by Eowyn Ivey
From then on, as we come down out the mountains & return to the land of the living, the tyone says we should not trust the people we meet.
Samuelson expected him to say as much, as the groups have battled each for bygones, stolen slaves from each other.
The tyone claims to be one of the few Midnooskies who has traveled over the mountains of his own free will. He managed to survive, even make a few trading deals.
— But only by the skin of his teeth, Samuelson said.
When we have traveled that far, the tyone says we should stow away the jacket he has given to me.
Would his enemies recognize it?
— More than that, Samuelson said. — It’s got to do with how things work on either side of the mountains.
I asked him to explain further, but it is only nonsense. Because Christian missionaries have traveled far into the country of the Yukon River, & many of the natives have been converted, Ceeth Hwya does not believe the supernatural protection of his jacket will hold sway.
I asked if he could at least tell me this — how long will it take us from here to cross the mountains? His answer was not particularly helpful: maybe 14 days, maybe two months, it all depends.
June 5
Ceeth Hwya has left us to travel back downriver. He goes in the baidarra. We no longer have use for it as the river becomes increasingly rocky & shallow. Several Indians from a nearby camp joined the tyone. I asked if we might trade them for their long-handled fishing nets so that we might feed ourselves on our journey north, but they said we won’t find salmon on the west fork. It seems the fish do not travel there but instead spawn on different tributaries. Uncured in this heat, any fish we harvest now will last but a few days in our packs. Once again, we will have to make do with what we can scavenge until we reach the village.
I repaid the tyone’s assistance with a generous amount of powder. On a more personal note, I gave him one of my pencils as well as a dozen or so pages torn from my diary. This especially pleased him. I suspect that if given the chance this young man would much benefit from learning to read & write.
After our farewells, Ceeth Hwya boarded the baidarra along with other Indians. I could hear his shouts of ‘A-to! A-to!’ (Paddle! Paddle!) as they floated down the Wolverine River.
June 6
Today we bade farewell to Samuelson & Boyd. They head to the west, into a valley the Indians say holds copper & gold. It is, too, in the direction Boyd believes he saw his wife traveling.
— You see that fog up that way, Colonel? That’s a good sign, don’t you think, that I might find her yet?
Tillman asked the two men how long they intend to stay in the valley, to which Samuelson said it would depend on what they find.
— You prefer this territory, then? Pruitt asked.
— It’s truly the last of the wild country, Samuelson said. — But it won’t stay this way for long.
— The wildness, then, is what you seek?
— Gold & furs are what we’re after.
Pruitt asked if there wasn’t an easier way for a man to earn a living, which brought a laugh from Samuelson.
— No doubt, no doubt, he said. — I suppose the wilderness does have its draw. She always keeps a part of herself a mystery.
Samuelson said that even after five seasons he cannot claim to know this territory.
— Give it time, though, he said. — Soon enough the proselytizers & the politicians will come & sort it all out. Next thing you know, the Indians will be dressed in cotton getups, going to church, & living in neat little houses that can’t hold the heat. We’ll go back to thinking we know it all. That’s when it will be time for me to move on.
As we parted ways, Tillman asked if either man might have a drop or two to spare. Boyd said they were all out of spirits, but that they could spare some tobacco.
I paid them both their wages, wished them the best of luck. It seems unlikely that we will ever meet again. I am sorry for that. Samuelson was a particularly good guide.
He correctly predicted this: Nat’aaggi stays on with me & my men. I did not ask her to join us, nor did she make her plans known except to continue in our company, along with the dog, Boyo.
The Indian woman is capable assistance. She is always at some work or another, hunting food, gathering birch bark for fire starter. I remain, however, somewhat mystified by her desire to travel with us beyond her people’s territory.
Did she understand we are to go over the mountains? We will travel quick & light, I said, so it will be no easy journey.
— I’ll hazard she knows better than us what we’re getting into, Tillman said.
June 7
We camp at the mouth of the west fork. Large bear tracks mark up the nearby sand bars, though we have not seen any animals. Brown bear meat is said to be rank, but in our current condition, we would not turn up our noses. For that reason, as well as our own protection, we will keep a man at guard through the night. I take the first shift.
I think on it more often than is good for me, especially when I’m alone at the campfire like this. Sophie a mother. Me a father. A family together. At the last Indian camp, I obtained a gift for her — an infant strap made by the Midnooskies. The women use the decorated leather slings to secure their babies to their backs as they work. This one is ornately decorated with flattened & dyed porcupine quills. I do not expect Sophie to use it, as I’m sure she will prefer a baby carriage, but I believe she will enjoy this souvenir of my voyage.
I still carry with me the Old Man’s silver comb, though I do not know what to do with it. I consider throwing it into the river, or offering it to the Midnooskies. Yet I cannot seem to part with it. More than once I have taken it from my pocket, tried to polish it with my shirt sleeve to see if I can determine any sign of its path to Alaska. The Old Man could have picked it up on Perkins Island, where soldiers & white men come with some frequency. Surely it can be explained.
We learned at one camp that the Old Man remains in our proximity. The Indians were lamenting his theft of fish from their drying racks. They said he was later spied on the riverbank, sleeping with his hands on his fat belly.
