Wild Life (21 page)

And now what to do? What to say? And so I do and say nothing, only meet each man's look with a look of my own, stony cold, the sort of dare that is full of false confidence, and otherwise keep to myself, behave as if nothing has occurred except that I am suddenly friendless and reclusive in wild, impossible circumstances, feeling myself to be completely surrounded by men.

That last is unfair, I think, to Gracie Spear. Aside from the clear fact that it was someone among the six men in my tent, not the five in that other party (no one could have crossed the rocky blackness in that rain and crossed back again between our two tents, crawling under the edge and so forth), the arm was certainly a man's—coarse haired, long muscled—and the breathing low and masculine.

The men, in any case, all behave as if I am suffering from an inexplicable female mood; they ignore me as men so often do when confronted by a woman's temper. But Gracie, though her demeanor is thoroughly manlike, is perhaps enough of a woman to have guessed out
something
of what occurred. She early fixed a curious look on me; and when I fled from Earl Norris and his damned camera and sat apart to eat my breakfast, she brought her bowl of mush and sat near me. When she stood to walk away, she bent low suddenly and blurted out, for my ears only, “I sleeps with a gun under my pillow.” So I imagine she knows, or guesses; and though we are not friends, I take some comfort from her presence. When she went into the trees to make her toilet, I hurried to follow her and squat nearby—I am so afraid to be alone now—and her look, as we crossed paths afterward, was knowing, and not unkind.

None of the others are free of my suspicion. My improved feelings toward Martin Pierce have evaporated, and I cannot bear the idea of being alone with him, nor with any of the others. There has been considerable discussion on the question of continuing or ending the search, as the rain is no softer and we are, to the last villainous man, wet through and cold. (I am desperately drawn to the idea of returning to Camp 8—oh! hot supper and warm feet!—where I should spend the night in Bill Boyce's office, sleeping not on rocks but upon a dry and comfortable cot, toasting my toes before a sheet-metal stove and with the door firmly locked against all others.) Yet there is a general unwillingness to call a halt. The likelihood of finding Harriet has diminished in every mind to a thing of naught, but no one will admit
to it and no one wishes to appear shameful—quitting the field over the issue of our discomfort. Lacking the courage to be cowardly, we have agreed to go on searching one more dreary day, though we will quit the lava field (at least this portion of it—from high vantage one can see another basalt outcrop off to the southeast) and will scour out the less-steep country which lies in a narrow crescent between this ridge and the conical little knob just to the east. I cannot imagine how I shall get through this long day—and another black night!

 

Was interrupted, and this is written quickly, just as we are making ready to head off into the brush. I found a moment to speak alone to Hank Willard—
horrible occurence—woman's modesty forbids—would he keep a watchful eye?
—not knowing if I had made myself understood at all. He began to blush furiously and look at his boots with a painful frown—this may have been anger as much as embarrassment. He murmured a few words as inarticulate as mine but then pressed on me a deer-foot-handled hunting knife, which I am now wearing in a sheath at my belt. I have a knife in my kit, of course, a sportsman's folding lock-blade knife, but Willard's big, masculine blade—the hair is still on the deer foot—confers an odd sort of boldness. Whatever else may come from my confession to Willard, I feel my courage somewhat restored.

 

At midnight Bauman was awakened by some noise, and sat up in his blankets. As he did so his nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-beast odor, and he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the night.

T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT
,
Wilderness Hunter
(1892)

What is it, I wonder, that has haunted this whole enterprise?

I had expected to spend this night lying awake in my blankets, clutching a knife to my breast—on guard against another assault—but here I lie alone in the woods with only my coat for a covering and I am on guard against other sorts of monsters—there have been screeches nearby, which must be owls, I suppose, or lions. I've built up a fire and backed it with a rotten log, and the sticks are burning well. With Willard's big knife I've cut hemlock boughs for a bed in front of the long line of fire, and recline here now writing and munching upon dried apricots. My clothes have mostly dried upon me, and I suppose I'll spend the night not uncomfortably so long as the rain holds off, and be reunited with my party in the morning. But I am low in mood, weary from worrying and from overexertion. I believe I have heard guns signaling into the darkness, but impossible to tell from which direction.

