Joko (19 page)

Seeing Johnny was in pain, Jocko jumped up and disappeared down the cliff. Johnny didn’t open his eyes. He leaned his back against the cool limestone and let his head hang above his folded arms. Even when he got his breath the throbbing in his skull didn’t stop.

He awoke to Jocko pushing a wet piece of bark in his mouth. Jocko stood before him with a swamp willow branch.

He was chewing pieces of bark and giving them to Johnny.

“Yuk!” protested Johnny, as he turned his mouth away from the offering. Jocko insisted, pushing the wad of wet stuff between his lips again. Remembering the sassafras, Johnny finally relented and took the bark into his mouth. It was sour as a lemon but tasted like wood.

“I don’t know if you’re tryin’ to poison me or what,” he said.

He chewed thoughtfully for a minute and closed his eyes. In a few minutes the pain in his legs began to subside and he slumped over, asleep.

When Johnny awoke, as far as his eyes could see was a landscape of unbroken forest and mountains. He blinked and scanned the horizon. He looked for the smoke from campfires, but there was none, only the mountains to the west looming in the brilliant afternoon light.

This was the deep forest. No farms or villages. People seldom came here, except in small parties to hunt, fish, or to trap game.

The Indians of the region preferred to travel the potlatch paths; the streams, rivers, and shorelines they used for trade.

They had no need to venture inland. The waterways provided everything the Native Americans needed.

Johnny knew from his reading the Indians here had formed a vast, complex and sophisticated society that stretched almost everywhere there was a habitable shoreline, but here in the deep forest he knew there was little chance he would encounter them.

While crossing the lowlands, Johnny had smelled a campfire, but here they were definitely alone. He could see that Jocko knew that too, because he had grown bolder and seemed more at ease.

Johnny stretched and looked around. Jocko wasn’t nearby, but the bearskin was draped over his legs, keeping them warm in the cool mountain air. Jocko had left him a small pile of huckleberries and wild strawberries, and a few starchy roots. These he ate first. They were fairly sour but tasted sweeter the more he chewed them.

It was getting dark, but the cave didn’t reach very far into the rock wall and he could see the interior quite well. Outside, the forest was quiet. As he listened, Johnny could hear a stream. Somewhere to the east a loon’s call trumpeted and echoed through the forest. Then a hawk or an eagle called a shrill response. Nature was taking care of business, and Johnny felt, in a way, that he was part of it.

He and Jocko had survived their first day of travel. He’d walked out of that green Hell and was alive to tell the tale. But had to admit that he spent more time on his hands and knees than on his feet, and without Jocko’s help and remedies Johnny knew he might not have made it at all.

“Today I fell down more times than in my whole life,” he said aloud. He groaned and pulled the bearskin up to his chest. It smelled terrible, but it was warm.

Johnny began wondering where Jocko had gone. He crawled to the edge of the bluff and looked around, but all that moved were the windblown branches of the giant trees.

“Tomorrow … got to clean up,” he muttered as he moved back into the cave. He shivered and wrapped the bearskin around himself and soon drifted back into sleep.

The next day Johnny awoke to the shriek of a hawk. His eyes opened in time to see it dip into the forest and reappear with something wiggling in its talons. Johnny grimaced as he tried to sit up. He’d spent nights in the woods before. He knew that the only cure for what ailed him was to get moving.

Looking around, he found Jocko sitting near him staring into the forest. His eyes seemed fixed on some detail in the distance. Noticing Johnny’s movement, he pointed to a small pile of edibles he had gathered.

“What is it this morning, Ma?” asked Johnny with a yawn.

“Oh boy! Wooden carrots, some lumpy root.” He picked up the dirty white root, wiped it clean on his pants, and took a nibble.

“I know these. Jerusalem artichokes, not bad at all. Better if boiled, I reckon, but thank you, my furry friend.”

Jocko was eating the tender tips of some fern heads –

“fiddleheads,” Johnny’s aunt had called them. He had never seen anyone eat a fern. He tried one, then frowned in disapproval. “Maybe when I’m real hungry.”

After they’d eaten, Johnny threw the bearskin, fur side down, over a large flat rock in the sun near the mouth of the cave and started scraping it with his pocketknife. For the next hour he worked at the skin, removing anything he suspected of causing the stink. Then he threw it down to the forest floor and made his way stiffly down the rock wall.

