Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality

by Pat Murphy

When Wauna sniffed her, Sarah released her grip on her mother’s dress and reached out to stroke the animal’s soft ears. Wauna licked the child’s face, tasting the salt of her tears. The child hugged the animal’s neck, drawn to the warmth and comfort she offered.

  Such a helpless human, so small. Wauna let the child pull on the fur at the ruff of her neck. The tugging of the tiny hands reminded her of how her pups had wrestled with her, biting at her fur, tumbling over one another clumsily in their battles. So small and helpless.

  What is it about a nursing mother that lets her recognize a hungry child? Mother cats have adopted puppies and baby rabbits. Mother dogs have nursed kittens with their own litters. What silent message passes between mother and child, cutting across species lines, communicating without words?

  The child whimpered as the wolf licked her. She was tired and hungry, and she had no words to express her sorrow. She made baby noises, and Wauna responded, recognizing the note of hunger. The wolf turned on her side, exposing her nipples. With her head, she nudged the child toward her nipples just as she would have directed a wayward pup.

  Sarah snuggled closer to the wolf’s warm body, her hands gripping the animal’s fur. The child was old enough to eat solid food, but young enough to remember suckling at her mother’s breast. Wauna’s nipples had a warm, milky scent that drew her.

  By the time Rolon and the others had returned from investigating William’s body farther downstream, Sarah was suckling at the wolf’s teat, clinging to Wauna’s thick fur just as she had clung to her mother’s dress. When Rolon came near to sniff the child, Wauna growled, warning the male to keep his distance, just as she had warned packmates away from her own pups when they were first born.

  Later, when Sarah had drunk her fill of the wolf’s rich milk, Rolon’s restless pacing indicated that the pack was ready to move. Wauna, not wanting to leave the child behind, nudged the sleepy girl whining low in her throat. Sarah put her arms around the wolf’s neck, embracing her as she had the old dog on the wagon train. When Wauna whined again, Sarah swung her leg over the wolf’s back, still holding tight to the animal’s neck. Moving carefully, aware of the fragile burden she carried, Wauna followed the pack, carrying Sarah away into the mountains.

  2 IN THE MOUNTAINS WITH THE BEASTS

  “The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots.

  This is really true. I know because I have tested it.”

  —Autobiography of Mark Twain; Mark Twain

  MAX PHILLIPS TUGGED ON his mule’s lead. “Come along, Wordsworth,” he said conversationally. “You’re a lazy, good-for-nothing beast and an overrated poet. Let’s move along, or we won’t make Selby Flat by nightfall.”

  Max was eager to reach town, where he could sleep on a lumpy strawtick mattress, rather than on the cold, hard ground. He was thirty-three, older than many of the gold-seekers. After three weeks in the hills, he missed the comfort of a bed, however lumpy.

  Max had been wandering the hills, panning gold from the mountain streams and sketching the scenery in his notebook. He was a self-trained artist—he could capture the likeness of a man or a mountain in a quick pencil sketch, a handy talent to have. Down in the mining camps, he drew portraits of miners, earning more gold from that occupation than he ever found in the California hills. Men asked him to draw their portraits, then bought the sketches to send home to their loved ones.

  But sometimes Max grew tired of the company of miners, tired of all the talk of gold, tired of the drinking and gambling and endless conversations about women back home. When that happened, he struck out on his own, prospecting for gold and lingering to capture the beauty of the landscape. Now he had a notebook filled with sketches, a poke full of gold dust, and a hankering for the finest meal that Selby Flat had to offer.

  The trail curved out of the pines and headed downward, following the creek into the valley. Max could see the white canvas of a tent. Someone had staked a claim beside the creek. A greenhorn, Max suspected. The spot didn’t look promising.

  Max made his way toward the tent. “Rallo!” he called. “Rallo!”

  No answer.

  Quilts were spilled in a tangle beside the tent’s front flap. Boxes of food, some burst open, littered the slope. As he approached, three jays flew squawking from the body that lay in front of the tent.

  Max knelt beside the body to examine it. A woman, dead for a few days, by the look of it. Shot and scalped and left unburied.

