by Jenna Blum
Right after they struck the road going up to Stanley's Camp they overtook a man riding a well-built stock horse and towing behind him a burdened pack horse and three worn-out-looking horses who were making a slow job of it, going uphill in the icy tracks of sleighs. He pulled all his horses off to the side to let their sleigh go by, but when Henry saw who it was he stopped the sleigh alongside him and leaned around Martha and said, "Orville, I guess you're working, but you ought to come up to Stanley's for the skating."
The man's chapped face was wreathed round by a knitted wool scarf tied under his chin. He peered out from the thick muffler and said, "Hey Henry, hey El," and touched his gloved fingers to his forehead and said, "Miss Lessen," as if they had met, though she didn't remember it. "I'm going up to the divide," he said, "but I'd sure rather be at Stanley's. You fellows keep a good thought for me. I'll be eating out of the government nosebag for the next few days, and I imagine you'll be eating peach pie and pork chops."
Martha remembered him then, and she looked again at the horses he was towing behind him, their muzzles hanging close to the ground, the heavy fog of their breath stirring the dry snow. They were bone-thin, those horses; she guessed they would have been sold for glue if they weren't here with Orville Tippett, who was the Biological Survey man and who spent his winters trapping coyotes and all kinds of cats—bobcats, cougars, lynx—and any wolves that might be left in the county, anything that might be expected to sneak down from the mountains to take a calf or a lamb. Sheepmen and some of the ranchers supplied him with old horses he took up into the mountains and shot for bait. Martha had met him at church with the Blisses or at the Woodruffs' party, she couldn't recall which, and people had told her what he did for a living.
Henry said cheerfully, "We will eat up your share, Orville, you can count on it," and he kissed to the sleigh horses to go ahead. The clay-colored horse Orville Tippett was riding turned yellow eyes toward them and made a deep throaty mare sound, which encouraged one of the Belgians to nicker and shift hindquarters toward her as they were stepping out. When they were a ways down the road, Henry said, "Orville works out of the Portland office, I guess, but he spends pretty much of the winter up here in the reserve, doing away with varmints."
This seemed meant for Martha so she said, "I heard that was what he did." After a minute or two, she said, "Did you think one of those bait horses had a little Belgian in him, judging from the feathering on his legs?"
"He looked like it to me," Henry said, and El Bayard looked at both of them and said, "They was plugs," in a tone of disgusted astonishment, and which they didn't argue with.
When they were still a couple of miles away from the lake, a column of smoke began to show itself, rising straight up above the crowns of the trees. Henry shook his head and said, "I guess they've got a bonfire going," and El made a slight sound that might have been amusement and said, "It's a good thing they're not hiding out from the law," which was only about the second thing he had said all day. El had a dry sense of humor that not everybody appreciated, but Henry laughed, which was a bit of a surprise to Martha. There was something between El and Henry, she had noticed, a guardedness that left them often silent in each other's company. She had taken this for coolness, an unresolved argument, but in truth, it had all to do with the car wreck that had crippled Pearl and killed Henry's brother—each of them overcareful and shy about saying anything that might bring up that old shared sorrow in the other man's mind.
As soon as they cleared the trees north of the lake Henry pulled up the team, which he said was to breathe the horses but it may have been to let everybody, including the horses, take in the view. It was the kind of view that could make your heart turn over, the long lake nestled in a bowl with the craggy peaks of the Whitehorn Range rising steeply all around. An old glacial moraine, rocky under the snow, bound the shore in a hairpin ridge along the south and west, and a spur of the Whitehorns, dense with trees, came steeply down on the east side. The lake glittered in the sun, an immense sheet of platinum mottled with thin floats of pure white ice. At the outlet the Little Bird Woman River spilled out across a wide plain of rocks and, almost full-grown, shot off through the trees to the northeast.
Stanley had put up his livery and corrals on a small hook of land that jutted out into the lake, and built the cabins at the prettiest point in the meadow east of the river. Will's friends had laid down floorboards and put up two walled tents, one to house their kitchen and one to house the men, just north of the lodging cabins. The snow had been shoveled out and trampled down around the tents and the cabins, and a maze of beaten paths crossed each other going down to the lakeshore and across the meadow to the skating rink and off into the trees where several sleighs were parked on the snow. Eight or ten horses stood nosing through trampled hay in a corral beside the livery.
Some of Will's party were out on the skating rink but the rest were at the camp, going in through the pinned-back door of the cook tent and carrying out tin plates, or they were already sitting on stones or logs upwind from the smoke of the big bonfire and balancing plates on their knees. When Henry veered the Belgians toward the livery somebody from the crowd around the bonfire shouted out, "There's still some flapjacks left but you'd better get over here at the double or they'll be gone!" which brought general laughter.
At the livery, before he had even stepped down from the sleigh, Henry turned to Martha and said, "I don't know if they were joking or not but you ought to get yourself some coffee and cakes before they eat everything up. El and me will get some help with the horses and the unpacking."
