Gilda Trillim
Page 27
However, the eight solid accounts are worth noting in that until I enquired, in all but two cases the men (they were all men) who repeated them to me had never mentioned the encounter to anyone else before. I have deposited these accounts in the archives of the Utah Folklore Association at Utah State University. I give only two in this work. I include my own as well.
The first was from a hand who worked for my father. He says this happened in 2008 in June up near Minor’s Basin.
“Yeah, well I was riding a four-wheeler down a back logging road because there were some fences your pa wanted me to mend. I parked it and had to walk the line for a couple of miles into some dense aspen most of the morning. I came to a little clearing and decided to have some lunch. I pulled out my sandwich and a RedBull I had and then laid down to rest, propping my pack up against a tree to use as a pillow. I must have nodded off but when I woke up I see what I thought was a little girl looking at me, but it wasn’t a little girl because she had tits like a full-grown woman and they were bared for all the world to see. She was just standing there and when I opened my eyes she looked for just a moment and then ran like a deer into the deep forest. It took me a minute to come to and to be honest I was pretty sure I was dreaming. But it seemed pretty real and I’ve never seen nothing like it before.”
The second encounter was from a Mexican ranch supervisor who worked for my father (I’ve translated this from his Spanish).
“It was during the muzzleloader hunt about the end of September 2012. I was up high in the Beaver Basin. I was on Slayer, up that road that runs up by the flanks of Waas. I was alone up there, largely because a big Pine had come down on the road and no one had cleared it away yet. It was blocking ATVs, motorcycles and trucks, but the horse had no trouble going around it. I was plodding through some light snow when I spotted a three-point standing broadside in the road looking at me. Slayer came to a halt and I slipped out of the saddle. I had the rifle out and moved forward real slow and took the shot. I thought it was dead on behind the front leg, but it was high and the gutshot beast busted up hill. I followed on foot, it being too rocky for the horse. The wounded animal was leaving a blood trail wet and clear. It was losing a lot of blood. I knew it could not get far so I reloaded the gun with three pellets, put in a bullet, reprimed, and started following it up the hill. It was crazy steep. I found the buck sitting in some underbrush breathing hard. I finished it with a good heart shot. Now I was glad that it had run uphill ‘cause it was going to be easier to drag him down to the horse instead of up. I had my elbow length rubber gloves because they were talking then that some of the deer had Mad Deer Disease so I put those on and gutted it and grabbed it by the horns and started pulling it down the hill. It was pretty overgrown so about half way down to the road I stopped to rest.
I was sitting on a boulder, when I look up and see what I thought was a little girl standing there. She was in a buckskin dress of sorts and wearing a crown-like thing on her head. I’d heard of this elf in stories and knew a guy who had seen her. I said ¡hola! and she asked me in Spanish if I was going to pay the tribute for the deer off her mountain. I asked what it was and she said a small piece of the hindquarter. I was actually pretty scared. This girl was like a woman but smaller, but she had devil eyes, and so I told her to take what she would like. She was fast and just stabbed a long-bladed knife right into the butt and carved out a piece. Said ¡gracias! and then took off up the hill. She was a rabbit.”
One can see from the map that the encounters (more certain encounters are in blue, and less in red) run along a line running roughly from the Buckeye Lake (near the yellow pin marking Trillim’s cabin) to the Mt. Waas area.
In the region near the most sightings, I set up a deer stand high up in a pine. I used logging shoes and climbing equipment to set it up and then I waited high above the forest floor.
I waited three days on the first attempt. Sitting in my deer stand, eating, reading, and watching. I nearly went batty. Long into the night I would stare through my night vision scope, looking at the trail below me. I saw deer, bear, and cows in abundance. About two weeks later I tried again. This time I was successful. Sort of. I didn’t find her, she found me. I fell asleep (so many of the accounts report sleep preceding her appearance) and when I awoke she was looking at me, squatting on a branch of the pine in which I was concealed. She was dressed in camo pants and a black T-shirt—quite unexpected given the reports I’d heard. Like finding a leprechaun dressed in jeans. She was small. Maybe four feet high and lithe as a dancer. She looked older than I expected, maybe even some graying on the edges of her dark brown hair. Her eyes were clear but there was a bit of age about them. I would put her perhaps as old as thirty-five or even forty. This quite surprised me as I expected more a young girl as the reports tended to suggest.
I made no move, but looked her in the eyes. Then I smiled. She did not smile back, but said, “¿Sabes que facillo sería matarte?” (Do you know how easy it would be to kill you?) I didn’t know what to say, but nodded. Then in American English she said, “Stop looking for me.” Then added in Spanish, ¿Entiende?” She then climbed quickly down the tree, making an almost fifteen-foot drop at the end from the lowest branches of the Ponderosa to the ground. I finally had enough clarity of thought to shout after her, “Did you ever meet Gilda Trillim?” It was a stupid thing to say, since she had only met her twice in brief, random encounter. How would she know who Trillim was? But as if in answer, she turned and smiled at me and flipped me off, just as she had Gilda. Then she turned away and began moving as if she meant to sprint away. I called out almost in desperation, “Do you have a name?” This stopped her. She turned her head up, almost in amusement, and said, “Estrellas. My name is de las estrellas.” Her Spanish and English were both flawless. The name translates as ‘From the stars.’
Since then I have given up the search. I felt a genuine threat in her first declaration to me. I took it seriously. There are human laws, but there are also mountain laws. Someone who does not want to be found must be allowed that right. But these things I believe about her. She is educated. Her diction is very good and there was a wryness about her that spoke of intelligence and mischief. No one has ever seen her in the winter, so I believe she spends her winters elsewhere. But something in her look when she raised her middle finger led me to believe it was a dog whistle, signaling me that she knew who I meant. She was letting me know Gilda was known even to her.
Most important in this she was a real person. A number of scholars, most notably, Gillian Weaver of the University of Idaho, have argued that Gilda was going mad and these hallucinations were signs of some sort of mental collapse that might explain the strange turn her life took toward the end. She was not mad—unless I am as well.
Vignette 20
1. Etulain, R. W. “Wallace Stegner and Western Spirituality.” Literature and Belief 21 (2001): 255–71.
2. Stapley, J. A. and K. Wright. “Female Ritual Healing in Mormonism.” Journal of Mormon History 37 (2011): 1–85.
Vignette 22
1. Friedman, K. T. and G. N. Glick. “Wild Fluctuations: Was Gilda Trillim Bipolar? A Look at New Evidence.” The Journal of Historical Psychological Research 45 (2007): 344–51.
2. Steward, M. “Empress Trillim is Wearing No Clothes.” The New York Review of Books 58.16 (2011): 34–36.
3. Tobkin. M. “Trillim, McCarthy, and Stegner: One of These Western Writers Has Crashed the Party.” Quarterly West 57 (2004): 28–35.
4. Lightfoot, S. A Comparison of Jungian, Freudian, and Lacanian Perspectives on Trillim’s Life and Work. PhD Dissertation. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. 2011.
5. Franks, K. “Was Gilda Trillim Dying? A Re-examination.” Journal of American Studies 41 (2007): 321–29
Vignette 23
1. Donatello, A. “A Fragment from Trillim’s Last Day.” Trillim Archives Catalog #1497. 1999.
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