Sophie Forrester
Vancouver Barracks
June 6, 1885
“Why didn’t you have hired help when you were a little girl — was your family poor? You don’t talk like you were raised poor. What do you mean Friends? What’s a Quaker? I don’t like church a bit. Mam makes us go but I think it’s just because she likes that we all have to sit quiet. What about your da, was he Quaker too? We don’t have marble or sculptures around here, just trees and hills and more trees. And you can see the mountains on sunny days. No, I’ve never seen a sculpture before.”
In such a way, as we walked today in search of nests, Charlotte drew to my attention the false-fronted and thin nature of civilized discourse. She speaks forthrightly, without guile or manipulation; she means no affront and only asks what any rational person would. Yet how do I answer her honesty? I simplify, even outright lie, all to keep the conversation light and moving forward. Each time she spies a gap, however, the child does not skip over it as expected, but instead pauses at the edge and peers down fearlessly.
“How did your father die, was he old or something? Who lit the barn on fire? Why didn’t anyone put it out?”
If only I possessed Evelyn’s ease with banter. I have watched how, when it suits her, she deflects and distracts and only talks of that which amuses her, never with sign that there is anything concealed.
I told Charlotte that my father died in a barn fire when I was about her age, and it was not a lie.
I did not say that the quarry boss had long ago sent him away because he fought with the other workers and behaved strangely, nor did I describe how he took to stealing his marble in the night and slept like an animal in the barn and often did not seem to know the faces of his own wife and daughter. I did not share my most fearful memor
y: the night I looked out my bedroom window to see him standing bare-chested in the rain, how he roared at some invisible entity, his long beard and hair matted like the fur of an unwell animal.
I ran out with a blanket that night, to wrap around his bare shoulders, but he only cast it off so that it lay wet in the yard.
I was there, too, the day he took the sledgehammer to the bear, and when I tried to stop him, he struck me with a blow that knocked me to the ground, but who would dare to speak of it? When he hid away in the barn, I continued to bring him food each day, but I was too frightened to get near, so would push the tray through the barn door with a broom, and it filled me with shame.
The day after Father went into a neighbor’s home and was nearly shot as a thief, a doctor came to our house to say that he should be committed to an asylum, as he was becoming dangerous and his demented brain was beyond healing.
I wanted to shout at the doctor that Father wasn’t mad. Anyone could see if they only looked — he was turning into his bear. I begged Mother not to send him away. I would feed him and nurse him, as if I had found him wild and injured in the woods; all this I promised without knowing how agonizing my failure would be.
Yet here again words are lacking, for this is nothing like the story of my childhood. What about the rich hues and variations in the texture of experience? There were the evenings before, when Mother would be preparing her lessons and Father would open his sketchbook and the three of us would talk of everything imaginable, of God and Spirit and free will, of poetry, enslavement, Transcendentalism, good works and the destiny of humankind, such vivid conversations that I believed that Mr Darwin, Mr Emerson, Mr Whittier, and Miss Susan Anthony were our intimate friends. The intensity to those hours of debate! Mother turning to her Bible verse: “That ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light,” countered by Father quoting his own prophet: “Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful.” I was encouraged, even at a very young age, to enter into the fray and voice my own thoughts, but only if they were well considered and interesting.
Most precious of all, in those hours I witnessed how these two desperately disparate individuals, my Quaker Mother and irreverent Father, had fallen in love.
And what of the morning Father appeared at the kitchen table for breakfast, after weeks of living in the woods? We thought he was beyond our reach, yet here he was before us. He had shaved his wooly beard, and the skin was pale and nicked with small cuts. His shirt was misbuttoned, his voice broken. He had never looked so small to me. His hand trembled when he held up his cup to be filled with water from the pitcher. Mother would not meet the gaze of his blood-shot eyes, and she did not speak a word to him. I have often wondered what guided her — fear, anger, or grief?
That was the last time he entered the house. Several nights later, I saw his lantern light near the barn. I ran into the yard in my nightgown and bare feet, thinking to call him inside. Maybe once more he would sit at the table with me. We could talk again, of the instinct toward art and the capacity of stone, of flying mice and demi-gods. He could tell me of his next sculpture. He could remember who he once was.
Yet I did not call out to him, for as I watched, I saw that Father carried the large kerosene can and that he splashed oil against the barn. When he reached the end of the wall, he knelt beside the barn and poured the oil onto himself, down his back, over his head and wetting his face and beard. He knelt there for some time in the lantern light, head bowed and shoulders bent toward the ground, so that I was beginning to think that he had entered some sort of trance. But then he abruptly stood and dashed the lantern at his feet.
He caught fire the same instant as the flames unfurled along the barn wall. I watched as the scene unfolded before me, as Father walked, burning, into the barn, and the flames crawled toward the roof. I watched until the billowing fire consumed the night sky, and Mother came running from her bedroom, then fled toward the quarry to see if there were men who could help put out the fire.
