Wild Life (22 page)

She retreated a step and arranged her face in a disapproving frown. “They don't look old to me, only wore out; we better not go poking around in here.”

I chided her for the foolishness of her reluctance—“Believe me, no one is returning to cook their supper in this room”—but when this did nothing to persuade her, I took another tack. “We have a duty to gather these artifacts and get them into the hands of Anthropology,” I said. She took a dim view of this idea as well, and went on standing over me with her reproving look while I took out my knapsack and began to collect into it the partly intact pieces of implements and tools, stone spearheads and arrowheads, and twisted cords tied to bits of carved ornamentation. There were astonishing finds—a well-formed cylindrical stone pipe!—an intact, finely made awl!—and I should still be sailing on the excitement of these discoveries except for the last one, which somewhat capsized me. At the very rear of the room, in the darkness where the stone shelved away in a series of ledges, behind that neat feather bed some animal or other had made, I lifted a fragment of matting or basketry and found lying beneath it a human skeleton.

For one irrational moment I believed it was Harriet, and my heart lurched. But of course, the bones were ancient, and identified by their Indian accoutrements. “Oh, lordy, what's that you've got there?” Gracie said, and brought the lantern. It was the bones of a small person or an older child, short of leg, with the wizened rabbit-fur moccasins still on its feet; and amid the little pyramid which was the piled-up bones of both hands, a fetish of sticks and feathers which had evidently been clasped to its breast.

I am sometimes forced to admit that my childhood inclination toward romanticism remains stronger in me than my adult study of the sciences; and this was one of those occasions. As we two women
stood and looked on those bones in silence, I believed I could feel a very old sorrow creep into the room. The arrangement of the body, lying undisturbed on the basalt bench, had a touching posture of peace, and I was struck by the realization that this rock room was no longer someone's dwelling place but had become someone's tomb; I'm afraid my enthusiasm for collecting the ethnological scraps and fragments of a person's life began, in those moments, to desert me.

“I never have heard of the Klickitats, the Cowlitz, and them burying their dead people in caves,” Gracie said in a low, somewhat affronted tone. (It's the Western way to pretend a serious acquaintance with local Indian custom.)

“No, I never have heard of it,” I said, being Western myself, and also on the firmer ground of scholarly knowledge.

This opened the door to several speculations—the sort of thing at which I am particularly adept. I told Gracie: These could very well be the bones of a suitor who had been traveling with his entire dowry to the village of his betrothed—he had sought shelter from an ancient volcanic eruption—had composed himself to die alone from horrid wounds received in the showers of flaming rock. Or the only survivor of an ancient tribe decimated by disease—her desperate parents had sequestered her in the deep cave, safe from wolves and weather and their own horrid plague—had furnished her with every tool necessary for her survival—she'd lived alone for months or years until at last succumbing to loneliness. Or a feral boy raised by bears—he'd later been killed by an arrow from his own human tribe, but his mother, recognizing her long-lost son, had tenderly returned his body to the bear den for interment, along with certain items for his use on the spirit-journey.

Gracie received these possibilities eagerly and supported them, one after the other, with an embroidery of her own details—a desirable tendency in a companion. When we had thoroughly satisfied ourselves that the anomalous cave burial was capable of explanation, we considered what we should do with our discovery—a brief and agreeable discussion which led to our leaving the bones exactly as we had found them, except that I placed on the stone ledge beside the body a respectful array of the artifacts I had gathered into my sack.

I suppose I should consider this a loss to Science, and a foolish surrender to sentimentality. Had I been with Pierce, or Willard, or especially Norris, the photographist, I don't doubt I would have behaved differently. But we were two women—they are disgracefully sentimental creatures, after all—and Gracie, having her own particular devotion to privacy and the natural rights of ownership (even as regards the dead), may have been an undue influence. I find it difficult, now that I'm removed from the moment, to explain or defend my performance. At the time, not only did I feel in a particularly weakened emotional state due to recent events, but I felt myself inhabited by a strange and intimate awareness of the ancient past as it related to the present—something of a spiritual nature—something which does not readily yield itself to words. If related to my gender, I shall hope it was not womanish sentimentality but intuitive reason, which Science allows is a woman's natural and creditable inheritance. And I should say, as well, that my mind had made a kind of premonitory leap from the bones in the cave to what must be Harriet's dire fate; I blame this on an inclination toward literary metaphor.