Reaching the bottom, he picked up the fur and dragged it to a small brook a short distance into the woods while Jocko, perched at the entrance to the cave, watched with great interest.

Within a few minutes Johnny and his hide attracted a substantial cloud of flies. Soon, despite the cold water, Johnny had doffed his coat, pants, shirt, and long underwear and was sitting naked, rinsing out his clothes, swatting flies and whistling a tune. He dunked and thrashed, covered himself with dirt, then rinsed it off, remembering being told a long time ago this was a way to remove grease and dirt without soap.

The clouds above seemed to be gathering for a typical Olympic deluge. As the sun went behind a cloud, Johnny shivered. “Dammit! I’ll freeze to death.”

He scrambled out of the stream and started hanging his clothes on bushes after wringing as much water from them as possible. Then he attended to the heavy bearskin. He stretched it out next to his long johns on a flat rock that was still warm from the sun.

After doing all he could to speed the drying of his clothes, Johnny found a patch of warm sand that was out of the wind and sat down, wrapping his wet arms around his knees.

Jocko couldn’t imagine what all Johnny’s splashing was about. But after a while he remembered his bath on Gert’s porch, and got the idea.

As long as Johnny was in view, Jocko was content to watch from his lofty perch, but when Johnny disappeared, he surveyed the forest for signs of danger, sniffed the wind, then climbed down to join the boy.

He found Johnny naked, stretched out on the warm sand and smiling. Johnny’s hand swept back and forth over its warm surface. “This feels good. Try it.”

Jocko felt the warmth of the place.

“Good,” said Jocko.

The human looked at him and smiled. “You’re starting to get it, aren’t you, ol’ boy?” he said, showing his teeth.

Jocko had no idea what Johnny was telling him, but Johnny’s display of teeth meant he was not in danger. Jocko displayed his own teeth as a reply to Johnny. “Goooood,” he repeated.

It rained nearly every day, but the weather had remained warm in the sub-alpine forests, and after a two weeks in the wild Johnny barely gave the weather any notice. Each day, as they moved slowly along the ridges, the great trees; cedar, spruce and fir, afforded them plenty of shelter. Each night Jocko seemed easily able to find a place to sleep that was secure and dry.

The bearskin was growing more difficult to handle. Johnny had been diligently scraping the skin and working it with his hands to keep it pliant, but the constant exposure to heat and cold, wetness and drying, made the skin start to wear in places. Johnny had trimmed away loose pieces and smoothed its tattered perimeter, so that what now remained of it folded like a rug, rather than rolling up like a blanket.

Sometimes Jocko would augment their bed with ferns and soft pine branches, and Johnny had taken to spreading his skin out and sleeping on top of it, but morning would invariably find him under the skin, furry side down.

Jocko was less of a creature of habit than Johnny. He would take short naps, and wandered or foraged while Johnny was sleeping at night. How he managed to find food, particularly roots, in the dead of night, was a mystery to Johnny, but he was always greeted when he awoke by an interesting assortment of fruits, berries, tubers, and various vegetables.

As time wore on and they penetrated deeper into the wilderness, Johnny’s confidence grew and they were able to cover more ground each day. By the third week they had gone almost a hundred miles into the Olympic Peninsula.

Johnny was getting stronger. He was able to move through the woods with appreciable speed and with little help from Jocko. Johnny had watched the way the sasquatch moved through the forest. He’d noticed that Jocko used his feet and toes to grasp branches and fallen logs when he crossed them. Sometimes Jocko’s way of walking reminded Johnny of someone climbing, only horizontally. In this way Jocko avoided getting his feet stuck in mud holes.

Sometimes, when the brush was thick or marshy, Johnny would find it impassable and have to go around, while Jocko, despite his weight, would move right through it without slowing a bit. He would invariably be waiting for Johnny on the far side of the obstacle, eating something he’d picked up along the way.

Now that Johnny was more able to negotiate his way through the woods, Jocko had taken to moving some distance ahead of him, scouting the land ahead. If there was an obstacle coming up he would whistle to Johnny, and Johnny learned to always move toward that sound.

