Some travelers nudged each other, snickering at Håkan’s outfit. But for the most part, they looked at him with mute curiosity. Nobody greeted him. He spotted a young couple—not much older than he, he guessed—and, trying to overcome his shyness, changed direction and started to walk alongside them on the other side of the slimy stream. They looked at him furtively and exchanged discreet, worried whispers. Finally, Håkan found the courage to address them. He introduced himself. They politely pretended to understand his name, and he theirs. A long silence ensued. The man cheered his team on. Håkan asked if they had a horse for sale. They could not spare any of their horses, but they referred him to a man a few wagons up who had more livestock than anyone else in that company. He thanked the couple and caught up with the man in question. After a short and failed exchange, Håkan stated his request. The man quoted a massive amount that made Håkan’s entire capital—which he hitherto had thought to be quite respectable—seem insignificant.
For the rest of the afternoon, Håkan kept walking up and down the train, asking if anyone had a horse for sale. The sellers always asked for prices that could never be met and bore no relation to each other—one asked almost one hundred times the already exorbitant sum demanded by another. Ever since he had landed in San Francisco, all the commercial transactions Håkan had witnessed had been conducted in the most extravagant terms, always dictated by circumstances. The pound of bacon for which prospectors in the desert paid in gold, today lay rotting by the emigrant trail. A simple piece of wood that never would have caught a trapper’s attention, now, in the tree-deprived plains, was exchanged for a calf to replace a broken axle shaft. But horses were the one commodity exempted from these drastic ebbs and flows. They remained consistently unattainable. And not only that: they were, on the whole, excluded from commerce. Men were reluctant to part with their horses, regardless of the sum offered, and whenever forced to sell them, they always felt that they had been swindled, even if the amount received had been outrageously high—probably because they knew that they would be unable to replace the sold property. Knowing all this made the loss of Pingo, painful as it had already been, almost intolerable. Every day, Håkan was visited by the elation he had experienced riding his own horse, a feeling that had been intense enough (his physical frame had barely been able to contain it) to ripple through time and lap against the present.
Although far from ideal, he believed that getting to New York on foot was not such a wild thought. It rained often enough and walking against the trail solved the problem of finding supplies for the journey. He was resigning himself to this plan when an armed rider approached him. He stopped at a prudent distance.
“Evening,” said the man, whose beard had not quite caught up with the mustache that must have preexisted it. In this exuberant thicket glowed a calm yet intense smile, and below a pair of dense eyebrows—the mustache’s runaway offspring—shone a set of twinkling green-blue eyes, which, although sharply focused on Håkan, stirred from side to side with mousy eagerness. There was something sunny and even melodious about his countenance. He looked like the happiest man Håkan had seen since arriving in America—maybe even the happiest man he had seen in his life. Håkan greeted him back, and the man responded with a seemingly welcoming speech, of which Håkan understood almost nothing. Still, he noticed that the tone, cadence, and rhythm of the man’s voice did not match his face—the natural arrangement of his features resulted in something that looked like cheerfulness but did not reflect an inner state. After a failed exchange, the man gathered that the newcomer’s English was limited and spoke to him slowly and, as people often do with foreigners, loudly. Håkan responded to his questions as best he could while the man nodded along, as if with the deep dips of his chin he could dig out from the air the words that the Swede missed. Introductions were made (Hawk? Hawk can? Hawk can what?), and Jarvis invited Håkan to dinner with his family.
As they moved on, it became clear that strife and resentment were widespread among that particular convoy and that there were at least two factions—those who warmly greeted Jarvis as he passed by, and those who, with a hostile frown, turned their backs on him.
“I hear you’re looking for a horse,” the man said.
“Yes.”
“Want one of mine?”
“How much?”
“You must be hungry.”
Careworn and always shrouded in a mackinaw blanket, Abigail, Jarvis’s wife, was drained of all the joy and gaiety that her husband’s face, probably despite itself, so radiantly displayed. She was a rawboned matron, slightly disfigured by exhaustion and bitterness. Her children annoyed her. The elements annoyed her. Her husband annoyed her. The animals annoyed her. Håkan annoyed her.
The sun would soon set. As if by common accord, hoots and whoops burst throughout the caravan, and the train came to a stop. With difficulty, but also with great coordination, the drivers got out of the rutted track and fanned away from the trail. The plains echoed with whistles and the few utterances the oxen seemed to understand—So, then! Yah! So, then! Wo! Gradually and (despite the arduous, plodding maneuvers) with remarkable grace, the wagons were wheeled into wide circles, the hind axletrees chained to the tongues. The oxen were unhitched and left free to roam together with most of the cattle within these large improvised corrals while the rest of the stock and horses were hobbled and left to pasture at their leisure. India rubber cloths were laid out on the ground, and cooking utensils were brought out. As the men pitched precarious tents outside the circle, the women produced hard brown discs from sacks and crates, piled them up together with some kindling, and set them alight. Håkan looked at Abigail’s heap and asked what those odd cakes were. She ignored him. He picked one up from her bag and smelled it. Dung. Jarvis saw him inspecting the disc and explained that, as Håkan had surely noticed, there was no timber to be found on the plains, and that they had to rely on dried buffalo manure for fuel. The chips had a steady and smokeless burn that glowed brighter whenever the fat of the buffalo meat roasting upon tapering spits dripped down on them. That meat, together with bacon and corn flour fried in buffalo lard, was, as Håkan would learn, their daily bill of fare. Combined day after day in tinware that was never fully cleaned, these viands had solidified in a crust at the bottom of every pot, pan, and bowl, infusing whatever was put in them (including the occasional pickle and the dried apples steeped in warm brandy they had on special occasions) with the same flavor.
Over dinner, Jarvis asked Håkan everything about him and his travels. They did not understand each other easily, but Jarvis, making good use of his appearance, persevered with jovial tenacity. He was particularly curious about the Clangston lady and her gang (How many men? What kind of weapons? Where exactly was the town?). The precise destination of Lorimer’s tracker and his men was another matter he came back to over and over again. In turn, his answers to Håkan’s questions were vague, and he dismissed anything related to himself with a slack wave of his hand. Behind them, beyond the light cast by the fires, a child was being belted. As Håkan was trying, for the third or fourth time, to provide Clangston’s location—an effort doomed by his limited vocabulary and inveterate disorientation—he was interrupted by a robust farmer who took off his hat and nervously wrung it in his hands as he approached them.
“Mr. Pickett, sir,” mumbled the large man, barely overcoming his shyness.