I screamed for Jake as the knife came down again. When he missed, he grabbed my arm and held it to the floor, poised to slice it right off. I had nowhere to go and Hank was too strong.
I closed my eyes, prepared to feel my limb being severed.
Suddenly there was a great thwack, followed by another one.
Warm liquid splashed on my skin.
His grip on my arm loosened.
I opened my eyes to see my mother standing over me with an axe in her hands, one foot on Hank’s back as she pulled and tried to remove the axe from the back of his head.
It didn’t matter though. He was dead enough. He collapsed to the ground in a lifeless heap. My mother gave me a short smile just as she got the axe back and swung one more time. Hank’s head came right off, washing me and the walls in blood.
“Can’t be too careful,” my mother said, staring down at his body.
The first words I’d heard her say in years.
Then Jake and Avery were at the door, guns and axes ready for battle. I quickly got to my feet while Jake inspected the body and Avery ushered me and my mother out of the room and into the hallway.
I collapsed into my mother’s thin arms and thanked her for saving me. She held me cautiously at first, as if she wasn’t really sure who I was, then her hug grew stronger. “I’m so glad you came back,” she said in a hush.
I closed my eyes at the sound of her voice. How sorely I had missed that, missed her embrace.
“What happened?” Avery asked her. “Where is everyone?” From the way his voice choked up at the end, I knew Avery was preparing for his world to come crashing down.
She took in a deep breath and spoke to him over my head. “My sister and her husband are gone. It started a day ago. This…beast of a man. This devil, he went to the Miller’s. From my window I saw him staggering up the road, coming from the mountains, and go into their house. I heard screams. I didn’t know what to do. Then he came here, covered in blood. I heard the screams from downstairs…my sister,” she broke off. “She was downstairs. I should have warned them but…my voice. I didn’t know how. I looked in time to see him bite her by the neck and take her to the floor. I couldn’t watch the rest. From the sounds, I knew what was happening. Patrick was next. He went down to fight him, fired a few shots. The beast didn’t die, it only ran after him. There was nothing I could do. I was in my room and Rose was in hers. While the beast was going after Patrick, I grabbed Rose and brought her into my room. Locked the door. There’s a storage compartment under the floor of my bed. We both squeezed in there and hid…until now. It wasn’t hard for me to stay silent.” She pulled away and wiped at the tears that were streaming down her cheeks. “I heard your scream. I knew your scream. The scream of your nightmares. I couldn’t hide anymore. I couldn’t stay silent anymore.”
“How did you know to take off its head?” Jake asked.
She gave him a wry look. “When someone gets shot in the head and doesn’t stop, the next best thing is just to remove it. At the very least, he wouldn’t be able to see.”
I shuddered and Jake reached for my hand, squeezing it. I could tell my mother wanted to say something about that, but when I looked at her, she only gave me a tired smile.
“Why did it smell like vinegar?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”
“The kitchen smells like vinegar too. All the bottles are emptied,” Jake said. “Maybe Hank was trying to cover his smell up. He knew you were a tracker, and it’s obvious he was here for a reason. For you.”
“But how could he know, be intelligent, be human enough, to know to do that?”
Jake shrugged. “I reckon Hank still fought to hold onto his humanity as long as possible. Maybe by eating a lot, maybe by eating a little.”
I snorted with contempt. “He was not a virtuous man.”
“Not out of virtue,” he said. “But because that would be the ultimate advantage, as Isaac would have said. Inhuman strength with the sharp mind of a killer.”
“Hank?” my mother asked.
“You probably wouldn’t recognize him, but he was one of the men on the expedition,” I explained, knowing we had a long night ahead of us while we got her caught up on exactly what happened out there.
“Where is Rose?” Avery asked. I’d noticed he’d turned quiet, rubbing his hands anxiously on the front of his shirt.
“Rose?!” my mother yelled. “You can come out now.”
There was a shuffling sound from my mother’s room, and moments later a shaky and disheveled Rose appeared with frightened tears in her eyes. Avery ran right over to her and scooped her into his arms, holding on tight.
My mother looked up at me. “June is gone. And I’m going to take care of Rose the way that June took care of you. It’s time for me to be a mother again. For both of you.”
I squeezed Jake’s warm hand and smiled at her. Despite the blood and the death and the sadness that we stood in the middle of, I was standing with everyone I ever cared about.
I was standing with my tribe.
Later that night, the five of us loaded up the carriage with Sadie and Avery’s horse at the reins and Ali trailing behind, and headed out into River Bend. So far it seemed that Hank’s appetite never stretched further than the Smiths and the Millers. I was glad that the town was spared the wrath, but as we watched the familiar faces as they sat on their porches, waving at us in their oblivious ways, we all knew we couldn’t stay there anymore.
