The Hunger

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The snow kept falling over Alder Creek: It was dainty, pretty, even. Unrelenting.

Often as her husband slept, fitfully, Tamsen would stare at him in wonder, remembering how she had once longed for his death—prayed it would come as a pleasant and nasty surprise: neat, tidy, over with quickly, as it had been with her first husband. How she fancied she’d find an improved opportunity elsewhere, that her beauty, like a fishing hook, would save her yet, fetching her a better catch than before. Those ideas seemed remarkably naïve to her now, set as they’d been within the larger belief that life would be good to her, despite everything—that she would turn it all around, would carve out a space for happiness. That it was a thing you could get to by clawing at it.

She knew better now, though. And knowing it allowed her to forgive George, at least a little, for the terrible entrapment she felt their marriage had been. He’d given up his own safety for hers, for no good reason at all, except that she was the mother of his children. Except that he, unaccountably, adored her.

In a practical sense, she hardly needed him. George wasn’t good for much more than bluster and bright-eyed cajoling. No, what she did need, though, was that very adoration.

For someone to care.

TEMPERATURES DROPPED.

Two days now they’d been hunkered inside the tents. The snow came up to their knees and obscured the way ahead in a thick blanket of white. It had begun to harden in place. Everyone shivered together, fully dressed, under quilts and blankets. George was delirious and feverish. His skin burned but was as pale as the snow. Every time he cried out in pain in his sleep, the girls whimpered, terrified. Tamsen made him drink tea made with ginger, bee balm, and cinnamon, good for infection.

It was late. She slept now only in snatches—an hour, maybe two if she was lucky. Burger and Shoemaker had eventually made it back, during a break in the snowfall, but only with the bitter news that Eddy had refused help. They had no choice but to wait out the weather now. They were as good as stuck.

She was sitting at George’s side, sleepless, when she heard a sound outside the tent: a gentle schussing, as though someone was gliding by on runners. A sleigh, that was what they needed, but a sleigh out here in the wilderness? Impossible. She was so desperate to be rescued that she was hallucinating.

Tamsen threw her cloak over her shoulders and picked her way out of the crowded tent. She listened for the crunch of boots on snow, but instead she heard something else: whispers. No matter how hard she strained she couldn’t make out what was being said.

Something was out there. If you’d asked her a month ago she’d have said it was wolves, but now she was filled with a worse kind of dread. Once again the visions she’d had in the basin came back to her: the shadow figures with their strange appearance, like something long-dead come back to life; the sickening smell of the one that had caught fire. Pushing through the fear was a current of anger. She’d let everyone dissuade her of what she’d believed to be true. Kept her head down while they mocked and isolated her.

But she’d been right, and she knew it now—could feel it.

No, could feel them.

They had followed her here. Had been, possibly, tracking their party all this time.

Her mind raced. Should she awaken the others and demand their help? Would they even listen? If they once again ridiculed her, the danger might only get worse. There wasn’t much time. The creatures moved fast.

She shuddered, turning toward the mouth of the tent to try to find a rifle, remembering again the way their faces writhed in the fire.

Fire. They had been terrified of the fire in the desert. They had scattered after the broken lantern set the dry plain aflame.

Tamsen paused, listening again. There they were—the distant, hungry whispers, moving through the branches of the trees as drifts of snow blew to the ground.

She couldn’t be imagining it, could she?

She thought again about rousing the hired men to help, but they were slow to get out of bed and she would not let a second pass while the creatures could be closing in on her family. She would not allow these men to stop her from doing what was right.

Not this time.

Fire. She had to build a fire, now. She focused her mind on that.

Carrying wood slick with frost in her arms, Tamsen made her way through the snow as far as she dared go toward the woods. Her boots filled with frigid slush. Her hem cracked with ice. Her fingers turned numb, bloated from the cold.

She cleared a spot on the wet ground and stacked the wood as quickly as she could, occasionally stopping to look over her shoulders. Crouching, she thought she saw eyes glittering in the dusk, glittering with the reflected light.

“Go away,” she said out loud, her voice thin in the cold.

From the old flames, she set a twig alight and carried it to the newly built campfire. Carefully, she lit the tinder at the base. The tinder caught but just barely, sending up a smoky plume. She would build a third one, too. The others would say it was a waste of good logs, but she knew better.

As she was working, Solomon and William, Betsy’s teenaged boys by her previous husband, crept out from the tent, shoulders hunched against the cold. “What are you doing, Aunt Tamsen?” Solomon asked.

She straightened up. On the air, their breath seized and turned white. “There’s something in the woods—can you hear it, boys?”

“Wild animals?” William asked. He was the younger of the two and was always looking for adventure.

Tamsen hesitated for a second, then nodded.

“We should hunt for it. Father says we could use some wild game.”

“These animals… aren’t the kind for eating. And though you’re a very brave boy, William, you shouldn’t go out hunting after dark.” She had to clench a jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. “Will you help me build some more campfires, though, to keep it away?”

The brothers looked puzzled. But they were good boys and helped her in the end. They built three new fires, making four in total. By this time, the oxen had started lowing, but it was too dark to go searching for them and make sure they were okay. Tamsen’s heart felt as if it might splinter in her throat, as if it might shatter like ice and cut her open from the inside out. She remembered how Elitha had screamed when the man got a blackened arm around her. How he’d sniffed at her neck. The cadaverous look of his face and the wet, pulsating motion of his nostrils.

As if he’d found them by smell.

They were still out there. She could hear them. The wood was wet. It wouldn’t light fast enough. Why hadn’t she thought to bring out her rifle anyway? Maybe the noise would have at least scared them off. Would four fires be enough? No. They must build more. As many as they could. In a circle, all around the tents…

A hand came down on her arm and she nearly screamed.

But it was just Jacob. He had given his heavy coat to George, piled it on top of his brother’s blankets, though it did nothing to stop the shivering. Now he wore only a filthy shirt. The cold had turned his nose red already.

“What are you doing?” He shook his head, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “It’s as bright as daylight out here. Go on,” he said, to Solomon and William. “Go get some sleep.”

She saw that the boys were pale with cold and exhaustion. She had lost track of how long they’d been outside.

“There’s something out there,” she said, once they were alone. “Something watching us. You can hear it.”

They both stood still, listening. Sure enough, within minutes, a murmuring rose above the lowing of the oxen.

“Do you hear it?” she whispered.

When Jacob nodded, she nearly wept. She had almost begun to wonder whether she was going crazy.

“It sounds human,” Jacob whispered. “Perhaps some of the others, looking for us?”

Tamsen shook her head. “No.”

They stood together in silence, and after a minute they saw dark figures moving between the trees, caught behind the haze of smoke from the fires. They appeared and then vanished, then reappeared again. Circling, pacing, stalking.

“There,” she whispered.

Jacob was quiet. “Those are mere shadows cast by the flames, Tamsen,” he said gently. “And the whispers—it could just be the wind. Or our minds playing tricks on us.” But she heard the tremor of doubt in his voice, saw the way he shivered, listening hard.