This morning we took our search away from the lava tableland, bearing off steeply downhill through the brush and trees in slipping wet boots, in a pouring rain, until we had come down upon thickly wooded, flatter ground—not a great expanse of it, but several outspread fingers and tongues hedged in by the numberless ridges. Willard's idea was that a child wandering lost would stick to the low valleys, the flattish ground, and would not be found upon the steep slopes, which idea wore a certain logic; or we had been made receptive to it by virtue of our own exhaustion. Our tents were brought downhill and pitched along the footings of the lava ridge (lying more or less at the palm while we searched up the several fingers of the glove), and the sorry horses were freed of their enormous swaying burdens and left to munch the scant grass at camp while we two-footed fools set off with our rucksacks and ditties, holding such lunch as we had need of, and little else (which of course I now have reason to regret).

Being by this time old hands at the search, we scattered ourselves wordlessly through the trees. I kept as near to Gracie Spear as could be privately accomplished and beat about the brush without any hope of finding Harriet alive or dead. I confess I had in mind only getting through the day without breaking any bones, and speedily tomorrow returning to dry clothes and stove heat and my own house, my own dear children.

The rain went on until we were thoroughly wringing wet and our boots sloppy; until every depression in the ground, every bunker in the rocks, every hollow among tree roots was inches deep with muddy water and floating detritus. Then the sky lightened to Quaker gray, and steam began to rise from the ground—a startling illusion of vulcanism—and it was the end of rain for the time being. (Why do you suppose one feels the clamminess of clothes more miserably when the rain has stopped than while it is still falling?)

Then occurred an extraordinary adventure.

There is a certain science to the spying out of larger holes and caves in a lava field, certain signs and markers I had become alert to while in the field yesterday, and though we had left the lava behind us, such awareness had not deserted me; in the late morning, after the rain had quit, I was drawn to examine a particular hemlock growing oddly askew, which investigation found the tree tilted over a cavernous sinkhole. I am still agile, or as much as can be expected at middle age, and did not hesitate to shinny along the tree trunk to a point that allowed a short drop to a sloping rock ledge, which then allowed of a careful descent, tossing pebbles ahead as I groped into darkness by the insignificant flare of matches. Quickly it was clear: this was a reverberating, pitch-black passage of huge proportions.

My first thought was that we should be prevented from a thorough search of the cave, my Ever Ready batteries being exhausted and the materials for a pitchy torch not easily to hand in this country of sodden wood. But I nevertheless went after the next-nearest person, which of course was Gracie, and when I had explained the point—cave too large, lacking sufficient light—she made a little happy chirrup and said, “I got just the thing.” With a self-satisfied flourish she brought from her lunch sack a kerosene oil lamp no more than five or six inches tall, which I recognized, with a glad thrill of commonality, as a bicycle headlamp. (It was a false trail. “Oh, I ain't never rode one of those things,” she told me, her mannish face rosy and artless; she had only admired and coveted the lamp's miniature stature.)

So after all, we investigated. I went ahead of her, snaking out on the tree again and jumping down to the slanted ledge, after which she reached the lamp down to me and followed my example. I should guess her to be twenty-five, and of course very strong, but built too thick and low to the ground for nimbleness: she sat astride the tree trunk and leant forward to embrace it, then dragged herself along it by inches, which got her to the necessary place for jumping down. I held the lamp before us as we began a slow progress down the slippery stone chute.

