Infestation (Part II)

Infestation



II.

1.

Major Goodweather remarked that foraging was warfare, just as efficacious in defeating the enemy as cavalry advancing under banners and cannonade or a skirmish-line of infantry attacking across an open meadow. This was something Major Goodweather had learned, so he said, during the Shenandoah campaign during the late war to preserve the union, declaring: "we scoured that valley from one end to the other until there was nothing remaining to provision man or beast." Quartermaster Biggens replied that he had heard about that campaign of which it had been proclaimed that a crow wishing to traverse that valley, made a howling wasteland by the Federal troops, would have needed to pack his own victuals since there was not a grain of corn or wheat anywhere remaining in those Blue Ridge Mountains. "So the Indians (explained Major Goodweather) who have seized our beef-cattle, three of them (as he recollected) have engaged in an act of war against us just as surely as if they had fired upon our troops sent out to gather firewood or burnt the barn of one of the settlers entrusted to this fort’s protection." "But did you not feel a bit like a wild Sioux Indian yourself," Quartermaster Biggens said, "falling upon barns and hamlets and growing fields and putting them to the torch in that way?" "We were proceeding under the strictest orders," Major Goodweather said, sucking a bit on his pipe. "Most assuredly, war is a cruel thing," Lieutenant Williams said helpfully. Dr. Marcus, the camp surgeon, made a clucking sound in his throat, suggesting assent.

"I was at Winchester Station, Kernsville, Cross Keys, Waynesville, Front Royal..." Major Goodweather said. "Pillaging and burning with General Custer and General Sheridan..." He spoke contemplatively and his small hot-tempered eyes softened with his voice.

"War is a cruel thing," Lieutenant Williams repeated.

There followed an uneasy hiatus in the conversation during which the gentlemen could hear the winter wind blowing against the building so that the window frames and joists overhead creaked. The ladies had retired to another room, beyond a corridor dark with cold and menacing shadows. A woman’s voice, accompanied by the pianoforte, sounded in that room. The singer cautiously navigated between notes either too high or too low for her, warbling with vibrato that some might have found tastelessly broad on the tones that came confidently to her.

"It’s a bad night, so cold and stormy," Lieutenant Williams said. "Brutal," Dr. Marcus replied, beaming a little with pride at his wife’s singing in the other room. Major Goodweather, deaf as a result of an artillery bombardment during the War, was indifferent to the music. "I am merely suggesting, my friends," he said, "that we can, perhaps, use this order, which is distasteful to me, as an occasion to pursue the hostiles who have been thieving our cattle."

Lieutenant Williams blinked several times and, then, turned his gaze to the fire burning merrily in the hearth. The fire was big and bright and the flames leaped in a jolly way that Lieutenant Williams found calming. One might comfortably fall asleep watching the flicker of a fire this robust and well-mannered.

"There will be a campaign this Spring, as soon as the ice goes out of the rivers," Major Goodweather said. "That is most assuredly the case. And I am told that General George Custer will lead the force dispatched against the hostiles. So it would seem to me that when we go forth to implement our own orders, we might also keep an eye out for bands of marauding Sioux and, perhaps, punish them for thefts that they have committed."

"It seems a shame to employ fighting men on a relief mission that might just as well be accomplished by church groups or a ladies’ aid auxiliary," Dr. Marcus said.

"I would submit that the entire enterprise is not only questionable, but illegal," Major Goodweather said. "It’s another instance of the corruption and graft afflicting this president’s administration. Shameless pandering to indolent men."

"Illegal?" Quartermaster Biggens asked.

"I am soldier not a warden of the poor," Major Goodweather said.

"An order is an order," Quartermaster Biggens said, "And we have our orders." Quartermaster Biggens lit a cigar and sucked on it. Major Goodweather raised the bottle of brandy and asked them if they would take another drop. Dr. Marcus and Quartermaster Biggens set their glasses on the table in front of the Major and he distributed rations of brandy, pouring out the bottle in three measures.

"And those orders shall be fulfilled. In the due course of time," Major Goodweather replied.

Lieutenant Williams tore himself away from watching the brightly dancing flames in the hearth. "Yes, it would hardly be prudent to set forth in this weather," he said.

"Brigadier General Custer will depart when the ice is melted in the rivers, early April, I presume," Major Goodweather said. "Campaigning is not possible with the ways all clogged with snow and blizzards howling down out of the north. We will coordinate our expedition with his."

"But in the interval?" Quartermaster Biggens asked.

"No man of decent industry will starve," Major Goodweather said. "Isn’t that true, Dr. Marcus?"

The doctor seemed embarrassed to be called upon: "I am sure that you are right, Major. But, of course, one worries about the women and the children. They certainly can not be charged with this misfortune."

"I think rumors of starvation in this country are very much exaggerated," Major Goodweather said. "A man with powder and ammunition should be able to provision his family by hunting. I am told that the deer and antelope are most plentiful even in the areas scoured by the locusts."

"Our settlers are farmers. Not all of them are proficient hunters," Lieutenant Williams said.

"But is there abundant game?"

Lieutenant Williams paused: "That would have to be determined. I’m not so convinced about that. And I will say that the poverty among those afflicted is very severe."

"General Ord has made it clear what we are to do," Quartermaster Biggens said. "We are to enter our storehouses and inventory our material. Then, we are charged to go forth and distribute surplus provisions to those made indigent by the locusts."

"And, thereby, reduce our capacity for campaigning in the field if we are called upon to support General Custer," Major Goodweather said.

"Omaha is making you into grocers," Dr. Marcus said.

"General Ord has already turned his troops in the Army of the Platte into purveyors of dry-goods," Major Goodweather said. "Last year, he had them abroad, distributing ‘old pattern’ uniforms."

"We are a division of the Army of the Platte," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"I needn’t be reminded of that," said Goodweather, "and I am well aware of the chain-of-command."

"Flour, bread and hard-tack, salt pork and bacon," Quartermaster Biggens said. "From our storehouses according to our means to those that are impoverished according to their needs."

"Criminal," Goodweather said. He opened another bottle of brandy, brandishing it like a club.

"But an order, nonetheless," the Quartermaster replied.

Dr. Marcus said: "I think I have had enough." He cupped his hand over his glass.

"No more for me," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"All the better for me," Major Goodweather said, pouring himself another full measure.

In the room beyond the dim corridor, the ladies tired of singing. Mrs. Williams closed the lid over the keys on the pianoforte and Dr. Marcus’ wife set aside her sheet music. Mrs. Goodweather stood up and paused in the doorway, cocking her head to listen to the men’s voice at the end of the hallway. "I hope that they don’t indulge too heavily," Mrs. Goodweather said with a sigh. She heard her husband speaking, a little too loudly and in a voice that she found slightly shrill and, therefore, disturbing. The Quartermaster’s wife looked at Mrs. Goodweather with a sympathy that the Major’s wife thought slightly insubordinate.

For a time, the women talked about their children and the rigors of raising them on this desolate prairie. Then, the doctor’s wife suggested that one of them read aloud to the others. The wind gusted against the house and made the glass panes shudder in their frames. Mrs. Goodweather always wanted them to read from Pilgrim’s Progress but she was overruled in favor of a new novel by George Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career.

"Is it very scandalous?" The Quartermaster’s wife asked.

"Very much so," laughed Mrs. Marcus as she opened the volume and began to read in a clear voice, affecting just the slightest of British accents.

　

2.

The great hailstorm frightened Morgan’s beef-cattle and many of them went astray. In an arroyo remote from ranch house and buildings, one of the cowboys found Morgan’s barbed wire fence buried in rubble where a hillside had collapsed in the torrential rain. Judging by the hoofmarks imprinted in the wet clay, some of the herd stampeded through the ravine onto the open prairie. It was unclear how many cattle were missing. The animals remaining within the fenced property had scattered and had taken shelter in the deepest and most inaccessible pits and cavities in the broken country and remained huddled there, hidden and miserable, their flanks scarred by the thorn and yucca spears through which they had precipitously fled. It took Morgan’s ranchhands more than a week to round-up the beef-cows and, during that time, the Preacher had the bunkhouse, more or less, to himself. As the lightning flashed and the thunder rumbled and rain commingled with hail that was like bright white sparks, Morgan observed to his women that the Preacher’s prayer had, indeed, been efficacious because the black cloud brought wind and water but not locusts and, on that basis, he invited the man to stay with him at his ranch, at least until the awful weather cleared, and the lanes were dry enough for a wagon’s wheels. As he made this invitation, Morgan told the Preacher that he could sleep in the bunkhouse and asked the laundress to make a place for him there, remarking that he hoped the reverend pastor would not be offended by sharing these premises with his rough and ready cowboys, mostly uneducated and rude fellows. "No," the Preacher had replied, "I appreciate your generosity. Jesus made due with fishermen and shepherds and, surely, I can bunk with your vaqueros."