“Maybe. Or maybe something’s been following us. Ever since the basin,” she said, emphasizing the last word only slightly.

Jacob turned to her. “Tamsen,” he said quietly, placing his big hands on her shoulders. He looked into her eyes. “What is this really about?”

She wanted to cry, or scream, or tear at her brother-in-law’s face. How dare he keep questioning her?

“We’re isolated from the rest of the party,” she reminded him, “and I bet they—the creatures, the monsters—they know we have an injured man in the tent.” She paused, even as the truth she’d already known sank in deeper, thudding into her gut. Her voice dropped to a hard whisper. “We’re going to die. After everything—after everything. We made it this far. And now they’re going to get us.” She was shaking so hard she thought she’d fall.

“There’s no such thing as monsters.” But Jacob lifted his rifle to his shoulder. His eyes watered from the dense wood smoke, but he didn’t falter. “Go wake the men. We’re going to bring the oxen in, to be on the safe side.” So some part of him did believe her. “Tell them to bring their rifles.”

“The oxen aren’t worth dying over, Jacob. Let them have the cattle.” Maybe they’ll be satisfied, she nearly added, but then stopped herself.

“With no oxen, we can’t get the wagons out of here even when the snow recedes.” Jacob didn’t look at her. He didn’t take his eyes off the figures moving behind the scrim of smoke. He had to see them, too. See how their forms moved with an animal hunger. Shadows didn’t move that way. “If we lose the oxen, we’ll be trapped.”

She knew she didn’t have to remind him.

They already were trapped.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Mary gazed around her at the snow-covered cabin and the makeshift lean-tos nearby, which stood like crumbling sugar cubes, and thought how quaint they looked, almost inviting, if one didn’t know better. Instead they were a kind of purgatory.

It was William Eddy who’d spotted the abandoned cabin first, nearly a week ago now, and it had indeed seemed like a vision under the pine trees: a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, undoubtedly built by an earlier family of settlers that had tried to make its way through the mountain wilderness.

The first flakes of snow were already falling by then. The children, tired as they were, ran around trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues.

Except for the Donners, the wagon party had maneuvered successfully into the hollow, past the inky black lake scattered everywhere with boulders. The place was dark and still as a mausoleum.

“We rest here for the night,” Patrick Breen had said then, though that had been days ago. They had left the Donners behind, and already Patrick Breen had taken on the role of captain.

The Eddys had dragged their meager possessions into Breen’s dwelling, but Breen had pushed them out. “I got more children; we should get the roof,” he’d argued.

Meanwhile, the Murphys had claimed a second cabin. Its roof had fallen in and weather had beaten its walls to a state of collapse, but they propped it up as best they could to keep the weather out. It shared no clean line of sight to the Breens, which was fitting; a feud had broken out between the two families and they hadn’t spoken a word to each other in a week.

The rest had found shelter where they could. The Graveses had joined the Eddys in a tent pitched under a large pine and invited Margaret Reed and her little ones to join them. As for Charles Stanton, he kept to himself in a tiny tent on the outskirts of the area, with a view of the lake’s dark surface.

They sheltered their fires from the snow as much as possible, building them up near the cabin and the lean-to, then gathered to try to warm their hands. And since then, the snow had just kept on coming. Everyone was growing restless, and worried.

Mary still felt the burden of Charles Stanton’s confession on her own heart, too. She believed, powerfully, that she was in love with him, but this place seemed inhospitable to love, and she almost couldn’t bear the idea of telling him now. There would be another chance, later, she told herself. When they got to California. At least when the pass cleared and they made it over these peaks to the next ranch. It wasn’t that far. And love was like forgiveness—deep and patient. It would be waiting for her on the other side.

“WE’LL TRY TO FIND a pass through the mountains tomorrow,” Breen said now as they gathered around the fire. But he’d been saying the same thing night after night, and if this storm didn’t blow through soon, Mary didn’t know what they would do. Breen nodded in the direction of mountain peaks they’d been able to see just days ago, but which were now invisible. Mary thought he was delusional; the snow was coming down faster and heavier than she’d ever seen in Illinois. “Everyone try to get some sleep tonight.”

But in the morning, they found that one of the oxen had gone mad. At first, Mary thought its pained moaning was just the echo of snow dissolving into the lake.

The animals lowed like this every morning, bellowing their hunger, asking for grain that would never come. They were penned in a haphazard circle of the remaining wagons and had stripped all the grass to be found under the snow. Now, they had nothing left to eat. They bumped restlessly against the wagons, hoping for escape.

But then she saw it: There were gouges—open wounds—in the side of one of the beasts, as though it had been attacked by wolves in the night, yet somehow managed to live. Its eyes were bloodshot and a line of foam coated its lower lip. It lolled its big head menacingly as the men approached it, snorting and pawing the ground.

“Waste not, want not,” William Eddy said, and promptly shot it between the eyes.

“Damn it, Eddy,” Patrick Breen cursed. “That was my cow.”

The other cattle grumbled and shuffled away. Eleanor Eddy whimpered.

They harvested the meat and built up big fires, but Mary was one of many who hung back. She’d seen the way the beast’s eyes rolled in its sockets, heard its deranged bellowing. She knew stories of dogs and raccoons that could infect humans through a bite. True, she’d never heard of a cow getting sick that way, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. They still had rations enough; she refused to touch the animal’s flesh.

But many others—too many—were hungry. And the smell of the roasting beef that night drew them out, willing to set aside their caution for a taste of fresh meat.

There were no stories around the campfire, no laughter or songs or shared bottles of whiskey like in the early days on the trail. They’d run dry of all of that long ago. Now it was just the sound of ravenous eating, the smack of lips and teeth tearing flesh off bone.

All around them, the snow came so fast it blurred the world behind a veil, and swallowed the sound of the babies wailing in the cold.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dawn broke pale gray and carried the taste of ash.

The sky was thick with clouds. Snow fell lightly; the storm wasn’t over yet. Sometime in the past hour, the accumulation had put out the bonfires. Thick black tails of smoke now lifted into the sky.

Stanton stamped feeling back into his feet and met the other men around the embers of the last fire, hoping the warmth would drive the numbness from his chest. Rumors reached him quickly; one of Patrick Breen’s boys, his namesake, had gone missing in the night. Patrick, his friend Dolan, and his oldest son, John, had set out to look for the younger Patrick at daybreak.

But midmorning, Patrick Breen and the other scouts returned. They had not found any trace of the boy, nothing but a slick of blood in the woods that seeped through the fresh snowfall.

Meanwhile, William Graves hadn’t woken since last night’s feast. “His forehead’s hot to the touch,” Elizabeth Graves, his mother, said through tightened lips. James Smith, a teamster who’d also partaken of the meal, sweated like he was in the tropics.

Thirteen-year-old Virginia Reed had run off, too, and no one could account for when she’d gone. They feared the worst.

