Wild Life (9 page)

S
AMUEL
B
UTLER

I write this hurriedly while the
Telephone
is making her approach.

It is a mild paradox, I suppose, that plots taken from real life often are the harder to believe. In the dime novel, misadventure and misfortune are discreetly foreshadowed; one expects a heroine to suffer adversity and equally expects the outcome to be favorable. In real life such events are more often defined by their absolute unexpectedness and the indeterminacy of the outcome. Extraordinary things happen in real life and extraordinary coincidences occur, but I daresay a deft pen must make them plausible before they can be delivered to the pages of a novel. I should not have dared to write a fiction so improbable as this: on the
T. J. Potter
came word that Harriet, after all, may not have wandered away lost; that she may have been seized by a giant wild ape and carried off to his lair in the woods, which possibility was at first kept from Florence to spare her from torment.

Melba and I fell out entirely over this news. She received it as a ghastly truth and collapsed prematurely into horror and grief; I would not take the story seriously enough and made of it a barbarous joke. “Jacko the Chimpanzee has made his escape from Barnum's, then,” I said to her, “and has come back to the woods to take his revenge on little children.”

She turned to me a wildly rabid look, which I felt I must parry with reasonable theories: “This was a bear, Melba, or some hirsute old tramp in his flapping rags.”

Inasmuch as Harriet continued missing, these words were both blind and cruel, which I knew as soon as they were out of my mouth. Melba's whole face folded inward and I could not think how to recover my damn-fool mistake. We stood in the front hall, bound in a malignant silence.

“What is ‘hirsute'?” Jules whispered. I had forgotten him standing there, with his fists wrapped in my skirt, and children have an instinct for understanding when argument has transcended the ordinary and become dangerous: his eyes were round and white with alarm. “Hairy,” I said, and rested my palm on the crown of his head. “'Hirsute' is hairy. Run over to Eustler's and ask Edith to come and see me. And then run over to Stuband's and ask how his mother cows are doing. Tell him I sent you over. You can help him pull calves, if any of his mother cows are so inclined.”

Though pulling calves has been denied to him in the past on grounds of his young age, he was not distracted from his fear. He took a deeper grip of my dress and screwed up his mouth to cry.

I stooped and took his face firmly in my two hands. “Go get Edith and then go over to Stuband's,” I said, in the voice I reserved for Serious Matters Involving Punishment. I peeled his fingers from their clench and pushed him to the porch. When the door closed between us, he burst out crying and went off in the general direction of Eustler's.

“You aren't right, the way you deal with that boy,” Melba said bitterly. “He's high strung.”

“He's thin-skinned, and will have to get over it,” I told her. Then I said, “We'll take the
Telephone
on the flood tide, Melba. I'll farm the little boys out to Edith, and Stuband can look in on George and the twins, who ought to be old enough to fend for themselves.”

She was evidently startled. “I don't need you to see after me.”

“What you need is someone of a clear mind and fit for a tramp afoot and horseback, who can go out from Yacolt to that deepwoods camp and learn the truth of what has happened to Harriet.”

Her clenched face examined me with considerable distrust. I would not have been surprised by further argument, but in a bit she wrung her chapped hands together and began silently to weep.

“Oh now, Melba, don't,” I said.

“Well, I try to consider your comfort, but you can't always be spared other women's tears,” she said crossly. She pressed her knuckles to her eyes and went on standing with her hands at her face, sobbing quietly. At long last she withdrew an embroidered hanky from her pocket and wiped her eyes with it. “There,” she said, folding the handkerchief to a precise square once again, “I'm finished for now. I'll go up and pack my duffel.” Which I took to mean I should go up and pack mine.

