Wild Life (18 page)

He gave me an admiring look of surprise—oh, a considerable satisfaction—and allowed as how his logs washed downstream to the pond at Camp 7, where they were gathered up and sent down the flume. When I told him the source of my unwomanly knowledge was merely to have lived most of my life on the lower Columbia, he said to me with a lively interest, “So you're an old pioneer, are you? In this part of the country, I find not many people have been in one place longer than last week.”

“Last week I was in Skamokawa, amongst all the other latecomers, but my mother's family was among the first to settle up the Grays River, if you know that part of the woods, and my mother was born and raised there, which doubtless makes her an Old Pioneer.”

“I do know Grays River, Mrs. Drummond. We never got up that far, but we scouted some timber on Crooked Creek, which I know is in that direction.”

“There's now a post office on Crooked Creek, which some fool has named Eden.”

“Is that right? There was nothing much but trees in that country when I went through.”

“They're making every effort to cut them all down, in the evident belief that Eden was a stump garden. At the present rate of logging, and considering the improvements to machinery, I don't wonder that all the trees in the West, with the exception of Roosevelt's reservations, will soon be cut to the ground. They have brought a steam falling-saw and a crawling tractor powered by gasoline into the Columbia River woods, you know, and at the mouth of the Wallace Slough they are laying a floating cradle which, when finished, will form an ocean-going log raft one thousand feet long. The world is spinning fast, Mr. Boyce, and you fellows in logging are doing what you can to keep up.”

He took this impersonally. “Well, we're in a land of logging, Mrs.
Drummond; and I recall from my Bible that Eden is a garden, all right, and no mention of a forest.”

This was something I could not deny. Muir and the preservationists would have the ancient deepwoods unaltered by man, but I suppose Harriet would not now be lost if these woods were a tamed and beneficent park. In any case, I am a woman who most admires the wilderness from the comfort of her civilized home, and in point of practice my Utopist fantasies will every time bring forth a cultivated, pastoral nature, with ripe fruit dropping from every bough, and not a giant wild tree in sight.

We had by now come into near view of the camp, which, being way back in the deepwoods with no milled lumber at hand, is made of cedar slabs with the bark left on, and roof shakes thick as a man's fist. The lamps in the windows were lighted, for it was still dark inside at half past seven, and the shaggy buildings sitting amongst the usual black stumps and rubbish piles and outhouses had the appearance of a comforting cloister. I was struck by this, a pang somewhat resembling nostalgia, and quoted seriously to Boyce, “Home is home, though it be never so homely.”

He skipped a look in my direction, evidently wondering if there was sarcasm involved—we had just then come within range of the fragrant hog pens. But his reply, when he delivered it, was sentimental as a cheap romance novel. “Well, it's a consolation, Mrs. Drummond, how lamplight and chimney smoke will give the worst place a cheerful aspect.”

I have written these words down, and expect to place them in the mouth of one romantic character or another as soon as I recognize the appropriate moment in my story.

 

Our national forest reserves are still to a large extent in a wild, natural state, and it will be many years, in fact, before they shall have become impressed with the stamp of artificiality. Fire-scarred and over-grazed as many of them are, careful treatment can but improve the appearance which large areas in the reserves present today. And yet there are corners and
ridges and valleys in these reserves that would retain a higher scenic value by being left untouched, if such a sacrifice were possible. Would it not be possible to combine in each of the proposed special reservations the silvicultural aims and the aesthetic ones?

A
MERICAN
F
ORESTRY
A
SSOCIATION
,
Forestry and Irrigation,
June 1905

 

C. B. D. (1905; unpublished)

F
ROM
T
ATOOSH OF THE
S
EE
-A
H
-T
IKS

 

By means of that precariously narrow flight of stairs, the party descended to a hidden cleft in the rock, and thence into a labyrinth of dark passageways and narrow lanes, which after some time unwound onto a broad level road paved with bituminized wood and illuminated by electrical lamps. Helena had nearly despaired of reaching their destination when the road at last gave on a splendid gateway of fluted and twisted pillars, beyond which could be seen an immense domed cavern lit not only by clefts in the mountainous roof, through which poured an abundance of sunlight, but also by the phosphorescence of the volcanic stone itself, which caught the sun and mirrored it. The road, after passing through the gateway, sloped downward into a wide valley, the whole of which could be seen from that high outlook. At the center was a circular city built around a vast central piazza, with streets radiating outward, extending into a land of tranquil lakes, open parklands, and neatly groomed orchards. On the lakes were gondolas of a swan design, powered by some unknown means; and on the footpaths, which were paved with stone, strolled a population of See-Ah-Tiks, the naked men and women alike ornamented with bright and colorful jewelry. The roofs of the city, which were adorned with elaborate flower gardens, struck the eye, from this high vantage, as a bright and intricate Egyptian mosaic. It was altogether a startling and resplendent sight.

 

4 Apr

Darling boys,

This is morning and I am writing to you from the dining hall of a log camp away back in the deepwoods, while Melba is keeping Florence company in Yacolt. You have never seen such large trees as grow here. If one of you—even George—were to hide behind the trunk of one, even though his arms were outspread, you other boys could not see him from the opposite side. You know the stump behind Horace Stuband's milking shed where Lightning hid her kittens last litter but one? With its rooster tail of fern and huckleberry? The trees they are cutting here will leave stumps such as that—such as I saw on the Deep River Divide as a child. I must get this note off to you quickly—not to frighten you with such haste, but I am setting off directly with a search party, and by tonight shall be in the black lava caves far up in the mountains, where we are all hoping to find Harriet hiding, safe and sound. We will see one another soon. With all the love I can send you,

M

One of my fortunes is a resilient constitution—I have had but five hours of sleep, which has thoroughly restored me—and one of my deficiencies a smallish bladder, which is to blame for my awakening this morning before the crack of dawn. After a private toilet in the woods, and finding myself reconstituted, I now sit in a cold gray light, writing of yesterday's events while the men are still moving sluggish and rolling their blankets.