And then there was teenaged Eleanor Graves: She took to dancing in the snow, claiming she was a fairy princess. Pink-cheeked, delirium in her eyes.

Stanton stood with others in the choppy snow outside the Graveses’ shelter, eyes downcast, no one knowing what to say to Franklin and Elizabeth, their family seemingly disproportionately afflicted, and so quickly. Inside the lean-to, Margaret Reed cried into Amanda McCutcheon’s arms for the loss of Virginia.

“It doesn’t make sense. How could William and Eleanor get ill so fast?” Elizabeth Graves murmured, her face blank with grief. “They were fine yesterday morning. Just fine.”

“What we’ve been through… it was bound to take its toll sooner or later,” Eliza Williams, the Reeds’ servant, said. She sat huddled on a stump next to her brother, Baylis.

“It’s just like when Luke Halloran got so bad so fast, don’t you remember?” Lavinah Murphy stood bundled with a shawl over her coat. She looked from face to face as though trying to convince them. “His fever spiked so high and he acted funny, like he had a brain fever.”

A wail broke from Elizabeth Graves’s throat. “You mean my William and Eleanor got the consumption?”

“No—consumption don’t come on real fast like that,” Eliza Williams said, shaking her head. “I tended to some consumptives over in Taylorsville. It builds up in a person. It isn’t like that at all.”

Stanton thought of Halloran those last few days, his fevered glittering eyes, the nonsense he spouted when anyone pressed him, how he’d attacked Tamsen. He’d never known a consumptive but thought of an epidemic he’d witnessed as a boy in Massachusetts, smallpox breaking out all over town as though it had been carried on the wind. The children died first, it seemed, the young and the old and the very weak.

It made sense now. This madness might be contagious, something a body could carry with it, hidden inside. It might take very little to pass along the disease.

Stanton hated to be the one to break this bad news to them. Not only bad news, but the worst possible news under the circumstances. Reluctantly, he stepped into the center of the circle, coughing to get everyone’s attention. “I think we have to look to what all the people who got sick have in common. And that’s that they ate some of the meat last night.”

Talking ceased. They looked at each other, brows lifting in realization as they tried to remember which of them had partaken. Faces paled in recall.

“That’s right,” Elizabeth Graves said, a hand rising to her mouth in alarm. “Both my William and Eleanor had some of that beef. The teamster, too. I saw him.”

“Does that mean we’re all going to get sick?” Baylis asked, his voice rising.

“Maybe. Don’t panic, now,” Stanton said, spreading his hands for their attention. “Let’s see what happens. Maybe there’s a reason only some of us took ill. Maybe it won’t affect everyone.”

Mary Graves looked to Stanton, her gray eyes clouded with worry, and he knew why. Her parents had pressed all her siblings to eat last night, to partake of the rich red meat while they could; it might be their last chance for fresh food in a while. They’d given all of the family’s share to the children. Stanton had skipped it because Mary had shared her concerns with him. Thank God he’d listened to her.

“Are you saying that cow was diseased?” Lavinah Murphy asked, paling. Her entire family had been at the feast. “It looked perfectly fine—before it was attacked.”

Those gruesome wounds. Stanton turned to her. “Maybe that’s it—maybe it was the attack. Maybe whatever attacked that cow was diseased—”

“A wolf, it had to be a wolf,” Baylis Williams broke in, saying what they were all thinking. “What else could it be?”

“Wolf, or bear,” Stanton said. “Maybe whatever’s been following us is diseased.” He pointed to the dark forest surrounding them; eyes followed.

The part he didn’t understand was how this disease could pass so quickly, how a victim could succumb within hours. It seemed somehow faster in the young, as though the disease fed on the able-bodied and strong. Again, he cursed Edwin Bryant’s absence; his medical training would come in awfully handy right now. But there was nothing to be done for it except make their best guess.

Stanton paced in front of the group, pointing again to the woods. “If we don’t want whatever’s waiting for us to come back, night after night, trying to pick off the cattle, bringing that disease with them, we’ve got to do something.”

Patrick Breen, withdrawn deep into his worry, looked up. “What are you saying? We may need those cattle to keep us alive through the winter.”

Stanton turned back to face the group. “I’m saying we slaughter them. Today. We can store the carcasses in snow. It’ll be easier than trying to guard twenty live head of cattle.” He looked at Breen. “It’s your livestock, Mr. Breen. It’s your decision. If we don’t do this, we stand the chance of losing those cattle one by one to whatever’s out there, and that won’t do any of us any good. What do you say?”

All eyes were on Breen, the big man looking even bigger wrapped in his heavy coat, a bear pelt hanging from his shoulders. He glanced at his wife, Peggy, her eyes red from crying, and she gave an almost imperceptible nod. “All right then, we’ll do what you say. For the good of the wagon party.”

Every grown man in the party gathered by the lake, bringing knives and axes and rope. It was hard, tiring work and within an hour the men were drenched in blood: blood up to their elbows. Their hair was matted with it, and they lost the grip on their weapons. A dozen scrawny flayed carcasses hung from the trees, dripping warm blood that melted the snow underneath. Steam rose from the ground and carried a warm, fecund scent.

They’d have to stack the meat like cordwood in the snow to freeze, close enough for Patrick Breen to keep an eye on it but far away enough so the diseased wolves, if that was what they were, would not be led to their door.

Stanton helped pack the carcasses in ice and snow. It was a huge quantity of meat. But not enough to see sixty people through an entire winter, if it came to that.

He prayed it wouldn’t.

He thought of the narrow mountain pass that he’d ridden through just a few weeks back—it would be just two weeks’ journey in fine weather from the pass to Johnson’s Ranch but one they simply couldn’t risk in these conditions. The land was hidden under deceptively deep drifts of snow. It was clear now they couldn’t even make it to the pass.

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.

They were stuck, among an ever-deepening landscape of snow and ice.

But there was one good thing about the snow, about their remote high nesting place in the mountains: It seemed the dead had not been able to follow her there. Even they knew to stay away from this cursed place. For the first time in months, her head didn’t echo with disrupted arguments and cussing and nonsensical conversations. Which left room instead to hear the moaning of her father, sick and bundled, still, at the back of their tent, where Tamsen tended to him hour after hour.

For the first time, she wondered if her father would die. Death had been chasing them a long while, she knew, but it had never gotten this close. Now it was at their heels like a begging dog; the smell of it was in their hair and under their fingernails. It was everywhere, and it was waiting.

Thinking of this made her miss Thomas, terribly. She missed the way he smiled at her when no one was looking, missed kissing him when they were able to steal a few moments alone. Now they were separated by who knew how many miles and snow so deep you could disappear in it, sink like a stone. No telling when she would see him again—if ever.

Then there were the things waiting for them in the woods. She knew what they’d seen in the basin was real. She knew whatever those creatures were, they were after them, biding their time.

The grown-ups did not like to talk about it, but sometimes, at night, when she woke to the sound of Tamsen weeping, or heard the crunch of her uncle’s boots outside the tents, she knew they were out there. Those times she knew, too, that the reason the ghost voices hadn’t followed her was because they were also afraid.

