“What’s that?” Errol said, noticing my affliction. He took me by the arm away from the others. “What have you seen?”
“We cannot go with them.” I recounted the augury. “We’ll die,” I finished.
Errol tore off a sliver of fingernail with his teeth and spit it to the ground. “We’ll die if we stay,” he said finally.
“Likely,” I admitted.
“But you say we should stay.”
“Yes.” I had seen his dead body in those mountains as clearly as I saw his live one before me now.
“Damn you, Joshua. How do you expect we’ll get rich without ever setting foot at those diggings?”
I looked at the range, which rose out of the ground as though she knew her peaks were the only thing standing between us and those goldfields. That was the main impression I had during our travels, that the ranges of the West had a way of making you feel watched. “I only know what I’ve seen,” I said, fearing he would strike me.
Errol regarded Doble and the others, who were near ready to depart. He sighed. “Then we stay,” he said. “For now.” He ordered me to return our things to the wagon. Then he approached Doble and informed him of our intent to remain in the sink. “Storm coming,” he said.
Doble looked to the sky, cloudless. “Boy, leave the weather to me.”
“This is not the time to cross,” said Errol.
Doble scoffed. “It’s barely October.”
Errol returned to our wagon.
I whispered that we ought not let them go.
“You’re welcome to elaborate,” he said, “and risk them shooting you to alleviate you of your madness. Kindly leave me out of it if you do.”
We stayed. They went. I did not warn them. I was young and a coward, if you want to know the word. At the time I thought no fate worse than being considered a lunatic.
Errol and I watched from the valley as a tremendous storm took the range. It lasted three days, and the snow remained for ten more. Each night we built a fire and sat shuddering before it, the wagons round ours empty as fresh-built pine boxes. We did not speak of the storm nor the men up in it excepting the first day, when Errol said he would not care for a stroll in those hills right now, and I said I would not, either. That was, I think, his way of thanking me.
The report reached the diggings before we did. It went round and round and still goes round today: an expedition perished under a bad storm. The Missouri Overland Mutual Protection Association. Trapped in the mountains with nothing to eat but their own dead.
III. THE RESCUING SHE-ASS
We survived in the sink on quail which Errol shot and what scant rations the others could not carry. But both supplies and game swiftly dwindled. One night when I lay awake considering starvation and Indian ambush and cougar attack and worse, I saw shadows moving along our canvas. I remained in my ruck, petrified, not even reaching for the knife near my feet nor the musket near my sleeping brother’s. The shadows grew monstrous in size until finally a dark shape loomed at the rear of the wagon. When the form emerged through the slit in the canvas, I nearly laughed aloud at my own cowardice.
It was the head of a burro. She stared at me, ears twitching, an almost intelligent expression on her long face. I donned my spectacles and climbed quietly from the wagon. I ran my hand along her coarse mane and dust rose from it. I did not recognize the animal. She likely belonged to another caravan and had been abandoned, like us.
In the dimness I saw that her back bore the black cross of Bethlehem. I traced my fingers along this coloring and felt beneath it each individual knob of her spine. I wished I had an apple to give her, or a pear. I was overcome then by the melancholy that had been accumulating in me since I left Ohio. I wrapped my arms around the beast’s soft brown neck and wept. The jenny blinked her long-lashed glassy eye and began to walk. I, trail-weary and homesick and perhaps resigned to death, let her pull me along, stumbling and wetting her mange with my tears.
We walked together through sand and scrub and rock for I knew not how long. We crested a hill and then another. And then the old girl stopped. Before us, quaking in the moonlight, was the giant spherical head of a cottonwood. It was the first tree I had seen in seven hundred miles.
I ran down the hill to the tree, stumbling, and fell finally at its raised roots. Beside the cottonwood was a stream, icy and clear. I drank from it, drank and drank and drank. The water soon returned some of my faculties and I turned to account for the burro. She stood, miraculously, on the hill where I left her.
I retrieved her and we both drank. As the sun rose I rode the old girl back to the wagon, calling, Hullo, hullo, to Errol. The look on his face suggested he thought us a mirage, and indeed when I drew near he reached up and touched my jaw, lightly. The jenny and I led him to the cottonwood, a warm wind at our three faces. Errol took a bit of the stream in his hand. “It’s meltwater,” he said.
Errol wanted to set out that day but it was the Sabbath, and he surprised me by agreeing to observe it, which we had not done but once the entire journey. So Errol sat drinking beside the crick and I spoke a service, the first of my life. I knew then that the Word was my calling, but knew as well that it was too late to follow.
At dawn we loaded the jenny with our supplies and those which the others had not been able to carry. That same curiously warm chinook was with us as we followed the stream into the hills, where it branched from a mountain river throbbing with snowmelt. The river led us through the Sierra Nevada, and we spent some threatening cold days in those mountains, our burro growing so weak that we were forced to discard nearly all her load, save for the meagerest provisions and two books—the Bible and The Odyssey—which I insisted on keeping with me always.
Finally, she bore us to the diggings. I recall the moment we crested the last ridge on our journey. It was dusk, and lightning bugs blinked among the shrubs. I cleaned my spectacles and saw then that they were no insects but the fires of the goldfields, strung along the foothills below us. We howled in joy and exhaustion. I knelt, and asked Errol to do the same. I spoke a prayer of thanks to God and to the rescuing she-ass He’d sent us. Errol, blasphemer that he was, spoke a prayer of thanks to me.
IV. DECEPTION AT ANGEL’S CAMP
So it was that we arrived at the diggings penniless and without any equipment. Our first stop was the general store in Angel’s Camp, which was at that time a log house rudely thrown together with mud. There, we had no choice but to sell our burro to the store’s proprietor, a Swede who denied us a fair price, saying she was an Arkansas mule and not of the sturdier Mexican stock.
God had tested my brother with a wicked temper and a walloping hook. It was a test he often failed back home, bloodying Ohio noses and blacking Ohio eyes for no good reason I could see. I was worried he might put his pique to use here, where we had no one. I discreetly reminded by brother that we were not in the East anymore and that this man was likely the only merchant in the entire county. Inwardly, though, I envied the way my brother could make a man cower.
So, in the first of many injustices in the territory, we sold the jenny to outfit ourselves with a fraction of the very supplies we had dumped in the Sierra: an iron pan for the outrageous sum of sixteen dollars and a shovel at the ungodly price of twenty-nine. We also purchased two red shirts, two pairs of smart-looking tan pantaloons, a tent, a sack of flour, and a shank of dried pork.