The Hunger(81)

Now she knew that if Virginia died, it would at least in part be her fault.

And then they’d never know why she’d really come.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE





Edwin Bryant recognized the trail to the abandoned prospectors’ camp as soon as he saw it.

He’d traveled north by northwest from Tiyeli Taba’s village on Tanau Mogop’s horse, which he tied to a tree several yards away. The wind riffled through the branches of the surrounding pines, sounding alive. A shiver ran down his back.

He built a fire and carried a burning stick into the tumbledown hovel as a torch, knowing it would be as dark as a cave inside the shack. The items he’d found earlier waited for him: the tin cup, book of psalms, coins, bottles. He inspected them for identifying marks, particularly the psalm book. The flyleaf, the most likely place for an inscription, was gone as were the next thirty or forty thin, onionskin pages.

He got down on his knees and shifted through the trapped dead leaves and pine needles that had fallen through the collapsed roof. He picked carefully through the loamy dirt, setting aside the edible bugs that he found, insects being his main source of food now.

At the end of an hour, the only thing he’d turned up was a tattered shirt, decayed by long exposure to the elements. He sat back, stretching the fabric between his hands, feeling his spirits sink. Had it been a waste of time to return? What had he expected to find?

Bryant put the shirt next to the other items and went outside, grateful for fresh air free of the musty taint of the cabin. On his last visit, he’d respectfully piled the bones he’d found outside the cabin, a way to mark the horrors that had taken place here. Staring at the skulls now, Bryant wondered if there had been any survivors. Was there a way to know how many men had been at the camp? He counted five skulls. Yet someone had severed the limbs from the bodies. Had it been one of the prospectors or someone else?

He pulled the prospecting tools from under the bushes and sorted through them. There were a dozen shovels, though that proved nothing. He imagined it likely that a man who’d come all this way to prospect might have brought more than one shovel. Nine pickaxes of varying design. A number of dented tin ore buckets and a half-dozen sieve pans. Bryant inspected the tools one by one, looking for identifying marks. Though the heads of most of the implements were covered with rust, he could make out the manufacturers’ marks: Greenlee, Beatty, Stanley.

It was then he noticed crudely scratched names on some of the wooden hafts. Probably meant to identify the owner when disagreements broke out. He sorted them by name. Whitely. Gerjets. Appleby. Smith. Stowe. Dunning. Foulkes. Peabody.

Keseberg.

Bryant’s gut twisted. He recalled now with decent clarity a fact that had slipped from his mind these past weeks. Lewis Keseberg had mentioned a relative—an uncle—who had gone prospecting out in these very mountains a handful of years ago. He hadn’t thought much of it at the time, though he was sure he did write of it to his fiancée. But now he realized it was too much to be coincidence. Lewis Keseberg’s uncle had been one of these prospectors, and had surely died along with the others. Or had he?

That night as he sat next to the fire, sucking the wet innards of insects from their shells, Bryant wondered what exactly had happened at this doomed place—how it had all started. Of course, it was still possible there’d been no disease whatsoever, that the prospectors had all been attacked by an external force—but surely there’d been enough of them to defend themselves from such an attack, which meant he was likely right in assuming the threat had come from within.

No, he felt more sure than ever that there was a disease to blame, the same one he’d seen in Smithboro, and that this sickness, this strange desire for human flesh of which the Indians had spoken—had even associated with their preexisting myth of the na’it—must have started here. Tanau Mogop had told Bryant they’d suspected the Anawai brought it on themselves by associating too freely with the mountain men who trekked through their forests. The Washoe were wary of outsiders, who were known to pass on sickness. They’d said the outbreak of behavior, and the behavior of sacrificing to the na’it had begun around exactly the same time, in what had been a relatively peaceful area. What else could explain it but the introduction of white men carrying the disease? But how?

How did disease spring forth in one place or another, seemingly out of nowhere? Surely one of these prospectors would have had to catch it first, then spread it to the others, and beyond.

He thought of one of Gow’s last letters to him, in which he’d mentioned the work of Dr. Snow, and his belief that disease could spread in myriad ways. Snow had told him that in fact humanity’s entire understanding of disease, our connection of the disease to its symptoms, might be erroneous. Namely, that a disease and its symptoms were not necessarily the same thing. That the disease is something alive but invisible—almost like a spirit, in fact—that then takes hold in the body and causes symptoms, sometimes different symptoms in different people. Sometimes, even, causing no symptoms at all.

He thought, too, then, of the story of the large Irish family he’d heard about, who had apparently all succumbed to a similar sickness, save for a young girl who had remained remarkably symptom-free.

Bryant tossed the shells into the fire and listened to them crackle as he turned the mystery over in his mind. He lay on the bare ground, hoping for sleep. As Bryant watched the flickering orange flames, his mind drifted.