West of Here Page 7

“Crushed it,” said Ethan.

  “Ah.” The old Indian surveyed the little valley in the waning light. Beyond the foothills, the peaks of the divide were socked in by dark cloud cover. More heavy snow was imminent. George had visited this very spot as recently as high summer, when the evening hours were filled with the ghostly trilling of marmots and the tin whistle of thrushes from across the canyon.

  “What brings you up here, George?”

  “Postmaster sent word. It’s your woman. Her time has come.”

  Ethan dropped the skillet and practically leapt to his feet.

  “Sit,” said George. “We’re out of day. We’ll have to wait for morning.”

  “But we can’t wait! I have to be there!”

  George broke into a craggy smile. “Not really, you don’t.”

  Thus began the longest night of Ethan Thornburgh’s life. Oblivious of Ethan’s hand-wringing preoccupation, or perhaps because of it, George talked incessantly throughout the ordeal. Ethan had never heard an Indian talk at such length. His voice flowed as constant and steady as the Elwha. He sung the praises of sourdough bread endlessly, complained about the preponderance of salmon glutting the Elwha, wondered aloud as to the origins of the first sourdough bread, inquired as to whether Ethan happened to know where he might acquire some different varieties of sourdough bread, and just when it seemed he’d exhausted the subject altogether, Indian George pulled a half loaf of sourdough from his coat pocket and commenced eating it pinch by pinch. But even the tough, impossibly dry bread could not slow the river of his voice.

  And all the while, as George’s voice sounded in the night, punctuated intermittently by the popping of the fire, Ethan’s thoughts raced and bounded in his head. He shifted restlessly on his haunches. Morning seemed so remote that it would never arrive. He ached to be in town with Eva. His only comfort was the knowledge that all the parts of his new life were fitting perfectly into place, engaging harmoniously as though by some process of mechanization: Eva, Ethan Jr., all the blessings that were due to him as a man. In those moments when his mind took firm hold of this idea, he sunk into a sort of reverie. And it was during one of these reveries that Ethan was struck as though by lightning with the single greatest idea of his life, the one idea among all those scribbled notes and tossed off scratchings that would prove the key to unlocking his future. What serendipity, what power of fate was this at work, that he had only to stumble upon his destiny, had only to wade through a swamp in his undershorts, to claim this canyon without even knowing why, to squat on it and daydream until the moment arrived when its purpose was delivered to him? The heat of inspiration suffused his whole body.

  Indian George stopped talking when he saw Ethan climb mechanically to his feet and proceed, as though in a trance, to the edge of the chasm, where he stood looking down at the dark restless form of the river rushing through the canyon. And after a moment, Ethan began to laugh, a big hearty gregarious laughter that wracked his body and filled the night. The laughter of a god smitten with his creation. And Indian George began to laugh, too, not even knowing the source of his own mirth.

  * * *

  THOMAS STOOD JUST inside the door of Adam’s sparse little room at the Olympic. His cheek had only recently stopped stinging from the slap his mother had issued him upon his return from the hills.

  “Go to the Potato Counter,” she’d told him. “He’s at the Olympic.”

  With a bittersweet hard candy lodged between his cheek and gum, Thomas’s lips set silently to work over the handwritten columns inside the leather bound book. Adam went about the business of packing his open bag on the bed, now and again sneaking a sidelong glance at the boy. The twitches were getting worse. They were coming in fits. Adam observed a new strangeness in the boy. He seemed at once closer and further away. His expressions were less benign, sharper. He was lean and spindly and round-faced as ever, but there was something in his bearing that suggested manhood.

  Some of the handwriting was slanty, and some of it was in a loopy hand, and the columns were uneven, which Thomas liked, but not too uneven, and the feel of the leather spine was smooth and cool in his hands. He did not like the columns with the numbers, the way the fours were too different to have the same meaning, and how all of the numbers kept changing their meaning, how they didn’t really mean anything until they were attached to something else. And he didn’t like the way that some of the zeros didn’t connect. He liked the ink blots, but not the ones touching the letters or numbers that didn’t come first, and not the ones at the top of zeros. Thomas liked the words better than the numbers. They were even less exact than the numbers, but they told better stories than the numbers, which could only go up or down.

