October skies

‘We’re going to need to photograph each page. Get a digital record of this immediately. The paper’s fragile, and there’s very faint ink here, towards the back.’ Julian turned a few pages. ‘Very faint. The writing’s almost like a watermark. This should come out of the ground right now, and be kept somewhere dark and dry.’

She considered that for a moment.

He closed the notebook gently. ‘If I leave it out here, it’ll deteriorate. It needs to be taken out and digitised, Grace. As soon as possible.’

The woman considered that for a moment, and then nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘you know… for trusting us.’ Julian looked up at the cold grey sky. ‘You think it’ll snow today?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Snow’s due, I guess. Usually as regular as clockwork.’ She looked up at the pale featureless clouds. ‘I reckon, though, we’ll need to head back soon. We got us about six hours of daylight for hiking back to the camp site this afternoon.’

Julian stood up. ‘Where’s Rose? I’ll get her to pack up her stuff.’ He climbed out of the ditch and called out for her. He could see the bright red flash of her anorak amongst the trees on the far side of the clearing; she was stepping slowly through the tangled briar and roots with the camera braced firmly on her shoulder.

Getting some mood footage.

Grace, meanwhile, knelt down and ran her fingers over the rough, pitted surface of the metal storage chest.

‘Mr Lambert. Mr Benjamin Lambert from England,’ she muttered quietly through a plume of evaporating breath. ‘So, you gonna tell us all about what happened here then, are you?’

CHAPTER 5

18 July, 1856

Benjamin Lambert stretched in his saddle and felt the worn leather flex beneath him. His rump was sore and he could feel that his left thigh, rubbed raw by a roughly stitched saddle seam, was beginning to blister beneath the frayed linen of his trousers. It stung insistently with each rub, as the pony he sat astride swayed rhythmically like a heavily laden schooner on a choppy sea.

But the minor aches and pains were rendered meaningless as he looked up from the sweating, rippling shoulders of his pony to the sun-bleached open prairie; thousands, millions of acres of land untamed and not portioned out by mankind. No patchwork of fields, manicured lawns, landscaped rockeries or garden follies, no cluttered rows of terraced houses or smoke-belching mills spewing out grimy workers onto narrow cobbled streets.

And there were no gravel paths or smartly paved roads dividing up this expansive wilderness. Instead just the faintest, almost indiscernible track worn into the summer-baked orange soil by earlier trains of heavily laden conestogas; those that had passed this way earlier in the season.

Ben savoured this infinite horizon, defined so sharply between the swaying ochre of prairie grass and the fierce blue of a cloudless sky, not a single, solitary tree to punctuate it.

My God, this is exactly what I came for.

This was an alien landscape for Ben, a city-dwelling Englishman, used to every precious acre, yard, walkway and rat-run belonging by deed to somebody. Until he’d sailed over to the new world and embarked on this exciting journey across an unmapped continent, he realised, every step he’d taken thus far in his twenty-five years had been on ground owned by someone.

Right now he was on land owned by absolutely no one.

He reined in his pony, relieved to have that swaying motion cease for just a moment and give his back, his rump and his thighs a little respite. He took in the horizon, low and undulating gently with a smooth curvature of modest hillocks and spurs. To the west the hills grew more pronounced and shimmering in the heat; the white peaks of the Rockies danced.

Not quite so far away now.

‘Oh God, this is wonderful,’ he muttered to himself. This — THIS — was why he came; to see it all before swarms of humankind descended upon it and broke it up into a million homogenous parcels of fenced-in farmland.

Beside him the wagons rolled past, each pulled slowly but assuredly by a six-team of oxen. He twisted in his saddle, looking down the length of the train; in all he had counted forty-five of them. Some open carts, many smaller rigs, and a couple of dozen ten-footer conestogas with flared sides and sturdily contructed traps.

This particular caravan of overlanders was a blend of two parties that had happened to find themselves setting off into the wilderness from Fort Kearny at round about the same time and had merged to form a loose, if somewhat uncomfortable alliance.

The smaller contingent was one he had joined at the very last moment: five wagons that had coalesced outside the military outpost, looking for others to share the arduous and hazardous trip. Fort Kearny was considered by most overlanders readying themselves for the journey as the stepping-off point, the very edge of the United States of America. Beyond that point it was God’s own wilderness.