Led to the Slaughter Read online

  “Hear, hear,” someone said. Father frowned, for there had been a mocking tone to the words.

  “It is a worthy goal, Mister Reed,” Walter Herron said. Mr. Herron was constantly at Father’s side these days. They seemed to see eye to eye on the importance of this great national migration.

  By now, almost everyone who intended to join us on our journey had gathered. We were ready, and seemed only to be waiting for someone to give us the word.

  Father shook off his gloom and smiled. “Shall we get started?” he asked.

  The crowd cheered. “On to Oregon!” someone shouted.

  Then it was all business. Our party was not a large one, only about twenty wagons at the beginning. We would join larger groups along the way. Toward the end of the journey, when we took our ill-fated turn, there would be more than seventy wagons.

  The wagons were lined up in the agreed-upon order: the largest wagons first, to break trail, followed by the smaller ones. This had the unfortunate result of the bigger wagons kicking up dust into the faces of the smaller, poorer families. Father’s huge palace was the worst offender of all.

  Later, our giant wagon would cause much resentment. The party would break up and reassemble into smaller parties, again and again, until everyone had settled into the group with which they were most compatible.

  At the beginning, none of this mattered. All that counted was that we were finally on the move.

  CHAPTER 5

  From the personal notes of Jacob Donner, Secretary of the Wolfenrout, Independence, Missouri, May 20, 1846

  “Are you sure you want to do this, George?” I asked, not for the first time. It was the first night of the journey, and we were already committed. Still, I couldn’t help but question the wisdom of our actions, even now that it was probably too late to turn back.

  “We don’t have much leeway in the matter, Jacob,” my brother said. “We have been arguing about this for weeks, to no avail. I am certain that if we can get enough of Our Kind in one place and get them to sit down together, we can reason with them, make them see the sense of the old laws… and make the strictures even stronger.”

  George said “we” as if certain I agreed with him, and as if it was also my decision. I am not yet ready to tell him how I really feel.

  I sometimes wondered if George was making too much of it. Humans thought of Our Kind as myths. Those that believed in us thought we only Turned during the full moon. They had no real concept of our true natures. We weren’t supernatural beings––but simply a cross between man and wolf.

  My brother needed seven votes by members of the Wolfenrout––and a quorum of all thirteen members––to approve the Foregathering of the Clans. He quietly arranged for the five members who already agreed with him to meet in what he thought was an out-of-the-way place: the far West. He thought that no one who disagreed with him would show up. Counting my vote, he had the seven he needed.

  Unexpectedly, Keseberg and the German contingent of the Wolfenrout arrived at the last minute. They are the most militant of Our Kind. They have been hunted to near extinction in their home country, but instead of making them cautious, this has emboldened them. Their arrival was not a good sign. It meant that someone had told them about the meeting, which meant the betrayer had to be one of the six members whom George had expected to vote on his side. Since the Germans also had seven votes, that meant the matter could have gone either way.

  But to our surprise, the Germans also voted in favor of a Foregathering of the Clans for the purpose of reforms, though I don’t believe they have the same reforms in mind. Even more surprising, they also agreed that the gathering should be held in California, which means that they are confident they have the votes to carry the day. To George’s dismay, they have decided to join us on our long journey west, as part of the very same wagon train.

  “Perhaps we should delay the Foregathering,” I said.

  “What choice do we have?” my brother asked. “The Wolfenrout has already voted. Besides, we must do something soon. The humans become ever more numerous. Their expansion increases rapidly. They are invading territories that have always been ours. Confrontations between humans and Our Kind are inevitable.”

  “Oh, I agree,” I said. “But I am not at all sure you will get your way in this, nor that you can impose order through a set of rules––even if you succeed in getting approval. Our Kind do not follow rules well. A Foregathering can suggest guidelines, but cannot enforce them.”

  “That is what I mean to change,” George said adamantly. “We must make the rules mandatory.”

  “George,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. Yelling at my brother only makes him more stubborn. “You know if it was up to me, I’d go along.” Inside, I winced at the lie, but there was no point in getting George riled up. He has never liked it when I disagree with him. “As you always say, if it was important to avoid confrontation in the past, it’s even more important today.”

  “Exactly,” George said.

  “But you must understand,” I said, trying not to couch it as an argument, “the humans keep increasing while Our Kind decreases. The rules you are advocating about not creating more of us may have protected us from detection, but they have made us fatally weak in numbers.”

  As I spoke, I looked down at my journal, where I have written down the guidelines the last Foregathering of the Clans established. I have listed them here because I wonder if the day will come when there will be no one left to remember them. They have served us well up until now, but I fear they have become outdated, obsolete. My brother wants to make them mandatory, but I wonder in my Wolfen heart if they shouldn’t be scrapped altogether––not that I would ever say that in front of George.

