Wild Life (19 page)

The boys said I should be placed along the ridge with the horses—that is, at the top of the pitch to the creek, where the going was least troublesome—but I stupidly refused this offer out of an excess of female hubris, and made off down into the gully, where I took a spot between the peeler and the photographist, on the steep starboard flank of the creek. From there I set to work along my strip of ground, hallooing for Harriet every little while and whacking a stick through the underbrush, looking for a scrap of cloth, or a footprint, or the child herself, dead or catatonic.

I believe I began with an irrational sense of hopefulness, as if I did actually expect to be the one to find her, and—even more irrationally—expected it to happen within the first hours. But the day was passed by clambering over and under the tangled, matted wreckage of
hundreds of years of windthrown logs, slipping and stumbling around rocks and crevices, falling breast high into brush and tree limbs and the sharp, piercing spines of devil's club. It was impossible to keep footing on the plunging, muddy incline. I floundered along, trying to look as if I was getting across the ground on easy terms, trying to keep the idea of womanly weakness out of the boys' heads, and my own; and they scrambled along on either side of me, whether with ease or difficulty, damned if I knew, but quick enough and steady enough to make me long passionately for a respite. Gradually the reality of the search, the formidability of it, found its way into my body and brain, and the work became leaden, as if I dragged a pointless weight—as if a logger's heavy blocks and hooks and wire tackle were fouling behind me in the brush.

The rain held off, which was the only grace given to us; the air was cold and damp, and at intervals an icy wind brought down spatters of wet from the sodden trees. We stopped once, to light a fire and restore feeling to our fingers and feet. E. B. Johnson took a seat beside me. A faller is the man with whom all logging begins—the fellow who cuts down the trees. In general, such men are known for a certain cleverness and patience, and for stamina—a tree with a hundred-foot girth is not unusual in these precincts, and is the labor of several days. Our E. B. has been in on the search from the beginning, but if he is worn down, shows it not at all. As to his feelings in regard to orangutans, I have only the evidence of all our hallooing, which, if he believed in savage ape-men, he might have advised us against, for fear of giving the creatures fair warning.

“Say, Mrs. Drummond,” he said to me in a sorrowful, slow Swedish drawl, “yur sure holdin' up fine,” which I took to mean I was not.

When we had eaten a lunch of ham sandwiches and apples, we began again our seemingly useless and dismal searching, until we had finally climbed above the stream entirely and into the high forest, which country collects rain and snowmelt and sends it downhill to the stream, and is no less steep, and clotted with green shrubbery which must be painstakingly beaten through. And so was the day passed. By dusk I was lagging far to the rear of our chain, which was a fortunate circumstance or I might have been in poor Earl Norris's place. A commotion made its way back to me, and it was plain that some of the boys thought something terrifically funny had happened.
Evidently the photographist had flung up an arm and pedaled backward, defending himself from a dark, monstrous hulk among the trees, which proved to be a lava cast at the edge of an escarpment of old black magma. By the time I straggled up to the front of the line, I was quite inoculated against the shapes of mountain beasts rearing up around us in the dimness. My principal shock was in realizing it was still daylight in regions with access to the horizon: a whitish field had begun to be visible behind the lacework of trees—open sky, a rare creature in these thick woods—and it had become evident that this field of sky lay above outriggers of basalt—ground that supported few trees, and those stunted and misshapen.

At the edge of the pillars and spurs and cobbles of stone, E. B. Johnson located a grotto in the talus, paved with bearberry and strewn with lodgepole pines, which was a campground familiar to him from numerous Sunday hunting expeditions and which other parties had made use of in the weeks and months previous: trees had been felled to make way for tents, and the ground layer was much beaten down and muddied. There was an elaborate lava-rock fire pit whitened by heat, in which discarded tins and jars lay unburied. “There is a sinkhole back in here,” E. B. said, seeming to mean a lightless shaft among the rocks, and seeming to mean we should get our water from it.

