“Have you ever been camping, Sarah?” Myra adjusted her pack belt.
“I hated it.”
“Back east?”
Sarah opened her eyes. “My parents sent me to this camp last summer in Quebec.” She spat. “I know about sailboats and canoes. I was sent home.”
“A total waste of time?” Myra was smiling.
“We tried to cross this huge lake in our canoes and a storm came up. We almost sank. At least out here we won’t be in canoes, right? Then a week later we got caught in a bigger storm, and two sailboats sank. One girl broke her arm.” Sarah paused. “They caught me opening the drain plugs in one of the sailboats the next day. That finally got me out of there.” Tom wiped his neck with a handkerchief, then checked his glasses. “I don’t think you’re my grandfather. Jailer, more like.”
“Have you been in jail?” Tom put his glasses back on.
“Juvie.”
“This is like juvie? Being out here?” Myra asked.
“Worse.” said Sarah.
“When I was eight, I was sent to a place like your juvie.” William’s wandering eye roamed up and away. His voice rumbled.
“Where?”
“I was born on Haida Gwaii, off the mid BC coast, home of the Haida people. My tribe. When I was eight, my dad took off after my mother died. The government sent me to a school on the mainland, in Kamloops. For native people, to make us like white people.” William’s loose eye landed on Sarah and held. “I forgot my language and I almost forgot my people, too. I ran away, at 15, and came down to the States. If your juvie was anything like that place in Kamloops, you know this isn’t worse than that.”
Sarah said nothing. She lurched forward and rose to her feet. She was ready to leave. They’d been stopped for three minutes.
After an hour they came to a stream that crossed the trail just before an abandoned cabin. The stream was rushing over rocks. They could cross without removing their boots, but the rocks were slippery, covered with racing water.
Sarah began to cross after watching where Tom stepped, but she had no walking stick for support. Her foot slipped. She fell, hard and fast. She grabbed for a branch but she missed. She landed face down in the stream. The water poured against her. Her pack had ridden forward as she fell. She struggled to raise herself. By the time Myra and William reached her and pulled her up, she was soaked through. Even her pack, which had remained on her back, was partly soaked.
Sarah stumbled from the stream, dripping, flinging her pack. “That’s it. I’m outa here.” Soaked, she marched back down the trail, fast. She disappeared around the bend, head up, arms swinging. She was exactly the whining, spitting bundle of rage William had foreseen.
“Get a fire started. A big one.”
Myra turned and went after Sarah. William gathered wood and started a fire. Tom opened Sarah’s pack, strung a line, and hung what was wet. Half an hour later, Myra returned. Sarah, feet kicking, was slung over Myra’s shoulder. She was sputtering and her teeth were chattering. She was moving clumsily. Myra found dry clothes in Sarah’s pack. Sarah changed in the cabin with Myra’s help.
William built up the fire and arranged a place for Sarah to sit. Tom pulled out the stove and brewed hot water for tea. When Sarah sat down by the fire, Myra draped her own sleeping bag across Sarah’s shoulders. Sarah shuddered, holding the bag, lips quivering. Her bare feet, alabaster white, were covered with pine needles. Tom set up the tents with Myra’s help while William fed the fire, tended the hanging clothes, and gathered more wood. Sarah now held a mug of hot tea with both hands. She remained silent.
“We’ll camp here,” Tom said.
“Duh.” Sarah’s teeth clacked.
“Ah. You can talk even while shivering. We aren’t that far from where we would have camped anyway, at Lillian River, but it’s not as gloomy here.”
“Not gloomy? Everywhere here is gloomy. I’ll report you to the state. Child abuse. Grandfathers don’t torture their grandchildren. This is torture.”
“I had to chase her halfway back to the car, Tom. She took some convincing to return.”
“Convincing? That’s what you call it? Carrying me?”
“You were becoming hypothermic, Sarah. It’s less than 50 degrees today. Look at you, you’re still shaking.” Sarah drank tea, then held out her cup for more. Her legs were steaming, as were the hanging clothes. She pulled the bag tighter over her shoulder.
“I should have given you my walking stick before you crossed,” Tom said. “That was a mistake.”
