It had taken him most all of yesterday, his last in Bridger’s forge, but he and Roman had managed to swap off those much-worn two-inch-wide iron tires the Burwells had rolled away from Westport on, then hammered and shimmed wider, three-inch rims around their shrunken wooden wheels.
“Wished I’d had these back in May after we got ourselves out on the prairie,” Roman had commented as they were muscling one of the hot tires onto a wheel there in the shade of the awning. “When all them rains come, day after day—a narrow tire sinks faster.”
“Ain’t nothing gonna keep your tires from sinking under a heavy wagon,” Titus had told him, “but out here a wider tire do better crossing creek bottoms and rocky ground too.”
The water in Muddy Creek was turgid and slow, brown as its name and tepid to boot. Only good thing about the stream, he thought as he watched his two oldest urge the pack animals across and up the north bank, was that the Muddy was running so shallow that it hadn’t so much as lapped at the bottom of a wagon box or licked at the bellies of their ponies. Besides, these small western streams weren’t all that wide. It wouldn’t be until these farmers got to the Bear that they would face their first test, a crossing that would prepare them, or weed them out, for the crucial two crossings of the capricious Snake River before they ever reached the mighty Columbia.
There wasn’t much water to speak of in the bottoms around that great grove of cedars where Harris and Hargrove chose to stop the train an hour or so earlier than usual—but then, another hour wouldn’t find them camping at any better a place. Here they would have to hack away at the wind-stunted cedar for firewood, and scratch at the sandy bottoms in the nearby coulees to see if they could pool up any murky water. Bass was sure they could find enough here to satisfy their thirsty stock. But for the dust-choked humans, each wagon had carried along at least one pair of hardwood kegs filled with clear, cool water drawn from Black’s Fork. Water enough to boil their supper and brew their coffee until they camped tomorrow night on the Little Muddy as they neared the rugged north end of the Bear River Divide.
All three women pitched in to get a fire pit dug and a supper fire started, while Flea and Magpie helped Lemuel and Leah lend their father a hand in dropping the heavy cottonwood yoke from the thick necks of the docile oxen. Four teams had managed to make it this far on the westward journey. With an eager dreamer’s foresight, Roman Burwell had started out from Westport with a full six teams. Two of the oxen had fallen dead either of disease or exhaustion back along the trail not far out of Laramie, and Roman had traded a third animal to Bridger for those four new three-inch iron tires Titus had fashioned for him. That left the farmer with nine oxen to get them across the roughest stretch of the road to Oregon. For the present, two of the beasts had the first signs of cracked hooves, but the farmer was doing all he could with salves and plasters to see those wounded creatures through each day’s long, dusty journey. As it was, Burwell carefully, thoughtfully, rotated his teams, so that after one day’s bone-jarring labor each two-ox hitch would have the next three days to rest up, dawdling along under the watchful care of Lemuel and Leah, both of whom herded them along on foot, using lean, seven-foot-long teamster’s whips. And when a long, steep slope was confronted, he could always bring up two or more of the fresher oxen, temporarily chaining them in tandem to drag the heavy wagon to the top of the rise.
Bass came back to camp with a small doe slumped across the front of his saddle about the time the women had a bed of coals built up and their beds spread out for the night beneath the shade of the wagon box, along with a large square of waterproofed Russian sheeting they had strung from the side of the wagon to the nearby clumps of cedar. The venison wouldn’t make a meal fit for kings, but they weren’t about to starve either.
After shooing the too-curious dogs away with a pair of legbones Titus hacked off the carcass with his tomahawk, the two Indian women showed Amanda how to skin out the doe, then bone out the steaks they tossed in the white woman’s two large skillets. While the meat went to frying, they set about showing Amanda how to chop up some of the liver and heart into fine pieces, then sprinkle the cubes with a dusting of flour before they stuffed it inside short sections of slippery intestine. Raking aside some of the gray ash and half-dead embers at the outer extreme of the fire, Waits and Shell Woman laid more than two dozen of their greasy treasures in the hot ashes, then promptly covered them with coals to slowly sizzle while they tended the steaks.
“This ain’t the first you’ve et venison, is it, Lucas?” he asked his grandson.
The boy glanced over at his father. “My pa takes me hunting sometimes.”
“You a good hunter?” Titus asked. “Like your pa?”
“We get some birds and rabbits, a few squirrels sometimes.”
Roman cleared his throat self-consciously. “Don’t always bring down big game. S’pose I ain’t near as good with a gun as you’ve got to be all the years you been out here.”
“Gran’papa gonna teach you how, Pa,” Lucas declared.
A bit self-consciously, Roman reached down and pulled the boy against his leg, tousling his hair. “Yep, I s’pose your gran’pa can teach me ’bout hunting, son.”
He instantly felt a stab of sadness for the man, having his own son point out his flaws and shortcomings to his face. But Lucas didn’t know any better. He was just a sprout, a pup who didn’t know any different, a child who would one day come to realize no man could be all things to his son.
Dropping to his knee, Titus said, “I can teach your pa to hunt in this country, I’m sure, ’cause he pretty damn good at ever’thing else, Lucas. Back where you come from, I know your pa was far better at ever’thing he done than I ever could be. An’, when you get to your new home in Oregon country, your pa’ll be the best at what he’ll do out there too.”
As he stood again, he glanced into Roman’s face, finding deep appreciation written in Burwell’s eyes.
The women had dragged the skillets off the flames to cool and Amanda had just put some water on to heat for cleaning when a trumpet sounded faintly at the far end of the long camp scattered and strung out through the cedar grove.
“What’s that horn for?” Shadrach asked.
“They’re calling the council meeting,” Amanda said as she stood, kneading her hands into her apron, her eyes anxious as she stared into her husband’s face.
Roman said, “That’s the way they let everyone know Hargrove is getting ready to start.”
“Fixin’ to start in on Shad an’ me,” Titus replied.
“Maybeso we should leg on over there,” Sweete suggested. “Since these doin’s got to do with you an’ me.”
“Got everything to do with me too,” Burwell said as he stepped around the edge of the fire pit. “Your families are with mine—so I think I got some say in this vote.”
“Vote?” Titus repeated.
Amanda stepped up to loop her arm inside her husband’s elbow. “Hargrove loves to take a vote on everything.”
“Least he did when we was forming up our company back at Westport,” Roman grumped. “But after he got hisself made captain of this train—”
“And after he got us to vote for all these rules he wanted for the journey,” Amanda Continued, “Hargrove hasn’t had many meetings. And he hasn’t called for any votes since we voted to give the lash to one of the men.”
“The lash?” Shadrach asked.