Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (20 page)

“He says that my mother was a white woman named Rachel,” Sarah told Malila. After she had left the lake, she had gone to seek out Malila’s advice. They sat by the fire, sipping yerba buena tea. “He says that I have an aunt who misses me.” She shook her head. “How can she miss me when I do not even know her?”

Malila watched Sarah quietly. The adolescent Indian girl that Sarah had rescued four years before had grown into a young woman, a healer in her own right. Though Malila had spent many hours with Sarah, the Indian still wondered what the girl was. A spirit of some sort? A human made of flesh and blood? Or a human touched with a powerful spirit that made her more than flesh and blood? Malila thought that the last answer might be right. She was a human girl, possessed by a powerful wild spirit.

“He came with another man.” Sarah shivered. “A very bad man.”

Malila nodded, accepting Sarah’s assertion that the man was bad. “So you ran away.”

“I had to,” Sarah said. “He is too strong.”

“But before that,” Malila said softly. “You did not go with the white man called Max. Did you want to go?”

Sarah shrugged, a gesture she had picked up from Max. “I do not know. Part of me wanted to go.”

“Why?”

Sarah looked uncomfortable, confused. “To find out…” She stopped, unable to say what she had wanted to find out.

“To find out who you are,” Malila said, filling in the silence. “To find out where you belong.”

“I belong with the pack,” Sarah said.

“Sometimes,” Malila said. “Sometimes you belong here with me. And sometimes, maybe you belong with these white people.” Malila studied the girl, her riot of red-gold hair, her skin, pale beneath the tan.

Over the years, Malila had speculated about Sarah’s relationship with the whites. Perhaps, Malila had thought, Sarah was the white people’s wild spirit. When she ran away, the white people lost their connection to the wilderness. By losing her, they lost their balance, and that was why they tore up the land and poisoned the rivers and drove off the game. Perhaps if Sarah visited the whites, they would see how they fit in the world.

“I think you need to meet these white people to learn who you are,” Malila said. “They are a part of you.”

Sarah sipped her tea, gazing into the fire. Since she had rejoined the pack, she had been restless and uncertain. She was glad that she had not gone with Max, but she kept thinking about him. Her dreams were haunted by sights and sounds and smells of the past. She dreamed of her mama’s face and her papa’s hands, lifting her above his head. She dreamed of baking bread and frying bacon; of harmonica music and a woman singing lullabies. And when she woke, she was with the wolves.

Sarah shrugged again, sipping her tea and wondering what to do.

“I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it’s never happened yet.”

—Mark Twain

I
N THE AUTUMN OF
1859, Wauna was fourteen years old, a healthy age for a wolf in the wild. She had been four years old, a mature wolf, when she met Rolon and formed the pack. She had reigned as alpha female for ten years, and during most of that time she had not faced a serious challenge from the lower-ranking females. There were, as in any pack, always younger wolves testing her leadership. But Wauna dealt with insubordination quickly and firmly. Consequently, insubordination was rare. The other wolves respected her. Under her guidance, the pack was stable, free of the turbulence and change found in packs where the alpha pair was constantly battling to retain dominance.

Sarah remembered her human mama as a dreamlike figure: a soft voice, a gentle touch. But the memory of her human mama wiping her face clean with a warm cloth had been overlaid by the memory of Wauna’s tongue washing her. Wauna was her mother.

On a chilly night with the promise of snow in the air, Sarah fell asleep curled up between Yepa and Wauna, warm and content. Wauna had borne many pups since adopting Sarah. Those pups had grown to adulthood, becoming mature wolves. Some, like Yepa, had remained with the pack. Some had left the pack, striking out on their own. But Sarah, her little foundling, had never entirely grown up. In many ways, Sarah was still her pup. When Sarah was with the pack, she slept by her foster mother’s side.

That night, Sarah woke in the darkness, feeling cold. She blinked sleepily, wondering what had woken her.

It was a cold, clear, moonless night. Overhead, the stars shone in the blackness of the night sky: brilliant, beautiful, and indifferent to the doings of the creatures who gazed up at them from the earth below. The Milky Way was a sweep of white across the center of the sky. Malila’s people said that the Milky Way was a path through the sky, a trail to another world. When people died, they followed the path.

