Stranded

by Matthew P. Mayo

  In the dark I played a game, a silly passing fancy that I was all alone in the whole world, and that if I knew where I was I might never again find the place I should be. That made more sense as a notion in my head than it does written down on this page.

  I sat like that, the only sounds tiny cricks and cracks from my small struggling fire, and my own breathing. I thought of Bib and Bub. Where were they? How far away from me in the dark? I thought of Papa and the boys and asked the same questions. How far? How far from me? I knew they had not come back. Else they would have roused me, hugged me. I ache for that.

  I don’t remember how long I sat in the dark, eyes open but seeing nothing. I slipped into sleep again and when I next awoke the day was coming off bright. Blue sky peeked through a gap in the bunched canvas at the back end of the wagon. I heard the slow clank of the oxen’s bells not far off.

  “Papa? William? Thomas?”

  My words floated in the air. Why weren’t they back yet? I knew I should not, but I did the thing Papa always tells us not to do—I panicked. Again. My breath came out in shorter, faster bursts and I felt that tightness in my throat and hotness on my cheeks.

  I cannot continue to cry every time a predicament comes up. I bit the inside of my mouth so hard I felt sure I was going to draw blood, and I climbed my way like a stiff old woman out of the wagon. Of course I poked my head out first for sign of anything that wasn’t right. I am not sure what I expected, but this is a land of surprises and mysteries to me. I hope Papa and the boys return today so I will never have to know what this place is capable of.

  I stood in the new sunlight of early morning. The campsite is not as tidy as when I left yesterday morning. On my return last night I made a mess of everything there is to disrupt. And I do not care. This is no camp without them, so what shall I do about it? I shall tidy quickly, mostly myself, for I am a sooty mess, then I have to set off again.

  I do not for a moment trust myself or my own judgment. The mind is an evil trickster, an ill-bred thing at best, but I have little choice. I packed a sack with what is left of our jerky supply, three potatoes I cooked in their jackets in the fire’s coals yesterday morning, and the last of the biscuits. I cinched the lot into a canvas sack, my pretty flour-sack satchel now gone wherever rivers take such things. Perhaps someone downstream will make use of it. More than likely it will end up forever snagged in brambles and sticks and mud.

  I have decided once more against taking the shotgun with me, as it might slow me down, and I have a burning urge to track them before I lose whatever sign of their trail might be left. I have to know which way they went, beyond where I watched them disappear from my view over that far rise.

  Now that I know something of the countryside, I feel certain I will come upon them on the trail. They will be tired, carrying sacks of heavy meat, walking slowly. That is the reason they have not yet returned—they are laden with buffalo meat. I will find them.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1849

  * * *

  I am writing this sitting on a rock far south of the camp. I am at the spot where they stood when I last saw them, three days since. They were waving to me from this very ridge. It’s a grand view, but I do not care about that right now. I am weary and worried and my eyes burn from squinting at the wide, neverending land. When I do finally catch sight of them I want to be able to wave them toward camp.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1849

  * * *

  It has been four days since I last wrote. I have been busy, spending my mornings roving as far as I dare, bettering up my wind and hiking back here well before dark, though it pains me to give up on their trail while there is still light in the sky. I leave earlier each morning to lengthen my hours of searching for them. I also have taken to shouting and I do not care if Indians or lions or bears or snakes hear me. This wicked little valley and the ridges that rise about it echo with my shouts of “Papa! William! Thomas!”

  I cannot help myself, even now, as I write this I have stopped to bellow their names.

  Bib and Bub do not care. They graze, though the grasses are withered and brown. They nose at them hard and chew deep into the dry dirt for tender rooty stubble. If they are worried they do not show it. The only thing they show is ribs, and that is one thing I can say I share in common with them. We none of us is faring well in that regard.

  I would bake them biscuits, but as I have never heard of an ox eating a biscuit, and as I am worried about running low on flour and bread soda, I will leave them be to forage as best they can.

  I talk with them, spend time patting and scratching them, but they ignore me and swish their tails as if I am an irksome bluebottle.

  I shall spend some of tomorrow’s morning hours here at camp, righting it around and gathering firewood. I have a plan to burn a blaze outside, large enough for the smoke to be seen during the day and for the flames to send a mighty glow at night.

  This will take much wood, but what else have I to do? My kin are all, and are lost to me at present. I will do what I must to bring them back.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1849

  * * *

  I awoke to an unwelcome surprise this morning. Snow lay on everything in sight. Even on the oxen’s backs. As always, they do not notice. It is little more than a layer of dust that will likely melt off by midday, but this morning I have no regard for it.

  Used to be I loved the first snow of the year. But that was a long time ago. Here, in this place, the sight of it chills me to my gut, for it means many things, and none of them good. It means long, cold months ahead, months that Papa had said we would spend in Oregon, which he promised is a warmer place on the other side of these foul raw-rock mountains jutting to heaven nearly all about me.

  The snow also means I need to get busy gathering firewood, for if it takes Papa and the boys more time to get back to me, I will need heat and fuel for cooking, and digging wood out from under snow is a task I do not care for.