It was getting so hard to find dry firewood. There was talk of burning the wagons, or trying to take down a tree. They were eyeing the oxen, too, as food got low. There was grass under the snow, but the cattle couldn’t get enough to keep them alive and they would start dying soon. “Either that or those things out there will get them,” Uncle Jacob had said bitterly. That was what he called them—because no one could say for sure what they were. Shadows. Shapes in the darkness. As though their worst inner fears had taken shape and grown limbs, as though the demons that had often visited Elitha’s mind in the form of voices had sprouted into half-living monsters come to haunt them all.

She had overheard Aunt Betsy whispering to her husband one night: “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?” He had no response.

That was when the bad thing happened. They were huddled together in the tent one evening, listening, always listening now. They were packed tight, sixteen people in a tent that usually held just one family. All the bodies kept them warm, warm enough to stink of sweat and oils and all the rest that came with a body. The air was thick with expelled breath. Outside, two of the teamsters were on guard with rifles, acting as lookouts and keeping the bonfires fed.

Then: an unmistakable scrabbling outside the tent. There was no door, only an old cowhide hanging over the opening, so that bitter cold air slipped past its edges and froze whoever was sitting nearest. Something was standing right outside the tent, separated by only a flimsy bit of hide.

Everyone looked up. Aunt Betsy stopped singing. Fear brought its own kind of cold, freezing the air in Elitha’s lungs. Why hadn’t the men on watch called out?

They were dead, perhaps. She had a sudden image of the teamsters gutted, and charred creatures with human hands picking at their ribs. They were already steaming out their heartbeats in the snow.

Uncle Jacob grabbed up his rifle and pulled back the hammer. “Who’s out there?” He got to his feet, crouching to avoid the low ceiling.

No answer. Then there was the crunch of a foot on snow, then another.

The cowhide started to lift…

Aunt Betsy screamed as if someone had grabbed her.

Jacob fired. The flash lit up her uncle’s face, alien and terrible in the glare. The tent filled with gun smoke. Elitha’s baby sister Eliza screamed and the little ones began to cry.

Outside, someone screamed, too—a high-pitched shriek so unexpected and childish, Uncle Jacob froze. It was Tamsen who pushed the flap aside, to find Virginia Reed—Elitha’s friend, though she hadn’t seen her since their families separated—on her back in the snow, the right arm of her boiled-wool coat dark with blood.

THEY CARRIED HER INSIDE and Elitha’s father was rousted from his pallet to make way for her.

“I’ll never be able to explain this to her mother if she dies,” Jacob said, as Tamsen eased off Virginia’s coat. It was a funny thing to say, Elitha thought; did he really think they’d ever see the rest of the wagon train again? The distance between camps might as well have been an ocean. Then again, Virginia had found her way here, somehow, and on her own, it seemed.

“It looks like the shot just grazed her, thank God,” Tamsen said. “She’ll pull through if it doesn’t get infected.”

Jacob was still white-faced. “What is she doing here? By herself, in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe there’s trouble, wherever the rest of them are. I hope to God whatever it is, it didn’t follow her here,” Betsy said, wringing her hands. Jacob was still breathing hard and was pale as a sheet. He was back on his stool with his head in his hands, the rifle out of arm’s reach.

Elitha sat next to Virginia, willing her to wake up. She considered Virginia her best friend among the girls of the wagon party, and felt terrible; she had forgotten all about her, and had spent little time with her since meeting Thomas. She hadn’t even missed Virginia; all her concern had been for him.

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.

The row of skulls winked at him in the firelight. The flames danced, vibrant gold and blood red.

In his hands, Bryant turned over the haft with Keseberg’s name on it, and memories of Keseberg on the wagon trail came back to him. A series of mostly ugly encounters: Lewis shoving his still-pregnant wife back into their tent. Lewis picking a fight with James Reed. Lewis sitting outside his camp, cutting up rabbits he’d caught for dinner, his hands washed in blood, a look of concentration on his face, as Halloran’s little dog paced excitedly nearby. Bryant recalled the knife slipping in Keseberg’s damp hand, the blade catching the flesh of his palm. Blood swelling, a fat line of red. Halloran’s terrier seeing his chance and lunging at Keseberg’s hand, lapping up the rabbit meat—and Keseberg’s blood—hungrily.

A deep horror stirred within Bryant as he thought of that dog, thought of Keseberg’s mean face and presumptuous swagger. How the man had roamed among them like a form of plague himself—something disgusting, something to be feared.

The more he turned the pieces over in his mind, the more he was sure he had something. A hunger that spread from man to man. A disease, perhaps invisible at first—or invisible in some, like the girl from the Irish family who’d all gone mad and became something more like wolves than humans. They had celebrated her good fortune, believing she had survived where the others had succumbed—until the day, many years later, that she was found squatting over a neighbor’s baby, her mouth and hands smeared with blood.

A disease that turned some men into monsters. But others were able to hide their monstrosity on the inside.

Bryant sat bolt upright, bathed in sweat. The implication stared him in the face.

Keseberg’s uncle had carried the disease.

That was how the sickness got here. That was how the prospectors had all died.

Keseberg’s uncle, like the Irish girl, must have been carrying the disease in his blood, perhaps even unbeknownst to him. He had been the one to bring it to this territory a half-dozen years ago, causing an outbreak that had not only resulted in the death of the rest of his group but subsequently rocked the local tribes, amplifying some of their ancient belief systems and driving fear throughout the inhabitants of the mountains.

And if this was true, it was even possible that others in his family carried the disease… or some sort of trait that allowed them to survive it.

Others like Lewis Keseberg.

It might be a long shot, but if he was right, then everyone in the Donner Party—nay, everyone in the entire territory—was in jeopardy. He had to warn them.

But then he paused. He thought of what lay ahead—not for him personally, but for the future of science.

A new letter began in his head.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

For two days after she regained consciousness, Virginia refused to say why she had come or what had happened at Truckee Lake. At first Elitha thought she was just being stubborn, until she realized from Virginia’s gestures and frantic signals that Virginia did not want the grown-ups to know.

Whatever had happened, she was ashamed. Even at night, alone, she would say very little. She did tell Elitha about the slaughtering of the cattle, the strange behaviors, and that fighting had broken out. How the younger ones, teenagers and children, were succumbing first. “They say it’s a sickness,” she said. Virginia’s extra-wide eyes made her look perpetually surprised. “They say Mary Murphy has got it now, too.”

“Is that why you left?” Elitha asked. “Were you afraid you were going to catch it, too?” But Virginia didn’t answer, only saying that Mr. Stanton and Mr. Eddy had gone for help but failed and Mr. Keseberg was trying to make himself the leader. But she would say nothing more, and when Elitha tried to get details from her, she only pulled the blanket up to her chin and pretended to go to sleep.

