West of Here (57 page)

Mather almost envied the dog. Looking at her there on the frozen ground, the pale flame of her spirit all but spent, he felt a welling of emotion for which he was grateful. Even in her present condition, she was, by his estimation, a nobler beast than he. He squatted down next to her and ran his hand over the dog’s head, past her ears, and she exhaled once more with a wheeze. He could not bear to look at the washboard of her rib cage or look her in the eyes. He could not bear
to feel her spine running like a row of gravestones down her back. The best he could do was pat her head.

“Rest now,” he whispered.

Rising to his feet, he turned to face the cliff, doing everything in his power not to look back at her as, hand over hand, he began climbing ahead of the party. The going was exceedingly slow and measured, and the rock was given to crumbling under the force of their toeholds. Mather paused at each crevice to lower a cod line. Halfway up, he could not help but look back at the dog and immediately wished he had not. She was lying just as he’d left her, head on forepaws, staring straight ahead, at nothing. Part of him wished he was lying there beside her.

Along with the precarious ascent itself, the jangling of nerves had taken a toll on the men by the time they reached the flat narrow shelf, which hung as though suspended just below the ridge, not a hundred feet above the wispy cloud tops. The sky was deep blue again, though Mather could hardly see it through the blinding sun as he approached the final stretch, where, just below the crest, the face gave way to a series of natural steps, not unlike a ziggurat. A final step brought Mather’s head above the sharp wedgelike saddle, and the curtain rose from before the unknown region, and there before them, wide and green and pristine, lay the valley of the Quinault. Mather might have fallen to his knees and wept then and there were it not for his impatience to put it all behind him.

After grueling months in the wilderness, through the most perilous winter on record, having traversed some of the most rugged terrain in North America, ever in the shadow of death, the Mather expedition had reached the central divide at long last. From this vista, they could see to the west, unobstructed, all that lay between them and the Pacific. Beyond the first range lay a wide, handsome valley. The thickly wooded bottomlands gave way gently on either side to a range of mountains that rose gradually, green about the waist and capped with snow. The river, visible some two thousand feet below, where it emerged out of a dark funnel of rock, appeared to run wider and generally straighter than the Elwha.

Bountiful country, there could be no doubt, a generous watershed running right to the very edge of the world. Endless resources. Boundless timber in every direction and a wide, navigable waterway to move it. Yet standing on the divide, with the wind whistling past his ears, Mather could not shake a certain disillusion in knowing that what lay in front of him had already been discovered, had no doubt seen the restless footsteps of other men. Paradise, if it existed, lay somewhere behind them — perhaps they’d trudged right through its midst without recognizing it. Mather would not be the man to discover it. He’d known that this day was coming, or at least sensed it, the day when everything before him had yielded to discovery. Thus, it felt to Mather less like he had arrived here and more like this place had been following him all along.

“We can reach bottom by sundown,” he said. “There, we can camp.”

“Onward,” said Haywood wearily.

Thus the party gave pause but momentarily before they began their zigzagging descent down the wayward side of the divide. And even the fitful past gave way to Mather’s footsteps, as he plodded through the thick snow, while behind him, the men strung out in a crooked line, trudging onward one ragged step at a time. Nobody said a word.

In a day’s time, they dove into the dense bottomlands and began fighting their way westward. Haywood would describe a high-canopied forest fecund with rot, a brackish cathedral festooned with moss. He would describe the biggest timber he’d ever laid eyes on, spruce wider than train cars, colonnades of hemlock so massive that “the wingspan of three men stretched finger to finger could not match the diameter of these giants.” He would describe a soft and yielding forest floor, presenting a crust so brittle with rot that the casual footfall would break through the surface. He would describe the party’s perilous crossing of the the raging gray Quinault, whose swift current they forded some fifty yards across. Late in the afternoon, in a sloping valley brimming with maple and spruce, they would come upon the first evidence of human activity in two months — blazes consisting of two sets of slanting lines conjoined at an apex in the manner of a chevron.
Like their own blazes, they were relatively fresh and notched high on the trunks of the great gnarled trees, suggesting deep snowpack in the recent past.