Jocko thought Johnny knew the sound of his bird-like whistle, but occasionally Johnny would strike out in the wrong direction, pursuing a bird. He wondered why, after so much time and practice, the human couldn’t tell the difference between his whistle and the bird it imitated.

Jocko also wondered why Johnny had so much difficulty crossing areas of brush and marsh, but after observing the human he concluded that Johnny’s wearing shoes

necessitated a way of walking that was more hindrance than help. His own bare feet were thickly calloused to withstand sharp sticks and even nettles and thorns. They easily conformed to the ground, and his toes, unlike Johnny’s, were free to be used like fingers for climbing when necessary.

But it was the crossing of streams that demonstrated the major differences between sasquatch and human abilities.

Any timber spanning a stream was a natural bridge for Jocko.

His powerful arms and legs could use both bough and branch, while Johnny required a pathway along the trunk of the tree, free of thick branches, to be able to use it as a bridge. Often Jocko would make his way across a stream with ease, only to have to go back because of Johnny’s cries for help.

Once the human fell from a giant cedar and landed in the churning water, milky with glacial melt from the distant white-capped peaks, but Jocko’s speed and agility allowed him to quickly snatch the boy from the torrent.

While Johnny took the incident in stride, Jocko disliked waiting near an Indian trail while the human dried himself out, and resolved to choose only the trees the human could cross with ease when next they had to ford a stream.

On the morning of their twenty-second day in the wilderness, Johnny awoke to Jocko nudging him insistently. He seemed upset. They had made camp on a bluff overlooking a broad valley full of thick forest. Their camp, if you could call it that, was located under an overhang of rock that formed a depression in an otherwise sheer cliff of grey sandy stone.

As Johnny sat up, the bearskin made a crunching sound, folded in half, and rose up like a stiff sail blocking his view. He pushed it aside with annoyance and looked to where Jocko was pointing.

A plume of smoke curled up behind the distant tree line, perhaps a mile away.

“Hunters?” said Johnny. “Maybe Indians?” he added after a few moments of studying the smoke. “Is there a way to tell?”

Jocko sat mutely beside him, his eyes fixed on the smoke and his nose twitching as he sniffed the cool breeze. Johnny noticed that Jocko’s body pressed against the stone, and at a glance his dark form could easily have been mistaken for a shadow. He wondered how many times he’d gazed into the forest from the train and overlooked one of Jocko’s kin lurking there, hidden among the shadows of the giant trees, looking back at him.

For several minutes Johnny and Jocko did nothing but watch the smoke curl up and dissipate in the morning air.

Johnny finally leaned forward and touched Jocko’s knee.

“It could be anyone, but it looks to me like it comes from a cabin. From a chimney. I don’t know why I think that, but it does. Maybe we should have a look.”

Johnny’s touch helped the sasquatch understand. He shook his head. “Nooo Joonnee. Maaaan. Bad … mannn.”

Johnny looked at Jocko in surprise. “How would you know that? Whether the man is bad or not? Why not take a look?”

Jocko didn’t respond. Seeming now unable to understand Johnny’s words, he stared at the smoke with concern.

When he thought it through, Johnny realized that Jocko was right. Why take any chances? What could be gained from human contact? He patted the worried sasquatch on the back and said: “You’re right, Jocko, as usual. I guess it doesn’t pay to be too curious.”

His stomach growled at him, so he rolled over and picked up a root and began chewing on it. “Maybe I was just thinking of a nice big plate of ham and eggs. Some coffee.

Cornbread.”

Johnny frowned and sighed as he examined the grimy tuber. “I’m just makin’ myself miserable. Best to move on and thank God for what I got.”

He looked back at Jocko standing at the top of the path that led down the bluff. “If it wasn’t for your good sense, I’d be dead now. I guess this ain’t the time to start arguing with you.

Time to move on.”

Johnny dusted himself off, folded the bearskin and tied it with a crude rope he’d made from a vine. Then he wrapped his belt around it and fitted the bundle over his right shoulder like a lopsided backpack. He’d taken to carrying it so, to free his hands.

It had rained the night before and the ground was soft. As they crept down the face of the steep bluff Johnny followed closely behind Jocko, carefully watching each step the sasquatch took.