Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  Grand and irregular thunder began to boom over the plain much to their relief and could be heard above the roaring of the fire wind. Now and again spurs of light would flash. There was more thunder in the darkness and then the whole air in their immediate vicinity began to vibrate and tremble. The thunder was continuous and there came close and dangerous lightning, three pulses between thunder and flash. Michael counted again the number of seconds. Forked lightning stitched the sky, two seconds, and there came more thunder in quick, sharp percussions.

  There was another crash of lightning and a little rain and the men turned up their faces. It began to rain a downpour as if a waterspout bursting over their heads. The gleams of quivering lightning lit up the wagons and horses and their burned landscape for a long second, then a deafening roll of thunder followed by another burst. They were grateful and they cheered. They let the water wash and cool their faces.

  The swift slants of sharp rain came in torrents and the road began to grow heavy and in some places the water was collecting. The ravines channeling water to the main were flooded, the water rising over the embankments and cutting them away, and before long the level ground on which they traveled was covered with water.

  Some bolts pierced the earth straight and lancelike and some forked and others were shafts that zigzagged. The darkness between flashes shortened and it was as if they were forever illuminated to show the plunging horses and riders, the plodding oxen, and men in daylight. There was a flash and a tree at the roadside was torn to pieces in a blinding explosion. The oxen bellowed and went to their knees as they felt the stun of it.

  He tried to reconstruct the land so changed from his earlier reconnaissance. The river was so dreadfully swollen. He touched at Khyber and she leaped ahead that they would be the first to step off the edge. He chose a place of entering the river above the destination so the current would assist in carrying animals and wagons across on the oblique. If the animals should stop in the river the wheels would sink rapidly in quicksand.

  They reached the river proper and Khyber plunged and staggered. The water deepened to her belly, but her feet found bottom and she struggled on. They made the other side and he turned and before he could stop them Elizabeth and the reverend doctor were making their own crossing. He directed them to a high bluff and reentered the river as the first team, the Miller brothers, stepped off. They shouted and pushed and twisted the oxen’s tails. He got to them as near as he could, caught a rope around a horn, dragged them into line, and the gaunt team followed to the distant shore, the lead yokes finding their footing, climbing the bank, and pulling the others through.

  “Drive on!” he yelled. “Drive on!” as he went back into the water, the flashes of light stabbing the night.

  Next came the Gough brothers and then Cochran and Meadows with Daragh, kicking, whipping, and shouting, their teams, plowing through the swift water, and they were followed hard on by the penman and his grandson. Finally came Aubuchon with Charlie and the boys and Darby riding behind with the spare horses, chasing the cows. They reached the shore and began to climb out when their wagon dropped a foot with a jolt and Charlie fell out the back and into the river floating on a crate. The crate rolled and broke open. The water was too fast and swimming was impossible as his clothes filled with floating sand. Michael went down one bank and Darby the other. They rode as fast as they could to get ahead of Charlie. Elizabeth and the reverend doctor were already on the move.

  The reverend doctor had the first chance at him. He turned his horse and they bravely plunged in, but Charlie’d already shot past and the reverend doctor and his horse were too bogged down to get another try. Elizabeth saw him next and cut left, and Granby took her into the water where it was swift but not so deep. As Charlie came near she could think of nothing else to do except lean over and make a grab for him. If it took her from the saddle, so be it. It was his only hope. As the boy came swirling through, it was evident he’d not be floating much longer as his clothes were so weighed down. She left Granby and went in after him, the water ripping at her thighs. Charlie knocked into her and they both went under. She fought to stand and lifted him to breathe. She knew it’d be the last moment for the both of them as she felt the bottom washing away beneath her feet.

  This is how it ends, she thought, and she found the strength to fight for another moment, and then Michael was in front of her, blunting the flow of water, and Darby was behind, dropping a rope around Elizabeth holding Charlie.

  At last the men erected wagon sheets and wet and shivering, they crawled under and into blankets, where they huddled. Scattered bolts of lightning boomed and crashed. They’d driven the wagon with the red pennant as far off as they could. Everybody and everything was soaked through. And yet with kerosene and broken crates they were able to start a small sputtering fire for Aubuchon to boil coffee. He opened boxes of crackers and carved a big cheese and each man filled his open palms.

  Story Miller climbed in the wagon to forage for more victuals, pickles, sardines, and canned peaches. He called to Daragh to step up and fetch down the boxes. Daragh climbed to the fore box and sat with a leg over the side. As he was waiting for Story a golden bolt of lightning struck him on his head, and after boring a clean round hole through his hat and skull, the electric fluid passed out through his side above the hip and ran down the iron rung of the wagon into the earth.

  Ripped from their throats were groans and shrill piercing cries as splinters of wood flew everywhere. They cowered and went down and quivered on the wet earth and all about them was the smell of sulfur.

  Michael was the first to stand. The iron rung was melted and fused with the nails in Daragh’s boot. He found a tarpaulin to use as a winding sheet. He and Aubuchon arrayed Daragh’s body on the cloth. They wrapped him and tied him closed.

