Wild Life (31 page)

Shortly, a wild woman came down the hill and with a soft moan of pleasure lay down her great body in the band of sunlight nearby and began to roll back and forth across the damp grass; and then the wild children. And when the wild men came down to the grass and lay with the others, the human woman went on rolling, rolling, under the magical influence of the early morning dew, rolling leafless as Eve—no more clothes than a frog—rolling as one among the great naked beasts, and joining in their wild whistling and chirping, which seemed to her a joyous sort of singing and which seemed linked to her happiness and to every other happiness in the world in a continuous symphonic chorus.

And afterward, as she lay gasping on her back and feeling herself to be still giddy, still turning over in the bright play of light—there was a singular moment when she believed she felt the dignified slow rolling of the earth beneath them all.

 

MISTAKE WILD MAN FOR BEAR AFTER CLAMS

I
NDIANS
N
EAR
Q
UILCENE
T
AKE A
S
HOT AT
H
AIRY
M
ONSTER
, W
HICH
M
AKES
O
FF
S
HRIEKING

Victoria, B.C. (Special)

Captain Owen, pilot, reported today that Indians had seen and shot at the wild man, previously reported to have been seen near Qualicum. The creature, which was naked and covered with hair, was engaged in digging clams with his hands when the Indians came, and thinking him a bear shot at him and wounded him. The man ran away shrieking. The Indians returned to Union much frightened, and reported having wounded the wild man.

Search parties sent to look for the creature have failed. Residents of Union and that vicinity believe in the existence of the wild man. Some allege that he is a young man who disappeared twelve years ago.

Seattle Daily Times
,
May 1, 1905

A child dead and my mind in turmoil—how to make sense of it? I have lost my bearings, may not be able to tell the truth even to myself.

When you have seen no other person for days on end, you begin to forget what you look like, which is my only blame—I hope is my only blame—and the rest falling on the men, who must have been startled—I must look a strange creature with wild untended hair, filthy red mane tangled with twigs and mosses, and from that distance my mud-daubed coat and trousers maybe mistaken for an animal's thick fur—and I shrieked when I saw them, the two men strolling suddenly out of the dense brush—men!—but in my throat after so long no human language, a wordless animal cry of pure astonishment, which turned their heads, of course, knocked them back, but my God! To kill! The one in a plaid shirt—his pants were stagged, high-lace boots, a miner's getup—lifted his rifle so quick with no thought in it, just fired, and I was utterly taken by surprise, could not speak,
stood paralyzed while the other one—suspenders, a mustache, a foolish canvas hat—took his aim deliberately and tried to kill me, and if I had formed a thought—to speak humanly, to make myself known—it was driven out of me by the bullet whizzing past my ear—I bolted like a rabbit for the cover of the woods.

I'm ashamed to admit I took no thought for the others, the instinct of fear and of individual survival at that moment being paramount, but behind or offside to me such a cry arose, a screeching moan which recollected me, and the grief in the outcry so unmistakable—my heart tearing in my breast, for I knew in an instant, knew absolutely, and throwing a look around—Oh! the cub, the child, one of the twins, lying in gore and the men coming to it on the run, and the mother, the poor mother, stumbling away with the other twin clasped to her hip—must keep safe the living child—but peering back to the lost one and crying, crying—I will never forget that moment, that cry, that horrible glimpse as I ran.

I have only a dim recollection of the next minutes—believe I threw myself headlong downhill—ran and ran—clumps of trees, brushy thickets, a pumice slope—tumbling and falling, staggering up to run again—in certain terror that I would be left behind, that the long strides of the others—my family, my friends!—would carry them far ahead and leave me bereft, abandoned to evil. But the grieving mother staggered yet farther to the rear, carrying her lone child, moaning, moaning, which I bore and then could no longer bear, going back through the trees despite fear, a shaking heart, to find her, to comfort and console her—impossible of course, but I touched her great shuddering body, stroked and petted her, which she did not shy from, and finally we went on together, we two women, desolated and grieving (and the baby in terror clinging to his mother), until we had found the others, our family, whistling for us from the green darkness of the hemlocks.

