The ferry across the North Platte made its slow, rope-pulled traverse of six to eight feet of cold mountain water, one wagon at a time, the dollar per wagon. The animals swam. The Greer team crossed with the accumulated expertise of a company that had been swimming animals across rivers since the Kaw. (Excerpt from The Road Not Taken)
Maya, dressed in her jeans, managed the water from beside Buck the way she always managed it, her hand on his neck through the crossing, the contact doing what the contact did.
When the last wagon was up the north bank Cord sat his horse and looked back at the North Platte for a moment, the river curving away southwest toward its mountain sources, the Red Buttes above the crossing in the afternoon light and turned northwest.
The Platte River was behind them. All of it: south bank and north bank, Nebraska and Wyoming, the five hundred miles of plains and river and alkali and landmark since early June. Behind them. The company understood this without being told. They had accomplished the first half of an enormous thing and had discovered that the second half was different in more ways than just miles.
The twenty-five miles of dry travel between the North Platte crossing and Willow Spring was the first sustained dry stretch since the drive to the Platte back in early June. All the trail variants converged there for the first time: the Mormon Trail companies crossing from the north bank, the various cutoff routes rejoining the main road and every wagon train that had been running parallel courses through Wyoming were suddenly on the same road. The traffic thickened to a density the company hadn’t experienced since the consolidated Platte corridor in Nebraska. The dust it produced was the worst of the journey. The road narrowed between the canyon walls of Devil’s Backbone. The concentrated passage of hundreds of wagons in July heat ground the Wyoming soil to a powder that hung in the air with nowhere to go, coating everything it touched with the alkaline gray that had become the trail’s signature color.
