Five miles into the trip, we came upon the Blue River. Staring out over the wide channel, thinking about the many, many mishaps I’d experienced in the different versions of this game, I shuddered.
“Want to know what the river conditions are like?” Ezra asked.
“Yes, please.” If Niall had asked me that question, I would’ve tacked on ‘obviously’ instead.
Immediately, he replied, “The river is 800 feet across, three feet deep, and seems tranquil.”
“Well, that’s a neat trick. You just guessing, or do you actually know?”
“I know,” he said.
“Huh. Well, tranquil and deepish sounds like a good candidate to float across.”
“If you say so.”
“What, you don’t agree?”
He shrugged. “All major decisions in the game are up to you.”
“What are my other choices?”
“Wait/rest here, ford the river, or see who’s around.”
“We just started traveling.”
“Indeed.”
“The river sounds a bit too deep to me to ford.”
Ezra grunted and propped his booted foot on a large rock in front of us.
“Okay, so… I’ll see who’s around.”
Immediately, a man approached. “Hi! Are you on your way to Oregon, too? I’ve heard there’s rich farmland on the other side of the Rockies.”
“Uh, yeah, though we might be taking the turnoff to Sacramento. You know anything about the river?”
He turned to look out over the water. “It’s a big’un, isn’t it?”
“Um. Do you have any advice on how we should cross?”
He chuckled. “Stay upright.”
“Right. Okay, I’m done with you. Go on,” I said, making shooing motions.
He wandered off.
“Who else is around?” I asked.
A woman approached, an inquisitive-looking dark-haired specimen I could’ve sworn I’d seen in town. She swept her gaze down me, taking in the saloon girl getup.
“Hi, uh, we were planning on heading across the river. Any idea how—“
She spit at my feet and walked away.
“I don’t remember that being a programmed response,” I mused.
The next woman had lovely dark skin and a bonnet.
“Hi. Do you have any advice for me?” I asked.
“Stay away from our men,” she said.
“I have no designs on your men. I have a few already, thank you very much. I just want to get across the river, same as you.”
“I had no idea we had a harlot in our midst.”
Because I wanted to see how she’d react, I asked, “Want to trade?” To my surprise, the list of items she had popped up, and I scrolled through. “How about the ten pounds of fresh fruit?”
“I’ll take a horse.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“Two horses,” she said.
“It’s just fruit. That’s nowhere near the same value.”
“Three hundred dollars.”
“Okay, I get the point,” I said, waving her off. Something like a hermit crab must’ve crawled up in her vag and died.
“You done screwing around?” Niall asked. He’d walked up as we were ‘bartering’, and now propped his hands on his hips.
“I was seeing if anyone had some advice.”
“We should hurry up and cross the river,” Niall said. Behind him, Wesley was nodding.
“I’d like to point out that there is a base pace,” Ezra said.
“What does that mean?”
“The map, the world, dissolves from East to West over the course of the summer. Go too slow, and we disappear with it.”
“What?”
Ezra pulled out my Guidebook and opened it to the map. “This is us,” he said, pointing to the green star. “This line,” he said, tracing one that was just a fraction of an inch inside the edge of the page, near Independence, “is the line we must stay ahead of.”
“You’re saying that in a day or two…”
“Independence will be gone. And the line will continue to chase us all the way to Oregon.”
I didn’t want to disappear. What happened to people who disappeared?! I took some nice, deep breaths to stave off panic. “Okay. So we need to ford the river. Caulk the wagon,” I said.
A little bit later, we were lined up to pull the first of our Conestogas across the river. I watched the families ahead of us float their wagons across with growing relief as, one after the other, their teams pulled them safely to the other side.
Wesley whistled, and touched the oxen’s backs with the reins. They pulled, and I watched with horror as the wagon plunged into the water. It wobbled side to side before settling fully upright. It was floating, trailing after the oxen whose heads and backs were still clear of the surface.
I held my breath until he reached the other side. As the oxen pulled the wagon from the water, Kenny poked his head out the back. He waved, then cupped his hands around his mouth. “The grandfather clock is safe!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered.
Ezra signaled Clay, who urged the second team toward the shore. “Did you want to cross on horseback, or ride in the wagon?” Ezra asked.
Imagining squelching around the rest of the day in wet shoes, I approached Clay. He gave me a hand up, and urged the oxen into the water. Here we go, I thought, gripping my skirts as the water’s edge slid underneath us. I yelped as we bounced down over a pretty good drop-off, then glanced over at Clay’s faint grin. Right, I needed to man up. First day, this was just the first day. What were the odds of us having a problem, after watching every other wagon float across safely? I was braver than this. I am brave.
Something thudded, and the wagon swung sharply to the side.
“What the—“
A couple more quick thuds, then the wagon tilted. Everything was thrown to the side, including me against Clay. He threw an arm around me, and for a breathless moment, I thought we’d be okay. The wagon would pop back up, we’d continue across, and everything would be fine.
The wagon went horizontal, and Clay was in the water. Then so was I, and I lost contact with him. The water was shockingly chilly, bubbles swirling around me. I struggled toward the surface, but something was tugging me.
Something had my skirt.