  Max closed her staring eyes. The wind blew up the valley, carrying white feathers from the torn feather bed that lay among the rocks. He felt cold and empty and suddenly lonely. He hadn’t felt lonely in all the time he had been in the mountains. He liked being alone. He had come to California from Chicago, and he preferred the wide-open spaces to the crowded urban streets. He had been happy, wandering the hills. But now, kneeling by this dead stranger, he felt sad and abandoned.

  He did what he could. He wrapped the woman’s body in a quilt to protect her from the jays and the coyotes until he could bury her. He murmured a prayer over the body, asking God to look out for her, to take her to a happier place. He glanced inside the tent. In the clutter in front of the tent, wedged by the wind beneath a broken box, he found a letter and sat in the sunshine to read it.

  Dear Audrey,

  After all of the hardships of the trail, California is a paradise indeed. The land is wild, that is true, but it is beautiful as well. As I pen this letter, I am sitting in front of our snug tent. Higher in the mountains, snow lingers far into the spring, but here in the foothills the sun is warm and the grass is green.

  From where I sit, I can look across a verdant valley. William is panning for gold in the stream. Little Sarah stands by the stream nearby, fingering pebbles as if she, too, is looking for gold. The sunlight glistens on her red-gold curls, and that’s all the gold that I need. She has grown so much in the last year. She’s bright and alert and sharp as a tack, a laughing child who even now holds her hands out to show me a pretty white stone that she has found.

  William and I are well. The mountain air is sweet and healthy and the water is fresh and pure. I think this place will be good to us. I just know that we will find a rich claim here, and I’ll send you gold nuggets the size of goose eggs. I hope

  The letter ended there, obviously incomplete. No one would ever know what she had hoped.

  Max stood and slipped the letter into his pocket, wondering what had happened to William and little Sarah. In the debris scattered beside the tent, he found three letters from the States, all of them addressed to Rachel McKensie, which he assumed was the woman’s name.

  He expanded his search and found William’s body beside the stream below the tent. Like the woman, William had been shot and scalped. Still no sign of a child.

  Long ago, in another life, Max had had a daughter. He did not like to think of that time. But now, as he searched for the lost child, he could not help imagining his own daughter, lost in the wilderness. She would be weeping; she would be frightened.

  “Sarah!” he called. “Sarah! Where are you?”

  After an hour of searching, he shook his head. There were so many places a child could hide. Alone, he could search this wild countryside for hours without covering it all. He needed help. At last, he took the mule’s lead and headed down to Selby Flat.

  In 1850, Selby Flat was inhabited by three hundred or so men and three women. For a mile or so along the shores of Rock Creek, miners had built cabins and shelters and shacks, constructing them of canvas, of logs, of brush, of stones yanked from the hillsides.

  The path that meandered among the shacks was muddy when it rained and dusty when it didn’t. At night, it was a dangerous place to stroll. On either side of the path were so-called coyote holes—some of them ten feet deep—remaining from mining operations. Drunken miners regularly tumbled into these pits as they wandered in search of their cabins. The hills on either side of the creek were riddled with long burrows dug by miners in search of
gold.

  That Sunday afternoon, a dozen miners lounged on a patch of gravel and sand beside Rock Creek. The surrounding boulders were draped with cotton shirts and canvas trousers, washed in the rushing water and now drying in the sun. For the past hour, the men had been sitting around in their underdrawers, idly discussing the latest excitement in the town. Four days before, two armed men had held up the stage, shot the driver, and stolen a shipment of gold headed for San Francisco.

  A fellow named Arno had gone missing at about the same time. Most of the miners figured that Arno, with the aid of a confederate, had stolen the gold. The identity of the confederate was a mystery.

  There was no sheriff in Selby Flat. No sheriff, no judge, no official representative of the law. A jury of miners dispensed a rough sort of justice, subject to the consent of the general population. Stealing was punished by whipping and banishment. Murder—unless it was in self-defense—was punished by hanging. A posse of miners had set out to look for the stagecoach robbers, but they’d lost the trail and given up after two days, returning to their claims.

  “I’d guess Arno’s halfway to Mexico now,” suggested Jasper Davis, a tall blond miner. “He and his partner took that gold and headed south.”

  “I reckon you could be right, Jasper,” allowed Johnny Barker. “If he were holed up around here, folks would have seen him for sure.”

