Wild Life (17 page)

the misty moors. Men cannot know

whither such hell-wights bend their ways!

B
EOWULF

 

Of course, I have become accustomed to thoroughly governing my own affairs and the affairs of my children, and I suppose I should have some trouble ever turning them over to a man again. And a woman who is believed to have been abandoned by a man is freed from certain concerns: public opinion, fixed by the unalterable fact of the desertion, becomes charmingly irrelevant. I am in those respects well content with my condition. But I never have conquered loneliness. I find as I grow older that its dominion becomes narrower, but there has always been a moment as I am climbing the stairs to bed when I begin to be mindful of my situation and to suffer from it; and in recent months, of course, I have felt this much more keenly than in the past. The lascivious will doubtless think of “the beast with two backs,” but I believe what I miss foremost is something less particular, and less definable.

There is a relief in getting your hair unbound at the end of the day, and when I have escaped the confines of my clothes and put on a loose nightgown, I like to take the pins from my hair and let it out onto my shoulders, put my hands into the thick tangle and pull my fingers through along the scalp until the whole mass of it is loose. I have an ivory comb with wide teeth which will get through thick snarls rather better than a hairbrush, and I sit at my dressing table and comb and comb with slow care until I've got all the day's knots out. Then I take at my head with the brush. I know some women will brush their hair one hundred times or five hundred, with a religious fervor, but I am too impatient to keep on with such a habit. I brush my hair vigorously from the roots until the brush crackles and my scalp burns, and that must be enough. Then I brush my teeth and wash my face, my hands, and my feet, before taking myself to bed. These are habits of years' standing, my accustomed practices carried out in the same order, always, at the end of every day. In recent years it has become also a sort of ritual habit to indulge in self-pity and dreariness
while carrying them out. In the daylight I seldom think of the husband I have lost. But I remember him nostalgically at the end of day—dressing for bed, brushing his teeth, carefully soaping his face and scraping away the day's beard with his razor.

And of course, I miss not only the indefinable comfort of ritual nighttime ablutions carried out in each another's presence but the weight of another on the mattress with me, the heat of that person against my spine, the simple solace of another body in my bed. And in these modern days when life is so material and so rushed and there is less and less time for real talks or real thought, I miss especially the murmured words that a husband and wife exchange in their bedroom at the end of the day.

I suppose if I marry again, it will be for this; and not, as I once thought, for the reason that Feminists should hold up their egalitarian marriages as models before the public. (It is spring; even the birds all have mates.)

C. B. D.

April 1906

 

A party is forming, which I've been invited to join, but they are slow in their preparations, so I sit and write while waiting to head off into the wilderness. Whether I'm to be gone for one night or several remains to be seen—there are apparently half a dozen named and nameless branches of Canyon Creek, arranged in a succession of narrow gorges and elevations, and Bill Boyce has been methodically sending his men up one and down another until they have combed them all.

I rose at 4:30 when I heard the faint clatter of the cook's helpers beginning their preparations for breakfast, went in, and cadged from them the first cup of coffee. The cook is a big fellow with a walrus mustache and small eyes resembling those of a pig, which he turned on me with disapproval, but his helpers, who are George's age or a little more, were solicitous and kind, imagining, I suppose, that I might
be their mother. I sat out of their way while drinking my coffee and gave the cook as good as ever I got.

If the camp had been working, the dinner gong would doubtless have been rung by 5:00 and the men breakfasted by 6:00 and walking out through the darkness to their jobs in the woods. But as it is, tired men wandered into the dining hall at intervals, which of course made more work for the cook and may have accounted for his ill nature. Bill Boyce came in shortly past 5:30, and seeing I was alone, he politely sat opposite me. “Have you ate?” he said, and though I had done so I ate again, which was only well mannered. I am not an easy talker before I've had my third cup of coffee, which Boyce before long surmised, so we ate in much of a silence save for the scrape of forks on plates and the quiet chewing of hind teeth. “It's been a while since I've been reminded of the little bit a lady eats,” he did say at one point, which I suppose was meant to compliment. I had earlier put away hash and ham, a mess of greens, hotcakes, and oatmeal, as well as bread and doughnuts, and upon this second plate had made a dainty arrangement of bacon and potatoes and stewed fruit. My mind briefly turned over the question of how a Feminist ought to answer such a falsity. “I've never suffered the lack of an appetite,” I said in the end, which at least was true and might, under the circumstances, be considered neutral.

