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  “Do you think then that we are but figments of God’s dream?” he asked. I did not answer, the question having taking me by surprise. Spencer continued unabated. “That, I believe, is the natural conclusion one must come to if they are to accept Mr. Berkeley’s theory.” He barely paused before carrying on, “Unless of course God is a figment of our dream, each of us being the center of his own universe with all around him the product of his, or her own vivid imagination.”

  Having recovered from the initial shock of such heretical thinking I rejoined, “Are you an atheist – or a follower of Protagoras then?”

  “No, I would not describe myself as either,” Spencer said assuredly. “There is too much of the world that we do not understand to proscribe the possibility of God, even more so the human spirit. Maybe it’s the dreamer in me, but I cannot believe that once the breath of life goes out of a man, he’s gone for good.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  Spencer continued, “And to my understanding; Protagoras believed that Man is the measure of all things. If that were the case, I’d throw myself beneath the wheel of this steamer. Do you believe in the Transmutation of species at all?”

  I nodded. “I’ve heard the term. Some of the fellows used to rave about it at Harvard.”

  “Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He was a soldier, naturalist and academician. One of my teachers in Paris knew him in his youth. He died about ten, fifteen years ago. He wrote a series of books, of how he’d come to the conclusion that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament with the power of acquiring new parts in response to stimuli, with each round of improvements being inherited by successive generations.”

  “I don’t understand,” I admitted.

  “A million years ago, we might have been a race of intelligent goats. How do you like that?” Spencer asked with only the hint of a grin.

  “Not at all,” I replied skeptically.

  “I exaggerate of course,” he said locking the fingers of both hands behind his head. “He makes no mention of goats, that’s my contribution, but the gist of it is, that a species, any species, develops, changing over time, adapting, adding and discarding various traits, both physical and mental. You can see it in the lower animals.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “I avoided most conversations that led to such ideas while at school, concentrating on literature instead.”

  “I’ve heard as well that the soul cycles back. The Hindus in British India believe it. I met a gypsy in Romania who told me I could cross the void to past lives through my dreams. Now that’s a notion!” He exclaimed happily.

  By now my head was so awhirl with wild ideas I could not figure which one to deal with first. I stared up at the sky. It was cloudless and burned nearly white by the hot, morning sun.

  “May I be Pangloss to your Candide and you, Sancho Panza to my Quixote,” Spencer ventured, his words more a statement than a query.

  I began to answer, my curiosity aroused, but a whistling sound had begun to emanate from Spencer’s sinuses and I saw that my companion had fallen asleep, so I lay back as well, pulling the stiff brim of my hat down over my eyes to join him, my mind suddenly weary from all the talk.

  I awoke once to find Mozart watching us, carefully as a fox watches the rabbit, while his fingers worked the neck of the banjo, softly pulling a child’s lullaby from the gourd. There was something in his eyes that spoke of a deeper intelligence than he portrayed.

  Then, astonishingly, he began to pick out the notes to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata; though I’m sure he had no idea the origin, or author of the tune. The beauty of the piece could not be muted by the oddity of the instrument upon which it was played. The boy was soon asleep himself, the banjo sliding limply to his side. I yawned and within moments, the three of us were snoring our way down the Ohio, the morning sun warm upon our backs.

  Chapter 2 – Elijah

  June 1844

  The smell of rain was in the air. A black wall of clouds hung like a curtain across the western horizon, flashes of lightning illuminating their distant face. I stared out at the immensity of the Plains as a distant peal of thunder shook the Earth beneath me, a cool wind whipping through the tall grass, bending its surface in cascading waves. It truly was like an ocean I thought, the illusion of movement turning the sea of grass into a storm tide as fearful as any I’d seen off the coast of Cape Cod in my youth.

  The black pony between my knees whinnied, trembling, his long ears twitching as the air around us crackled. I steadied the animal, stroking its mane as you would a pet dog. The pony was half wild, barely broken to the saddle. I had named him Elijah after the Bible prophet who was known for his flight on the whirlwind, a propitious choice considering the journey that lay before us.

