Wild Life (25 page)

I have imagined over and over again, like a melodrama, the moment when I shall limp into the log camp and the astonished men call to one another and come on the run, and someone's soft words—
shall ye be carried, miss?
—which offer I refuse with a weary smile and walk resolutely the last steps to the mess hall, where the cook with a nod and look of approval delivers over a hot platter followed by a blackberry pie, and afterward a troop of men escorts me to the boss's cabin, where Bill Boyce—he has lost heart, given me up for dead—beholds, awestruck, the brave woman before him, and stands guard without while I bathe in his own deep tin tub; and afterward he tenderly applies ointment to my injuries and gives up his own feather bed for my sleep.

Lost. Giddy hopes dashed. Cold, poorly, fretful.

 

In the midway of this our mortal life

I found myself in a gloomy wood, astray

Gone from the path direct: and even to tell

It were no easy task, how savage wild

That forest, how robust and rough its growth.

D
ANTE
A
LIGHIERI
,
Inferno

If I wanted to locate a place where no one would ever find me, here is where I would come. I've not been following the banks of Canyon Creek but some other water, which shows no sign of the activity of loggers. In this deep trench all is gloom and dampness, little daylight arrives, and I cannot escape into the broad day, as the climb upward is beyond my present strength; cannot bring myself to go backward, where lies failure and vanquishment; therefore I press forward, which at least is downstream and must eventually arrive at a larger stream which may yet take me to the Land of Men. The way is hellishly hard, clotted with windfalls of ancient and recent origin, and the stream bank frequently eroded, obstructed by dense thickets of brush, jams of drift logs, or bulwarks of stones. I am slowed by these natural impediments as well as my own failing strength. I have spent the greater part of my life in logging country, but never have felt so entirely enclosed by trees. They are
presences,
their limbs a ruffling commotion, like bats in the cavelike dark. Have spent the last two nights cowering amongst the great root structures of one and then another windthrown giant, being in too much despair and exhaustion to improve my shelter beyond a smoky fire and its natural comforts, which are minimal. Tonight is distant thunder, lightning in faint glimmery flashes which enframe the canyon walls. I should have nothing to fear—should welcome the light—trees too wet to catch fire—but the primeval instinct is alarm. In any case my mind circles and circles desperately around the matter of hunger and will not settle upon a survival strategy.

Wilderness is a great reminder of the limits of human perception. Where there are no clocks or roads, time and distance behave differently, and without signs or labels, everything appears able to shift its shape.

 

Dzo'noq!wa are people who dwell inland or live on mountains. Their houses are far in the woods or by a deep lake on top of a mountain. They have black hairy bodies and their eyes are wide open, set deep in the head so they cannot see well. They are two times the size of men. They are stout giants. Their hands are hairy. Generally the Dzo'noq!wa who appears in the tales is a female. She has large hanging breasts. She is so strong that she can tear down large trees. The Dzo'noq!wa can travel underground. Their voice is so loud that it makes the roof boards shake, and when a Dzo'noq!wa person shouts, lightning flashes from the place where he stands.

F
RANZ
B
OAS
,
Kwakiutl Texts
(1903)

Cold, in a weak state, barefoot—boots and much else left behind when at midnight of a terrible storm a bolt of lightning struck at my very head. In such moments we live in the body, not the mind—hair standing on end, felt the electricity, oh so close, so close, the air galvanic, explosive—fled in a feeble panic. This is how people die—fear and stupidity. I have only my clothes (stockings on my feet) and what was carried in the pockets of my coat: this book and pencil and the deer-foot hunting knife, as well as the useless compass. The most dread loss, of course, being the matches, which I thought were safely carried on
my person but were not. Have been keeping warm—not warm, rather, but alive—by scraping a shallow hole to lie in and covering over with hemlock branches and mosses. I regret not only the warmth of fire but the light. Nights are utterly black, filled with unknowable screeches and moans and the phantasms of my cold brain. For these two nights (or three?) I have been dreaming of the dead, all the lost dead ones, Mother and Dad and Teddy and Wes and Harriet, of course, and people I have barely known or not known at all, Horace Stuband's wife and infants, Edith's dead babies, Melba's young husbands, even dogs and cows I have owned and my mother's horse Libby—I dream of them lying in the wet ground, every one of them, all that is left of them the white bones, which I recognize as I turn over in my hands. I know that monsters grow out of people by way of dreams, but I am not afraid to die—these dreams don't worry me; only, sometimes in sleep the earth falls away beneath me and my heart flutters strangely. Have become detached from my hunger, getting used to it, I suppose. If I live, I shall have stories to tell and to write.