In the pursuit of the strays following the thunderstorm, everyone was very busy and, then, there was an encounter with a band of Sioux spiriting off a pair of Morgan’s cows, an incident in which rifle-shots were exchanged, although at a comfortably long-range, and this episode required Morgan with his foreman to ride up to the fort to petition Major Goodweather for increased vigilance and protection against the hostile savages. In that discussion, Major Goodweather told Morgan that he construed the Indians’ activities as a form of forage and that forage was an act of war, something that he had come to understand during his service with the Federal troops in the Great War to save the Union. During all of this time, the Preacher was, more or less, forgotten in Morgan’s bunkhouse, eating each noon and evening with the servants of the house and, forming a close, even, intimate association, with one of the laundresses, Irish Annie, the girl who had rushed forth to cling so tightly to him after his prayer that the heavens withhold their scourge of locusts from the rancher’s pastures.

By the time, the strays were all rounded-up and the beef-cows numbered and accounted-for (except for the pair snatched by the hostiles), the north winds were blowing continuously and the sky spitting sleet that turned to snow. Then, the country was mostly impassible, the tracks and lanes, such as they were, buried in wind-driven drifts of snow and the days alternating between bitter, deadly cold and warm thaws that flooded the roads traversing the badlands with axle-deep mud. During this time, Morgan, making a virtue of necessity, deputized the Preacher to conduct twice-daily Bible studies with his daughters and, sometimes, in the evening, the Pastor discussed theology with the rancher and, even, spent some hours attempting to teach the rancher’s wife the fundamentals of New Testament Greek. By this time, the Preacher was taking most of his evening meals with the rancher and his family, although he still breakfasted and ate his dinner with the other servants of the house.

Morgan’s bunkhouse consisted a half-dozen cell-shaped cubicles that opened onto a central room with field-stone fireplaces at both of its ends. The poor weather kept the cowboys inside most of the day and the men passed the time in the common room playing endless games of poker. At first, the cowboys invited the Preacher to play cards with them, but he demurred thinking that gambling might reduce his authority as a pastor and counselor to Morgan’s wife and daughters. Nonetheless, the Preacher sometimes circled the card table, looking on enviously, and commenting to himself how he would play this hand or that, and the cowboys, who also drank beer and whiskey while shuffling and dealing their cards, suspected that the reverend had more knowledge about the game than he had admitted. Certainly, he watched their play with a glittering eye and, after an hour or so, would vanish without excusing himself, slinking across the farm yard to the smoky shanties where the laundresses lived with their children.

Sometimes, poor people, ragged as beggars, with their ankles bloody and frost-bitten from trekking through the ice, came to the shacks where the laundresses lived. The Preacher saw them himself when he was visiting Irish Annie. The poor people asked for a little bread, some oat meal, perhaps, or a basket of potatoes or apples and the laundresses gave them the food as well as worn-out garments that the cowboys or the ranchers family no longer used. Winter and starvation had made the poor people half crazy and, although they spoke the same English as the Preacher, he always felt that poverty and inanition had altered their tongues so that they were, in fact, speaking an entirely different language, words that sounded familiar to the Preacher but that had completely different meanings in the discourse of the indigent. One of women who came to beg at the laundresses’ shanties brought with her a bright, blonde-haired boy. The boy eyed the tallow soap that the laundry girls used for their work with glistening, eager eyes. He was so hungry that the women were afraid that the boy would pocket the lumps of fatty soap and try to eat them somewhere in the barren country between the ranch and their devastated farmland. "I told my father," the boy said, "that everything we had went into the hopper." "The hopper?" Irish Annie asked. "The grasshopper," the boy said, laughing in a high, strained voice. He had a bad cough and the laundresses thought that he should stay overnight with them in their shacks, but the boy’s mother said that there were invalids at home and that she had to return and care for them and, so, they left before sunset, walking through the thigh-high drifts of snow toward the distant hills. "The cowboys will find them out there," Irish Annie told the Preacher, "frozen stiff as boards in all this frightful snow and ice."

"Oh no," the Preacher said, "the bodies will not surface until Spring."

"Someone should help those people," Irish Annie said.

The Preacher caressed her thigh and belly. "God will provide," he said. "God will provide."

"I hope to heaven that is true," Irish Annie said.

The Preacher could adduce a half-dozen well-attested proofs of divine providence, including the child that he had raised from the dead at the silver camp at Creede, but all of these examples involved mercies extended to himself and, perhaps, demonstrated nothing more than the he was one of God’s elect.

A couple weeks later, Irish Annie whispered to the Preacher that she thought that she was with child. The Preacher embraced her heartily and, then, went to the bunkhouse where the cowboys were playing one of their never-ending games of cards. He insinuated that one of the men was cheating and there was a brief, vicious fistfight between the players that greatly pleased the Preacher because it showed him that most people are worse than brutish animals. Then, the Preacher went into his cell and kneeled next to his cot, praying with all his might. Three days later, Irish Annie announced to the Preacher that she had miscarried.

　

　

　

3.

Major Goodweather’s weakness for strong drink was well-known and, so, Dr. Marcus suggested that the gentlemen join the ladies where the temptation to carouse would be decidedly less. The Major ignored this proposal and declared that he would gladly give up his command at the fort to serve as an adjutant, or, even, an enlisted man in General Custer’s summer campaign against the Sioux.

"I see nothing but ignominy here," he cried and, it seemed for a moment, that his small eyes, half-closed under the influence of liquor, produced a half-dozen tears that wet his cheek.

"Come, come now, Major," Dr. Marcus said. "The duty of a soldier, and, I suppose, his glory is in executing orders."

"That’s so," Major Goodweather affirmed.

Quartermaster Biggens asked: "If you were ordered to lead troops in a dawn assault on an Indian village so to destroy their lodges and shoot their horses and carry out the slaughter of all men and boys present in that encampment, would you carry out that directive?"

"Undoubtedly," Major Goodweather said.

"Because it is a just and good order you deem strategically sound or because it is an order?" Quartermaster Biggens continued.

"Because it is an order."

"Then, why is it abhorrent to you to act as ordered in supplying salt pork and blankets and flour to your fellow white men?"

Major Goodweather paused. "I distinguish between the two orders on the basis of their accord with human nature. I am soldier and my business is war and war requires that we fight and kill. War is the mother of all of manly virtues and the natural state of the world."

"Some might disagree with you on that point, sir," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"There have always been wars," Dr. Marcus said mildly. He looked to Lieutenant Williams.

Lieutenant Williams said: "A soldier is bound to execute only those orders that have a lawful intent and purpose."

"Nonsense," Major Goodweather said. "An order is an order."

"So why the hesitancy to perform the order to offer charity to your fellow white men?" Quartermaster Biggens asked.

"Because the demand that I distribute my supplies to civilians weakens my capacity to fight and, further – and this is most important – is destructive to the very men that it would aid. It’s contrary to human nature."

"I don’t see how," Quartermaster Biggens said.

"Have you read your Emerson, sir – Self-reliance?" Major Goodweather said. "The struggle for existence requires fortitude. If, now, we distribute charity to these farmers, don’t we strip them of their manhood? And don’t we insure that the next crisis that ensues will result in further petitions for charity and further reliance on the beneficence of others?"

"But these are special circumstances," Lieutenant Williams said. "Three years of grasshopper infestation. The crawling larva in the Spring and, then, the great swarms of them in Summer and Fall."

"I unwilling to cede such influence to a mere insect," Major Goodweather said.

"An insect that comes in the billions, in swarms that are a mile high advancing across a front that is the width of a county?" Quartermaster Biggens said.

"I haven’t seen that," Major Goodweather replied. "Indeed, I think the accounts of this plague are much exaggerated."

"The fort’s been spared," Lieutenant Williams said.

"Poverty is a direct consequence of improvidence and indolence and..." Major Goodweather paused.

"...and ‘intemperance’ you were about to say?" interposed Quartermaster Biggens.

"I do so much fancy a drop of strong spirits, that much I’ll concede," the Major said smiling.

"If it is known that the army is distributing its materials to the poor," Dr. Marcus asked, "won’t we attract all manner of riff-raff to the fort? And, then, won’t there be bitter rivalry among the beggars for our largesse?"

"Charity encourages habitual beggary, it has ever been thus..." Major Goodweather said. "Beggary and confirmed mendicancy increases the tribe of the idle and vicious."

"But there are people in this country who are boiling grass and weeds for their soup," Quartermaster Biggens said. "If their poverty were the result of an invading foe, you would supply relief without hesitating."

"Upon the order of a proper authority," Major Goodweather said.

"In this case, the invading foe are the locusts," Lieutenant Williams said.