Sarah looked into the fire. She finally stopped shaking. When she took a breath she shuddered. “This place is cold. Cold. I froze at that skate park. I froze at Ruth’s. I’m freezing here.” Sarah scratched her nose. “I froze back east, too. Everywhere I go it’s cold. I mean, this out here? This is the sticks. Why am I here, anyway? Oh, that’s right. I’m on a time out.” A tear rolled down her cheek. She sniffled, then straightened. “I’m hungry.”
“We’ll have dinner at sundown,” Tom said. “First we need to get your sleeping bag and clothes dry.”
Myra made a place by the fire next to Sarah. Sarah moved away. Tom was looking at his granddaughter, then William. William knew Tom was thinking Sarah coming along was a huge mistake.
“Sarah.” William squatted across the fire from her. “Your first time ever with a big pack on your back was today, am I right?” Sarah scowled. She huddled close to the fire. “Four miles we came, today. You didn’t complain, not really. The first time I took Myra out, she complained, every single step.”
“She did?”
“He’s mellowed plenty since he took me out.” Myra glared at William. “He was a lot meaner then and not half as old. Or fat. But, it’s true. I complained.”
For an instant, Sarah was proud.
By late afternoon Sarah’s clothing and sleeping bag were dry. They had seen no one all day since the party of four had started up the trail before them. Once Sarah’s boots were dry, she and Myra wandered together down to the broad meadows by the river. Along the winding river bottom, maples and alders clustered along old empty channels. Here, 15 miles back from the strait and the sea, and 1,000 feet higher, the trees were bare of buds. Across the river, through the empty branches and the scattered firs, steep slopes rose to high snowy ridges and rocky peaks.
“You going to be okay, ‘Eye? You seemed to be suffering a little back there.”
“I’ll be all right, Tom, once I get a few miles under me. It hurts plenty right now but it will pass.” William could see Sarah down on the meadow. She had a stick and was poking some old elk dung. Myra basked in the sinking sun. “Sarah’s ornery. Being ornery can help, out here.”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “She’s small. This is a mistake. It was a bad idea, ‘Eye, to bring her. We’re keeping her from school. I don’t formally have permission to have her with me, and if anything happens, Ruth will sic the authorities on me, that’s for sure. What kind of father sends his daughter across the country, alone, to live all summer with a stranger anyway?”
“I’m not surprised Ruth didn’t want to keep Sarah, Tom. Fletcher surely wouldn’t want your granddaughter to be living in his house. He’s had it in for you forever.” Tom had once told William that after returning from Vietnam he got together with Ruth, unaware she was spoken for by Fletcher Lynch. She became pregnant. Tom tried to do the right thing, and married her. Gone fishing for months at a time, Tom rarely saw his daughter, and before Becky was three years old Ruth left Tom and moved in with Lynch.
Tom prepared the food. Through a gap in the trees, William could see the Elwha, flowing fast and dark. Across the river, in a distant meadow, three big elk looked his way.
By the time Myra and Sarah had returned to the fire, the distant meadow was in gloom, the elk gone.
They ate dinner, sitting around the hot coals, bowls in their laps, feet braced a
gainst old sections of cut logs they’d pulled around the fire pit. The western sky, above the ridges, glowed dark red, then faded. The coals shimmered. Sarah pulled out her sketchpad and pencil.
Myra settled down not far from Sarah. “This cabin here?” Myra waved toward the dark. “People came way out here, homesteaded, over 100 years ago. Before that, this valley and river belonged to the tribes. Before they built the dams to power the logging mills, salmon in this river were 100 pounds apiece. Now, after 100 years, the dams are out again.”
Sarah was bent over her pad. Now and then she’d raise her head and look across the fire at Tom and William. Heat throbbed from the coals. Thin smoke rose to smudge stars overhead.
William leaned back against his log, felt the heat. How many thousands of years had people sat before fires just like this, quiet, staring, lost in their thoughts? How many hundreds of thousands?
“A story,” Myra said.
Sarah closed her pad. She was finally looking warm. William was stiff. Only four miles and he felt crippled. Tom sat relaxed, opening and closing his pocketknife. Myra was looking at Tom, expectant. “Come on, Tom. Tell Sarah where we’re going, and why. Tell me and my dad, too.”
