‘By the way, what’s your name?’
‘Sam. Sam Gribley,’ I said.
‘Sam, if I could borrow a coat from you, I think I could make it to the bus station without freezing to death. I sure didn’t think it would be so much colder in the mountains. I could mail it back to you.’
‘Well,’ I hesitated, ‘my house is pretty far from here. I live on the Gribley farm and just come down here now and then to hunt with the falcon; but maybe we could find an old horse blanket or something in one of the deserted barns around here.’
‘Aw, never mind, Sam. I’ll run to keep warm. Have you any ideas about this wild boy—seen anyone that you think the stories might be referring to?’
‘Let’s start toward the road,’ I said as I stamped out the fire. I wound him through the forest until I was dizzy and he was lost, then headed for the road. At the edge of the woods I said, ‘Matt, I have seen that boy.’
Matt Spell stopped.
‘Gee, Sam, tell me about him.’ I could hear paper rattle, and saw that Matt’s cold hands were not too stiff to write in his notebook.
We walked down the road a bit and then I said, ‘Well, he ran away from home one day and never went back.’
‘Where does he live? What does he wear?’
We sat down on a stone along the edge of the road. It was behind a pine tree, and out of the ripping wind.
‘He lives west of here in a cave. He wears a bearskin coat, has long hair—all matted and full of burrs—and according to him he fishes for a living.’
‘You’ve talked to him?’ he asked brightly.
‘Oh, yes, I talk to him.’
‘Oh, this is great!’ He wrote furiously. ‘What color are his eyes?’
‘I think they are bluish gray, with a little brown in them.’
‘His hair?’
‘Darkish—I couldn’t really tell under all those coon tails.’
‘Coon tails? Do you suppose he killed them himself?’
‘No. It looked more like one of those hats you get with cereal box tops.’
‘Well, I won’t say anything about it then; just, coon-tail hat.’
‘Yeah, coon-tail hat’s enough,’ I agreed. ‘And I think his shoes were just newspapers tied around his feet. That’s good insulation, you know.’
‘Yeah?’ Matt wrote that down.
‘Did he say why he ran away?’
‘I never asked him. Why does any boy run away?’
Matt put down his pencil and thought. ‘Well, I ran away once because I thought how sorry everybody would be when I was gone. How they’d cry and wish they’d been nicer to me.’ He laughed.
Then I said, ‘I ran away once because . . . well, because I wanted to do something else.’
‘That’s a good reason,’ said Matt. ‘Do you suppose that’s why . . . by the way, what is his name?’
‘I never asked him,’ I said truthfully.
‘What do you suppose he really eats and lives on?’ asked Matt.
‘Fish, roots, berries, nuts, rabbits. There’s a lot of food around the woods if you look for it, I guess.’
‘Roots? Roots wouldn’t be good.’
‘Well, carrots are roots.’
‘By golly, they are; and so are potatoes, sort of. Fish?’ pondered Matt, ‘I suppose there are lots of fish around here.’
‘The streams are full of them.’
‘You've really seen him, huh? He really is in these mountains?’
‘Sure, I’ve seen him,’ I said. Finally I stood up.
‘I gotta get home. I go the other way. You just follow this road to the town, and I think you can get a bus from there.’
‘Now, wait,’ he said. ‘Let me read it back to you to check the details.’
‘Sure.’
Matt stood up, blew on his hands and read: ‘The wild boy of the Catskills does exist. He has dark brown hair, black eyes, and wears a handsome deerskin suit that he apparently made himself. He is ruddy and in excellent health and is able to build a fire with flint and steel as fast as a man can light a match.
‘His actual dwelling is a secret, but his means of support is a beautiful falcon. The falcon flies off the boy’s fist, and kills rabbits and pheasants when the boy needs food. He only takes what he needs. The boy’s name is not known, but he ran away from home and never went back.’
‘No, Matt, no,’ I begged.
