[He falls silent again.]

It took a very, very long while for me to discover she died shortly after childbirth and that our daughter had not made it, either.

I am not proud to report I was relieved—relieved as surely as I was relieved of an onerous burden—indeed, I was relieved.

† September 3, 1846

[The fiddler reprises "Loop #7: Tracks."]

In the Great Salt Lake Desert, the water was gone and the children ran out of sugar to suck on; their parents gave them flattened bullet casings, in the hopes that the metal might induce salivation.

Finally, however, they made it through.

The Donner-Reed Party spent an entire week recuperating at the foot of Pilot Peak. The point at which they had crossed the desert was 80, not 40, miles wide. It took five days—not two.

The wealth distribution among the group was now completely upended: four wagons had to be abandoned and, in total, the party lost 36 head of cattle. Half of those belonged to James Frazier Reed, who now had to go hunting for food.

Only in America should the nobility suffer such privation! Oh, Reed, yours was not a singular sin, but that misery of objects!

That misery which howls both across the desert or down to the very depths of the Carquinez Strait.

That misery which so reduces a man—a hero in his own private mind, the protagonist at least within the confines of his family—is reduced to hopeless player, an impotent victim, a husk of usefulness before those he needs to believe must need him most. His only true audience, if you will.

[Abruptly changing tone to something more deliberate, harsher—]

Oh, Reed, I hope you had a family crest embroidered upon a handkerchief on which to sob because the general lot is not so lucky to think of themselves as another man's better—nay—he must merely pray he is elect.

So, Reed, my good popish, Polish [with frontier butchery] VICOMTE: I hope that family crest did serve you well in the desert most men cross!

[He strains not to speak up more, rather electing to drink a short while.]

Two of the men—one a bachelor and the other especially hardy—went riding ahead to Sutter's Fort with the hope of bringing back supplies and food. On September 10, they started up again.

On September 26, after passing the butte called "Floating Island" because it appears so lonesome upon the lakelike ripples that lead up to it, lost curlicues of frothy, dusty water that form the same pattern for miles or for yards depending on tides no one has seen for centuries...There, the party finally reached the Humboldt River—an actual river, mind you, hailing from an extinct, yet eerily rumpled sort of bed. Here, where the æons lie sleeping, the cut-off meets the standard trail.

In total, they traveled 125 miles more than they would have on the older route.

And that, too, Dear Reader, is a figure that has dogged me.