by Brian Doyle
“I was in a revolt, miss,” said Captain Smith, for that is what the world called him, whether he actually had been appointed captain under Colonel Fremont or not, “but that was when I was youngish, and California was a part of another country, and there were those of us who wished it to be its own country, which it was, briefly, and sometimes now I think the republic lasted only as long as the few days we raised the bear flag over it. But that was long ago, and since then I have concluded that there is no such thing as a country, really; there’s only groups of people living as best they can, and what we call countries is generally an excuse for men to take money they did not earn from those who did earn it. Myself now I have a ranch, running goats with a friend of mine from the wars, and it seems to us that the ranch is a country itself, for we have a healthy population of children and goats and deer and badgers and bears, and we vote on matters, and exact taxes, which is to say deer and trout and quail, and we stand to arms if necessary to protect the citizenry—just did so recently, in fact, when a fellow came through our country thinking that he could freely remove the furs from a number of our residents. We deported him, after undiplomatic negotiations. Also we have a lionhound, and no man ought argue with a dog that will track a lion. There are not so many of that kind of dog, you know.
“But me, I am a bear hunter, and there are not so many of us either, for the cinnamon bears here are going up into the mountains to get away from people, and the golden bears, the biggest bears in the world, I believe, are losing their war against people who shoot them for hardly any good reason. The only decent reason to kill a golden bear is if he is eating your animals, and even there he has a good case that you and your animals are on his land and not the other way around; his people were there long before your people were, is how I look at it. But they do be hunted, and I figure if he has to be hunted he might as well be hunted by someone who knows and respects him, and does the job fair and just, and doesn’t just shoot him to take his fur off, or leave him there stinking for the condors. So my pal and I, we do some bear hunting, and to be honest it gets us off the ranch and into the woods and away from the goats, which is an obstreperous animal altogether.
“Now, the real bear hunters up and down the coast, we know each other, because we are a sort of a tribe ourselves, with certain rules and customs and traditions, and we respect the best among us, and tell stories of them and their adventures, especially with particular bears. There was the San Luis Rey River bear, for example, who fought all day long and knocked down an old oak tree he was so angry, and the Santa Clara River bear who weighed a lot more than a ton. But it’s not always the biggest bears. There was a lean old golden bear up toward Sonoma Creek north of here who never did get shot, though many a man hunted him; it is said that he was a master at hiding behind trees, and there’s some even think he could climb trees, and there are even stories that he could change his color to disguise himself depending on what tree he was in, although I don’t think that’s a true story, myself.
“Similarly there are stories of hunters who are famous for whatever reason. We tend not to like fellows who shoot a lot of bears, though that sort of fellow thinks he ought to be famous, but being famous for causing a lot of death isn’t much to be famous for. For us it’s more the story. There’s an old woman in the Siskyou mountains up in Oregon country who can track bear better than anyone I ever saw; she was down here once tracking a bear who liked to use the tide to wipe his footprints on the beach. That was one smart bear. She found him, though. And there’s a young Okwanuchu fellow in the Shasta River country who we think is very fine, and two brothers up in the Nisqually River country who are the best hunters up that way, and there’s a few fellows in the Canada forests who are very fine hunters. Now up there the bears change, and are not so golden, but they can get even bigger, and the best hunter is a fellow who personally fought a terrific bear not once but several times, until they finally agreed to call their duel a draw.”
At this Mrs Carson exclaimed aloud, and asked for more details, and Captain Smith said, “Well, he is a most hairy man, miss, and there’s some who call him Harry or Hairy as a sort of joke, though those of us who know him would never jest at his expense; he is a most gentlemanly and kindly man, and what he has not done for his neighbors can’t be reported, for there’s nothing he has not done for them, by their own account.”
“He wears a bear claw on a string around his neck?” said Mrs Carson.
“Indeed he does, miss,” said Smith. “From the very bear he fought, the bear who extracted a tooth from him in exchange, or so he says; and if he says it, it’s so.”
