was less like coming to a river in the boy’s mind than arriving at a place where a part of the sky had fallen to earth. It was so wide and shallow that men and beasts walked its surface like an immense blue highway. After the privations of Kansas this highway of life was the sweetest blessing imaginable, and he knelt and drank like any beast of the field and praised the Lord of that Bible from which various emigrants now made requests of his reading by campfire.
At the first river camp the women set about washing and stringing clothes between wagons, and Jeremiah made himself present as the pigtail girl was stretching on her toes to hang her father’s long johns. “Can I help?” he asked, rushing toward her.
“Well, sure. You look tall enough.” It was true. Since Missouri his pants had crept from ankle to calf. He took the wet garment from her hands and strung it across the line. “What’s your name, and what school did you attend back home? You read beautifully.”
His face burned. “I’m Jeremiah.” He concentrated on the wet union suit as it were an object of grave importance. When he looked at her face from the deliriously close proximity of her passing along the next garment for the laundry line, their fingers touching in the process, his tongue seized within his throat.
“I just turned fifteen,” she said, “and Father wants to marry me off quicker than tomorrow, and I just don’t know, it’s all so confusing right now.” He remained nearly silent, nodding or grunting as she chattered until the task was finished, and he took his leave on heavy feet, thinking, Fool, fool, fool! For he had heard enough to know that she was a young woman with a formal education and breeding, a beautiful maiden promised to a handsome gentleman from the South, and he was a boy a year her junior, raised on a backwoods farm, far from schools and cities and culture.
THAT NIGHT the captain had them form a circle with their wagons on a large island right in the middle of the knee-deep river. The fires crackled and died in its center, and the Platte gurgled and tumbled over stones all around, and the people’s voices were subdued after supper. Jeremiah heard them whisper of savages far more dangerous than the Kaw, of Pawnee and Sioux. He and Father stretched their bedrolls in the sand near the wagon as the women bedded inside it, but the boy couldn’t sleep. As the night deepened and the embers were outshone by the vivid jewelry of stars he heard a haunting music, a ghostly, quavering chorus that had about it something so melancholy and disturbing, as of madness come of the despair of great loss. At first he wondered if this were an Indian war party set to avenge the man Smith had killed on the Kansas plains, and he sat bolt upright listening to the eerie voices sing their despair from the distant bluffs until his father suddenly appeared above him in silhouette. “Coyotes,” the old man said. “They might worry them cattle, but they can’t hurt a man.”
DAVID TOOK to accompanying their family on the trek, teasing and talking as much to Ruth as to Jeremiah as they walked beside their oxen. He said he was going to share sentry duty soon to watch for Indians.
“Probably shoot some poor cow thinkin’ it’s a Pawnee,” Ruth said.
“One good supper-shout from your sister would scare them redskins out of their moccasins,” David said.
Jeremiah asked if he’d ever seen the likes of these bluffs, hills with nary a tree, and the young man admitted that he never had. They speculated as to the height and distance of one such sandstone formation on the horizon, agreeing that ten minutes by horse would be enough to reach it, while Ruth guessed it would take twice that time and all day long to actually climb the stupid thing. At midday camp time they were allowed by the captain to go explore it while hunting up some rabbits.
He sat behind David on the roan, holding both rifles across his lap. Jeremiah had always been good with the flintlock, and he bagged three hares in the first ten minutes, hopping down from the horse and charging the powder quickly. Something like an hour of riding passed, and it seemed that the bluff never got any closer. “What the hell,” the young man asked, “is the damned thing moving away from us?”
“Maybe it’s a Spanish galleon floating down the Platte,” the boy suggested.
“This country is just a hell of a lot bigger than it looks.” David turned the roan enough to look back toward camp. The wagons were barely visible. “A guy could get good and lost out here, even without trees.” The roan took an opportunity to graze as they sat, and Jeremiah asked to dismount. Among the tough grass stalks were some kind of brush, and stuck to a branch he found a lump of black fur, or hair. “What the hell is that?” David called to him.
“Looks kind of like a bear’s fur,” the boy replied. He brought it to the young man.
“Can’t be no bears living out here,” David said. “Can there?”
The boy stretched the fur between his hands like a cat’s cradle of black strings. “Sure ain’t rabbit,” he said.
THEY PRESSED ON for another half hour or so and came within the shadow of the great white butte. Another ten minutes winding among house-sized slabs of rock brought them to the steep, loose base of the giant. They dismounted and stared up the conical slope to the vertical cap of sheer cliffs. After some silence, David whistled.
“What do you reckon?” Jeremiah asked. He’d started to have some difficulty breathing but didn’t want the young man to notice, and now he was taking careful sips of air as he stared upward.
David pulled on the wisp of his chin whiskers and clucked his tongue. “Well,” he began and lapsed into silence again. After a minute or more he whispered, “God almighty.”
The cap of stone was straight and vertical as any piece of masonry made by man, but much bigger than anything within the experience of either of them. “I’m a guessing,” David finally drawled, “that we could scramble two hour up this loose rock to that ’ere cliff and kind of peer around her shoulder.” He plucked a long stem of grass and chewed it. “Howsomever,” he continued, “we might not make it back by nightfall, and we might git lost. And if we survived, your sister would kill me, anyway.”
They started back in the lengthening shadow of the butte, picking their way slowly among boulders and chunks of fallen cliff, and Jeremiah asked David to hold up as he spotted something shiny in a rock cleft. It was an old frying pan half buried in sand, and just beyond it something odd poked upward like a brownish-black mushroom.
It was a human toe. Attached, and half buried in sand, was the rest of a desiccated body, naked and multicolored, here a pinkish-yellow, there deep brown and dried like jerked venison, the head a mottled, eyeless husk with huge yellow teeth and a grotesque aspect, pancake-flat, too close above the eye sockets.
“Scalped,” David said. “Missing part of his head. Sweet Jesus of Nazareth.”
THEY RODE BACK quickly and were received near sundown with much alarm in camp, their story eclipsed by the encounter they’d missed an hour earlier between a band of savages and a contingent of emigrants who’d awkwardly given a calf, three steer, and various provisions to the demanding natives. “Most disturbing of all,” William explained to David and Jeremiah in his mannered drawl, “was the confusion about what could and could not be bargained between our two races.”
“How do you mean?” David asked.
“They wanted our white women.” William chuckled bitterly and spat into the dust. “Savage animals. One even took your Ruth by the elbow, but she shook him off quickly enough.”
David cursed and kicked at the ground.
AFTER THE WAGONS had once again formed a circle, perhaps a half mile from the river, and the cook fires flared beneath pots of beans, the captain appointed a dozen men and boys to share sentry duty. Jeremiah, recognized now as an excellent shot in pursuit of rabbits and pheasant, proudly joined the guard with David for the first three hours of darkness.
And he thought a certain darkness had enveloped his heart and made him anxious to be the first to shoot some sneaking Indian right between the eyes. He thought that maybe this was manhood coming to him, this steel in his veins giving him the