Julian nodded and smiled.

A branch snapped out in the darkness and Julian jerked nervously, spilling coffee from the mug he was cradling in his hands.

‘Uh… Grace, what the hell was that?’ He swallowed anxiously, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing like a fisherman’s float. Rose smiled at the grainy-green display in front of her.

Jules plays the fool so naturally.

‘Nothing,’ replied Grace calmly, ‘just dead wood falling. It happens. Relax.’

‘God, I hate woods,’ he gasped with a cloud of vapour. ‘Anyway, you were saying?’

Grace nodded. ‘History. We got a lot of it here; Indian history, followed by settler history. You know Emigrant Pass isn’t that far away from us.’

‘Emigrant Pass?’

‘It’s the one and only way through the Sierra Nevadas. At least, it was back in the 1850s when something like half a million people were migratin’ west,’ she continued. Rose listened intently to her dry throaty voice; a mesmerising monotone of Midwest vowels, back-woods charm and a lifetime of Marlboros.

A perfect voice for storytelling.

‘They called the route a number of things back then; the South Pass trail, the Emigrant Trail, the Freedom Trail… I guess you’d know it best as the Oregon Trail. It was the route settlers were taking across the wilderness to Oregon. There wasn’t one fixed trail though. It was a bunch of different east-west routes that mostly followed the Platte River towards the Rockies. Those trails criss-crossed each other, each one promising some kinda shortcut that beat the others. But no matter how much they all twisted and turned, they all came together in the end. They converged at one critical point.’

Grace pulled out a cigarette and lit up. The flame of her lighter flared brightly across Rose’s view screen, and then it flickered out a moment later.