Brave Woman Keeps Wolves from Body of Dead Husband ¹

The September night was cool without being cold, and as she paced through the amber firelight, an unwelcome, wayward word alighted on her tongue: pleasant. Disgusted by the sentiment, she dragged her teeth along its rough-smooth surface, as if a precursor to the snow that would not fall for at least another month or two, as if she could dig herself out of this.

She bounced her husband’s heavy revolver in her palm, measuring its weight, but also for courage. The wails had not even slowed, the chorus, at least in her mind, growing. Adding volume: sopranos above, and bassos, too, ubiquitous, infusive, as if coming from inside the trees themselves, rumbling along the ground beneath her like a tide. Like the world itself were tracking her, as of course it was.

She had already sent the girl from Idaho off bareback to retrace their steps and flag help from the ranch house ten or so miles back. Hopefully, she would arrive unmolested and greeted by someone who could do something. Something more. Georgia hoped she had not sent this girl to her death, too.

A breeze flickered the campfire, ran across the back of her bare hand, her cheek. It wasn’t enough to force a shiver, but triggered a tight surge at her spine, a need to keep pacing. She circled the fire to where they had parked the wagon, and peeked through the curtain at the sleeping boy inside. Wholly at peace. She had expected him to sob and tantrum—particularly in those panicked minutes right after the blast—but he never did. Not then, nor at any point after. She imagined he was too shocked, the confusion stronger than the fear. That alchemy would perhaps change in the days to come, but now it was as if his calm were an act of great internal aggression, and exhausted and spent by it, he had collapsed into the deepest peace, a truce with being.

The boy was a stranger, a fellow traveler, same as the student she had sent off into the pitch and wail, but both had hung on her every word after the gun discharged, and her husband slumped across the driver’s bench. She suspected he was dead before he crumpled, and could not fathom why the horses reared as gently as they did.

Strangers on a stagecoach, and now, through another kind of alchemy, providence or chance or some other word she hadn’t fallen to yet, a clan. Under the animals’ song, she was struck not only by the faith one needs to simply put one foot in front of the other, but how the betrayal of that faith only strengthens it.

She closed the wagon’s curtain and continued her crescent along the edge of the giant blaze to where her husband’s body lay, wrapped in as many layers of blankets as she deemed those still breathing could surrender. She kept him as close to the fire as she could—it was his blood in the air, after all, that was attracting the timber wolves and coyotes and whatever other of God’s great predators were among them, stalking just beyond her sight. If she could have circled the wagons, she would have, but there was only one wagon, and her, so she did the circling, the gun’s metal every now and again grazing against the thin wool of her skirts.

Her husband was a good one, and a provider, and she had entrusted him with many more years of her life that had now suddenly been hurled back at her. What was surety had become chaos, and all because he had dropped his shotgun. Best she could figure, they had hit a rough patch in the trail, and when the stock fell, it had somehow managed to go off, ripping two barrels into William’s chest and neck. At first, she had thought it was bandits, but once she confirmed there wasn’t a soul around for miles, she realized it had been God.

The sun was dropping fast, and there would be no time for mourning. Georgia and the student girl had slid his body off the coach and wrapped it as best they could, then went about scrounging for wood. Only after a tent of sticks and logs as wide as her prone body and more than a head taller had been lit did she send the girl off for help. That decision weighed on her, as did the vigil she now held over the sleeping boy and her husband’s corpse. She stoked the fire with a long stick, and almost in rejoinder, the howls around her rose and curled. Leaves snapped like gnashing.

It would be a long night. She wanted to sit but thought it imprudent; instead, she resumed her pacing, until that too became tiresome. She stopped to study the fire and watched the wood burn long enough for it to no longer seem like burning, but a transmutation, each piece shifting first its shape, and then its place among the others, less like wood than a kind of river, fluid, unfixed, eternal in its change. She narrowed her gaze, and watched the ambers give way to the golds, and the golds to the whites, and tucked behind even those shades, a winking blue secret.

Georgia studied the fire, and in its flash and suggestion, she could see the student riding back in the morning light, the girl from Idaho, an extended family of ranchers in her wake. What she couldn’t see, not quite, was what they would find when they arrived.

¹The title is taken from a 1908 Pocatello Tribune article of the same name.