“But I know him, esteem him as much as you do,” said Mrs Carson with a smile, and it was wonderful to see the look of surprise flood across the captain’s seamed face; it is always a pleasure to see words that entered ears be instantaneously transformed into a flicker on someone’s face; a subtle and lovely thing.
“He is indeed a most kindly man,” continued Mrs Carson, “and his name is Gérard Harrison, which is why some people call him Harry, and everything he says is true, and he once helped me escape a great danger, and that is a story that has a great deal to do with bears, and I will tell it to you sometime, if you like. But our tremendous salmon is ready to consume, and it would be disrespectful both to fish and fisherman to not make the most of such a gift. Shall we to table?”
* * *
Reading over what I have written thus far of John Carson’s adventures, I see that Mrs Carson’s adventures are coming up fast along the rail behind her husband’s, and that the author himself, and the woman he loves, are far more of a presence than I had envisioned; I never meant this to be a tale of four people, but a sketch of one remarkable man. Also I notice that many other people are strolling in and out of the story just as they please—on just a casual glance over the pages here on my desk, I find Mr Mark Twain, and a dog named Lazarus, and Mr Alfred Wallace, and a boy named Adil, and a Dayak chieftain in Borneo called Pale Hawk, and Miss Frances Matilda Vandegrift Osbourne, and a girl in a stone village on the shoulder of a mountain in Ireland, and a Catholic priest who was rescued from a hell of the soul by Mr Carson, and the young sailor in Sydney whose piercing words sent Mr Carson sailing in wholly another direction in life, and a Yidingji man called Gurumarra, or Dry Lightning; and this is not even to mention such brief visitors to our book as the actor with a trunk packed with the costumes of Cicero and Pericles and Demosthenes, or the man from Canada who wore a bear claw around his neck.
This panoply or plethora or procession of visitors is not something I had expected, but I find that I cannot keep them out: they insist on telling at least a bit of their stories, and the cleverest ones persuade me easily that their story materially advances or augments that of John Carson, who was to be our primary subject. Indeed, as the priest noted, perhaps John Carson is best understood as a sun around which other galactic bodies revolve, each of the latter then in some occasional relation with each other, by virtue of their original relation to the magnetic force at their center. This makes some sense to me, if we understand that John Carson had not the slightest inclination to power or influence, control or authority; indeed, it was the very absence of those common driving forces in other men that perhaps made him so interesting to so many.
In my experience, the men who affect not to care of the opinions of others care very much indeed, and actively solicit your good opinion of their ostensible lack of caring about that very thing. Conversely there are many men who so desire your good opinion, that they will be at strenuous and insistent pains to tell you clearly why you should esteem them so—for their strength, their wit, their acumen, their money, their status, their beauty, their courage, their intimacy with God, or, best of all, the high opinions held by men of whom they have a high opinion; the men of whom I speak are in a sense always brandishing testimonials about themselves in the public square, often so loudly and assiduously that I have come to suspect that they do not themselves believe what it is they
shout to the rooftops.
All this, on either side, was not John Carson’s way. He was at once the most generous and the least interested of men; he would, as I saw for myself on many occasions, give away his money and labor without the slightest hesitation, but never think for a moment of repayment, or future favor, or whether or not your project was sensible, and his time well spent. If you asked, he was your man; if you were in need, he was your man; if you did not ask, and did not need, he was more than content to conduct his own affairs in and out of the house. I sometimes thought that because he evinced no interest in social matters, he was eagerly sought out by a certain class of men in San Francisco; with my own eyes I witnessed invitations proffered him by the habitués of clubs, by men of business, by men of the cloth, by men of political ambition, but in all cases he declined. He did so with a wonderful grace, so that each of the men who were asking him for his time so as to be associated with him, and thus be able to trumpet his good opinion, left the room thinking he had acquired just that; but I noticed that John Carson never once, that I knew, joined any group, or club, or church, or party. You would think the clear record of his reluctance in social matters would dissuade further invitations, or at least cause them to wither to a trickle, but this was not so; the cards and letters arrived at such a rate that every other week Mrs Carson would use them to spark the fire, and comment pleasantly on the way that the ones with wax seals added color and zest to the flames.
