Excerpt
from Wild Life by Molly Gloss
Alone in the deepwoods, night of the 6th
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 bridgework, 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 orang-utan – 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 orang-utans
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."
She retreated a step and arranged her face in a disapproving frown. "They
don't look old to me, only wore out; we better not go poking around in here."
I chided her for the foolishness of her reluctance – "Believe me, no
one is returning to cook their supper in this room" – but when this did
nothing to persuade her, I took another tack. "We have a duty to gather these
artifacts and get them into the hands of Anthropology," I said. She took a
dim view of this idea as well, and went on standing over me with her reproving
look while I took out my knapsack and began to collect into it the partly
intact pieces of implements and tools, stone spearheads and arrowheads, and
twisted cords tied to bits of carved ornamentation.
There were astonishing finds – a well-formed cylindrical stone pipe!
– an intact, finely made awl! – and I should still be sailing on the
excitement of these discoveries except for the last one, which somewhat capsized
me. At the very rear of the room, in the darkness where the stone shelved
away in a series of ledges, behind that neat feather bed some animal or other
had made, I lifted a fragment of matting or basketry and found lying beneath
it a human skeleton.
For one irrational moment I believed it was Harriet, and my heart lurched.
But of course, the bones were ancient, and identified by their Indian accoutrements.
"Oh, lordy, what's that you've got there?" Gracie said, and brought the lantern.
It was the bones of a small person or an older child, short of leg, with the
wizened rabbit-fur moccasins still on its feet; and amid the little pyramid
which was the piled-up bones of both hands, a fetish of sticks and feathers
which had evidently been clasped to its breast.
I am sometimes forced to admit that my childhood inclination toward romanticism
remains stronger in me than my adult study of the sciences; and this was one
of those occasions. As we two women stood and looked on those bones in silence,
I believed I could feel a very old sorrow creep into the room. The arrangement
of the body, lying undisturbed on the basalt bench, had a touching posture
of peace, and I was struck by the realization that this rock room was no longer
someone's dwelling place but had become someone's tomb; I'm afraid my enthusiasm
for collecting the ethnological scraps and fragments of a person's life began,
in those moments, to desert me.
"I never have heard of the Klickitats, the Cowlitz, and them burying their
dead people in caves," Gracie said in a low, somewhat affronted tone. (It's
the Western way to pretend a serious acquaintance with local Indian custom.)
"No, I never have heard of it," I said, being Western myself, and also on
the firmer ground of scholarly knowledge. This opened the door to several
speculations – the sort of thing at which I am particularly adept. I told
Gracie: These could very well be the bones of a suitor who had been traveling
with his entire dowry to the village of his betrothed – he had sought
shelter from an ancient volcanic eruption – had composed himself to die
alone from horrid wounds received in the showers of flaming rock. Or the only
survivor of an ancient tribe decimated by disease – her desperate parents
had sequestered her in the deep cave, safe from wolves and weather and their
own horrid plague – had furnished her with every tool necessary for her
survival – she'd lived alone for months or years until at last succumbing
to loneliness. Or a feral boy raised by bears – he'd later been killed
by an arrow from his own human tribe, but his mother, recognizing her long-lost
son, had tenderly returned his body to the bear den for interment, along with
certain items for his use on the spirit-journey.
Gracie received these possibilities eagerly and supported them, one after
the other, with an embroidery of her own details – a desirable tendency
in a companion. When we had thoroughly satisfied ourselves that the anomalous
cave burial was capable of explanation, we considered what we should do with
our discovery – a brief and agreeable discussion which led to our leaving
the bones exactly as we had found them, except that I placed on the stone
ledge beside the body a respectful array of the artifacts I had gathered into
my sack.
I suppose I should consider this a loss to Science, and a foolish surrender
to sentimentality. Had I been with Pierce, or Willard, or especially Norris,
the photographist, I don't doubt I would have behaved differently. But we
were two women – they are disgracefully sentimental creatures, after all
– and Gracie, having her own particular devotion to privacy and the natural
rights of ownership (even as regards the dead), may have been an undue influence.
I find it difficult, now that I'm removed from the moment, to explain or defend
my performance. At the time, not only did I feel in a particularly weakened
emotional state due to recent events, but I felt myself inhabited by a strange
and intimate awareness of the ancient past as it related to the present –
something of a spiritual nature – something which does not readily yield
itself to words. If related to my gender, I shall hope it was not womanish
sentimentality but intuitive reason, which Science allows is a woman's natural
and creditable inheritance. And I should say, as well, that my mind had made
a kind of premonitory leap from the bones in the cave to what must be Harriet's
dire fate; I blame this on an inclination toward literary metaphor.
When we came out of the lava tube into the daylight – no resumption
of rain, as yet, but a cold overcast and an ill wind – we resumed our
search without remarking on the futility of it, simply tramping on through
the deepwood, zigzagging around the ruins of logs and poking into thickets
of hawthorn and thimbleberry.
Shortly we sat to eat our lunch in a lightly forested glen where some others
of our party were already stopped. Earl Norris fussed and fiddled with his
camera and tripod from the vantage of a mossy rockfall, while Almon Pierce
and E. B. Johnson and an old ox logger by the name of Edward Stanley huddled
in gloom around a smoky bonfire which had not even the advantage of rain cover
from overhanging evergreen boughs; they chewed dry crusts of bread and hard
jerked meat while submitting to their photograph.
It occurred to me that Gracie and I had made no decision as to whether we
would share our news – our discovery of the lava-tube cave and its furnishings
– with the men. I suppose if Gracie had blurted out the story, I'd have
readily joined in; but she did not. I held off, myself, from an indefinable
reservation, and perhaps also from grudgingness – not wishing to share
our sentimental, private knowledge with the villain in our midst. In any case,
due to the general mood of the day, hardly a one of them gave us the benefit
of a greeting.
