The Blessing Stone (67 page)

Here, in the person of Helmut Schumann, lay fresh meat.

“My God, no!” cried Matthew when the full meaning of their silence struck him. “We are not animals.”

“But we are,” Mr. Hopkins said softly, sadly. “Humans, perhaps, and God’s children. But animals all the same, and we need to eat.” His wife, Albertina, was sobbing with her face in her hands. One would not recognize the skeletal creature in the loose-fitting dress as the same domineering woman who had departed Independence eight months prior. But her two children were dead, her spirit broken.

“And what will
I
eat?” cried Manfred Schumann. “I cannot eat my own brother!”

Another silence filled with meaning answered him: Helmut was only the first, more were sure to follow.

Matthew ran outside, stumbling in the snow, tears freezing on his cheeks. He fell to his knees and wept with great heaving sobs. When Emmeline joined him, he drew her into his arms. Despite the layers of clothing, her coat made from a blanket, he felt the skin and bones beneath. She was no longer a robust young woman. But there was still life in her eyes as they searched his face with anguish and compassion, and life in her lips as they sought his and kissed his mouth.

“We cannot do it,” he sobbed into her neck. “We cannot reduce ourselves to that!”

“Have we a choice? Should we let ourselves die? Matthew, we are trapped here. And we shall be here until the spring. There is no food. There is no—” Then she too broke down weeping, and they held each other in the snow, rocking back and forth, their wails of despair rising up to the frigid, indifferent sky.

Finally, taking control of herself, Emmeline drew Matthew to his feet and said, “They need a leader. They need someone to hold them together in body and spirit. They respect you.”

“I am not a leader. You’re the brave one, Emmeline. You have been from the start, back in Independence when you were determined to make this journey on your own.”

She looked at him with hunted eyes. “I am not brave, Matthew. Not any longer. I am frightened out of my wits. All that courage—it was all talk because it was so easy. But now that I am faced with the necessity for real bravery, I find that I have none.” She said, “You are lucky, you have the Blessing Stone to guide you. I have only myself and I am a very weak guide indeed.”

He took the crystal out of his pocket and tried to see the Guiding Spirit his mother had always seen in it. Suddenly, all hope and pretense of belief in the stone gave way to hunger and despair. “It’s a fake! A humbug!” he cried, and he flung the stone with a mighty throw.

“No!” said Emmeline, for though she herself did not believe in the crystal’s magic, she knew that Mathew still did. She stumbled through the snow after it, frantically searching for the crystal.

“Wait,” Matthew said, going after her.

When they found it, and Emmeline was bending to pick it up, Matthew saw something in the snow. He frowned. He squinted and bent low. He rubbed his eyes and blinked. There was no mistake: they were bear tracks.

“What is it?” Emmeline said when she saw the look on his face.

Matthew drew up straight and looked around. The landscape was blinding white and nearly featureless. He watched for movement.

Then he wrinkled his nose. “Do you smell that?”

She sniffed the air. “What an awful stink!”

“I think I know what it is.” He took off through the deep snow and Emmeline followed.

They came to a small pile of bear scat. It was still steaming, which meant it was fresh—the bear was nearby.

“We have to tell the others!” Emmeline said. “We can kill it! We’ll have food—”

“No! A group of people will scare the beast off and then we might never find it. If I can sneak up on it with a gun…”

“Matthew, you’re no huntsman.”

But he knew that this was something
he
had to do, alone, and quickly. His heart pounding with fear, he dashed into one of the shelters and quietly grabbed Charlie Benbow’s gun. He wouldn’t tell the others, who were too listless and lethargic anyway to notice or care that he was taking the rifle. It would be too cruel a thing to get their hopes up. He told Emmeline to wait for him inside, in the warmth. And to pray.

Matthew knew it was folly for a man to face a bear alone with only a muzzle-loading gun, but reason was not part of his thinking right now. He cocked his rifle and tucked the only other rifle ball into his mitten for quick reloading. Then he followed the bear tracks with great difficulty, for the snow was blinding and his sight grew blurred. Each intake of breath stabbed his lungs, and he no longer had sensation in his feet. He stopped every so often to listen; but the snow-white forest was silent.