"If anybody chooses to lie down and be eaten up by the grasshoppers, I don’t much care if he is devoured body, boots, and breeches," Major Goodweather said. "But if he fights and keeps on fighting, I am convinced that the cases in which he will require the charity of others will be rare, very rare indeed."

Dr. Marcus exhaled a cloud of pipe-smoke: "In the majority of cases, our pioneers are robust fellows. I have no doubt that, in the majority of cases, they will pull through just fine. And those who don’t –"

"It’s providence, my dear fellows, it’s the decree of God. If you are to be eaten up by locusts, that is the ordinance of the almighty and who are we to interfere with such ordinances," Major Goodweather said.

"At minimum, I suppose, the fellows who we succor should agree to pay us back for the loan of food and blankets and seed," Dr. Marcus said.

"That’s what the Sutler says," Lieutenant Williams replied. "Mr. Berwyn told me that the other

day. He advised that General Ord’s orders to the Army of the Platte insofar as they mandate charity to private individuals is unconstitutional. Goods may be provided to the destitute but only upon the execution of promissory notes and other instruments for repayment with interest."

"Interest?" Major Goodweather said. "Are we all Jews here?"

"Is Mr. Berwyn of that persuasion?" Lieutenant Williams asked.

"I spoke figuratively," Major Goodweather replied. "Although Mr. Berwyn would insist on usury."

"The valiant pioneers will depart the land devastated by the locusts," Dr. Marcus said. "They will go to earn their way in the pineries of Minnesota or in the gold fields of the Black Hills. I believe that we will find only the weakest and most feckless remaining on their farms when your columns go forth to render aid."

"Of that I am sure," Major Goodweather said.

A candle borne by one of the women came down the darkened corridor. In the shadows, the woman’s face shone like an angel, eyes and hair illumined by the flame that she carried.

"We’re tired of reading," the woman said. "The ladies ask that you join us."

"So the nymphs will receive us," Major Goodweather said. "Arethusa and her sisters await."

Major Goodweather stood up unsteadily. He swayed to and fro, his feet planted far apart to keep him upright.

"We should make a punch, a rum punch, to share with the ladies," Major Goodweather proclaimed.

"That’s not necessary my good fellow," Dr. Marcus said.

"It’s essential, essential," Dr. Goodweather said, mispronouncing the word a little.

"My dear friend..." Dr. Marcus began.

"No, it’s essential, really essential – a good rum punch..."

"Not at all," Quartermaster Biggens said.

Dr. Marcus took Major Goodweather’s arm and steadied him. The candle withdrew a few feet, loitering in the dark hall and the wind outside snarled against the windows and flung sleet at the glass panes. Major Goodweather said something in Latin.

The men stood and Dr. Marcus half-bowed to the lady holding the candle and, then, led by Major Goodweather they began their march down the dark corridor, a campaign through the dark accompanied by the wail of the wind outside. After eight or nine steps, Major Goodweather lost his footing and slid sideways so that he fell onto the floor, cracking his head hard against the wainscoting.

Major Goodweather’s wife hurried to her husband’s side. Her skirts rustled against the floor and the dry air conducted a spark upward from the place where she touched him. The spark flashed so briefly that it was impossible to tell whether it was white or orange or violet.

"My husband has been a bit indisposed this week," Mrs. Goodweather said.

"Idleness is the curse of the true soldier," Dr. Marcus said softly and his wife nodded her head in agreement.



4.

Major Goodweather reckoned that his baggage train should consist of no fewer than four heavily laden freight wagons of Conestoga manufacture together with a touring buckboard for the provision of ammunition and rations to the relief column. Ten infantryman were to accompany the wagons to protect against raiding Indians and starving pioneers who might be inclined toward theft or riot. Lieutenant Williams was to lead a six cavalry troopers. The mounted men, with a Ponca scout, were to reconnoiter the country in advance of the relief column in the hope of encountering and, perhaps, suppressing hostile Sioux rumored to have kidnaped a child and known to have rustled several beef-cows from pastures near the Fort. Because he opposed the order from Omaha to provide welfare to the locust plague victims, Major Goodweather intended to accompany the column for the purpose of writing from personal observation a report to his superiors that he expected to be both scathing and eloquent. Major Goodweather had been an accomplished horseman when he was younger and had spent days in the saddle during the War between the States but he had grown fat with idleness at the Fort and gouty, an affliction that particularly troubled the commander when he was in his cups.

On the morning of the expedition, well before dawn, the Conestogas were drawn up in a file on the parade grounds, loaded by soldiers who used the touring buckboard and two small wagons usually deployed for gathering wood to convey provisions to the big freight wagons. On inspection, the running gear of one of the Conestogas was found to be fractured, the broken weld rendering the wagon impossible to turn in any reasonable radius. Major Goodweather ordered that one of the freight wagons owned by Sutler Berwyn be requisitioned for the mission. Berwyn protested and set an impossibly high rental price on his rig. Several teamsters were dispatched to retrieve Berwyn’s wagon from the Sutler’s compound. Sutler Berwyn protested and said that the wagon was being taken to impoverish him and drive him out of business so that the government would have the monopoly on sales to the friendly Indians and local pioneers who traded at the Sutler’s store. Not quite at gunpoint, the wagon was commandeered by the armed men from the fort, driven to the parade ground and duly loaded with blankets, boots, bedding and canvas tents, as well as several barrels of salt-pork.

After the sun rose, George looked at the sky and, then, stamping his feet on the ground because it was very cold, said that the day would be dry and windy and that the nights would be cold enough to freeze the water in the marshes and lagoons by the river. At least in the morning, when the earth was still frozen, the relief column should make good progress overland on its mission of mercy. At Major Goodweather’s order, the cavalry rode forth, very quickly crossing the prairies and breaks near the fort to attain sentry positions on the buttes at the horizon. The wagons would attain those heights midday so that the cavalry might, then, range forth again as the column moved north and west toward the river. The heavy freight wagons lumbered forward very slowly with Major Goodweather slouched on a horse at their head and, when the marching men turned to look over their shoulder, it seemed that they had made almost no progress away from the buildings of the fort behind them. A number of ragamuffins and scarecrows were standing idly by the Sutler’s compound, warming themselves at the embers of fires lit the night before. (Mr. Berwyn had given them permission to rake through his potato field harvested the previous year in the hope that they might find some vegetables still lingering intact in the frozen ground.) When the ragged men learned that the wagon train was driving north and west to provide relief to the starving pioneers, a sort of cheer was raised so that the dogs at the encampment barked and the Indian children came from their huts and lean-tos to race for a quarter mile along side the Conestogas.

At three homesteads, the wagons halted. At each place, Major Goodweather asked the settler to attest that he was "absolutely destitute" and had neither livestock nor seed to plant. The first two settlers were willing to stipulate as to their poverty and signed affidavits to that effect. At the third farm, the homesteader said that he was destitute and would so attest under penalty of perjury. Major Goodweather noted that the man had a dilapidated-looking ox standing in his pasture, a beast that seemed not to have eaten for some time and that seemed unsteady on its legs. "But, sir, you have livestock," Major Goodweather protested. "How am I to travel or put in my crop this Spring if I am not allowed to retain my ox?" the farmer asked. Major Goodweather shook his head and said that relief was granted on the condition of absolute impecuniousness and not on any other grounds. "So am I to surrender my animal to you?" the farmer asked. The man’s haggard face was red but white around his nostrils. "Not at all," Major Goodweather said. "I am merely without authority to render any aid to you." Goodweather climbed back on his horse a bit clumsily. His gout afflicted him and he was limping. The column proceeded away from the farmstead. The farmer’s wife emerged from their sod dug-out and sobbing raised her infant so that Major Goodweather could see the child swaddled in a rags. Two troopers went to the final wagon in the baggage train and, loading their arms with as much bacon and hardtack as they could carry, brought the food to the woman and spread it out at her feet. The baby howled and Major Goodweather, whose foot was throbbing, watched out of the corner of his eye but pretended not to see what the men had done.

At noon, having made good progress for wagons so heavily laden, the baggage train reached the pine-clad heights where the horsemen were waiting for them. Major Goodweather asked if the men had seen any trace of hostile Sioux. Lieutenant Williams said that they had not encountered anyone and that much of the territory seemed to have been abandoned. He remarked that there was a company of pioneers foraging on a table-land about three miles to the north, pointing to a ridge crowned with stony palisades harboring snow in their fissures. "They seem quite self-sufficient," Lieutenant Williams said.

Major Goodweather was interested in collecting evidence that most of the farmers, at least of the better sort, had not been so much inconvenienced by the grasshoppers, and, so, after their noon repast, he led the train in the direction of the mesa where the settlers were said to be located. Major Goodweather told the cavalryman to range widely across the country as far north as the breaks at the river, but to rejoin the caravan at the Pilgrim Holiness church where several country lanes intersected.