  “What do you make of all that, boy?” said Adam, fastening the leather straps of his bag. “Hmph. Can’t say as I understand what the devil you find so interesting in any of it, considering it can’t possibly make any sense to you, but I’m glad of it.”

  Adam found himself wondering with a pang what would become of the boy. He was liable to start getting bigger and stronger. What if the fits got worse? Who could control him? What if he hurt somebody? Adam’s worst fear was that he would be forced to take action himself. There was nobody here to shepherd the boy, nobody to keep him under control, not even a watchful eye to monitor his condition. Hoko seemed to exercise little influence over his wandering ways. Many of the natives stubbornly clung to the belief that the boy was gifted and could not see the curse for what it was. And just what was it, anyway? Adam could not say, but it was not a gift. At best, the white world would treat the boy with stepmother kindness, Adam reckoned, but then, they’d treat him that way anyway. God forbid he should ever take to the bottle and become unmanageable. There was no getting around Jamestown, no getting around the Shakers. He must put the boy among them if he was to have a chance. Even if it meant separating him from his mother. It was the only way.

  “Look at me, boy.”

  Thomas did not look up, but continued appraising the columns of words and numbers.

  “Thomas, look at me.”

  Thomas looked up from the book. His lips stopped moving.

  While some of the Klallam believed the boy could see many worlds, Adam was not convinced he could even see one. Sometimes he felt sure that the boy’s blue eyes were sightless, which accounted for their strange distant appearance. And yet the boy moved gracefully through the world, so how could this be?

  “You quit running off now, you understand? You stick by your mother. Watch her. Do what she does. And quit following white men around, unless you’ve got something useful to offer them. Do you understand? Because I suspect you understand a lot more than you’re letting on, boy. I suspect you know the difference between right and wrong. And that’s something. It may not seem like much, but it’s a lot. Just keep knowing right from wrong, you hear me?”

  Thomas heard him, but he was not really listening. He was looking across the room at the shaving mirror on the foot of the bed. More precisely, he was looking at the reflection of almost but not exactly half of the window and was straining to see what was in the reflection of the world outside the window. But he could not quite apprehend the reflection. So he looked out the real window and could see a light snow beginning to fall, and then he looked back out the reflected window, but it wasn’t snowing there.

  Watching the unwitting boy, Adam resolved himself once more on the matter of Jamestown. “I’ll be back through town in a week or two.”

  Thomas moved to the foot of the bed and picked up the mirror. He did not look at his own reflection, but turned his back to Adam and looked at Adam’s reflection over his shoulder.

  “Stick by your mother,” said Adam’s reflection.

  onward

  JANUARY 1890

  When confronted with the resignation of Abraham Lincoln Charles, the party’s Klallam guide — who had taken leave stealthily from base camp the previous night, leaving only his rations — Mather was nonchalant. “Fairy tales,” he
mused, slapping Dolly kindly on the hindquarters. “They take to them like children. Boogeymen and Thunderbirds. Sometimes I think they make them up so that they don’t have to confront their real fears.”

  The rest of the party went silently about their tasks. Haywood was fidgeting impatiently with the altimeter, an open notebook in his lap. Runnells was squatting by the fire, renesting the skillets and packing the coffee away. Reese was cleaning his rifle beneath the cover of a fir, with Moose, one of the bear dogs, at his feet. And Cunningham was somewhere out in the brush with a case of the trots. The snow had turned to slush during the night, and now the rain came straight down in big heavy droplets. The tents were heavy with it. And the slate gray sky promised more to come.

  “Better that he spooked now than later, I suppose,” pursued Mather. “Let’s cinch up these mules and beat a path to the promised land, shall we? We’ve lost a guide, but we’ve gained some flour. And we’ve still got Dolly and Daisy on our side.”

  “A couple of plugs,” observed Reese, from behind a walrus mustache. “I practically had to beat the fat one with an ax handle to get her stirring this morning.”

  “A mule, despite its reputation, can be finessed, Reese. Unlike that stubborn pair of cayuses you attempted to secure from the natives.”

