The Hunger(70)

Each night as they sat around the campfire, Bryant coaxed the elders into telling him their tribe’s folktales. It was laborious as he had to stop the speakers frequently to clarify what was being said and, in the end, he could only guess what they were trying to tell him. Then one day a hunting party returned including a young man, Tanau Mogop, who had scouted for a military regiment and spoke some English. Bryant was overjoyed.

The first evening with Tanau Mogop, Bryant asked him to find out if his tribe knew anything about the prospectors’ camp he’d stumbled on earlier. He had not been able to stop thinking about the collection of bones and skulls in the abandoned cabin. If anyone knew the secret of what had happened in that grisly camp, it would be this village, which appeared to be the closest. Tiyeli Taba sat meditatively without saying a word, but two of the men, agitated, began speaking simultaneously to Tanau Mogop.

Tanau Mogop turned to Bryant and explained that the camp he’d stumbled on had indeed been built by prospectors and that they’d lived there for over a year, trying to find gold in the river and rocky caves. The tribe had nothing to do with the prospectors, the elders made clear. They would pass close by from time to time to make sure that nothing bad had happened. Occasionally they would leave a pouch of pine nuts or tubers if the prospectors looked hungry. There was still game then, mostly rabbits, and they did not worry that the white men would starve. But then one of the prospectors became infected with the na’it.

“Na’it?” Bryant asked. “What’s that?” He recognized the word, could swear it was the same word one of the other Washoe had used when they first found him by the cave.

“It is the hunger. A bad spirit that can pass from man to man. A very old myth among our people, though it had rarely if ever been upheld with proof. But what had happened to the white man . . . it was certainly the na’it. That’s what the elders say.”

“How does this happen?” he asked. “How does this . . . na’it . . . work?”

Tanau Mogop listened patiently to the elders before explaining. “In the ancient tales, the na’it will attack a man to eat him, but we think . . . we believe that sometimes the man survives the attack, only he has been infected with the bad spirit. Before long, he will be na’it, too, and will want to eat the flesh of men.”

Bryant remembered stories he’d read of how the Incas, when first confronted with Spanish conquistadors over three hundred years ago, had mistaken the tall, light-skinned Europeans for gods. Then again, he suspected those stories had been a mere invention of the Spanish. But could the na’it-worshipping Anawai have mistaken a white-skinned stranger with a ravening hunger as the sufferer of a punishment by an ancient evil spirit? Perhaps if they truly had no other context to explain the white man’s sickening behavior . . .

He rubbed his lower lip. Of course, if it was a proper sickness they’d experienced, there might be any number of diseases that could be said to exhibit similar symptoms. Walton Gow had told him of the work of a British researcher, Thomas Addison, on a strange type of anemia. Sufferers of Addison’s anemia, as it was called, were said to rarely, but on occasion, exhibit a desire to consume blood. Bloody meats. Organs. Surely it was conceivable that there were more diseases like this out there that had not yet been studied or fully understood. This na’it might be a variation of Addison’s anemia.

But the coincidence—the similarity to the incident in Smithboro, the man who seemingly had devolved to an animal state, killing livestock with his teeth and bare hands—felt uncanny.

Which is to say, it was just what Bryant had, in some form or another, been chasing all along.

“So it is your understanding that one of the prospectors killed the rest after he was infected with the na’it?” Bryant wanted to be clear. “Killed them”—he thought of the bones he had found, picked clean—“and ate them?”

Tanau Mogop nodded solemnly. “Na’it are never satisfied. Na’it want everything. Kill everything.”

“And you’re saying that this condition is contagious? That it can be passed from a person exhibiting the symptoms to someone who is healthy?” Anemia wasn’t contagious; that meant this might be a new type of disease, a contagion like rabies. A disease that made men desperate for raw meat. Human flesh. And frightened the Indians enough to kill anyone with the symptoms.

Na’it kill everything.

From the galais dungal later that night, Edwin stared into the empty distance and wondered if he would ever leave this place and see his friends again. He was starting to think Margie was a figment of his imagination, marvelous and unlikely, an invisible friend he’d dreamed up to hide the fact that he was a lonely old bachelor destined to die alone.

Tanau Mogop saw him and asked if there was something Bryant wanted.

“I must find my way home,” Bryant said. “Do you think your people could help?”

Tanau Mogop whittled while he thought. “I will ask Tiyeli Taba,” he said at length. It was not a small thing to ask, he explained, because they would have to cross through Anawai territory to get to Johnson’s Ranch.

Tanau Mogop shook his head. “The Anawai were not always this way, though. They only began the practice of sacrifice five or six summers ago. Protection against the na’it.”

Bryant’s hands froze around the arrowhead he’d been honing. Something Tanau Mogop had said began twirling through Bryant’s head, activating a theory, a suspicion, you might call it, that had been nagging at him these last weeks. “Six years ago . . .”