The adults debated what to do with her. “We can’t send her back, not until she heals,” Jacob said, still worried about Virginia’s mother, Margaret. “It’s not like we can send her back by herself, and we can’t spare the men from standing watch,” Betsy said. Even Elitha could see that Betsy was feeling overwhelmed with so many children and so few adults.

“If Virginia made it here by herself, the way must be reasonably passable,” Tamsen had said, sizing the girl up shrewdly. But Virginia insisted it had taken her the better part of an entire day and that she’d nearly gotten lost and it was practically a miracle that she got to Alder Creek at all.

“Don’t send me back. Please,” she begged.

Several days after her arrival, on a surprisingly clear day blowing no snow, Lewis Keseberg arrived at the camp so early that the bonfires hadn’t yet burned themselves out.

“I had a feeling she might be here,” Keseberg told Jacob and Betsy and Tamsen. They stood together outside in the chilly dawn. The damp wood smoke still hung in the air. “She worried her mama something awful. I come to fetch her back.” Mr. Keseberg was being much nicer than normal.

“And Margaret Reed sent you?” Tamsen said. Elitha could see that Tamsen wasn’t fooled.

“I come because I’m the one in charge,” he said, a little too loudly. “It’s not like she has a husband to take care of these things and keep her girl from running wild.” Virginia absorbed this blow quietly, without blinking. Everyone knew James Reed had likely frozen to death somewhere in the wilderness. “Now, come on. We need her. We’re almost through slaughtering the cattle. Even the girls got to pitch in.”

Slaughtering cattle; that meant there would be food. Elitha tried to remember how many cattle the Breens had. A dozen, surely. The idea of all that meat made her stomach twist with longing. Elitha knew the talk of cattle would persuade Tamsen to give Virginia up. There wasn’t much food at Alder Creek, just the last scraps from the tough old oxen. They didn’t need any extra mouths to feed.

Her boots squelched in the mud as she stepped up to the campfire. “I want to go, Tamsen. I volunteer to go and help Virginia.”

Tamsen looked surprised to see her. That always happened—everyone was always surprised to see Elitha. She was the kind of girl that other people forgot all about. Except for Thomas. Thomas always looked like he was expecting her.

“Stop talking nonsense,” Tamsen said. “You belong with your family.”

She belonged with Thomas—but she couldn’t admit that to Tamsen. Besides, Virginia had run away for a reason, and even if she hadn’t yet told Elitha what it was, she could hardly stand by and watch her head off alone with Keseberg, back into the danger she had fled. “Virginia will need help getting back. You said it yourself: She’s lost blood and she’s weak. She’ll do better if I’m with her.” She didn’t mention that Virginia had talked about a disease spreading. She’d be careful. She was afraid, but her desire to see Thomas was stronger than her fear. And no disease could be scarier than the creatures that had been watching them night after night. “C’mon, let me go. I’m not a little girl anymore. I can take care of myself.” Then: “Trust me. Please.”

Those words, at last, seemed to do it. “Very well. I expect you’d be safer in a larger group,” she said quietly. Tamsen helped her pack her few belongings. Before she kissed Elitha good-bye, she gave her one piece of advice: She must never let herself be trapped alone with Lewis Keseberg.

ELITHA COULDN’T BELIEVE the conditions at Truckee Lake. The shelters were scarcely better than her family’s tents. And they were just as crowded; she couldn’t believe all the people that came spilling out of the cabin where Virginia’s family was staying with the Graveses. At least Thomas was among them—spotting her, he ran up to her and threw his arms around her in front of everyone.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

His touch warmed her everywhere all at once. She was blushing; she could see how people stared. “I came to see you.”

His expression changed. It shuttered and grew cold. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said. “It’s not safe here.”

“It’s not safe where I was, either,” she replied. She knew if he told her to go back, her heart would break.

But he simply said, “Come on,” and slipped his hand in hers.

He was leading Elitha away from the crowd when she spotted Keseberg with Virginia. He’d bent so they were face to face and was saying something to her very quietly. She’d gone all stiff, and her face was white as the snow around her. Elitha got a twist of bad feeling in her stomach. What did he want?

It was two of the Graves girls—Lovina Graves at twelve, Nancy at nine—who later let Virginia’s secret spill. Lewis Keseberg had told the girls that they were going to start putting a child out each night as a sacrifice to the wolves. He said their parents knew all about it, so it was no good going to them. They’d agreed to leave the decision up to him so they didn’t have to choose which child would have to die. The grown-ups had come together on this so the majority would survive, just like those Indians who strung up one of their boys. Sacrifices had to be made.

But he’d spare you if you went into the woods with him and did what he told you.

“It’s not so bad,” Lovina Graves said, though her expression told a different story. She smiled funny as she told her story and was as fidgety as a hummingbird. “He just feels under your skirts and stuff.”

“He put it in my hand and made me hold it,” Nancy Graves said, so low Elitha almost didn’t hear her. Nancy was so thin she looked all hollowed out like a ghost.

Elitha felt like she couldn’t breathe, like she was being held underwater by an invisible hand. She was a fool for coming here. She realized quickly she couldn’t tell Thomas about all this; it would only put him at risk. He was no match for Keseberg.

She had been at Truckee Lake less than twenty-four hours when it was her turn. She had ventured into the woods with Thomas; it was his idea to try to look for fish in the creek.

There were worse things than going hungry, Elitha wanted to tell him, remembering Virginia’s white-faced, terrified nod when Keseberg stooped to speak to her.

Lying flat on her stomach on the hard surface of the creek, Elitha pressed her face to the ice, looking for movement. Thomas had gone off to find a rock to smash through the ice. In truth, Elitha knew nothing about fish. She had grown up on a farm and had only tasted fish once or twice in her entire life. Still, it seemed like a good idea; from the things Thomas told her, Indians knew the best ways to get through tough times. Thomas had taken one look at the creek and said they probably wouldn’t find any fish suitable for eating, but by then Elitha was so excited he didn’t have the heart to call it off. So he went to look for a rock and Elitha brushed snow off the icy surface of the creek and slid out on her knees. She could make out nothing, however, but a dark tangle of frozen branches and rotted leaves, a rush of black water beneath the surface.

Now that she had been with Thomas, she had thought she would feel different, but other than an ache lodged high between her legs, she felt nothing but a deep contentment, as if in becoming a woman she had fallen into a sleep untroubled by dark dreams. It had been her idea; she’d asked Thomas to meet her last night at the wagons. No one went out to the wagons anymore. It was dangerous being out at night, even with the bonfires. There were always at least two men patrolling with shotguns, and in the shadows they might be mistaken for one of them.

She had brought a blanket, though she didn’t dare bring a candle or a lantern. Thomas appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. He knew how to be practically invisible; they were alike in that way.

When Thomas climbed over the backboard and saw that she had made a makeshift bed for them, he turned to her. “Are you sure this is what you want? Think about it, Elitha. Your family will not let you be with me. Once we are down from this mountain, they will not let us be together.”