What did Mr Carson do with his days? To be direct, how did he make his living? One night, along about the end of February, I asked him this forthright, feeling that we were close enough friends now that I could inquire without rebuff, and he laughed and delivered a brief merry speech that has stayed in my memory ever since, for the blunt cheerfulness of it.
“For one thing, Mr Stevenson, I do not own this house—Mrs Carson does, and you and I both reside here at her pleasure; so I do not have to pay a note, or a landlord, or a tariff to a grandee somewhere. She owns the place free and clear, and there is a story in that for you someday, though you must hear it from Mrs Carson herself, for some stories belong only to one teller, and they have no weight or substance in the mouth of another.
“As for me, other than my work around this house for its shipshape upkeep, I am a maritime man still, and am in the business of men and ships. At one level I suppose I could say that I am in the way of connecting men and ships, putting men on and taking them off, moving one to another as fate and circumstance dictate—for the right man on the right ship matters tremendously, and many a ship and journey and venture has faltered or foundered because the right men were on the wrong ship, or the right ship was staffed by the wrong men. And only a little of such dissonance is enough to cause a problem. So part of my job is to ease such dissonance, and measure men and ships, and do my best to put one man on a yawl and another on a schooner, one brother on a sloop and his twin on a steamer; for men are just as different as ships, and how they weather storms, and how they handle in high winds, and how grim their resolve when all is dark, and how much they will steal when no one is watching—these are things to be discovered only by living, for no man knows his own character until it endures some dirty weather. That is one true thing I have learned from my years at sea.
“I am also in the way of being a bayman, I suppose you could say—not in the sense of the fellows fishing the bay in their little sloops and skiffs, the scallop draggers and the oystermen—no, here too I am in the business of connecting men and ships in one part with men and ships in another. We forget that the bay is not one entity, but five: Suisun Bay and San Pablo Bay, north and south San Francisco Bay, and the mother of waters to whom they report in the end, the vast bay, as it were, of the ocean, waiting hungrily beyond the Golden Gate. Each of these great waters has its particular flavors and characters, residents and migrants, styles and manners, and my work, or a good part of it, is to shepherd the catch in Suisun Bay, for example, to certain wharves and canners in the city, and then away on ships to all points west. Such transactions need middlemen to pick and choose at either end of the trade, and I am one of those men in the middle. In a way I suppose you could say that I am that lucky sort of man who understands various languages, and can accept information in one and translate it productively to another; I speak clam and mussel and oyster, and shrimp and turbot, and herring and cod, and stevedore and chandler, and boatswain and owner, and I walk and wander and visit and listen, and I know whom to trust and whom to avoid, and who will deliver his catch on time and properly cleaned and who will add gravel to gullets, and who stood by his mates in a storm in Sumatra and who cowered in his bunk pretending to be sick, so that when I am asked about men in any sort of capacity, I can with confidence provide an answer—and there is a living in the right answer, for me, at least. Though if ever there was a man who was paid less in coin and more in fish it would be myself—just yesterday we ate a goodly number of the answers I gave a man who paid me in oysters.”
Did he like the work, did he love it?