Gracie and I carried our lunches off somewhat from the others and ate together
in silence. Our association was transformed, of course, to one of friendship
– we were easy in each other's company – but the truth is, I was not
in a conversational frame of mind, and our differences are profound. While
we sat together eating our crackers and cheese and washing all down with the
liquor from Gracie's tin of peaches, we exchanged only a few private words
on the subject of the local distilled spirits (the Amboy prune brandy, which
by now I thoroughly lamented not buying) and, of course, the weather, which
is always a safe topic. I was briefly troubled by a wish to confide in her
the specific events of the night before, but I suppose such things are best
dealt with sub rosa; and in any case, no occasion for intimacy arose from
our discussion of fruit wines and rain.
We did discover a common habit: Gracie, having finished off her lunch, brought
forth a twisted black pigtail from her shirt pocket, carved a thumbnail-sized
plug, and deliberately seated it in her cheek; which encouraged me to do the
same. While half reclined against our respective blowdowns, we each gazed
upon the other's vile and un-ladylike tobaccoism with solemn, if unvoiced,
admiration. (And inasmuch as spitting women are evidently newsworthy, we were
hurriedly made the object of Norris's yellow-journal picture taking.)
In the afternoon, having suffered through a resumption of showery weather
and a rising westerly wind, I became much in the mood to quit the search,
but slogged on – I admit – for the sole reason that the others were
seemingly unremitting, and I would not be the one to suggest our discreditable
surrender. My affrighted need to keep Gracie in my sight gradually subsided
(I blame increasing lethargy), and though I glimpsed one or another of my
party or heard them hallooing to Harriet in a hoarse monotone through the
long afternoon, I often labored alone and in silence. I peered into the dank
shade along the corpses of old trees and climbed onto the thrones of their
rotted stumps; from time to time I poked a stick into a thicket of wild raspberries.
But I'm afraid I became more and more perfunctory, doing as little as could
be managed without seeming to have given up the search entirely.
I am not as a rule a startlish person, but may have been brought to timidity
and trepidation by recent events; I cannot, otherwise, explain what occurred
– two events within minutes of each other, and in large part to blame
for my present situation. In the mid-afternoon, after I had not seen or heard
others of my party for a good interval, Almon Pierce arose suddenly from the
brush behind me, which provoked me to a wild-Indian yelp and my constitutional
defense against surprise, which is a malicious glare. This astounded and mortified
the boy more than might have been expected – his face flashed crimson,
and he was gone – had turned and fled into the wet shrubbery before I
had quite recovered my poise. I confess, I stood for some little while afterward
in frozen apprehension – knew instinctively and utterly that Almon Pierce
had been my midnight assailant and that I had just saved myself from a further
assault. I cannot account for this now except to plead the overwrought mind
of a beleaguered and exhausted woman.
Which must also be blamed for what followed. Having recovered myself (so
it seemed), I went on through the trees some few hundred yards, examining
the root flares of thousand-year-old cedar trees, and simply became aware,
with absolute and sudden certainty – the heaving over of my heart in my
breast – that evil eyes were upon me; became sure of the presence of someone
else glimpsed only as a shadow, a heaviness, a shape behind the trees, which
vanished as I turned my head. I am half ashamed to admit I took out Special
Agent Willard's deer-foot-handled knife and brandished it in the air, while
fiercely calling out, "Halloo, damn you, who is there?" to which I received
in reply the faint resounding of my own rabbity tremolo. Here is the truth,
which can only be told in the privacy of these pages: I quite lost courage,
believing someone was there – Almon Pierce again, or a beast, and in either
case breathing death; and I plunged off through the deepwoods like a deer.
It is humiliating to realize one's base fear lies so near to the surface.
When I had got over my blind flight (not long) and got hold of my senses,
I surrendered to a weaker impulse and made off directly for camp, with every
hope of finding at least one or two of the others waiting (shameful if I should
be the first to call it quits), and the comfort of hot soup, as well as a
tent to get in out of the rain. It was at that time just past two o'clock.
In the neighborhood of four o'clock, having struck no sign of camp nor indeed
of the lava ridge, and no glimpse of Gracie nor any of the men, I began to
fall prey to a certain anxiety and restlessness. I had been holding the terrain
lightly in my mind, which is a coherent enough map, and I am usually unerring
in the matter of orientation; but we had been keeping to the flattish troughs,
and the whole of our traverse was gradually uphill, which I suppose had led
me into a kind of complacency regarding which way was "back" – that is
to say, downhill. I may also have gotten turned around somewhat, while bolting
from shadows. Further, this is a jumbled country, no less so than the lava
tableland – a muddle of ravines and gullies and ridges which give upon
one another in a confusing way. In any case, subsequent hours were spent casting
back and forth deliberately along the low ground until I became aware that,
in the darkening shadows, injury was ever more likely.
I am not worried in the slightest – have certainly spent many nights
alone in the woods and have sufficient flesh on my bones to stand the loss
of one meal (or two, I suppose, in case I do not find my fellows in time for
breakfast; but I have hardtack and cheese in my pockets). And here is an adventure,
after all, and a story to embellish for the boys when I have regained them
as an audience.
On the Columbia River I have found evidence of the former existence of
inhabitants much superior to the Indians at present there, and of which
no tradition remains. Among many stone carvings which I saw there were a
number of heads which so strongly resembled those of apes that the likeness
at once suggests itself. Whence came these sculptures, and by whom were
they made?
– James Terry, Sculptured Anthropoid Ape Heads, Found in or
Near the Valley of the John Day River, a Tributary of the Columbia River,
Oregon (1891)
Copyright © 2000 Molly Gloss. All rights reserved.
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