As the packs came off the horses, the middle of the three Pierce brothers said to the general population, “Here, I got corned beef and sauerkraut,” which was evidently an offer to take on the duties of cook, that is to say an offer to open tin cans and heat the named foodstuffs. This relieved me of a woman's natural work, and in any case I had by now fairly given in to my fatigue; my legs and arms were weak, shuddering, and would not hold against any force. While one of the boys set about gathering dead thicket and dragging the sticks to camp, I made a pretense of holding this rope or that picket stake while letting the others manhandle the canvas and raise the ridgepole of the tent. When the tent sides were spread and pegged down and personal belongings stowed within, I sank to a stone and waited stuporously to be fed. When finally we crowded into the tent, it was without washing, without brushing teeth; I stretched out in my blankets like a cataleptic, rigid of limb, insensible of lying among the stinking bodies of six men. And oh! what a blessed relief it was.

This morning the boys have

 

The wilderness, I believe, is dear to every man though some are afraid of it. People load themselves with unnecessary fears, as if there were nothing in the wilderness but snakes and bears who, like the Devil, are going restlessly about seeking whom they may devour. The few creatures there are really mind their own business, and rather shun humans as their greatest enemies. But men are like children afraid of their mother, like the man who, going out on a mist morning, saw a monster who proved to be his own brother.

E
RNEST
T
HOMPSON
S
ETON
,
Lives of the Hunted
(1901)

This morning I was interrupted in my report by the breathless news of another party camped near to ours (though it is not Homer's, which is said to have gone farther up Canyon Creek, toward its head). This ridge of basalt with its high, violent disarray of stone is in places half a mile wide, and evidently streams away to the south and east, piled high in middens and long wicked drifts among the trees for five miles or more. Such is the size and complexity of the rivers of magma, our camp was pitched along the verge of the lava field no more than two hundred yards from another tent, and our separate groups might have remained ignorant of each other save one of ours encountered one of theirs, each shyly looking for a private place to move his bowels.

They are an odd lot of five people, including three loggers such as one sees everywhere in the woods: argumentative, tale-spinning, superstitious, stand-alone fellows, who must be sprawling, noisy drunks when in Town but apply themselves seriously to their backbreaking work while in Camp. The other two are a Special Agent of the government and, lo! a woman, though the boys do not seem to regard her as much of a one. I admit there are few differences between Gracie Spear and any of the boys: she is built like a stevedore, thick armed and broad through the shoulders, wears overalls and a plaid Kilmarnock bonnet,
parts her hair along the side, and wears it chopped short around the ears. She has been working as a peeler on a hand-logging crew at the farther end of Pelvey Creek, where, the boys tell me, she holds up her end as well as any man, and therefore is looked upon with respect, though evidently also as something of a freakish monster.

Now. Special Agent Hank Willard is a tall and strongly built man of the variety that warrants attention. He and his fellows have charge of investigating homestead and forest claims for possibilities of fraud. I have followed this forestry scandal somewhat, as any bona fide Westerner is obliged to do. When a new Forest Reserve is declared, homesteaders whose claims lie inside the boundary are offered swaps, for “in lieu” claims elsewhere. Bribery of government officials, surveyors, and so forth, to gain advance notice of new Reserves, has of course been rampant. Land-grabbers pay people to take out land claims of dubious merit in the soon-to-be-named district and “sell” to the speculator immediately; then, as soon as a Reserve is declared, these low rollers hurry to the Government Land Office and announce they were living on the claim at the time the Reserve was created—though they have not seen the land, nor lived within fifty miles of the township, and the land in question most usually is hanging upon a cliff. Once the useless claim has been swapped for more valuable land outside, the speculator's usual course is to sell his fraudulently acquired piece of the public domain to a logging company for the removal of all standing timber; which company in turn sells the stump patch to foolable homesteaders, claiming it to be “agricultural” land, or cuts the timber and lets the land revert to the state without taxes being paid.

The slew of Forest Reserves Mr. Roosevelt has set aside in recent years has attracted criminals at all levels—Land Office receivers, recorders, inspectors, surveyors, attorneys general, as well as the odd congressman and senator. However, these Special Agents report directly to Pinchot and are said to be a select and dedicated breed. They have largely kept themselves in good repute; if any have succumbed to bribery, the news has not made it into the papers. I cannot vouch for his rectitude, but Hank Willard, in the manner of a dime-novel hero, carries a pistol in a leather holster—land-grabbers have been known to put up a fight—and wears an Army Duck Dryback coat.