He grew desperate. He had to find the animal! He had to stop the others from going through with the unthinkable act they were contemplating. Matthew had been raised to respect the dead. Desecration was an abomination. The dead couldn’t defend themselves; it was up to the living to protect them.

But the people back at the camp were barely living now; they were walking corpses themselves.

Suddenly he froze. There it was, about a hundred yards ahead, an enormous grizzly bear digging in the snow. Matthew moved slowly forward, then he crouched behind a tree, cocked his rifle, took careful aim and fired.

The bear gave out a roar and reared up on its hind legs. Seeing Matthew, it charged. Matthew hurriedly poured powder into the gun and rammed the second lead ball home. He leveled the rifle and fired again. The bear bellowed and staggered. Then it fell to all fours and ran away. “Wait,” Matthew said weakly, not believing that he had been so close and was now going to lose it. “Please!” He began to weep. All that food. He could have saved everyone. But his aim had been poor. He had failed.

Then he saw the bloody trail in the snow.

He ran back to the camp as fast as he could, stumbling and falling in the snow. He found several men gathered around the corpse of Helmut Schumann, Mr. Benbow holding a butcher knife. The women were crouched around the fire, sobbing. “Stop!” Matthew cried.

When he hurriedly told them about the bear, saying that they should follow it, not everyone agreed. “A wounded bear is too dangerous,” said Aahrens the barber. Charlie Benbow added, “I seen what a hurt bear can do to a man. It’s suicide, doc.”

Bret Hammersmith said, “Why don’t
you
go after it? Take a look see. Then come back for us.”

Matthew looked into the hollow eyes and gaunt faces etched with the madness of hunger. He knew they would not wait for him to return with news of the bear, that they only wanted to get rid of him. “I am weak,” he said, and it was the truth. “I can make but one more walk through the snow and then I will be done for. I ask all of you to make that trek with me. I shot that bear good. He won’t live long. And where we find him, we’ll find food. And we will survive. Here,” he looked around at the hell they had descended into, “even if our bodies survive, our spirits will die.”

But Emmeline was also terrified to leave the camp. He took her by her frozen hands and said, “You have to have courage now, Emmeline. For the others. If you go, they will follow.”

“But I’m afraid.”

“I’ll see to it that we’re all right. Don’t worry, my darling.”

In the end, they followed him, starved people holding onto one another, carrying loved ones on their shoulders, staggering through snowdrifts, half dead from hunger. They carried only a few possessions—blankets and quilts, cooking pots, and carefully protected hot embers from their fires. Several times they wanted to give up, for it seemed they were lost in a blinding white limbo. But Matthew found the drops of blood, scarlet in the snow, and he urged his ragtag group onward, promising them a feast of roast meat at the end. He described fat sizzling in a pan until they all smelled it, and their saliva ran. Emmeline joined in, taking each person by the arm, lifting them up from their knees, telling them how she had seen the wounded bear—a lie—and that she was sure by now it was dead. It was just up ahead…a few more feet…a few more steps…just one more step…no, no, don’t stop, don’t fall, here take my arm….

Ruth Hammersmith sank into a snowdrift and lay there like a dead-weight. Her husband dropped by her side and told the others to go on. He stared up at them with sunken eyes circled with dark shadows.

The half-dead people pressed on, not even really thinking now, barely hearing Matthew’s words of encouragement, plodding mindlessly through snowdrifts, hands and feet frozen numb, faces white with extreme cold.

More fell, holding their children in their arms. Emmeline tried to raise them up, but was too weak herself, having only just enough strength to follow Matthew.

And when it seemed even to Emmeline and Matthew that their trek was a hopeless one, they found the cave, the bloody trail going inside.

While the others waited at a safe distance, Matthew and Manfred Schumann went cautiously inside, listening, sniffing the air, rifle cocked and ready. They found the bear inside, and it was dead.

Manfred and Osgood Aahrens found the strength to plunge knives into the animal’s belly and slice it open. At the sight of tender raw innards spilling to the cave floor, the others came straggling in, falling upon the steaming, bloody morsels in a mindless feeding frenzy. They glutted themselves on warm, raw bear meat and blood, and then, feeling strengthened, went back along the trail to retrieve the people who had fallen behind. The Hammersmiths were both dead, but everyone else was brought back, packing the cave with their human warmth, filling their bellies with grizzly bear.