All this time, I did nothing. Still I can remember the cold, rough ground beneath my bare feet, and the terrible heat from the fire, the smell of the heat, and the sound of fire like wind ripping through wood. All this I remember with clarity, but what did I feel? What kept me silent and unmoving? At some moment did my child’s mind think of mercy, of allowing one kind of suffering to end another, or was I merely suspended by cowardice? As a grown woman, I often imagine running up to this younger self, grabbing the girl by the shoulders and begging her, Please, please, why don’t you do something?
So here lie the darkest, most tender places in my heart, the ones I keep hidden from even a sweet girl like Charlotte, and I would have sworn that never in my life would I share them with another.
Yet, I did, didn’t I? I told just one person. I told you, my dear Allen. We were walking in your Mother’s garden, and it was like the day at Nantasket Beach — you did not spurn me or counsel me or beg me to leave these memories behind, but instead, when I finished telling you everything, you took up my hands and cupped them in yours, blowing on them and gently rubbing them, as if to keep them safe from some deep cold.
June 9
I have wasted so many precious plates. Each morning these past two days, I have carried all my equipment to the alder near the shed where birds so often come and go, and I have focused my lens on a single branch, for that is all one can do. That and wait. Warblers and sparrows of variety, a robin, several dark-eyed juncos, all made their rounds, and darted about the branches, but rarely did one land within the range of my camera.
The hours of stillness do not test me, nor do I much mind the biting flies that are chased away only by the tiring heat of the sun. I have my broad-brimmed hat and long sleeves, and the task reminds me something of fishing in the pond with Father; much time passes in a quiet meditation, and then in a breath, one is confronted with a quick choice — do I take off the lens cap now . . . or now? And oh, the bird is gone again.
There is a most significant difference, however, for when you jerk at a fishing pole, you lose nothing but the fish, yet with the camera, each time I make the decision to remove the lens cover, I not only startle the bird, but also expose the plate, almost always for naught. For as I reach toward the lens, the bird inevitably darts away, and I am left with yet another useless picture of an empty branch.
It is a nest I must find, I know, for there a bird will come and settle regularly, and I have always pictured it so in my head. If only the robin’s nest behind the Bailey house would suit, but in that shady corner, there is never sufficient light for a photograph. I had hoped the large marsh upriver would provide some opportunity, but so far Charlotte and I have only found a few abandoned nests that I suspect belonged to red-winged blackbirds. I have yet to see another humming bird, much less be so fortunate as to discover an active nest.
A profound sense of despair and loneliness settles on me. I allow that I may be so lucky as to someday catch a bird clearly in the frame of my camera, yet my attempts so far lead me to believe that the poor creature will be reduced to nothing more than coarse shadows, with no subtlety or detail.
June 11
I am not given to hysterics, but this morning when the young soldier appeared at my door with a letter in hand, my knees buckled from beneath me and I saved myself from falling only by grabbing hold of the doorframe. The soldier reached toward me. “I am sorry to have alarmed you, Mrs Forrester. It’s just a letter from your Colonel.”
He spoke as if this were the most common of occurrences, a letter from my Allen, who I have seen or heard nothing of since the 30th of January, four terribly long months ago. It was as if I watched from afar as I took the battered, water-stained envelope. Only much later did I come to my senses and recall that I had turned from the soldier without ever thanking him or bidding him farewell or even closing the front door.
For a time, I could not bring myself to op
en it. And then, once I tore open the envelope, it was with much difficulty that I slowed myself to read the words, for I wanted to know everything at once.
Now these hours later, I have taken the letter to bed with me and know its contents nearly by rote. “So often I have wished that you could see this land for yourself. We walk past glaciers that would bring tears to your eyes for their majesty, & the Wolverine River is grand.” Oh foolish romantic that I am, I even kiss it and hold it to my cheek and kiss it again. It is you, my love, every last word. The paper smells of wood smoke and damp, moldy canvas. Your well-ordered handwriting, the thumb smudge at the bottom of one page, all cause me to think of the smallest details of your presence, so that I can imagine you in this room with me even now. It is all the more painful, then, when I remember the great distance that separates us.
It is dated April 18. And without meaning to, he has abandoned me in a most perilous place. The letter was composed from the cusp of the most dangerous portion of his journey, as he prepared to enter the Wolverine canyon he so feared. And how fondly he wrote of our unborn baby, as if it secured all future happiness. “You carry our child, Sophie, & you become all the more extraordinary to me. Each passing day as I think on it, I love you more.”
Dear Allen, what is to become of us?
The letter has made an astonishing journey, by Indian boat and traders’ hands, across ocean and uncharted land, to find its way to me, yet for all that it secures me no solace. I am no closer to knowing his fate, or the contents of his heart upon learning my news.
He intended only to comfort me, even in his postscript. “Know that my love is steadfast. I march back home to you.”
And now that I have folded up the pages and think of the days ahead of me, I am sapped of all livelihood and impulse. Why have I chased about the forest, as if anything important were at stake? It occurs to me that even if one is able to achieve something of beauty, art is entirely impotent. What can a photograph do? Not a whit. It holds no power to reclaim the life of our child or make me whole. It cannot carry Allen safely home, nor can it preserve his love.