The Tears of God

Chapter Seven

“Are those buzzards?” Jeremiah Blunt wondered.

Nate King had been deep in thought. He was thinking of Evelyn and the Nansusequa and hoping Shakespeare got them home safely. Now he glanced at the captain and then in the direction Blunt was staring and a chill rippled down his spine. To the northeast vultures were circling, an awful lot of them.

The freight wagons had been under way an hour and were strung out in single file.

Maklin rode on Nate’s left. He had been with Nate since Nate woke up, at Blunt’s orders, Nate suspected. Now the Texan swore and said, “That’s about where we ran into that dirt farmer and his family.”

“I’ll catch up,” Nate told Blunt, and brought the bay to a gallop. His shadow stayed with him. In due course they were close enough that Nate could see the bald heads and hooked beaks of the winged carrion eaters. He hoped against hope, but when he drew rein at the basin’s rim, his hopes were dashed. “God, no.”

“I hate idiots,” Maklin said.

Nate gigged the bay down. A score of vultures rose into the air, flapping heavily, disturbed from their feast

The scent of so much fresh blood caused the bay to shy and snort. Nate had to calm it to get it to go all the way to the bottom. The gore, the viscera, the abominable things that had been done, churned his stomach. He came close to being violently sick.

“This wasn’t no ordinary butchery,” the Texan remarked.

Nate nodded, his mouth too dry to speak. The family had been tortured, tortured horribly, and then hacked and cut and chopped, even the little girl and boy.

Maklin asked the pertinent question. “Was it the Pawnees or someone else?”

Nate slid down. He tried to avoid stepping in the blood, but there was so much it was impossible. The killers had stepped in the blood, too, leaving footprints. He examined them.

No two tribes made their footwear the same way. A person would think that feet were feet, but each tribe had a distinct shape and stitch. Cheyenne moccasins were wider across the ball of the foot and tapered at the toes and the heel. Crow moccasins were a crescent. On Sioux moccasins the toes all curved inward. Pawnee moccasins were usually shorter than most others and narrowed from about the middle of the foot to the heel.

The footprints in the blood were short and narrowed from about the middle of the foot to the heel.

“Now we know,” Maklin said.

Nate bowed his head. This was Kuruk’s doing. He was as sure of it as he was of anything.

“He’s rubbing your nose in his hate. Letting you know what he has in store for you.”

Choked with emotion, Nate vowed, “Not if I kill him first.”

The Texan nudged a severed finger with his toes. “This reminds me of what the Comanches did to Na-lin.” He swore under his breath. “What kind of world is it that things like this can happen?”

Nate didn’t have an answer. He had long since stopped trying to figure it out. The best he could do, the best any man could do, was protect his loved ones as best he could from the cruelties life threw at him.

“Are you fixing to go after them?”

Nate considered. The freighters were on open prairie and had days of easy travel before they would reach South Pass. They didn’t need him right now. “Your boss won’t mind you tagging along?”

“He was the one who told me to stick to you like prickly pear.” Maklin confirmed Nate’s earlier hunch. “He doesn’t want anything to happen to you.”

“I told him I don’t need a nursemaid.”

“All I’m to do is watch your back.”

“It might take a lot of watching.”

Maklin motioned at the slaughter. “Do you want to bury them or leave them for the scavengers?”

“We’ll do it on the way back.” To Nate the important thing was to catch the culprits.

Their trail was plain enough. Eleven horses left a lot of tracks. They led to the north for over a mile and then off to the northeast.

Nate and Maklin went another mile and the Texan remarked, “Looks to me as if they’re heading for Pawnee territory.”

Nate thought so, too. Unless it was a ruse and Kuruk intended to circle back later.

“They’re moving awful fast. It could take us days to catch them, if we ever do.”

Nate came to a stop. Leaning on his saddle, he frowned.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Maklin said.

“By giving up?”

“By being smart. This smells of a trick. Could be this Kuruk aims to lure you into Pawnee territory.”

Nate felt his jaw muscles twitch.

