Wild Life (11 page)

His family had a fish receiving station and cold storage plant on a rocky point just to the west of Dahlia, from which they shipped frozen sturgeon and caviar by rail to the East Coast. I told him about my mother's farm up Skamokawa Creek, which now was rented out to neighbors. We went over the names of people we knew in common and told certain gossip which had not made it across the intervening nine or ten miles. I remember that he was passionate in his belief that the wealth of capitalism would shortly abolish poverty. I had just begun to see my stories into print, and he encouraged me to write, stating his belief that women's minds should be satisfied as well as their hearts. We had read the same books. His eyes were a delicate green.

By the time I was twenty, I was a mother in addition to a wife, and within the next ten years would be the mother of five, and alone.

I have always been of two minds on the matter of Love. In one of them I am a fool for the romantic hero in buckskins, and the heroine who is a crack shot and binds up the poor boy's wounds without swooning; they marry and live happily unto The End. But when I am in my other mind, I know that love is a longer, more difficult, and more interesting story.

The lower Columbia is a wilderness of gillnetters, horse-seiners, salmon boats, and fish traps, which the steamboats must negotiate without tangling their wheels. I have been aboard boats that lunged suddenly to one side or the other to avoid disaster—passengers thrown to their knees, china sent flying, lamps swinging crazily. Every now and then when a boat makes an urgent hairpin turn, someone is thrown over the rail.

Twenty-three days after my husband's failure to return to his wife, a man's body washed up near Stella, at the mouth of Germany Creek. This news was brought to me by a sheriff's deputy, who stood with his hat in his hands, turning and turning it by the soft brim as he brought the words out laboriously. I suppose he expected me to fly into hysteria.

I was excused from viewing the body—Horace Stuband and Otto Eustler went in my place. Evidently the face, as well as body, were much destroyed, and the clothes remaining to the corpse were ragged and muddy remnants of blue serge such as Wes wore, along with half the men plying the river routes. Nothing remained of the pockets.

The lower river, of course, is home to numberless migrants, army deserters, tramps, and ship jumpers, any one of whom might disappear without notice or report. Who was to say this was Wes's body when it might just as well have been a friendless Bavarian hop-picker headed for the Finnish baths in Astoria?

When it was suggested to me that I might wish to claim the body, I said that I did not. I understood what was being offered: inasmuch as a deserted wife is held to be discreditable, here was the dignity of widowhood. But I always have preferred scandal to sympathy; and I had had twenty-three days to sound out my heart and to discover its druthers: I would rather hate a living husband than grieve a dead one.

C. B. D.

October 1906

 

There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience.

O
SCAR
W
ILDE

I am told there are a dozen mills within a two-mile radius of this town, and no proof can be more telling than the occasional scrawny young tree standing forlorn amidst the stumps and shattered brush either side of the railroad right-of-way. At sight of this shorn countryside, I have begun to relent a little in my opinion of Homer traipsing off into the tules to work. The homeguards here have a long walk and then some to bring them to uncut timber, burnt or green, and the big trees are sure to be away back in the deepwoods, for the nearby hills were hand-logged and re-hand-logged in days before the boom.

The town is unremarkable except for its late flowering. If there were settlers here before '03, then the greater part of them were taking up claims in the best interests of the timber companies, would be my guess. Now that the railroad has brought the logging industry to town, there are a few hopeful souls who have scratched at the ground between the stumps and planted hops, but I should be surprised if the town much survives the falling of the last tree.

Florence has her house very near the train yard—Melba pointed it out to me as soon as we had stepped down on the landing—but the mud was deep in the streets and Melba could not be persuaded to shuck her shoes and cross directly, which meant we must keep to the boardwalks where possible and take a tedious way around, which I'm afraid I did chafe at, being anxious to get past this necessary visit and deliver myself into the woods.

All the business buildings a-rowed beside the tracks are of a raw newness, and Florence likewise lives in a new little shack cobbled together of rough lumber and shakes. I have seen worse, and lived in them too. Melba called, “Florence,” against the shut door, her voice breaking a bit, and then with her usual impertinence promptly lifted the latch and stepped across the mudsill.