I was about to wrestle it out with him when he said furtively, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. Let me spend my spring vacation with you and I won’t print a word of it. I’ll write only what you've told me.’
I looked at him and decided that it might be nice to have him. I said, ‘I’ll meet you outside town any day you say, providing you let me blindfold you and lead you to my home and providing you promise not to have a lot of photographers hiding in the woods. Do you know what would happen if you told on me?’
‘Sure, the newsreels would roll up, the TV cameras would arrive, reporters would hang in the trees, and you’d be famous.’
‘Yes, and back in New York City.’
‘I’ll write what you said and not even your mother will recognize you.’
‘Make it some other town, and it’s a deal,’ I said. ‘You might say I am working for Civil Defense doing research by learning to live off the land. Tell them not to be afraid, that crayfish are delicious and caves are warm.’
Matt liked that. He sat down again. ‘Tell me some of the plants and animals you eat so that they will know what to do. We can make this informative.’
I sat down, and listed some of the better wild plants and the more easily obtainable mammals and fish. I gave him a few good recipes and told him that I didn’t recommend anyone trying to live off the land unless they liked oysters and spinach.
Matt liked that. He wrote and wrote. Finally he said, ‘My hands are cold. I’d better go. But I’ll see you on April twelfth at three-thirty outside of town. Okay? And just to prove that I’m a man of my word, I’ll bring you a copy of what I write.’
‘Well, you better not give me away. I have a scout in civilization who follows all these stories.’
We shook hands and he departed at a brisk pace.
I returned to my patch on the mountain, talking to myself all the way. I talk to myself a lot, but everyone does. The human being, even in the midst of people, spends nine-tenths of his time alone with the private voices of his own head. Living alone on a mountain is not much different, except that your speaking voice gets rusty. I talked inside my head all the way home, thinking up schemes, holding conversations with Bando and Dad and Matt Spell. I worded the article for Matt after discussing it with Bando, and made it sound very convincing without giving myself up. I kind of wanted to write it down and send it to Matt, but I didn’t.
I entered my tree, tied Frightful to the bedpost, and there was Jessie Coon James. It had been months since I’d seen him. He was curled up on my bed, asleep. A turtle shell that had been full of cracked walnuts was empty beside him. He awoke, jumped to the floor, and walked slowly between my legs and out the door. I had the feeling Jessie was hoping I had departed for good and that he could have my den. He was a comfort-loving creature. I was bigger and my hands were freer than his, so he conceded me the den. I watched him climb over The Baron’s rock and shinny up a hemlock. He moved heavily into the limbs, and it occurred to me that Jessie was a she-Jessie, not a he-Jessie.
I cooked supper, and then sat down by my little fire and called a forum. It is very sociable inside my head, and I have perfected the art of getting a lot of people arguing together in silence or in a forum, as I prefer to call it. I can get four people all talking at once, and a fifth can be present, but generally I can’t get him to talk. Usually these forums discuss such things as a storm and whether or not it is coming, how to make a spring suit, and how to enlarge my house without destroying the life in the tree. Tonight, however, they discussed what to do about Matt Spell. Dad k
ept telling me to go right down to the city and make sure he published nothing, not even a made-up story. Bando said, no, it’s all right, he still doesn’t know where you live; and then Matt walked into the conversation and said that he wanted to spend his spring vacation with me, and that he promised not to do anything untoward. Matt kept using ‘untoward’—I don’t know where he got that expression, but he liked it and kept using it—that’s how I knew Matt was speaking; everything was ‘untoward.’
That night I fell asleep with all these people discussing the probability of my being found and hauled back to the city. Suddenly Frightful broke into the conversation. She said, ‘Don’t let that Matt come up here. He eats too much.’ That was the first time that Frightful had ever talked in a forum. I was delighted, for I was always sure that she had more to say than a few cries. She had not missed Matt’s appetite.
The forum dissolved in a good humor, everyone being delighted with Frightful. I lifted my head to look at her. She had her beak in the feathers of her back, sound asleep.