In the valley at the foot of the pine-sprinkled ridge, the relief column came upon a settlement with several buildings all of them scarred and wrinkled and half-burnt away by fire. On the side of a granary, someone had written in chalk-white words GRASSHOPPERED.

By mid-afternoon, it was warm and the sun was high in the sky, burning brightly over the barren land. On a small knoll, the column saw three wooden crosses with the word STARVED written on each of them. The snow in the pockets between the brittle-looking cliffs overhead melted and the ravines were slick with mud so that it took the big wagons a long time to attain the heights.

The top of the mountain was a grassy expanse encompassing sixty or more hectares and the flat prairie was strewn with the white and brown bones of bison. A man with two women in tattered shawls stood near a small cart to which four hungry-looking dogs were tethered. The man had a shovel in his hands and was loading the buffalo bones into the cart. The women sorted through the bones, now and then, finding something that must have been a prize because that specimen was set aside in a special burlap sack. The dogs rooted through the bones under their paws and, where calves had been shot on the day of the great buffalo massacre, the dead animals had not been skinned so that half-mummified and leathery carcasses rested here and there among the skeletons.

Major Goodweather’s wagons crushed the bones under their wheel rims and went forward slowly, a crackling sound of femur and rib breaking that sometimes made a loud report like a rifle-shot. The man waved at the relief column and, then, came toward Major Goodweather.

"We have come to render aid to anyone who is in desperate and impecunious straits," Major Goodweather said.

"I won’t deny that it’s been lean," the man said. His eyes were grey and immobile and, when he spoke, his jaw didn’t move. The words came from a hollow place in his rib cage twisted through lips like thin, pale laundry mangles. "It’s a hungry spring, nothing ripe yet except these bones."

Major Goodweather noticed that the women brushed back their hair and, even, cast coquettish sidelong looks at his soldiers. Although they were wearing heavy, malformed boots, foot-ware that looked as if it had been cast out of lead, their ankles and calves were bare to the knee.

"The railroad buys bones, a dollar a ton with a premium for horns," the man said.

"These bones been picked over," one of the women said. "You don’t find many horns."

"Sometimes, but not often," the other woman said. They looked like they were sisters.

"Do you have children at home?" Major Goodweather said. "We can grant you some assistance for the sake of your children."

"Not any more," the man said.

"Got no home," one of the women said. "We’re ‘hoppered’ out of hearth and home."

Major Goodweather looked at his plump fit soldiers and the fat oxen drawing his heavy wagons.

"We don’t think it fitting to ask for charity," the man said. "God will provide."

"God will provide," both women said echoing him.

A gunshot cracked nearby, loud and piercing so that Major Goodweather almost fell from his mount. He raised a fist in the air enraged. The dogs tethered to the bone-cart cowered and some of them whimpered.

"I didn’t give any order to –"

One of the soldiers stood up from where he had crouched to rest his rifle barrel across the back gate of the wagon. He grinned uncertainly at Major Goodweather, eyes blinking in the faint bluish haze of gunsmoke around his shoulders and head.

"I shot one of them grey fellers," the soldier said, pointing across the field of bones to a furry humped mass sprawled on the ground. "I’m sorry, sir, but I thought –"

"Wolf," another soldier said. "Nosing around to steal these bones from these folk."

The two women looked up at Major Goodweather with their red eyes and, then, set out toward the fallen wolf. Major Goodweather saw that they limped slightly as if their feet were injured and their hips not entirely trustworthy, a slow, swiveling gait that seemed somehow indirect and crooked.

"Are you sure you don’t need assistance?" Major Goodweather asked again. "We are prepared to issue some rations, provisions."

"We have no money," the man said. "And we’re not accustomed to buying goods on credit."

"This is charity," Major Goodweather said. "We don’t expect payment."

"It’s a hungry moon," the man said. "You know, the Indians call this month the "hungry moon", before the grass is green and when the game is gaunt, the rabbits famished too, earth too cold to dig up roots, no nuts or seeds on the trees."

"That’s why we’ve come to render assistance," Major Goodweather said.

"God will provide," the man said. "Anyone who accepts charity blasphemes against his heavenly father – God will provide."

He pointed to the dead wolf. The two women were squatting next to the carcass. Then, he began to cough. The cough racked him and, after a minute or two, he sat down in the bones.

Major Goodweather did not descend from his mount. The gout in his foot hurt him and he didn’t want to put weight on his swollen toes and ankle.

"No weapon is to be fired without my order," Major Goodweather shouted to his men. Then, he signaled that the column should continue its march.

A half mile from the hilltop covered with bones, one of the men asked another soldier if there was a way to butcher and eat a wolf.

"Oh, yes," the other soldier said. "The old mountain men did it all the time. It’s no different from eating dog. The Indians eat their dogs when they can’t find game."

"Dog?" the soldier asked.

"It’s hard to imagine," the other infantryman said.

One of the men set a little cairn of salt pork and boxes of biscuits on a knoll. The man tied a red bandana to pile of provisions so that the bone-collectors would see it. Far away, on a pyramidal mound of earth, three wolves sat overlooking the bone-strewn mesa. One of the troopers, Private Glasgow, raised his rifle and sighted it on the wolves.

The oxen drawing the wagons smelled the wolves and seemed skittish, pulling toward the side opposite the animals.

"Better not shoot," Private Thompson told Private Glasgow.

"They are mourning their brother," Private Glasgow said, shouldering the weapon.

　

5.

Mr. Morgan debated with the Preacher whether the locusts would come again. The Preacher said that afflictions like the locust swarm were special manifestations of providence and akin to the year of jubilee – a sabbatical plague arising at intervals with a refractory period during which all would be well. "If the plague were continuous and unremitting, it would lack authority as a decree from the All Mighty," the Preachers said. "But we have had the grasshoppers in swarms for two years now and I see no reason why they would not return once the weather is temperate this year," Mr. Morgan said. The Preacher said that there had been very little snow this winter and that the temperatures had been cold and he supposed that the frost had destroyed the eggs in the soil where the grasshoppers had deposited them. "Surely, the cold will have spoiled the egg beds," the Preacher said. "I am not so certain on that point," Mr. Morgan answered.

Mr. Morgan had collected a variety of recipes for roast and fried locusts and said that if they came again this Spring, he would make a curry of them. "They are perfectly edible," Mr. Morgan said. "But to avoid unpleasantness, you must remove the wings and legs – those members will stick in your craw." "Disgusting," the Preacher replied. "Oh not at all," Mr. Morgan said. "I have tried them cooked with garlic and onions, salted or fried with bacon – the mature insects have a most delightful nutty flavor. You will concede that John the Baptist subsisted quite comfortably on them, together with wild honey." "So it is recorded," the Preacher replied.

A baby cried in another room. "It’s nice to have a baby in the house again," Mr. Morgan said. "My children have been grown for many years." The Preacher knew that the rancher’s sons had studied engineering in New England and, now, worked in industry in Pittsburgh and Chicago. One of the laundresses who had just given birth to her own child went into the nursery to attend to the baby. "Poor little Alpheus," Mr. Morgan said.

It had been a propitious thing to have the Preacher in the household when the infant was delivered to them in the sleet and storm. At first, the baby seemed scrawny, ill-tempered, tormented by the colic, and, for several weeks, the child was despaired of and Morgan, who kept his distance at that time, recalling his own grief at the illness of his children when they were little, thought that the baby had been brought to his ranch only to die there, an unhappy and unlucky thing and, possibly, the sort of misfortune that might draw locusts out of the sky. Mr. Morgan was convinced that the locusts were the materialization of certain forms of misery and that grief and unhappiness summoned them and, so, he did not even look at the foundling child, didn’t hold the baby or dandle it on his knee, for fear of bringing calamity upon the ranch. Morgan decreed that the Preacher baptize the child but, then, prepared himself for the infant’s funeral, obsequies that he intended to avoid. But, after a few weeks, the foundling rallied, fattening on the milk of the laundress, and Morgan, with his wife, were so bold as to, even,

name the infant. Morgan knew a bit of Latin and had read Virgil, although mostly in Dryden’s translation, and, so, he named the child "Alpheus."

The laundress acting as wet nurse to the infant told the other women that the Preacher’s prayers and baptism had saved a baby that was otherwise marked for death. The laundress who had miscarried her child said that there was sorcery, for both good and ill, associated with the man and that he had certain powers, that much was irrefutable. Ponca women with sick women sometimes came to Morgan’s ranch and asked that the Preacher bless those children and he prayed over them and, even, encouraged the mothers to become Christians. The Preacher said that, when the snow was gone and the grass reestablished on the hills, he would go forth and resurrect the Pilgrim Holiness Church – he told Morgan that he would build the church anew from its ruins with the help of the rancher and his cow-hands and found a congregation in the wilderness so that, when the pioneers returned to the land that they had deserted, there would be a consecrated place for their baptisms and weddings and burials.

