The Hunger

EPILOGUE

James Reed was halfway across the ridgeline when the big bay gelding buckled suddenly underneath him, floundering in the deep snow. For a moment, Reed was afraid they would both go down.

The footing had been treacherous every inch of the way from John Sutter’s fort. If it wasn’t heavy wet snow, it was slippery mud higher than the horses’ fetlocks. A wet, miserable time of year. But there was no choice. Putting off the rescue operation until it got warmer was out of the question. He was afraid he’d already waited too long.

Reed urged his reluctant horse on. A string of men on horseback and supply mules snaked behind him.

Seven days out from Sutter’s, the snow was now chest-deep on the horses. It was clear they could go no farther on horseback; they’d be better off traveling on foot. This meant they could take far fewer of the precious supplies he’d worked so hard to gather, which troubled Reed but couldn’t be helped. The rest they strung up in the trees to use for resupply on their return. The bundles, swaying high in the branches, looked like misshapen insects’ nests. In that moment, he made himself a promise: When they came back this way, his family would be with him. Margaret, Virginia, Patty, little James, Thomas.

It was the promise of this reunion that had kept him going through his hard months of exile. He wouldn’t have lasted a week if his stepdaughter Virginia hadn’t snuck out of camp to provide him a horse and supplies for his journey. Clever girl. Only thirteen years old and she knew what to do. A cloth bundle contained food from their diminishing store: dried beef, currants, hard-boiled eggs, and the last of the family’s beer in a canteen. He had fought back tears as he thanked her.

“You was always a good daddy to us,” she said to him as she handed over the reins.

When Reed had arrived at Sutter’s Fort in late October, a cold wind was already blowing from the north. Sutter’s Fort was sprawling and strong, with thick adobe walls and cannon—no hole-in-the-wall like Jim Bridger’s place. Sutter had a couple dozen Paiute, Miwoks, and Mexicans working for him, and a steady stream of nearby settlers came in every day for supplies, the post, and the latest news.

Reed had been delighted to find Will McCutcheon at the fort, nearly recovered and working for Sutter to earn his keep. Between the two of them, they talked Sutter into lending them two mules and a few supplies, though Sutter warned them they wouldn’t make it over the mountain.

He was right. The winter had already arrived at the higher elevations. They made it nearly to the pass before they had to admit defeat and turn back.

“The pass will be snowed over until February,” Sutter had told him, and so, when the California Battalion came through the fort signing up men to fight for independence from Mexico, Reed joined them. He had been in the militia during the Black Hawk Wars. He knew how to soldier.

While in Yerba Buena, he spoke at gatherings about the party stranded in the mountains, appealing for donations. It was there he heard that a few survivors had made it to Sutter’s Fort. William Eddy was quoted in half a dozen newspapers, telling of the hardships they faced: starvation, hard snows, and a strange disease that ravaged men and turned them into monsters, the way rabies acted on dogs to make them violent and blood-hungry.

Blood-hungry. Reed thought of the Nystrom boy and Hastings’s deranged rantings and the corpse of the Indian boy found strung up between the trees.

The newspapers said a rescue party was already gathering. He resolved to lead it.

AS THEY DESCENDED into the pass, however, Reed saw no signs of cabins, or of any life at all. Even the lake was invisible. All Reed could see was a valley of white; a few sparse pines poked through the long sheet of snow. They looked suspiciously like the top portion of much bigger trees.

As they made their way lower, the black surface of a lake became visible between snowy hillocks. Then: irregularities in the uniform white. A square of brown that might be part of a damaged cabin. Wispy smoke plumes lifting to the sky. A camp.

The last stretch was agonizingly slow. He had to keep his eyes nearly closed against the blinding glare. He fought the urge to run toward it. It would only exhaust him. Discipline had gotten him this far. It would get him the rest of the way.

He saw indications of life, evidence all over of activity, of survivors—but no actual life, no humans, no shouting, no cattle, not a single horse in sight. Big fire-blackened pits ringed the cabins. An echoing sort of quiet.

As he moved toward the first cabin, he was touched by a deep and resonating fear—it worked on him like an interior bell, sounding through his whole body. He was suddenly self-conscious in front of the hired men. Afraid he would find his family dead, afraid he would break down. For he loved them—he had to believe that. It was why he was here. It didn’t matter that he’d been sent away in disgrace.

Run away with me, Edward McGee had once said. But Reed had told him no. Edward had been full of rage and hurt, a kind of righteousness that came with youth; he accused Reed of not wanting to abandon his family because he was afraid, but Reed wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t hiding. That was what McGee hadn’t understood. Reed did love them, in his way. Perhaps he sensed that the love they bore him back was different—more enduring, more forgiving—than the kind he’d find in Edward McGee. And in that, he’d been right, hadn’t he?

But Edward McGee didn’t matter now. And what had happened with John Snyder didn’t change things, either. Reed once thought that love was akin to passion, but he saw now that it was something different entirely; that it was, perhaps, a kind of faith.

Given the stillness in the valley, he fully expected the cabin would be empty, that the newspapers had gotten the story wrong, that Sutter had sent them to the wrong place.

He pushed open the door and almost shouted. A cluster of skulls stared back at him from the reeking gloom.

Not skulls—near skulls. People so emaciated they looked like skeletons.

One of them moved and let out a faint groan.

Horror and hope swept through James Reed in a dizzying wave. He’d found them—some of them, anyway. They were alive.

And then a hushed, ragged voice emerged from the darkness. The voice of a girl, young, almost unrecognizable. “Father?”

It was Virginia. His daughter. He could make out her features now, though they’d been ravaged by hunger and transformed—teeth jutting from a drawn face. There was a pause, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to stand the emotion that took hold of him by the throat. But then it was as if a bright light lit him from within, and he felt certain—more certain than he’d ever been in his life—that he did understand what love was.

He fell to his knees and reached out a hand.