CHAPTER 27

 

Diary of Charles Stanton, January 1, 1847

 

I no longer feel the hunger. My body has wasted away, and I am a wraith wandering the woods alone. I am at peace beneath the trees, for nature, in its silence and stillness, is not cruel, simply uncaring. Nature and I are one, and soon I will lie down in the dirt and snow and become nourishment for the earth.

The calendar says that it is a new year. Never has this date seemed so arbitrary, nor had less meaning.

The others are talking about another attempt to leave, this time with the roster to include everyone who can still travel, which is roughly a quarter of those left alive. These are fathers and mothers who are willing to leave their children behind, because all can see that if nothing is done, everyone will die.

I’ve been asked to go with them and I think I shall, not so much for my own sake, for I can feel that my end is near, but for the sake of the children: for Virginia Reed and her young brothers and sister, for the great brood of Breen siblings, and even for the Graveses, who have become petty and domineering but who only wish to survive, as we all do.

So I will join them. It is a forlorn hope, but I will try one more time to save these people.

There is another reason that I plan to go along. Someone has to protect us from the Things that hunt us. They have us trapped. They don’t want us to get away or find help. There are those among us who know that we are being preyed upon, and there are others who are unaware of that terrible fact, but the majority of the Donner Party simply refuses to believe such a thing could happen, even though they have all seen evidence of it.

I have broached the matter with all the different groups, and only the Reeds and the Breens seem both aware of and willing to confront what faces us. To my mind, it is not a coincidence that these are the only two families that have remained mostly intact, and have kept some shreds of their dignity and integrity: the Breens because of their strong Catholic faith and the Reeds because of their strong faith in James Reed, their paterfamilias.

I wish I had faith in either. God I can’t speak for. He’s never done anything for me. The last time I saw James Reed, he was but a pale shadow of his former domineering, assured self.

I don’t know how many of these Monsters there are, or who among us may shift into one at any moment. I sense that most of us are still as we appear, but I don’t know for sure.

Virginia Reed has decided to stay, to protect her family, but she took me aside at the last moment.

“William Foster is going with you,” she said.

“Yes,” I answered. I knew what she was going to say next.

“He has been bitten,” she told me.

I nodded and pointed to the pistol at my belt.

I will go along with the others, the witting and the unwitting, and I will keep my pistol and my rifle loaded and close at hand, and endeavor to do my best to protect these poor innocents. I hope that we will draw away enough of the Beasts that the loved ones we are leaving behind will remain unmolested.

 

January 2, 1847

 

We have begun our journey. Each of us is armed, and each is carrying a few days’ worth of rations––if ox hide and pine nuts can be considered rations. We hope be able to hunt and forage along the way, but thus far we have seen no wildlife, not even their tracks. All God’s creatures know better than to venture out into this cold. Well… almost all.

Franklin Graves fashioned some crude snowshoes for most of us. Those few who started out without them quickly gave up and headed back. We now number fifteen souls.

Without the snowshoes, we would make no progress at all, but they are unwieldy, constantly coming undone and needing repair. Our progress is agonizingly slow. None of us is well-nourished enough for this trip, but we cannot wait for help to arrive in the spring. The rescue parties would find us gone, missing like our forebears on Roanoke Island. Vanished. Eaten.

If even a few of us can survive, we will bear testimony to our misery and our struggle.

 

January…?, 1847

 

All I can see are the dark vertical stripes of what I think are tree trunks. Everything else is white, sky to ground. We are snow blind. Some of us can’t even see the trees, judging by how they keep walking into them. We are walking in single file, each holding onto the person in front of him, and only moving as fast as the slowest among us.

I have seen one other thing: quick flashes of movement among the trees. I fear it will not be long before we are attacked, but we have vowed not to turn back no matter what. I believe we are being herded. It is hard to tell direction, but we climb ever higher, for we know that on the other side of this mountain is California.

The trail, never clear in the first place, has disappeared. We simply follow the easiest route through the underbrush, which means that we encounter dead ends, cliffs, rockslides, and tangled deadfalls, and are constantly forced to double back.

The snow must be twenty feet high. We sleep in tree wells to get out of the wind.

I have no idea how far we’ve traveled. I’ve even lost track of the nights. Has it been six, or eight? Such confusion is a result of the hunger and cold we have been suffering. Our food seemed to run out in only a couple of days. We are dying, but no one has proposed that we turn around. No one is giving up. We will not go back.

 

January…?, 1847

 

Patrick Dolan has broached the unspeakable. He insists that one of us must die so the others can live. There was a moment of silence after he spoke, but no one objected. Instead, we began rationally discussing how this might happen. Someone, I don’t remember who, suggested a duel. Bill Foster suggested a lottery of some kind.

In the end, we were not desperate enough.

Not said aloud but surely thought by all was the fact that soon one of us will succumb, and that person will save the rest of us, giving us the energy that will make it possible to move on a little farther. Perhaps far enough to survive.

 

Winter, 1847

 

I am no longer putting dates in this journal. I can’t remember what day it is. This accursed journey has been my whole life, and nothing good has ever happened. I am not going to survive this; none of us will.

Unless… unless we do the unthinkable––the forbidden.

Franklin Graves died during the night. Soon after dawn, if the thin light that wended its way through the trees could be called dawn, Antonio also passed on. A blizzard has kept us here for days now. No one looks at the two bodies.

Lemuel Murphy, the twelve-year-old boy, is near death. It was finally decided that some of us––I won’t record whom––should cut away strips of flesh from the corpses and feed them to the child, to try to save him. I refused. I told them that once we took that step, we would never come back.

Lemuel need never know what he has eaten, they argued.

I started out on this mission with the intention of saving us from the Monsters. Little did I know we would become Monsters ourselves.

I refuse to partake, knowing that this will seal my fate. I do not judge the others. I cannot judge them, for I am tempted. It is meat, after all. Only meat.

I walked away from the campsite. Luis and Salvador started to follow, but I told them to stay. I watched from a distance as the others––again, I will not say whom––crouched over one of the bodies and hacked at the flesh.

This sight was apparently too much for Patrick Dolan, who got up in the middle of this scene, muttering incoherently. He took off his clothes, the sounds he was making more like those of an animal than a man. He ran directly toward me; I don’t know if he saw me or if it was happenstance. As he ran, he began to Turn. He dropped to his hands and knees and hunched his back upward as if in pain. His face elongated and his groans became growls, his hands and feet became claws, and he howled at the gray skies in pain or triumph, I couldn’t tell which.

I heard answering howls off in the distance, and I knew that we had been herded to this spot where we could all be consumed.

The creature that had been Dolan started lurching back toward the campsite, where the others stood frozen. I took aim and shot it in the back.

It flopped to the ground, then tried to get up and run toward me, but it covered only a few yards before falling over. I walked over carefully and prodded the body with the tip of the rifle. Before my eyes, the fur faded away, the snout receded, and the creature turned back into a man.

I grabbed him by his ankles and dragged him toward the others. They left off hacking at the corpse and stood silently, watching me.

“If you have to eat someone, you should eat he who intended to eat you,” I said; then I walked away.

I will watch them from a distance. I will try to protect them.

But I am no longer one of them.