I watched them go, and then Avery patted my head again. “It’s nice to see you again, Eve. Jake will be good as new when they’re done with him. Then we’re almost home.”
I nearly cried from relief. Then I plumb fainted.
I came to when a vile stench filled my head. My eyes burst open to see a cup of ammonia-scented liquid being swayed underneath my nose. I looked up to see Avery holding it.
“I reckon it’s like smelling salts,” he explained with a shrug. “They haven’t worked on Jake though.”
I sat up, my head woozy, and looked around. We were gathered in a long but low-ceilinged cabin that looked as if pioneers had built it. Now it was taken over by the Paiute Diggers. I was lying on a bed of animal hides by a fire that burned in the middle of the room. On the other side of the fire was an old man with deep, wrinkled grooves in his old face and long white hair. The jewelry around his neck and the wise look in his eyes as I stared at him across the fire told me he was a respected elder, perhaps even a chief. To the side of him were the two familiar Diggers and the straight-faced one that had the arrows. Nearest to me was Jake, who was also lying on animal hides.
He was bare-chested and his arm was covered in something black and shiny, as was the wound on his shoulder. He looked as if he was out cold, his breath slow and laborious.
“Is he going to be okay?” I croaked. The sight made my heart bleed.
Avery nodded and put a bowl of dried meat in front of me. I couldn’t stand the thought of eating it, but he only put the bowl closer to my mouth. “It’s dried venison, Eve. Nothing else. You must eat.”
Gingerly, I took a piece and sighed in relief when I realized it was venison. Still, it took a lot of effort to keep it down. I kept thinking about the monsters.
When Avery was satisfied with the two pieces, he handed me some roasted pine nuts which I managed to eat with more enthusiasm.
“Slow, slow,” the old man across the fire said in a rich voice. I looked to him in surprise. He smiled kindly. “You have been starving. You must eat slow or you will get sick.”
“You speak English?”
He gave a simple nod.
I eyed Jake. “Is he really going to be okay?”
He nodded again. “Yes. Bad burn but he will heal. So will his bullet wound.”
I felt myself tearing up. “Thank you, thank you so much.”
A small smile teased his lips. “My name is Brave Dicutta. Your friend here has told me what happened to you in the mountains.”
I placed a small amount of the pine nuts in my mouth and closed my eyes, savoring the taste. I just wanted to think about food and the relative safety around me. I wanted to think about Jake and how he was going to be all right. I didn’t want to relive what happened to us.
So I asked about Avery instead.
“Well,” Avery said, drawing his knees up to his chest, “I couldn’t tell you what exactly happened other than I was ambushed from above. One minute I was riding hard and the next one I was nearly knocked off my horse. I fought back but the creature was strong. Took a few bites of my side and back.” He lifted his arm to point out the area. I could now see there was bandaging underneath his shirt. He shivered from the memory. “I did what I could to fight back and I guess it was enough. It fell to the side and I somehow stayed on. My horse kept going like mad, but eventually I fell off too. I don’t really remember. I was just certain I was going to die. Then I woke up to see our old Indian friends here. They took me back, healed me up.”
I looked to Dicutta. “What were they doing so far up in the mountains?”
“They were worried about you,” he said. “They told me they saw you and your men heading up. We knew what was up there. They tried to warn you. I do not blame you for not believing them. It is almost impossible to believe. But, as you know now, it is very true.”
“How long has this been happening?” I asked.
He motioned for the arrow man to come over. The arrow man did so in silence, bringing with him a long pipe. He gave it to Dicutta who nodded in thanks. Arrow man went back to the Diggers’ side.
As Dicutta dipped the pipe into the flames to light it he said, “Do not mind him. He doesn’t say much but he meant no harm to you or your friend. As you know, we have to be careful out here. When they found Avery, they weren’t sure if he was still man.”
I shot Avery a look. His face was grim in the dancing light.
“To answer your question, Eve,” Dicutta went on, putting a gentle emphasis on my name, “we do not know for sure how long this has been happening. In these parts there has always been the story of the Chinoka, a man who became stranded in a snowstorm with his family. When his youngest son died from the cold and Chinoka was starving, he ate him. After that, Chinoka became so much stronger that he became insatiable for the taste. He killed his wife and other child, ate them, then ran off into the woods where he stayed. He survived the storm but knew he was no longer welcome with his tribe, so he lived in these mountains, preying on those unlucky enough to get in his way.”
“We were told a similar story, about a monster called the Wendigo.”
He puffed on his pipe in thought. “I have not heard of Wendigo, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this exists elsewhere in the world. To consume another human being is one of the greatest taboos—now we see there is a reason for this.”
“So the Chinoka is what killed the Donner Party?”
“I don’t believe so. Chinoka, so far, is just a story, but the Donner Party was real. Faced with the hardships they had gone through, I am not surprised that some of them may have resorted to cannibalism to survive. I suppose many that were accounted for as dead were never really dead at all—but missing.”
“Now they can be accounted for as dead,” I said gravely.
Dicutta raised his brows. Taking in a deep breath, I recounted what had happened to us after Avery and I had been separated. Aside from the occasional grimace or swear from Avery, both of them were silent as I went through every grim and startling detail. It goes without saying that I left out the more private moments between Jake and I. I could already tell Avery was having a hard time with the fact that I cared so much about saving Jake’s life. It wasn’t as if Jake had been all that honorable when Avery and I had taken off in the night.
“You have certainly been through a lot,” Dicutta said. He looked at me with scrutiny. “Tell me, you have Paiute blood in you?”
I nodded. “Yes. My father was Paiute.”
“He is no longer around?”
I looked down at my hands. “No. I believe him to be dead.”
“What was his name?”
“My mother, she would call him Yanny. His real name was Yahuski.”
Dicutta’s eyes went wide. The Diggers began to murmur something.
Avery squeezed my arm with comfort as I looked to Dicutta. “Do you know him?” I asked excitedly.
“Yes,” he said, but his smile was sad. “Even though he was from a neighboring tribe, I knew him.”
My lungs felt as if they were seizing. This was the moment I had been waiting for, the chance to find out the truth. Only now, after all I’d seen, I was afraid of the truth. I was afraid that he’d tell me that my father had disappeared in the mountains and become one of them. Every time I saw the monsters, I kept thinking that one of them would be my father, that I’d recognize his humanity among the animals.
“Can you tell me what happened to him?”
He blew out a ring of smoke so that it floated up to the ceiling. He watched it in silence. The cabin was deafening, suffocating, because of it. I needed to know.
“Your father,” he said slowly, “was a great man. Very generous, very friendly. If you ever had a problem, you could go to Yahuski. He would help you. Perhaps because he was nice and giving and everyone liked him, there were a few that did not. When he met your mother, a few members of the tribe were angry. They told him he could never come back. He chose your mother—he chose love—instead of those who would rather see him banished, despite all the good he had done. And so, he left. He went to go live with your mother. He then had you. From the reports of a few of his tribe who would go into town to barter, he had a good life.”