Wild Life (33 page)

We made off west-by-southwest without stopping to browse until we had come out above the tree line. The sky was a ceiling of dish-pan blue, and when clouds coasted over the sun, the air became abruptly colder and the shadow hurt our eyes. The summit of the
mountain stood bright white above us, seeming oddly both smaller and more real—more earthbound—from this near perspective. I supposed it to be only a half mile away, but after an hour of climbing it stood no nearer. Away to the east and to the north the snowy peaks of other mountains rode above the woody valleys, remote and extraordinary, like illustrations in books of fairy tales.

We ate unripe strawberries and the leaves of purslane; I dug wild carrots with my curved stick. Several times we found we must skirt around meadows where sheep were grazing—the shepherd unseen but his smell in the air, and the others raising a silent alarm which I felt as a bright flame in my blood.

We crossed through an old glaciated field bounded on its east edge by a ridge of pumice and rock, and where there was a slight break in the moraine and a steep gorge falling away abruptly, we climbed through the gap and down. The others treated this as an old secret passage, but we were all startled to find at the bottom the broken timbers of a buried cabin, the wooden bones cocked skyward from among the clay and boulders of a rock slide. There was the reek of human smell in the air there, and no telling if men lay dead inside or if they had walked away and built a new house nearby, so we scrambled hurriedly away, back up onto the plain and across it, through a windy pass. (It is an odd and perhaps ominous thing, how I traveled alone for so many days without signs of men and desperately anxious for them, and now I am afraid to be seen by men, and around us the land seems beset by them.)

We are camped now beside a shallow marsh in steep country below a glacier. The ice is evidently slowly receding, as the skeleton of an ancient animal was lying exposed along the bare rock at the glacier's edge. A few hairs were still attached to the bones, as well as scraps of frozen flesh, which, though it might have been four hundred years old, we cautiously smelled of and ate. There are white trilliums here, and a red-tailed hawk has been hunting over the ice field. It must be a lion which has left its droppings at the edge of the marsh, with an entire mouse skull intact in one turd.

We are high up on the peak, and at times, lying down on this high ground, I can feel a slight susurration enter my body, which must be the troubled inhale and exhale of the mountain in its restless sleep. It is windy and cold, but the half-moon is a dim bedside lamp by
which to write. My friend e'neth'kee has been wading in the marsh hunting frogs, and while I have been watching her, the stars have come out in the shallow water and now they are moving quietly about her ankles. I believe it was my mother who used to say, when the long shape of the half-moon lay shivering upon the river:
There goes a boat sailing for the faerie isles
.

In the deep of night, the mountain became a living animal, a beast of irascible temperament turning and moaning in its sleep, and this morning in the gray daylight there were flakes of ash falling out of the sky (which I at first took to be snow), and above the peak a cloud of steam rising a mile into the heavens. I have dipped into the study of vulcanism—the Cascade volcanoes unpredictably explosive—Helen in particular having blown her top two or three times in the hundred years since Lewis and Clark—but the others have neither History nor Geology and are seemingly indifferent to or insensible of the danger. If I had been alone I might have fled below the timberline at least, where the canopy of trees would have furnished a little protection in case of eruption, but we spent the morning high on the shoulder of the mountain browsing upon the deer lilies. The ground periodically shuddered beneath our feet, and the sky precipitated soot and ash. Three or four or five times, in expectation of showers of fiery lava, I could not keep myself from singing to them the one-note word of alarm—made desperate hand signals (how does one gesture the spewing of lava and rocks?!)—which they answered unexcitedly with whistles and songs I could only dimly construe. E'neth'kee consoled me with her petting hands; and after so much has happened I do feel myself numbed to the prospect of death.

I wonder if the others' experience of dying, and their understanding of it, is different from the human process. Perhaps it is the curse only of humans: to have a clear awareness of the inevitability of one's own end, and therefore to fear and anticipate it and strive mightily against it. I should be ashamed to tell them, we have scores of books about dying and special shelves set aside for such titles in bookshops—as if the ability to die properly is something one must be specially trained to do.

Grief is another thing. I can more easily think of my own death than the death of that poor butchered child, yet his mother, for the most part, has recovered her spirits. In a human female I should think this unnatural and precipitate, but I am reminded of certain farm women of my childhood, and how they seemed to take the death of a baby as a terrible thing, but not much more terrible than the death of a sow upon whose piglets they had hoped to eke out a living through the winter; and how even my mother, losing a firstborn infant daughter, and then a husband and a son, never became death's handmaid—our house always was filled with laughter. I suppose it is our modern way of soft living which has made grief such a prolonged event. I suppose, among those who live in the old way, the realities of death bring about a more “natural” acceptance, and if I am to go on living wild I shall have to learn this myself.

Today we flushed a single crow from the foot of a basalt cliff and found a yearling deer lying dead under the low brush there, the flesh still very warm, the bright eye only just beginning to cloud. The poor thing was very thin, unmarked save for the crow's work; perhaps a weakened winter condition had kept it from thriving.

I have become devoted to carrion for its strengthening properties, preferring it to worms and grubs, and was glad to eat of meat not yet soured nor infested with flies. I was struck by a certain sorrow, though, or perhaps only by an irony: the poor fawn to have survived that first critical year, and then to give up the ghost just as the earth has finally swung nearer to the sun, and every rocky bank and open field is a pasture.

Now we have made our den in a deep-cleft canyon, which I imagine was carved out by an earlier eruption and must soon again serve as a channel for flowing magma. (I have been remembering certain Indian tales: In the interior of the earth, in volcanoes, subterranean gods were often supposed to reside. Craters were inhabited by beings mightier than men, who sent forth fire and smoke when they heated their sweat lodges or cooked their food.)