  I am thankful that Papa saw fit to pack his two axes, the smaller one he calls his “limbin’ axe,” and the large, double-bit brute. I can heft the larger, but it is a trial. I do not like the feeling I get when I hoist it aloft. Having the blade of that thing hanging over my head is an unpleasant sensation. I try my best to give it a high swing like Papa always says you need, so as to get enough power to bite into the wood. Then a picture comes to mind of me dropping it right down on my own head, and I falter.

  It reminds me of a mad invention by the French, something called a guillotine. A foul thing that delivers a slicing blow to the neck and lops off the head of someone who did something offensive to someone else. But honestly, how much worse could it be than to have your head sliced off? Truly, the mind of mankind can be a nasty thing.

  That invention haunts my dreams. But then I should consider myself fortunate, as I expect the people whose heads came under that thing are long past dreaming.

  I decided today to set that double-bit aside, at least until I can work on getting something more pleasant in my mind than a guillotine. That, and it’s so heavy I can barely use the thing for ten minutes before I am tuckered out. The limbing axe is a lighter tool, single-bladed, but it goes dull quicker.

  Still, I am getting better at using Papa’s stone and keeping an edge on it. It is the same stone he carries in his pocket in the field. He always says to keep an edge on things is the most important part of cutting anything. That’s why when he works the fields he’ll stop every so often and give that long scythe blade a few licks with the stone. He can use that thing so sweetly it sings as he whisks it along the blade.

  I try to remember exactly how he ran the stone over the axe blade, but for the life of me, all I can recall is a circular motion. All those times I’ve seen Papa swing an axe and sharpen blades and make that stone sing, and all I can dredge up is that he works that rough-smooth stone in a circle.

  Then I remember it isn’t round and round, but he sort of smoothes it along the blade’s edge. I tried that, and while I can�
��t say it sang to me, it did sort of hum. Maybe I am imagining that part.

  I am careful to do it right, maybe too careful, because Papa says you can ruin the steel if you do it wrong too much. But I must have done it right, because with the next big branch I tucked into, the blade made a satisfying whapping sound and chips spittled out of there looking like something you’ll find near a beaver-chewed tree.

  I had to stop and admire them, so proud am I of that sharpening job I did. I kept at it until it felt like I was working harder than I should, and that sort of let me know maybe the blade needed another few licks of the stone. Papa always says that a dull blade will cut you bad, but a sharp blade never will, unless the tool is mishandled.

  I will admit when he first told me that I did not understand what he was talking about. I must have shown that on my face because he smiled and stopped me at what I was doing—hatcheting on kindling for the cookstove. This was a few years ago, back at the farm.

  “Janette, girl, what I’m on about is that a dull blade is like a . . .” He paused to look around, as if the words he was talking about were waltzing across the barnyard. “There,” he said, pointing. “Imagine old Nell there.” Nell was our old plow horse at the time—she passed on a good six months or more before we ever left.

  I knew she wouldn’t have made the journey with us to Oregon, but I let myself think she would have. I could use her sweet company now. She had the prettiest eyes. But I’m all off the track again. What I was talking about was Papa pointing at her as she stood in a sort of daze at the corral gate, watching nothing in particular. “Now imagine her without any teeth.”

  “Why?” I said. “You know perfectly well Nell has a good set of teeth still, even though she is getting on in years.”

  “Getting on in years?” said Papa, smiling. “That old horse was around before they ever invented the idea for years!”

  “Papa, that’s not a nice thing to say about old Nell. She is sweet.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I’ll give you that much, she is a kindly old thing. But what I am on about is that if she didn’t have any teeth there would be no way she could chew through that tough hay we feed her. Like a dull blade will skin right off whatever it is you’re trying to cut or carve with it. And where does that blade want to end up?”

  He looked at me and I did not want to disappoint him, but for the life of me I had no idea what he was on about. I was still thinking of old Nell not having any teeth. I’d about decided I could mush up her food for her when Papa asked his odd question. I shrugged and looked at him.

  “Oh, Janette, you have to pay attention now. I won’t always be around to teach you the few things I have worth learning, girl.” He tugged out his handkerchief and mopped at his sweaty face, lifting his grimy hat enough to dab at his forehead.

  “Papa, don’t talk such nonsense. You will always be here for me.” I smiled.

  He got real serious on me then. And I reckoned he was right. Funny, I haven’t thought of that conversation we had so long ago, least not until now. And with Papa and the boys wandering around lost in the mountains hereabouts, I wish I hadn’t chased that thread today. It has made me sad enough that I don’t think I want to write any more this day. I will dream poorly tonight, too, I know it.

  It is not even anywhere close to Christmastime on the calendar and already I have read and reread all of Papa’s newspapers and manuals, the family Bible, every word, not that I understand them all. There is no way I care to guess what some of those words mean, though there are plenty of others that give up their meaning all too easily.

  But I will force myself to think back on that lesson on how to sharpen the axe blade because, as Papa says, there is a time for foolishness and a time for work, and the two best not mix. Now it was time for me to work. I needed the firewood and I didn’t need to be reminded of anything except that right then.

