Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (21 page)

But Betsy never got the opportunity to fatten Sarah up, to add a layer of fat to her hard muscle. In the morning, at the first sign of light, Sarah woke them, waited while they packed their meager possessions on the oxen, then led them to the trail.

She walked with them all morning, setting a brisk pace and carrying the smallest of the girls when she lagged behind. “Can you smell the smoke?” she asked the little girl. The little girl shook her head.

“Can you smell the smoke of the campfires?” Sarah asked Betsy.

“Maybe.” Betsy sniffed the cold air. “I think so.”

“There,” Sarah said, pointing down the trail. “Go down there, and you will see a cabin. They will help you.”

“But what about you?” Betsy said. “You come with us. You can’t…”

Sarah put the little girl beside her mother. “Good-bye,” she said. Without another word, she disappeared into the trees.

“Come on, Betsy,” Ellie said. “I can smell the smoke. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Betsy followed the others down the trail.

“The Lord sent an angel to save us,” Ellie told the miners. The men had fed them, given up their tents for them.

“An angel,” asked one miner. “What did she look like?”

Ellie frowned. “Not what you might think,” she said slowly. “A dirty red-flannel shirt, moccasins. Not nearly enough clothing.” Ellie wet her lips and went on. “She was beautiful, but she was very dirty. She liked biscuits. And her eyes were wild, like an animal’s.”

“You’re sure she was an angel,” the man asked.

“Oh, yes,” Ellie said. “There’s no doubt.”

“She sounds rather dirty for an angel,” another man said dryly. Ellie lifted her eyes from the fire. She smiled, an innocent smile that would make any man ashamed of teasing her. “Of course she was an angel,” Ellie said. “But she was wild. A wild angel.”

“When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.”

—Mark Twain

T
HE NEXT SPRING
, Max traveled to the lake where he had met Sarah the previous year. He camped alone. At night, he listened to the distant howling of wolves. He called Sarah’s name until the mountains echoed. But Sara did not come.

He waited.

He fished in the mountain lake, standing on the shore and casting his line. More often than not, he caught fish and fried them up for supper.

He wrote to Audrey North and reread her latest letter to him, a long and thoughtful missive. She seemed undismayed by his description of Sarah’s table manners, thrilled by the news that she had been dubbed the Wild Angel of the Sierras. She wrote of her desire to come west and visit the lake with him, to see her niece after all these years. “When my husband returns from sea, I will consult with him on this matter. I cannot leave without his knowledge, though I would like nothing better than to travel westward. I find myself dreaming of mountains and wolves and my heart aches when I wake to my house on the shore.”

He told himself that he was working on another book. Rather than picturing the men who made their living in the mines, this one would depict the wild beauty of the land. That’s what he told himself he was doing. But what he was really doing was waiting.

Sometimes he had the feeling that he was being watched. When he stood on the lakeshore, he scanned the surrounding hills, but he saw nothing.

One night, after he had been camped by the lake for almost a week, he sat by the fire, baking biscuits in a Dutch oven. Every night, he had made biscuits, hoping that the aroma of baking would lure Sarah from hiding. On this night, he had waited until dark to build a fire and cook his supper. The moon had not yet risen. Above him, the stars blazed in the sky.

Around him, the world was dark. But he knew she was there. He could feel her watching him, unwilling to reveal herself. While the biscuits baked, he lay back on the ground, looking up at the stars.

“I wonder how many stars there are. More than you could count, I wager.” He spoke in a conversational tone. By the lake, the spring peepers sang. In the fire, a pine knot crackled and popped. Otherwise, the night was quiet.

He waited for a moment without speaking. A breeze stirred his hair, tickled the back of his neck.

“I’ll lie here and count them,” he said. “One, two, three, four…” He had taught her to count to one hundred. She had delighted in numbers. He could smell the biscuits baking and knew that she could smell them too. “… seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…” He caught the first whiff of burning biscuits. “… thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four…”

“The biscuits are burning,” Sarah said.

He continued gazing at the stars. Her voice had come from behind him. She was still outside the circle of firelight, he guessed.

“… thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”

“Max! The biscuits are burning!”

She was closer now, but he did not turn to face her. “…forty-two, forty-three…”

“Max!” She stood over him, glaring at him. “Take the biscuits off the fire.”

He sat up then. Leaning over, he hooked a stick through the handle of the Dutch oven and pulled the cast-iron pot away from the fire. The biscuits were a little burned, but not too badly. “Hello, Sarah,” he said.

She was a year older, a year taller. She still wore the flannel shirt he had given her, and a pair of ragged, cut-off trousers. She looked healthy.

She frowned at him. “You did not bring that man.” He shook his head. “I did not bring him.”

Warily, she crouched by the fire.

“As soon as the biscuits cool, we can eat them,” he said. He was afraid that she would run away again.

She was not ready to abandon the subject of Jasper Davis. “He is a bad man.”

Max nodded. “Sarah, I’m sorry. He told me he thought Beka was chasing me. He was shooting at Beka.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you think?”

“I think he is a very bad man.”

Max bit his lip. He could not argue with her, in good con science. He had never liked Jasper Davis. There was something shifty about him. Nothing that Max could put his finger on, but something not quite right.

Max shrugged. “He said he was shooting at the wolf. He said he wanted to help you. I couldn’t see any reason he’d be lying.”

“What is that?” she asked, frowning.

“What?”

“Lying. What does that mean?”

He blinked. He had, the previous summer, managed to introduce Sarah to a number of abstract concepts, but lying was not among them. “He didn’t tell the truth.”

She continued to frown.

Max scratched his head, trying to figure out how to explain. He was glad that Sarah had come to speak with him. She did not seem to hold a grudge against him for bringing Jasper to the lake, but she was puzzled.

“Look in the pan,” he said. “How many biscuits are there?”

Sarah counted. “Four.”

“I say there are three biscuits.”

She stared at him. “You are wrong. There are four.” She pointed. “One, two, three, four.”

“When I say that there are three, I am lying.”

“Lying means you can’t count.”

“I know there are four biscuits, but I say there are three. I am lying.”

She stared at the biscuits. “There are four. Why would you say there are three?”

Max shook his head in frustration. “Here, would you like a biscuit?” He used a stick to poke one of the least burned biscuits to the edge of the pan, when he could pick it up with his fingers. He gave it to Sarah, who devoured it.

“Now there are three,” she said. “One, two, three.”

“So if I said that there were four, I would be lying.”

She studied his face with a baffled frown. “That man. What is his name?”

“Jasper Davis.”

Sarah repeated the name several times and nodded. Her fascination with words had extended to names. Words and names intrigued her. In the fashion of the primitive savage, she seemed to believe that knowing the name of something gave her a power over the person or thing. For some reason, the name “Jasper Davis” seemed to hold a particular interest. She frowned as she said it, as if the name itself made her uneasy. Looking thoughtful, she ate another biscuit, using the blade of her knife to scrape it from the pan.

“You do not like Jasper Davis,” she said, after licking the last crumbs of the second biscuit from her palm.

“That’s true.” He nodded.

“You are afraid of Jasper Davis.”

He frowned at that. “Afraid? Not at all. It’s true that I don’t like the man, but…”

Sarah watched him blustering about Jasper Davis. His shoulders were hunched high and stiff; his eyes blinked a little too quickly; he did not meet her eyes as he spoke. It was clear to her that he was afraid, very afraid. And yet he said that he was not. His words and his feelings did not match. How strange that was.

She laughed, interrupting his monologue. “You are lying!” she said with delight, understanding the concept at last. “You are afraid, and you say you are not. You are lying.”

The summer passed. Max taught Sarah more English. He asked her to take him higher into the mountains with her, and she complied, taking him on long hikes away from the lake into the wild lands that she knew so well. He took his notebook and sat and sketched, while Sarah and Beka roamed and hunted or slept or played.

Once, on a sunny afternoon after a long hike, they rested for a time on a mountainside. Sitting beside Max as he sketched, she asked him a question that had been troubling her. “Max, where is your pack?”

