The Hunger(9)

“Damn wolves,” someone muttered.

As Stanton shoved his way inside the circle, the first thing he saw was Edwin Bryant on his knees. What looked like a red, wet smear in the grass turned out to be a body. He shut his eyes momentarily. He’d faced ugly things before but was hard-pressed to recall ever seeing something as monstrous as this. He opened his eyes again.

The head was intact. In fact, if you only looked at the face you wouldn’t think anything was wrong. The boy’s eyes were closed, long brown lashes stark against chalk-white cheeks. His fine blond hair was plastered against his skull, his tiny mouth closed. He looked peaceful, as though he were sleeping.

But from the neck down . . .

Next to him, George Donner let out a whimper.

“What happened to him?” Lewis Keseberg asked, prodding the ground by the body with the butt of his rifle, as if it might yield answers. Keseberg and Donner were friends, though Stanton couldn’t imagine why. Keseberg was all black temper and violence, hard lines: your side, my side. Hard to believe he had the patience to be a father but he had a little daughter, Stanton had heard.

“It’s got to be wolves, body torn up like that.” William Eddy rubbed his beard, a nervous habit. Eddy was a carpenter, good at repairing broken axles and busted wheels. For this reason, he was popular among the families on the wagon train. But he was jumpy, too, high-strung. Stanton wasn’t sure he trusted him.

“What do you think, Doc?” Jacob Wolfinger asked, in his mild German accent.

Bryant sat back on his heels. “I’m no doctor,” he reminded them. “And I couldn’t say. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think it was wolves. It seems too neat.”

Stanton shuddered involuntarily. There wasn’t even a body, not really. There was almost nothing left but the skeleton. Tatters of flesh and scattered bones in a flattened, blood-soaked circle in the grass, intestines lying in a heap and already dark with flies. And another thing troubled him: They were six miles up the trail from where the boy had first gone missing. Wolves wouldn’t drag a carcass before devouring it.

“Whatever it was, it was hungry,” Donner commented—his face was leached of color. “We should bury the remains. We don’t want any of the women or children to see this.”

Eddy spat. “What about the parents? Somebody’s got to say whether this is the right boy or not—”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. The next white settlement is days away,” Wolfinger said. “Who else could it be?” Wolfinger had emerged as the leader of the German emigrants in the party, translating for the ones who knew no English. They kept mostly to themselves, and often huddled around their campfires at night, speaking rapid-fire German—though Stanton hadn’t failed to miss Wolfinger’s pretty, young wife, Doris, whose hands looked like they were made for playing a piano, not carrying firewood or tugging on reins.

In the end, a couple of men went for shovels. Others wandered back to check on their families, to wake their sleeping children or simply to look at them, be reassured by their presence.

Stanton rolled up his sleeves and took a turn digging.

They didn’t need a large hole to accommodate the remains—there was so little of the boy—but they wanted it deep so that no animal would go after the bones. Besides, the physical exertion felt good. Stanton wanted to be tired tonight when he went to bed.

Too tired to dream.

Predictably, although George Donner stayed, he did nothing more than heap a few shovelfuls of dirt onto the grave. When at last they were done, Donner said a brief halting prayer over the fresh dirt. The old words sounded thin in the night air.

Donner and Stanton walked back to the wagons together, along with James Reed and Bryant. Stanton didn’t know Reed well and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He’d been well known among business leaders back in Springfield, but not well liked.

Reed held a dying torch overhead, but the flame could do little against the darkness that surrounded them. He and Donner floated in and out of the light, their pale faces bobbing on the periphery like ghosts. The ground was uneven and treacherous underfoot, broken up by prairie dog tunnels and clumps of tall grass. The hot summer air, so oppressive during the day, had cooled but was still dry and dusty.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Reed said at length, breaking the silence. “I agree with your earlier assessment, Mr. Bryant. If it were an animal that attacked, it would have been messier. The answer is obvious. Indians—it had to be Indians.” He raised a hand to stop Bryant from interrupting. “I know you claim to be some kind of expert on Indians, Mr. Bryant. You go live with them and talk to them and take all manner of notes for this book of yours. But you’ve never fought them, never faced them in anger as I have. I know what they’re capable of.” Reed told anyone who would listen that he’d fought in the Black Hawk War, probably so the tough old trail hands would stop treating him like a tenderfoot.

Bryant’s voice was mild. “That’s right, Mr. Reed. Everything I know about Indians I’ve learned from talking to them as opposed to shooting at them from across a field. But arguing won’t resolve anything. Even you must agree that if we let people think the Indians are responsible, things will go bad pretty fast. We’re traveling through Indian territory. The last thing we need is for people to panic. Besides,” he said, as Reed opened his mouth to object, “I’ve never heard of an Indian custom where they slaughter and dress a body like that.”