Infestation (Part III)

III.

　

1.

For a time, Anders didn’t understand the men when they spoke among themselves. He knew the words for women’s work and taunts from the other boys, but the men spoke in a different way, at least when assembled at the campfire, and used words that were not common-place. Anders understood that what the older men had to say was grave and important and significant to their lives but their discourse was difficult for him to decipher. He heard the men’s voices and saw their gestures, arms reaching forth to embrace empty air, a hand raised to take the measure of the sky or descending to touch the earth, but the meaning of their speeches was unclear. Nonetheless, Anders attended closely to what the men said, listening closely, and, when the wind warmed and the first sprigs of green grass showed between places still slick with old ice and snow, he began to understand that the men were concerned with a problem, something that seemed insoluble to them so that they deliberated on it ceaselessly. Although young men sat around the fire and heard their elders speaking, they did not add their voices to the counsel. Only those who had been purified could speak at these gatherings and this status was earned by ordeal and being re-named.

When the winter seized the land and made travel difficult, the people stayed in the shelter of some trees growing on a hummock of high ground heaved up between bends in a small, frozen creek. Some crumbling cliffs protected the meander on three sides and seemed to repel the worst of the winter winds. On the fourth side of the valley, the river flowed out onto a marshy plain rimmed by distant pine-clad ridges. The marsh was full of decaying grass and reeds and, before the ice put it to sleep, the muddy ponds seemed to breathe themselves, a hot animal stink like the breath of a wolf or a bear. It was a protected place and this was where the people camped for the dark, cold months, sleeping for most of the day since there was nothing much to do, and, as the famine made them weaker and weaker, scarcely leaving their lodges except to attend to the call of nature. Then, one of the men killed an antelope that had come to drink at the place in the river that the women kept clear of ice so that they could provision the encampment with water. Everyone gathered by the fire and there was a enough meat for all of them and, revived by the food, the women said that Spring would be coming soon, that they had seen green grass on the south-facing hills, slivers of green growing up through the snow, and that soon the time of abundance would return. Then, the men returned to their deliberations, and speech followed speech, and, now, Anders understood most of what was said.

The White people were like locusts, the old men maintained – at first, there were only a few of them, ungainly, and clumsy, and a man could either ignore them or laugh at their peculiar customs. But, then, they came in great swarms and, where they gathered, the fields and streams and woods, even the vast prairies, were devastated. They set upon the earth and burned it with their greed and left only ashes and charred places and the grooves in the hills where they had set their monstrous locomotives running to and fro. In the beginning, the old men said, you could escape from the White men by simply traveling to another place and this was done by taking a road in one direction away from the hordes of pioneers advancing over the land. The people were swift and agile and easily outpaced the white settlers staying ahead of them and, always, moving in one direction, straight as an arrow toward the high mountains and the setting sun. But, then, the railroads shot ahead of the Indians and the whites followed their iron tracks west and gathered there also, ahead of the people who had been driven in that direction. The swarms of White men now seemed to come from all sides, to strike like lightning from the heavens, and so there was no place to go to escape them. Then, the old men decided that they should not march in one direction straight as the railroad tracks cutting across the land for, after all, that was the white man’s way, but that they should make their road inward, turning and spiraling as it were, making a path that curved in on itself, a way that cut across its own path, twisting to lead to places that were somehow hidden inside the land, places like the valley where the band had spent the winter. If you turned aside from the westward march and took a path that curved backward like a snake eating its own tail, you would find an inside place where it was mostly safe – the rugged patches of land where the whites could not go or where they were afraid to venture, the hollow places and dark, the shadowy recesses inside the territory where it was safe to be.

Anders was not certain what was meant by these words, but he understood that there were badlands difficult to traverse and, therefore, very holy. In the middle of those badlands, there was said to be a mountain with sheer sides and a flat summit. On the summit of the mountain, wild ponies raced to and fro and there was a great herd of buffalo. The buffalo had fled into that inaccessible place when the White hunters came to slaughter them and they had flourished there so that the herd had many calves and, if the white soldiers came to harry the people, or the white pioneers fell from the sky, harassing them like so many ravening and devouring locusts, the clan could still go to that refuge, a place not more than two or three days march across difficult terrain. On that mesa, the people could stay without being molested and they could guard the passes with only a few warriors and any white man who came in their direction they would kill and any column of soldiers advancing in that way they would also kill, destroying each and every one of the troopers so that there would be none to report where the Indians had gone.



