La Grande Sauterelle took a bar of soap and headed for the fountain. She took off her clothes, letting them drop in the short grass, and then, wearing only the leather thong that held her knife, she sponged herself with cold water and soaped her body. She shouted to the man to bring her a towel. The government employees interrupted their work and, scythes in the air, began to watch.

Jack brought her the beach towel, the big one with a lion, parrots and an orange sun on it.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I fed the cat,” he said.

“You’re sweet.”

She was drying her hair with the big towel. He jerked his head in the direction of the men who were watching her.

“I saw them,” she said.

“But did you see their boots?”

“Of course, they’re the first thing I noticed.”

“That means there are rattlesnakes, right?”

“You think so?”

She wrapped herself in the towel.

“Out west everybody wears knee-high boots,” said Jack. “Maybe you shouldn’t go around barefoot.”

The girl put on a dress and her running shoes. They took along the cat, as usual, and a thermos of cold water and a bag of cookies, then set off on foot for the top of the hill that the emigrants had descended with such difficulty.

Its name was Windlass Hill, and there was a winding path paved in asphalt that one could climb, with benches to rest on. At the top they could see the ruts left by the emigrants’ wagon wheels: hollowed into the rock, eroded by rain, they were surprisingly deep and of a yellow, almost golden colour, like paper discoloured by the sun.

They stood there in silence. They felt like intruders. Out of place. (An old house where elderly people speak in undertones and communicate by secret gestures.)

On their way down, they took a detour to look at an old cemetery, and as they were drawing near they saw a tombstone that had been placed under glass; the epitaph read:

Her name was Rachel. She was nineteen years old and she was dead. Probably of cholera. That’s what it said in The Oregon Trail Revisited. It also said that thirty thousand emigrants had died along the Oregon Trail and that this number represented one-tenth of the people who had tried their luck. About these thirty thousand, the book said: “They didn’t make it.” These emigrants — men and women, old and young people and children — had not reached their destination. They had died en route, with their dreams. They had died in all sorts of ways: from cholera or dysentery; drowned crossing a river in spate; struck by lightning; killed by Indians; mortally wounded when handling a gun; dead of fatigue, of exhaustion, of sunstroke; devoured by grizzly bears; young children fallen from a wagon crushed to death by the wheels.