She spoke in my head, however, and said, ‘You really want to be found, or you would not have told Matt all you did.’
‘I like you better when you don’t talk,’ I said, pulled the deer hide over me, and fell into a deep sleep.
in which
I Cooperate with the Ending
By the middle of March I could have told you it was spring without looking. Jessie did not come around anymore, she was fishing the rewarding waters of the open stream, she was returning to a tree hollow full of babies. The Baron Weasel did not come by. There were salamanders and frogs to keep him busy. The chickadees sang alone, not in a winter group, and the skunks and minks and foxes found food more abundant in the forest than at my tree house. The circumstances that had brought us all together in the winter were no more. There was food on the land and the snow was slipping away.
By April I was no longer living off my storehouse. There were bulbs, tubers, and greens to be had. Meals were varied once more. There were frogs’ legs, eggs, and turtle soup on my table.
I took my baths in the spring again rather than in the turtle shell with warmed-over snow. I plunged regularly into the ice water of the spring—shouting as my breath was grabbed from my lungs. I scrubbed, ran for my tree, and dried myself before the fire, shouting as I stepped into my clothes. Then I would sing. I made up a lot of nice songs after my bath, one of which I taught to a man who was hiking along the top of the gorge one day.
He said his name was Aaron, and he was quiet and tall. I found him sitting on the edge of the cliff, looking across the valley. He was humming little tunes. He had a sad smile that never went away. I knew I would not have to hide from him just by looking at him, so I walked up and sat down beside him. I taught him my ‘cold water song.’
I learned he wrote songs and that he was from New York. He had come to the Catskills for the Passover festivities and had wandered off for the day. He was about to go back when I sat down and said, ‘I heard you humming.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hum a good deal. Can you hum?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I can hum. I hum a good deal, too, and even sing, especially when I get out of the spring in the morning. Then I really sing aloud.’
‘Let’s hear you sing aloud.’
So I said, feeling very relaxed with the sun shining on my head, ‘All right, I’ll sing you my cold water song.’
‘I like that,’ Aaron said. ‘Sing it again.’ So I did.
‘Let me suggest a few changes.’ He changed a few words to fit the tune and the tune to fit the words, and then we both sang it.
‘Mind if I use the hum hum hum dee dee part?’ he asked presently.
‘You can use it all,’ I said. ‘Tunes are free up here. I got that from the red-eyed vireo.’
He sat up and said, ‘What other songs are sung up here?’
I whistled him the ‘hi-chickadee’ song of the black-capped Mr. Bracket; and the waterfall song of the wood thrush. He took out a card, lined it with five lines, and wrote in little marks. I stretched back in the sun and hummed the song of the brown thrasher and of Barometer, the nuthatch. Then I boomed out the song of the great horned owl and stopped.
‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘I guess so.’ He lay back and stretched, looked into the leaves, and said, ‘If I do something with this, I’ll come back and play it to you. I’ll bring my portable organ.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
Then, after a drowsy pause, he said, ‘Will you be around these parts, this summer?’
‘I’ll be around,’ I said. Aaron fell asleep, and I rolled over in the sun. I liked him. He hadn’t asked me one personal question. Oddly enough, I wasn’t sure whether that made me glad or not. Then I thought of the words Frightful had spoken in my head. ‘You want to be found,’ and I began to wonder. I had sought out a human being. This would not have happened a year ago.
I fell asleep. When I awoke, Aaron was gone and Frightful was circling me. She saw me stir, swooped in, and sat on a rock beside me. I said, ‘Hi,’ but did not get up, just lay still listening to the birds, the snips and sputs of insects moving in the dry leaves, and the air stirring the newly leafing trees. Nothing went on in my head. It was comfortably blank. I knew the pleasures of the lizard on the log who knows where his next meal is coming from. I also knew his boredom. After an hour I did have a thought. Aaron had said that he was up in the Catskills for Passover. Then it must also be near Easter, and Matt would be coming soon. I had not counted notches in weeks.