“You mean, aside from kidnapping?” Sarah scowled at Tom, Myra, then William.
Tom closed his pocketknife with a snap. “You haven’t been kidnapped, Sarah. You’re not really a child, either. You made it across the country alone, found the bus to Port Angeles from the airport, found your grandmother.”
“Big mistake,” Sarah said.
“Maybe so, Sarah. Jury’s still out on that. I’m having a hard time seeing you back at Ruth and Fletcher’s. They’d put you in school; the law requires that. Either that or, what? Homeless in a strange town?”
“I’d be fine.”
“I was older than you, but when I came back from Vietnam I bet I was as miserable as you are today. Back then, my grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, took me into these woods when I had nowhere else to go. Not so different than you, actually. My last trip in with him, where we’re going now, he was going to show me something. He died up here. I buried him.” Sarah blinked. “I have some unfinished business, and I asked ‘Eye to come with me, and ‘Eye asked Myra. Now, with you, we’re four. Here you are, and as ‘Eye said, you did pretty well today.”
“What unfinished business? You said you had unfinished business.”
“Ah. I’ll answer your question only if one day you tell me about yourself and your mother. Will you do that?”
“Maybe. Depends.”
“Fair enough.” Tom tossed another thick log on the fire. Sparks rose. Sarah backed into her log, side against Myra. Myra adjusted herself to fit with Sarah.
Tom began.
“I grew up in Port Angeles. My father worked in the logging woods like his father before him, but when he returned from the Navy, after World War II, he got hurt, so he took a job with the postal service. My mother was a grade school teacher. I was pretty wild when in high school, rousting around. I had no interest in college, or money for college, when I graduated from high school. It was 1965. That summer I was drafted.”
“What’s that?” Sarah brushed needles off her ankles.
“Back when I was young, we had no choice about military service once out of school. There was a war over in Asia and the army needed bodies. We’d be sent a letter, told to report to military training. One day I was stuffing grocery bags and the next I was on a bus headed for basic training. Six months later I was in a war. I flew home in January, 1968. I landed in Los Angeles, flew up to Seattle, finished my duty at Fort Lewis, and mustered out that spring. I was 21 years old. My mother died while I was in Vietnam and my father, your great-grandfather, disappeared into the bottle, got fired from the post office.” Tom stretched. His back cracked. “It was my grandfather who came to see me down at Fort Lewis every other weekend before I mustered out, even though it was a long damn drive. His name was Robert Olsen, but his friends called him Bob. I’d called him Bob-Bob since I was three. Bob-Bob’s grandfather, Henry David Olsen, came into the west in 1855. Henry David was, let’s see, Sarah, your great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was here just after this place was first settled by whites. He hunted game for the logging camps. He had a native wife whose brother showed him the ancient trails into the high country.”
Myra and William exchanged a look. It was news to William about Tom’s heritage.
Tom went on, “Having a native wife meant he was shunned in settler communities. His three children, though, passed for white. By the time Bob-Bob came along, the family had buried our native heritage, as people did in those days. Bob-Bob, though, learned of his heritage from Henry David Olsen, his grandfather. Bob-Bob first went into this country, maybe the same trails we’re on now, as a boy with Henry David before 1910, back when these trails were ancient Indian paths.”
“Did Henry David kidnap Bob-Bob the way you kidnapped me?”
Tom thought. “Maybe he did. I don’t know. That’s what Bob-Bob did with me, though. A month after I mustered out from the army, Bob-Bob told me to get my drunken ass off his couch. He took me into the Olympics.”
“So this grandparents kidnapping grandkids is, what, an Olsen family rule?”
William, seeing Sarah’s expression, laughed.