The husband seeing his wife coming with only the one child, oh! his look was so broken, and he came to her, keening, taking the living child in his arms, rocking from foot to foot, and she let her heavy body slump and began a low whistling moan, which the others took up, which I also took up, though we could not stand there long but must go on swiftly and dangerously down into a rocky canyon and
halfway up the vertical opposite slope—I was staggering, exhausted, they hauled me bodily up the cliff—where we crept into a deep hole together and lay in terrible silence while the men thrashed through the brush far below us and called to each other in murderous, excited tones. Their voices became gradually distant and quarrelsome, but we went on lying there mournfully until a crescent moon rose above the edge of the mountaintops, and then we climbed down, trembling, into the steep canyon again and up out of it and through the dark trees, the faint glimmering moonlight, to the body of the child—to the place where the body had been. There was a cold black stain on the grass. The mother began to rock her weight to and fro, though her wailing was silent in the night, beyond the range of human ears, and we stood with her, all of us, while her husband moaned softly in the wordless language which is grief, which is unspeakable sorrow, and then we went on uphill following the broad track in the duff and the thin smear of blood where the child had been dragged along the ground, the men's boot marks in the track and their human smell still rank where they had worked and sweated to haul the child's heavy body uphill. We followed them up through the trees onto a high outcrop of rock, where their rough little house was standing beside the open black mouth of a mine, the place where they had brought the child, and oh! God! He was eviscerated and flayed, the naked shape so white and so thin in the darkness, the body of a child (the body of one of my own sons or my brother), butchered and hanging from the branches of a tree by the bloody sinews of his bare feet, while his bloody fleece was nailed in cruciform upon the bole; and if I had any thought yet of speaking to them—of making myself known to them—if I had formed that thought in any part of my mind, it was driven out now by wildness.

It always has been my belief that murder is a primitive instinct not common to women's hearts, but I would have killed them, I know, if the tools had been in my hands, murdered the men and brutalized their bodies, which I should be ashamed to write but am not, being still bloody-minded as I put these words down. The child's mother—not having the tools to do manslaughter—lifted a great stone and with a grievous howl threw it clattering against the door, and this we all took up, the huge flung rocks booming against the roof of the house
and rumbling down. The men would not come out, but scratched the chinking from between the logs and poked their rifles through, firing blindly into the night, which made us more wild, more unafraid, and we went on with that terrible, useless rock-throwing, that terrible despairing screeching and crying, until our murderous impulse was spent. Then the child's father climbed up into the dark tree and took down his son's naked, mutilated body, which the child's mother, keening, received into her arms; and he undid the nails from his son's fleece and we enfolded the child in it and together we carried him away from there.

This is dusk, and we are camped along a narrow shelf among the dense brush of salmonberries, and the dead child lies with us. We have all day been keeping to the oldest trees, the deepest canyons, not stopping to eat, going swiftly north, carrying the twins, the one who is dead and the one who is living, in the arms of the adults, who must spell one another of the weight; and the orphan woman ignobly carried too, whenever too weak to climb or to clamber her puny limbs over a windthrown trunk. I am so tired, so hungry, but it is my mind and my heart that shake. I have been wondering all day how to write what happened, and who will read it. When you have been so long without speaking, without encountering another human being, you may forget who you are; in this wild state, this wild life, I do not write to be read but to clear my mind and my path, to gain strength.

The mother of the dead child looks out at the country with a stunned expression, as if the world has been made desolate and hostile, as if she has been set down suddenly among the rocky craters of the moon. She does not speak. I think I must be writing for both of us—writing as women have always written—to make sense of what the heart cannot take in all at once.

I shall be glad if no one reads this, for I must write what cannot be written. My help, my only help, is in these pages, where I take myself to heal grievous wounds; where my woe and my weakness and my anger and my doubt are received in silence.