This entrance proved to be a small lava sink littered with rock rubble, which after one hundred feet or so let into the sidewall of a very long, high-ceilinged throughway grooved with flow marks and a whole succession of shallow ledges. At other places in the lava field there had, of course, been open gullies and intermittent stone bridge-work, which must be the skylighted leavings and minor versions of such caves; but this one was a considerable size—entirely intact. I am no spelunker but have read enough to know: they are formed by rivers of lava which, cooling, forms a thick top crust and simultaneously eats away the ground beneath its molten stream, so that when the eruption is finished and the lava drains away, what is left is a through tunnel. The small light cast by the bicycle lantern made a circle of dim illumination that allowed us to see the tube stretching away in both directions for an indeterminate length, and the ceiling twice higher than hand's reach. I have read of tunnels thousands of feet long: Ole Peterson's Mount St. Helens Lava Cave, which cannot be more than a dozen miles from here, is a modestly famous international destination for tourists and speleologists.

Inarguably, no human child would choose to shelter herself in such a place—the vast, echoing chamber seemed, even to me, a gateway to the underworld. But the cave air was somewhat warmer than the chilly daylight, and dry despite the hard rain overnight and this morning; I could imagine a wild creature—bear or wolf, if not orangutan—happily choosing such a cave for winter quarters.

Gracie Spear, while saying nothing of apes nor the unlikelihood of a child hiding so deep underground, seemed loath to advance any farther within. For my part, I have seen more evidence of the savagery of men than of savage ape-men, which on the one hand frees me from
fear of cave monsters. On the other hand, if no phantasmal beast had dragged Harriet to its den inside, what could be the point of looking for her there? I cannot, even now, divine the answer, but something of a wordless compulsion came over me. I said to Gracie, “We shouldn't let this cave go unexplored,” and gave her a firm look.

I have always felt occultism to be the realm of fools and natural idiots; perhaps it wasn't any glimmer of intuition or clairvoyance that impelled me into the depths of the cave, perhaps it was my scientific bent and natural curiosity. (Lava tubes are nothing like the limestone caves in France, of course, but they have their own interest; and a large, dry stone room holds none of the terrors of the lava rimrock, its small tunnels and chasms doubtless home to crawling creatures of slime and tentacles.) What I should report is only that something—
something
—drew me in. And in the event, though we didn't find Harriet hiding in the black cave, and no giant orangutans leaped upon us from the darkness, we were certainly led to a discovery.

The left-hand of the tunnel was blocked after some two hundred feet by the rocks and rubble of its broken-down walls and ceiling. The right-hand, though, went on for as much as a thousand feet, with a sandy floor of volcanic ash and pumice, and dark walls glazed and shiny as glass from the excessive heat of the lava. The walls narrowed gradually, and the ceiling lowered until we were made to crouch, but then opened suddenly to a roundish vaulted room like the cupola of a house—it was the furthermost reach of the tunnel, sealed by the breakdown rubble of the ceiling—and when we rose erect inside this space and lifted the lamp, I was seized with wonder.

There were husks of empty nuts and fir cones on the floor, and a frightening smell which I took to be feral, but the furnishings of long-absent tenants, scattered in disarray, were specifically human artifacts: chipped and flaked bits of stoneware; fragments of carven or heat-shaped wood; a broken strand of twisted leather strung with shells or bone; the unknit remains of what had once been woven strips of cedar bark; moldering feathers fallen into pieces, which one could imagine had been joined into a sort of cape or blanket, though many were now incorporated into a wild animal's artfully arranged nest on a high ledge at the rear of the room.

Gracie, perhaps seeing only that we had reached a blind alley, snuffled through her broad nose and said, “Shee-it, what a stink.”

I rate highly any woman who will freely swear and say the word “stink,” but on this occasion I would rather have had a woman with an appreciation for ancient relics and mysterious rooms hidden in the deeps of forbidding caves. I held up for her a piece of flaked obsidian which she might reasonably have been expected to recognize as a spearhead, and in the other hand a bit of bone carved into something like a button. “Someone lived in this cave, Gracie—aboriginal peoples. These things are of great age, and valuable to Science.”