Bending, I felt along the billowing cloth. It was like being caught in a forest of seaweed. Unable to see, I didn’t know which way was up or how to get out.
My lungs were burning when I found the taut section of cloth. Gripping it, I tugged, but to no avail. I felt along the slick, tight material, found the spot where it’d been snagged by a large splinter of wood on the wagon’s seat. Tugged again.
I was damn close to panicking when I realized what I needed was leverage. I braced my feet against the wood, grabbed the skirt, and pushed off with all my might.
I tore free, and popped up above the surface. The air tasted so good. The sun was warm on my face. I was alive.
I’d taken two deep breaths, and then my skirt dragged me back down. It was wrapped in my legs, billowing like octopus legs, wrapping around me and yanking me ever downward. I kicked my legs and got almost no result in my heeled shoes. And they were laced all the way up the fronts of my shins.
My skirts whipped around my face, grabbing at me. I struggled against them.
But then the grip resolved into a warm, firm band across my chest, and something pulled me above the surface again.
“I’ve got you,” Clay said.
I just had the presence of mind to quit fighting him. Gripping his arm, I otherwise went limp in his hold as he propelled us both toward the far shore.
“This is deeper than three feet,” I said. When he didn’t comment, I realized that he’d spoken. So, he wasn’t a mute. Just quiet, then?
Some splashing preceding Ezra on a horse. “Hey, now. You all right?” he asked, reaching for me.
Clay handed me up, and Ezra lifted me, sopping skirts and all, in front of him before guiding his horse the rest of the way across.
“I’m not riding in the wagon again,” I said. “What the heck happened?”
“A log hit the wagon. It was mostly submerged, making it hard to see, and waterlogged and heavy. So it hit, started to roll under, and then the current fully caught it and flipped you.”
“The oxen! Are they…”
“Wes and Ken are retrieving them.” He gave the horse his heels, urging it up and out of the river.
“So,” I said with a feeling of inevitability, “what did we lose?”
“Well, they haven’t quite retrieved the wagon yet.”
“On second thought, don’t tell me what we lost,” I said, not wanting to be discouraged on day 1. “Just tell me if we need something so I can trade for it, okay?”
As Ezra handed me down to solid ground, I watched morosely as yet another wagon floated safely across the river. Over a hundred wagons, and ours was the one that got hit with the freak log? Of all the rotten luck…
A woman herding two children up the bank saw me, and gripping their shoulders, guided them away. The man driving the wagon tipped his hat and winked at me with a gap-fronted grin.
I rubbed the groove between my brows, then my hand wandered up to find I’d lost my hat. My hair was hanging against my shoulders in wild dreads. IRL, I didn’t have this much hair. Here, it must’ve been three feet long if it was an inch, and heavy even before it’d gotten wet.
Another woman limped up the shore, and wrapping my arms around myself to ward off the chill, I prepared for more derisive looks. She was older, grey hair in a bun, and when she looked up, she smiled kindly and handed me a towel.
“Thank you,” I said, accepting with cautious gratitude.
“God is watching,” she said before limping past.
Okay. A gift with a warning. I wrapped it around myself, covering myself from chin to thighs. Even so, the chill was starting to seep through my wet, clingy skirts. Miserable, I found myself longing suddenly for my bed. My real bed, in the real world, where things like drowning weren’t a possibility. My warm, soft sheets, my down comforter. I’d slip into dry PJs and possibly even turn on the electric blanket…
“That was so cool!” Kenny said, leading an ox up out of the river. “You went like floop, and then the river just sucked you under!”
“I know, I was there,” I said, “and it wasn’t cool.”
“Here, hold this,” he said, handing me the ox’s lead.
“Don’t we need those to pull the wagon out?”
“This one was tangled. Wes’s got the others on it.”
“Damn it,” I said, watching Ezra, Clay, and Wes struggle to right the wagon. They’d tied a rope to a tree on shore, and were slowly coaxing it upright.
Kenny patted me on the shoulder. “It’s okay.”
“Did I make the wrong call?” I asked, fully aware I was talking to a tween.
“Naw. Just a spot of bad luck.”
I grimaced.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”
Optimistic bugger, he was.
A while later, they’d coaxed the tipped wagon up on shore. “Nothing broken,” Wes announced.
“We’re low on food,” Ezra informed me.
Ugh. Which meant, most if not all of it had been in that wagon, and most of it was now gone.
Without comment, Clay handed me a dry dress.
“Can we hunt?” I asked.
“We could, but I recommend we prioritize catching up with the others.”
We’d been a few from the back of the line to start, and now… dead last, I realized. Or completely without a wagon train if we didn’t hurry.
“There’s a fort coming up tomorrow. You can resupply there.”
I sighed. “Okay. Listen, I’m sorry about this. It was my call to float across, and—“
“Not your fault,” Ezra said.
“But we—“
“There really wasn’t anything you could do, lassie,” Niall seconded. “Like the stiff says, wasn’t your fault.” And if Niall was saying that, then it had to be true, because I doubted he had a polite bone in his body. “Now get your skinny arse in that dress and let’s get movin’. I don’t fancy losing this game just ‘cuz a loose woman ain’t got nothin’ between her ears but wind.”