  I gazed up at the sky. The black ceiling of heaven was a cathedral of indescribable proportions and yet seeming so near you might touch it. I knew we should turn back toward the camp where Spencer and the others waited, but could not, the lure of the storm compelling me to stare into its maw, almost commanding me to ride on into it. The Stygian wall of cloud moved upon the ground, boiling toward us with relentless fury. It was like looking into the face of God I thought with awe.

  Rain began to fall in fat droplets, puffs of dust rising up from the dry Earth. I turned my face to it in supplication as it turned to icy pellets, stinging my skin like a hive of angry wasps. Roused from my reverie I twisted hard on the horses’ reins.

  “C’mon Elijah!” I shouted above the din.

  The pony responded, nostrils flaring, eyes rolling back in his head as we turned away from the oncoming behemoth. The prairie rose up and fell away beneath our feet as we rode, lightning bolts crashing about us. The rain had turned to soaking sheets that blinded us, obscuring the landscape. Calming the fear that drove me, I tried slowing the animal, knowing that one misstep into a gopher hole would kill us both. A flash of lightning revealed a grove of trees twenty yards ahead. They appeared like bony fingers illumined graveyard white in the ocean of grass. I drove Elijah toward them then pulled hard on the reins as we dove head first into the bramble.

  The animal stumbled to a halt and I flew from the saddle keeping hold of the bridle and reins. Pulling him after me, I scrambled beneath the shelter of a scrawny oak. The pony resisted, but I held tight, the reins biting into the flesh of my hands. I feared the insane beast might stomp me with his hooves, but he suddenly reversed course and pushed his head into the foliage like a four legged ostrich, his exposed flanks quivering with every blast from the orchestra of heaven.

  Curse me for a fool I thought. I had been warned about the ferocity of the tempests that raged across the prairie during this season, but had gone rabbit hunting in the face of the storm anyway, though my prowess with a rifle was limited at best. Still, it had seemed the thing to do. Spencer, when not painting and sketching, had already proven himself an excellent marksman and the others, Sebastian Parker, Dr. Zenobia and the scouts, Titlark and Trotter, lived for the hunt, it being the stated purpose of their trek into the wilderness. I felt a need to prove myself to them and add to the larder.

  We had happened onto the hunting party in Independence, Missouri, the jumping off point to the Great Plains. I had struck up an immediate kinship with young Sebastian, the scion of a wealthy Boston family come west to improve his oft times frail health. There was safety in numbers in the place we were going, so after some discussion, we had joined the company, making the journey a collegial one.

  As the storm raged, bluish spheres of lightning danced about the treetops, spectral in their form. They could be lost souls I thought, peering up at the devilish shapes with a wet shudder. I remembered the ghost stories my grandmother had told me as a boy and the isolated farm on which she had lived in the Massachusetts woods. Despite my years at Harvard and the grand education it had afforded me, the dark pines that surrounded the old home place still haunted my dreams. Thanks to my grandmother’s tales, I had been convinced the woods were filled with hob
goblins and malevolent spirits waiting to snatch unwary travelers from the path and carry them away to some unspeakable purgatory. The dancing blue spheres filled me with dread.

  Just then Elijah pulled hard at the reins, nearly jerking my shoulder from its socket. I swore at the animal, wishing the storm would let up long enough for me to hobble the horse, though the thought of playing about near the frightened beast’s flashing hooves was none too enticing.

  I was no great lover of horses, having grown up in the city and traveled most places by either foot or wagon. Bartholomew, my father’s horse, an enormous German Holsteiner, had always terrified me as a child, inducing nightmares of Brobdingnag proportions in which the gigantic horse had pursued me through distorted landscapes of impossible Nature. I could still envisage the twisted forests and rivers of my dreams descending from brackish skies. I would wake, tumbling from a height so great I could not catch my breath.

  It occurred to me that the prairie, transformed by the storm and lightning, had taken on the look of my childish nightmares and for a moment I felt the old fear rising in me. I shut my eyes tight and prayed to my mother while my father’s ghost raged at my infantile fears. My mother’s image flitted across my mind. How I still missed her after all these years. Father loomed before me on his giant horse casting judgment like an Old Testament prophet. I swore out loud; taking the Lord’s name in vain, that it might fortify my resolve, ashamed of my cowardice.