This morning we ate the body of the child. We afterward buried the fleece, broke apart his skeleton, crushed his skull—scattered the fragments of bone in the forest.

The civilized world will suppose this to have been cannibalism, and an act of savage nature. Indeed, what I have seen and done is unspeakable, never to be erased from the mind, but I believe it was a desperate act of love—it was the sacrament by which this child redeemed the lives of his family. His corporeal body will be found nowhere—he is buried within the bodies of his mother, his father—and thus their lives, their objective existence, undivulged, shall remain a secret closely kept from the brutal world of Men.

I should write further—of my feelings, my spirits, the state of my mind—but find some feelings do in fact elude language. Here I am at the uttermost center where lies the inner being, the heart's core, and which is without words altogether.

In three days' relentless travel we have left behind our fear of pursuit. At evening of the first day we crossed a river (it may have been the North Fork of the Lewis), which was a dangerous undertaking, the
spring freshet having made of it a white cataract running rough with driftwood and entire trees. We scouted back and forth along the river shore for miles (a “basket ferry” at one place and raw new pilings of an unfinished boat landing—terrifying to think of being seen) and briefly tried two or three places which might have done for the others but which I could not have managed alive; then finally made our crossing where the river ran in two streams either side of an island. The near side tore swift and gray over a wide gravelly bed, the water nearly hip high even on the men, and the splash at my chin—must not think of losing one's footing—death if an uprooted tree should come rafting down while we stood precariously in the middle of the rushing flood. I waded across clinging to the others like one of their children, and holding this notebook aloft in my hand to keep it from drowning or being swept away. The far stream was narrow, pouring around a hard curve, with the lap and race tearing at the bank in a wild brown surf—layers of cobbled rock and basalt and sand eroded into raw shingles and shelves. There were trees lying broken across the channel, which we made use of as precarious and slanting bridges, though their yet-green limbs lifted and waved dangerously like the flukes of a whale. This crossing I managed without help—became the helper—showed them how to place one foot warily in front of the other. I have, in a dim and former life, walked miles of six-inch catwalk above a bottomless abyss.

When the moon came up behind the black trees to the east, we denned in the hollow left behind where a giant spruce had fallen, its root mass tearing out of the ground as it went down. Our river crossing had of course been a thorough soaking, which was untroubling to the others—they possess a double guard coat over a dense undercoat which no amount of cold or wet can penetrate—but I am pathetically poorly covered and was, by that time, shaking with cold, my drowned clothes clinging to me, wicking the heat straight away from my body. I shucked every waterlogged rag and in a state of nature burrowed down among the others, where I slowly became warm.

We went on to the north, through narrow canyons choked with cedar, where the cool and sunless ground was groomed and carpeted with an old brown duff of leaves and needles. When we climbed out upon the ridges we could see thin snow on the blue ranges all around
us, and white peaks of a mountain chain rising into cloud to the east and to the north.

In the afternoon we passed through the ruins of an old logging camp: huge old stumps with high notch cuts, moss-rotten fence posts leaning about an ancient ox shed, and rusted chains and dogs and jackscrews in the wreckage of an old “boat” fallen down along the dim swath of the skid road. An heroic fir stood at the edge of the old yard, the last of its generation, which I must guess was left for a boundary mark, or for some other reason no one can now know, as the wood-choppers who felled the other trees are dead or long ago gone to the pursuits of old men. These lone, left-behind trees I have heard the loggers call wolf trees. I know that in the old world, where many generations of a clan lived under the shade of one ancient tree, their traditions told and retold the circumstances of its planting and the events that occurred within its witness; and such trees were venerated. And I know that the memory of a tree is real and concrete—it registers in its flesh, in concentric layers, the years of drought and of flood, of fires and volcanic event, and the fall of meteorites centuries old. From miles away we could see the lofty head of that wolf tree, a landmark, towering above the thick stands of blackberries and alder which had grown up again in the cleared field.