He is, further, the sort of man around whom a crowd gathers: we made our two parties over into one, and E. B. Johnson implicitly gave
up the helm to him. The Special Agent promptly divided his party of twelve into pairs—this being rugged, disorienting terrain in which a false step can lead to shattered bones—and dispersed us along the front of the lava so as to thoroughly scour and range over the entire rocky ridge; we were instructed to visit, insofar as possible, every dark tunnel and gallery in the black rocks—any that might hold a child. And pointing ahead a mile or two or three through the thicket of lodgepoles to a particular formation standing dimly against the overcast, he proposed that we should all regather at the end of the day at the foot of those rocks, resembling, to an active imagination, a high-backed Mexican saddle.

The youngest Pierce brother, named Almon, brought up the problem of bringing the horses through the lava field, which led to Willard appointing Almon to pack our two camps and lead the overburdened beasts a safe way around the rocks to our new camping place below the Mexican saddle. Almon's withdrawal left our numbers uneven, but Special Agent Willard, who is used to working alone, said he would fire his pistol three times if he broke an ankle or fell into a sinkhole.

I was partnered to another of the Pierce brothers, the middle one, who is thirty or thereabouts and whose name is Martin, a man with some whiskers and some girth, who likes liquor and changes his shirt on the first day of the month. I have known such men all my life, and stayed away from them.

Once we had gone into the rocks there was seldom opportunity for seeing the horizon nor the Special Agent's landmark, and the rough terrain was dislocating. I brought out my explorer's compass and demonstrated it for Pierce, so as to encourage his following my lead; but the principle was lost on him, or he was stubborn as regards the proper roles of men and women. Though he agreed we ought to keep each other in view while working roughly twenty feet apart, he struck out directly and kept to his own course, rejecting the reading of magnetic bearings in favor of personal instinct. It soon became my chief task, trailing Pierce to prevent his being lost and left behind in the lava.

Keeping one's partner in view is about all one
can
manage; peering into chasms looking for a huddled child is a matter of wretched difficulty. That broken field of clinkers and boulders and lava mounds
is much covered over with lichen and vines, so the careful placing of one's feet becomes the entire center of one's nerves. And the terrain, which is an otherworldly landscape of stone swags and festoons, gaping black hollows, and picturesque columns of basalt, is further complicated by a dense understory of shrubs, viny maples, and small pines, as well as various members of the fern family. Here is the desolate truth, though no one speaks it: a child could find a cavity in the rocks, of which there are thousands, climb into it, and be hidden for a millennium.

Pierce and I beat back and forth across the tumbled ground quite as deliberately as if our hunting might turn something up. What we turned up were castings of delicate tree parts visible on the surface of the frozen flow; a lava sinkhole with logs standing on end as if sucked into it by a whirlpool; natural stone bridges in startling mimicry of those one sees, manmade, in paintings of the Irish countryside; and long, sinuous, caved-in tubes thirty feet wide, the glyphs of molten streams, with ripples and splashes forever imprinted in the stone.

Here and there are the shafts and tunnels which are the old burnt-out casts of standing and deadfallen trees. At their apertures such cavities are carpeted with moss and licorice ferns, and littered within by woody debris and sheets of leathery, grayish-green lichen such as my sons declare to be dragon's skin. And farther inward, midnight darkness.

I shined my Ever Ready light down certain of the black maws, used a long stick to plumb some of them, and cast pebbles down into others, but when I plucked up the courage to crawl into one of the longer tunnels—fully had the intent to crawl in—my body was dead-set against it. An affrighted imagination might very well fill the darkness with ghosts or giant man-eating apes, but mine filled the caves and holes with oozy invertebrates, poisonous spiders, and mutant, cave-blind rodents. I've never had a fear of tight quarters, and do not fear the dark, so this was something of a surprise; one doesn't expect to learn a new cowardice at the age of thirty-five. Pierce, in any case, believed such occupation too brutal for a woman—not only the physical rigor, I suppose, but the possibility of discovering a child's mortified body; and I found myself unexpectedly willing to play the woman's part. I might perhaps have gotten my heart to quit its frantic
racing once I had bored through two or three of the stone tunnels (and, of course, assuming I did not put my hand onto a snake or into a slobbery mouth); but it was Pierce who crawled into these forbidding tubes and descended into the long holes; and so my body went on apart from my intellect, in a rigor of instinctual, aboriginal fear.