Wild Life (34 page)

One of the first things I worried about was the fate of this book, whether it went into the ground or was burnt with my ragged old coat and trousers, or whether members of the Wildwood Club had got hold of it and were regaling one another with its monstrous stories while they sat at the fireside pulling candy. I was afraid to speak to the ferryman's wife about it—afraid to know the truth. But it is here with me after all, was lying in a dresser drawer together with my few civilized possessions—the little stub of pencil, my deer-footed knife, and
compass, though not my good carven digging stick, which I cut and shaped myself and carried in my belt for all those weeks, and which I fear I cannot live without.

I've been going over and over events in my mind with a feeling of shock, or not shock exactly—this outcome awaited, dreaded, expected for so long—but rather a lack of feeling, a helpless numbness, as when the fatal diagnosis or the irreversible verdict finally comes to its pass. (I am at the bottom of the cold sea, and anything deeper is death.)

I imagine other outcomes: if we had left the cleft gorge by its western end and gone over the backbone of the ridge toward the lake country, we should never have met the Wildwood Club. But it had begun to rain, and we went down into the cover of the timber along a goat trail that twisted away steeply to the southeast. Though I had had the idea that the trees might defend us from an eruption, it came out that we were in as much jeopardy there as anywhere on the mountain. In the afternoon a great wide stream of mud and small rock poured suddenly down through the standing boles of the firs, with a slight rushing and rattling noise such as wind makes in the winter limbs of cedars—mud thick as pudding, brickyard red, slipping down the hill with not enough force to push over the trees but enough, certainly, to take down a woman, or even a giant—and warm and alive, issuing from the boiling heart of the mountain. We were lucky not to be buried or carried off by it, lucky to get away alive.

The muddy stream forced us higher, a climb to get around the broad, steep-sided basin which stood at its head. In the rain, we went up great slabs of shelving rock to a blasted crag where in clear weather we'd have had a wide view over the tops of distant ridges, a view of mountains breaking into pinnacles of bold gray rock too steep for snow to ever cling, and canyons all trending westward in purplish darkness—in clear weather we might have seen the smoke and felled trees which marked the Wildwood Club in their tented bivouac at the foot of a glacier. But we went over the crag in fog and rain onto ground that was mostly bare basalt, as smooth and polished as a tile floor. We were coming down off this bench into a park of stunted hemlock and dwarf huckleberries, through the weathered ghosts of dead trees standing singly in the fog, when the heads of a mountain-climbing party rose out of a knoll on our left hand.

The alarm I felt was a bright and electric showering of light that spun away to the ends of my limbs—the others veered off into cover of the rocks with their great twelve-foot strides, sudden and silent as gulls in flight—we might have gone unseen, all of us. But I briefly stood there, charged with fear, staring across at the climbers as they swung their alpenstocks and labored over the knoll in the rain—stood there alone and still as death until their startled, greased faces lifted to me beneath their cartwheel hats—and only then did I break and run. So it is my own fault to be here. I am wild, but not wild enough.

I can remember the slapping of my feet across the basalt floor, and the way the wet stone slanted off obliquely under me; I remember the gravel scattering when I pressed my heels into the rock to make myself run faster, and how my eyes teared against the wind, and how the rain fell into my open mouth. I remember that I looked back to see where the climbers were, and whether they would shoot me—some of them had dropped their packs and were shouting and sawing the air with their arms, brandishing their axes or their climbing sticks—I realized some of them were women—and I remember flying over the top of the ridge, the broken lava-rock crag, and seeing below me the others bolting down the wet slab-rock shelves into the concealing darkness of the trees. I remember all this clearly, and even e'neth'kee, the swing of her long powerful arms, her heavy legs in that reaching, deliberate, loose-kneed stride, and then her head turning across the great muscled and caped shoulder, turning to gain a last look backward, inconsolable, walleyed, and then gone into the trees; and my feet sliding in the rocks, and the slow fluttering jerk of my body as I fell.

The air smelled of blood and mountain sorrel, and there were twigs and stones inside my shirt, down the back of my neck; this is what I remember. And dirt in my mouth which I tried to tongue out. I lay still and listened to the rain ruffling across the rock. I was thinking how funny it was, to have escaped death and then to be killed anyway, all in the same day.