Whether the men were telling a story, something like a fairy tale or legend from the Bible, was not clear to Anders. He didn’t know whether the mountain with the ponies and buffalo was a real place or, something, merely imagined and, as he came to understand more and more, it seemed to him that the distinction, perhaps, scarcely mattered.

　

2.

The scouts returned on their hot, wet ponies and said that the whole land was deserted. Between Morgan’s ranch, where camphor and kerosene blazed in shallow moats, all the way to the river, the farms and homesteads were abandoned, fields left without furrows, and wild, starving hogs and goats harried by packs of feral dogs. The nymphs were every where, pouring from the hillsides like green and grey avalanches. At night, sentries posted on the hilltops could hear the armies of wingless grasshoppers advancing through the darkness, a faint sound like a pot full of bones boiling.

Lieutenant Williams argued that the relief mission was accomplished and that the column should return to the fort. But Major Goodweather was now convinced that the wilderness was thronged with poor families, huddling in their dark and cheerless cabins, too weak to venture forth to find the supply train that the soldiers led over the ravaged terrain. "It has been two days since we encountered anyone to assist," Lieutenant Williams told the Major. Major Goodweather no longer rode his mount, but rested on pillows and quilts, in one of the wagons from which supplies had been distributed.

The Major’s face was red and swollen and he said that the locust nymphs had entered his lungs so that he was constantly coughing them up, legs and heads intact. He told Lieutenant Williams that as long as a single wretched farmer remained within reach of the wagon train it was their duty to find that man and provide him succor. Major Goodweather spread a map out atop his pillow and Lieutenant Williams squatted beside him as the big wagon, swaying like a sailing ship, moved forward. The map had been printed by the railroad company and it was entitled "A Guide to the Edens of the Middle West".

"We have not inspected the settlements at Tecumseh," Major Goodweather said, jabbing at the map with his swollen fingers. "Nor have we explored, Chicken Hollow nor Butte nor Gospel Hill nor Weeping Waters where it is said that there is a spring of most remarkable sweetness."

"These place don’t exist," Lieutenant Williams said. "They were never built. This country is too arid. Those are phantom villages imagined by the land speculators with their plat books."

"I am convinced that there are people remaining in these hills who require our assistance," Major Goodweather said. "I will not call retreat until we have found and helped them."

Lieutenant Williams departed from the conference with orders to send the scouts and cavalrymen forth once more and have them range as far as the river to bring back word if they encountered either settlers or marauding bands of Sioux.

Private Anderson said: "So the old man has changed his opinions about this mission."

"He is positively fanatical," Lieutenant Williams said. "I suppose when he was half-devoured by the hoppers himself his views on this subject have suffered some revision."

"We’re not that far from the river," Private Anderson said.

"Our jurisdiction ceases at that point, at least, so I would argue," Lieutenant Williams replied. "We will continue to the edge of the territory and, then, there will be no choice but to return. Our supply-line is over-extended. If we encounter the enemy in any force in these wild places, I fear for the outcome."

"At least, we have plenty of provisions," Private Anderson said. For the last four days, the relief column had been supplying itself from the bags of flour and rice and beans and the barrels of salt pork and hard tack burdening the wagons. "We could travel for a month," Private Anderson added, "and, soon enough, there will be game in the hills."

"And we have spiritual protection," Lieutenant Williams said, gesturing across the grassland to where the Preacher in his buckboard was urging his mules forward over a muddy track too soft for the heavy wagons.

Someone marching on the flank of the column shouted. The cry sounded loud in the sunny mid-day silence. After several hours trudging over the broken country, the men moved quietly and the sounds accompanying them were the clink of canteen against rifle stock or gun muzzle, the bell-like rattle of tack on mules and oxen, the creaking sail-noise of the canvas bonnets on the big wagons. Startled, the troops turned to their side and, then, walked over to the soldier who had uttered the cry. The man pointed down at the grass: the amputated wing of a great bird of prey rested on sun-bleached brown prairie. The wing was, at least, as long as a man’s forearms with feathers that were glistening and dark brown.

"What do you suppose happened?" One of the soldiers asked. "The bird was sick, probably from eating too many locusts," Lieutenant Williams said. "And it came to roost here where a wolf or coyote was hiding."

The wing seemed complete in itself, an emblem that had fallen from the sky, and, for a time, George carried it, slung across his saddle, for good medicine.

　

3.

Day was equal to night. Then, the days were longer and the grass flourished so that the ponies were fat and sleek. An old man wearing soldier’s clothing came from the west. He carried a battered bugle in the pack slung over his shoulder. The old man said that the bugle spoke with the voice of an angel and that it was powerful medicine.

