October skies

Ben looked up from his journal across the heat shimmer of the campfire. This morning the skies were heavy and dark and promised a new inches-thick carpet of snow to rechristen the ground. The women — Mrs Bowen, Mrs Hussein and Mrs McIntyre — were preparing a gruel of stewed oats flavoured with some strips of pemmican, taking turns stirring the contents of a large, steaming iron pot suspended over a bed of ash-grey logs. By the pallid light of this morning the fire looked lifeless and spent, the flames all but invisible. The same fire at night, though, would look like a furnace, casting a reassuring amber glow across their end of the clearing.

Beyond the heat shimmer, his eyes drifted onto the now utterly still mass of tan hides.

The last of the oxen froze last night. That is it now; they’re all dead. Which is a merciful relief, for us as well as them. The occasional pitiful bellowing in the freezing cold of night was an awful sound that I was struggling to ignore. The oxen froze from the outside of the herd in. One imagines if they were human, or perhaps more intelligent, they would have taken turns, shuffling those on the edge to the middle to recover some warmth. But they didn’t. The last one to freeze to death was at the very centre of their huddle.

No doubt he’ll also be the very last one we butcher to eat.

His eyes focused beyond the carcasses — to the rounded snow-covered hump that was the Dreytons’ shelter, and he wondered what was wrong with Dorothy. Sam and Emily had spent some time around the campfire with Ben last night. Sam had talked about his mother, how worried he and Emily were about her. She had sunk into some kind of stupor of despair, unwilling to step outside, unwilling to talk, unwilling to eat.

Ben wondered if she’d managed to hear Preston’s drug-induced outburst. He wondered if she’d been troubled by what she’d heard. It was quite clear that, for Dorothy, for many of these people devoted enough to leave everything, risk everything to follow him out into the wilderness, Preston was the very centre of their universe. To hear him talk like that… what was it he’d said?

They’re just my words, not God’s?

Ben didn’t believe for one moment that God came down every night to have a chat with Preston. He looked at the half a dozen men and women gathered outside the church shelter, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands to stay warm.

But these people undoubtedly do believe that.

They believed in him completely, that every stricture, every instruction, every word he had thus far penned in what Sam had referred to as the Book of New Instruction, were words directly from God’s mouth.

What else had he said?

What if they know? What if they find out what I am?

In the minds of these strictly faithful people, Ben knew there was a special place in hell for someone who might lead them astray — for a false prophet. And yet, given what he knew of Preston, the genuine courage he’d demonstrated, the genuine compassion he had for people, Ben didn’t believe for one moment that the man’s motives were suspect, that he was a charlatan.

Those drug-induced words were nothing more than a momentary crisis of faith, a hallucination, the babbling of a feverish man. He wondered whether it might help if he were to pay Mrs Dreyton a visit to explain this to her; that it was just the laudanum she had heard talking.

CHAPTER 31

22 October, 1856

Ben stared out into the moonlit darkness. The snowy carpet on the ground and the pillows of snow on every laden branch seemed to glow phosphorescently by the quicksilver light. He was relieved that his turn on watch was made easier by a clear sky and an almost full moon. Beside him the bowl of Keats’s pipe glowed as the old man pulled on it.

‘Hmm,’ the old man’s voice quietly rumbled. ‘So what’ll you do with all them words you been writin’ down?’

Ben shrugged. ‘I’d like to get them published back in England.’

Keats laughed quietly. ‘You mean like a proper book?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘You s’pecting to get rich with this book o’ yours?’

‘Oh, probably not,’ he replied with a faint smile. ‘It would just be nice to see my story printed. Perhaps even in a newspaper. ’

Keats was quiet for a while. Ben watched the glow of his tobacco floating in the darkness, bobbing gently. ‘You got the bear in yer book?’

‘Of course.’ Ben smiled.

Keats laughed quietly. ‘Bet you writ about yerself bringin’ it down like some big ol’ hero, eh?’

‘Hardly. I wrote about how terrified I was,’ Ben replied with shame in his voice. ‘I wrote about how all I could do was stand frozen to the spot, like a fool.’

‘You writ ’bout me shootin’ it in yer book?’

‘Yes.’

‘You made me sound all brave an’ heroic?’

Ben nodded.

‘Good. I ain’t never been in a book before. The ladies’ll like that,’ he snorted.

‘Do you think it’s dead?’

‘The bear?’ Keats grunted. ‘Ain’t no bear worries me. It’s ’em Paiute out there.’

‘You think they’re still out in those trees somewhere?’