Wild Life (32 page)

We drove doves and quail up out of the grass along the ridges. A coyote stood in a meadow and lifted his head and watched us pass. We crossed a shallow, silty stream that ran to the west, and a heron stood utterly still in the water, not rising to fly from us. We scarcely ate. In the evening we denned under the brink of a gravelly caprock.

Today we have at last stopped our running. We went up slowly through steep, high country, the rock ridges dotted with noble fir, and the columbines in scarlet bloom along the south-facing slopes. We ate mushrooms and cattail roots, maple seeds and leaves of nettle, chewing deliberately as one must do, breaking a fast. When we crossed a barren pumice plain and climbed above it and looked out over the country to the south, cloud shadows were streaming over the land and a hawk was turning in the dark air below us. Tonight we are lying under the shelving roots of an immense fir which was undercut by a rock slide and clings by muscular tendrils to the shorn and gravelling bank. We have had rain and wind in spates since yesterday.

Their own word for themselves is two notes of plaintive minor quality coming down the scale, and a following trill. I believe it might be written, in Roman letters,
seqwa'tci.

 

C. B. D. (1906)
F
ROM
“D
ARK
T
HINGS
”
IN
A D
ESOLATION
,
AND
O
THER
S
TORIES

 

After her death, the child lived for a time in the tops of the old trees, among owls and woodpeckers. She swung her bare legs, heels wigwagging, on the springy limbs very high above the society of plants and animals living in the ground story. She and the birds hid laughs behind their elbows when the bears or wolves of that world shuffled beneath them, eyes directed downward. She let loose her hold of the trees from time to time and flickered through the green air, her body an intermittent shadow, a wraith against the canopy of branches. A man, glimpsing the child one day, believed he had seen a nightjar or a crow; but on another occasion a woman's eye caught a flashing of white high up in the trees, which she understood to be a ghost, translucent and insubstantial as a child's bones, lifting and turning above her. The sky was huge that night, with clouds rising like mountains in it. Of course, the child, by then, had been dead for days.

We are in the broken foothills of a mountain which can be glimpsed only rarely, though I feel it rising heavily into the sky like a massing of cloud to the north. It may be St. Helens Mountain, though they have named it to me a slow and strong note which I would write as
n'wascht,
and I believe this is the name with meaning and truth in it.

Yesterday we came into the yard of an old homestead long abandoned, and we dug up and ate all the daffodil bulbs which were rampantly growing there. The smell of those people was gone, but something remained in the air about the ruin of their cabin—something cold and disheartening. We passed through a field of lava casts yesterday, too, climbing through a low pass where an avalanche had mowed a wide swath through the forest. This was land as barren and rugged as the moon, so it was startling to hear the faraway gabbling of geese. Presently the high, excited clatter of their voices mounted through the pass, and we caught sight of them as they streamed across the face of the pale sky. Humans envy few things among the animals, but flight must be one of them.

When we came down from the high volcanic valley, here was drier country, with stands of pinewood among the fir and cedar. The resinous cones of pines have palatable, nourishing kernels which I relish more than maple seeds or the needles of Douglas's fir, which are bitter, but we went through this pine forest without eating much, for there was a small natural prairie which we could see below the trees, and we hoped to find camas growing there. We were coming down onto this grassy plain when we saw a family of Indians who were there ahead of us, already on hands and knees with their digging sticks—a mother and father and three children and perhaps an aunt or uncle—a family such as we were. They squatted back on their heels and looked at us in silence. We stood still and looked back. Then we went
up into the timber again. The adults after a short time went on quietly with their digging, though the little children stood up and watched us as we climbed the hill.

Last night I went onto a ridge to watch the sun set over the mountain, and shortly afterward the mother of the twins, carrying her living child, climbed up to this same place to sit nearby me, settling her heavy body to the ground with a low groan. Since the death of her other child she has lost her radiance, moves slowly, is thin within her great coat, and though she may have answered to other names in the past (I once ignorantly called her Cleo, which word I now realize has a frivolous sound, as if she were an infant or a pet), the name by which all of us now greet her is three descending notes—something like
e'neth'kee,
which has a somber meaning I understand and feel but have no desire to translate—it is enough that I should feel and understand it.

In silence we two women and the baby watched the sun set and twilight fall. There was blue sky above the mountain but long gray strokes of rain upon its earth-hold, and the westward clouds bound in vivid mauves and golds which gradually purpled and took on dimension, piling high in vast caves and outcurves, with the hems trailing off in thin whips of fringe. A mantle of rose pink fell over the summit—it became a pyramid of soft flame—and while the ranges below it fell away to darkness, the fires on the crest burned on, deepening from gold to burnished copper. The mountain slowly became separated from the earth, became a veil of light floating above a black skyline, and slowly afterward dimmed to a silhouette upon the night. Then the witchery: the eastward sky paling to ghost white with the black mountain limned against it, and suddenly from the summit the full moon breaking forth, flooding the lower world with brightness.

I felt that we had climbed high above thought; here we could sit distracted, holding nothing in our minds but the glory of the sky—the miracle of the cold moon upon the white peak of the mountain. Of course, I was mistaken in my feeling, for the black masses of trees stepping away in numberless ridges westward a hundred miles to the sea brought my mind westward until I was suddenly thinking of my children. For a moment I felt unable to recall their names—not only their names but the meanings of their names, which seemed vastly
more important—and when I did recall them it was faint as breath or the indecipherable gabbling of geese—a clamor thin and distant. I began to cry, which I have not done for oh so very long—whether for my nameless boys or for my situation or for all the dead and lost children, in truth I cannot say.