  The Rules of the Foregathering of the Clans

  1. Do not eat humans except in emergencies; hunt animals instead.

  2. Do not create more of our kind, except through natural reproduction or with the approval of the Wolfenrout.

  3. In our ceremonies, only sacrifice humans who won’t be missed.

  4. Leave no witnesses to our acts.

  Keseberg and his cronies only agree with rule number four, naturally. As for the rest, Keseberg wants us to do the opposite: to expand, to confront, to reproduce in greater numbers, and to act on our ancient instincts.

  George believes such a response will almost certainly mean the inevitable demise of our species. He wants to make all the rules compulsory and have them enforced on pain of death.

  Word has gone out to all the clans of the world that a Foregathering is to be held in late winter, in the territory of California. Some of Our Kind will likely travel there by ship, others overland like ourselves. George had hoped to encourage his supporters to attend while discouraging his opponents from going, but now the German contingent has arrived and disrupted those plans.

  “I’m worried about the Germans,” I said. “Keseberg has a strong following among the younger Wolfen. You should know: even my own children are in sympathy with his more aggressive ways. Even your children are, dear brother.”

  “What choice do we have?” George repeated, as if he wasn’t really listening to me. “Those times when we have been revealed, we have been slaughtered. We are faster and stronger, one on one––that much is true––but the humans are more organized and have much greater numbers. They have won every time we have come into open conflict. Their weapons have neutralized our brute force.”

  Again, I dared not disagree with my brother, though I worry that he does not see that he is in danger of being outvoted. “Keseberg sees no reason why we cannot use human weapons as well as brute force,” I said.

  My brother has forgotten who and what we are. He is too old to remember the fire that runs through the veins of our young ones. He dismisses the dangerous possibility that their instincts will override their reason. I disagree with George on what path Our Kind should take, but instead of telling him so, I have been trying to get him to see that his attitudes are considered ol
d-fashioned.

  “We simply do not have the numbers to defeat the humans,” George said with a finality that brooked no further argument. “We’ll never catch up, no matter how much we breed. Nor do we have the financial resources. If we are revealed, we cannot win.”

  With a sense of foreboding, I let my objections rest.

  CHAPTER 6

  Virginia Reed, The Oregon Trail, June 1846

  We made good time at first. The trail was well worn––indeed, almost too rutted for some of the wagons––but additional, parallel trails had been created that were less pitted and grooved, with the happy result of moving the lagging wagons to the side and out of the dust.

  Those first few weeks stand out strongly in my memory, though little of consequence happened. I shall never forget the smell of canvas broiling in the summer heat. Even now, a whiff of this pungent smell can send me into a state of overpowering but unwanted reminiscence. Some of these memories are pleasant, but most are not.

  We soon broke away from the Missouri River and began to follow the Platte River instead. It was a shallow, dirty river with shifting sands and treacherously soft banks. No one had much luck catching fish in its muddy waters. Somehow, it had turned out that there was not a fisherman among us.

  So many wagon trains had already passed this way this year that the water was too polluted to be drunk, except by the livestock. We were forced to seek out tributaries along the way to find clean water for drinking and bathing. Yes, the Platte was an ugly river; but it was easy to follow, and it went in the direction we desired.

  Our family had eight oxen pulling our large wagon, so it didn’t matter if we rode in it or walked, as they were unlikely to grow too tired. I walked for most of the first few days, simply because I wanted to see, hear, and smell everything there was to see, hear, and smell. But my feet started getting sore on the fourth day, and the oxen I was walking next to or behind began to stink, and after the second week, I started spending more time drowsing inside the wagon, under the canopy.

  All of us––men, women, and children––settled into daily routines. Some things were done without comment, as when women would wander off to the side of the trail and disappear into the bushes or tall grass for a short time. When there was no cover at all, several of the women would go off together and make a kind of privacy screen with their outstretched skirts, taking turns. Men were slightly bolder, sometimes simply turning their backs and watering the trees, but again, no one said anything. Modesty was a luxury we no longer had.

  I soon found that I had little in common with the other girls my age. Father had always called me a tomboy, but until this journey, I hadn’t really understood what he meant. I chatted occasionally with one of the Donner family’s servant girls, Eliza Williams, but even she seemed more interested in domestic activities than in the adventures of the trail.

  So I spent most of my time alone. I noticed one boy my age, early on, and tried to approach him, but he practically ran from me. He was a little waif of a fellow, with untrimmed hair and huge brown eyes that never looked you in the face. I found out later that he was an orphan named Luke Halloran. No one seemed to know where he had come from. He had attached himself to our wagon train, and would drift from camp to camp, begging for food. Most of us gave him what we could, out of pity.

  Most days, I would sit in the back of the wagon, writing in my diary, and sometimes the wind would whip up and rock the wagon back and forth, as you can see from the scribbles that pass for entries. When it rained, we would tie the canvas tight around the wire canopy rungs, but no matter what we did, moisture got in anyway. When we traveled too long bundled up in such a fashion, it became so stifling inside the wagon that even the rain was preferable.