Tom studied his granddaughter. “Maybe it is, Sarah. Anyway, Bob-Bob showed me the secret places, the high tarns, basins, the lost valleys. He’d spent his entire life logging the peninsula, plus he’d ranged all the creeks and streams looking for minerals. He even had a mining claim in what later became part of the national park. He knew these million acres as well as any man. He had close friends in the Sol Duc Tribe. They taught him something of this country. The settlers here thought that the native people were afraid of the interior, and had never explored it, but Bob-Bob knew that was untrue.” Myra nodded. Tom reached for a stick, pushed coals. “Once you get up high, back in here, in addition to peaks, glaciers and snowfields, there are miles and miles of open alpine terrain, basins, lakes, and fields of heather, blueberry, paintbrush. It’s beautiful.” Tom shifted against his log. “In August we came in here, same exact route we’re taking now. We spent a week lugging in huge packs of food and stores, building big caches up where Godkin Creek drains into the Elwha. We were preparing for a long September trip. Bob-Bob wanted to take me back to his old mining claim. He told me he wanted to show me something up there, something his grandfather, Henry David, had found years and years earlier. We made two trips up to Godkin that week, maybe 100 miles of walking. I was in pretty good shape; young, able to run like the wind if I wanted to. Bob-Bob, he was 74 years old, but he kept going.”
“Snowfields? Snow in July? That’s summer.”
Myra waved toward the ridges. “You saw the snow across the river, up high, earlier? These mountains start at sea level. There’s lots of moisture coming off the ocean.”
“September is the best month, here, for weather,” Tom went on. “The bugs are gone, the nights are cool, the days, hot. Back then, the late ‘60s, we had the place to ourselves. A week later we brought huge packs a third time up to Godkin Creek.”
By now fully dark, the glow to the west was gone. The coals glimmered.
“Where was he taking you?” Myra asked. “Did you know?”
Tom shook his head. “All he said was, ‘I have something to show you that Henry David showed me.’ We reached our cache, big sacks hanging from trees beyond the reach of bears. We camped there and the next day started ferrying food up into Bear Creek, off Godkin Creek. Coming up from Whiskey Bend we were on a trail and the walking was clear and unobstructed. Now we were off trail, working through the forest.
“It would have taken three or four days to get everything ferried up there. It’s not that far, maybe six miles from the mouth of the Godkin to the camp on Bear Creek, but we were in no hurry and it was a little far to
make a round trip in one day lugging a big pack. Bob-Bob had anticipated this; we brought along our tent, sleeping bags and cooking gear. There was a level area on a bench above the creek in that high valley, away from a cliff. We set up our tent and he pulled out his ax and went to chop wood. I explored east toward the head of the valley. There was a huge slide slope beyond the cliff and I climbed high on that, several hundred feet, over boulders. I found a place to sit, facing west, down the valley.
“The sun was strong. Dragonflies buzzed. This was a remote valley, far from trails. I could see, on the slide slope below me, two huge boulders, they could have been two people standing, and embracing, with a space between them. High above, an eagle circled. I could hear Bob-Bob down by the campsite, hidden in the trees, chopping wood, and then it was silent. I was tired, my seat was comfortable. I was sleepy in the sun. I must have slept, but then I heard the eagle cry, twice. I started back, surprised that I didn’t see smoke, because Bob-Bob always started a fire when he made camp. When I reached our camp I knew something was wrong right away. It was silent. A distance away I saw a log with a deep new cut, smooth and almost perfect. He must have paused for some reason, swinging the ax into the log, because it rested there, standing, stuck in the wood, one blade of the double-bit pointing at the sky. Bob-Bob was on the ground.”
Coals settled with a whisper.
“Was he alive?”
“No, Sarah. Heart attack? Stroke? I couldn’t just leave him there, but I couldn’t carry his body out either. Not 30 miles. I found a place further down the shelf where he could be buried. The biggest tree that had gone over, pulling up its roots, leaving a deep hole. I used that. I covered him with rocks so bears or cougars couldn’t dig him up. I took his pack and stuffed it deep in one of the clefts below the cliff. Then I returned to the mouth of the Godkin and spent a few days ferrying the food we’d brought in back to Bob-Bob’s truck at Whiskey Bend. I reported his death to the park rangers and the Port Angeles police when I finally did come out. At first they wanted to go in, retrieve him, maybe see if what I’d said was true, but it’s a long damn way. That September, the weather turned early, brought cold rains, wind, flooding. Nobody wanted to travel back in there to exhume a body. ”
Strong Heart Page 2