A cool shadow crossed my face and I arose, whistled for Frightful to come to my hand, and wandered slowly home, stuffing my pockets with spring beauty bulbs as I went.
Several days later I met Matt on Route 27 at three-thirty. I tied his handkerchief around his eyes and led him, stumbling and tripping, up the mountain. I went almost directly home. I guess I didn’t much care if he remembered how to get there or not. When I took off the blindfold, he looked around.
‘Where are we? Where’s your house?’ I sat down and motioned him to sit. He did so with great willingness—in fact, he flopped.
‘What do you sleep on, the ground?’
I pointed to the deerskin flaps moving in the wind in the hemlock.
‘Whatdaya do, live in a tree?’
‘Yep.’
Matt bounced to his feet and we went in. I propped the door open so that the light streamed in, and he shouted with joy. I lit the tallow candle and we went over everything, and each invention he viewed with a shout.
While I prepared trout baked in wild grape leaves, Matt sat on the bed and told me the world news in brief. I listened with care to the trouble in Europe, the trouble in the Far East, the trouble in the south, and the trouble in America. Also to a few sensational murders, some ball scores, and his report card.
‘It all proves my point,’ I said sagely. ‘People live too close together.’
‘Is that why you are here?’
‘Well, not exactly. The main reason is that I don’t like to be dependent, particularly on electricity, rails, steam, oil, coal, machines, and all those things that can go wrong.’
‘Well, is that why you are up here?’
‘Well, not exactly. Some men climbed Mount Everest because it was there. Here is a wilderness.’
‘Is that why?’
‘Aw, come on, Matt. See that falcon? Hear those white-throated sparrows? Smell that skunk? Well, the falcon takes the sky, the white-throated sparrow takes the low bushes, the skunk takes the earth, you take the newspaper office, I take the woods.’
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘Lonely? I’ve hardly had a quiet moment since arriving. Stop being a reporter and let’s eat. Besides, there are people in the city who are lonelier than I.’
‘Okay. Let’s eat. This is good, darned good; in fact, the best meal I’ve ever eaten.’ He ate and stopped asking questions.
We
spent the next week fishing, hunting, trapping, gathering greens and bulbs. Matt talked less and less, slept, hiked, and pondered. He also ate well, and kept Frightful very busy. He made himself a pair of moccasins out of deer hide, and a hat that I can’t even describe. We didn’t have a mirror so he never knew how it looked, but I can say this: when I happened to meet him as we came fishing along a stream bed, I was always startled. I never did get used to that hat.
Toward the end of the week, who should we find sleeping in my bed after returning from a fishing trip, but Bando! Spring vacation, he said. That night we played our reed whistles for Matt, by an outdoor fire. It was that warm. Matt and Bando also decided to make a guest house out of one of the other trees. I said ‘Yes, let’s’ because I felt that way, although I knew what it meant.
A guest house meant I was no longer a runaway. I was no longer hiding in the wilderness. I was living in the woods like anyone else lives in a house. People drop by, neighbors come for dinner, there are three meals to get, the shopping to do, the cleaning to accomplish. I felt exactly as I felt when I was home. The only difference was that I was a little harder to visit out here, but not too hard. There sat Matt and Bando.
We all burned and dug out another hemlock. I worked with them, wondering what was happening to me. Why didn’t I cry ‘No’? What made me happily build a city in the forest—because that is what we were doing.
When the tree was done, Bando had discovered that the sap was running in willow trees and the limbs were just right for slide whistles. He spent the evening making us trombones. We played them together. That word together. Maybe that was the answer to the city.
Matt said rather uncomfortably just before bedtime, ‘There may be some photographers in these hills.’
‘Matt!’ I hardly protested. ‘What did you write?’
It was Bando who pulled out the article.
He read it, a few follow-ups, and comments from many other papers. Then he leaned back against his leaning tree, as it had come to be, and puffed silently on his pipe.
My Side of the Mountain Page 11