  I went back to working that blade with the stone and it paid off. The task grew easier with each swing of the axe. I was soon heated up in fine shape. I knew that meant I would have to swap out these damp clothes for dry clothes, but I will have to bathe first.

  The thought of it chills me, but I push it out of my mind until I chop enough lengths of wood sufficient to keep me in warmth and cooking fire for two days. And then I drop another dead standing tree, for good measure.

  When I say a tree, I am talking of trees that are dry, bark sloughing off, and no bigger around at the base than my leg. They burn well, being dry wood, but they do not offer much heat, being of the softer variety. I have yet to find any heavy, dense trees and suspect this raw country is bereft of them, too, on top of all the other things it does not have.

  Still, to be fair, this wood is about all I am able to handle. It is forgiving and easier than a hard wood to chop up. And some of the trees are so dead they don’t need felling with an axe. I push on them and they give up the ghost with a satisfying crash.

  The topsoil hereabouts is thin enough, all matted and veiny with hairlike roots from smaller, scrubby plants growing low down. They, too, are fairly sparse, and I suspect the roots of the trees do the same thing—spread outward like stretched fingers at the end of an arm. I expect that’s because there isn’t much in the way of opportunity for those roots to worm their way down into rock. And it most surely is rock I am standing on, if the mountains here are any indication.

  I manage to lay low as many of these rattly, easy burners as I can. They are a good twenty to forty feet long. If I am lucky they are easy pullers as well, and have at least the nub of an old branch I can muckle onto and drag behind me. I can do three at once if they’re fair to middling. I grab one tucked between my ribs and my right elbow, sort of locked in there. Then I bend low and grab another with my right hand, Then with my left, I hold the handle of the axe, midway down, and hook the axe head around a branch nub. Or if there isn’t one, I sink the bottom of the blade lengthwise in the trunk and drag it along behind me.

  I am thankful right now that I don’t have to go all that far from camp, but I see that this patch of forest, a mix of old and new growth, will not last me for long. I am in great hopes I won’t have to range further to find firewood, since I expect we will be away from here soon. But back to the wood, once I drag it to camp I spend time limbing the trees and then set to chopping them into useful lengths. That part is the hardest work, I don’t mind saying.

  I am blessed to have the wonderful little stove that Papa bought for the wagon. It is a solid sheet-steel beast that glows like a pumpkin when it’s been working many long hours. But it takes a lot of wood to get it warm and keep it that way. Were I prone to, I could not sleep for long stretches as the wood burns quickly and the stove’s firebox will not hold much at one stuffing.

  Nothing from these pines goes to waste. I salvage every scrap, from the wood itself right down to the crumbling sleeves of dry bark, which works exceptionally well to help raise a fire from embers. To this smoking bit, which I blow on to help along, I add twigs from the smallest branches, from out near the tips, then bigger and bigger bits, not very long, as the stove won’t stand anything of length.

  I snap what I can over my knee, though it is now a bruised thing. Both of them, in fact, but it is a quick method and I will gladly suffer bruises to get the task in hand. When I have had enough bruising, I lay the branches against the jut of gray rock nearby the wagon, and I stomp them. I do not prefer that because those pieces wing up in any direction they choose, like moths on a mission, and sometimes they stick me quick as a gunshot.

  I am prattling on and on about firewood, using up precious blank diary pages, and who will care? I am the only one who will read this one day. I will look back on this journal and smile. Maybe even read some out loud to Papa and the boys, perhaps on a grand Sunday afternoon family meal.

  We will all be sitting around a long, fine table. Our crockery will be bone china and there will be glass windows on all sides of us. As we talk we will eat good meats and warm biscuits, potatoes, gree
ns from our gardens, perhaps yellow squash and carrot, and green beans. And through those windows I will spy long, rolling fields all planted with wheat and corn and grasses, their tips silvering in a late-summer breeze under a stretch of sky bluer than Mama’s eyes.

  And above it all the sky will be quilted with enough goosedown clouds to make us smile and guess at shapes. The breeze reaches the full, shiny green leaves of the oak already setting its acorns. There is a white slat fence surrounding a greensward where I can hear children giggling. I cannot see them clearly yet, but I will. One of these evenings as I write this I will let my fancy fly even further along that thought trail, and I don’t doubt it will bring me much comfort.

  I came to in the midst of that thought and realized I had been standing in the campsite, shivering as the sun traveled to the west behind me. I found myself facing the east, like Papa. I wonder if I am beginning to think as he did. I worry I am let ting sorrow into my mind.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1849

  * * *

  I have been here all alone now, except for the oxen, for more than a week. I know how many days have passed because I scratch tiny marks, like sticks, on the side of the wagon, in a spot where Papa would not mind seeing them. Four upright stick scratches with one dragged through them, corner to corner, to make it five sticks. Tomorrow I complete a second bundle of stick marks. Today makes nine days I have been alone. I did not count the day they left to hunt.

  I know now that they are lost in the wilderness, somewhere out there, in one of the directions I look toward every day, all day. I have lessened my range since my earliest forays out into the surrounding wilds, concentrating instead on building up a goodly supply of firewood and counting and recounting the goods we have in our stores.