"I don’t think the settlers will return," Morgan said. "The country is too harsh for them and the rain too unpredictable." The laundress brought the infant, freshly changed and clean smelling, into the room where the men were sitting and Morgan held the baby on his lap. The baby looked at Morgan’s beard with interest and, then, fell asleep. "You mean," the Preacher said, "that you own so much land in this territory that there will be no farmsteads for the pioneers to acquire."

"It’s true that I’ve acquired a great amount of land due to the depredations of the locusts," Morgan said. "But I’ve always thought of myself as helping the destitute by purchasing their ruined farms."

"Indeed, that is true enough," the Preacher said. "But you now own a very vast preserve here."

"It’s a patchwork," Morgan said. "Not all of the tracts are contiguous. And I would consider relinquishing the more remote parcels, I think, if I could trade or exchange property to connect my lands adjacent to this property."

"The pioneers will return," the Preacher said.

"It will have to be new men with new families," Morgan replied. "The men who have gone to the gold fields and the silver mines are ruined for agriculture. The lure of the ore destroys the husbandry in them. Consider this child – do you think we will see his father again?"

"It’s unlikely," the Preacher said.

In his sleep, the baby winced slightly as if he knew that the men were speaking about him.

The day before the child was brought to the ranch, the sun shone and there was a general thaw so that the creeks rose and, where the land was eroded, the meltwater ran in innumerable muddy rivulets down into the pockets and craters in the land. But in that season, warmth only presaged the advance of cold weather, icy winds from the north, and the dark clouds scudding over the badlands brought freezing rain first, then, sleet that fell slantwise out of the skies, and, then, after dark, blizzard winds and snow. In the midst of that chaos in the elements, one of Morgan’s cowhands, riding the fence-line to retrieve livestock baffled by the storm and wandering far from their accustomed pastures, came upon a farmer huddled under a buckboard wagon with its wheels frozen hub-deep in the mud. A ox rested on its side at the head of the wagon, just skin and bones frozen into an armature of icy sleet. With his body, the farmer was sheltering a baby, probably two months old, but appearing to be much younger, a pink and scrawny thing with a cry that was like cloth being ripped.

The ranch-hand helped the farmer onto the back of his horse and they made there way back to the house. The farmer said that he had been ‘hoppered,’ successive swarms of the locusts, both the crawling nymphs and the flying insects and, that, just as he was about depart the land, his rations depleted to a barrel of pickled sauerkraut and a few dozen moldering potatoes, his wife, being pregnant, had been seized with labor pains and rendered unable to travel. The woman gave birth to the child, but it was a difficult travail for her, accomplished alone in the man’s remote sod-house and, afterward, his wife’s mind seemed disturbed and she spoke of strangling the child nursing at her breast and worried that she would act on thoughts that were troubling her. The farmer said that he did not think that his wife would injure the child but that she became increasingly distraught and angry, demanding that the farmer load his gun and bring her meat to eat – "You brought us to this place," the woman said, "and you must provide for us." The farmer was afraid to leave his wife alone with the child and stood for hours at the threshold of the sod bunker carved into the hillside, his gun at his side in the hope that some animal suitable for hunting would wander near enough so that he could shoot it. In fine weather, deer came down from the hills and had to be driven away from their corn and squash patch, but the land had been swept clean by the crawling and flying locusts and the game had fled from this part of the county. At last, his wife said that she was so hungry that she would go herself into the hills and see if she could find some roots or seeds to devour, maintaining that on a distant hillside there were orange and red flowers that grew from bulbs buried in the sandy soil and that those tubers could, perhaps, be boiled and eaten. And, so, his wife left the baby lying on the floor and went outside and, before he could stop her, she ran very swiftly across the dooryard and, then, into the broken sticks and brambles where the locusts had destroyed the brush along the stream near their home. The farmer was concerned that the woman was running, lunging forward, when she had so recently given birth and had been so badly starved as well, and he shouted to her to return and that he would kill one of the two oxen remaining to draw his buckboard wagon so that they would have meat. But she didn’t respond and so the farmer gave chase, following up the stream bed into the close embrace of the hills.

Then, as the farmer told Morgan at the ranch-house, the locusts came again and fell from the sky like flakes of snow. The insects made a vortex around them and the farmer lost his way in the clouds of flying locusts. When the swarm lifted from the earth and departed, the farmer found himself in an unfamiliar country, staggering along the edge of creek that ran brightly over agate-like stones of many colors. He saw his wife’s footprints, small and distinct, in the soft sand along the edge of the water that rippled down from a cave opening into the side of a rocky hill. The farmer followed his wife’s footprints to the mouth of the cave where there were slabs of reddish sandstone like quarters of beef resting against the walls of the grotto. Beneath the rock overhang, a round eye-shaped pool brimmed over its edges so that cold water cascaded down the terraces of sandstone to form the creek in its agate and jasper stream bed. The farmer knelt to cup water in his hands and carry it to his lips. The stream slipping down the sandstone ledges seemed to whisper to him in his wife’s voice. This creek, the farmer told Morgan, did not exist before the locusts had come and, somehow, their devouring jaws had cut through the foliage and the grass to expose the water rolling down from the rock. The spring seemed fresh and newborn and his wife’s foot prints in the sand and soft reddish soil led directly to the edge of the water and, then, ended. The farmer said that he thought that his wife had fled the locusts, creatures that disgusted her, and that, in order to avoid their attack, she had been transformed, metamorphosed into the spring, this source of water that had not existed in this place before. And the more that he thought about his wife’s metamorphosis, the more he imagined that she had become the freshwater rolling sweetly down from the cave and the more he was convinced he could hear her singing, as she had during happier days, where the water babbled over the bright, many-colored stones. He wanted to linger by the spring in the hills forever but knew that the baby was alone at home and, probably, dying, and so he felt he had to return to that child and, at least, hold the baby in his arms before it passed away.

On his way back to the farm, following the stream that his wife had become, a watery guide that led him home, the farmer found a female goat wandering in the wilderness. Then, he was confused because he thought that, perhaps, he was mistaken about the creek and that his wife had been changed into a goat. But he led the goat back to the sod house and found that he could express milk from the animal’s dangling, triangular udders and, so, the baby did not die. Then, the weather changed and ice and snow clogged the trails. In the thaw, the farmer thought that he could, perhaps, escape to Morgan’s ranch, but his ox was greatly weakened by starvation, and, ultimately, unable to pull their wagon through the blizzard. The farmer expected to perish under the buckboard and had said his last prayers when the cowhand came upon them stranded in the mud.

When the farmer had been fed and, after he had slept for several days in a room warmed by a fire burning merrily in the hearth, he told Morgan that he was willing to sell him his homestead in exchange for enough money to buy a mule and some provisions for an expedition to the gold fields at Deadwood Gulch or Rapid Creek. At that time, the baby was expected to die and so Morgan said that he would care for the child until his father returned from the Black Hills with his fortune. The farmer told Morgan his name so that a quit-claim deed could be properly drawn and executed. When Morgan asked the man about the child’s first name thinking about a gravestone for the infant, the farmer said that his wife had been too sick and weak to name the baby boy and that he had not settled upon a name himself because he thought the child was sickly and would soon be in Heaven. "Well, then, I will name your boy," Morgan told the farmer.

Morgan said that the spring in the hills was like Arethusa, a fountain of freshwater rising on the very edge of the salt sea in Syracuse. Alpheus was a river in Greece much praised by shepherds and the naiads that they pursued and, as legend maintained, the course of the stream buried its head and hair of running waters in the earth on the edge of the Greek sea and, then, flowed under the ocean to emerge once more on the island of Sicily in the harbor of Syracuse. So Arethusa and Alpheus were related, although in a hidden way. The farmer had drawn a map to show Morgan where Arethusa’s fountain arose in the badland hills, the source of a stream with waters of abiding and pure sweetness. When the weather cleared, and it was Spring, Morgan said that he would find that place and, then, acquire it for his ranch. The Preacher commended this idea and the child slept peacefully on the rancher’s lap.

　

　

　

6.

