestures and pantomime and drawings in the dirt. They indicated that there was a lake ahead, high up in the mountains, but that he should avoid it. They said the lake was home to a spirit that, they claimed, consumed the flesh of men and turned them into wolves.

“Na’it,” one man said to him repeatedly while pointing to the figure he’d drawn in the dirt. Bryant didn’t know what they were trying to say.

He led them up to the cave and showed them the corpse, wondering if they might have known the man in life, if he had been of their tribe. Bryant asked as best he could whether they knew what beast or spirit had killed the man in the cave. To his surprise, they had been repulsed by the sight of the corpse, had insisted on setting fire to it immediately without so much as a prayer.

Perhaps because it was so dark and the nuances were lost, or because of the mushrooms he’d eaten, which he was sure were mildly hallucinogenic, he couldn’t figure out what the drawings were meant to represent. But it seemed the Indians believed that the man’s brutal death was not the work of a man or beast but both, somehow. A man in a wolf’s skin, or a beast in a man’s skin? It was impossible to tell from their drawings, and they spoke so quickly, and so quietly, Bryant could only make out every third or fourth word.