To head off and eat before the horses were put away wasn't something she ever did when she was a hired hand; but she had made up her mind to behave like the other girls today. Two young men she didn't know were already walking over to the sleigh, their jaws still working on a last bite of breakfast, and all the girls were sitting, eating their flapjacks. So Martha crossed the beaten-down snow to the cook tent and found a boy inside cooking on a cast-iron griddle on the lid of a sheepherder's stove. She didn't know if he was one of Will's friends or someone who worked for Stanley Cambridge; he was pink-faced and distracted and he barely glanced at her.
The tent smelled strongly of coffee, which brought back in her a needful craving, and she found an empty cup and poured it full from the big dented pot on the edge of the stove, coffee very dark and oily and just under the boiling point. If there was cream anywhere in the tent she didn't see it. When the boy handed her a plate of cakes, she found the huckleberry jam and smeared some over, and then went out and sat on the end of a log and bent her head to the food. She was glad she didn't have Dolly with her, who would have been alarmed by the size of the bonfire.
Half a dozen people were still eating their breakfast. She knew some of them—Roger Newbry and Mary Lee she remembered from the Odd Fellows Christmas party—but most she didn't recognize. She thought Will and Lizzie must be out skating on the flooded pond. There were probably twenty people altogether on the rink and around the fire, quite a few more than she'd been expecting. She was afraid even the ones she had met at the party might not remember her, or might be unfriendly. Every so often, she looked over toward Henry and El to see whether they were finished yet with unloading the boxes and turning out the horses, but otherwise kept her head down and plied her fork with frowning concentration, which gave people the idea she wasn't interested in friendship.
She would have gone back for more flapjacks if she had seen other girls doing it, but after her plate was wiped clean she went on sitting where she was, drinking down the bitter coffee slowly. She had thought Henry and El might sit with her to eat their flapjacks but when they came over from the livery they got swept up by their friends. She could hear Henry every little while, laughing or saying something that made other people laugh, but she kept from looking in his direction. It was a surprise, then, when he suddenly lowered himself on her log and handed over a cup of coffee whitened with cream and said, "I dumped in a bunch of sugar. Y
ou like things sweet, if I remember right."
"I don't have to have it," she said, which was meant to be a remark about sugar being in short supply. The words came out stiff, which was from general embarrassment. She glanced at Henry. "Anyway, I didn't see that they had any sugar."
"I brought along a secret stash of that black beet sugar, and it doesn't seem to mind a bit, going into black coffee." His grin had a way of flattening the end of his nose, stretching the skin tight across the line of bone high up where his nose had been broken. He took a couple of swallows from his own cup, which was as milky as hers.
She said, "I didn't see the cream either."
"Well, I had to hunt for it, they're keeping it out of the hands of the unworthy." He was still smiling, looking down at his gloved thumbs where they fidgeted on either side of the coffee cup.
Martha drank down the sweet coffee gratefully.
"Have they got lakes up there around Pendleton?" Henry asked in a meditative sort of way but without notice or warning.
There weren't any lakes to speak of around Pendleton, just sinks and sloughs and watering holes and the canals and ditches dug by irrigation cooperatives, but she didn't want him to think she was a brush-popper who had never seen a body of water. She said, "We don't have a lake but we've got the Umatilla River that runs through the whole valley."
"I remember seeing that river. It's got quite a bit more water in it than the Little Bird Woman. Where's that river start from? Is it the Wallowas?"
"I don't know if it's the Wallowas or maybe the Blues." She was flustered, caught without solid knowledge of her own home territory.
"I've heard that's pretty country over there," he said, without making clear if he meant Pendleton or one of the mountain ranges. Martha thought Elwha County had Umatilla County beat all hollow in terms of scenery, but before she could say so, Henry said, looking out at Lewis Lake in its cup of mountains, "But I guess I never have seen any place prettier than this. I wasn't but seventeen or so when I came here to Elwha County, and I never have wanted to leave."
In the front room of the Woodruff house was a painting she had admired, of a tree-lined canal in autumn and a pair of lovers holding hands, walking through dry leaves on a path beside the bank, and in the far back of the painting a stone bridge arching over the water. It was a scene outside anything in her own experience but she felt strongly that it was in France. She knew a boy in Pendleton who had gone into the army "to get out of the sticks and see that pretty French countryside," and when she had seen the Woodruffs' painting she had understood what he must have meant. She didn't know why Henry Frazer was staying put in Elwha County while so many other men had joined up and were on their way to see the Eiffel Tower and the French countryside, or if his remark about not leaving the valley had anything to do with that. She didn't know him well enough to ask. What popped into her head now was that the countryside in the Woodruffs' painting wasn't a scene a soldier was likely to see—not while the war was going on.
After a few minutes Henry said, squinting over toward the river, "I guess the Little Bird Woman is named for an Indian girl by that name who used to live around here. Indians used to come up here and spend the summer fishing and berry picking. I guess some of them would still be coming here but people complained, and the county passed a rule that keeps them out."