Someone spoke and I looked over to see who it was, and a great rush of noise and pain sprang up behind my eyes; I believe I also felt something give way in my heart. Those people, the Wildwood Club people, stood over me, speaking to one another in hushed voices in a language that I did not recognize, and one of them, a man with no
chin whose nose was streaked with white grease, squatted down beside me and touched my shoulder and spoke earnestly to me. I could not make out the meaning of his words, which drifted and faded in and out. Behind the molten pain I was thinking about the others, and whether the climbers had seen them, and how to keep the climbers occupied with me, to keep them from going down the rock shelves into the trees.

The chinless man was a doctor. He directed things with a good deal of talking and gesturing, and eventually they picked me up, four of them, in a stretcher formed of their linked arms. My vision swung—there was a leap and blaze of brightness—I vomited, which fell half on my own collar and the rest on the boots of the doctor. They carried me, staggering up over the crag and onto flatter ground more convenient for surgery, which I do not remember, or not much of it—a needle and thread and some workmanlike sewing, while certain of the club women reinforced one another in their resolve not to faint. I closed my eyes but did not sleep, and what I remember after that is a shivering that began in my knees and rolled up into my shoulders and arms, and a great swollen grief that pushed into my throat.

My face was stiff and throbbing, and voices argued in a low mutter, and it was very late in the day—the sky in the west was heavy and dark, the swollen clouds streaked with purple veins. The smell of the rain had a very cold edge, as if it were not a spring rain—as if the earth had rolled over on its back and now was facing into winter. They were carrying me down from the mountain, and I was aware of the awkwardness and thinness of my bones in the arms of the men, aware of my body's lightness and its yearning to sink down to the earth. The men often stopped to readjust their grips on one another's forearms, or to shift me to four new burden bearers. At several points while we were stopped like that, a certain woman with a long forehead and long eyes put her face close to mine and repeatedly asked me something, the meaning of which I eventually guessed out. I answered her with my name song, which is two repetitious notes and then the call note, and which I will write as
tuq'tuq'tsqa.
She received this information with a painful look I imagined to be confusion and sorrow.

It seemed to me we were descending through the darkness into a field of yellow stars and constellations of moons in various phases. Shadows fluttered and shifted in the rain, and I heard a wild voice, a whispery
crying that faded in and out, muffled by currents of air—my heart in terrible throes. I became suddenly very afraid of being lost, and whistled softly to myself a song for nameless places. Gradually there were a great many bivouac tents, luminous and lit from within, scattered upon a wide clearing in the trees, and several bonfires with which the Wildwood Club meant to keep out the unknowable darkness and the beasts of the wilderness. Shadows began to be people moving among the fires and coming in and out of the tents. Then the wild cry became a woman singing, and I suddenly recognized phrases of the song, which was “Crossing the Bar.” Something gathered motion in my head and then collapsed downward, as the edge of a steep riverbank crumbles under the downpour—I felt flooded with language, the several human languages of which I had once had an acquaintance.

I was two nights and a day with them. (They had made elaborate preparations for a three-week trek and were tremendously reluctant to cut it short, whether on account of volcanic eruption or the unexpected capture of a wildwoman.) There were, as it turned out, fifty-some men and women in the expedition, the greater number of whom had remained at the bivouac that day, glissading on icy slopes and fishing glacial streams. They had evidently argued about the probabilities and perils of an eruption, and finally only twelve had been reckless enough to attempt the scaling of a mountain which might at any moment shower them with fiery rocks. When I imagine other outcomes, here is one that often rises to my brain: they might all have stayed back from the climb.

They are a recently organized band of newfangled conservationists who believe in the virtues of the strenuous life—doctors, lawyers, businessmen, broker's agents, librarians; not a farmer, logger, or fisherman amongst them. The rules for the expedition were elaborate and precise: Each person a pack sack of no more than thirty-five pounds, as well as one hundred feet of rope, an axe, and an alpenstock—the most popular form being a stout staff six feet long with an iron spike on one end and, upon the other, a goat horn blackened and polished by hand. All to wear stout boots when hiking and to carry hobnails and the tools for driving them into the boots, as needed for crossing dangerous ice. The women to wear bloomers on the trail but skirts over their bloomers while in camp. Reveille at 4:30.