There was no sense worrying about the future. She would be Thomas’s woman, if only for one night. And she would go to her grave without regret.

They would all be going to their graves soon enough.

Kneeling now on the thick frozen surface of the creek, Elitha heard a whisper behind her and paused to listen. The hairs lifted on her neck. The whisper kept going, a susurration like the hiss of wind.

The voices. They were coming back. She couldn’t make out the words they said but they were there, clawing at the edge of her consciousness like a sick headache. Some of the voices were new; that meant more people had died. She tried to close her mind against it.

Suddenly, she felt a presence behind her. It was like being visited by a ghost, like a dark shadow stepping across her mind. She spun around and saw Keseberg, coming up the ridge, his breath steaming in front of him. “Well, lookee here,” he said. He grabbed Elitha by her shoulders before she could scrabble away and lifted her to her feet, as if she was a doll. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?”

“I’m not by myself,” she said quickly.

Keseberg grunted a laugh, as if she’d said something funny. “I know. You got your Indian sweetheart. What a shame, a nice girl like you just gonna throw yourself away like that.”

“We love each other,” she blurted out. She didn’t know why. It seemed important. Where was Thomas? She wanted him to save her, and she wanted him to stay away, all at once.

Keseberg pulled off a glove and put his bare fingers against her cheek. Her blood froze at his touch. “You think them savages even know what love means? They don’t love the same way as a white man,” he said, as though it were a fact. Elitha pictured Keseberg’s wife, Philippine, a slight woman with light brown hair, usually with a bruise somewhere on her face. She’d never heard Philippine speak. Did Keseberg love his wife? Had he ever loved anyone? Elitha was pretty sure she knew the answer to that.

“I’m gonna yell.”

He backed her up against a tree. She focused on a bead of mucus hanging from the tip of his red nose because she didn’t want to look into his eyes. “If you cause trouble for me, I’ll make trouble for your boyfriend. You know I can, too. Ain’t nobody gonna help no Indian.”

She felt the truth of this in her bones. She pressed her spine into the tree trunk, steeling against the first touch of his hand. Wearing so many layers of clothes, she knew that even if he put his hands on her breasts he wouldn’t be touching them, not really. Still, the thought made her shiver. She remembered how Thomas had stepped close, nuzzling her neck, only last night.

But Keseberg wouldn’t do anything serious, the girls had said. She tried to calm herself with that thought, even as her stomach seemed to have lodged itself somewhere in her throat and her whole body went rigid in protest. He was just going to touch her. She could stand that and Thomas would be safe. She almost wished he would hurry up and get it over with…

Keseberg grabbed the front of her coat and yanked it open, yanked the front of her dress open, too, exposing the bare skin of her throat and sternum. She cried out in surprise. But he got one hand around her mouth. His fingers tasted filthy. She thought about kneeing him but she was worried that wouldn’t stop him, it would only make him angrier. He seemed like the kind to hit you if he got angry; his wife, Philippine, was proof of that.

“You ain’t as pretty as some of the other girls,” he said, in a low voice, as he pushed one knee between her legs, parting them, “but you’ll do.”

Too late, she realized that he wouldn’t just touch her and be done with it. Too late, as he moved his hand to undo his belt, she realized he intended something far, far worse. A voice in her head yelled run, run, run. Was it one of the dead? It didn’t matter; her legs were rigid with fear.

Then, suddenly, a terrible force struck them both, knocking Keseberg away, driving her into the snow. She tasted blood in her mouth where she’d bitten down on her tongue. A horrible screaming echoed through the woods. At first, she thought it was one of them.

But it was Thomas. He and Keseberg were on their knees, grappling in the snow. Thomas had surprised him but Keseberg regained the advantage quickly. She scanned the ground for a rock, for a branch, for something to use as a weapon.

Keseberg finally pushed Thomas off him, sending the boy to the ground. He stood up, heaving, shaking off the snow—like some horrible shadow, doubling and redoubling as the sun set. “You think you can fight me, boy? You think you’re going to save her?” He put a boot into Thomas’s side, hard. “Well, the joke’s on you. She’s a whore. She wants me. She wants me to make a woman of her.”

When Keseberg lifted his foot to give Thomas another kick, Elitha lunged. She threw herself at him, knocking him backward and pinning him in the snow. He thrashed, trying to unseat her.

“Get off me, you stupid bitch.” He shoved her to the ground. Snow slid down her skirts and beneath her collar. The cold made her gasp. She was tired. Tired of fighting him.

“Leave us alone, just leave us alone,” she shouted. Keseberg came for her again and she closed her eyes, waiting for his fist. A strong hand grabbed her and hauled her up from the snow.

“Come on.” It was Thomas. Turning, dizzy, she saw Keseberg hanging back, doubled over as though looking for patterns in the ice. She and Thomas plunged through the snow, floundering, struggling to their feet each time. Thomas looked over his shoulder at her. His face was flushed and his breath ragged, pulling her so strongly that her shoulder burned.

“Run, run,” he kept saying. But why, she wanted to ask him. They were way out in front of Keseberg, halfway to the cabins. They didn’t have to run anymore.

Then she saw what was in his other hand: a small knife, no bigger than what you’d use at the dinner table. A fine, thin line of blood clung to the edge, and a line of blood was visible on the snow behind them, like a fine skein of red thread. Keseberg wasn’t following them. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t let them get away if he could help it.

Thomas, Thomas, she thought. What have you done?

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Mary Graves watched that next morning as Mary Murphy escaped from her family’s cabin with the Eddys’ baby in her arms. Eddy and William Foster followed her tracks in the snow, but by the time they caught up to her, the teenage girl had already killed the baby and was devouring her liver. Eddy shot the girl where she stood, Foster unable to do anything to stop him.

After Mary Murphy came Eleanor Graves, Mary’s own sister, who had taken to dancing barefoot in the knee-deep snow, her toes going blue and frostbitten. When her mother tried to force her into the tent, she screamed and pulled away, bolting for the woods, her long dark hair streaming wildly behind her like a wave good-bye.

“We’re going to leave. We’re going to make a run for it,” Stanton promised Mary. He had sharpened his hunting knife and was cutting an old deer hide into strips. “We’re going to make snowshoes. It’ll be easier to get through the snow. I saw a pair in my grandfather’s house… I never used them but I think I remember how they were made.”

“We’re going with you. I think we’re strong enough not to slow you down,” Sarah Fosdick, Mary’s sister, said when she saw what they were doing. She sat next to Mary and began stringing strips of hide to wooden frames they’d made from the staves of empty flour barrels.

They sat together through the afternoon working on the snowshoes. Miserly slivers of sunlight fell through the cracks in the walls to illuminate their work. There were little children underfoot everywhere in the cabin since the adults were afraid to let them outdoors. Mary glanced guiltily at the children, knowing she would be leaving soon but they would not.

We’ll send help as soon as we’re able.

Sarah was sitting next to her on the floor, humming while she laced deer hide strips to a frame, but when they heard the shot, she stiffened and looked at Mary. She asked, “What could that be?”