Awash in silence as he trudged through the fertile bottomlands, Mather scarcely paused to observe the wonders he passed, which might have taken his breath away were he still the man he was when he left Port Bonita. Perhaps, with enough rest, he would be that man again. Perhaps a few months spent in the relative ease of society would reawaken that restless urge to discover. But for now, he was no longer that man nor certain what man he might become. Perhaps his days of discovery were not over after all. More than anything else, with each muddy step westward, Mather was eager to get home — wherever that was.

In three days’ time, over the foothills and through the bottomlands, the party would come upon a squat little cabin with a smoking chimney on the wooded edge of a small glen, where, standing beside a woodpile with one leg propped on a chop log, and a rifle slung at his hip, a skinny stooping figure with a long gray beard would finally move Mather to speech.

“God help his plug of tobacco,” he said.

OCTOBER
1890

On the bluff to the northeast came the baying of hounds, maybe a half dozen, maybe more. Even before Adam crested the hogback on Lord Jim’s mare, a cloud of black smoke unfurled into the moonlight. He could hear the distant shouting. Already the air was thick with the acrid stink of creosote and burned timber. Ascending the rise, first at a canter, then at a trot, Adam felt the frantic heat of panic rising all around him. There was sure to be chaos on the other side. Finding the boy might be impossible under the circumstances.

The mare reared back on two legs and whinnied at the first sight of the flames, and Adam eased her down on all fours. Dismounting, he settled the horse with an expert hand, surveying the scene below as colonists hurried past him down the hill. The flames were fanning out in both directions along the south side of Front Street, though the prevailing wind was doing its best to push them southeasterly. Furious bucket brigades were strung out on all sides, heaving and splashing vainly at the blaze. The Belvedere, its fiery roof caving in on itself, was nearest to the center of the inferno.

The horse nickered and balked, worrying her head all around the bit as Adam led her down the hogback slowly toward the center of town, with a hot, ashy wind blowing into his face. Front Street was littered with rubble, burning shingles and scattered brick amid shattered glass. From the back lot of the leather works, a phalanx of fifty or sixty men drove the flames back. Others scurried about madly in the street to no apparent purpose. Dogs skulked in the shadows. Doc Newnham darted across the street in front of Adam, flanked by a pair of teenage boys; he clutched his leather bag in his right hand as he ran. Flames consumed the hardware store, lapping at the roof of P. G. Rhinehalter. Old man Rhinehalter, in spite of the advices of
a half-dozen screaming men, scrambled to save his inventory, heaving tack and leather into the street with desperate haste. The mare fought Adam harder and harder as they drew closer to the center of town, continually rearing her head back in the halter. Adam ran a comforting hand over her damp withers and coaxed her along gently.

The muddy street pulsed wildly with shadows. Chaos cut through the night on wings, breathing fire. Suddenly there came a commotion from up the street as the frantic crowd dispersed, and right through their midst with a furious clopping came a pair of frenzied black geldings hitched to a flaming carriage. The mare pitched, landing on stiff forelegs as the carriage shot past like a cannonball. Then, from the east end, came an explosion of plate glass, followed by the staccato cries of a dozen or more voices as a column of flames flared thirty feet into the air, roaring at the center like a great furnace. A tethered mule brayed in earnest before the Olympic Hotel, where luggage of all shapes and sizes was cloistered in the mud nearby. They came upon the gutted Belvedere, a dozen splayed timbers and a collapsed roof and a row of blistered piles still flaming. The boardwalk, too, had collapsed, running like a black shattered spine west down Front Street. In front of a charred splintered section of railing, Adam came upon a human torso, charred blood red and black beyond recognition. The second body was draped with a blanket, but even so, by its very configuration Adam could guess at the brutality of its repose. Up ahead, he could see several other bodies in a line, even as another was being dragged into their midst by a man Adam recognized as the druggist’s son. On the west end of town, near the foot of Morse Dock, women and children gathered, their faces at turns stunned and terrified in the firelight. Some of the children were crying. One child, charcoal-streaked and tear-soaked, clung tightly to her mother’s waist.