He looked up from his drawing. “I don’t have a pack. People don’t travel in packs.”

Sarah frowned. His answer did not match her experience. Most of the white people she had seen over the years were traveling in groups. “Ellie and Betsy were traveling in a pack.” She had told him about her encounter with the emigrants.

“That’s a family,” Max said. “Mothers and children. Not a pack.”

Sarah shrugged. “Family, pack—where is your family?”

“I don’t have one.” Max scowled at his drawing, then began darkening the lines with short, hard strokes of the pencil.

“Why are you angry?” she asked him.

“I’m not angry,” he snapped.

She studied him, wondering why he would deny something so obvious. “You are angry,” she said.

The pencil lead snapped, and he put it down, still frowning. He did not look at her. “I am not angry at you,” he said softly.

She studied his face. He was angry, and he was sad. She did not want him to be sad. She reached out and took his hand. “I had a family once,” he said. “But that was a long time ago.” She squeezed his hand, not knowing what to say. “My wife is dead. My daughter was better off without me. I did something wrong. I broke the law and went to jail.”

She did not know what the law was, but she was sorry that it was broken, since that made Max sad. She did not know what jail was, but clearly it was not a good place to go.

“Can I be your family?” she asked him. “Beka and I—we will both be your family.”

He nodded, squeezing her hand. “I think you already are.”

As the days grew shorter, Max tried to persuade Sarah to return with him to Selby Flat. One night, sitting by the fire, he told her, “You belong with your people.”

“I belong with the wolves,” she said.

“You are more human than wolf,” he said.

She gazed at him. Beka lay beside her, staring into the fire. The wolf’s eyes gleamed in the firelight; her tongue lolled out over sharp white teeth. “People are dangerous,” Sarah said.

Max smiled. “Some people think wolves are dangerous.”

Sarah nodded gravely. “Some wolves are.”

“And some people are dangerous. But not all people. What did you think of Betsy and Ellie?”

“I thought I would talk to them,” she said. “To see if they were dangerous.”

“That’s good.”

She stared into the fire. “Some people are not dangerous,” she said grudgingly.

“Some people are nice.” She nodded.

“Mrs. Selby wants you to come to Selby Flat,” he said. “She wants to make you apple pie and biscuits. Your aunt wants to see you. She lives very far away, but I could take you there.”

Sarah looked nervous. “I don’t want to go far away,” she said. “I belong here.”

It was hard for Max to imagine what she would do if she came with him. He could not imagine her in proper clothing, hampered by skirts, sipping tea in the parlor and fussing about ribbons in her hair.

“I will come back next summer,” he said.

She nodded. “I will look for you.”

After Max left, she returned to the pack. She had been away from the pack for more than a month, spending her time with Max by the lake while the other wolves roamed their territory, hunting wherever game was most abundant. She found them high in the mountains, far from the mining camps.

She saw Istas first, a sweet-tempered female who had been littermates with Marek. As soon as Sarah saw Istas, the girl knew that something was wrong.

Istas was an easygoing, mid-ranking wolf that avoided squabbles whenever possible. But Sarah could tell that she had been in a fight not long ago: Her right ear was torn and scabbed; she was limping, and her left front paw still bore the bloody marks of a bite. Sarah ran to greet the wolf, eagerly touching noses, stroking the wolf’s soft fur.

Istas seemed glad to see her, but Sarah noticed that she was hesitant to lead the girl to join the rest of the pack. Sarah understood why as she approached.

The pack was resting in the shade of a pine. They had killed a buck and feasted on venison. Now they were sleeping and grooming each other, exhausted from the hunt and sated with meat.

As Sarah approached, Yepa stood to run and greet her, then hesitated, staring at the black wolf who crouched in the sun in the center of the pack. He returned her look, flicking his ears back to communicate his disapproval, and Yepa sank down again.

When Sarah had left the pack, Rolon had been the pack’s leader. Over the years, he had grown a little slower, a little stiffer. But his minor physical decline had been offset by his wisdom. Rolon knew the mountains like no other wolf. He could find game when food was scarce; he could unify the pack in a hunt as no other wolf could.