When we came out of the lava tube into the daylight—no resumption of rain, as yet, but a cold overcast and an ill wind—we resumed our search without remarking on the futility of it, simply tramping on through the deepwood, zigzagging around the ruins of logs and poking into thickets of hawthorn and thimbleberry.

Shortly we sat to eat our lunch in a lightly forested glen where some others of our party were already stopped. Earl Norris fussed and fiddled with his camera and tripod from the vantage of a mossy rock-fall, while Almon Pierce and E. B. Johnson and an old ox logger by the name of Edward Stanley huddled in gloom around a smoky bonfire which had not even the advantage of rain cover from overhanging evergreen boughs; they chewed dry crusts of bread and hard jerked meat while submitting to their photograph.

It occurred to me that Gracie and I had made no decision as to whether we would share our news—our discovery of the lava-tube cave and its furnishings—with the men. I suppose if Gracie had blurted out the story, I'd have readily joined in; but she did not. I held off, myself, from an indefinable reservation, and perhaps also from grudgingness—not wishing to share our sentimental, private knowledge with the villain in our midst. In any case, due to the general mood of the day, hardly a one of them gave us the benefit of a greeting.

Gracie and I carried our lunches off somewhat from the others
and ate together in silence. Our association was transformed, of course, to one of friendship—we were easy in each other's company—but the truth is, I was not in a conversational frame of mind, and our differences are profound. While we sat together eating our crackers and cheese and washing all down with the liquor from Gracie's tin of peaches, we exchanged only a few private words on the subject of the local distilled spirits (the Amboy prune brandy, which by now I thoroughly lamented not buying) and, of course, the weather, which is always a safe topic. I was briefly troubled by a wish to confide in her the specific events of the night before, but I suppose such things are best dealt with sub rosa; and in any case, no occasion for intimacy arose from our discussion of fruit wines and rain.

We did discover a common habit: Gracie, having finished off her lunch, brought forth a twisted black pigtail from her shirt pocket, carved a thumbnail-sized plug, and deliberately seated it in her cheek; which encouraged me to do the same. While half reclined against our respective blowdowns, we each gazed upon the other's vile and unladylike tobaccoism with solemn, if unvoiced, admiration. (And inasmuch as spitting women are evidently newsworthy, we were hurriedly made the object of Norris's yellow-journal picture taking.)

In the afternoon, having suffered through a resumption of showery weather and a rising westerly wind, I became much in the mood to quit the search, but slogged on—I admit—for the sole reason that the others were seemingly unremitting, and I would not be the one to suggest our discreditable surrender. My affrighted need to keep Gracie in my sight gradually subsided (I blame increasing lethargy), and though I glimpsed one or another of my party or heard them hallooing to Harriet in a hoarse monotone through the long afternoon, I often labored alone and in silence. I peered into the dank shade along the corpses of old trees and climbed onto the thrones of their rotted stumps; from time to time I poked a stick into a thicket of wild raspberries. But I'm afraid I became more and more perfunctory, doing as little as could be managed without seeming to have given up the search entirely.

I am not as a rule a startlish person, but may have been brought to timidity and trepidation by recent events; I cannot, otherwise, explain what occurred—two events within minutes of each other, and in large part to blame for my present situation. In the mid-afternoon, after I had not seen or heard others of my party for a good interval, Almon Pierce arose suddenly from the brush behind me, which provoked me to a wild-Indian yelp and my constitutional defense against surprise, which is a malicious glare. This astounded and mortified the boy more than might have been expected—his face flashed crimson, and he was gone—had turned and fled into the wet shrubbery before I had quite recovered my poise. I confess, I stood for some little while afterward in frozen apprehension—knew instinctively and utterly that Almon Pierce had been my midnight assailant and that I had just saved myself from a further assault. I cannot account for this now except to plead the overwrought mind of a beleaguered and exhausted woman.