“It’s not as if that dirt farmer and his family were kin of yours. As you reminded me last night, you only just met them.”

“For a man who doesn’t talk much, you have a leaky mouth.”

Maklin grinned. “My boss says I’m to keep you alive. We keep on going and that might prove hard. Do we use our heads or do we lose them?”

“We turn back and bury what’s left.”

It was pushing sundown when they caught up with the freight wagons. Jeremiah Blunt took the news in grim spirit. “You did what you could. Their souls are in the Lord’s hands now.”

Nate blamed himself in part for the tragedy. Maybe if he had been more insistent, Wendell and his family would still be alive. But what else could he have done short of forcing them to join the freight train at the point of a gun?

By the next morning Nate had come to terms with his guilt. Blunt and Maklin were right; he had done all he could. Wendell and Maddy had brought it on themselves by not heeding his advice. The wilderness was a harsh mistress. She was cruel and merciless. Simpletons were fodder for her claws and fangs. The timid fell to her tomahawks and knives. Some people were too naive to see the thorns. Like Wendell, they relied on the hand of Providence or on luck to keep them alive. It never occurred to them that to a hungry grizzly or a hostile out to count coup, Providence didn’t matter a lick. Luck was more fickle than the weather. To rely on chance when one’s life was at stake was to have a secret death wish.

Day followed day without further incident. Nate got to know the freighters well.

On a sunny morning they started the climb to South Pass, which wasn’t much of a climb at all. When most easterners thought of a pass, they thought of a gap high on a mountain range. South Pass was the exception. The prairie rolled upward as gently as could be to the Continental Divide and then down the other side. To the north were the jagged peaks of the Wind River Range; to the south the land peaked to form the mileshigh backbone of the Rockies.

South Pass was the one point where wagons could cross from one side of the Divide to the other with ease. Thousands of emigrants bound for Oregon and California had left the ruts of their passage. They had left other things, too. A stove, a grandfather clock, an anvil, tokens that even an easy climb had taxed teams pulling overburdened wagons.

Beyond lay a sage-sprinkled valley. The main trail bore to the southwest for a number of miles before it jagged to the northwest again and eventually brought travelers to Fort Hall.

Nate and the freighters left the trail shortly after South Pass, making for the rugged mountains to the north. From that point on, the freighters relied on Nate to guide them. Few whites had ever ventured into the geyser country. The tales of steaming springs and spouts of hot water hundreds of feet high had brought the region the label of “hell on earth.” No one ever went there, which had Nate wondering about the Shakers.

Nate had been to the area twice. Both times he had taken the same route, north up Bridger Basin and then along the Green River to where it flowed down out of the Green River Range. From there on it was solid mountain travel.

Nate chose a different route this time. He had them cross a low unnamed range and follow a long, winding valley to the banks of the Gros Ventre River. By paralleling it they didn’t want for water or graze, and while now and then the men had to wield axes to clear the way, the going was easier than on the slopes above.

The oxen were unflagging, but their progress, through no fault of theirs, was slow.

The mountains were magnificent. Peaks that towered almost three miles into the sky. Slopes forested thick with spruce and fir and stands of shimmering aspens. Meadows that ran riot with the colors of wildflowers.

Wildlife was everywhere. Black-tailed deer raised their tails in alarm and bounded off. Elk hid in the deep thickets. Bear sign told of black bears and grizzlies. Eagles ruled the air. Hawks dived for prey. Ravens squawked and flapped. Squirrels in the trees and squirrels on the ground scampered and chattered. Songbirds warbled an avian orchestra.

They were now deep in the heart of the Gros Ventre Range. To the northwest were the Tetons. Beyond, the spectacular geyser country. The Valley of Lost Skulls was at its southernmost edge.

Another ten days brought them to where Nate felt they could come on the valley at any time. As he told Jeremiah Blunt, he’d never been there, but based on what Shakespeare had told him and other accounts, the landmarks were right. It should be near.