It was the season when boys earned their names. With an elder, boys were taken to a high place from which they could see much of the world and there they were led to deliberate as to what kind of men they wanted to be. The old man from the west said that long columns of soldiers with wagon guns were crossing the prairies, come to punish the tribes at their mid-summer gathering, and that it was necessary that all young men be purified so that they could fight in the war that was coming.

So, three boys went with the old man to the high hills overlooking the river. The names of the boys were Comes First, Round Wind, and the youth who was called Sold By His Father. The old man was a prophet and, when they encountered, the bare wooden poles supporting the telegraph line, he leaned against one of the poles and said that he could hear the wires singing with the messages that the white men sent to and fro. The boys scattered and each of them set his ear against a telegraph pole but they heard nothing. The wood was full of splinters and smelled of creosote and, as they looked in both directions, they saw the brown poles like barren, desolate tree trunks marching, one after another, toward opposing horizons, a sight that was both forlorn and menacing, and the old man, sensing their mood, said that when they returned from the river, the poles would flower and put forth branches and the birds of the sky would come and make their nests among the leaves sprouting from those big stakes that now seemed so dead. "That is how it shall be," the prophet said. "All things will be made new."

The land by the river was all wrinkled up like a blanket disarranged by a sleeper and the paths through the hills were crooked. They walked up and down slopes and came to places where the grass was broken around expanses of pale sand that gleamed in the bright sunlight. It was a thirsty road, climbing and, then, skidding down steep places, and, from the summits of the hillocks, they could see that the land was a chaos of small grassy dunes as far as the eye could see. Then, at last, they reached a high ridge overlooking the river. The ridge was thick with grass that was belly-high, a long, sliver of a hilltop where they had to march single-file. On the side of the ridge opposite the river, there was a deep ravine silky with high grass. The slope dropping to the river fell away into open air so that the prophet and the young men could look across the glassy distance to the tops of trees below, the lagoons and wet lands fenced by old brush around the river bottom and, then, the watercourse itself, a vast plain of pebbles and ribbed sand dunes in which the stream ran in bright rivulets, reflecting the sun, a braided meandering channel wandering back and forth across the expanse of polished stone and driftwood and stranded sand bars made by its floods. From the top of the hill, it seemed that the boys could see forever, across the enormous river valley to the other country beyond, more hills and valleys lush with streams falling down from the heights and, therefore, shady with ancient trees, reddish cliffs where swallows were whirling and spinning, and, then, plateaus even more distant, the mesas and buttes with their clay ramparts where, perhaps, the herd of hidden buffalo still roamed.

　

The boys were thirsty and asked the prophet if they could descend to the river and one of the marshes full of twisting watery lagoons to drink from that water but the old man told them that they should stay on the heights and not think about their thirst, but instead purify their minds by imagining the coming days when the white men be gone and the land would be restored to its original abundance and the buffalo would return. The prophet told the boys to look toward the sun and raise a song to the heavens and he said that they should be asked to be filled with Holy Spirit and made glad.

So the afternoon passed and, then, it was night and very cold on the high bluff. The prophet told the boys that they should strip to their loin cloths and, then, go to the river and bathe in its icy waters and that they should return chilled to the heights where the wind would pierce them and make them clean. Comes First and Round Wind and Sold By His Father did this, drinking from the water so that their bellies were full, and, then, they returned to the hilltop and the wind made them shiver so that their teeth rattled in their skulls and, then, at dawn, the Prophet said that a great train was coming from the west, a train that was so long that you could stand atop the locomotive and look along its length and never see the end of it. On this train, the Prophet told them, were the ghosts of the Indians killed by the white men, a multitude without number and they were coming to aid their brothers who were still alive and that, if the old man were to sound his bugle, the train would come to his call, riding along tracks made of bone in the river valley.

A day passed and the boys were very hungry and they asked the old man if they could eat but he said that was forbidden. He told them to sit apart from one another on the knife-edge of the hilltop and look at the river and how the stream below them accepted the blessings of the sun and they were to meditate on their own courage and purity. Some black birds appeared overhead and circled the place where the boys were sitting crosslegged on the ridgetop and the old man told them that, if they were lucky, the birds would swoop down and pluck out their eyes and carry them high aloft so that they could see from the vantage of those winged creatures the great valley and all the nations of Indians that were arising from the earth and making peace with one another now that the locusts had driven the white men away from their lands. The sun set and the boys were so hungry that they felt weak and drowsy, but the Prophet told them they were not to sleep but to go to the river again and bathe themselves and, then, return to the heights once more to be chilled by the night wind. The boys did as they were told and Sold By His Father, in particular, was very weak because his skin was paler than the other boys and had been burned by the sun so that it was all blistered on his arms and shoulders and the cold water blazed in his wounds and made him feel feverish and he labored up the steep hill, step by step, almost unable to attain the heights where they maintained their vigil until the third day.

