Crossing Purgatory Read Online Free Page A

present. But in sleep, the past returned, images crept back, burned anew, engraved themselves more deeply into memory, grew more vivid rather than faded with time. He sat up and swung his legs to the floor. The fever had broken. He tested his arm and found it stiff and tender. He tossed stale water from the basin out the window onto the street below and refilled it from the pitcher on the nightstand and changed his bandage. Before full light, he was up and on the road.
    Thompson traveled for a week, following the course of the Missouri from its junction with the Mississippi, west by northwest across the state. In places the river bottom stretched for miles from either bank, fertile and, in places, cultivated. Sometimes the yellow bluffs came up close to the banks and from them he sat looking out over the expanse of river country, the hardwoods, the land’s gentle rising and rolling, the pale green of crops ripening in distant fields, and felt an unspecified yearning for something lost. From the stillness of the heights, he could look down on the world below and follow the progress of paddle steamers churning upriver, and flatboats gliding down with their loads of firewood or buffalo hides. Men going about their business. Sometimes the bottomland became so swampy with back eddies and side channels that he was forced to leave it altogether for a stretch of miles. But always the river revealed itself in the cut of the land, in contours carved from flowing water, coursing for millennia after millennia, for years uncountable in human reckoning.
    Ten days west of Saint Louis, the salt pork ran out. Thompson had gone three days living on weak coffee and a thin mush of cornmeal mixed with water and a pinch of sugar. But he refused to pass through Jefferson City for supplies. His forearm yet throbbed, the wounds outlined in red and draining, a bothersome reminder of city hospitality. West of the town, a day’s journey, he located a promising oxbow on the river, spongy banks carpeted in new grass gently sloping into scrub flats cut with game trails. He camped off to the edge of the opening and slept the night without a fire. He primed and loaded his rifle and put it at half cock and slept sitting upright against a cottonwood. First light, a rustling, and three does and two small spike bucks came out of the brush to drink at the river. Thompson shot one of the bucks cleanly through the lungs. It lurched with the shot and kicked for the river but dropped before reaching it.
    He dragged the buck by the forelegs up the riverbank and positioned it on its back, head uphill so it could bleed out when he cut. He dressed out the carcass and skinned it sufficiently to access the backstrap on each side of the spine. He removed the meat and cut it into thin strips on a flat stone he’d pulled from the river. After washing the blood from his hands and arms, he built a fire and roasted the liver and the heart on skewers. While the fire was burning down, he built a drying rack by suspending willow switches over Y-shaped branches staked on either side of the fire pit. He banked the coals and put on some green wood to raise the smoke and draped the meat strips over the rack. While the meat dried, he ate a chunk of the liver and dozed and then turned the strips, ate part of the heart and slept again. Road-weary and sated for the first time in days, he slept without dreaming and woke midafternoon, grateful and rested. He sacked the jerky, and left the river bottom for firmer ground.

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    G radually, the land stretched out, the woods thinning and the hills flattening into broad reaches of rolling meadowland. Heat built through the day, little rain fell, and locusts flew up from the road at his passing and buzzed into tall grass. Thompson noticed the change, his mind recording countryside not so much his own any longer. It made it easier somehow to forget, to associate his memories with another land, another time. For a day, sometimes, he could