My letter to Melba and Florence was a breathless flurry of particulars and minor facts which may yet conceal the scrupulous omission of Hope. I sent it by way of a colored man who was forced to quit the search—evidently he broke his collarbone, and in the nonchalant way of loggers with regard to injuries, his friends bound his arm tight to
his body and have sent him afoot and alone over the trail and the flume to Camp 6, and thence over the spur to Chelatchie Prairie and the rails to Yacolt, where there is a doctor.

I saw him away with my letter—oh, it was two letters, as I also wrote to the boys, and asked Melba to see it posted from Yacolt—and promptly afterward made off into the woods with six men and two horses, who are taking the search farther up Canyon Creek and then along one of the many local stream courses to an outbreak of lava which evidently stretches away in a high ridge toward the southeast. My own particular intent is to put myself in the way of meeting up with Homer, and this is a party that will likely bring me into his locality; we should end up, I was told, joining ourselves to other search parties among the black caves and casts, which terrain the men look upon as the suspected haunt of monsters and orangutans.

We struck off south-by-east from Camp 8 across the logged-over field and skirting around Harriet's little glade, until shortly we were under the old trees. After my walk at dawn with Bill Boyce, the dark, eldritch woods had gotten more ordinary; or I had gotten over my spurt of unholy dread; or there were now sufficient numbers of us to foster a feeling of safety. I followed the boots of the man before me, tramping stolidly through a common daylight forest whose trees, though tall as the trees of Brobdingnag, had become the barely noticed frame for hard work.

This was ground that had been thoroughly searched in the first days and therefore could be passed through without much attention. We climbed by means of switchbacks, a seemingly circular route, until I was sure we were headed north-by-west and must soon come down again onto the cutting ground at Camp 8. I was grateful for the horses, who suffered under the weight of the greater part of our provender and carried also the heavy tents, which otherwise would have had to be parceled out to the shoulders of the seven hikers, and to my own puny shoulders in particular. In the rainy months this country is generally inhospitable to horses, as the deep ruts, mud holes, and steep embankments will bring on a condition of swelled ankles which some people have colorfully named “mud fever.” The two horses in our party, though, are hammer-nosed, short-legged, sorrowful-looking creatures, whose thick ankles are frankly due to inelegant breeding and whose coarseness serves them well, I suppose, in the matter of standing continually in muddy conditions.

They were brought to the search by the three Pierce brothers, whose cinnabar mine lies situated somewhere in these hills around Camp 8. Besides the brothers, and the audacious woman, our party includes a peeler and a faller from Bill Boyce's crew and, lastly, a photographist named Earl Norris, carrying on his back an 11 × 14 Eastman view camera and a high-extension tripod. He has been making his living by photographing every operation in every phase of West Coast logging, and selling his photographs to loggers and lumbermen to enshrine their place in the fast-disappearing Glory Days of Logging. I'm told he came up the flume from Chelatchie just hours ahead of me, and I don't doubt he joined the search in the hope of finding his own glory: a photograph of a genuine Wild Man of the Woods might be expected to make a man's fortune, and, failing that, a gruesome photograph of a lost child's body should butter his bread for weeks.

“The boys” are a rough class but, as is the usual way in this country, would not fail in respect to a lady. While we climbed through the wet shrubbery, I fell into conversation with the youngest of the brothers, who proved to be desperately anxious to talk once he had been spoken to. We batted the shuttle back and forth: I told a fishing tale to do with a flock of geese flying into a boat cabin and shut in by the quick-thinking captain, who served them for supper; he returned with a mining story of fellows who had blown their own house to shreds while drying explosives in their kitchen stove. I then recommended several books to him, Verne in particular, whose work is principally aimed at the working class and the young; he had not heard of Verne but said he would seek him out, on my good advice. Once the ice was broken—and here I suppose I was encouraged by my earlier success with the flume tender—I pressed on him several arguments for women to have the vote, and the sensibleness of trousers when a woman goes tramping in the woods. This drew from him a circumspect nod which I took to be an admission of the validity of certain of my arguments, and afterward a complete silence. It was necessary for the peeler, a Finn named Peter Mer, to rescue us all with an account of a bear who liked to eat tallow off the logs of a skid road.

When we'd gained a certain elevation, our way straightened and became, as I thought, an ordinary matter of following the course of Canyon Creek, which was occasionally visible as a pale glimpse in the
draw below us. But the path was confined to a narrow ridge with a precipitous fall on either hand, and I did take a slip—came up handsomely against a tumulus of rock and earth at the uttermost edge of the yawning chasm—and survived only by luck. In my brief flight I made no sound, though some of the boys shrieked; and afterward, having lain a moment on the ground taking survey of my health, I sprang up with a wild joy and shouted out, “Nothing broken—not hurt at all!” and felt about for my hat. It was only afterward, when the boys sat me on a stone and gave me a lookover, and when I peered once again down into the canyon, that the thought of what could have happened came in a rush, and I very nearly was brought to tears over it. (Of course, now that the experience is safely over, it is interesting to think about—my lack of fear, and how Death might have taken me off just that quickly, without notice or warning. I think of Montaigne: “If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it.”)

Shortly we were headed downhill again, very steep into the gorge, until reaching the trough of a nameless little tributary, which we turned up, and thereafter became more earnest in our mission. The log faller, a stringy, big-eared fellow named E. B. Johnson, being the senior man present, gave us our direction: we were to distribute ourselves along both steep banks of the creek and beat our way methodically upstream through the brush. Every little while, he said, it wouldn't hurt to send a halloo into the trees.