cry. “We must have back our beasts. We will be stranded here. Winter is coming . . .”
Kohn hears weeping from behind the wagons, shrill voices raised in fear and anger. Der Winter ist da, mein Freund. “Are they all right?”
“Yes. They are vexed. We cannot make Montana without our beasts.”
The old man, as if summoned by the doubt shown by his son, comes over to them from the wagons. He has a bandage around his head and blood seeps down his cheek from underneath it. Kohn notes a trail of clothing and goods from the back of one of the wagons strewn out on the ground, and thinks perhaps the Indians made to steal the goods as a distraction while their brothers cut through the traces and stampeded the mule and ox teams.
“Jacob, come and help your family,” the old man says.
“I will, Father.” He takes the gun back from Kohn, pocketing the small parcels of birdshot. He looks ashamed.
The father notices the musket in his son’s hand. “What were you going to do with that? You know the teachings. And you would be killed. Do you want to die and to die in sin? Pride, Jacob, pride. You are a fool for it.”
Kohn understands some of this. He understands the words “die” and “sin” and “pride” but the rest is clear enough. The old man wipes at the blood on his cheek and checks his hand. Dawn light is leaking over the plains and Kohn can see frosted buffalo grass running east, the undulating land like rolling waves of the sea. These Murphy wagons, prairie schooners folk call them, like lost, demasted ships, Kohn thinks, having seen storm-damaged barques limp back up the Cuyahoga every winter as a boy. He considers the pilgrims’ chances. One team of oxen left. They will be all right but will be going no farther, only back.
“Sir, was our Indian here?” Kohn asks, as if to distract the father from his tirade. Kohn pities the son. Sees himself in him. Sees his own father in this bearded Mennonite.
“Savages, savages, damned savages,” the younger man says in English, as if he has heard it said before and liked it.
“There were many and it was dark,” the old man says.
Kohn looks west. The land rises away from the riverbank and he can just now make out the trail up into the bluffs the raiders would have taken. Jonathan too. He decides he will make his way back to Molloy and Rawson in camp.
“Will I load the gun for you?” he asks the young man. “I can give you some balls you can melt and shape for shot. You will need a heavier load than the one you have there if you are to do any good with—”
“We do not need your help,” the old man says.
Kohn looks at him and rage rises in his gullet. Pride. Pride? The old fucker, the son of a bitch. Let the Sioux have his scalp. Let them rape and kill every goddamn one of them. Kohn thinks that he may be all used up with pity. Fathers. Every son’s curse to have one.
“Suit yourselves.” He ignores the old man and speaks to the youth in English. “If you can’t find your animals, pack as much as you can from the other wagons into one of them and head back for Laramie. You’ll have to winter there. It’s too late in the season to restock and try again until spring.”
“I will try to tell them this. My father, the others, but they will not listen. They say it is the Lord’s will and He protects us. Where is His protecting now I ask you?”
The old man says something sharp to his son, a rebuke, as if he has understood his son’s words.
“Well, good luck,” Kohn says. “I’m sorry we could not be of more help to you.”
He rides slowly out of the jam of wagons to the sound of the old man scolding his son, of women weeping and a woman shouting, hysterical with rage. A child crying. They’ll be all right, Kohn thinks. They’ll be fine once they make it to Laramie.
Halfway back to camp and he can no longer hear the pilgrims and their lamentations. Instead, he hears gunshots. Two or three, perhaps one with an echo, from somewhere in the hills west of the trail. He stops and listens and some moments later hears screaming again. This time he is certain it is not a young woman