Martha tried to see the snowy meadow as it must have looked in those summers, in the days before Stanley Cambridge built his cabins: a cluster of tepees standing on long, golden grass at the edge of the lake. She didn't know why Elwha County had decided to keep the Indians out, if it might have had to do with some reservation Indians driving off the government agents who tried to register them for the draft. But she wouldn't have minded if they were here right now. During the Round-Up, when Indians came over to Pendleton from the reservation and made a kind of encampment on the fairgrounds, she liked seeing their tepees. For those few days she almost felt like she was living in the old times before everything was so overrun with people, so settled and modern. She was thinking of saying something like that to Henry when he said, "There's some pictures they painted, up there on the rocks," and he made an incomplete gesture that seemed to take in the mountains all around them, "which've got to be pretty old, so I imagine Indians must have been coming up here every summer for a long time. Before any of us showed up—any white men, I mean."
She turned her head and peered at Henry. "What kinds of things did they draw?"
"Oh, horses and deer, things like that, and some that don't appear to be anything but lines and marks." He glanced at Martha. "It's a climb, but I could show you."
She straightened up slightly and said, "All right." She didn't mind having to walk in the snow, so she hoped he meant right now and not some indefinite time that might never happen. He didn't say which it was, but stood and took her plate and both cups from her and headed off with them to the cook tent, and she waited where she was because she still didn't know if he meant to show her the picture rocks now or later or if he had meant his remark only to be polite. As he was walking back up to her he looked at her feet and grinned and said, "Good thing we've both got our boots on," and then she knew.
He led her a short way up the edge of the lake along a path that had already been beaten through the snow and then he left the lake trail and began to break a way uphill into the trees, the snow not even a foot deep in most places, so their boots took most of the wet and their trousers grew dark only around the turned-up cuffs. He and Martha both began huffing a bit as they climbed, and he looked back at her a couple of times but didn't slow down or say anything. The sounds of the skating party became thin and birdlike below them. She wanted to tell him she could take her turn breaking trail but since she didn't know where they were going she didn't say it. Every so often, with all the snowed-over rocks looking the same, he stopped to get his bearings in the timber and then he went on. Once he silently pointed out to her a row of small craters in the snow that could have been made by deer or elk or maybe sheep. The ground began to be cut with steep-walled ravines and narrow brushy draws where snowmelt would run in the spring. He zigzagged up the face of a sidehill until coming onto the high ridgeline, which they followed up, and after fifteen or twenty minutes they came out of the trees and were standing at the foot of a high, upthrust cliff. A line of smooth rock twelve or fifteen feet tall ran along the bottom beneath a jutting brow of basalt.
Henry turned to her, grinning, pleased as a child. "Well, I wasn't sure I remembered how to get up here, but here it is, like I knew what I was doing."
Martha got her breath and squinted her eyes to make out what he had brought her to see: small, dim figures chipped and carved into the dark stone, the details and outlines worn away smooth in places. She could make out a handful of riderless horses, some animals with branched racks—they might have been elk or some kind of deer—and stick-figure men in stiff poses holding sticks or bows, and several boxy or swirled shapes that looked like the meaningless things toddlers draw when you give them a pencil. None of the figures looked real to her, they were childishly simple, strung out across the rock in an uneven line at eye level like a ragged single-file troop. She had been drawing horses as long as she could remember and almost never was happy with how her drawings came out, the proportions never exactly right, and these horses weren't drawn right either; but she felt, looking at them, exactly as she did when she saw the tepees at the Pendleton Round-Up: a dim thrill of yearning.
"Do you think it was one person who drew all of these pictures?" she said to Henry after they had stood looking for several minutes. A kind of nostalgia had taken hold of her, a regret for something she couldn't have named. She liked thinking the drawings had all been made by one person, someone who came up here year after year to carve a new horse or another deer, someone who had made up a secret language and then started writing down a story no one else could read. One person who kept this place secret, or only told the secret to one friend.
Henry said, s
tudying the pictures, "It could have been. I don't know. Or it could have been the whole tribe taking turns and this was where they wrote down what happened every year. An almanac, something like that."
With a finger of his gloved hand he traced one of the shapes. "I always figured this one meant summer." It wasn't a rayed circle, as she would have drawn the sun, but she could see what Henry meant: that the little boxy shape could have been someone's idea of what the sun looked like. He touched a spiral shape. "And this one, winter."
She had wanted to say something to him earlier having to do with the Indians—that a vital, inexpressible meaning had gone out of the land when the Indians were driven off—but by now the words had become jumbled and wouldn't come out the way she wanted to say them. "I used to wish I was an Indian," she said.
He didn't smile. "Did you? Well, I guess I know what you mean. I always wanted to be one of Lewis's men, old Lewis and Clark. I wanted to see what they saw back then, the way it was, all this country out here before any buildings got put up, and those big herds of antelope and wild horses and so on, like they saw." He dropped his chin and glanced over at Martha and suddenly broke into a smile. "If you were an Indian and I was with Lewis, maybe we'd have run into each other."
Her cheeks were hot. She tried to think of something clever to say, to keep up the imaginary story that had sprung into his mind and hers, but nothing came. What she hadn't said to him was that in her childhood daydreams she was always a boy, a noble Indian boy with long black braids streaming out behind her when she galloped bareback across the wild plain on a painted pony. She looked over at Henry and tried to guess what he was thinking, but when he looked back she lowered her eyes.