Upon every horizontal surface in that room sat a woman, her
hands busied with needlework. Half a dozen faces lifted to us with strained, anxious attention. The girl who let her embroidery fall and came weeping onto Melba's bosom was not Florence, surely—could not be, for Melba's girl has a rosy round countenance of the sort people call a sweetheart Face, and not this face all bone and ash—but oh, oh, and my heart sinking in my breast. There was a terrible moment, a quick shying away, an unreasonable dread for my own children left behind: I was run through by a blind impulse to break and turn back. In such ways does a body defend itself from an unbearable pain.

Our entrance roused a little bustle of activity, and directly a lunch was brought forward and urged especially upon Florence, who sipped coffee and touched the chicken with her fork. Melba, sitting beside her, patted her knee from time to time, which invariably started them both into tears.

I sat over my own plate beside a woman with a no-nonsense look to her, and shortly I had as much news as there was to be had, though the crux of it is rumor and thirdhand tale: Evidently Homer and others heard Harriet's cry of alarm, and following a trail of freakish big footprints, they came on tufts of coarse hair from bear or beast or wildman, and a scrap of Harriet's shift. In the rain and mud the trail was lost, though, and now every man in that part of the woods is engaged in looking for sign. At Camp 8 they have shut down the logging show, which is an uncommon event; the injury or death of a man might only call for poles run through the sleeves of a coat and two men to haul him down from the woods when the boss declares there is sufficient time. But rough old fallers and buckers and heartless boss-loggers will weaken where a child is concerned, and men in camps lying miles away to the east and south are keeping a lookout. There have been a dozen sightings of “monstrous forms,” and three men claim to have seen little Harriet carried upon a hairy creature's back like a yoke.

Of course, it is typical of men not to think of sending detailed and accurate information back to the waiting women, and every scrap of news reaching Yacolt is delayed and distorted by the distance. Generally Florence must wait for news to come to town with the occasional injured man. The country being rough and rock-ribbed, it is seemingly every bit as risky to mount a search for monsters as to carry on with logging: four men have been carried down from the woods so far, of which two suffered from broken bones and two were shot by
their nervous fellows in the deep brush. Homer evidently has not left off his searching even to comfort his wife, being unwilling to surrender the greater part of a day to travel here and back again. In any case, I should wonder what he would say to Florence if he came. That she must prepare herself for the worst?

“There is a general hope that if the beast's den can be tumbled on, Harriet might yet be found alive.”

This last was said to me by a sober mind, and with a solemn face.

From the women in Florence's house I have gained a better notion of how one must travel to reach Homer's camp in the deepwoods, and this only confirms my belief that the trek is beyond Melba's capabilities. In the morning (for I have missed the afternoon run) I shall have to hitch aboard a log train the six miles to Chelatchie Prairie at the terminus of the regular line and catch a little Shay engine up the spur line to Camp 6 on Canyon Creek. Evidently one must then walk five miles of flume to Camp 7 and two miles of footpath to reach Camp 8, away up the canyon. Since Melba is too weak and old for a hike of that kind, she'll remain here with her daughter while I go on alone.

Immediately on finishing lunch, someone instigated a prayer, and every woman in the room went down on her knees, even an old lady of eighty or eighty-five whose joints crackled when she knelt. Melba and I are both stubborn in our separate beliefs, and I generally will neither bow my head nor kneel for prayers and devotions; but to coldly stand while Melba and Florence were on their knees praying Jesus to return Harriet harmless would defeat even my own expectations. I let myself down to the floor and examined my clasped hands briefly before taking my glance around the room. Eyes were tightly shut beneath earnest frowns, lips were moving in devout silence. At length, a heavy woman with moles on her face, whose name had been told to me but which I'd promptly forgotten, opened her mouth and importuned the Lord on Harriet's behalf in a series of platitudes and prescribed phrases which the others seemed to think well of. Then we stood again, and the women picked up their needlework and resumed the solemn business of Waiting For Word. When I have caught up these notes (I suppose I mean now) I shall go into town and buy my provisions, and tomorrow at the crack of dawn shall be off into the woods.