Gazing sleepily upward, Sarah snuggled closer to Wauna, seeking to share the mother wolf’s warmth. Her foster mother did not move—did not shift in response to Sarah’s movement, did not sigh in her sleep. The night seemed unnaturally still. Sarah could hear Yepa’s soft breathing beside her, but she could not hear Wauna.

Sarah knew much of violent death—the death of deer at the fangs of the wolves, the death of wolves in battle. But this was something else: Wauna was asleep and would not wake. Sarah sat up and stroked Wauna’s head. The mother wolf did not respond. Sarah whispered to Wauna, but the wolf’s soft ears did not swivel to hear her.

Yepa woke when Sarah moved. The wolf watched as Sarah tried to rouse Wauna. Yepa sniffed Wauna’s muzzle, washed the mother wolf’s muzzle and face. When Wauna did not respond, Yepa washed Sarah’s face, tasting salty tears as the child wept for her foster mother.

Yepa became the alpha female. She had learned much from Wauna. Like Wauna, Yepa was calm and wise in her treatment of the younger females.

The wolves accepted Wauna’s death quickly. They remembered the past, but they lived in the present, accepting each moment as it came. Sarah was blessed and cursed with the human propensity to remember the past and plan for the future. She mourned for Wauna, aching for the comfort the wolf had given her, grieving as she had for her human parents.

After Wauna’s death, Sarah spent more time away from the pack, exploring the mountains with Beka at her side. She was restless, irritable. She was not a wolf—she knew that. But as long as Wauna was alive, she had felt as if she belonged with the pack, at her mother’s side. Now she felt that she did not belong.

She was not a wolf. She spoke with the Indians, but she was not an Indian. She watched the whites—the miners and the emigrants who passed through the pack’s territory—but she was not one of them, either. She had belonged with Wauna. She did not belong anywhere else. She thought about this as she and Beka roamed the mountains together.

Winter came early that year. Snow fell on the high peaks and in the lower elevations, catching weary emigrants who were late in crossing the Sierras. So it was that two sisters and their children huddled around a small fire. They had set out from Missouri in the spring with brave intentions, in a train of three wagons, with their husbands, their younger brother, and their three children.

On the Great Plains, Ellie’s husband had died of a fever. When they were crossing the Rockies, their younger brother had died in an accident. A chain had snapped when they were hauling the wagon up a steep grade. The wagon had rolled back, crushing his legs. Despite Ellie’s nursing, he had died of the wounds.

On the grueling trail down the brackish trickle known as Mary’s River, Indians had attacked and stolen three oxen. Betsy’s husband had intercepted an Indian arrow and had died of his wound a few painful days later. That left Betsy and Ellie and their three children.

The group had set forth from Missouri with great hope and too much baggage. They had left most of the baggage behind on the plains and in the desert, lightening the load by abandoning dishes and books and pots and pans and feather beds. Surprisingly, with their menfolk dead, the two women did not abandon hope.

Betsy and Ellie had been raised on the frontier—sturdy, stouthearted women, disinclined to give up in the face of disaster. The two women, with their children, had abandoned all but one of their wagons. With Betsy leading the oxen and Ellie whipping them from behind, they brought that wagon across the Carson Desert and up the Truckee River canyon. At the lake where the Donner party had camped in the winter of 1846, two of the oxen had refused to go on. There, the women had abandoned their last wagon. Refusing to stay in that place of bad luck and past pain, they had packed their meager possessions on the back of the remaining two oxen.

They were at the top of Donner Pass when it started to snow. Lightly at first, dusting the tops of the trees, then harder. As they made their way down the pass, the snow covered the trail. They had walked that all day, struggling through the snow, climbing over one ridge, and then another.

Betsy, the older sister, led the way. By the time they made camp, she was no longer sure of the trail. Everywhere she looked, there were mountains and trees and snow. One ridge looked much like another. Her feet ached from the cold. Her eyes burned from staring into the snow, searching for any sign that others had passed this way.

Ellie built a fire and mixed flour to make a batch of biscuits. They had left their cooking pans behind at Donner Lake. So Ellie had wrapped bits of dough on green sticks, carved from a tree with her husband’s buck knife, which she wore in a sheath at her side. Now, over the flames of a fire, she toasted the dough, cooking biscuits to feed the three children.