  “Finessed? A mule? You’re out of your mind, Jim.”

  Mather rather liked the stubbornness of mules, enough to afford them a good deal of patience. The trick, to Mather’s way of thinking, was to harness their will. This was done gently, not overtly. The world was no more a black-and-white proposition to a mule, he reasoned, than it was to a man. Beat them, and you only exhausted their will. Charm them, and they would give you their life force. Mules had served him well all the way up the Mackenzie River. And despite what Reese had to say, Mather had a good feeling about Dolly and Daisy. They had sturdy legs on them, and broad backs.

  “You’ll see,” said Mather. “These two will serve us well.”

  Four hours later, Dolly and Daisy were put to the test. When faced with the very swamp Ethan had crossed in his underwear, the mules refused to proceed farther than ankle deep in the muck, braying in protest at the prospect of crossing. Mather offered them gentle encouragement, patting their heads, scratching their backsides, nudging them along with a hip. After several minutes, these methods still failed to inspire movement in the beasts, and Reese began flaying them with the butt of his rifle, in spite of Mather’s entreaties. Dolly and Daisy began plodding forward incrementally. Within a half-dozen steps, however, they were mired to the belly and could proceed no farther, could not even rear up in spite of their efforts. Runnells and Haywood were forced to unload the cargo and haul it out of the swamp, as Mather and the others backed the braying mules out with considerable effort.

  They were a half day making three trips along switchbacks down the thickly wooded gulley to the river, where they staged their supplies at the foot of a narrow canyon. In addition to the large stores of flour, sugar, coffee, and pemmican, their cargo included tobacco and whiskey and fishing tackle and bacon grease, oilskin and canvas and blankets and axes and whipsaws and rifles. Also among the supplies were Reese’s tools for mineral prospecting, Cunningham’s medical supplies, and Haywood’s survey equipment.

  The oilskin was no match for the relentless rain, nor did the canopy of timber offer much protection from the downpour, as they plodded down the gulley with the last load of supplies. Dolly and Daisy were cooperative beneath their slackened loads. They handled the mudslicked terrain with relative ease. The dogs bounded ahead at all times, now and again sniffing. The morale of the party remained upbeat through the dreary weather. Haywood moved with a spring in his step. Cunningham, the untested professional man, kept a vigorous pace, to everyone’s relief. Reese and Runnells bantered about everything from bear hunting to suet pudding.

  Mather was at the head of the group, preoccupied by the spirit of adventure. The complexities of living had been pared down to the minimum, reduced to the business of steady progress. The lay of the land was no more rugged than a few small canyons broken with gulleys and streams.

  The canopy was high, the understory dense, but not so thick as to tangle up the mules. The downhill route was sodden in the bare spots, but the thick groundcover of fern and salal allowed for passable footholds. All things considered, the terrain was quite easily navigated, but then, they were still miles from the high country.

  In the late afternoon, the party set up camp on a high bank overlooking a logjam, just around a bend from the mouth of a narrow canyon, where the river could be heard roaring through the chute. Runnells gathered deadfall and started a cooking fire while Cunningham and Haywood pitched the tents and unburdened the mules. Reese gathered his tackle and headed for a deep hole just above the logjam where, to the disbelief of the whole party, he caught no fewer than fourteen fish of five varieties in a twenty-minute period.

  “They’re catching themselves,” he exclaimed. “The river is practically bubbling with them.”

  Restless to move forward, Mather set out up canyon with his rifle for the purpose of collateral exploration. After a quarter mile up the wooded incline, he emerged in a small clear meadow, where the valley opened up in the shape of a teardrop. From this vantage he caught his first glimpse of the divide, its steep snow-clad ridges festooned with clouds. On a bluff overlooking the canyon, Mather spotted, to his surprise, a cabin, and made his way toward it through the snow. An Indian with a yellow bandanna fastened about his neck in the manner of a cravat was at work on the roof. The Indian nodded to Mather, took note of the rifle, but kept to his work, notching a crossbeam with a hatchet.

