Gone West by Kathleen Karr

banjo is sort of appropriate for our story. `The Ballad of Sam Thayer’.”
     
    Sam groaned self-consciously.
     
    “How about `The Ballad of Sam Thayer and Company’?” from Irish.
     
    “How about `The Ballad of the Women Left Behind to Cook and Wash and Keep the Children from Killing Themselves’,” smiled Maggie wryly.
     
    “Never happen, Ma,” yawned Jamie.
     
    “And why not, young sir?”
     
    Johnny answered for his son. “It’s not epic enough, Meg.”
     
    Maggie glared. “What could be more epic than centuries of women washing and cooking and caring for their men and children, all the while following them to godforsaken places?”
     
    “Oregon is not godforsaken!”
     
    “Getting there certainly is,” Gwen added in sudden support of Maggie.
     
    Jamie slipped away from the argument to return with the instruments. “I don’t care what you play. But we ought to be celebrating something tonight! If nothing else, it stopped raining!”
     
    Johnny picked up the concertina and began to sing, making it up as he went along: “Ain’t gonna rain no more, no more, ain’t gonna rain no more . . .”
     
    Maggie shrugged, laughed and joined in with the others.
     
    There was plenty of good hard hickory wood for the taking next to the creek, and all during the next pleasant day the men and children gathered piles of it for their future fires, while most of the women sat around mending torn trail clothing and smoking strips of jerky over constant fires.
     
    Maggie had a big soup pot going, cooking up a rich broth from the bones of the elk. On top of her other labors, she’d begged one of the skins. Now the green hide was pegged to the ground, the way her friend Flower Blossom had shown her, and Maggie was carefully scraping from it the last bits of fat preparatory to beginning the long softening process. For that softening she was boiling the elk’s brain in a little water. Flower Blossom had always averred that brain tanning made the softest skins. “Ma-gee,” she would point out, “Ma-gee, each animal has enough of the brains to tan itself. The Great Spirit thinks of everything.” Maggie smiled as her friend’s words returned to her. Then she shooed Bacon and his sharp little teeth from the irresistible edges of the skin.
     
    “Jamie. Convince your pet that he can’t play tug-of-war with my pelt! Either that or lock him up in the wagon. If our boots give out down the trail, we’ll need every square inch of this skin for moccasins!”
     
    Jamie had been watching her with interest each time he returned with an armful of wood for their pile. He gathered up the pup obediently, but still seemed anxious about something. As he wrestled with the pup he finally spit it out.
     
    “I know you got moccasins in mind for that skin, Ma, but if, just if there should be enough left over . . .”
     
    “Yes, Jamie?” She smiled at his unusual efforts at beating around the bush.
     
    “I’d dearly love an elkskin vest, like the kind Straight Arrow and Running Bear used to wear back in Independence, with the rawhide tassels and all. `Course I’d covet a whole buckskin jacket even more, but I know there won’t be enough left for that.”
     
    Maggie scrutinized the skin laid out before her with great seriousness. “There surely won’t be enough for a jacket, not if we’ll be needing moccasins. But there just might be enough for a vest for a very good, smallish boy.”
     
    Jamie let out a whoop. “And maybe you could sew on a handful of those Injun beads we brought for trading? We got a whole barrel of them!”
     
    Maggie laughed. “I think the Indians could spare a few, Jamie.”
     
    He let out another whoop.
     
    “But it won’t be ready for months. I’ll have to soften the skin first, and that takes a long time. There’ll be the cutting next, and the fitting and sewing~”
     
    “Maybe by cool weather?”
     
    “I should be able to manage it before autumn.”
     
    “Thank you, Ma!” He