Wild Life (37 page)

I suppose, in considerable respect, I should be a suitable heroine of my own novels.

The truth is, I have never wished to use myself in that way—as the subject of storytelling. Though the events of my life are sufficiently poetical, I am neither lovely enough, nor admirable enough, nor sensible enough in my character or in my actions to be an interesting heroine. And of course I fear coming face-to-face with my Self on the printed page—it would chill me through to the heart.

C. B. D.

April 1904

I have slept a little (with all the boys, even George, in my bed—such heat and comfort—the first deep sleep since coming off the mountain) but woke early and now sit beside them, watching as they lie tangled all together in the quilts, their arms and legs seeming so very thin and naked white and their breath hardly more than the whisper of a field mouse creeping among leaves. This house is strange and unnaturally still, unfamiliar to me, inhabited by the ghosts of people I do not know, but I know the faces of my children as they sleep, and that is enough.

With the boat bringing us so late on the evening tide, I had not thought to see the boys before today. When we came off the boat at midnight, I expected Stuband to row me quietly up the slough in darkness, expected to lie down alone in this empty cold house and wait for morning, when the boys and I should be finally reunited, for they've been these many weeks with Edith and Otto and should have been asleep in the Eustlers' house long since. But Horace had evidently sent word ahead, for when we stepped onto the landing, oh! there they were, my children together with their dear caretakers—all of them standing in the cone of gaslight on the wharf—standing in a golden shower of fine, lambent pollen which rained from the dark air. The little boys were so shy—I had expected this—and hiding behind Edith; only George stood apart with Otto as if they were two sober men.

I thought my legs would hold. But poor Edith's face became white with shock, and in a moment, when the boys had gotten a good look at me—I am a sight, I know, and they were afraid of me, afraid to discover if I was someone they knew or a wild and shorn and skeletal stranger—Oscar began suddenly to wail, which spread to the twins; and Edith, who had not yet recovered herself, held them to her, crying, “It's all right, it's all right,” which meant nothing to them, or
everything; but it was Jules, screwing up his face and sobbing in terrible silence, which was more than I could stand. I had to sit down suddenly, or half sit, as Stuband caught me by the arms and I came down upon my knees on the oily boards of the wharf, which I have no doubt frightened my children and which I would have spared them if I could. George had not wept, had gone on standing there shifting his feet in a terrible agony of restlessness, but now with a soft moan he came plunging across the splintered planks to his mother, and I just sat back and gathered him into my lap, my big boy, my giant child, and kissed his dear face, his tears, and he kissed mine.

Of course, then the other boys took after him, rushing across all in a bunch and clambering into my arms, tenderly examining and petting me, and we became as a great mountain of squirming limbs, only barely human in aspect. And while I held them and soothed them, they told me their pent-up news and events of the lost weeks, their thin voices streaming and twining together, but it was Jules I heard most clearly, his voice the wordless, murmurous sibilance of a new-made and ancient language, the language of mothers with their babies and of animals in their lamentation.

Horace, who was naturally worried for my health, soon made the boys get up (they must be lifted from me one after the other), and when he had stood me on my feet again, Edith at once put her arm about my waist. She had got hold of herself and now wore the determined and stern look of a fire warden surveying a burnt woods. “Dear, oh my dear, you've got so very thin!” she said, “I'll have to make you eat pie,” and though I am always these days close to tears, this made me laugh; and Horace, who has the most reason to be surprised by such a thing, gave me a wonderfully startled look of happiness.

Otto rowed us steadily away from the river landing, along the path of black water winding between the blacker, brushy margins of the slough. He pulled the oars steadily, breathing through his mouth, his arms straining, and could not be persuaded to let George or Horace spell him, though the tide had begun to turn and the boat was watersoaked and heavy laden. I held Oscar and Jules in my lap, and Edith the twins, the two of us sitting close in the bow of the boat so that our shoulders supported each other. We did not speak. The oarlock cleats were pulling their nails, and I listened to them rattling, and the sweep of oars in the black water. Shortly the stiffness went out of
the little boys and they slumped in my arms, asleep. Across Otto's shoulders I watched Horace and George, sitting together in the stern of the boat, their two faces slack with overtiredness; and they watched me. Which went on until the gaslight on the wharf had contracted slowly to a minute point of light and the thickening darkness had made of us only breath and shadow.

 

C. B. D. (1906)

FROM
“T
ATOOSH
”
IN
A D
ESOLATION
,
AND
O
THER
S
TORIES

 

We began to hear of him in the Moon When Little Fish Are Caught. We had been up the head of the hla'hou river, eating salal berries as they fell ripe, and then we had gone over the shoulder of the ridge to wait down there along the stucallah'wah for those sandbar willows to drop their seeds, and when we came there we learned from stucallah'wah people that he had passed us somewhere in the river draw. The trees all were shining and full of heat that day, and we believed we could see his form still fluttering in the air—it was the form which is taken by human people and certain bears and by ourselves, though those stucallah'wah people said this person wasn't human, wasn't bear, wasn't one of us.

We heard of him again in the Moon When the Adder's Tongue Turns Color, over at kwiwichess, and again at n'sel, where he had passed by the day before, and at last some of us had a glimpse of him at oleqa as we went westward with the ripening camas. Those of us who had seen him told the others this: that his eyes had a startled look, the look of a little wood rat in the mouth of an owl; that his coat was close and pale, the way a hare's coat will look in old snow just before the wake-robins bloom. And we said this: that he walked as human people walk and as we ourselves walk, upended, standing on two of his feet.