The few remaining cows started lowing, panicked.

Stanton was the first one out the door. Franklin Graves and Jay Fosdick snatched up their rifles and were right behind him.

There was a second gunshot and a tangle of raised voices. Then a volley of shots, sounding like thunder.

The waiting was unbearable. Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, knew what it meant when Mary got restless. “Don’t go out there,” she warned. “Mr. Stanton can take care of himself.”

There was another volley of shots, a few sharp cries. Mary could wait no longer. She leapt to her feet and ran outside.

There was yelling down by the lake, coming from behind a curtain of pines and boulders. Mary started to run in the direction of the voices, slipping in the choppy snow.

Finally, she found Stanton. He had an arm around Thomas, the Indian boy. He’d been wounded—shot; his right shoulder was pinched high and he had a hand pressed to his ribs. Blood showed through his jacket, a dark spreading patch. “What happened? Will he be all right?” she asked, running up to them.

She saw her answer in Stanton’s expression. “Tell Mrs. Reed to boil some water and make bandages.” Margaret Reed wouldn’t lift a finger to help, Mary knew that. The woman hated Indians as much as her husband. She caught herself wishing Tamsen were here; Thomas would stand a better chance with her.

Amanda McCutcheon agreed to tend to Thomas. Elitha Donner had joined them by now, pale with fright. She obviously loved the boy. Amanda had Thomas strip off his clothes from the waist up, then sit on a stool. She sluiced water over the opened flesh, careful not to touch the wound herself. The cuts went deep, gaping so wide that Mary thought she could see to the rib bones. She forced herself to watch everything Amanda did, knowing it could come in handy. Any one of them could be the next to die, especially the ones nursing the sick.

“Hold this,” Amanda said, guiding Elitha’s hand to clamp the end of a bandage against Thomas’s side while she wound the rest around his torso.

People were talking outside the shelter, too low to hear. Mary left Thomas to dress and tiptoed to the entrance.

“I say we wait.” William Eddy stood in the middle of the gathering. He’d lost half his weight on the climb up the mountain and looked like a scarecrow. “I ain’t seen any signs of the disease in ’im myself.”

“But once it begins to show…” It was Peggy Breen. “Look what happened with Noah James and Landrum Murphy. It moves fast. We can’t wait until this Indian boy up and attacks people. Look around you—we’re down to mostly women and children. We got kids to think about.”

“It’s only an accusation,” Stanton pointed out. “There’s no proof other than Keseberg’s word.”

Peggy Breen crossed her arms. “Why would Keseberg shoot at the Indian boy if he hadn’t seen what he said he did?”

Mary drew back, her heart pounding. So Keseberg had claimed something about Thomas—claimed he had the disease. She didn’t know what Keseberg had said, but her stomach sank as she began to realize it didn’t matter. The idea was in everyone’s heads now.

They continued to argue but she had no doubt which way it would go. She felt weak, like she was about to drop to the ground. Mary ran up to Elitha and Thomas, who was stiffly buttoning his shirt. “The two of you, listen to me: Thomas has to run now.” When he gave her a quizzical look, she said, “They’re coming for you.”

He stopped doing up the buttons to stare at her. “What are you talking about?”

Amanda McCutcheon, in the corner putting away the spare bandages, glanced over her shoulder at them. Mary didn’t care.

“They’re afraid you’re going to succumb to the sickness.” She pushed a trunk against the rickety wall. “Keseberg says it’s why he shot at you. Says he saw something he didn’t like. You’ve got to climb up and slip out under the roof”—cowhides and tenting lashed haphazardly to the timber walls—“and run. Don’t look back. They’ll kill you if you stay, Thomas.” She wanted to think otherwise, but she’d seen how the group had become. Quick to target, even quicker to act. Paranoid. Panicked.

Thomas didn’t hesitate—it seemed he, too, understood the hopelessness of it. He started to climb onto the trunk but stopped, turning back to Elitha. “Are you coming with me? Or are you staying here?”

Mary’s heart went out to Elitha. To go with him was sure death. They would have no food, no weapons, and then there were those wolves, prowling the woods—whatever creature it was who’d started this contagion in the first place. And the snow; there was so much snow they’d never get through. And yet for Thomas, this was his only chance of survival. If he stayed, they would surely kill him.

But it wasn’t the same for Elitha.

Elitha ripped a blanket off the nearest pallet and threw it over her shoulders. “I’ll be right behind you. Climb.”

But the men rushed the shelter before Thomas could get over the wall.

Mary tried to block their way but her own father took her by the arm and dragged her out into the snow, holding her tight.

Red-faced Patrick Breen and his friend Patrick Dolan, Spitzer the German, and Lewis Keseberg grabbed Thomas’s legs, pulling him down. They hustled him outside, stepping past Mary and Elitha like they weren’t even there.

Mary went to chase after them but her father warned her, “You’ll only be hurt if you try to stand in their way.”

She managed to break free and pushed past him, Elitha on her heels.

Soon they were marching Thomas into the woods. Elitha caught up to them first, throwing herself at the two men holding Thomas’s arms behind his back, but the big German Spitzer brushed her aside like she was a gnat.

“Go back, girl. This ain’t for you to see,” Breen warned.

Mary struggled through the deep snow behind them. “You don’t have to kill him. Just let him go. You don’t have to worry about him—he’ll leave you alone.”

“He’ll turn wild like the others and then he’ll come for us. Maybe kill one of us, one of the kids. You seen what happened to Landrum. Is that what you want?” Dolan asked, his voice angry.

“You don’t know that! I swear we’ll go, you won’t see either of us again if you just give him a chance,” Elitha begged.

The men continued walking as though neither of the women had spoken, eyes fixed straight ahead. They walked until Breen called a halt. It was a still spot, with only a slight breeze riffling the branches of a nearby pine. You could barely hear voices drifting up from the cabins, the only sign of humans in all this wilderness. By now, Franklin Graves had caught up to them and yanked Mary back hard, with a look that said he wouldn’t let her have her way, not this time, for her own good and the good of their family. You can’t stop angry, unreasonable men.

The men stepped back from Thomas. Dolan lifted his rifle, bracing it against his shoulder.

Thomas was eerily calm. His eyes flicked to Elitha’s face. “You shouldn’t have followed me. Go back now. Please.”

Keseberg nodded in Elitha’s direction. “Make it easy on her. Tell her we’re right. Tell her you can feel the disease inside you.” But Thomas said nothing, choosing to stare over their heads.

Mary looked wildly from man to man, trying to think of a way to make them understand that they didn’t have to do this, but the words didn’t come to her. They weren’t interested in reason, however. They were slaves to their anger and fear.

Elitha was crying wildly now. She pointed at Keseberg. “He put you up to this, didn’t he? Whatever he told you is a lie. He’s doing this to get back at me and Thomas, because we wouldn’t do what he said.” They weren’t even listening, Mary saw. They didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow, and Keseberg only smiled at her, looking pleased.