The relief column returned to the Fort. George told Major Goodweather that the Sioux raiding party, with a white child hostage, had broken its winter camp and was moving again. George said that the Indians were not attacking the pioneer encampments or farmsteads because the locusts had seized everything from the settlers and there was no point in robbing beggars. Major Goodweather drafted a report critical of his orders and the mission to supply food and blankets and seed to the impoverished farmers. He put the report in his desk drawer, because he thought it might be construed as intemperate, and, then, re-read his writing a few days later. The report was honest, Major Goodweather noted, and laconic in a soldierly manner, but he detected a troubling incongruity in his account of the expedition. Although he was critical of the objectives of the relief mission, it seemed to him that his narrative account of the expedition thoroughly supported the orders that he condemned as distasteful and "questionable from a military perspective." This mismatch between Major Goodweather’s opinions and the circumstances that he had encountered during his relief expedition suggested that either he had misrepresented the facts or his views of the mission were mistaken. Principles, it seemed, yielded to specific instances of poverty: facts were different from ideas and, often, thwarted them although that did not necessarily make the ideas wrong. It seemed to him that he could rewrite the report in such a way as to eliminate this incongruity, but this would be difficult and time-consuming and, in any event, a supply train of provisions had just reached the fort, the big wagons driven by teamsters hired at the rail-head, and, at the same time, new orders from Omaha had arrived requiring that Major Goodweather use those supplies to mount another charitable expedition. So the Major put the report that he had prepared aside and, once again, told his men that they were going to venture north toward the river and the badlands, ostensibly to provide welfare to the farmers ruined by the locust infestation, but, in fact, with the objective of employing their Ponca scouts to track the hostile raiding party so that the cavalry could pursue those Indians, rescue the white hostage, and punish those renegades.

The snow had melted in the last hideaways in the rough terrain and the streams ran swift and clear in their green gutters meandering through the land, all the brush budding green with tender young leaves. Hungry deer and antelope appeared on hillsides grazing on the bright grass. The mornings were cold and crisp, but by afternoon it was warm and the wilderness seemed to close its eyes and luxuriate in the sun overhead, somehow self-contained, dreaming of its own abundance, the haze of green leaf in the folds and seams of the land shielding from view a million busy little factories where new life in fur and feather and seed and flower was being built. The blue of the sky was so intense and unclouded that an alert eye could see the moon and stars shimmering in the transparent and glassy depths of the heavens.

Major Goodweather’s column made rapid progress to Morgan’s ranch where trenches full of stagnant camphor and kerosene encircled the ranchhouse and the barns and the neatly made outbuildings. The Major was invited to dine with Morgan and, after they had eaten, the men retired to the veranda above the home’s front door to enjoy the temperate evening. Major Goodweather praised Morgan’s industry in combating the pests. "I don’t know if I have been successful on my own account or simply lucky," Morgan said. "Fortune favors the industrious," Major Goodweather said, looking out over the landscape of flower beds and lawn and the trim stables and bunkhouse.

Morgan said that he benefitted from the presence of a Preacher and that the man had said several prayers to prevent the locusts from descending upon his ranch and, further, had breathed life into an infant recently rescued from the wilderness and, otherwise, everyone concurred, doomed to die. Major Goodweather said that he wanted to meet this interesting fellow. "He has left only a day or two ago," Morgan said. "Departed to rebuild a church and congregation at Pilgrim Holiness. He is certain that the pioneers will return and flourish and that the plague of locusts has now ended."

"There are rhythms in nature," Major Goodweather said, blowing a cloud of bluish cigar smoke around his head, " and the strange perpetuation of these pestilential swarms seemed to violate nature’s rhythms."

"We must continue to pray that the do not descend upon us again, this third year," Morgan said.

The next day, the relief column moved across land, now flowering, that the locusts had devoured. People came to greet them, emerging as if from caves dug into the earth, arising from the ground itself, it seemed, haggard and ragged, their mouths red from bleeding gums, with glaring eyes like lanterns. There were many of these people, more than Major Goodweather expected, and they were all in dire need and weak with starvation. These people were the remnants of homesteaders who had come to populate the imaginary villages and cities platted by the railroad companies. They staggered about like corpses reanimated by galvanic energy, showing yellow jaundiced eyes and faces peppered with sores and scabs, but, when the soldiers approached, the emaciated people grinned, opening their mouths to show the hollow darkness behind their bleeding and loose teeth.

Troops set up tents from which blankets and foodstuffs could be distributed and the starving farmers squatted near the encampment, bony knees rising above the men’s brittle-looking skulls, legs crooked like those of the grasshoppers that had reduced them to this state. The farmers whispered to one another and some of them fell sideways and seemed to sleep in the bright sunlight, snoring loudly. Rations were distributed according the capacity that the starving people had to carry away the provisions that they were given – it would do no good for a badly weakened man to be given a hundred pounds of flour only to collapse, and be injured, by the weight of provender that was supposed to save him. Major Goodweather surveyed the scene and wrote notes and said that he would, perhaps, write a book indicting this policy while, at the same time, acknowledging that, at this precise location and this exact time, there seemed little alternative to the mission of mercy that he was superintending. Indeed, that was his dilemma: although the policy of rescue seemed misguided and, even, pernicious, in the abstract, Major Goodweather felt forced to concede that these measures were, perhaps, justified in particular cases and this troubled him.

The cavalry scouts returned from their reconnaissance. They reported that the Preacher was on the height of land a few miles away, a windy ridge where there were burnt ruins. Major Goodweather went that way, sickened by the filth and poverty of the farmers clustered around his tents. He ordered that his men strap together the branches of several trees to make a pole at least thirty feet high so that a flag could be displayed from atop that makeshift lance, green with leaves and thrust up into the sky. The white canvas of the tents and the big, glistening and polished wheels of the Conestogas looked bright and efficient and clean next to the mob of ragged beggars clustering around the encampment – the white people were dirtier and more abject than any Indians Major Goodweather had ever seen, another observation that he noted for his report, but expected that he would suppress when it came time to complete that document.

A rocky trail, just barely accessible to his horse, climbed toward the sunny ridge-top where fire had burned the Pilgrim Holiness Church to the ground. The preacher had built a lean-to propped against a timber and lathe wall of the church that was still partly upright, the shack nailed together from bits of broken and burnt wood. Next to the shanty, the preacher had raised a cairn of soot-darkened foundation stones. By the cairn, a big bronze bell rested on a bed of ashes. The Preacher had cleansed the sides of the bell and polished the bronze until it shone in the ashes with an incandescent light, catching the beams of the sun and reflecting them out across the barren country.

Major Goodweather shook hands with the Preacher and commended him upon his work. A man in tattered clothing was assisting the Preacher, digging with a spade in the wreckage of the church. Burnt bibles were strewn about the ground and hymnals split open to show notes and words within their pages and a few rough-hewn pews were heaped up in a pile as to provide fuel for bonfire. Major Goodweather dispatched his orderlies down the trenched, pebble-slick sides of the ridge to report his location to the men in relief camp.

"It’s an impressive view," Major Goodweather said, surveying the land around the hilltop.

"Yes, that is why the church was built here," the Preacher replied.

A green grasshopper, half the size of the Preacher’s thumb, leaped clumsily from underfoot. The grasshopper landed awkwardly, deflected by the edge of a thistle plant so that the insect sprawled on its side. The man in the tattered clothing lifted the grasshopper by its crooked and protuberant hind legs. The insect’s head was black with two large eyes and it had stubby antennae like the prongs of an antelope. As the man held the grasshopper, a slick of tobacco-colored froth came from its jointed and complex jaws and, further, seemed to exude from the armor plating on the insect’s abdomen. The man held the insect up to his eyes and inspected it.

"Ain’t much to look at," he said.

"This is Jeremiah," the Preacher said to Major Goodweather, gesturing at the man. "He had a place down in the valley, a mile from here."

"Sweetgrass ranch," Jeremiah said. "In the Sweetgrass Valley. That’s what the railroad men at the land office called it."

"Sounds promising," Major Goodweather said.

"It was the prettiest place in the county," the tattered man said. "I had the prettiest house and fields in the prettiest place in the county. Orchards. I distilled my own spirits from fruit that I raised. Where it was stony, I grew berries on the vine."

Jeremiah cast the locust aside and it was blown like a leaf away from them.

"Most of their lives," Jeremiah said, "they live underground. They are really a beastly subterranean, mole-like burrowing animal."

"Is that true?" Major Goodweather said.

"Oh, yes," Jeremiah said. "They emerge to plague us from underground. Otherwise, they are content to spawn and excavate in the depths of the earth. Creatures of darkness."

"That was a nymph," the Preacher said. "It doesn’t have wings yet. They fly only during the last days of their lives. They go into the air in a kind of panic, I think, because they know that death is upon them – they sense it somehow."

"They start in the soil and end in the air," Jeremiah said.

"I don’t think we’ll see them this year," Major Goodweather said. "I am quite convinced of that."

"I’m sorry to disagree," the Preacher said. He turned to the tattered man who had seated himself on a barrel of provisions that the Preacher had been given at the ranch. "Tell him what you saw," the Preacher said to the ragged man.

