The Hunger(79)

The boys were sent to root through snow for more firewood. Stanton, William Eddy, and Jay Fosdick, husband to Mary’s sister Sarah, set to work skinning. Behind them floated sounds from the lake, the steady chop of metal on bone . . . and men shouting.

The shouts rose up from the lake, growing louder in pitch.

A scuffle had broken out. Stanton laid down his knife and joined the swarm of men flowing like ants to the water. He pushed his way through the crowd to see Noah James and Landrum Murphy squaring off. Both were young, under seventeen.

“What’s going on here?” Stanton said, trying to get between them.

Noah glowered. “Murphy’s too careless with his knife. He almost cut my hand off.”

“It’s his own fault,” Landrum Murphy sneered. Landrum was a strapping farm boy with his mother Lavinah’s plain, broad face. “He’s standing around catching flies. This is men’s work we’re doing.” He was playing to the crowd. “If he can’t keep up, Noah should go back to the cabins with the women.”

It was a low blow. Red-faced, Noah lunged, but Stanton caught him before he could do any harm. Still, Stanton was surprised by the boy’s strength. He could barely keep a grip on him.

“You shouldn’t be out here anyway. Weren’t you both sick this morning? You should be resting.” Stanton pushed Noah back a step, but the boy wasn’t listening. The murderous look in his eyes gave Stanton a chill.

But it was Landrum Murphy who charged, bloodied knife drawn. Noah, the quicker of the two, leapt out of his way but then stumbled in the choppy snow. The crowd danced back, too, as Landrum threw himself at Noah and knocked him to his back. In a split second, he drove the knife into Noah’s chest.

A gasp ran through the circle, and for a second, everyone froze.

Landrum sat on Noah James’s chest like a cobbler at his bench. Before anyone could pull him away, Landrum brought his knife to Noah’s face—prettier than Landrum’s, almost as pretty as a girl—and sliced off an ear. He held it up for a split second, watching it tremble in his fingers like a freshly caught minnow.

And then snatched it up with his teeth, grinning.

Panic. Shouting. Stanton grabbed the boy before he could reach for Noah’s other ear. It took two men plus Stanton to tackle the boy and pin him. Everyone was shouting. Stanton took a boot to the head, a ringing shock he felt in his teeth, but didn’t let go.

Murder, someone screamed. Murder. Devil.

He gripped Landrum Murphy in a bear hug. The boy’s chest and shoulders heaved with each breath, his whole body thrumming with excitement. Stanton couldn’t help but notice Landrum was hot to the touch. Burning up.

“What the hell has gotten into you?” Stanton shouted at him, frightened beyond sense. And Noah lay with a ribbon of blood unspooling from his ruined face, and his chest sticky with blood, as another dust of snow began to fall. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Eliza Williams danced backward, away from Noah. “It’s madness, that’s what it is. After what we’ve been through, we’re all going mad.”

He had heard of men going mad in the wilderness, driven to talk gibberish and crawl on all fours. He had heard of men lost for months in the snow forgetting their names, forgetting who they were, or that they were men at all.

But this was something different.

He thought of the Donners, miles back by now, and they hadn’t caught up. Surely they’d been forced to camp somewhere just as the rest were camped here. What would become of them? It seemed almost a certainty that they would’ve been beset by this same madness. He felt a pang of regret that he was powerless to help them, but he was needed here.

He then thought suddenly of Halloran—he’d heard how Halloran had played the fiddle like a madman just days before he died. But that had been far enough back down the trail. “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he said shortly, “but maybe madness is part of the sickness, too. Maybe it can catch.”



* * *



? ? ?

THAT NIGHT, Charles Stanton watched the layers of snow gathering on the pass and thought of Mary. Pure as snow. He wanted to love her with a clean heart. How all this snow and all this danger seemed to want to erase his past as badly as he did—to blot out everything. But as it did, it began to blot him out, too. To change him. His grandfather would say even this horrible situation was part of God’s plan, but Stanton would be damned if he could see what it was. It made him certain of one thing, however: his love for Mary Graves. She seemed more and more every day like the image of an angel his grandfather used to keep on the wall in their home—perfect, pure, but also untouchable.

The rest, sleepless, watched each other: The disease, if it was a disease, might work like any other kind of sickness. They watched for sneezing, for coughing, for signs of fever.

Noah James died before morning.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR





The Donners had been more than a week at Alder Creek, and every day, it snowed. Elitha felt like the whole world had shrunk to the size of the tent, to the sprawling branches of the giant alder tree, to the distance between firepits. The snow melted away near the bonfires they burned every night, at Tamsen’s insistence, but beyond this circle the landscape was nothing but a thick blanket of white. Snow halfway up most of the trees. Tamsen and Uncle Jacob decided it was too deep for the wagons. They debated how far they might get on snowshoes, if they had any, but all that talk amounted to nothing, since they didn’t.