Shooting the Sun by Max Byrd

Author:Max Byrd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553898736
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

On the Trail

FIVE THOUSAND MILES WEST OF DORSET STREET, THOUGH not visibly closer to Hades or the sun, the Somerville-Babbage Expedition rolled across a seemingly endless prairie landscape, ten small white dots crawling over an enormous rumpled flag of dusty green and brown.

On July 29, the latitude reading at noon, taken as usual by James Searle and Selena, was 35 degrees, 6 minutes, 9 seconds north. Longitude was 106 degrees, 4 minutes, 20 seconds west. (The U.S. Army maps supplied by Lieutenant Frémont were quite badly off, also as usual, by one and a half minutes north, two minutes west.) The temperature, checked at the same time, was 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Winds were calm. High, thin cirrus clouds streaked the southwest sky. There was no rain whatsoever in sight. In the pocket-sized logbook she kept as a semi-official record, Selena wrote: Approximate distance from Council Grove: 56 miles. Then she squinted up at the sun and performed a quick mental calculation: Days until the eclipse: 38.

At two o'clock Webb Pattie made his shrill two-fingered whistle, rose in his stirrups, and called out, “Catch up, catch up!” One by one, with a great cracking and flourish of whips, the wagons inched forward again.

It is utterly impossible now—it was probably impossible then—to convey the true realities of life on a caravan of mule-drawn wagons, far out on the empty, wind-swept plains of western Kansas.

Day after day Selena woke in the darkness to the same sharp smell of roasting coffee, the crackle of burning wood; wet grass, mule hair, and musty straw; horses stirring. Through the opaque slant of her tent she could see the stiff white fingers of the dawn. Shadows moved back and forth on the canvas walls. Low voices, unmistakably masculine, quietly hawked and coughed and drifted about murmuring and making what her father used to call the daybreak sounds of nasal plumbing. If they had been on one of his ships at sea, she would have swung from her hammock down to a smooth tilting deck and the creak of wood and rope in the wind. Here, when she pulled aside the blanket on her cot and put her bare feet down, she touched unseen bristles of buffalo grass, cool earth. Before breakfast she and Lona walked back along the trail ruts, with Pearl of Scotland trotting beside them, the three females, and in the sleepy dim light, lifting their heavy skirts, went about their morning necessaries.

By the time the sun was level with the eastern horizon, they were already miles out along the endless trail, under the curved white eggshell of the sky, following the straight ruts straight ahead, as if they were driving methodically and directly toward the end of the world's great flat table. The ruts were not two-track grooves, such as a single wagon's four wheels would have made in the tall grass. They were wide square depressions in the earth, like dry creekbeds or a sunken road. And most of the time the

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