Jeremiah blinked at him and looked as if he were about to cry. "You have to understand about my son. I wasn’t gonna be driven off my stake by vermin. I resolved to stay and so, after my son died, I sent my wife back home on the train and I told her that I would remain on the land and protect our boy’s grave and that since my son was buried near our cabin I wasn’t about to desert that home and my fields and the grave where my boy was resting. I told my wife that I would send for her and, then, I hunkered down and waited to see if I would starve but I didn’t, somehow I made it through the winter; I had jars of the home-brew and I traded them with Indians, I won’t deny that – traded the booze for dried meat and berries – and so I survived the cold months. Then, the sun came and warmed the ground, made the soil fruitful again and the land turned green and..."

Jeremiah paused and gulped air, blinking at them in bright sunlight.

"Then, I stood by my son’s grave and I looked at the earth raised up over him, just a little hillock, and it was all seething, it was bubbling and blistering and hoppers were hatching, coming right up out of my son’s grave, I saw them splitting through the surface of the soil, green joints like a thousand fingers suddenly straightening from being crooked and extending to poke up through the soil. I picked up a rock so large that I had to hold it in both hands and I battered the hoppers to pulp but they kept coming, spearing up through the dirt and, then, crawling away, millions of them..."

"You see," the Preacher said. "They’re swarming. They don’t have wings and can’t fly but they are swarming on the ground."

"When I saw that my son’s grave was their hatchery," ragged Jeremiah said, "I decided that I had seen enough, that this was a sign to come here and await the end. I had two bottles of strong spirits and I brought a bucket of spring-water up here and I’m not going to deny that I had the devilish scheme to use that home-brew to drink myself into oblivion. But I found the Preacher was already at the church. I found him praying here on his knees. He was ahead of me and so I put aside my wicked plan and together we found the bell and hauled it out of the ruins at least as far as you can see here. The Preacher took the spirits – I don’t know if he spilled it out upon the ground or broke the bottles in that gorge..."

"It’s a mighty heavy bell," the Preacher said, gesturing at the curved, female profile of the bronze lying in the cinders.

"I came up here with the thought that I would establish a camp in this place," Major Goodweather said, "but the land is too broken. There are too many ravines that might afford shelter to the Sioux were they to set an ambush for us. If I put a camp here, the Sioux might occupy that coulee and pour fire upon us from that shelter."

Major Goodweather pointed to a hollow place in the hilltop where the land slumped down to deep trench vivid now with small bushes and trees just tall enough to raise their uppermost leaves above the ravine’s edge.

"I agree," the Preacher said. "It is not really defensible. The Indians could come up from the ground, out of the gulch and shoot at us."

"Come down to my camp," the Major said. "It will be safer there."

"God will protect us," the Preacher said. But he went to his mule grazing in the shade of a tree, and loading his leather satchel on the animal, made ready to depart.

"They have kidnaped a white boy," Major Goodweather said. "And rustled a number of our cattle, taken them away from the fort."

The Preacher patted the satchel draped over the mule. "He’s right, Jeremiah," the Preacher said. "Let’s not tempt fate here. We’ll go down to the camp."

"Tomorrow, I’ll dispatch a team of oxen here," Major Goodweather said. "And we will retrieve that bell from the ashes."

　

　

7.

The wagons were drawn into a fort. Several sentry posts were established, a few hundred yards from the circled Conestogas and the soldiers lit small fires at those places to warm themselves. The tents and provisions and the congregation of emaciated settlers were outside of the ring of wagons. When it was dark, bugle calls sounded and the flag was retrieved from the tall pole made of branches strapped together by the simple expedient of tilting the makeshift flagstaff out of the earth and setting it on its side on the turf.

Jeremiah was shivering and said that he felt feverish and so he rested on his side close to the large campfire inside the wagon-fort. He wrapped himself in a cocoon of blankets: "I am weary," he said. "I am very weary and my bones ache me so."

After eating, Major Goodweather and the Preacher went for a stroll, walking across the dark moist prairie between the far-flung campfires set by the sentries, making, as it were, a tour of inspection. At one of the small fires to the northwest of the wagons, a couple of men were playing cards while two other soldiers peered uneasily into the dark. The fire was bright enough to make it impossible to see if you looked away from the blaze into the night and, because the two sentinels watching were interested in the card game, they looked back and forth from the area lit by the flames and so blinded themselves as to the vast darkness surrounding them. Major Goodweather and Preacher came quite close to the men and, indeed, shouted out a hallo to the sentries startling them.

"Be more attentive, men," the Major said. "You must be more attentive."

One of the soldiers warned them to stay near the fire. "There is a cliff in that direction," the trooper said, gesturing toward a place where the night’s fabric changed subtly, a decrease in the density of the shadows where the prairie fell away into a steep eroded slope.

The Preacher was carrying a satchel and his Bible and prayer book.

An hour or so, later, Lieutenant Williams rode up to the sentinel campfire where the Preacher and Major Goodweather were sitting. The four soldiers were distant from the flames, huddled together and watching the darkness with sleepy eyes.

"I am making my evening report," Lieutenant Williams said.

In the flickering light of the campfire, Major Goodweather looked sweaty and his face seemed to be flushed. The Preacher was sprawled on his left hip leaning on his arm next to the fire and there was a jug between the two men.

"All well?" Major Goodweather asked.

"All is well," Lieutenant Williams said.

"Beware," the Preacher said. He gestured at the darkness. "There is a cliff over yonder."

Lieutenant Williams nodded and made his horse bow slightly.

"I am telling my friend," Major Goodweather said, "that our mission is to destroy all manliness and courage among the pioneers. Our mission is to end by our charity what is known as the race of self-reliant men. We are the last survivors on this prairie. It is the end of humanity."

Lieutenant Williams did not dismount but hovered over them on his big horse and its eyes caught the flame-light so that they glowed in an unearthly manner.

"The victims of our charity will multiply like locusts and they will devour all the earth," Major Goodweather said. "I am quite confident of that."

The Preacher nodded.

Later, after midnight, Lieutenant Williams heard the sound of voices singing, men’s voices raised raucously in an old hymn, "Come thou fount of ev’ry blessing." The singing came from the northwest sentry post. The little point of fire there seemed to wriggle helplessly in the immense darkness.

"The Major is drunk again," Lieutenant Williams said to George. The Indian looked at him with dark, expressionless eyes.

　

　

8.

The dawn was clear and very still. As the darkness lifted from the hilltops and slid slowly down into the ravines, the wet, vibrant air close to the dewy grass and archipelagos of prairie flowers

warmed and, as it warmed, the dense, sweet air close to the ground seemed to be elevated, lifted on high, rising to an immense height in the cloudless sky. This displacement left a breathless vacuum, close to the surface of the earth, a vacancy of wind and odor, without breeze or scent or any sort of motion at all, not a leaf rustling or stirring, but rather a great suspension, as if all the land were holding its breath.

The little campfires of the sentries established far from the wagon fort oozed trickles of smoke rising straight upward from the prairie and, far away, on the hills and slopes, Lieutenant Williams could see the starving pioneers, little groups of them guarding the booty that they had received from the soldiers. For the most part, their packs of seed and flour and saltpork had been too heavy for them and they had set the provisions down in the grass and, then, spent a hard and cold night protecting their supplies, huddled close to them, and, now, Lieutenant Williams could see them stirring, rising to readjust their parcels so that they could continue on their ways home.

"The Major is in his cups again," Lieutenant Williams told Private Anderson. Of course, he would deny being hungover and would say that it was his gout tormenting him and, during the day’s march, the Major would have to ride flat on his back in the jolting wagon, his horse led alongside the Conestoga by a soldier. The Major would be wrathful and, therefore, it was best to make certain that all aspects of the camp were properly policed and maintained in a soldierly and disciplined manner and, with that thought, Lieutenant Williams had the flag once again laced to its leafy pole and, then, lifted up above the prairie where the banner dangled limp as a wash rag in the great silence between heaven and earth.

One of the starveling farmers still squatting in the shade of the wagons pointed to a hillside a couple hundred yards away. Lieutenant Williams saw that the hillside was covered with fallen leaves, indeed, so thickly shingled with the green and brown leaves that the buffalo grass on the slope was entirely concealed. A brisk wind seemed to be driving the leaves before it, causing them to scuttle along in windrows, waves of fallen leaves that shuddered to a stop and, then, started again under the impulse of a breeze that must have been both intermittent and powerful. But the spectacle, at first seeming so familiar, became strange to Lieutenant Williams when he thought that there were no trees anywhere on the hillside from which the leaves could have fallen and it was the wrong season for leaves to fall, and there was no wind stirring, not even the faintest breeze.

"Hoppers," the starveling farmer said. "The wingless ones."

"On the march," Private Anderson said.