  After this first death a silence fell over the camp and each was left to his own thoughts as the time began to lengthen between flashes of lightning and the clap of thunder. Who knew what his end would be? Accident, fate, destiny, the luck of the draw: to each was his own explanation why it was Daragh’s end and not someone else.

  The four brothers did not speak a word of the world they’d entered. They sat together at their own little fire, gazing into the flames. Matthew held his little brother John in his lap. Beside their fire the wet sticks of wood they gathered steamed dry.

  The Gough brothers also stayed to themselves as did the two Englishmen. The Englishmen sat on a blanket stripped to the waist. On their bodies they wore the blue tattoos that mapped their life in Her Majesty’s service. The one favored tigers and the other the cobra. Their minds were on gold and silver bullion. Their working biceps flexed the hips of hula girls.

  “You’ve got very wet,” the reverend doctor said to Elizabeth.

  “Yes, I am washed clean,” she said, the light of a little alcohol lamp flickering on her face, her teeth chattering from time to time.

  “You were very brave,” the reverend doctor said, and made a heartening smile.

  In the flashes of light the river gleamed in every direction as far as they could see. The land was ruined for travel.

  “I have been struck by lightning several times,” Charlie said.

  “You know perfectly well you are telling a lie,” the reverend doctor said.

  Charlie said he wasn’t lying and performed a pantomime of being struck by lightning to prove it.

  “When I was struck by lightning,” he said, “a tree grew in my chest.”

  “Would God approve of your stories?” the reverend doctor asked.

  “I do not believe in God.”

  “Young man, do you think God cares what you believe?”

  “Please,” Elizabeth said, and it was enough to remind them a man had been killed, a man who had a family and she’d known since the war. Mark began to sing, “There is a green hill faraway,” and Elizabeth was taken home in her mind and she wondered if the boy could possibly know how sad and beautiful he sounded.

  All
night the storm renewed and raged with unabated strength and each time the lightning lit the land they could see the water was climbing around their little island on the bluff. Hour after hour they lay beneath their tarps under their blankets unable to sleep, and listened to the wind and rain. Story Miller started up from sleep and said his wife’s name as if it was a question. He looked about, and when he found his brother Temple nearby, he lay back down.

  In the morning they learned they’d indeed crossed the river and were camped on the bank with barely enough height to raise them above the flooded land. Rags of smoke and vapor drifted over the water and the air was dense and stifling to breathe.

  Aubuchon put on the coffeepot and made a kettle of oyster soup. During the night the wolfer and his woman had slogged in wet and hungry.

  “I have never seen such a misery,” the wolfer said.

  “The elements seem to be against us,” the penman said.

  “There is no purpose in nature,” the wolfer said. “It just is.”

  “It’s the order of living things,” the penman said.

  “There’s progress,” the reverend doctor said, “even if it does not seem so.”

  “The notion of progress has yet to be proven,” the wolfer said.

  Elizabeth listened to the men as they talked. Inside her there was something gray. She thought to sift out the meaning of recent events. There were signs to be read and there was accident and there was good luck and bad luck. It was as if she’d passed from one world into another and all she wanted was to rest and move on again even deeper into the country.

  “Well, that’s something done,” she said, and she stood and she told them tomorrow would be another day and each day would bring them closer. She directed them and they lassoed driftwood and opened a dozen more tins of canned fruit and salmon and all day long kept the coffeepot hot on the fire while the water began its recession.

  The next day the sun appeared like a molten ball, intensely red. The water was shallowing fast and soon gone, and left behind was a mud flat as far as the eye could see. There was enough new land revealed to bury Daragh and for two more days they waited on their little island as the land baked and cracked, and on the fourth day when they awoke the land was parched and cratered. Michael and the boys were bringing in the oxen and the dangerous river they crossed had disappeared.

  Chapter 13

  The days went on as if an eternal passage through hell. Relentless and unremitting night turned into day and day into night. Daragh was missed and then he wasn’t missed. Fire, flood, injury, accident, death—each was an episode to be experienced and endured and forgotten as they plodded south by southwest with the increasing sense there would be no arrival and with no arrival there could be no return.

  As the sun climbed, its rays refracted and reverberated from the heated ground. A great part of the road lay through a very sandy country with little water. The sun was wearying, but the oxen were fit. The landscape was alive with mirage. What Elizabeth thought to be water was a mineral efflorescence in the dry sands. In the vapory distance, straggling antelope loomed huge on the shore of a sparkling lake, then a miraculous city, its skyline rivaling New York’s or Chicago’s, gleamed out of some tantalizing future lit from within. She knew what this was and yet she could not resist riding in its direction. Perhaps her willingness was the girl inside her, the dreams of an imagination, hope, and want. If only she could arrive it would be there. She looked again and Michael appeared to be crossing the prairie in midair and then he passed from her vision as if over the lip of the earth.

  They trailed south down the line of the 100th meridian, keeping an average of ten miles east on the sandy and dusty freight road to Camp Supply and the valley of the buffalo. According to David’s maps, they were south of Snake Creek and north of Buffalo Creek.

  For several days Michael sensed doom. Out there something terrible was happening. Then it was over and the aftermath was waiting ahead.