  What I remember most about those first ten days was Grandy’s passing.

  For days, I’d been expecting it, watching the spirit drain from her eyes. I thought––feared––I would soon see them dim, unsure how I would endure it.

  It seems strange now that Grandy’s death could have affected me so. I was to see many more deaths, more than anyone should have to bear, but this was the first. The only blessing was that the whole family was with her at the end, as she coughed up blood for the last time, relaxed her bent body, and became still.

  “She is at peace,” Father said with a sigh. I understood his sad relief. I remember those last few years with Grandy; her eyes had always shown alarm and fear, as if she couldn’t believe she was dying. She’d frowned at us when we had loaded her into the wagon, but had said very little since. Now she was forever quiet, her eyes closed, and indeed she seemed finally to be in harmony with her fate.

  As it happened, the wagon train had passed a small graveyard of the earliest pioneers the day before. Father pleaded for the others of the party to wait while we went back to bury Grandy.

  “We don’t have time,” Patrick Breen argued. “We are going to be late getting to Fort Laramie as it is. We don’t want to be caught in the mountains when winter comes.”

  “Oh, let them have their ceremony,” George Donner said. “It may be the last time any of us has the luxury of a formal funeral.”

  For once, Keseberg did not offer an objection. He just shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind a day of relief from this cursed dust.”

  We took one wagon to carry Grandy back in. The rest of us rode horses. Out of respect, many of our fellow travelers joined us, though most of them barely knew us. Grandy was the first to die on the trail, and it was as if everyone knew that it was important to mark the occasion––as if it was understood that, as Mr. Donner had said, we would not always have a chance to pay proper respects to our loved ones.

  We buried Grandy beside the trail. The men dug a grave, but when my mother asked if it was six feet deep, to keep away the wild animals and Indians, they were silent. In her grief, she jumped into the grave and started digging with her bare hands. The men begged her to desist, and dug the grave deeper.

  Mother was never the same after that day. She was a good wife and companion to Father and always did as he asked, and she did her duty to us children as well. But the light had gone out of her eyes, for one of the reasons she had agreed to this difficult journey was now buried along the trail. She had hoped that the mild climate of California would improve Grandy’s health.

  The following night, William Eddy, a handsome man with a pretty wife and two small children, presented my parents with a loose board he’d pulled off his wagon and spent several hours carving on. It read:

  A precious one from us is gone

  A voice we loved is stilled

  A place is vacant in our hearts

  Which never can be filled.

  We were all quieter after that, and there were fewer occasions of Father proclaiming our Western destiny.

  #

  The beast slipped away from the others in the darkest hour of the night. He easily found the graveyard and its newest grave, and quickly dug up the old woman’s body. Dead meat was distasteful, but it was too early to start feeding on the living.

  He didn’t want to scare them away too soon, or put them on their guard. Better to guide them gently to their doom; to lead them to the slaughter in such a way that they never knew what was happening until it was too late.

  #

  Grandy’s was far from the last gravesite we saw along the trail. Every day, it seemed, we would pass another gravestone, cairn of rocks, or crude wooden cross. Sometimes they lined the trail like silent sentinels, miles and miles of them.

  At first, the entire wagon train obediently stopped to observe the Sabbath, but as we fell further and further behind schedule, we continued traveling throughout the week, stopping only before our midday meal on Sunday to pray. We believed that God would forgive us, for he saw the difficult road we followed.

  At the beginning of the journey, the landmarks were well established, and the watering holes came in a timely and orderly sequence. It appeared that most of the Indians had been driven away. The livestock of
earlier wagon trains had closely cropped the grasslands, but in those days, there were not yet so many that the earth was completely denuded. We were on an established trail, and because many thousands had traveled it before us, we believed it was safe and that its dangers had been tamed.

  In retrospect, this was the easiest part of our migration, though we didn’t know it then.

  At the time, the journey seemed endless. Already the drudgery of the day-to-day routine was setting in. The great American desert stretched out before us, and the summer heat was oppressive and draining. Our water never seemed to last as long as we thought it would. Dirt and grime got into everything.

  I feared for my mother, but she stood up to the hardships surprisingly well. Grandy’s death was difficult for her, especially so soon after the loss of dear little Frank, who died the year before we left Springfield. But Grandy had been fading for a long time, and though no one said it aloud, we all felt a sense of completion. After all, she’d been an older woman––almost sixty-seven years. Mother was not happy, by any means, but she seemed reasonably content.

  So our family carried on, though somehow all seemed different. Before, we had been both pulled by the West and pushed to the West: pulled by the desire to save Grandy and pushed by the death of baby Frank. Now half of our motivation was gone.

  As we pushed onward, I could not help but reflect on how different things were from the grand adventure we had imagined when we’d first set out for the West.