Of course, there was considerable alarm and argument from Horace Stuband, who is entirely a man of his times, that is to say hidebound and proper. If he was scandalized at the prospect of my traipsing into logging camps unaccompanied, he did not say so, but made his argument—that he should go in my place—by raising foremost the question of danger, as if a woman may not stand up to a wild, fierce life as well as a man; and of course the question of strength, and stamina, and heart, in case the search should go on long or lead to horror. I blame a too-narrow imagination for his failure to mention death at the hands of an orangutan. I said to him, “A woman can and should do everything a man can do, and do it without ceasing to be female,” which he has heard me say before. “Waiting For Word,” I further told him, “has often been the female portion but shall never be mine if I can help it.”

And here is the boat. We are off.

 

WHAT IS IT?

A S
TRANGE
C
REATURE
C
APTURED
A
BOVE
Y
ALE
A B
RITISH
C
OLUMBIA
G
ORILLA

Yale, B.C., July 3rd, 1882.

“Jacko,” as the creature has been called by his capturers, is something of the gorilla type, standing about four feet seven inches in height and weighing 127 pounds. He has long, black, strong hair and resembles a human being with one exception, his entire body, excepting his hands (or paws) and feet, is covered with glossy hair about one inch long. His fore arm is much longer than a man's fore arm, and he possesses extraordinary strength, as he will take hold of a stick and break it by wrenching or twisting it, which no man living could break in the same way. Since his capture he is very reticent, only occasionally uttering a noise which is half bark and half growl. He is, however, becoming daily more attached to his keeper, Mr. George Tilbury, of this place, who proposes shortly starting for London, England, to exhibit him. His favorite food so far is berries, and he drinks fresh milk with evident relish. By advice of Dr. Hannington raw meats have been withheld from Jacko, as the doctor thinks it would have a tendency to make him savage.

The Daily Colonist
(Port of Victoria, British Columbia)

At the front of my mind is a thicket of worries to do with Harriet, of course, and Melba, and my children left behind; in the middle ground there are half a hundred lesser concerns, such as the state of our pregnant cow and whether the Brussels sprouts standing ripe in the garden will go neglectfully to seed in my absence; what lies dimly at the back of my mind is a small, irrepressible tremor of excitement. As the
Telephone
bore us away from the Skamokawa landing in foreboding midnight darkness, there was a whispering, ignoble voice within me which said,
We are two women entering on a wilderness adventure.

We have not been tempted to waste money on a berth, for all the little cabins are taken, and in fact several men are sleeping on the passage floors. The women's saloon is crowded and restless with children, which is the worst situation for Melba, so we are sleeping sitting up in the smoking room, or rather we drowse there, for a number of men play cards all night, and their murmury voices and the soft ripple of shuffled cards, as well as the spitting of tobacco, keep up without cease. Once, when I had dreamt in a shallow way, I woke to find Melba asleep in the deck chair opposite to mine, displaying a clenched frown that pulled her eyebrows right in to her nose. I am well acquainted with her black look, for it's brought out at every tedious aggravation, but just then with her body slumped in the chair, seeming shrunken and aged with this bad news from Yacolt, it struck me that her face was engraved by sorrow. My little writerly fancies, my childish plots involving the two of us in bravery and derring-do and perilous rescue, all of that was beaten back suddenly by a terrible clear vision of Harriet raped and strangled. I put my hand to my heart, the quick drum-drumming, and then I had to stand as quietly as I could manage and creep out through the cigar smoke, past the frank inspection of the card players, to the afterdeck, where the cold rain was a distraction and there was no sound but the steady thumping of the engines, and I stood a long while, heavy, leaning as against a brute force, staring across the black water, the black wind, to the dim moving line of the river shore.

This was, after all, not the best thing for my state of mind, as I never have learned to ride the river at night without falling into an old morose train of thought. I began to follow my misgivings about Harriet down a dark and secret path, and shortly I was brooding about Wes. Why is it, do you suppose, we are so at the mercy of Memory?

“Is you feeling ill, miss?”