By this time, no one spoke and the boys rested on their backs in the warm sun, eyes open to the depths of the sky that now seemed to writhe with winged beings. Black shapes fluttered around them and, when they sat up the boys felt dizzy, and saw spirits emerging from the earth. Then, some beings approached from very far away, a shape like a spear-head crossing the river, and the old man gave them dried meat to chew and berries that had been preserved in animal fat and he let them drink from his canteen because he said that their vigil was complete and, now, they must show their courage. The approaching beings splashed through the water and the sky was in great turmoil and Sold By His Father saw living things falling from the heavens without number and the clouds glittered as if laden with chips of mica and were sculpted by the wind into the profiles of devils and demons. The Prophet sounded his bugle and the boys slipped and slid down the grassy slopes to meet the armies of earth and sky that had gathered in the river valley and the sky roared with a noise like a great locomotive surging across the land.

　

4.

From the hilltop, the soldiers could see the ribbon of river, split into glittering channels in its great, empty bed of pebbles and drifts of blonde sand. The land across from them and beyond the valley seemed wild, crests of small wind-scuffed hills rising in wave after wave like tumultuous frozen sea. In coves cut into the river bluffs, big still lagoons reflected the sky and marshes sodden with stagnant channels and sumac-rimmed puddles extended as causeways across the valley, ambiguous places that were neither water nor land. White long-legged birds searched the muddy edges of the oxbow lakes.

Private Anderson saw the ferryman’s shack on a thumb-shaped promontory fallen on its side, undercut by a flood, so that its boards trailed their splintery fingers in a glittering branch of the river.

"I don’t see anyone," Private Anderson remarked.

The column had advanced along the ruts that led to the ferry to a windy hilltop from which they could see into the great river valley and look along its length, rows of cottonwoods occupying narrow strips of higher land that were islands during the season of the thaw, a rocky ridge, speckled with mica crystals drooping down from one of the remote hills to manhandle the river and twist it into a new direction. Birds with great wings circled overhead.

Lieutenant Williams said that Major Goodweather had ordered them to this height overlooking the valley to see if there were yet signs of commerce along the river – a trader’s shack that had been there once and a land-office and the ferryman’s cabin with his docks and flatbedded raft. "We must determine if there are still people starving in the valley," he had ordered and, now, Lieutenant Williams turned away from the landscape unscrolled beneath him and walked back to the Major’s conestoga, below the crest of the hill to make his report.

The cloud behind him surged up like a mighty hand reaching into the sky to blot out the sun. The horsemen on the ridge saw the glitter of the river extinguished so that braided stream meandering in its desert of stones turned the color of the lead and lagoons became dark tarns, an alpine chill suddenly insinuating itself into the air.

The first grasshoppers fell from the air like sleet, coasting horizontally on the wind, their wings a blur. For two days, the men had marched in intermittent showers of the locust, but, now, it seemed that the principal swarm of them was overhead, black towers that caught the sun on their serrated edges so that the millions of whirring wings cast off a metallic glint, a foam of sparks haloing the huge cloud.

Just as he reached Major Goodweather’s wagon, one of cavalrymen appeared at the top of the hill, his horse bucking and neighing in the sporadic hail of locusts.

"We see some people on the other side," the cavalryman shouted.

"How many?"

"Less than a dozen," the man reported. "On a bluff."

"Poor wretched fellows," Major Goodweather exclaimed. "If there are several, we know that there are other people too weak to signal to us."

"Are they signaling to you?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

A man with a small field telescope aimed its eye at the bluffs across the river: "They seem naked," the man said.

"Poor brutes," Major Goodweather said. "We must cross to assist them."

The horse was restive, skittish as the locusts crashed into the animal’s flanks and shoulders. The horseman dropped from the animal and said: "I don’t know. I couldn’t tell if they saw us."

"Advance the column toward them," Major Goodweather ordered. "This is our mission."

"That will require that we cross the river," Lieutenant Williams said. "I question that directive."

"Why?" Major Goodweather said.

"Do we have jurisdiction in that territory?"

"I regret that I earlier criticized this mission," Major Goodweather said. "My eyes are open now. I have authority to go anywhere needed to aid those who are suffering distress because of this plague."

"But to cross the river?" Lieutenant Williams said. "The ferry is abandoned."