“What will we do tomorrow?” Ellie asked Betsy, as the biscuits toasted on the fire. “This is the last of the flour.”

“I don’t know,” Betsy murmured.

“I wish we hadn’t left the Bible behind in the desert,” Ellie said. She had been fretting about the Bible ever since they abandoned it.

“I’d read the passage about manna in the wilderness.” She looked skyward, clasping her hands under her chin. “If only the good Lord would send one of his angels to save us. It wouldn’t have to be much of an angel, just someone to show us the way.”

Ellie had been talking about the good Lord and his angels for weeks. Betsy was happy to pray for the good Lord’s intervention, but she was getting tired of listening to Ellie talk about it.

She poked at the fire with a stick. “We need more wood,” she murmured, and started to get up.

“I’ll fetch some,” Tommy said. At age eight, he was the oldest of the children, a little man who tried to take care of his mother. “You stay here.” Tommy stood up and trudged off to search for wood. Shivering in the cold wind, he headed for a stand of pines.

Sarah watched the boy approach the trees. Attracted by the smell of cooking biscuits, she had been watching the small group by the fire. The boy who trudged toward the pines was younger and smaller than she was.

“You need to be with your own kind,” Max had told her. Was this her own kind?

She watched him search beneath the trees, picking up fallen branches and bits of wood. He looked thin and hungry. He was no threat to her, that was clear.

“Rallo,” she said.

The boy stopped where he was, staring at her. His eyes were wide and frightened. “Rallo,” he said. He didn’t move, just stared at her. She stared back, studying the boy. “Are you an angel?” he asked.

She frowned at him. “What is an angel?” she asked. Max had not taught her that word.

“One of God’s helpers,” the boy said. “An angel come to rescue us. We’re so hungry and so cold and my little sister, she’s crying’ cause she’s so hungry and so cold and my mama doesn’t know the way.” He was almost crying himself, blinking fast and shivering a little in the cold. “It snowed, and we lost the trail.”

Sarah studied him. She had wondered why these people had strayed from the track followed by most of the emigrants.

“Please.” The boy reached out and took her hand, holding it tightly in his cold fingers. “Please come help us. Tell my mama the way. Please.”

She could have broken free easily enough. The boy clutched his firewood in one arm, tugged on her hand with the other. But she followed him, curious about these people by the fire.

“Mama,” Tommy called. “Mama, I found an angel.”

One of the women at the fire stood up, staring at her. “An angel?” she said. “Or another lost soul?” The woman held out her hand. “You poor girl. Come and get warm.”

It was the tone of the woman’s voice that won Sarah. Until Betsy spoke, Sarah could have still turned her back and returned to the mountains. These people were not part of her pack; they were none of her concern. But the woman’s voice was warm and caring. She reached out and took Sarah’s hand, pulling her into the circle of warmth around the dying fire. She put her arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “Where did you come from?” the woman said.

Sarah stood for a moment in the protective circle of Betsy’s arm, blinking at Ellie and the two little girls who sat beside her. “You are hungry?” she asked the little girls. They both nodded. She looked at Betsy, and said, “You stay here.”

She returned to the forest, leaving the women by the fire. She had killed a marmot earlier that da y, a fat animal that had put off hibernation for one day too long. The animal was too big for one meal, so she had cached half the meat in a snowbank for later retrieval.

She brought it to the hungry women, who roasted it on the fire. They ate meat while Sarah ate burned bits of their biscuits, hungry as always for bread.

“What kind of animal is it?” Ellie asked, and Betsy shrugged. “Some kind of rabbit, I reckon. Don’t ask too many questions.” When Ellie and the girls went to sleep, wrapped in blankets by the fire, Betsy and Sarah and Tommy sat up. “Where did you come from?” Betsy asked.

“I live here,” Sarah said.

“But where are your folks?” Betsy asked.

“Where’s your mama?” Tommy asked.

Sarah thought of Wauna and stared at the fire, not answering.

“I think her mama is in heaven,” Betsy said to Tommy. She put her arm around Sarah and hugged her close. Maybe this mysterious child was an angel, as Ellie maintained, but it seemed to Betsy that this was an angel in need of a little mothering. “You need to be fattened up,” she told Sarah. “If I had you at my kitchen back home, I’d feed you apple pie until you got a little meat on those bones.”