Paymaster’s escort up to Ft. Smith when Tom & I woke after a good sleep to find the Quaker boy missing from his bedroll by the fire pit the embers burnt down to ashes & the morning air cool enough to see your breath with all around us but for the sentries on picket fast asleep still.
“Where’s Ridgeway got to then?” says I to Tom.
“See is his picture making things—” Tom did not know yet the word for camera & not in the Gaelic anyway. Says he, “See if the yokes are where he left them.”
“They are not,” says I.
Tom heft himself up from his blankets. He is not a Hail The Sweet New Day sort of fellow at all in the mornings. Says he, “For all that is holy that boy is like a G__ D___ tinker travelling here & there with no cares in the world for anything but where the road does take him.”
Rubbing sleep from my eyes I took myself over to one of the sentries a Swede with no English at all on him. “Did you see the picture maker Henrik?” I made with my hands the shapes of long hair & a box. “Ridgeway,” says I. The Swede did catch on at last & point me to a deer trail that led away from the clearing into the woods. I suppose I wondered why he did not stop Ridgeway from leaving the bivouack as was our orders but in truth there is always trouble tween civilians & the Army for oft times no man knows who is in charge of another so mostly a soldier will say nothing for fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong man.
So Tom & myself took up our rifles & made to follow the deer trail into the woods & I tell you in no time at all we could not hear the running of the river & night shadows still hung heavy in the trees. We kept silence between us as we walked not daring to speak or call out to the picture maker for there is something of the woods that puts fear on a man no matter his age or experience of them.
Well Thanks Be To God but shortly the trees begun to thin & the morning sun strained to shine through the branches & soon we could see another clearing. We came to it after a moment & leaving the forest & our fears behind us in the wooded shadows we found ourselves in a meadow of fine long grass & wild flowers. It was maybe 200 yds. across & it dipped down in the middle to rise up on the far side to another wood. A layer of mist was afloat in the chill air at our knees & sunlight lit the water in it making it like a swathe of shining silver cloth above the grass. And across that meadow where the ground begun to rise into the far stand of forest my eye caught a thing moving & the sound of something did break the morning meadow’s silence & this sound was the low growling of a beast. More than 1 beast my eyes could now see & I tapped Tom’s shoulder & pointed for him to look.
“Wolves,” I did whisper to Tom in English first then in Irish too I do not know why. “Mac tire.”
“And there is Ridgeway,” says Tom raising his Springfield & using it to point some yds. to the right of what we now saw to be the carcass of a great deer or elk I did not know the difference then. Well it was lain out there in the wet grass that carcass the ribs of it white & bloody red & poking up like the beams of a shipwreck on a beach & 1 wolf had that dead elk’s guts in his teeth like a looter at the ship’s cargo. 2 other of the beasts did be at the hind of the elk snouts stained red but one was not at all at the elk’s body but instead in the long grass on his belly like a snake with his hackles up & his teeth unsheathed at the figure of our friend Ridgeway whose head & shoulders were under the camera’s drape with only his hand out of it for to open the lid of the camera’s eye or aperture I did later learn to call it.
I made to say to Tom that