Where the Lost Wander(53)

For three years she lived beneath Jennie’s wings, working and watching, until one day she was gone, and Jennie didn’t know where. Ana couldn’t write, but Jennie found a crude drawing on Ana’s cot in the cellar. It was a stick figure depiction of a woman with a pack on her back, the sun above her and pointed triangles of varying sizes in the distance. A curving line ran through them. Mountains. Tipis. A river. I knew what it meant the moment I saw it.

“She went home,” I told Jennie.

“All the way?” Jennie gasped. “All by herself?”

“Well . . . she’s alone here. She is all by herself . . . here.”

I regretted the words as soon as I said them. Jennie looked stricken.

“She is not alone,” she sputtered.

I just shrugged, letting it go, knowing it would hurt Jennie to insist.

It is impossible to explain to someone who is surrounded by their own language and people just how lonely it is to not understand and to not be understood.

Jennie put the picture Ana left between the pages of her Bible and prayed for her every day. My father said she’d gone with a wagon train. He had it on good authority, and Jennie was slightly reassured. He seemed relieved to have her gone. I think Ana reminded him of my mother too, and he was never comfortable in her presence. My father was never comfortable in my presence, and it made me uncomfortable with myself. It made me nervous with others. It made me quiet and cautious. It made me doubt myself.

I’m definitely doubting myself right now. Jennie was right; I am good with languages and good with sounds, but I am not always good at hearing what people don’t say. Naomi is not saying anything, and I am stumped. I need her to talk to me in order for me to understand her. She doesn’t come find me when I am on watch—she hasn’t since I told her I wasn’t going to kiss her again—and I’m too proud to seek her out. So I’m miserable. And if her downcast eyes and stiff shoulders are any indication, she’s miserable too. Damn, if the days aren’t long. It is not easy, once you’ve been bathed in light and warmth, to be shut out in the cold.

We are forced to cross the Sweetwater again and again as it winds and turns through gorges and canyons where we cannot follow, only to veer back across our path before turning again. One day we ford it three times before making camp and rising again the next, when we don wet boots to walk several miles before doing it again. And like the river, I swing between what I want to do and what I need to do, not really sure which is which.

It is mid-July, yet halfway between Split Rock—a giant stone wall with a vee hacked out at the top—and the Pacific Springs, we walk through canyons where the snow has blown down from the peaks above and collected in shadowed drifts along the roadside. We pick up handfuls and ice the water in our canteens and barrels. A huge snowball hits me right between my shoulders, and Webb hollers like a Sioux brave on the warpath, having hit his target. Naomi pelts him right between the eyes, and a battle is waged for a few frenzied minutes. I’m riding the dun, and he is not amused by the raining clumps of ice. Naomi has no problem lobbing a flurry of snowballs my way, but when the game is over, she reverts to the polite stranger.

We leave the river to skirt an impassable canyon, travel two days without seeing the Sweetwater at all, and swing back down to cross it again. Seven times. Eight? I’ve lost count, but I don’t complain; the river is easier to cross than the hills.

We climb a ridge so steep and rocky we cannot ride our animals for fear of tumbling over and rolling down the graveled slope. We unhitch the teams, walk them to the top, and then one by one, using the teams to help us pull, we push forty wagons—ten fewer than we started with—up the ridge. When the ropes start to unravel on the final haul, the men pushing the Hineses’ wagon barely make it out of the way before it crashes to the bottom of the hill, broken, bent, and completely unsalvageable.

Adam Hines and his new bride will be without a wagon at least until we reach Fort Bridger. William offers them the use of Warren’s, with the condition that his supplies remain. A few others make room in their wagons for the possessions that won’t fit. Lydia walks alongside Naomi and Winifred, and Adam gladly yokes his oxen to Warren’s wagon. My mules and I are freed from duty for the first time since the alkali flats, and I herd them ahead, stripped of an excuse to travel with the Mays, though I hardly needed one before. Samson and Delilah are almost giddy as we ford the river for the ninth and last time, leaving the Sweetwater and the longest week of my life behind.



South Pass is a wide, grassy saddle of land sitting between a range of mountains to the north and another to the south.

“They call this the Continental Divide. The Sweetwater River flows east, and everything to the west flows toward the Pacific,” Abbott hollers, pulling his wagon to a halt. “Everything thataway is the Oregon Territory.”

“Oregon? Already?” Webb yells, as if the journey has been a buggy ride in the countryside. “Ya hear that, Will? We’re almost there!”

Almost there, and still eight hundred miles to go. Webb is riding Trick alongside me, Will behind him. My mules and the horses have picked up the pace, sensing quitting time.

A few trees climb the low bluffs that rise up here and there, but from where I sit, there is nothing but vastness. Vast skies above, vast land below, and nothing to obscure the view in between.

I pitch my tent and see to my animals, keeping myself apart from the rest, still swinging between resolution and regret. I’m carrying buckets from the stream we’re camped beside, my hair still dripping from a good wash, when Winifred May finds me and asks for a moment of my time. Wolfe is in her arms, his little legs kicking wildly, freed from the papoose I bought him in Laramie.