 

Mother

 

Her husband was a big man, some 250 pounds, and he had gone out to the farther edge of his pasture, wading the flooded creek in the darkness to look for the cause of the scream that had come from that way, an animal screaming or a woman screaming, though not quite screaming, a nasal shrill whistling such as he had never heard—though he had heard elk, coyote, bobcat, panther, screech owl—and while he was standing there at the brushy hem of his pasture in the moonless night, in the rain, peering out, he had been struck by surprise, a small firestorm that ignited his bones, a flash of light rising not from the blackness riverward but from inland, inshore, from the intimate geography of his brain and his blood and his heart. And afterward, after she had come out to the field and found him and had propped his big shoulders with a hemlock branch to keep him from lying in the rising margin of the creek, and after she had gone off to get their neighbor to help her carry him to the house, he had slipped down in the water, the flooding pasture, and drowned. The woman
and her neighbor, a man who lived alone and had the only house near them, a quarter of a mile to the south along the creek, carried him twenty yards and laid him across a log stomach-down and rolled him back and forth, which drove a thin spurt of water from his mouth and then a scurf of foam, but after that nothing, and they went on with it only a short while before the woman cried, “Oh, you have gone and died on me,” and the neighbor stood away from the body of the woman's husband and said, “Missus, I'm sorry.”

The woman wept, which was useless in the streaming rain and which discomfited her neighbor. She exerted herself, and though she could not stanch her crying, it became silent. She felt disconnected from herself, scattered, as if she had taken a long fall or as if their cow, Pearl, had shifted weight suddenly and smacked her against the side of the milking stall.

There had been ceaseless rain now for days and nights, and they stood in it, in the uneven lantern light at the center of a pouring darkness, and the neighbor considered the distance to the woman's house. The creek that divided the man's body from his bed was a narrow runoff from the Grays River Divide, a stillish and shallow gutter of water for the cows to drink from, and the deer, but it had spread out over the pasture and ran now in a broad black path, rushing through the blacker brushy margins with a rattling noise of anxious haste. The woman had crossed this creek twice, on the search for her husband and then for her neighbor, and they had crossed the creek together, she and her neighbor, wading through the mud and brush and uneven stones with the water sucking at their knees, to get to the dead man, and now must carry him back over the same way, his deadweight, which problem the neighbor considered uneasily.

The woman had put on a short wool coat, but the nightgown beneath it from her knees to the hem was dank and gritty with mud, the cold wet flannel cleaving to her bare legs, and her hair had come loose from its braid and hung in dribbling strands as if she wore a strange skullcap of raveling rope, and she had begun to shiver without being aware of it.

“He's a heavy man, missus,” the neighbor said, and the woman, as she went on crying silently and shaking, said, “I can lift his legs.”

They carried the dead man to the near edge of the creek and laid
him down there while they recovered their breath, and the neighbor went back for the lantern and set it near them, and they lifted the body again and waded out into the water with it. The body, depending from their hands, sank low in the stream, and the neighbor began to worry and to struggle harder to keep the man's head out of the water, which he knew was foolish but understood also to be consequential. The woman had stringy muscles in her shoulders and her back and her arms from a lifetime of wood-chopping and ironing and churning and clothes-wringing and carrying two babies about and rowing waterlogged boats up and down the rivers and the sloughs, but her husband's body was a heavy weight. She staggered, and with her husband's legs clasped around her hips, her hands straining, gripping him to her, her mouth began to release a low whistling moan, a succession of powerful animal noises, as if she and her husband were engaged in an act of love. She staggered, and the cold flood ran in along her thighs.

