The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout Page A

night.
    She was very lonely. She missed the virile voices of her husband and her boys. She wished they had a ticking clock.
    They had come west from a farm south of Springfield, in Illinois. Otto longed for free land and a fresh start. His farm was mortgaged. He hungered for adventure, too, but this he could not put into words except to talk now and then about buffalo. So he sold out and bought a wagon and oxen. Hedda made him wait until the baby was born, a girl, Eva, and then they set out across Iowa, husband, wife, two boys, a girl, Gerda, and the baby, Eva, nursing. Crossing the Missouri by ferry at Kanesville, they joined several other wagons to follow the Platte River, the most traveled trail. Here they lost Eva, the baby, to fever and fits, and buried her beneath a tree beside the river. They left the train then, and turned northwest, and after a month more Otto found his land. He filed two claims, each of a hundred sixty acres, half a section, one a homestead and the other under the “timbering” provision, and paid the fee of fifty cents an acre. The soil was sandy there, and he concluded to try potatoes along with corn and wheat. By the end of the second summer he favored potatoes over corn and wheat by forty acres. The Petzkes prospered. And to top it off, Otto found adventure. He shot and killed the only buffalo seen in those parts in years, a stray bull. He skinned it out, butchered it, kept the hump and a hindquarter, took three quarters to the three nearest neighbors, and came home drunk for the first and only time in his married life.
    In the afternoon it started snowing.
    She was very lonely. It was not so bad in winter, with her family about, but the rest of the year, when she was alone, she talked to herself. Now she had not seen another woman for four months, even her nearest neighbor, Mrs. Iverson, four miles away. She had not gone into Loup with Otto since August. Mrs. Iverson told her about a farmwife up north in the Territory who went into the fields summers and lay down among the sheep, to have company.
    She forgot to go to the stable to feed the stock until it was near dark. Then she ran both ways, and to the outhouse, and running back stumbled over the shotgun. She snatched it up, hurried it into the house, dried it off, and stood it against a chair by the boxes of shells Otto had put out.
    It was snowing hard and getting cold. The thaw was over. They might not be home tomorrow.
    At dark she lit the old hussy. This was a bowl of sand with a stick upright in the center and a wick wound around it and filled with skunk oil. Otto had shot a fat polecat that gave two quarts of oil. By this light she cooked herself a supper of schnitz und knep , dried apples and dumplings, and drank a cup of rye coffee with bran essence to make it taste like real coffee.
    There were precious few hay cats left. She stoked the stove with some, saving most for morning, and got into bed fully dressed except for her boots.
    They were gray wolves. Some weighed as much as fifty pounds. As the winter wore on they began to hunt in starving packs of five or six to be sure of their prey. They attacked anything alive. Mr. Iverson had told Otto what they did to cattle during blizzards. Covered with ice and snow, the cattle were jumped on and knocked down and couldn’t rise, and the wolves would rip into their bellies and eat until they had eaten a hole big enough for one or two to crawl into and shelter themselves from the storm. Hedda Petzke knew in her soul they were more than wolves. They were messengers of God.
    She dozed, then went rigid at the howls outside, not close but not far.
    She slid out of bed and by the light of the old hussy took up the shotgun, loaded it, and creeping to the door, opened it a crack, put the gun to her shoulder, poked the barrel through the crack, and fired. The explosion deafened her, and the recoil bumped her backward. She closed the door. When her ears could hear, the howling had