The Hunger(78)

A wail broke from Elizabeth Graves’s throat. “You mean my William and Eleanor got the consumption?”

“No—consumption don’t come on real fast like that,” Eliza Williams said, shaking her head. “I tended to some consumptives over in Taylorsville. It builds up in a person. It isn’t like that at all.”

Stanton thought of Halloran those last few days, his fevered glittering eyes, the nonsense he spouted when anyone pressed him, how he’d attacked Tamsen. He’d never known a consumptive but thought of an epidemic he’d witnessed as a boy in Massachusetts, smallpox breaking out all over town as though it had been carried on the wind. The children died first, it seemed, the young and the old and the very weak.

It made sense now. This madness might be contagious, something a body could carry with it, hidden inside. It might take very little to pass along the disease.

Stanton hated to be the one to break this bad news to them. Not only bad news, but the worst possible news under the circumstances. Reluctantly, he stepped into the center of the circle, coughing to get everyone’s attention. “I think we have to look to what all the people who got sick have in common. And that’s that they ate some of the meat last night.”

Talking ceased. They looked at each other, brows lifting in realization as they tried to remember which of them had partaken. Faces paled in recall.

“That’s right,” Elizabeth Graves said, a hand rising to her mouth in alarm. “Both my William and Eleanor had some of that beef. The teamster, too. I saw him.”

“Does that mean we’re all going to get sick?” Baylis asked, his voice rising.

“Maybe. Don’t panic, now,” Stanton said, spreading his hands for their attention. “Let’s see what happens. Maybe there’s a reason only some of us took ill. Maybe it won’t affect everyone.”

Mary Graves looked to Stanton, her gray eyes clouded with worry, and he knew why. Her parents had pressed all her siblings to eat last night, to partake of the rich red meat while they could; it might be their last chance for fresh food in a while. They’d given all of the family’s share to the children. Stanton had skipped it because Mary had shared her concerns with him. Thank God he’d listened to her.

“Are you saying that cow was diseased?” Lavinah Murphy asked, paling. Her entire family had been at the feast. “It looked perfectly fine—before it was attacked.”

Those gruesome wounds. Stanton turned to her. “Maybe that’s it—maybe it was the attack. Maybe whatever attacked that cow was diseased—”

“A wolf, it had to be a wolf,” Baylis Williams broke in, saying what they were all thinking. “What else could it be?”

“Wolf, or bear,” Stanton said. “Maybe whatever’s been following us is diseased.” He pointed to the dark forest surrounding them; eyes followed.

The part he didn’t understand was how this disease could pass so quickly, how a victim could succumb within hours. It seemed somehow faster in the young, as though the disease fed on the able-bodied and strong. Again, he cursed Edwin Bryant’s absence; his medical training would come in awfully handy right now. But there was nothing to be done for it except make their best guess.

Stanton paced in front of the group, pointing again to the woods. “If we don’t want whatever’s waiting for us to come back, night after night, trying to pick off the cattle, bringing that disease with them, we’ve got to do something.”

Patrick Breen, withdrawn deep into his worry, looked up. “What are you saying? We may need those cattle to keep us alive through the winter.”

Stanton turned back to face the group. “I’m saying we slaughter them. Today. We can store the carcasses in snow. It’ll be easier than trying to guard twenty live head of cattle.” He looked at Breen. “It’s your livestock, Mr. Breen. It’s your decision. If we don’t do this, we stand the chance of losing those cattle one by one to whatever’s out there, and that won’t do any of us any good. What do you say?”

All eyes were on Breen, the big man looking even bigger wrapped in his heavy coat, a bear pelt hanging from his shoulders. He glanced at his wife, Peggy, her eyes red from crying, and she gave an almost imperceptible nod. “All right then, we’ll do what you say. For the good of the wagon party.”

Every grown man in the party gathered by the lake, bringing knives and axes and rope. It was hard, tiring work and within an hour the men were drenched in blood: blood up to their elbows. Their hair was matted with it, and they lost the grip on their weapons. A dozen scrawny flayed carcasses hung from the trees, dripping warm blood that melted the snow underneath. Steam rose from the ground and carried a warm, fecund scent.

They’d have to stack the meat like cordwood in the snow to freeze, close enough for Patrick Breen to keep an eye on it but far away enough so the diseased wolves, if that was what they were, would not be led to their door.

Stanton helped pack the carcasses in ice and snow. It was a huge quantity of meat. But not enough to see sixty people through an entire winter, if it came to that.

He prayed it wouldn’t.

He thought of the narrow mountain pass that he’d ridden through just a few weeks back—it would be just two weeks’ journey in fine weather from the pass to Johnson’s Ranch but one they simply couldn’t risk in these conditions. The land was hidden under deceptively deep drifts of snow. It was clear now they couldn’t even make it to the pass.