  Mather set his rifle aside and sat on a stump, whereupon he packed a pipeload. He watched the Indian work for several minutes without comment. It was almost as though Mather was not there.

  “A fine spot you’ve picked here,” said Mather, at last.

  “Fine spot,” concurred George, dismounting the roof beam. “But I didn’t pick it. It belongs to somebody else. You may have passed him.”

  “I can’t say that I did. We left the trail a few miles back. We’ve been back and forth through the gorge with our supplies. We’re headed for the divide. For the Quinault, actually.”

  “Mm,” said George.

  Mather was amused by the Indian’s attire. While most of the natives were content with cotton twill and flannel work clothes, this one seemed to fancy himself something of a clotheshorse. Not only did he wear his bandanna in a ridiculous manner, he wore a waistcoat and wool trousers, and a small-brimmed hat.

  Mather extended a hand. “The name’s Mather. My party’s just downriver.”

  George shook his hand. “I’m George.”

  Mather offered George his grip of tobacco, which George declined.

  “When do you expect this somebody back?” Mather inquired.

  “I don’t know him well enough to say. It was his woman’s time.”

  That the woman was Eva did not occur to Mather. Had this occurred to him, he might have inquired about the matter in greater detail. “You work for this man, I take it?”

  “No.”

  “He’s an Indian?”

  “No.”

  “Do you suppose he’d mind if my men and I staged our supplies here for a day or two? We’ve got a boat to build.”

  “And you’re going to Quinault?”

  “That we are.”

  “In a boat?”

  “As far as it’s practicable, we are. We’ve got well over a thousand pounds of fortifications.”

  “Mm. Yes,” said George, gravely.

  “What is it?” said Mather.

  George proceeded to explain that several miles upriver, through the next gap, lay a second, larger canyon, and that if they were determined to build a boat, they’d be better served to build it there, beyond the head of the canyon. They’d never navigate a boat through the canyon, not even a canoe. When Mather asked him what lay beyond the second canyon, George could not say.


  “Ever know anyone who’s been beyond that?”

  “When I was a boy, there was a Quinault woman who used to bring her children over the mountains every summer to the Elwha to see her people.”

  Mather grunted a laugh. “A woman with children, you say?”

  George laughed, too, not really knowing why. “Yes.”

  “How did she get by the Thunderbird?” mused Mather.

  George scratched his neck, and looked toward the divide, as if the answer might be found somewhere amid the lofty ridges. “That’s a good question.”

  Mather smiled. “What would you say if I crossed those mountains, and when I returned, I told you I encountered no Thunderbird?”

  “I’d say you were lucky.”

  “Indeed, I’m lucky. And I’ve little doubt that my luck will hold out where this Thunderbird is concerned.”

  George was still looking for answers in the high country. “But then I’d say you were unlucky.”

  “Unlucky?”

  “Yes. Because you couldn’t see the world underneath the world.”

  “Ahh.”

  So amused by all of this was Mather that he invited George to join the expedition for dinner. George accepted but upon arriving at the camp downriver was disappointed to discover Runnells filleting salmon with a buck knife. His spirits improved drastically, however, when he spotted a frothing crock of what he presumed to be sourdough starter near Runnells’s feet.

  Mather was gregarious throughout dinner, a veritable master of ceremonies, eliciting conversation from George for the entertainment of his men. George obliged, and dined happily on sourdough, while the others inhaled the fourteen salmon among them, leaving only the discarded skins ringing the edge of the fire, where smoke curled off of them in tiny plumes. Afterward, they smoked by the fire, and Mather uncorked the whiskey and passed it around. George did not partake of the whiskey but continued eating sourdough in little balls. Mather persisted in coaxing stories out of the old Indian. George did not disappoint. Gazing intently across the dancing yellow flames at Mather and Haywood, George told the men of the Great Spirit who had looked over his people for thousands of years. He used his hands to conjure the Great Spirit out of the air and show it to them. And when the white men could not see the Great Spirit, George released it just above the lapping tongue of the flames, and it rose like smoke, and even Mather felt something in his spirit rise, even as something else pinned him to his seat. Outwardly, however, he expressed only amusement.