  He cut the tracks of another wagon train and followed up behind. He’d been following their trail most of yesterday, and through the cold night, the wheels of their wagons rolled ever southward. He determined there were three wagons, smaller and lightly loaded. For some reason they’d left the advantage of the military road and they were cutting their own trail. He climbed to the top of a little sand hill, looking out with the field glasses. On his right was the common trail and on his left was their trail and it stretched southeast into seeming nothingness for mile after weary mile. It made no sense. It was as if they’d left the shore road and set forth onto the trackless sea.

  That day he’d come upon the half-­calcined bones of two men burned to death. They were surveyors and in the sand of a creek bank he found their tools, a reflecting telescope, transit, theodolite, Gunter’s chain. He watched his back trail as he moved down the offside, taking the same detour they did. There was a dread he could not shake as the horse strides brought him closer to where they might be. Not here, but out there was sadness and sorrow, death from violence.

  He came upon a burial the wolves had scratched out of the ground and there was nothing left but a strew of rags and cracked and broken bones, an old man’s bones, shrunken and brittle. He took from their case the field glasses. He adjusted them and looked for some time to the south and southwest. He studied every fold in the earth. He saw nothing and proceeded along.

  The rolling plain was cut up by irregular and closely located sand hills. He waited there for a long time but saw nothing come in sight and rode on again. Already their track was vanishing and then, suddenly, it disappeared. His compass in hand he took his bearings and matched them with the map he carried in his head. He’d ride another length and then he’d break off his search, his curiosity best unsatisfied. The red dog was off somewhere and not yet returned. He slowed his pace as he saw a spectral flock of black vultures hovering on the wing. With the field glasses he studied the edges of the land. He picked up the remnants of their train.

  He came across a yoke key and then standards and other trappings belonging to a wagon train scattered along their trailside. There were plowshares, hen coops, boxes, millstone, a split-­open crate of pocket Bibles. Strung for half a mile were fragments of broken cups and musical instruments, torn leaves of books, remnants of dresses, silks and velvets, a small satin slipper, a wedding gown, china, books, furniture, a spinning wheel, bonnets, crockery, a cradle, tools.

  He was loath to get off the horse, but he did. He knelt in front of Khyber to sort the scattered books and found a volume of Dickens he’d not read before. Khyber nosed him. He quietly reached up and ran his hand down her neck, caressing the tight muscle over her shoulder. The book he stuffed in his saddlebag and quickly remounted. Khyber danced her impatience beneath him.

  The red dog finally came in, his nose lifted into the wind the way he did when he smelled blood.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, and the dog trotted ahead.

  They picked their way along, the only sound the occasional stroke of Khyber’s hoof. He was grateful it was Khyber he was riding, a horse with the courage to face a lion. At any moment they were poised to run hard and away from this horrible place.

  He reached a small stream where the water’s edge was littered with broken bottles, meat tins, rags, and paper. There was a case of patent medicine that’d been broken into and the contents drunk. Some Indian was probably blinded or poisoned to death. He could smell the rank and unmistakable stench of decaying bodies. He lit a cigarette and held it in his teeth.

  He suddenly had a dim vision of a scene where all hell had broken loose. He let his hand rest on one of the revolvers draped over the saddle horn.

  Khyber signaled by throwing up her head and snorting. He rode a few strides nearer and floating in the water was a man. His body lay in several inches of water and was not yet swollen and bloated. His corpse was full of arrows, which made him resemble a porcupine. His eyes were pecked from his head and his eyeholes were ringed with black halos.

>   They crossed the small stream and in a burst Khyber ascended the banking to an open grassy spot just beyond where buzzards floated lazily in circles.

  “The slaughter pen,” he said. He let the reins hang loose, knowing the horse understood his work. They were in a sag between two higher points of land. Tick mattresses had been slashed and the stuffing still carried in the air like pollen. The men and women had been stripped and scalped. There was a dog and it had also been scalped. An ox stood by, its sides quilled with arrows.

  Vultures fed everywhere.

  A cavalry saber was left protruding from the body of a woman with child.

  Who can imagine the shrieks and lamentations of the women, the final moments of their fear and torment?

  There was the dead and mutilated body of more than one child, their heads scalped and clotted and dried in the sun, the black stains of their dried blood, their little shoes.

  They’d not stopped until the bodies of the men and women and children were hacked and burned and severed and covered with blood and not stopped until the bodies were opened to the air and the sun and their blood had turned purple and black.

  In his mind he recomposed the families. There was the white-­haired grandfather, the mother, two grown-­up girls, a boy, and three little children. There was a father and wife and their children. There was the man’s brother and his family. There was the young bride, the shot hole under her chin telling plainly enough her fear of capture, and her husband stoned to death. There were the rest of them.

  He made a wide circuit, cutting a pony trail headed west-­southwest. He came to a travois track going in the same direction. He discovered the tracks of shod horses among numerous tracks of ponies, horses taken in raids. They were on the move. There were women and children, horses, dogs, and men. There were coins, buttons, and buckles. There was the blood of the wounded on them. The trail was not old and there were fifty or more.