"In this season, the water is low. We can readily make our way to the other shore."

Lieutenant Williams took he reins of his horse from an orderly and rode to the head of the column. "We will cross the river," he ordered. He waved at the cavalry, the men now dismounted and struggling to hold their horses as they reared against the locusts pelting against them.

"Go down there and find a crossing and we will follow," Lieutenant Williams said.

The cavalry troopers wrestled their way onto their horses and, then, hurried down the zigzagging switchbacks cut in the side of the hill and leading to the ruins of the ferry.

The sky was now dark and the pressure of the insect swarm overhead had walled off the wind so that it was very still. The air sang with a sound like millstones grinding or a circular saw spinning under the power of torrents of water.

George, the Ponca scout, rode as swiftly as possible to the edge of the stream, the hooves of his horse casting up little splashes of sand and smooth pebbles. Tongues of locusts reached down from the sky to lick at the earth and one of them blocked the path of two of the cavalrymen. The horses balked and their hooves caught in a slush of locusts and the men were pitched down on the ground. They rolled on the slope, with each rotation of their bodies collecting more and more of the slate-grey locusts something like the way a snowball rolling on a hillside collects mass as it descents.

"The locusts will not follow you into the water," Private Anderson cried and he applied his whip to shoulders of the oxen pulling his wagon. The air was black now with the insects and they pelted against the canvas covering the wagon like hail, swarming through openings in the back and front to fill up enclosed freight space with frantic buzzing. The air was fogged with the locusts and the men clawed at their faces and eyes casting aside great fistfuls of crushed grasshoppers and the hooves of the animals caught in them like slush and slipped so that the wagons skidded sideways. The oxen were maddened by the locusts crashing into them and they surged forward, yanking the wagons through the underbrush and over hummocks of sand and driftwood. Lieutenant Goodnature could hear wheels and axles splintering and men screaming and, then, some of the troopers, made wild by the onslaught of locusts, lifted their carbines and fired them skyward, gouts of flame and round rings of smoke rising up through the clouds of grasshoppers now falling on them like an avalanche.

Water splashed under the hooves of the oxen and the locusts had dropped onto the river and formed grey-green masses of flotsam, wings and claws entwined and the grasshoppers overhead, mistaking those rafts of drowned locusts for grassy islands descended in their legions to land on them and push them under until half the stream seemed a solid wedge of insects all of them writhing as they flowed against the sides of the wagons. The guns roared and the men shouted to one another and, it seemed, that the water churned where wagons rolled sideways and through the howl in the air, Lieutenant Williams heard a bugle, the high brazen note sounding over the chaos of wings and raked claws.

"We are under attack," a man shouted. A fusillade of rifle fire slashed sideways and Lieutenant Williams saw troops kneeling in the water, or crouched behind uprooted trees firing their weapons.

"Indians," another man cried. A soldier sloshed through the watery stew of locusts to crouch behind the wagon and fire his gun but it was impossible to see what the men were shooting at. The air was congested with the swarm of locusts, the churning darkness fitfully lit by the blasts of fire spit from gun-muzzles.

Lieutenant Williams didn’t know how long the battle lasted. The guns roared for a time and, then, the men despairing of reloading in the pelting storm of locusts simply covered their faces or submerged themselves in the river, rising sometimes to suck air and, then, dropping face down again in the current clogged with insects. The air lightened a bit and some of the weight of the swarm seemed to rise and, then, at last, they saw the cloud departing, its edges all frayed with tattered, dark banners of flying insects.

Sunbeams searched the opening in the cloud of insects and the Major, batting locusts away from his eyes, looked up and saw that the river-bed and wagons were at the center of the great, smoky crater of the swarm. Several horses without riders cantered along a narrow rivulet where the water sluiced over golden sand between piles of small stones. Two of the big conestoga wagons had stampeded into the shallow lagoon and were mired in the mud, soldiers standing hip-deep in the glassy water where tangles of locusts floated like lily pads. The wagon where Major Goodweather reposed was tilted sideways, its running gear high-centered by the medusa-hair of driftwood tree. Oxen that had torn free from their yokes stood on one of the tufts of tree-lined island, dipping their heads smoothly down to eat the grass, although the flanks and legs of the big animals were shivering with shock. A cavalryman was ascending the gravel slopes of the highest hill overlooking the valley beyond the bend of the oxbow lake. The brush at the edge of the rivers still sang with locusts and heavily laden branches bent down to dip their leafless tips in the water.

