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“Be sure to pick up every stick you find and bring the wood back,” Erin instructed the children, who were about to set out to gather wood. The sling under the wagon was constantly being refilled against a time when there wouldn’t be creeks with trees and branches.
“Be sure to poke around, but don’t pick up any snakes,” Molly cautioned.
They were one of the few families who gathered the wood against a time there wouldn’t be any. Others weren’t planning for the future, and while Erin wasn’t against burning buffalo chips, she wasn’t going to make Molly do that until they had to.
Taking her axe, Erin wished she had packed the solid wood stump she had used with her anvil. It would have been a great base to chop wood on, but the added weight to their already overloaded wagon hadn’t seemed necessary. She chopped the branches the children brought them into useable pieces for the fire that night and for future fires. At night, after dinner, she would sharpen the blade, keeping it sharp and taking care of her tool before she put it away.
“Pa, when can I fire the gun?” Theo asked, indicating the ever-present rifle that was slung across Erin’s back. She checked it each night by the fire, removing any dust from the day, assuring herself it was fully loaded in case of need.
“When you are older and show that you are responsible enough,” she promised.
It was a sore point with the boy as others his age had fired and loaded guns. Erin had promised they would all learn to use and shoot a gun, but she didn’t want to waste bullets. He was further upset when she took Tabitha out to look for and shoot game. The pickings this early in the spring were sparse, and she explained that was because the animals had been surviving over winter and were now mamas and papas, so there wasn’t much to choose from.
“I got to shoot the rifle!” Tabitha crowed after one of these rare excursions.
“Did you hit anything?” Theo scoffed, immediately jealous.
“No, but Pa said it was a good start.” They continued to discuss it, arguing slightly until Molly put an end to it. Later, she asked Erin about it.
“Well, here on the frontier, the children must know how to fire and load a gun. We had the opportunity to shoot at a deer, but the gun was too heavy, and it frightened her. Still, she learned to reload and that’s important too.”
Molly understood. It had been Erin who taught her back on the farm in Ohio. She too had been afraid of the noise and the recoil and overloading the barrel with gunpowder. It had taken practice then too. Erin had learned from her brothers, who had learned from their pa. He disapproved of females touching firearms, but he hadn’t been around to say no.
Still, those who did bring in game, lean as it was, were welcome. Parceling it out, a lot of the fresh meat didn’t go far. Not everyone had fresh eggs, milk, or butter, and Molly was popular because she shared their excess. The children benefited from having these foods, and she parceled out the extra to those in need who had children.
“Can I get some of those eggs?” someone boldly asked her.
“I’m sorry. These are for Mrs. Johnson. She’s going to try to bake a cake with her Dutch oven.”
“A cake! Out here on the prairie?”
“Yes, it’s her son’s birthday, and she needed the eggs.”
The person who had asked her was flabbergasted that she would waste such a precious commodity on a cake.
Some were envious that there were eggs for breakfast at the Herriot campfire nearly every day. Others thought they should share more. Erin didn’t mind sharing the extra, but she didn’t think it should be mandatory.
“Hey, there,” she cautioned the goose who had gone all broody on her as she tried to take her eggs. She knew there was no way any of these eggs were fertile since their gander was in another cage and hadn’t been with her. The goose hissed and pecked at her reaching for the eggs anyway.
“I’d have me a goose dinner if I had one do that to me,” a voice called, watching as Molly collected the eggs.
Molly ignored them. They needed these geese, so when they were at the farm they could breed up more geese. They were good for weeding too, and their droppings were good for the garden. Some people just couldn’t see the whole picture.
“I’d like to buy...” was a familiar refrain, but everyone wanted things for cheap, and the Herriots weren’t willing to sell. The apparent wealth of the family continued to be a bone of contention for many people, despite their large family.
“He just planned this trip better than ya’ll. He’s a farmer. He needs his stock for the farm he is gonna set up in Oregon,” someone defended them.
“If he had such a fine farm in Ohio, then why is he moving?”
“If you could get a bigger and better farm, wouldn’t you?”
The conversations weren’t all about the Herriots but enough of them that they knew they weren’t all that popular.
“Whatcha writin’?” one of the women asked Molly as the campfires died down for the evening.