“Make it stop,” Adam heard her say.

He cut through the crowd to Hollywood Beach, where up and down the shoreline the Klallam huddled in clusters of five and ten, murmuring. Adam led the mare through their midst, searching for a familiar face. He came upon Abe Charles clutching his rifle as he
stood in a small group before his shack. Another rifle was propped against a saw log.

“I’m looking for Hoko King’s boy,” said Adam.

“They’ve gone after him,” said Abe.

“Who?”

“Tobin and maybe a dozen others. With dogs and rifles. They’re headed east along the bluff.”

A chill washed over Adam. “Give me your rifle.”

No sooner did Abe surrender his rifle than Adam mounted his horse and galloped east down Hollywood Beach.

GEORGE STOOD LIKE
a statue in the shadow of Morse Dock, still perplexed by Storm King’s puzzling revelations. What did it mean to hold nothing in your hand? What did it mean, this strange song? Even as the flames threw long shadows down the length of Front Street, even as George heard the frantic shouting and the clanging of bells from all quarters, he sang softly under his breath:

doon-doon, doon-doon

doon-doon, doon-doon

A dozen Siwash brothers streaked past him, headed toward the blaze, clutching buckets and hatchets. A dozen horses whinnied crazily in the night. A black and terrible cloud threatened to blot out the moon. And still George puzzled and pondered. What did it mean, the fingers? Why did it matter how many he held up? While others huddled in whispering groups up and down Hollywood Beach, George stood alone and turned toward the shore, with one hand holding nothing and the other holding up three fingers, singing louder now as the flames reared up behind him:

doon-doon, doon-doon

doon-doon, doon-doon

His trance was broken when a young woman, whom he soon recognized as Hoko, wandered dazedly into his midst, moving like a
ghost between worlds. Stopping a short distance in front of George, she swayed faintly side to side, wide-eyed like a blind person, open-mouthed but silent like a mute, with one hand out in front of her, reaching toward nothing.

And when it seemed that she was totally without voice, she spoke, not to George, but to no one.

“They,” she said. “Them.”

MINERVA WAS SCARCELY
three days in the ground when Ethan came down the mountain for the first time since the funeral in a rickety old carriage bursting with caged chickens, driven hard by an old white-beard named Lofall who lived just downriver of the gorge. As they began their descent of Homestead Hill, Ethan could see the pale yellow nimbus of fire glowing on the horizon. He wondered if it was already a lost cause. They rattled in on the east end of town, where Ethan jumped from the moving carriage and began fighting his way west down Front Street toward the center of town, through the frenetic crowd of onlookers, through the mad scramble of bucket brigades. He claimed a station squarely in front of the post office, where driven slantwise by the wind, a tongue of flame lapped at its roof and clapboard walls. Wresting a bucket from a confusion of hands, Ethan attacked the fire with furious haste, ducking low under tentacles of flame. Narrowing his silver eyes against the heat, which seemed almost liquid itself, he heaved bucketful upon bucketful of water at the fiery onslaught. The post office must be saved, above all else — it was the address of Port Bonita, the very proof of its existence, its link to the outer world. Without an address, Port Bonita was no longer a destination. Without an address, Port Bonita was not a place. To what purpose would the great twin turbines of Ethan’s conception hum without a town to power, without a place to light?

Beside him at the front, where the heat singed and chafed, a squarish, dough-faced man, slick with perspiration and ruddy about the cheeks, called out instructions to the mob.

“Heave!” shouted Dalton Krigstadt. “
To the left, to the left!
Heave!”

Preceded by an ominous creaking, then a great yawn, an interior wall came crashing down, and a burst of flames roared from the center of the blaze, swelling to a forty-foot crescendo. The men in front recoiled breathlessly. From behind them in the muddy street came a collective gasp.

“Heave!” Dalton spurred them on.
“She’s jumping the break. Cut her off at the break!
Heave!
You there, shift to the left
! Heave!
To the left, to the left, you!”