When we sat over our plates washing all down with our third and fourth cups of coffee, and my eyelids had risen somewhat, he said to me, “Now, what are your intentions, Mrs. Drummond?” and I replied in the straightest way possible: “I intend to learn whatever details are to be learned about the way Harriet disappeared, and the progress of the search, and to send that complete information by letter back to her mother and grandmother, who are waiting in Yacolt with only rumors and vagueness to comfort them. And I intend to go out looking for her myself.”

He bent his head to his coffee cup. It's rare to see a logger without a soup strainer, but he is clean shaven, his sideburns trimmed short and beginning to gray. A small scar in the shape of a crescent moon decorates his naked chin, the skin of which is leathery and thick in the way of men who work out of doors. When he raised his head from studying the bottom of his cup, he said, “Well, as to the first part, here is what I know: Homer Coffee brought his girl up to
this camp on Monday morning, which a father will do, you see, to give his child a little adventure, and to show her off a bit, or maybe show himself off. A log operation is a dangerous place, and I wouldn't bring a child of mine here if I had one, but though I discourage it as much as I can, I don't outright forbid them from it. Well, his donkey crew set her on a windfall a ways up the steep hill behind them, which is the safest place, I guess, though no place is truly safe, and the men say she was good as gold, not scared by the noise or the sled bucking when a log comes up jammed behind a stump or a rock, which it will do. And at lunch Coffee took her out to the edge of the cut woods, to where there is a little crick and a glade, and which is out of harm's way, and they ate their lunch together and he watched while she played in the crick, and then he brung her back to her lookout perch on the hill, where she sat all afternoon without a peep. Which was Monday, and the same on Tuesday. On Wednesday, after they'd had their picnic in the woods, she evidently whined and told her daddy she was tired of watching the same dread work over and over, which I don't doubt, so he left her there at the crick to go on playing, and he says he give instruction for her not to leave the glade. But at the end of the day, when he went out for her, she wasn't in the same place.

“He looked awhile, I don't know how long it was, and when he was walking back to get others to help him look, he evidently had a glimpse of something going off through the trees, which was considerable bigger than his girl, as he says, but even so, he followed after it; and when he finally give up and yelled to the others of his crew, the daylight was going in a hurry. They shortly come back here and we all lit lanterns and looked through the night without finding his girl nor the thing he'd seen, which could have been elk, or bear, or I don't know. What was found next day after the sun come up was one of her little shoes, which was about one hundred feet into the trees, and some long tracks going up the slope from the crick about a quarter of a mile farther along, which might only be men's boot prints run together and wore away by rain. We had had a Special Agent up that way the week before, surveying the trees, and they could have been his prints, you see, where he slid a bit, and then much rained-upon. There was no blood and no sign from a bear or a coyote or any of that kind in the grass where Coffee left her, and her own prints was hard to make out from all the tramping through there looking for her.

“Since then we've had more than fifty men out looking, most of which will swear they're looking for a giant orangutan that ripped her out of her daddy's arms. I don't know your opinion of Homer Coffee, Mrs. Drummond, and this isn't meant to speak ill of him, but he has become as sure as any fool, by now, and is swearing it was a giant wildman or ape that he saw, though he didn't get much of a look that I ever heard about, and at the time it happened couldn't say
what
it was. What we have found so far, for all our hunting, is just a lot of tracks too muddy to make sense of, and stories too excitable to credit, and men with too little sense to keep from shooting at each other in the woods. But we're still looking and will go on awhile yet, until I'm told by the Company that we ought to get back to work. And that's what I know of the circumstances, pretty nearly all of it.”