The soldiers who came to report to Major Goodweather were decorated with necklaces and bracelets of living locusts. Lieutenant Williams said that they had been ambushed by about a dozen Sioux while crossing the river and that several of them, three at least, had been shot dead near the water’s edge. He pointed across the river bed to a sand beach where four or five soldiers were nudging a naked man with their boots. A dozen yards upstream, another Indian was hanging half-upright in a chest-high barricade of flotsam.

"This is the end," Major Goodweather said. He was panting with exertion, as if the words were difficult to utter. "When the wagons are repaired and the men gathered, we will return to the fort."

The horseman atop the high hill planted a pennant on a lance and the flag twitched in the wind.

"Where is the Preacher?" Major Goodweather asked.

Private Anderson pointed to a stony path leading between two eroded hills. The Preacher’s buckboard, slightly damaged, seemed to limp up the slope behind his balky mules.

"Should we send a horseman for him?" Private Anderson asked.

"Let him go," Major Goodweather said.

　

　

　

　

5.

The land over which the locusts had passed was close-cropped in places, areas thirty or forty hectares in extent in which all the vegetation was shredded, the grass ground to dust and the hot sun roasting the ground under the naked trees. The bare branches of the trees gestured at the passing soldiers with gestures that seemed replete with panic and desperation. But the devastation was neither uniform, nor complete – in some ravines, grass and flowers still beckoned and Morgan’s pastures, spared once more, were green with lush, dewy grass.

Major Goodweather sat with the teamster at the head of the lurching wagon surveying the landscape.

"It’s a terrible thing," he said. "All this ruin. It seems a judgement, an executed judgement."

At the fort, Major Goodweather rummaged among his Latin and Greek books. To his wife, he quoted one of the idylls of Theocritus, verse concerning a shepherd boy who "plaited a pretty locust cage with stalks of asphodel and fitted it with reeds."

His wife asked him: "Why would anyone want to keep a locust in a cage?"

"A single insect is not displeasing," Major Goodweather said and he mentioned Myrta, a little girl named in the Greek Anthology. "She wept over the tomb of her pet cricket and pet locust."

"I can’t imagine it," Major Goodweather’s wife said.

"I will include references to those verses in my report," he said. "It will lighten the subject matter."

He worked on his report for many days. One day, his wife unexpectedly entered the room where he was writing. She found him sitting over his manuscript with red, weeping eyes.

Major Goodweather told her that he was remembering the bodies of the two scrawny Indian boys lying like rubbish beside the glittering stream. He said that he recalled the pioneers nearly naked gathering bison bones on the barren tableland and the smell of camphor rising from Gordon’s grasshopper snares and the oxen shivering in the bright sunlight after the battle.

"It’s a terrible thing," he told her.

Then, he smoked a cigar and treated himself to a drop of brandy and, in a more optimistic vein, wrote the peroration concluding his official report to the Headquarters of the Army of the Platte in Omaha:

"I have no doubt that we will yet see that happy day when the plague of locusts in this part of the globe is eradicated. For there is no doubt that the ingenuity of man more than suffices to repel these noxious vermin and, indeed, harry them to extinction. Our mechanics and engineers will devise implements powered by steam harnessed within pressurized vessels so to make animate various kinds of flails, rollers, and entrenching systems contrived to expunge the pests from the earth where so much of their detestable existence is spent lurking underground. With my own eyes, I have seen iron hopper-dozers, currently horse- or oxen-drawn but soon to be mechanized by steam engines, furrowing instruments that plow into the soil the vermin as they alight on the earth, turning them from noisome nuisance into a rich carboniferous nutrient by which the cultivated fields shall be nourished. (It is curious fact, but one that must be remarked upon, that locusts are not only edible but nutritious and salubrious – I have confirmed with my own palate that the taste of the creatures, when properly prepared, is not at all inferior to that crawfish.) Similarly, I have seen flame and explosive charges deployed against the grasshoppers and have no doubt that dynamite, so useful in our mining industry, might also be utilized to repel the predatory insects since, without doubt, they are adverse to concussive forces in the air. And I may confidently prophesy that our chemists will devise powerful potions dealing death to the locust swarms and, yet, without inflicting damage on our domestic animals and, indeed, even sparing those useful insects in which our husbandry delights – for it would be woe to destroy the grasshopper at the expense of the cheerful and industrious bee. Trenches and moats properly contrived can defeat the hordes of nymphs when the insects have developed into that instar and, indeed, such earthen channels if made slick with petroleum jelly or bitumen have proven a most useful anodyne to the onslaught of these creatures. And, in the event, that the locusts take to the air and darken the skies with their pestilential multitudes, I think it prudent to raise into the upper skies hot-air balloons, aerial vehicles similar to those used for reconaisance during the late War to preserve the Union. Balloons of this species, hovering over agricultural fields at intervals, might be equipped with hooks from which would depend great nets, finely woven, so as capture the winged and voracious swarms as they progress through the skies. The locusts, so netted, might then be conveyed over bodies of water, the balloons descending so as to dredge them beneath the waves, drowning the entire rout of insects in that way. In the alternative, the floating balloons might be so configured as to unleash upon the flying swarms barrages of liquid fire, veritable "Greek fire" such as devised by Archimedes, perhaps to be spewed from nozzles attached to pressurized cannister of kerosene or water gas, the same flammable damp that afflicts some of our mines raised aloft to dispute the possession of the heavens with the armies of winged locusts. As the poet reminds us in one of his more sublime choruses to Antigone, "manifold are the wonders of the world, but, even, more glorious are the wonders of human ingenuity for man has tamed the majestic wild horse and felled the forests of Lebanon to make his ships that go fleet over the surface of the sea and all nature he has subjugated to his mastery..." And, in this spirit, I conclude my report,