“I’m writing a journal, so I can remember our trip. Someday, the children may want to hear my thoughts on what happened.”
The woman, who didn’t know how to write, wasn’t sure how she felt about that idea. Not knowing how to read, she couldn’t tell if that was what Molly was doing or not. But Molly wasn’t about to let anyone read her journal anyway, although she had told Erin a time or two what they contained.
“You don’t think it best the children not know some of those things?” she asked, worried. Molly had hidden away the earlier journal that told who Erin really was, that she had been born a woman but adopted the persona of a man.
“Someday, that might be important. Who knows, they may burn this,” she said sadly. She had put her own heart and feelings into the journals. She wasn’t writing daily as there wasn’t always something of note to write about but there was enough that she hoped they wouldn’t burn them.
“Mama, how do you write uppidity?” Thomas asked as she stirred the stew she was making. If she was lucky it would last for two days and several meals.
Molly spelled the mispronounced word out correctly in the dirt and then asked, “Where did you hear that?”
“Mrs. Johnson called you it, and I was wondering. What does it mean?”
Annoyed at what the children overheard she explained the meaning, letting the child decide whether it was a nice word or not. She saw that he didn’t like it when he finally understood.
“Why’d she say that about you?”
“Some people don’t like that we seem to have more education and things. If you are smart, you will learn something new every day.”
“There ain’t enough books for that,” he gasped, thinking how hard that would be.
“Aren’t,” she corrected him before continuing, “and I’m not just speaking of book learning. You learn everything there is about farming or hunting or whatever comes your way.”
The boy, young as he was, nodded. He was relieved she wasn’t talking about book learning as he hadn’t had much, and although it was fun the way Molly and Erin taught them, it was harder for him. Still, he enjoyed what Pa taught him about the sheep and even the cattle when he let him ride with him, which wasn’t as often as it used to be.
It was at dinner that night that Theo got his first hiding from Erin. He had found a snake and brought it to dinner to scare Theresa and Tabitha, but Molly had been frightened too, causing her to scream, upsetting their dinner, and wasting some of the food. The pups and dogs cleaned it up, but it was embarrassing as it caused some people to laugh.
“You wait for your pa and see how funny that was,” Molly warned the boy, angry with him as she fixed more food. “You waste your time and our food with snakes. You are going without tonight!”
Theo wasn’t sure if he was more scared about not having dinner, which he always looked forward to after never having enough to eat at the orphanage, or the warning about Pa.
Molly told Erin what had happened right off when she returned to their fire after getting the animals settled. She was taking down the cages of poultry as they talked, Molly lifting from the other side to make it go faster.
“I’ll handle it,” she promised, wondering if Molly would skin her alive if she laughed. Looking at how angry and upset she was, she thought she probably would. She took the boy aside to discuss it with him, but it wasn’t like the other children didn’t know what was going on. They, and several of their neighbors, watched them go.
“Did you bring a snake into our campfire to scare the girls?” she asked the boy sternly. She’d been the one to do it back in school, and she wondered if Molly remembered that.
He nodded, looking down at his shoes.
“A man looks you in the eye,” she told him, remembering something her pa had said to one of her brothers one time.
Reluctantly, Theo looked up into Erin’s face. He didn’t like the look, the anger, and to his surprise, the genuine regret on his pa’s face.
“As we get further into this journey, there will be other snakes and critters you should have no truck with. What if that had been a rattler?”
“It weren’t. It were just a garden snake...” he began to defend himself.
“But you captured it with the intention of scaring your sisters. You also scared your ma and caused her to waste food. Your intention caused bad things to happen and look where you are now. You must learn to think before you act. If it had been a rattler, you might have been bitten, and there is no guarantee we could save you. Think of how devasted we would all be if you died.”
The boy certainly hadn’t thought that far ahead. He’d seen the snake and thought about how much fun it would be to make his sisters scream. He nodded again, looked down, and then looked up in time to see Erin removing her belt.
“I don’t like that your actions have caused me to punish you.”
“But Ma said I don’t get no dinner. Can’t that be punishment enough?”