As added proof, the country changed. The mountain slopes were not as thickly forested. Lower down, where vegetation usually thrived, the little that grew was stunted and withered, as if the plants were being poisoned by the ground. Deer became scarce. There was no bear sign. Eagles and hawks disappeared from the sky. Ravens were never seen. Nor squirrels or rabbits or any of the small game formerly so abundant. The birds fell silent. Not a single, solitary note broke the disquieting stillness.

Nate could understand why it gave people the jitters. The silence, the twisted shapes of the rocks, the absence of life, gnawed at the nerves. Bad medicine the Indians called it, and they were right.

He roved on ahead of the wagons to try and locate the valley. As usual, the Texan accompanied him. The shod hooves of their mounts sounded like hammers on the rock.

A reek filled the air, a foul stench explained when they came on a pool of bubbling water no bigger around than a washtub.

The Texan coughed and said, “So this is what hell smells like?”

They rode on. It was a maze, this country, and Nate began to think he had been overconfident and the Valley of Skulls would be a lot harder to find than he imagined when they came on ruts. Wagons, a lot of wagons, had come in from the east. It had to be the Shakers, Nate reckoned. No other wagon train that he knew of had ever penetrated this far.

“These people must be crazy,” Maklin remarked.

Nate wondered, too.

The tracks led to the northwest along a ribbon of a stream that had no name. It had another quality, which Nate discovered by accident when he dipped his hand in the water to drink. “It’s warm.”

“What?” Maklin said.

“This water. It’s warm enough to use for bathwater.”

The Texan climbed down to see for himself. “I’ll be damned. Is it safe to drink, you reckon?”

Nate dared a sip. Save for a slight metallic taste, the sip produced no ill effects.

“I wouldn’t want to drink this regular,” was Maklin’s assessment.

Neither would Nate. They climbed back on their mounts. The wagon tracks hugged the stream and they did the same until along about the middle of the afternoon when it brought them to a narrow cleft dark with shadow. There was barely enough room for a wagon to pass through.

Nate entered the cleft. He didn’t like being hemmed by rock and was glad when after only thirty feet they emerged to have a valley floor spread out before them. Not a valley of grass and flowers but a valley of rock and boulders. Grotesque stone shapes testified to a geologic upheaval in the remote past that had bent and twisted the foundations of the earth.

Both abruptly drew rein.

“Is that singing?” Maklin asked in amazement.

Nate heard it, too, wafting from deeper in the valley, around a bend that hid what lay beyond. “They don’t even post a guard,” he noted. Then again, what need did they have of a sentry when the Indians wouldn’t come anywhere near the place?

They rode around the bend and again drew rein.

“Pinch me so I know I’m not dreaming,” Maklin said.

The valley broadened. To the north and south it was rimmed by high ramparts pockmarked with the dark openings to caves. The ground was rock, dark rock dotted with pale patches, broken here and there by pools that bubbled and hissed and gave off steam. Ahead, perhaps half a mile, grew an area of green, and there, parked in rows, were Conestogas. A corral held horses and mules. Two buildings had been built, long and low and made of logs, and a third was being erected. Around and among the buildings and wagons moved dozens of people, many singing as they worked.

“We should introduce ourselves and tell them their supplies will be here soon,” Nate proposed. He raised his reins and was about to move on when his gaze alighted on what he had taken for pale rock.

“A skull!” Maklin exclaimed.

That it was, far bigger than the skull of any grizzly or buffalo. Others were scattered here and there, along with giant spine bones and legs bones and even rib bones. But the skulls far outnumbered the rest. Strange skulls. Unnatural skulls. Skulls of creatures from another time.

Nate passed one with three horns, two of which were broken. Another skull was ringed by teeth as long as his fingers.

“What monsters were these?” the Texan marveled.

Then, around a boulder, skipped a young woman in her twenties wearing a pretty yellow dress. Around her throat was a neckerchief and on her head she wore a small cap. She was carrying a basket, and on seeing them she flashed a friendly smile. “How do you do, kind sirs? On behalf of my brethren, I bid you welcome to Second Eden.”