ss Major Timothy S. Goodweather"

Major Goodweather thought to revise his report, particularly the last paragraph to which he thought he might adduce more and better ideas for defeating the plague of locusts, but, then, word came that General Custer had been defeated by the Sioux and Cheyenne in the Powder River country and so he wrote no more.

　

　

　

6.

At the foot of a steep hill partly undercut by a ribbon of water from the river, the Preacher found the body of a white boy. The youth, perhaps about 13 years old, lay face-down in the stream so that his torso was washed and revealed his pale skin. It seemed as if the savages had tortured the child because his shoulders were scarred with healed burns.

As the swarms of buzzing locusts lifted from the earth, the Preacher lifted the fallen boy from the water and searched his nearly naked body for signs of recent injury. He found no bullet holes and the boy’s joints all seemed articulated properly without apparent fractures. It seemed that the youth had fallen on the hillside, knocked himself unconscious, and, then, rolled down the steep declivity to fall face forward into the shallow creek.

When the Preacher lifted the boy’s wet shoulders and neck and head from the water, the youth seemed to sigh and, when flopped down on the blankets in the back of the buckboard, he groaned and twitched. The Preacher used his thumb to pry open one of the boy’s eyes and his pupils reacted to the sunlight so that he seemed to look around for a moment and, then, blinked rapidly.

"I will take him into the hills from whence comes my comfort," the Preacher said. "There I will pray over him and raise him like Lazarus." The Preacher had raised other people from the dead before and he had no doubt that he could accomplish this feat with the nearly naked boy as well and that this exploit would wash away other sins that concerned him.

As he traveled between the sandy hills toward the ridge above the river, he saw a cavalryman atop a pyramidal knoll, the man dismounting to raise a pennant on a flag over the river valley. "Where are you going?" the cavalryman asked him. "I have a wounded civilian in the wagon," the Preacher said. "I am taking him to the Indian Agency or Mission – I think it is merely a few miles from this place."

Locusts in airborne swirling vortices passed overhead and, sometimes, the Preacher saw a cloud of them descending onto a distant hilltop or slope. The trail was uncertain and, once or twice, became so faint that the Preacher became lost and had to retrace his steps. The terrain was a muddle of small pits and craters with eroded clay slopes that were radiated the heat and made the hollow places steamy. Because the grass was of poor quality and the fields broken open onto by ravines and gulches, the locust swarms did not descend to the earth but, instead, remained high overhead in dense grey and blue masses that glinted with a dull radiance in the sunlight. It was an exhausting road and, after several hours, the Preacher stopped on grassy terrace overlooking a trench-like valley in which several small streams joined.

Soon it was dark. The Preacher made a compact, bright fire. He set the boy’s body close to the fire to warm him because he had become very cold. Then, he fell to his knees and prayed over the boy for a long time, sometimes spilling water on his closed, bruised-looking eye-sockets or dabbing at the youth’s lips with a rag steeped in whiskey. The Preacher ordered the boy to rise and speak, but nothing happened. He spilled more water on the corpse and thrust the whisky-soaked rag deeper into the boy’s mouth, but the body did not stir and the sunken eyes did not open. Then, the Preacher drank from the bottle of whiskey and sang a hymn in a loud voice and, it seemed, that the legions of locust flying overhead in the darkness howled at him.

The Preacher put his hands under the dead boy’s cold armpits and dragged him some distance away from the fire so that he would not have to look at the corpse. In the shadows, the corpse with its face and chest warmed by the fire seemed to radiate heat and the dead body seemed to expand in his imagination so that it became larger and larger and, then, sprawled like disorderly colossus across the prairie.