Which must also be blamed for what followed. Having recovered myself (so it seemed), I went on through the trees some few hundred yards, examining the root flares of thousand-year-old cedar trees, and simply became aware, with absolute and sudden certainty—the heaving over of my heart in my breast—that evil eyes were upon me; became sure of the presence of someone else glimpsed only as a shadow, a heaviness, a shape behind the trees, which vanished as I turned my head. I am half ashamed to admit I took out Special Agent Willard's deer-foot-handled knife and brandished it in the air, while fiercely calling out, “Halloo, damn you, who is there?” to which I received in reply the faint resounding of my own rabbity tremolo. Here is the truth, which can only be told in the privacy of these pages: I quite lost courage, believing someone was there—Almon Pierce again, or a beast, and in either case breathing death; and I plunged off through the deepwoods like a deer.

It is humiliating to realize one's base fear lies so near to the surface.

When I had got over my blind flight (not long) and got hold of my senses, I surrendered to a weaker impulse and made off directly for camp, with every hope of finding at least one or two of the others waiting (shameful if I should be the first to call it quits), and the comfort of hot soup, as well as a tent to get in out of the rain. It was at that time just past two o'clock.

In the neighborhood of four o'clock, having struck no sign of camp nor indeed of the lava ridge, and no glimpse of Gracie nor any of the men, I began to fall prey to a certain anxiety and restlessness. I
had been holding the terrain lightly in my mind, which is a coherent enough map, and I am usually unerring in the matter of orientation; but we had been keeping to the flattish troughs, and the whole of our traverse was gradually uphill, which I suppose had led me into a kind of complacency regarding which way was “back”—that is to say, downhill. I may also have gotten turned around somewhat, while bolting from shadows. Further, this is a jumbled country, no less so than the lava tableland—a muddle of ravines and gullies and ridges which give upon one another in a confusing way. In any case, subsequent hours were spent casting back and forth deliberately along the low ground until I became aware that, in the darkening shadows, injury was ever more likely.

I am not worried in the slightest—have certainly spent many nights alone in the woods and have sufficient flesh on my bones to stand the loss of one meal (or two, I suppose, in case I do not find my fellows in time for breakfast; but I have hardtack and cheese in my pockets). And here is an adventure, after all, and a story to embellish for the boys when I have regained them as an audience.

 

On the Columbia River I have found evidence of the former existence of inhabitants much superior to the Indians at present there, and of which no tradition remains. Among many stone carvings which I saw there were a number of heads which so strongly resembled those of apes that the likeness at once suggests itself. Whence came these sculptures, and by whom were they made?

—J
AMES
T
ERRY
,
Sculptured Anthropoid Ape Heads, Found in or Near the Valley of the John Day River, a Tributary of the Columbia River, Oregon
(1891)

 

Almon Pierce

 

The man had gone out before dawn, intending to be on his stand in the woods when the elk should break from their beds. Now he sat in the rotted-out shell of a cedar stump, holding the rifle across his knees while he waited. The white moon divided the ground into dim stripes of light and darkness, and relumed the shapes of rocks embedded in the earth around him, the round volcanic boulders hurled up from a crater more than twenty miles away. He had never learned to track, and lately his brothers, having given up the effort to teach him, had instructed him to wait on stand, to stay perfectly still, and to look, to look constantly with intent carefulness, until the deer, the elk, should move past him down the hill at dawn or at dusk to feed in the willow and alder along the stream bottoms.

He was uncomfortable in the darkness, disliking its boundlessness; and out of this illimitable dark ocean came a fecund smell and noises he must continually strain to identify: the rubbing of tree limbs one against the other, the creaking of whole trees as they shifted on their feet, the faint rustlings and whisperings which must be animals prowling abroad at night. He was not afraid but deeply wary, as one who is outcast and must be silent.