Some of us thought he might be a lost person of our family, but some others thought he must be a human whose skin had been blenched in the heat, or an upright-walking bear who had shed his coat or had had it cut from him. We asked the bear people living over
along the alimi'ct, but they said they didn't know him, and when we asked the human people at skuma'qea, they said if he was one of them, they didn't know his name or his tribe; they said that none of their people were walleyed, nor sallow skinned. It was human people who pointed out: tufts of thick, coarse hair sprang from his skull, yes, in the manner of humans, but also from his chin and lips, in the manner of goats and certain lions. As a consequence, lacking a name, we began to call him the Bearded Man.

 

Some of us have seen the Bearded Man. Some of us have only heard other people tell their stories of seeing him. As a result, some of us have wondered whether he has substance or belongs to another world, the world of Tahmahnawis, which we can glimpse only in coming and going. Between this world and that one, it's not a matter of realness or unrealness, but of eye-mindedness. It's the difficulty of seeing what lies at the edges of things, what lives in the thick shade, what is concealed by radiance. In such matters, all truth is hidden.

People began to say this: that the body of the Bearded Man was made of light. They said he was a vessel some wolf-people had made, a sack of light in which to hold their old stories. In one of those old stories, wild people living under the rocks come out at night to eat children.

 

The Bearded Man behaved as if other people weren't already living in this country. He left his foul-smelling scat in the waters where fish-people were living, and pissed upon the houses of weasels and porcupines. He crouched beside fire gathered into holds of rock, and afterward left the scattered embers to communicate themselves to the old trees. He ate from the soft hearts of stone-shelled tubers he had carried into this country from an unknown place, and left behind the bright sharp shells scattered upon the ground like seed, where they lay barren, cankering slowly in the rain and sun.

In those days we had no reason to be afraid of him, but some of us were—some of us thought it was a good thing people were invisible to him. But others said we ought to make ourselves known. They said if the Bearded Man built his fire where tree-people were living, if he fouled the nests of fishes with his shit, surely this was done from ignorance, and if people made themselves known, then this accidental
behavior would come to an end. Of course, in those days we thought he was of the world, and in it. We were slow to come to this understanding: that the Bearded Man had cut the cord between himself and the world and now stood separate in his victory, like an embryo which has triumphed over its womb.

 

In the Small Dark Moon, the Bearded Man was seen at chahulk-lihum digging up the earth, and people said he must be looking for a path down again, to his old home inside the volcano. Perhaps this was true, for he dug with a furious anger in one place and then another: first at chahulklihum, then ts'nuk, then hullooetell. When we went over there to hullooetell to help him find his way home, he had already moved westward. Across the shoulder of the mountain at k'kwiyai, people saw him going on with his digging, stabbing at the earth as if he meant to kill it with his knife. These people saw the dirt fly up from his blows and rise in a scrim that darkened the sky.

In the Moon When Ice Is in the River, we heard of the Bearded Man again, that he had gone mad and was eating rocks and defecating them, over in the tahweas pass, and when we went up there, we saw rocks in great smoking piles, and a terrible field of shattered trees smeared with blood and effluent. Going down from the pass, we had a glimpse of someone squatting in the old dry lava, and afterward some of us believed we had seen the heavy white body of a giant or a bear or a wildman rising from that place, going down through the rocks and trees; or we had seen a hole opening up, and felt a cold blast as from a cave.

 

In the Moon When the Grass Turns Brown, word reached us that the Bearded Man had been killing people over on the yoncalla prairie, but when we came there to see for ourselves, Raven had eaten the fleshy parts and flown away, so no one could say for sure what had done the killing. Horns and ribs and vertebrae, the bare white armature of the dead, lay upon a vast field of blood. Blood and death are a familiar thing, but there was something in the air and in the red mud footprints at that place, something unfamiliar even to the old ones among us, something malignant and unappeasable. Some human people at once said this must be the work of Dzonoqwa the Wild Woman, whose face is carved upon their masks and totems; they said Dzonoqwa will steal souls and children; they said she abides in the deep shadows. But Dzonoqwa is known to us—we inhabit the same country—and not many of us who looked upon the yoncalla prairie placed the blame for that killing in Dzonoqwa's mouth. Those of us who visited that field of blood began to say something else. We began to say that a giant had climbed up from the dark center of the mountain and now ran wanton upon the face of the earth.

 

In the Moon When Tight Buds Unfurl, Wolverine found a lost child belonging to the Bearded Man and brought this child to us. We have been keeping it safe.

In what ways does Molly Gloss resemble Charlotte Bridger Drummond? For instance, do you share any of Charlotte's wonderfully unconventional mannerisms, or her opinions concerning women, men, and the business between them? Do you share her delight in scandal?

 

I'm afraid I'm much more conservative and conformist than Charlotte. No cigars; no reveling in scandal. I would love to read condemned books, but I can't find anybody who would be shocked by anything on my bookshelves. I do ride my bicycle while dressed as a man, but these days, if I really wanted people to turn and look, I'd have to ride it while wearing an ape costume. As for the man-woman business, I seem to be one of the few people who managed to make a long-term marriage work, so my views of men are quite a bit kinder than Charlotte's. Many of the male characters in my novels, men like Tim Whiteaker and Blue Odell, in
The Jump-Off Creek,
and Horace Stuband, in
Wild Life,
have been in large part modeled on the men I know, who happen to be mostly
gentle
men. I do share Charlotte's views on independence and loneliness, and the difficulties of combining a career as a mother with a career as a writer. And we have similar tastes in novels—that is, we're always looking for a mythical/metaphorical/utopian/western/adventure novel that transcends its genre!