His eye now trained to see the armies of grasshoppers, Lieutenant Williams looked around the wagon fort and saw that the prairie was seething with them, wide greenish-grey columns that surged forward with what seemed to be purposeful intent. In some places, the wingless insects advanced in a continuous writhing carpet, obscure currents flowing through hordes to cause them sometimes to splash upward like corn popping in a brisk fire, small detonations along the line of their advance. In other areas, the grasshoppers moved in yard-wide columns, phalanxes of them flowing forward to braid around other streams of insects. The creatures didn’t really darken the prairie. Rather, they seemed to decorate it with fluid patterns, mats of nymphs that divided and, then, divided again before coalescing into a great irresistable flood. In places, the insects appeared to move in accord with some kind of strategy directing their green and dusty-grey regiments, flanking motions and enfilades executed with military precision.

"Do they have kings and generals?" Lieutenant Williams asked Jeremiah.

"Of course," Jeremiah said, "but no one has detected them – the marks of their ranks are concealed."

"They move with surprise speed," Lieutenant Williams said.

The farmer said: "You must dig trenches around your wagons."

"Why?" Private Anderson asked. "What if we are overrun?"

"They will eat your flour and seeds and devour the reins and leather holding your teams to the wagons and, then, the oxen will fill their bellies with them – your oxen will eat them as if they were grass and this will cause the animals to bloat and many of them will die. I know – I’ve seen this happen."

Lieutenant Williams ordered an assembly and entrenching tools were distributed. The farmer said that the soldiers should scratch 18 inch deep concentric channels around the wagons and in front of the insects, ditches into which the grasshoppers would fall and accumulate until they had filled the trench, then, rolling forward over the creatures writhing in the moat to encounter the next channel grooved in the prairie. In this way, the progress of the nymph army might be arrested or, perhaps, diverted. The men stooped over their spades, cutting the sod and prairie grass, as the sentries approached from their look-outs, wild-eyed, out of breath, clawing locusts out of their eyes and hair. The oxen in their corrals bellowed.

One of the sentries reported that Major Goodweather had fallen asleep near their post and, as the grasshoppers encircled them, the commander could not be found despite their search accomplished by wading ankle-deep through the horde of nymphs creeping across the ground.

"Most repulsive," a sentry said. Several locusts clung to the brim of his forage cap.

"There is a cliff near the post," another sentry told Lieutenant Williams. "Perhaps, he wandered off and fell from the cliff."

Lieutenant Williams mounted his horse and rode in the direction of the sentry post. A ribbon of rising smoke rose marked the fire that had been set at that look-out and Lieutenant Williams went toward that place, zigzagging across the prairie to avoid the great rivers and green, squirming lakes of insects. His horse was frightened, eyes showing white and wild, and the animal lunged and bucked when Lieutenant Williams ventured too close to the grasshoppers. A gentle slope ascended toward the campfire, a black, sooty rip in the closely woven tapestry of insects and when he reached the edge of the grasshopper army, Lieutenant Williams’ horse balked, setting front legs into a stiff skid that, almost, unseated the soldier. Williams was flung against the pommel and twisted sideways on the mount to avoid falling and, then, cursing, he dismounted and left the horse behind him, standing baffled and bristling on the edge of the advancing horde.

The grasshoppers burst upward underfoot, enveloping him in a peppery cloud of insects that whirred as they flung themselves into the air. Lieutenant Williams felt the hooked legs of the creatures clinging to the flesh of his wrists and ankles, braided chains of them interlocked and hanging down from his hair and ears. The air smelled like rotting silage and the nymph army made a peculiar sound, a great hissing, bubbling respiration that was something like water boiling. The insects were all around him, crushed beneath his boots and billowing up in clouds around his face and shoulders as he moved forward. At the campfire, embers glowed and the burned place was like a wound ripped in the living flesh covering the ground, locusts venturing too close to the cinders sizzling like bacon in the remnants of the fire. Lieutenant Williams stood with his boots in the ashes, clawing the locusts off his lips and sideburns.

From within the charmed circle of the burnt-out sentry fire, Lieutenant Williams heard a sound like a waterfall. A half-dozen yards away, the grasshoppers were pouring in a continuous cascade off the rim of a low cliff, a place where erosion had eaten away part of the hill and formed a declivity. As the insects fell they batted against one another, clawed legs clasping together to form jagged stars and lacy veils of falling nymphs. At the base of the raw place eroded into the hill, the grasshoppers were a yard deep, a great drift of wriggling insects rolling like a slow, syrupy wave down the hill. Williams was stunned by the spectacle and the sound of the creatures rasping against one another as they dropped from the cliff and, as he stared at this wonder, he seemed to see a knobby, huddled form, entirely blanketed in grasshoppers wriggling fitfully ten or twelve feet from the hot cinders in which he stood.

"Major Goodweather," Lieutenant Williams cried.

For a moment, he stood motionlessly, paralyzed. The grasshoppers were devouring Major Goodweather. Was this possible? If he fell into that writhing, ankle-deep mass would they eat him alive too? Revulsion and panic filled him and Lieutenant Williams’ breathing was disordered as if he couldn’t get enough air to his lungs and he felt dizzy, as if trembling at the edge of a precipice. There was nothing for him to do but go to the aid of his fallen comrade, although he hesitated.

Then, Lieutenant Williams charged forward and bent over the form enshrouded in the plump, large-headed nymphs. Millions of black eyes bulged out of the surging mass of insects and their jaws made a sound like the wind rushing through a forest in the winter. Major Goodweather was entirely clad in the insects, wearing them over flesh and fabric like a living, wriggling chain-mail. Sometimes, he opened a red eye and peered indignantly out through the writhing tangle of insects covering his face. His jaw moved spasmodically , the lower part of the mask of bugs twitching as he chewed them up between his teeth and vomited them out in a wet paste of brown and green legs and wings and carapace. A sort of snoring noise came from the Major and Lieutenant Williams slapped at the supine man’s face and forehead, knocking off the grasshoppers that had come to suck the sweat from his brow and cheeks. The fallen man beneath the insects stank of alcohol and it occurred to Lieutenant Williams that the insects feeding on his sweat must have become drunk and torpid as well – they seemed to slide away from this throat and chest and skull in thick plate-sized masses, scabs of entwined nymphs that drizzling off the man as Lieutenant Williams dragged him upward, pulling at his hair to yank him into a seated position. Major Goodweather groaned and growled and vomited out another porridge of chewed-up locusts and, then, Lieutenant Williams took him over his shoulder, staggering through the clouds of locusts that crashed against him like hot, buzzing hail.

It seemed a long way to the place where the pony was waiting, terrified, the horse’s tail batting against its flanks, as it backed-up, shying away from the flood of insects rolling down the slope. At last, Lieutenant Williams emerged from the grasshoppers, now dragging Major Goodweather by his booted heels over the turf, and, then, rolling him to crush the insects still clinging to his uniform under his body. Major Goodweather sputtered something that sounded like words, but that Lieutenant Williams could not understand.

Three troopers came from the fort of wagons, dragging a canvas litter through the streams and channels of grasshoppers. They carried Major Goodweather back to the Conestogas and set him in the center of the circle of wagons.

Around the fort, the soldiers worked silently to cut trenches in the prairie.

One of the men asked Lieutenant Williams if the grasshoppers had been eating Major Goodweather. A bucket of water was poured over the prostrate man and the grasshoppers still entangled in his hair and beard and caught under his clothes, at his collar and between his belt and belly, were plucked away. His skin was raw under his chin on his throat and his wrists seemed chaffed as if he had been bound by coarse fetters of rope but, otherwise, the drunken man seemed uninjured. He glared up into the deep, empty sky, the high heavens into which all the air on earth seemed to have withdrawn, his eyes red and filled with rage.

"I don’t think they can eat you," Lieutenant Williams said.

The bootleather on Major Goodweathers shoes was rubbed away in places and his belt looked gnawed.

"They can’t eat you," the emaciated farmer said. "They just eat everything around you."

"They can’t eat you," Lieutenant Williams said to the trooper who had asked if the insects were devouring Major Goodweather.

"They’re cannibals," the farmer said. "I have seen them eat one another in a kind of frenzy."

"We must move away from this place," Lieutenant Williams said. He ordered the men to desist from their entrenching work. The oxen, catching the scent of the vast tide of approaching nymphs, bellowed loudly and pawed at the earth. As the first grasshoppers began to dash themselves against the big iron-rimmed hoops of the wagon wheels, Lieutenant Williams ordered their retreat.

Bedded in one of the wagons, Major Goodweather muttered something, then, he cried out, half-choking on the words.

"What is he saying?" Private Anderson asked.

Lieutenant Williams said: "He’s blind drunk. A fine thing! A drunk for a commanding officer!"

Major Goodweather continued his litany: names of towns and villages and crossroads, recited as if he were reading from a map.

"Shenandoah valley" Lieutenant Williams continued. "He was a young officer there with George Custer and Phil Sheridan."

"Why is he naming those places?"

Major Goodweather clawed phantom locusts from his cheeks and eyes.

"I don’t know," Lieutenant Williams said.

　

　

　

　

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.