A makeshift flagpole was erected in the center of the clearing,
upon which Old Glory was mounted each dawn and dismounted each dusk. Days were spent in glorious outdoor pursuits; evenings involved a good deal of singing and joke-telling; on most nights, at most fires, corn was popped; and on Friday nights, I was told, half a dozen groups presented skits and sketches before the entire company.

There were several doctors among them, all of whom looked in on me at one time or another, while leaving my hourly care and mental health in the hands of a rotating force of women. While lying in the tent, I fixed my eyes on the ridgepole. While out of it, sitting on a brown duck folding camp chair and swaddled in blankets, I looked toward the east edge of camp, where a great ice-scoured basin rose and opened into the damp belly of clouds. The women spooned soup into my mouth and chattered at me dutifully and concealed my bare scalp and stitches from view of the men, by means of a carefully arranged turban made from their neck scarves. They had not the facilities for a warm bath, and my frail condition precluded a dunking in a cold mountain stream, so they satisfied themselves with washing my hands and feet, head and neck. They could not get my old coat and trousers off without a fight, and all were frightened of me, so my clothes stayed on—they anointed the walls of the tent with lavender oil and cologne.

There was considerable argument over what had brought me to my condition, whether a loss of mind, an upbringing among beasts, or outrageous hardships. The women generally ignored my peculiarities, believing that, with their tender care, I should shortly rise out of my lethargy and silence and tell them all the events of my life in the wilderness. Among the men, the more usual belief was that I represented a strange relative of
Homo sapiens,
a grim and pungent commentary on the bestial side of human nature—a reminder that there are basic and primitive impulses still battling for control of the human spirit.

By the second morning it was felt that I had recovered enough strength to walk off the mountain by short stages, so they sent me downhill the six-mile hike with three disinclined jailers—two gentlemen and a lady, the latter in her climbing clothes—who spoke to the captured wildwoman with exaggerated kindness and in slow, measured tones, supposing her deaf and feebleminded, or driven insane by her years of hermit life in the wilderness. I supposed them anxious
to get back to their candy pulls around the campfire, and consequently went quietly.

Now I have been told by the ferryman's wife that word has been sent out to the world—a lost woman recovered—and they are hopeful some one of my family or friends will soon get the news and arrive to take me down from the woods. I am meanwhile lying still and silent day after day, doing nothing because there is nothing for me to do except this writing, which is the work of emptiness and loss. I feel myself becoming suspended and pale and insubstantial, like those souls in Dante drifting about between Heaven and Hell. And at night, like a ghost, I call-howl softly until the moon rises behind a curtain of cloud.

I have been thinking of something I read once—was it in Boas?—how in the winter, for the spirit dances, medicine men would put on long heavy masks carved of cedar and decorated with teeth and feathers, which represented certain demons and immortals such as Raven, Coyote, and Hare; and how sometimes a dancer, crouching and circling with great leaps and bounds, howling and shaking the heavy cedar-bark fringe of the mask, would find that his body had become inhabited by the spirit of the mask. I suppose a dancer who was overtaken by the spirit of a Dzo'noqlwa mask would run into the woods and take up a wild life with the other mountain people.

Stuband came as far as Woodland on the sternwheeler, and under other circumstances he would have transferred to the small-draft ferry, which draws but a scant foot of water and even this late in the year might have gotten him up the river as far as Etna; but I suppose the stately pace of the sternwheeler had given him too much time for worry and useless conjecture, and he was therefore impatient of the smaller boat, of its many delays and unscheduled stops while farmers drive their wagons into the stream and make a swap of passengers and
freight without the formality of a loading platform. People in Woodland had heard the story of the lost woman who had been found at a remote location up the river, and they were anxious to help him get there in case she should turn out to be the woman he was looking for; so he was offered a ride with a timekeeper who was pedaling a rail-mounted four-wheel cycle up the spur line to a logging camp near Speelyei.