  “I was riding down the trail from Grizzly Hill at about the time they were holding up the stage,” Jasper continued. “I suppose I’d have seen them if they went up that way.”

  “I just keep on wondering who his partner was,” a third man said. “Arno wasn’t bright enough to plan a robbery on his own. And he didn’t seem to have any good pals.”

  “I saw you and him drinking together one time,” Johnny said, looking at Jasper. “A couple of weeks ago, at Selby’s Hotel. Did he say anything about a partner?”

  The blond man frowned. “You know, now that you mention it, he did mention that he had a partner down Hangtown way, where he was mining before. He said something about him going prospecting and his partner following along after.”

  “Prospecting?” Johnny snorted. “Checking out the stage, more likely. Prospecting for a good time to rob it.”

  It was then that Max came down the dusty trail from Grizzly Hill, leading his mule. “Rallo,” he called to the men by the creek. “A man and a woman have been murdered up the trail a piece. Their little girl is lost in the mountains. I’m going to Selby’s barroom to gather a search party. Pass the word.”

  “A woman? Murdered?” Jasper said, but Max had already moved on, tugging on the mule’s lead. The men dressed and followed.

  Several buildings in Selby Flat offered lodgings for transient miners: a log cabin with a bunkroom had beds for a dollar a night; a large canvas tent provided space on a dirt floor for half that price. Selby’s Hotel, located at the center of the encampment, was the biggest and best of the miners’ hotels.

  Selby’s was a sprawling structure built of logs and roofed with thick brown canvas. It was a palatial establishment by the standards of the area. First-time visitors, stepping off the dusty (or muddy) path into Selby’s barroom, had been known to stop dead in their tracks, frozen in place by its unexpected opulence.

  The walls were hung with pale pink calico that had been printed with roses of every size and variety, ranging from delicate blossoms smaller than a baby’s thumb to cabbagelike blooms the size of a man’s head. The cloth draped elegantly around a massive mirror, brought all the way from New York to San Francisco by ship, and from San Francisco to Selby Flat on the back of a mule.

  Mrs. Selby took very good care of that mirror. Every morning she wiped away the dust and polished the glass. Then she polished the cut-glass decanters and the jars of brandied fruit that stood on the shelf in front of the mirror. The floor was dirt, of course, but that dirt was hard-packed and Mrs. Selby swept it each morning. The room was furnished with benches and tables constructed from rough-cut planks. Mrs. Selby had wanted nicer furniture, but she made do by draping the tables in bright red calico to hide the rough wood.

  By the time Max reached Selby’s, word had spread, and the room was crowded with men who wanted to know what had happened. When Mr. Selby called for quiet, Max stood by the grand mirror and described what he had found up by Grizzly Hill.

  Death was common enough in the mining camps. Men got drunk and fell in the creek and drowned. Men didn’t hear the warning rattle of a sidewinder, got snakebit, and died of the poison. Men got into fights and sometimes killed each other for gold. Mexicans killed white men and white men killed Mexicans and both killed Indians and Chinamen. A man’s murder was unfortunate, but nothing to make anyone hurry down the trail.

  A woman’s murder, however, was something else. There were few women in California—three in Selby Flat, half a dozen in Nevada City. There were more down in Sacramento and San Francisco, but those cities were a long way off. Men would travel fifty miles on foot to eat an apple pie made by Mrs. Selby, a matronly woman with a broad pleasant face that no one would call beautiful. Women were precious; women were rare. A woman’s murder demanded action.

  It was a rough crowd that filled Selby’s barroom. Men from every walk of life had come to California in search of gold-farmers who had abandoned the plow, husbands who had abandoned their wives, sailors who had abandoned their ships. Rascals and heroes, wise men and drunkards. All of them sat silent as Max told of the dead woman who lay by the side of the creek. He read Rachel’s letter aloud: “I think this place will be good to us. I just know that we will find a rich claim here, and I’ll send you gold nuggets the size of goose eggs. I hope…”

  Rachel’s last words hung in the air as Max put the letter down. For a moment, each man in the room thought of his own hopes and dreams. I hope I’ll be rich. I hope I’ll be happy. I hope that my sweetheart will still be waiting when I get back to the States. I hope that I get out of these mountains alive.