 

Once we were awakened in the middle of the night by the screams of a wild beast that sounded like the yells and laughter of a demented man. I took my rifle; it was moonlight; I went in to the field, but could not make up the animal; I let go a shot in its direction, for conscience's sake. Never heard anything like it ever afterward. We thought it might have been a hyena; it may have been only an unusually gifted coyote.

Later, at another time, a large beast came to the edge of the cleared land, and would utter a scream that sounded like a frightened colt. I took my rifle, and a lantern, but the beast disappeared. My idea is, it was a cougar.

E
DGAR
R
OTSCHY
,
Early Days in Yacolt

 

C. B. D. (1889; unpublished)
F
EMALE
E
MANCIPATION

 

It's my belief there are only a few necessary conditions for female emancipation.

First, food preparation must be removed from the province of the home: I dream of a nourishing meal to which one adds only water; cheap and plentiful cafés; and refrigerated produce.

Then there must be a transformation of domestic duties through technology—principally the mechanization of heat and laundry. Freed of the labor of chopping and splitting wood, hauling and heating water, scrubbing and soaking and hanging up her family's clothes, a woman's real self will be able to have its day.

With the public spread of health care and birth control, women will be relieved of the unending cycle of maternity and nursing—freed, after raising through their infancy one or two or three children, to develop occupations suitable to their inclinations. And if there is available public education for all children unto the last degree, then every woman's mind will be a fertile field for ideas and she will have been properly prepared for the life she chooses to occupy.

Lastly, of course, women need the vote.

We are already “free” in the sense of being considered no man's
possession. Of late there has been some improvement in a woman's rights to property and to children in the case of divorce. But we are still politically disenfranchised and economically dependent, under-educated and—this is my belief—overpampered. With suffrage and these very few improvements and scientific advances, there will be no economic necessity to marry; and if a woman chooses to marry, she will have been cut loose from onerous domestic responsibilities and will still retain her independence. I envision a day very soon when women as a class shall be guaranteed happiness. We lack only the technology.

The hotels and saloons here, as in any lumbering town, are crowded in winters and on weekends, when loggers are forced out of the woods by bad weather or by the Sabbath, and this being a Sunday, men were scuffling on the sidewalks or sleeping drunk in the gutters when I passed uptown to find a store. I am at home in any village where the storefronts all trumpet the price of beer—was put at ease to find a few men, in the rumpled clothes they had slept in, standing before employment office chalkboards, gazing upon listings for axemen, rigging-slingers, buckers, and swampers.

Of course, with the uncommonly early spring weather, all the mills and shows are working twelve-hour shifts, and consequently the shops in town do the bulk of their trade on the weekends and do not trouble to close in honor of the Lord's Day. In the Worthington's store the shopkeeper was a Swede whose name was not Worthington, and he took my list between thumb and forefinger and examined it in wonder, as if it were the schematic of a ship that would sail to the moon.

“What's we got here, eh? What's is this?”

Having formed a clear idea of what lies between Yacolt and Camp 8, and how I might get from here to there, I had refined my little list of sustainables to a miserly few. At Camp 6 I can expect to receive the cook's fare for lunch before stepping off the end of the rails into the deepwoods; and once I've reached Camp 8 a cook supplies board to all that great search-party of men. Therefore I meant to pay Yacolt's dear prices for only matches in tins (many matches, for this is wet country), plug tobacco (for, paradoxically, cigars may not be lit in the woods without risk of runaway fire), dried apricots, hardtack, chocolate, and coffee, which ought to keep me alive for the tramp from Camp 6 to Camp 8 and replenish me when I'm engaged in the grim business of the search. I asked also for a map of the Yacolt environs, especially a Company map marking off every spur line, backwoods camp, flume, and trail. It was evidently these items, one or all, which had confounded the shopkeeper; or it was the tin pants in a small man's size, which I had put onto the list from an expectation that I'd be bucking brush and crawling into caves.