The Hunger(69)

She looked again at the gathering darkness of the sky. They were, even now, at the mercy of its whims.

She heard her husband cry out in pain, followed by men’s voices swelling in panic. She ran back to the wagons, calling the children to follow her. She found George kneeling beside the wagon, his face white with pain and shiny with sweat, his arm disappeared behind one of the wheels. Burger and Shoemaker, the two teamsters, had not yet returned with Eddy. The rest of the men had jammed a long branch under the wagon bed and were leaning on the far end.

“Hang on there, George,” Jacob said. He faced the others. “One, two, three—that’s it, put all your weight on it.”

The pole slipped out of position once, then twice, amid a lot of cursing and groaning, but finally the end of the pole bit and managed to hold up the wagon bed long enough for George to free himself, falling backward onto the mud.

He raised his right hand, his left hand circling the wrist for support. Tamsen nearly fainted; it looked like he was wearing a bloody mitten, his hand was so chewed up. It was a paddle of mashed, pulpy flesh drenched in blood. Her husband’s eyes were rolled back in his head, nearly unconscious.

Tamsen dropped to her knees beside him. “Bring me some clean water! Tell Betsy to put some water on to boil! Milt,” she called to one of their teamsters, “take the children away, they shouldn’t see this. And have Elitha fetch the satchel with my medicines and Leanne tear fresh bandages.”

She worked on him for the better part of an hour. Mercifully, he’d passed out so she didn’t need to worry about hurting him further. She cleaned the open flesh with water and then the very last of their alcohol. The hardest part was bandaging it up so that the pieces would heal correctly. She didn’t want to leave him crippled. Jacob paced behind her the entire time while the other hired men moved away, spooked. “We were using the pole to hold up the wagon bed and it slipped,” Jacob explained as Tamsen tried to make sense of the crushed fingers.

The first fat wet drops fell from the sky as she was finishing up. They were not quite rain, not quite snow. “We’d better set up the tents,” Tamsen said to her brother-in-law. “This is as far as we get today.” She wondered, but didn’t ask aloud, just how far ahead the others had gotten by now.

They hobbled the last remaining oxen to graze and set up the tents under a huge old tree with broad branches that made a natural shelter. They tried to make George as comfortable as possible, propping his hand in place with pillows.

“He’ll be wanting some of your laudanum when he comes to,” Jacob noted.

Burger and Shoemaker still had not returned by the time the sky had completely darkened. Tamsen tried to banish the worst from her mind. They had a rifle; no shots had been heard. Surely if they’d encountered any danger, they would have at least tried to defend themselves.

“How far away could the rest of the wagons be?” Betsy muttered as she wrung her hands.

“I’m sure they didn’t want to walk back in the wet,” Jacob assured her.

Sure enough, the snow had started to accumulate in a slushy layer. An hour later the wind shifted, cold and dry, and the snow become lighter, fluffier. It was going to pile up, Tamsen could tell.

The hired men slept on one side of the tree, piled into their tent. Tamsen persuaded her Betsy and Jacob to forgo a separate tent and for all the members of both families to make do with one.

“Are you sure?” Betsy asked as she tried to find space for all the children to lie down.

“It’ll be easier to keep warm,” Tamsen said, though that wasn’t the reason. Safety in numbers, she thought.

It had gone quiet around them. The wagon party, at its height, had been over ninety people. Even with deaths, losses, and departures, they’d still been like a moving village. Now, Tamsen glanced around at this diminished group of no more than twenty and felt just how shockingly small they were, facing the mountains, and the winter, and the night. The silence was oppressive—no one even snored. The only thing she heard was the soft hiss of snowfall and the occasional sound of snow slipping off the waxed cotton overhead.





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE





Edwin Bryant had been with the Washoe for close to a month now. Though the great Washoe tribe was scattered throughout the mountains and beyond, he’d been brought to a small and highly organized village, which consisted of two dozen bark-wrapped shelters stretched across the red dirt clearing. Lazy plumes of smoke rose above a few of them, burning off the morning chill. Gray sky hung low over it all.

Bryant was feeling better, but with no horse or food, he stood little chance of survival on his own and he was sure the Washoe knew this.

The leader of the small group was called Tiyeli Taba, which—as best Bryant could tell—meant something like “large bear,” because as a young man he had brought down a huge grizzly with a single arrow. Tiyeli Taba let Bryant stay in his galais dungal with his family, shared his food with him. Food wasn’t particularly plentiful, mostly nuts and roots and toasted wild grasses, but they gave him the same portion as the other men. Not knowing when or how he would leave the village, Bryant tried not to think about the life he’d abandoned. He wanted to think it was suspended in time with his fiancée, his friends, Walter Gow, and Charles Stanton all waiting expectantly for him. One day, he would return and life would continue exactly as he’d left it. He wanted to believe this even though he knew it wasn’t likely. Without his letter-writing, he felt untethered, undefined. Anything might happen, and no one would hear of it. Margie might wait forever, never knowing . . .