The baby was startled by my human crying but the mother almost certainly understood its meaning, for she began to join me in mourning, raising her voice in an opening phrase—a long, low, quavering whistle—which, after a pause, rose quickly and fell slowly and then rose again, ethereal and flutelike. Upon the third or fourth phrase, from the den in the canyon below us the others began one by one to take it up, their sorrowful croons and hums and whistles sounding a chorus as complicated and graceful as any opera. I am disharmonic and my understanding of their language is in its infancy, but even a dog cannot resist the impulse to howl with the wolves—there is release in it perhaps more satisfying than tears—so in a moment I gave up my weeping and joined my own warble to theirs. By such small increments the old lines that set me apart, that defined me, are erased. The sky by then was dark as a bear's mouth, and our keening song, unearthly, wordless as water, rose up into it and was swallowed whole.

 

The greatest poets never write poetry. The Homers and Shakespeares are not the greatest—they are only the greatest that we can know. And so with Handel among musicians. For the highest poetry, whether in music or literature, is ineffable—it must be felt from one person to another, it cannot be articulated.

S
AMUEL
B
UTLER

This is toward the end of a raw, wet day, and we are in a rough country where every step is difficult: in such territory we are surely safe from Men. Here are otherworldly valleys of scraggly, broken, and limbless dwarf pines, mosses, and lichens; pulverized pumice washings and debris gulches washed out by melted snow; steam caves and fumaroles, and cascades of snowmelt over vertical precipices; and yesterday we passed through a high field where great angular rocks large as houses had settled on the snow—these must have been hurled from the crater in ages past, and I suppose under the snow is a field of pumice and volcanic glass. There have been, as well, grassy ascents, and valleys of old trees, and small undulating prairies, but invariably cut by ledges of smoke-colored rock, or steep gulches and chasms, which if they are narrow we can leap—or I should say the others can leap, and lift me over with the children. But as often as not we must take a tedious way around: there are breaks in the earth too wide even for giants to bestride.

Marmots and gophers are thick, their whistled alarms remarkably like our own. We have seen mountain goats and blacktail deer, as well as pikas and coyotes.

Once today while we were climbing a gravelly steep ridge, the sky lifted and the valleys of the Columbia and the Willamette were visible far to the south—streaks of silver on a groundwork of velvet—and though the several white summits of this range were invisible in the overcast, we could see all their connecting ridges and intervening valleys, a vast forest stand seeming entirely whole save for Indian meadows and old burns and the brown scoria of ancient pumice and ash flows.

When we began to climb again, our feet started rocks, which fell five hundred feet to the valley below—a great reverberating sound and a haze of gravelly dust.

 

March 26th.—When we arrived at the mouth of the Kattlepoutal River, twenty six miles from Fort Vancouver, I stopped to make a sketch of the volcano, Mount St. Helen's, distant, I suppose, about thirty or forty miles. This mountain has never been visited by either Whites or Indians; the latter assert that it is inhabited by a race of beings of a different species, who are cannibals, and whom they hold in great dread; they also say that there is a lake at its base with a very extraordinary kind of fish in it, with a head more resembling that of a bear than any other animal. These superstitions are taken from the statement of a man who, they say, went to the mountain with another, and escaped the fate of his companion, who was eaten by the “Skoocooms,” or evil genii.

P
AUL
K
ANE
,

Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver's Island and Oregon Through the Hudson's Bay Company's Territory and Back Again

(London, 1859)

Today we passed down a shelving ridge through a stunted forest of lodgepole and white pine and thence through steep and ancient woods until suddenly we stood before a vast crescent of a lake, from which the timbered ridges rose steep-to all around. The others have told me, this lake lying in its green amphitheater ever has been a safe hold, as men consider it spirit-haunted: the old trees stand deep in gray pumice, and there is a silence which lies along the ground with the scoria. There were the vines of ripening wild strawberries growing upon the cinders and volcanic glass, and currants in a head-high thicket along the south shoreline, which crops we were happy to bring in.

I intend never to be lost again nor left behind if I can help it, and in any event have become as scrupulously wary as the others, so have
learned to keep an eye out—to lift my head every short while and take a vigilant look at my surroundings. I don't know why I kept looking out to the choppy water of the lake except drawn by the wisps of white vapor rising from it, which I've seen often enough along the Columbia River sloughs, but which appeared here as altogether remarkable—as if the lake had been set fire or had come alive and was steaming, as an overheated horse will do, or a wet dog. I looked and looked at it through the long morning, and in the afternoon when I looked, oh! upon the vaporous water half a mile out rode a stubby barge with men and equipage and piles of rock ore, and on the north shore perhaps three miles off (a small wind had sprung up which cleared out the fog a little) the evident wrack and ruin of a mining operation and a veil of smoke gray as death rising and spreading above the timber.

I stood a moment in stunned surprise watching while the barge made its slow way over the water, and then I began to shake—here was mortal danger. The faces of the men were too distant to distinguish one from another, but I have little doubt they were the type of men “hatched behind a stump,” as my mother would have said: fellows whose spare-time pursuits are fistfighting, drinking, gambling, and debauchery, and who would, of a Sunday afternoon, shoot bears for their recreation and sell the orphaned cubs to the circus. I never would have been afraid of such men in the past, but my life has recently been broken in two—I live now in the second half, which is a new world, wild and terrible. And I have learned, like any cub or fawn, to startle and bolt from human beings.

We fled up the ridge again, finding we must skirt around a clearing where a raw new sawmill and a horse shed stood beside a steep corduroy road. A man came out into the muddy yard and shouted after us, which made my heart seize, but he could not have had more than a glimpse of the others, must have seen primarily the orphan trailing behind them, her hindmost quarters pushing uphill into the trees, and perhaps he believed he was shouting at some one of his crew, a fellowman. This is what I hope.