They pitched the body heavily at the sodden margin of the creek and stood over it shuddering and wobbly and taking breath in and letting it out with the same sound a rubber bicycle tire makes when it's suddenly deflated: small paroxysms of rushing air. Then the neighbor waded back across for the lantern and carried it out half a dozen yards nearer the house, and they went on moving the body in short laboring relays, and moving the lantern with them as they went, and standing betweentimes swaying above the body in silence save for the whistle of their breathing and the unbroken beating of the rain.

The woman's children waited within, behind the streaming glass, watching the minute point of light as it intermittently gathered size in the darkness. Gradually there were shapes of things moving in the cast light, and voices carrying across the wet night. The girl, six, began to cry worriedly, though she went on standing inside the house and holding her brother's hand, which had been her only instruction. The boy, who was four, began to whimper slightly in chime with the girl. In later years of his brief life the boy would remember these events only as they were told to him by others; but the girl, in the next few moments, would begin to make out her mother, and a particular image would engrave itself upon her memory, an isolated single engram, her mother standing over a loose dark heap like a hillock of clay
slickened and eroded by the rain; her mother standing with her palms pressed to her hips, heaving breath and releasing it in a smoking cloud downward upon the mounded earth. And in addition, the girl ever afterward would carry behind her eyes, within her dreams, an insubstantial image of the shifting shadows of woods spirits against a wet, glimmering darkness, and voices carried whispery across the rain in the language of bears or birds, and which she understood to have a meaning beyond mere loss.

Cold. In a weak condition. Rain in the valleys overnight, snow upon the high shoulders. My bones shaking and mind discouraged—utmost exertion necessary to keep from freezing to death. I line my socks with leaves and moss, which has not kept my feet from becoming bloody—they can hardly be stood upon—but I walk and walk by sheer determination of mind and will to live. The walking is all that warms me, keeps me alive. I have been thinking of the vanity of a rich life and feel that I am reaching a true understanding of things perhaps for the first time, which is a return to Reason after being led down the perilous path of Adventure. If I survive these next days I should never again fail to taste and touch and relish life as it goes by, and my children. When I am home again, I should throw off the vampire seductions of ambition and embrace the solid comforts of housewifery.

 

When I am with my children—wholly with them—then I am working very hard all day, which is sheer joy and the satisfaction of hard physical work; and I am without the frustration that arrives when I take the children in small increments—when I am always trying to solve something else in my mind. Of course, inevitably I begin to feel that the “real” me is buried; and I begin to want to give up being a matron at the center
of a large family and go back again to being a bad housekeeper and a good writer.

And when I am entirely submerged in the writing, I have the devil's own time not to neglect the needs of my children. I come to the surface as if rising through ditch water, and am often unable to think what to say when the boys descend upon me, showing off their treasures; or my answers are short and surly, which is bad, I know.

On the morning of the very day in which I delivered my firstborn child, the proofs of my first little book were delivered to me in the mail. In the interval since, I have been reminded almost hourly: the man who has no wife, nor least of all children—who has given himself up to his Art—has an unfair advantage over the woman who has been given more than one encumbrance.

I applied myself to correcting the copy of that book,
Blackstone of Boston, the Strong-Hearted Detective,
while I lay like a poor spent salmon in the still water between ever-ascending cataracts of labor. I was very young then, innocent of children, but now it strikes me that Blackstone of Boston was like an older child, demanding my attention in a jealous sort of terror, knowing full well the new babe at breast would unseat him from the center of his mother's heart.