We buried June and Uncle Pat in the field adjacent to the house and said a few words while Rose sobbed into Avery’s embrace. I felt so very bad for her and for my mother too. We may have had our differences, but when it came down to it, they didn’t deserve this death. We wanted to do the same for the Millers as well, but when we went inside their house, the only sign of them was blood.
My mother said a prayer. That would have to be enough.
It was a couple hours’ ride to the next settlement of Truckee, but at least we could get a room there. Take a few days to reflect, to breathe, to take comfort in each other before we decided what to do with ourselves.
As Jake drove the carriage and the faint lights of Truckee glittered in the distance, I leaned into my mother.
“What did you mean,” I whispered to her, “when you wrote down that I had to go. I had to find what’s out there.”
She stroked my hair. “Well, little girl. Let’s say I had a dream about your father.”
“You dreamed about Pa?”
She nodded. “I see him in my dreams every night. That night he told me that you had to find it, what was out there. He seemed frightened. It frightened me. I asked him what he meant by it and he explained that there are angels inside of monsters and monsters inside of angels, and you had to figure out what was which. You had to find it—and find yourself—out there.”
I pondered that for a few moments before she asked, “Do you think you found yourself?”
I nodded, suddenly filled with the powerful glow of self-assurance. I eyed Jake’s back until he turned his head to look at me, always feeling my presence. He gave me a charming grin before turning his attention back to the road.
I smiled back. “I found him.”
The horse’s hoof beats carried on into the dark night.
Epilogue
Oregon City, Oregon – 1857
“Mama!” Ruth cried out in bloody murder.
I dropped the dishes into the bucket of water and ran out into the yard, my heart in my throat.
Please don’t let anything happen to my baby girl, I thought. Oh Lord, please.
I ran off the porch and looked around, unable to spot her. I panicked, not feeling this afraid since, well, since that time in the Sierra Nevadas.
“Ruthie!” I yelled, hiking up my skirts and running around the corner as fast as I could. I could hear her crying again, though it was so hysterical it almost sounded like laughter.
I barreled around the house, following the sounds until I came right up against the fence around the corral.
In the middle of it, Ruth was sitting astride a year-old calf that was trying to get rid of her. Holding her in place was my husband Jake McGraw, wearing a stupid grin on his handsome face.
“What in the dickens are you doing?” I cried out, climbing over the fence and stomping up to them.
Ruth was giggling her head off. At the sight of me, the calf widened its eyes and tried to take off. This time he was successful, and before Ruth fell to the ground, Jake had her in his strong arms, her little legs kicking beneath with glee.
“That was fun!” she cried out. “I want to ride again.”
“You can ride my shoulders,” Jake said. “Pretend it’s a piggy-back ride.” He flipped her chubby but light body up onto his shoulders, taking hold of her legs while she wrapped her little arms around the hat on his head. “Oink, oink,” he added.
He grinned down at me, a toothpick in his mouth. “Did we give you a scare?”
“Yes!” I cried out, and punched him lightly on the chest.
“That’s not very ladylike,” Jake commented.
“Mama ain’t a lady!” Ruth exclaimed.
“You got that right, half pint,” he said, giving her legs a squeeze.
“I’m serious, Jake,” I scolded him. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“That’s nothing new, you’ve been a barrel of nerves ever since your mother left.”
It was true. My mother, who was now living in Salem with Rose, her husband Avery, and their five children, had come to visit. Naturally since it was a long journey from their land in Salem up to our small farm in Oregon City, they had to stay more than a few weeks. I loved my mother a lot—we’d grown so much closer over the years—but she was still my mother and loved to nitpick everything. Even though she loved to read, she still didn’t quite approve of my writings for the local women’s journal, nor did she approve of Jake raising cattle when Oregon was a land made for produce. Avery and Rose had many orchards, I guess that brought them a cleaner, greener lifestyle than one filled with ink-stained fingers and cow manure.
Still, we were happy. And we never talked about what happened in the mountains—there was no need to. Though reports of the Donner’s cannibalism eventually came out, future pioneers and gold-seekers never reported any casualties or monsters in the woods. I suppose we had killed them all.
At least, I liked to think that.
“I’ll tell you what,” Jake said, reading my face. “Tonight I’ll go out and shoot us a duck. I’ll roast you your favorite.”
I stood on my toes and kissed his rough cheek. “You always were a better cook than me.”
“Everyone knows this,” Jake said. “Even Ruth.”
“That’s right,” she said, though from her voice you could tell she was just trying to be funny. She often was. She took after her father.
I brushed the dirt off of her calico dress and hung onto Jake’s arm like the girl I was, a girl still madly in love, and grinned up at him. “Let’s get you both cleaned up if we’re going to feast on something so fine.”
We walked back to the house, arm in arm, my tribe of three.
THE END