“Nope, because you didn’t think how far-reaching your actions were. This will make you think before you do anything like that ever again.” With that, Erin turned the boy around, blocking the viewers from seeing much, and ordered him to drop his pants. She watched as the boy lowered his drawers reluctantly. She struck with the leather belt: once...twice...three times, as hard as she could wield the wide leather. The red marks welled up immediately, and the boy cried out each time. He was blubbering by the third strike, and she knelt to take him in her arms. “I’m sorry you made me punish you like that. I don’t want to ever do that again, you hear me? Think before you act.” She held him until he stopped blubbering, pulling his pants up, so he wasn’t exposed. She knew that the people behind her could hear his crying. It took a while to stop, then she still used her body to block those watching and ordered him into the wagon to go to bed.
“I thought I’d sleep in the tent with the others?” he asked, sniffing slightly as the tears still leaked from his eyes.
“I don’t think you want to face those who are watching right now, so skedaddle into the wagon and stay out of sight.”
“They’ll see me in the morning,” he realized, saying it aloud.
“That they will. But if you ignore them and act as though nothing happened, they will forget it sooner. If they ask you about it, you can say you got what you deserved for upsetting your sisters and your mother.”
Thinking it over for only a moment, Theo began to climb into the back of the wagon. Pa was right. If they didn’t see him, they couldn’t see his tears or the way his buttocks hurt. He could already tell he wouldn’t be laying on his backside that night. He thought long and hard about what Pa had said as the pain slowly subsided and he fell to sleep, hungry.
Molly and Erin waited until they were alone in their own tent before discussing it. She had seen that Erin hadn’t liked having to administer the punishment, but it had been necessary. The boy had been in the wrong and curbing it when it happened would teach him quicker than waiting.
“I feel so bad for him,” Molly admitted. Perhaps she had overreacted.
“No, he did wrong. He paid for it with a little hide. Sooner a belt than the whip.”
“Would you have used a whip on the boy?” she asked, shocked.
Erin nodded. “If he forced me to I would. What if that hadn’t been just any old snake. What if it was a baby rattlesnake or worse?”
“What could be worse?” she wondered aloud, but the word rattlesnake had been enough.
“I have no idea, but let’s prevent it before it happens.”
“Everyone heard his cries.”
“Then they know we won’t allow our young’uns to be naughty like that without repercussions.”
“Repercussions, eh?”
“Yep, I read it in that book you have,” she smiled, knowing it was a big, fancy word and understanding its meaning was a triumph.
People were annoyed with Wallace’s insistence that any creek or river they stopped at be crossed before they set up for the night. With hundreds of feet, hooves, and wheels churning up the water, it took a while for that to settle enough to drink.
“You never know if a storm is upriver and will cause it to swell. Sooner be on the far side of where you want to go, so you don’t have to cross it after that,” he justified.
One of the younger men was helping with the herd when, in a moment of exuberance, he fired off his gun, shooting at a buffalo he saw. He was too far away to be effective, but his actions had consequences, and the startled cattle and horses scattered.
Erin galloped the stallion on ahead as soon as she saw what was happening. Shouting to Tabitha, she called, “Circle them!” gesturing to Queenie at the same time. King galloped to join up with his mate. “Circle them,” she called again, trying to keep the sheep from scattering as cattle began running past the slow-moving wagon train and out onto the prairie. Seeing a steer heading directly for the mare, she kicked the stallion hard. It shot ahead, its youth in its favor, and she scooped the young girl off the mare as it was struck and went down. “Hold on,” she ordered Tabitha, trying to stay ahead of the stampede and edge out to the side away from it. The girl grabbed her around the middle, throwing a leg over the back of the horse as she had many times before and closing her eyes. Erin thought she heard a yelp and hoped it wasn’t one of her dogs. Giving the stallion its head, she managed to steer him away until they finally pulled up. Watching, she saw the main part of the herd galloping over a hill and out of sight. She saw that Wallace and his men were already circling the wagons.
Breathing hard, she asked Tabitha, “Are you okay?” and patted her hand.
“I thought I was going to die!” she answered honestly, crying a little.
“You could have,” she answered brutally as she kicked the stallion forward towards the circling wagons, peering ahead to look for her dogs.
She found King, hurt and down in the grass. Queenie sat beside him, waiting for her master. Sliding from the stallion, she handed Tabitha the reins. “Don’t let go,” she cautioned. The stallion was still excited and could do anything.