  A moment later, the miners were all talking at once—shouting about finding the murderers, about justice, about honor. One man was sure that Indians killed the woman. He’d seen some Diggers up that way not a month ago. It must have been Mexicans, shouted another. You couldn’t trust Mexicans around a white woman. They had to form a posse and catch the killers and string them up, showing them that this was a civilized place.

  Then Mrs. Selby’s voice cut through the babble. “That poor little girl,” she said, her voice breaking. Her hands were knotted in her apron; her broad face was wet with tears. “She’s in the mountains with the wild beasts. You’ve got to find her.”

  “We’ll find her, ma’am,” called Jasper Davis. He had climbed onto a bench and was standing above the crowd. “I’ll lead a search party. We’ll start tonight. Who’s with me?”

  Max stood at the back of the room with Mr. Selby, watching the miners crowd around the man, ready to rescue the poor little girl and bring her to Mrs. Selby’s motherly arms. “Who is that fellow?” he asked Mr. Selby, gesturing at the blond man.

  “His name’s Jasper Davis,” Mr. Selby said. “He came here a month ago from Sacramento. A few days back, he struck a rich streak up the creek a piece. He’s a good fellow.”

  Max nodded, accepting the information but reserving judgment on whether Davis was a good fellow or not. Mr. Selby’s estimation of a fellow’s goodness depended more on the man’s financial stability than on any other characteristic.

  Outside, the sky had grown overcast. The clouds had darkened from the pale gray of granite to an ominous gray-black. As the miners shouted about how they would find the little girl and hang the killers, the first drops of rain began to fall.

  Sarah was as Mrs. Selby had said, in the mountains with the wild beasts. The wolf pack had taken shelter in a grove of pines. Wauna lay down close to the trunk of a tree, and the girl sat on the carpet of pine needles beside her, surrounded by wolves.

  “Dog,” she said to Wauna, testing one of the sounds that her parents had
taught her. The wolf made a low whining noise in her throat, and Sarah responded with a whimper of her own.

  Wauna leaned close to sniff the girl’s face. Sarah grabbed the ruff of fur at the wolf’s neck and used it to pull herself to her feet. When Wauna licked Sarah’s face, the girl lost her grip on the wolf’s fur. She fell into a sitting position, still holding her hands out to the wolf.

  After two days of suckling at Wauna’s teats and sleeping beside the female wolf, Sarah smelled of milk and wolf, just like any wolf pup. While the girl sat in the litter of pine needles that covered the ground, Wauna licked her face, washing her clean. Sarah closed her eyes. Her memories were vague and muddled, but the touch of Wauna’s warm, wet tongue was like the cloth her mother had used to wipe her face each night, rubbing away the dirt with water warmed on the campfire. “Mama,” she murmured, and Wauna responded with a whimper, licking away the salty tears that rolled down the little girl’s face.

  Thunder rumbled, a warning of the storm to come. Overhead, the branches of the pines lashed in the cold wind that blew down the mountains, where winter snow still lingered. Sarah shivered and Yepa, a young female wolf, moved to sit close beside her, blocking the wind. Yepa, Wauna’s daughter from the year before, had helped her mother care for the litter of pups, watching over the youngsters, letting them chew on her ears and pounce on her tail. This new youngster was strange, but when Wauna accepted her as a pup, Yepa did the same. She tolerated this pup’s behavior, just as she had indulged the pups that now lay dead in the valley.

  Seeking warmth, Sarah huddled between Wauna and Yepa, snuggling against their warm fur. Lightning flashed, illuminating the snowcapped mountains that surrounded them. The thunder rumbled again, and Wauna cocked her ears, listening to the mighty growls from the sky. Lightning flashed white, like sharp teeth in a dark mouth. Thunder growled and barked. Wauna nuzzled Sarah’s ear, whimpering low in her throat.

  A few feet away from Wauna, Rolon answered the thunder with a low bark and a whimpering growl. Then he lifted his head and howled, a long, lonely wail that echoed from the mountains. Wauna joined in, singing on a higher note that blended with Rolon’s. Then Yepa and Duman and Ruana and Dur, all Wauna’s children from the previous litters, joined in. Omuso, an older male, came in late, joining the chorus.