That night they slept exhausted against the carcass, children crawling inside to get warm. And when they awoke, they built a fire from the embers, offered a prayer of thanks to God, and began to butcher the bear.

They ate directly from it, throwing chunks of meat onto the fire, but then also began cutting long thin strips and hanging them over the smoke until it dried, in this way preserving the bear meat for the cold weeks to come. They buried the bones and skull, to discourage wolves, and then used the stiff hide, which nearly covered the cave floor, as a rug for warmth.

Six more people perished, despite the food and warmth, but when it appeared the rest would survive, Matthew took a count of the company: there were now fifty-five men, twenty-four women, and fifty-three children. Forty souls fewer than had left Ft. Bridger.

And one day when the sun felt warm for the first time, and they encountered the first snowmelt beside a stream, Matthew turned to Emmeline and, taking her face between his hands, said with passion, “I love the sound of your voice, Emmeline. Don’t ever stop talking. Don’t ever be silent. When we started this journey, I was gloomy and much too serious. And I thought you smiled too much. But your buoyancy kept me from sinking. I grew up among the dead and the dark, but you brought light and cheer into my life.”

“And you keep me from flying off the earth, dear Matthew, for I was frivolous and overconfident. You are my rock and my stability.”

The rescue party from Sutter’s arrived in the middle of March, led by one of the men who had run off with Amos Tice. Once they had reached civilization, the man had been stricken with a guilty conscience and told the authorities of a stranded party of emigrants up by the last pass. Volunteers had immediately signed up, loaded with arms and provisions, and had made the trek in record time.

Of the 172 men, women, and children who had left Ft. Bridger in August, fewer than 120 had survived.

Everyone told the rescuers that it was Doc Lively who had saved them, through his courage and wisdom to make the right decision in the face of extreme adversity.

Not one of them mentioned the incident over Helmut Schumann’s corpse.

When they came at last into Sutter’s Mill and they saw it was a place of growth and new starts, with gold fever everywhere, Matthew took the Blessing Stone out of his pocket one last time. “I don’t see it,” he said decisively.

“What don’t you see?”

“The Guiding Spirit. Do you see this clouding at the crystal’s core? Like diamond dust. It changes shape when you turn the stone in the light. My mother said it was a spirit, but I see only mineral deposits.” He handed it to Emmeline. “What do you see?”

She peered into the heart of the crystal and said, “A valley. The lush green valley where we are going to settle and start new lives.” She handed it back to him.

“I wonder,” he mused, trying to see Emmeline’s valley in the Blessing Stone. “All this time I thought it was the crystal telling me what to do. But perhaps it was me all along,
I
was the one making the decisions, not the stone. I wanted to go west, so I spun the stone eleven times until it pointed west. And when Ida Threadgood left you at the river and you needed someone to ride with”—he turned a smile to her—“I had already made my decision to ask you to join me. If I hadn’t wanted to, I never would have consulted the Blessing Stone in the first place. But I did not have enough confidence in myself to make my own decisions. The stone was my crutch. I don’t need it anymore.”

“Don’t be too hasty in your judgment,” she said, having given a great deal of thought to the miracle that took place at the mountain lake. “It was the Blessing Stone that led us to the bear tracks. Without it, we would all surely be dead now.”

He nodded, deep in thought for a moment, then he said, “I have been thinking, Emmeline, that Lively might be a strange name for an undertaker, but it’s a perfect name for a midwife.” Then in all seriousness: “I know you vowed never to wed, but—”

She placed a fingertip on his lips and said with a smile, “Of course I shall marry you, my darling Matthew, for we do make a perfect pair, midwife and undertaker. I help folks into the world and you escort them out of it.”

She took the Blessing Stone from him once again and held it to the sunlight. “I wonder about all the people who have held this crystal, who looked to it for guidance or protection or luck. And I wonder if they were like you, Matthew, blind to their own strengths, giving credit to an inanimate piece of mineral. But you discovered your own power in the end, the spirit that is in all of us, the spirit to overcome adversity. People are strong, Matthew, I know that now. We can meet whatever trials are put in our path, and we can be triumphant.