The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown

Author:Daniel James Brown [Brown, Daniel James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Adventure, Biography, History, Non-Fiction, Survival
ISBN: 9780061348112
Amazon: 0061348112
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2010-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

10

THE HEART ON THE MOUNTAIN

The first order of business on the morning of December 27 was to make a fire. Under the blankets, William Eddy poured some black powder from his powder horn onto a bit of tinder and at the same time struck a spark from his flintlock rifle. Pouring black powder onto tinder, especially if the tinder is damp, is an old woodsman’s trick for increasing the likelihood that the spark will catch. Unfortunately for Eddy, it caught with a vengeance, exploding the powder horn in his hands with a terrific flash of smoke and flame. He scrambled out from under the blankets with a blackened face and badly burned hands. Amanda McCutchen and Sarah Foster followed him out, also burned but not so badly. Eventually they got a fire kindled in dried branches they had collected and used it to set fire to another dry dead pine. Then they began doing what they had by now agreed that they would do.

They divided into groups so that no one would have to eat, or see eaten, any of their kin. Sarah and Mary Ann and Jay stayed apart from Franklin’s body, Sarah Foster from Lemuel’s body. Luis and Salvador would have no part of any of it. They built a separate fire at a distance and turned their backs on the whites.

If they did as others in similar circumstances have almost universally done, Jay Fosdick, William Eddy, and William Foster started by removing and concealing in the snow the heads, hands, and feet of the dead, to render the bodies a bit less human. Then, as they would with a deer or an ox, they cut open the body cavities and extracted the most nutritious organs: the liver, the heart, and the kidneys. These would not keep well; they needed to be eaten first.

Now that they had crossed the line, their hunger put itself foremost in their thoughts. So at some point shortly after they had taken these organs from the bodies, they stopped and sat down to their first unthinkable meal. They put the meat on sharpened stakes and held it out over glowing coals, roasting it until they judged it done, or done enough. The smell of roasting meat is largely the same no matter what type of meat, and, unbidden, it stimulates the appetite mightily, activating the salivary glands, awakening the gut, grabbing the attention of the brain. So when it had cooled enough that it did not burn their lips, they sat down in the snow, weeping, their eyes averted from one another’s faces, and took their first few tentative bites. Then they ate.

And when they ate, their digestive systems gurgled and surged back to life and demanded more, and so they ate more. Their headaches and bone-crushing weariness began to lift. Energy poured into their limbs. So they got up and prepared more of the flesh and ate more, still avoiding one another’s eyes as best they could. For the first time in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.