I said no, I most surely was not, and what I was feeling was the need to be Alone, all this even before seeing who it was, a broad-necked old Swede of the sort to grow a beard in winter and shave it when the weather warms up, a line of thick blond brows shading his eyes, a florid complexion. I had an intent to be rude, but he failed to take notice of it and settled his big arms on the rail to the left of me. “Well, good then. I seen you go pale and wondered if it was the boat gived it, or the smoke, or what.”

“It was the What,” I said, which made him blink and smile in confusion. But shortly he took another run at the situation and began to entertain me with information on the keeping of bees—I recall fire-weed spoken of with approval. These bee stories gave way at last to fish stories, for his honey deliveries all up and down the river evidently leave him with sufficient time to dig clams and to fish for perch, and he is proud minded as regards his long casts off the rocks at Seaview.

The greater number of these old Scandinavian bachelors are a quiet type who must be poked and whipped before they can be made to speak, but the odd one will be burdened with an excess of energy and a sore need for female company, and this was evidently such a one. Without so much as a word of encouragement from me, he gave an account of the major events of his life, including the cracked skull he suffered from falling “arse over tea kettle” while shoe-skating on the frozen mud-puddles of Tenasillahe Island; events of the Great Flood of '92, in which he hooked and landed an entire house filled with all its possessions as it floated by him on the river; and the heartbreaking accidental death of his dog Frazer, a brown-and-white spaniel which he had unknowingly rolled over with the wheels of his own wagon.

These stories might have been entertaining if he'd had the knack for telling them, but he was the sort to argue with himself over every
small detail—
It was We'nsdee the ninth, no, musta bean the tenth, no, I's right the first time, was the ninth, morning of the ninth, or shortly after I'd had m' lunch
—and as a result I lost patience the longer he kept at it, and became flat-out surly in my responses. It could be that rough treatment is wasted on a man of his good nature, for he wore on at a deliberate pace, emptying his sack of stories, and presently I gave up listening. While the old Swede prattled, I began to get our ducks in a row.

My experience of traveling is an odd mare's nest: I have twice crossed over the nation, and have a passing familiarity with the Capitol Building in Washington, and the Metropolitan Opera House in the city of New York, but on the other hand, after nearly thirty years' acquaintance with the logging and fishing country of the lower Columbia, I never have been in Yacolt, indeed few places in the state of Washington aside from the Skamokawa environs, and few in Oregon save Astoria and Portland and the steamer landings between them. Howsomever, every mill town resembles every other, and getting into the backwoods requires a private understanding of bad roads rather more than anything else.

The
Telephone
will deliver us to the foot of Alder Street, city of Portland, where we must then hire a cab to the train yard and get onto a lumber train bound over the bridge and through the woods to Yacolt. This will be the easy part, for the trains run three or four times a day in and out of every booming log town, bringing down the logs and trailing a Daylight car for the millmen and loggers, timber cruisers, and the occasional wife or mother; we are likely to gain Florence's doorstep by lunch.

Beyond Yacolt, the way is less clear. They will have laid track out into the timber and built camps at the ends of the spurs, a great pinwheel of industry and destruction, and one or another of those rails will bring me more or less in the direction of Homer's camp at Canyon Creek. From there I shall have to try to catch a ride with a millman supplied of mule or horse; and failing that, I must walk. In either case, I've every expectation of deep ruts and mud holes, narrow embankments, and wicked steep climbs. These backwoods camps are notorious for their remoteness.

From the Canyon Creek camp, if the search has not come to a pass by then, I fully mean to make myself part of it. Beyond that is impossible of imagination.

I have not met a man with better feet than mine, but my neck is wobbly and won't take a heavy pack. I have come away from the house with clothes and boots for a tramp, and my purse crammed with soda crackers and cheese, but a full provisioning waits for Yacolt; while the Swede sang on, I exercised my brain with a thoroughly abstemious list of rations. And when at last he cheerfully lifted his cap and sauntered off in search of another feminine audience, I found I had quite recovered my spirits. I have a mind that relishes a plan.