Checking the dog, she thought perhaps he was just knocked unconscious. Lifting the heavy dog, Queenie snuffled him, but Erin placed the body across her saddle where Tabitha held him. “He isn’t dead, is he?” she asked, sounding younger than her ten years. It was the first time Erin had ever heard her be anything but brave.
“I think he’s unconscious. We’ll take him to the wagon. I have to check the mare,” she said, leading the stallion. The mare was standing there, having gotten up after she’d been knocked down. She had a small, dripping gouge in her side. Erin gently poked and prodded. It would need stitching and she’d be sore, but she thought the mare was going to be okay. She walked her around a few paces and she seemed sound.
Leading the two horses, she headed for the wagon circle some ways off. At first, she couldn’t see the sheep and then, she saw one. Waving Queenie towards it she said, “Fetch ‘em,” and sent the Tervuren off for it, hoping she’d find others. Walking through the long grasses, she saw people congregating inside the circle. Someone was already starting a fire. They always want their hot meal and coffee, she thought. That solves everything.
“What happened?” she heard someone ask as she came up leading the horses, her dog laid over the saddle.
“Idiot fired off his gun and started a stampede,” she said succinctly, wanting to add more but refraining.
“Are you okay?” Molly asked, rushing up to take the mare’s reins.
“We’re fine, but the mare needs tending, and I think King is knocked out,” she told her. “The children okay?”
Molly nodded and saw the relief in Erin’s eyes. “I’ll tend to the mare, but you’ll have to lift King down,” she answered, taking charge now that she saw the two of them were okay.
“Can I go with you to find the sheep?” Tabitha asked.
“The stallion isn’t strong enough to carry two for very long, and I want you to walk to Queenie and see if you can find more of the sheep. Don’t get out of sight of the wagon train. That dog can be sent farther, and I’ll go see what I can find riding him,” she indicated the stallion as she pulled King down off the saddle and gently placed him on the ground. She wondered briefly where the pigs had been in all the commotion, but they were grunting under the wagon, apparently happy and safe.
“Fetch my needle and thread,” Molly told Theo, who was looking down from the wagon. He immediately climbed farther into the bed of the wagon to do as he was told. She watched as Erin mounted the stallion effortlessly and headed out without a backwards glance. She could tell she was angry about the herd, knowing she’d have done a better job and not been so foolish.
“Where’d your husband go?” one of the lieutenants asked.
“To fetch our cattle,” she answered.
“We’re getting a party together to do just that. Don’t he know it’s dangerous out there? He could get lost, and there’s Indians!”
“He knows,” she answered as Theo handed her the little basket containing her sewing needles. “Fetch me the clear bottle from the medical chest,” she told the boy. They’d all seen the chest from time to time as Molly took medicine from it. The clear medicine was a pain killer she used sparingly. Dripping some into the horse’s wound after she washed away most of the dirt and blood, she began to sew, leaving an even stitch for the wound to heal.
“I’ve found four of the sheep, but I want to go out farther,” Tabitha reported, sending Queenie behind them to gather them into the circle of the wagons.
“You heard your pa,” Molly warned her. King was getting up. He’d been knocked cold, and she didn’t know what she could do for him. The bump on his head told the story. Taking a rope, she tied him to the wheel of the wagon, so he wouldn’t go anywhere.
“Is he dangerous, Ma?” Theo asked, worried as he climbed down.
“No, but I think he’s confused and could use some petting. I don’t want him going too far. That’s why I tied him.”
Theo started petting the dog, who wagged his tail in response while looking around dazedly. Molly looked at Queenie, who was looking back over her shoulder where Erin had gone or maybe where the sheep were. Without thinking twice, she ordered the dog, “Go get them.” She didn’t know if the dog was going after sheep or Erin but figured either way, they could use whatever she found. She watched as the dog raced off, soon lost in the long grasses of the prairie. King lunged to follow but fell on his feet, knocking a kneeling Theo over.
“Whoa,” the boy said, the breath knocked out of him as he laid there stunned and then got back up to pet the confused dog. “Easy there, boy,” he crooned.
“Get some water for the dog and maybe fill the birds’ dishes,” Molly told Theresa, who was climbing down. She could see Timmy petting the two pups who had been sitting on the bed in the wagon with him.
It was then, Molly heard the screams that started from across the wagon train circle.