“If I cannot be at sea, I can with great pleasure be near it,” he said, after a moment; it was interesting to see him pause and ruminate a little before he spoke. “I will not be expeditious anymore, I think, but I can adventure all day along the water, and often on it—I suppose every other day I am on the water somewhere, checking on sturgeon in Suisun, or salmon pouring through the bay toward the Sacramento River, or whales cavorting by Point Diablo. Men and ships, fish and animals, wind and weather, rigging and rudders—I do love the work, because it isn’t work, for me; it’s what I would do with my hours and days anyway. Here and there, once a month or so, I feel the old urge to be aboard and away, and I’ll watch boats slide past Lands End, and wish, for a moment, I was with them, cursing at sea lions in our wake, snarling at the new men, checking the rigging for the third time in an hour; but then I remember that a hundred times the pleasure of what I might find at sea is waiting for me on Bush Street, and up the hill I walk, to this very kitchen, where Mrs Carson is captain of all she surveys, and I might find, if I am lucky, strangers from every land on earth, including, if you can believe it, a most inquisitive Scotsman, cheerful of mien and thin as a sail no matter how much good food Mrs Carson endeavors to provide. And speaking of dinner, I believe tonight we are dining on a San Mateo sturgeon that weighed more than you do before its demise last night; it is the answer to a question about which men from the Mission District would and would not be right for an expedition to Alaska. Shall we?”
* * *
On the last day of February, 1880, I received news of not one but two stories accepted by a London magazine, with payment to come posthaste; I received notice that not one but two essays had been accepted by newspapers, which do not pay as well or as promptly but they do pay eventually, bless their inky hearts; and I received a letter from my dear friend Sidney Colvin, reporting, with the genuine and heartfelt pleasure in another’s joy that is the keel of the admiration I feel for him, that my father, Thomas Stevenson, who had until this time objected to my prospective marriage to Fanny, has relented in his opinion, and will be pleased to send us small but steady money on a monthly basis, with his best wishes and those of my mother, who forebore to try to sway my father’s opinion, having long experience in the impossibility of such a task.
I was delighted; I capered about my little room at the top of the house; I threw open the window, and shouted joyful noises to the streets below, terrifying a passing crow in the process; I ran down the stairs as helter-skelter as a child at Christmas, to share the news with Mr and Mrs Carson, and any stray lodger who happened to be in the kitchen or parlor; and then I rushed from the house down to the docks, to take the first ferry to Oakland, and share the extraordinary news with Fanny; for this changed everything for us, and lifted us from worry to merry—we would be able to marry, we would be able to care for her son, we would be able to go home to Scotland, and then live where we would—England? France? New York? Zanzibar? The world was open to us
now, and we would finally be a family, and not a gaunt and penniless suitor at the door of a woman whose first and last concern, properly so, was her children.
I could have flown over the bay myself unaided, such was my transportive joy; and I chafed at the bow of the boat, and harried the captain under my breath for his sloth, until finally it touched home on the quays of Oakland, and I shot up the hill fast as a falcon, to the little cottage where Fanny lived.
I realize just now that I have mentioned Fanny a hundred times in this account, and told you where she was born, and said something of her wastrel husband, the charming and thoroughly adulterous Lieutenant Osbourne, and of her children Isobel and Lloyd, but I have told you nothing of who she is—her wit, generosity, verve, magnetism—the aspects and virtues that compose the actual person.
Fact and appearance are useful things, to be sure, and they outline only a perimeter of understanding, a rind on the real—so that if I tell you that she was born in the middle of America, and married the dashing lieutenant when she was all of seventeen, and she was instantly pregnant with Isobel, and all too soon aware that her husband was not who she thought him to be, that tells you something of her young beauty, of her headlong will, and of how she was forced to maturity sooner than most—but it tells you little of who she is.
So let me try. She is small and forceful. She is tender and flinty. She loves her daughter Isobel with all her heart and soul and they bristle around each other like rancorous cats. She loves her son Lloyd with all her heart and she broods over him and weighs him down with her fearful and overweening love. She lost a third child, a little boy, Hervey, only five years old, buried in an obscure grave in France, and I see her haunted by him sometimes; she croons wordlessly sometimes, when she thinks she is alone and unnoticed, and I know she is keening for her little boy; I have even seen her rock him in her arms too, when she was very sick with fever herself, and her mind was wandering through her previous lives.