EMPTY. MOUNTAINS well off to the west, mountains well off to the east. Big river in the middle, with desert scrub all around it. No sign of the brigade. Sam was sure his count was right, or close. It was April 14, or maybe a day or two later. The phases of the moon, full, half, and new, had made it easy to keep track of the weeks on his counting stick. Sixteen weeks and a day since they left Ashley on the Platte. Sam looked around. Desolation in every direction, including his heart. Memory: Last June he went ahead alone, with a promise to meet Diah and Fitz and the boys where the river got deep enough to float. He waited eleven days. They never showed up. Then his imagination ran wild. They were all killed by Indians. They got lost and would never find their way home. In this vast, apparently endless landscape, desert horizoned by mountain followed by desert and again horizoned by mountain, a man could never find his way home. There was no such place as home, not anymore, not for the men who came out here to hunt beaver.