There is a lake country we have seen to the northwest, which I suppose we must turn toward in the morning, if men are not there ahead of us. Of course, if we live until tomorrow I shall be very much surprised, but I have given up trying to communicate my worries to the others. Animals are seemingly unafraid of death—oh, they fear pain, yes, but not death—and when they are dying make no effort to live. Their bodies accept death with a kind of grace. I hope, if I am to die, that it shall be “naturally,” like a field mouse dangling tail-down from the teeth of a cat: patient and accepting.

 

Coyote was going along in the valley of the Willamette River and she met some human people who were living there. Those people told her there was a cave monster who was frightening all the people. Every night it would come from its cave, seize as many people as it could carry, and return to its cave to eat them. The people asked Coyote, “What can we do?” and Coyote said, “When the old moon is gone, I will kill the monster.”

The monster could not endure daylight. So on the first bright day, when the sun was very high up in the heavens, Coyote took her bow and arrows and went onto a mountaintop. She shot her first arrow into the sun, and her next arrow into the end of the first one, and so on until she had a rope of arrows that reached all the way from the sun to the mountaintop. She pulled hard on the rope until the sun came down into her arms, and then she ran down the mountain and hid the sun in the bottom of the river.

Now everything was dark, and the monster thought night had come again. He left his cave to catch someone to eat. Just as he was about to seize a child berry-picking in the woods, Coyote let go the rope that held the sun down and it sprang up into the sky again. In the sudden bright light, the monster was blinded, and Coyote quickly killed him.

Many years afterward, white people found the bones of the monster and began to carry them away. The Indian people
who were still living there told them that evil would come from moving the bones of a monster of the age-old time. But white people turned away from this warning and no one knows where those bones are now.

A COMMONLY REPORTED LEGEND OF CHINOOKAN TRIBES

 

It is hard
to write this down so that it will mean anything. Houses unlived in quickly become warrens for mice; pastures unmown go to woods. This is how I have been thinking of myself—like a farmstead gone wild—and now someone, a stranger, has hacked a trail through the brush and is setting up house inside my body again.

 

Returning
to live among men after living for a while among mountains, I am sensible of human beings as a Wild Child raised among wolves might be sensible of them: the nervousness of their faces, and the way their hands fidget, their fat-encumbered necks and the bleat of their voices. I have been a wildwoman for so long that I feel myself out of accord with this world, unable to like or understand much that I see. It takes such a very great effort for me to enter the consciousness of human creatures—to look at the world as they do, smell it the way they do—to understand their ways of thinking and feeling. I find I must exert a very great effort just to have them look at me and see something they recognize—a person like themselves.

Perhaps, after I am home, then everything will shift, become familiar and natural and well understood again, as it was before. Perhaps I'll even have a hard time remembering the mountains at all. This is why I try to write it down, so that afterward, when everything is returned to itself, I can remember what this all must have been like.

Oh! it is an odd and unnatural thing—the ascribing of dates to the days of one's life—which I shall not easily get used to again. And this date they have given me seems not to be believed: all that has happened can hardly have happened in such a brief time, hardly six weeks since going lost from Canyon Creek. Surely the larger part of my life has been lived as a child of nature—years and years, or so it seems to me. (My former life—the books and the boys and so forth—seems a distant adventure, something I remember only dimly, something glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope.)

They have brought me down to a place on the river where there are a few raw buildings and a sawmill and a ferry that draws itself back and forth between wooden loading platforms. Prospectors and timber cruisers and the occasional latecomer to the homesteading game all cross the river here, along with tourists and sportsmen bound for the fishing at Trout Lake or up on the mountain to “rusticate” for a while and to hunt bears. They have put me in a clean, cold little bedroom from which I cannot see the mountain, only the steep and muddy logged-over hills behind the river. I am waiting here for—what?

It is very hard to write. I am sore and sick, of course, but beyond that, the ferryman's wife is an Irishwoman with a flapping tongue who, being convinced that I am mad or mute or wild (which all may be true), protects herself from me by an unending flow of talk. She seems delighted not to get any answers and not to be interrupted in her presentment of every scrap of gossip about the neighborhood. I am too much out of heart to stifle her, so lie in her bed and look through the window to the river the whole time. The ferry platforms slant down to the level of the boat deck at low water.

It was the ferryman's wife—she told me her name, I have forgotten it—who oversaw my bath, in the forceful grip of two large Swedish women whose homes evidently lie nearby; and who gave me a flannel gown to put on, though I cannot get accustomed to the naked feeling of my bare legs and the flannel twisting around me in the bed. I suffer terrible insomnia, being without the comfort and warmth of the other bodies tangled with mine—an agony of solitariness—I wonder if I shall ever again be able to sleep alone. A clean and pressed shepherd's-check dress (too large by half) has been neatly laid out on the chair “for when you are recuperated” and my own clothes have been burnt, I think, or buried, to keep me from attempting to put them on again. There has been a good deal of effort made to locate me a pair of shoes, but apparently none to spare among this impoverished frontier community; so my feet remain free though the rest of me is prisoner.

It was an odd thing, the bath. I'm sure that, at an earlier time in my life, and after so long filthy, I would have gratefully accepted fiery death in a volcanic explosion in exchange for a hot tub bath, but as I was held in the water and my musky rind scrubbed off with a brush—how white the skin looked with the dirt washed off—I felt like one who was being skinned alive; and through the reek of the lye soap I got a noseful of my own fear-stench.

I must present a grotesque sight—not only the scabbed line of black stitches like a railroad spur from cheek to temple, but my hair cut off close to the scalp on order of the Wildwood Club surgeon and “by reason of the vermin and the blood.” I blame my shorn and broken head also for a feeling of light-headedness—my brain disconnected from my body. I have been unable to think at all, neither of the past nor of the future, and only today found any strength for it, and to try to write, if only roughly.