  Though I did not consider myself a particularly brave man, I had not expected a mere storm to reduce me to the state of a child. I thought of young Sebastian, our new traveling companion, who had come west in the hope of rejuvenating his sickly flesh and I resolved to overcome my own infirmities, though they were those of the spirit and not the body. Forcing my eyes open, I saw that the rain had begun to subside and a band of light was creeping upward from the western horizon beneath a band of jagged clouds from which drifted wispy tails and scudding rudders.

  Rising to my feet, I patted Elijah’s nose. The pony seemed calmer now than he had been at any point since our shared journey had begun some four weeks ago in Missouri. Perhaps detente had been reached, the shared experience of the storm having brought man and beast together I hoped. I began to extricate the reins from my blood encrusted hands. The leather had bitten hard into the soft flesh. Soft no longer I mused. Soon they will be as crusty as any backwoodsman’s. The pencil had begun to feel strange between my fingers when I wrote in the journal amid the blisters and calluses I had raised. How much stranger still would my perceptions be as my mind was transformed in a like manner I wondered?

  By now the storm was little more than a memory, a distant grumbling to the east. The Earth’s indigestion I thought with amusement. Climbing back aboard Elijah we rode out of the small grove and trotted southward toward the camp. The storm had left in its wake a wet, muddy plain strewn with leaves and branches, the tall grass matted to its surface like the feathers of a swimming duck. Small lakes had formed in the hollows and I rode around them. We are a schooner I thought happily, Elijah and me, skimming across the waves like Magellan upon his voyages. The horse nodded lazily as if in agreement and I patted his neck. The camp hove into sight and we picked up the tempo, the lure of hot coffee and vittles inspiring us.

  Chapter 3 – An Odd Company

  Titlark and Trotter were busy picking up storm debris as Dr. Zenobia tended the cook fire, brewing, no doubt, some medicinal concoction for his tender young patient. Mozart and Spencer were nowhere to be seen. I descended from Elijah’s saddle as easily as a Nantucket sailor might climb down from the rigging of a whaling boat, a newfound confidence filling me from having survived the storm alone on the Plains.

  “How goes it gentlemen?” I asked merrily, the mud sucking at my no longer new boots like an octopus a clam.

  Bog Trotter, a swarthy warthog of a man, swore at me as was his custom, annoyed by my cheerfulness. William Titlark, his partner, continued his chores unperturbed. Titlark reminded me of Ichabod Crane from Washington Irving’s story with his tall, skeletal frame and hollow, sunken eyes. The two were as unfriendly as matrons at a harvest dance, reserving all their politeness for their paymaster, young Sebastian. I disliked both the ruffians, but especially Trotter. I could tell he was a bully by nature and would gladly have robbed us all, or worse, if left to his own devices. Titlark, on the other hand, was a fool who would follow whosever’s orders he was given. The two of them had apparently been traveling companions for some years, traversing the western part of the country, according to them, from Missouri to Oregon and down into Mexican California.

  Dr. Zenobia looked up, one eyebrow arched. “We were worried about you out there in the storm. We thought you might have been struck by lightning.”

  “Elijah rode me to a grove where we weathered the blast. We did fine,” I said proudly. Then, looking about, I inquired, “Where are Spence and Mozart?”

  “They rode out after the storm had passed. Spencer said he wanted to capture the back lighting upon the clouds before they disappeared,” Zenobia answered.

  “Oh,” I nodded, disappointed somewhat as I had assumed they had gone out in search of me.

  It was a foolish notion I knew, as Spencer never seemed to worry about anyone, or anything, his attitude toward life so easy that one wondered if any person, or event could provoke a rise in him. As we spoke, two distant specks appeared upon the eastern horizon, framed against the departing storm.

  I pointed. “Our returning wanderers.” No one paid me any mind.

  “Thank God the storm cleared the bugs for a while at least,” Zenobia commented.

  Great clouds of gnats had plagued us for days and before that clouds of mosquitoes had swarmed the banks of the many rivers we had crossed. It seemed that every biting, crawling stinging thing in the history of the world had been stirred to life by the spring weather. We had come equipped only with tents, which were ill fitted to keep out the marauding insects and one small wagon to hold our dry goods. A team of unruly mules named Sheepskin and Mutton pulled the wagon, which Titlark usually drove when he wasn’t sleeping in it.