He lifted his arms from the table so as to permit the cook's boy to take away his plate and wipe the oilcloth clean. Then he said, resting his arms again, “As for the second thing, I wouldn't recommend you to strike off on your own, so I wonder if you mean to attach yourself to a search party that's heading out, or perhaps join up with Homer Coffee in the lava beds?”

Since this was direct and not patronizing, I said, “I frankly don't know. It was just my idea that I'd make myself useful.” This was the truth, though not all of it. Here is another part: I had imagined I might find Harriet myself, in some little corner overlooked by others.

Bill Boyce took me to see the place Harriet had gone lost from—the little “crick and glade.” We walked out to it through a damp, cold grayness, a morning as featureless as an unlicked lamb. The fog lying along the ground hid a good deal of the logging mess, the tops and trimmings, old cables and broken tools, but the waste hemlocks that had been left behind on the cutover fields rose up singly from the smoking ground and brought to my mind skinny gray pilings standing in a slough. At the edge of the uncut woods we jumped a piddling little stream, and Boyce led me a short tramp under the eave of the forest to the channel of a wider creek, or perhaps it was the main thoroughfare of the piddle. Here had been a burn fifty or sixty years earlier, for there were slender trees and brush growing beneath a dead superstructure of enormous whitened trunks. I confess those great skinned limbs pale as bone gave me a qualm, which I attribute to lack of sleep and to melancholy.

The clearing where Harriet and Homer had eaten their lunch must receive the sun when the sun consents to shine, and the industrious browsing of elk and deer had worn the shrubbery down to nubbins and left a jade-green field of vanilla-leaf and miner's lettuce, now much trampled upon and disturbed; of course, there was nothing of Harriet's to indicate she ever was there. We followed the margin of the creek into the primeval forest until the trees standing about us were giants thick as the Washington Monument and surely standing well grown when Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Such trees as these were common around Skamokawa in my childhood but long since gone to lumber, and I suppose I began to suffer a bit from a feeling of puniness and anxiety, which must be the human response to such supernatural forests. We have become too domesticated—imagining a forest should resemble a park, with a few judiciously spaced trees whose dead branches have been pruned away, flowers in weeded beds, grass neatly mown. Here, the shrubbery was meager from want of sunlight but great carcasses of windthrown timber lay about in unequal progress toward decay, with infant trees shooting up Indian file along the nurse-logs; and in damp, dark hollows yellow flower spikes of skunk cabbage were all abloom, which gaudy brilliance in the gray light served, contrariwise, to darken my mood more than raise it. There is something about those great fleshy leaves and spathes that always has struck me as repellent, loathsome; and in my low state I imagined them a teratogenic flower garden tended by monsters. Everything was wild. Of course, that is the meaning of forests, that they are wild.

Mr. Boyce pointed out the muddy bank where he said the big rain-slurried prints had been found, but there were no identifiable marks by this time, and the phantom-orchids growing along the edge of the mud were already beginning to make their recovery from a trampling by boots or the feet of giants. We stood and looked a moment and then faced about and made like cowards for the open ground. On the cutover field, the fog having ebbed off, it was possible to see the shape of the bare ground, knobby as an Irish wold, though entirely brown and much torn up, studded with stumps, cut through by the muddy creek; and this view, even though rough and unsightly, I found a great comfort after the dark and supernatural woods.

Where the creek narrowed between high banks, I made out the distant prospect of a splash dam, which is a structure familiar to me
from operations on the lower Columbia, where they sit on every little coastal stream, and must have been employed here due to remoteness and lack of a railroad spur line. The usual thing is to yard up your logs behind the dam until the pond is full, and then pull away the spill gate and let the freshet wash the whole show downstream, so I said to Boyce, “I suppose logs splashed down this creek must eventually arrive at Camp 7.” My knowledge of splash dams had sparked in me the usual glimmer of self-importance, which I will always advertise.