Dolan pulled back the hammer.

Elitha’s scream and the shot rang through the trees at the same time. Thomas remained on his feet for one weightless second—Mary’s hope buoyed—maybe Dolan had missed.

Then Thomas toppled backward into the snow.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Reiner had not changed much in fifteen years, Lewis Keseberg thought. His uncle’s hair was a little whiter and the skin on his face a little more ragged but otherwise much the same as when Lewis had last seen him, as a boy in Germany. Reiner had the same easy smile, the same wildness twinkling in his eyes. Both made something in Lewis’s gut turn over. He’d been content to hope Reiner had died, and seeing him again at his doorstep this evening had spooked Lewis more than he could say. You couldn’t trust his uncle’s smiles, and, he knew, those eyes held sickening secrets.

Reiner had just appeared on Lewis’s doorstep with no forewarning. Not that Reiner was ever one to write letters, but it was unnerving, still; Lewis had only started renting this homestead a few months ago. How had Reiner been able to track him down?

Lewis brought out a bottle of a neighbor’s home-brewed whiskey, potent stuff, and two tin cups. “Warum bist du hier?”—why are you here?—he asked in rusty German, eyeing his uncle as he set the cups down on his splintered old table.

That easy grin. “The family curse,” he laughed as he sat in one of Keseberg’s chairs and gulped down his liquor.

So. His uncle had fled the homeland. “What’d they get you for?”

“The usual. Not that they could prove anything. A man goes missing but there’s no body to be found—who’s to say it’s murder?” His uncle huffed out another laugh, then leaned back in his chair and squinted into the corners of the cabin, hidden in shadow. “Where’s your father gone off to?”

“He’s in jail. Back in Indiana.”

Reiner raised an eyebrow. “You left him to rot in jail alone?”

Keseberg’s cheeks went hot. “I’m making a fresh start.”

His uncle’s stare fell heavily on him but Lewis didn’t dare meet his eyes. He remembered Reiner’s wrath from his childhood; it was epic and unpredictable. A thrashing for spilling a teaspoon’s worth of salt on the floor, a tooth knocked clear out of his mouth for rolling his eyes at something Reiner had said.

But Reiner simply laughed again. “No fresh starts for men like us. What you are, it’s in your blood. You can never deny it.”

Lewis looked around his cabin. The gathering dusk hid its shabby nature. It was a simple cabin, one room with a sleeping loft. This table and the two chairs were about all the furniture he owned. “Not much room here for guests, Uncle,” he started to say.

Reiner poured himself another drink. “It will only be for a few weeks. I’m headed west for a spell. Heard about a prospecting gig out in the mountains.”

“California?”

His uncle nodded. “I hear it’s lawless out there. Men like us can roam free, if you know what I mean. No one watching.”

Heading out to make a fortune in gold. The idea flared up in Lewis’s mind like a mirage. To leave behind the daily grind of farming, plowing fields, watering and weeding. It was hard to carve out a living for yourself when you had nothing, came from nothing.

But—no. Lewis had plans. He’d get himself a wife, work hard, fit in. He had never known happiness as a child—his father had been abysmal as a parent and his mother disappeared before he’d formed any memories of her—but he’d vowed not to make the same mistakes as his father and uncle and the rest of his family. He’d resolved to be different. He would not be a failure. He would break the family curse.

If he could just hold on and get through these tough times, it would get easier. It had to.

The older man reached into his pocket before dropping a handful of wadded currency onto the table. “I can pay my way. I’m not asking for a handout.”

Keseberg’s eyes widened at the sight of the money, more than he’d made in an entire year. “Where did you get this?”

Reiner poured a generous amount of whiskey into his cup. “I’ve been selling patent medicines. My own recipes from the old country. I’ve been doing well.”

“So I see… But if the medicines are selling so well, why go all that way to California?”

That was when Keseberg knew his uncle was lying. The older man stretched back in his chair. He fixed his nephew with a stare, watching intently for his reaction. “I got a sickness no tonic can fix. Gold fever, I think they call it.” He winked.

Lewis felt ill. More like blood fever, he thought.

It wasn’t until that evening, as Keseberg made up a spot on the floor for his uncle to sleep—Lewis didn’t invite his uncle to share the loft, couldn’t quite bear the thought of lying next to him through the long night—that Reiner made the offer.

“Why don’t you come with me?” The older man had just peeled off his filthy jacket to ready himself for bed and stood before his nephew in his stained shirt. He fixed those wolf-bright eyes on him. “What’s keeping you here, anyway? This lousy farm? Because it looks like another in that string of failures of yours, son.”

“Don’t call me son,” he said, stung. “This is what I want to do. This is my choice.”

His uncle shrugged. “Suit yourself, but you’re making a mistake, my boy. There’s a reason why we Kesebergs are always on the move. If you stay in one place, they will catch onto you.”

The family curse.

It’s not going to get me. Not that he could say this to his uncle; it would be like waving a red flag before a bull. “I’ll be careful.”

But the older man wouldn’t give up. “I worry about you. You haven’t spent enough time with the Keseberg men, your father away in jail, you living in the new world with no uncles, no grandfathers. You don’t know what it will be like, how the feeling comes on you so strong that you can’t say no to it. When it does, how will you take care of yourself?”

For an instant, Lewis Keseberg was eleven years old again and standing next to his father in the smokehouse. A huge carcass hung from a meat hook, swaying gently. He could still hear the drip, drip, drip of blood hitting the muddy puddle under the body, still smell the iron tang in the air. The shape of the carcass not like an animal at all, but like a human.

The surge of something like desire that moved through him so powerfully he swayed, too.

How that feeling had never fully left him since.

A shiver ran down his spine.

All Lewis wanted was to get away from Uncle Reiner, from the eyes like fire and the carrion stink of him. “I’ll be fine, Uncle. My father taught me enough. I can get by.” He could hold it down—the lust, the thirst, the hunger.

Reiner rolled on his side to face the fire. “You think you know what’s in store for you but you don’t. Go on to bed, boy. One day, you’ll see.”

No, Lewis Keseberg decided as he climbed the ladder to his sleeping loft, putting distance between him and that frightening old man. It was good, in a way, Reiner showing up like he had. There were times Lewis could feel his honorable intentions slipping away from him. There were times, nights especially, when it was hard to resist the hunger that burned in his veins, when he gripped the corners of his bed and bit his knuckles and held in a rage that wanted to devour him, or wanted him to devour the world—he wasn’t sure which. Sometimes he wanted to give up, give in to the curse. Keseberg men, we were made like this; it’s in our nature, it’s in our blood. But seeing Reiner was as good as getting hit by a bolt of lightning. Lewis didn’t want to end up like that, always on the run, untethered, alone.

Though as he lay in the dark, imagining grabbing his uncle’s neck between his hands and squeezing so hard the skin turned purple and blood dripped from his lips, Lewis knew the odds were stacked against him. That Reiner was probably right—it was only a matter of time.