The whiskey burned in his throat and the Preacher took from his breast pocket the prayer that he had made against the locusts and read it out loud in a stentorian voice. Then, he shook his head and threw the piece of paper into the fire where it flared for an instant.

Notwithstanding his pleas and petitions to God, the locusts had returned – the locusts had returned in great numbers and, indeed, there was something majestic about their multitudes storming through the air, clouds of flying grasshoppers that were thirty or forty miles wide, extending across one-hundred mile fronts and rising 3000 feet into the air. The Preacher thought of the locusts and the fact that the judgements of the everlasting God are always just and equitable and he considered the advance of the insects, their inexorable spread and dissemination eastward. In a few weeks, the locusts would be in Minneapolis and, then, Milwaukee and Chicago. The locusts would lay their eggs in the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and, from those places, they would launch their assaults. Clouds of them would darken the sky at noon and the sidewalks and macadam roads in town and suburb and the rails where horses pulled trams and the factories and slaughterhouses and foundries, all of the works of man would be drowned in the vast, writhing sea of grasshoppers dropped from the heavens. Each season, the Preacher thought, the number of insects, already too great to be calculated, would increase in exponential progresion and their seed beds would expand on the land lying fallow because nothing could be grown except to feed the innumerable hungry jaws of the locusts. Then, the orchards and the fields of wheat would fall prey to the swarms and the flowers dripping nectar for the bees would be destroyed as well so that the bees could no longer survive and, then, the blossoming trees with wither and die and the grasshoppers, ravenous for new fields and meadows and pastures green, would rise up once more in their billions and ascend into the sky and their swarms would fall upon Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Cincinnati and the great Bessemer furnaces would be clogged with insects choking the throats of their chimneys and, in the hail of pelting locusts, the markets would close and the stores would be shuttered and floods of creeping nymphs would devour the seeds in the earth even before they could sprout and, then, the hot wind would come and blow away the topsoil as if it were smoke and the locusts would rise through that dust-storm like immense towers, like furious giants, and their clouds would stride across the land until they had come to Boston and New York and Philadelphia and the dome of the capitol itself would vanish under their dense, thronging darkness and the domestic animals would run mad and the people would abandon their houses and villages and cities and flee into the wilderness because there was nothing that could be done to stop this pestilential plague: no remedy and every army on earth supine in defeat before the vast clouds of locusts burning the earth to ashes everywhere they went. This was the end -- the island of Manhattan itself beleagured and the ferries lost in the scourge of locusts and the island of Nantucket, where the whales delight, a roosting place for the grasshoppers and their last outpost on land, and, at last, the country emptied behind them, the grey-green mists and clouds of locusts like ragged ghostly mountains would fly far out to sea and be destroyed in the icy waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

The more the Preacher thought about the locusts, the more they seemed an inexorable destiny and unalterable fate. The locusts had become the law of the world and their advance was irresistable and all the endeavors of man could not repel them: they were too numerous and powerful. Each year would bring more and more of them and they would dominate the New World from the snowy crests of the Rockies and across the plains to the river valleys of the Midwest and they devour cultivated lands on the prairie, extending into the Adirondacks and the Shenandoah Valley and, then, descending onto the battlefields once plowed by shot and shell and the cemeteries where the dead soldiers were buried in their endless ranks to roost there massive and contemptuous of all human history, and, then, bringing darkness at noon, to the cities and farms alike, the end would come in starvation and madness.

At dawn, the Preacher saw that the locusts were bedded down in their millions on the nearby hillsides. The mass of insects was torpid with morning chill and the dew glistened on the hard carapaces and wings of the locusts.

The Preacher decided that he would bury the boy. He took a zinc bucket from the back of the wagon and tried to scoop up earth with it. But the ground was too hard and cobbled with stones. The Preacher chipped a few fist-sized rocks from the ground and, then, tried to dig once more, but without success. Muttering a prayer, he dragged the body to the edge of a steep ravine and rolled the corpse down the slope. A few locusts, detached from their main batallions, moved lethargically in the prairie grass.

A couple of swigs of whiskey remained in the bottle. The Preacher tilted his head back and swallowed the rest of the whiskey. Then, he set his mules ambling forward, on a faint track that led westward, between swarms of locusts perched on the hillsides. There were gold and silver fields in the hills, camps full of desperate men, and, although the locusts might devour growing crops and orchards, they could not eat the precious metals mined from the earth and so that was the way he would go.