The Indifference of Tumbleweed by Rebecca Tope

stopped. Hot water, and – ’he cast around at the vegetation close by ‘see, there is yarrow, by God’s true mercy. Gather it, girl, and help your mother.’ His orders issued, he stamped away, brushing at himself where my sister’s blood had left a mark on his jerkin.
    The clump of white flowers was indeed as if God-given. It was the easier of the ingredients for Nam’s potion to obtain. Hot water was a bigger challenge, since we had not lighted any fires for the nooning. Reuben, without ceremony, made a smallfire, and placed a tin can of water on it. It was steaming within ten minutes, as the dry kindling caught and flamed immediately the tinder was sparked.
    My mother chopped the plant and infused it, while Fanny and Lizzie and two or three women from the party gathered around poor Nam. Pain came off her in waves you could almost see. The hand had swelled and turned a bright pink, the fingers looking small and useless, attached to the mis-shapen lump that had been a pretty child’s hand. Three teeth had broken it, as far as we could tell from the punctures in a ragged pattern across the small bones. My own hand throbbed in sympathy as I hung back helplessly. Fanny looked over her shoulder at me, an unfamiliar expression in her eyes. Something like accusation and puzzlement.
    â€˜What?’ I asked her, less boldly than I intended. My insides were churning, threatening to make me sick.
    She stood up and came to me. ‘Seemed to me you had more feeling for the dog than your injured sister,’ she murmured.
    â€˜Of course I did not,’ I protested. ‘It was simply…’ Again I thought of poor silly Melchior, unaware of his own strength and ravenous for food. Again my spirit rose in a passionate objection to the powerlessness of an animal in the face of human control. The man, his owner; the kindly child, between them they had constructed a situation which gave the dog no choice but to do what he did. It could hardly be termed an accident, given the circumstances.
    â€˜Mr Bricewood will shoot him,’ said Fanny. ‘I wager he will.’
    â€˜Then he will be a murderer in my eyes,’ I said, feeling faint from my rage.
    â€˜All the children will be afraid of him now. And he will grow nervous and unhappy. It might be that ’tis the best thing for him.’
    I stared at her, sixteen years old and disgracefully wise. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I would take him as my own rather than that. He would not be nervous with me. I have no fear of him.’
    Word was passing along that we should get moving for the next stretch. Five or six miles before sunset would be our goal, as always. It was so pathetically little in the great whole that a day’s travelling earned itself little significance. We had rested on the Sabbath each week, and for many it was becoming a chore to start off again on the following day. The train was becoming looser as the weeks unrolled. The more eager parties had overtaken the idlers, and spaces were growing between them. But the essential pattern persisted, with the entire assembly walking for eight hours each day,achieving somewhere between twelve and fifteen miles, now and then a little more, pitifully nibbling away at the thousands that seemed to be written in smoke on the sky ahead.
    There were, though, changes to the landscape, even in a day’s walk. Hills passed in the distance, vales were filled with the hundred or more wagons, forced together by the sloping sides, sometimes so close to small water courses that the heavy wheels altered the shape of the banks and widened the streams simply by their passage. The track was totally bare of any vegetation after all the traffic that had passed over it, the ruts so deep that there was seldom any alternative but to simply stay in them, until they wore down too far, the ground between them impeding the axles. This was not a frequent occurrence, since the feet of the oxen also