  “And how is Sebastian?” I wondered.

  “Fine, fine. He’s inside the tent cleaning his rifle, determined to go on the hunt. Bog Trotter, the goddamned fool, has put the notion in his head that certain animals are only flushed by the advent of a storm. It will be dark soon, so I’m making a strong herb tea to fortify him against the chill,” Zenobia explained.

  I nodded. Zenobia worried over Sebastian like a hen its chick, though the boy, rather man for he was of the same age as Spencer and myself, seemed healthy enough, if a bit on the lean side. Parker had suffered from a weakness of the lungs as a lad and as a result had embarked on a program of self improvement, climaxing with his venture into the wilderness, albeit accompanied, at his parent’s insistence, by his physician Zenobia and the bodyguards, if such they could be called, Titlark and Trotter whom they had picked up in Missouri.

  The two frontiersmen had been enlisted to instruct Parker in the skills of their craft, hunting, or as I preferred to call it, the wanton slaughter of animals. Though not averse to killing for food, I had already begun to find Sebastian and the scouts disregard for life repugnant and avoided their ‘hunts’ at all costs, as the three of them found it good sport to shoot at anything that moved, no matter how small or innocuous. At times, our camp resembled an abattoir so great was the volume of stinking animal carcasses and uncured hides.

  “Coffee?” Zenobia offered.

  The day had turned cool and I had begun to shiver a bit inside my sopping clothes. I gladly accepted. Zenobia was an enigma. The doctor was a man of forty odd years, stately and reserved. Though American by birth, he was a veteran of the British Army and had served in India. He was always dressed neatly as a pin, looking as out of place in the wilderness as a Rembrandt in a tavern. He had proved an interesting dinner companion, joining in the philosophical dissertations begun by Spencer and myself, his vast experience of t
he world and its peoples offering some insight into our arguments.

  Once Zenobia had filled my cup, I gestured toward the tent. “I Think I’ll check on Sebastian, then change into some dry clothes.”

  The doctor smiled congenially, pleased at the friendship, limited as it was, that had sprung up between us. Spencer had kept his distance, finding Sebastian more an amusement than a companion, though he had not been averse to cultivating the convenience of their hunter’s party as a means of crossing the trackless prairies. As I turned toward the tent, Sebastian pushed open the flap and stepped out, grinning at me as he held a gleaming rifle before him.

  “She’s a beauty isn’t she?” The lad was smooth faced, his month’s growth of beard barely more than the fuzz one might find on a ripe peach.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  Though a novice in such things, I had been raised on the adventures of Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo and was inclined to admire the long barreled Golcher Sporting Rifle that Sebastian so proudly displayed. Its sleek desiring fairly begged to be caressed, like the elegant neck of a beautiful woman. I had in my own possession, a smaller bore Pennsylvania Rifle and a Colt Revolver, a strange invention manufactured especially for the wild denizens of Texas in their fight against the savage Comanche bands. Sebastian had put on a demonstration for us in Independence, firing his brace of Colts simultaneously, one in each hand, flame issuing forth from his two fists like Zeus atop distant Mount Olympus casting thunderbolts down upon mankind; Spencer had been so impressed he had promptly purchased a pair for himself and me.

  My companion had outfitted us for the journey west through the sale of several paintings in St. Louis and Independence. He had produced a mural for a bawdy house consisting of seven nymphs, five satyrs and three cupids with several water color Births of Venus for the meeting rooms upstairs in the establishment, all done in the span of a week. I had felt guilty at contributing so little to our traps, but Spencer had allayed my guilt by procuring a contract with a St. Louis newspaper that was connected to a New York publishing house to which we would sell our journals and sketches of the odyssey for publication. Once we reached civilization in the coastal outposts of California we would ship our works east by clipper. That Spencer had bargained fifty percent of our wages in advance, was a testament both to his gift of gab and the clout of his family name even in so far flung an outpost as Independence. If not for our chance meeting on the banks of the Ohio, I fear my own odyssey would have ended in St. Louis.