by Pat Murphy
He looked up from his second sketch and saw the wild girl, silently watching him from a few feet away. Her wolf sat at her feet. “Hello,” Max said, setting the notebook down on the rock. She stepped up onto the granite slab and came closer, studying his face. When she was just a foot away, she squatted beside him, still staring at his face. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled his scent.
He was fighting the urge to get up and move away from her intense scrutiny when she looked down at the notebook. She picked it up, squinting at the sketch.
“That’s you,” he said, feeling foolish but knowing he had to say something.
For the next hour, Max was subjected to a thorough inspection. The girl examined his notebook, his pencil, his wet boots, his socks, his clothing. When he showed her how the buttons on his shirt worked, she was delighted and spent several minutes buttoning and unbuttoning his cuffs. She tugged on his hair, comparing the color and texture to her own.
Throughout all this, the wolf watched, lounging at ease at the base of the granite slab while Max was poked and prodded. The girl had no sense of personal boundaries. She tugged on his hair and collar, sniffed his hands, and stood entirely too close for Max’s comfort. But he put up with these indignities.
And he studied her in return. Though he felt some qualms about being quite so close to a nearly naked girl, he put them aside. She seemed so comfortable that after a time he almost forgot her lack of clothes.
While she inspected his person and his possessions, he talked with her. She talked back in some kind of guttural babble. An Indian language, he thought. At first, she seemed frustrated that he could not understand her. Finally, she accepted that he did not and seemed willing—perhaps even eager—to learn his language.
She reached out a grimy hand and touched his bearded cheek. She frowned, then touched her own cheek. In her guttural language, she asked something.
“This is my beard,” he said. “You don’t have a beard.” “Beard,” she repeated, stroking his cheek again. “Beard.”
“That’s right.” He smiled and nodded. Then he touched his hair. “Hair.” He stroked her curls. “Hair.”
“Hair,” she repeated, touching her curls, his hair.
Then he tapped his chest. “Max,” he said. “I’m Max.”
She patted his chest. “Max,” she said. She patted her own chest. “Max,” she said.
“No. I’m Max.” He touched his chest again. “Max.” He tapped his head, his arm, his foot, repeating each time. “Max.” Then he pointed at her. “What is your name?”
Sarah stared at the man called Max. She pointed to herself. “Sarah,” she said. That was what her Mama had called her, what Malila called her now. Malila told her it was a name of great power.
The man’s eyes widened. “Sarah,” he said. “Sarah McKensie.” He said a great many words then, too fast for her to repeat. He was smiling and yet his eyes were wet with tears. He took her hand and held it tightly.
After talking for some time, he released her hand. He said something she didn’t understand and beckoned to her. She understood his gesture and followed him to his campsite. Beka hung back, licking her lips nervously, but Sarah encouraged her to follow. After a time, she did, making sure that Sarah was always between her and the man.
Sarah watched Max build a fire and make dinner. She wasn’t hungry—she had eaten her fill of bear meat that afternoon. But the strange foods intrigued her. She would not eat the salt pork, but she ate three biscuits with great enthusiasm. She gave the salt pork to Beka, who devoured it, keeping a watchful eye on Max while she ate.
As Sarah ate her fourth biscuit, Beka snuffled in her ear, then moved away. She returned a moment later, then moved away again. Her motions indicated that she was leaving, going to find the pack. Sarah rubbed Beka’s ears, an acknowledgment that she understood. The she-wolf left, but Sarah stayed with Max. She was interested in this man, unwilling to leave just yet.
As the sun set, the air grew chilly. Max went to his tent and came back with a red shirt that had seen better days. He handed it to her and demonstrated in pantomime how to put it on. She took the garment and studied it. She rubbed the cloth against her cheek. Soft and warm—she liked that.
With his help, she put her hands into the sleeves. He pulled the collar around her neck and buttoned a few buttons. The sleeves were far too long, and the shirt billowed around her, with enough space inside for another girl her size.
She shook her arms, watching the loose ends of the sleeves flop around, and laughed. She stood and spun around, letting the sleeves fly and the shirt billow. Such a silly garment. When she stopped spinning, Max beckoned her to him and rolled up the sleeves so they did not get in her way. He fastened her belt on top of the shirt. Sarah stroked the worn flannel, enjoying its warmth against her skin.
It was dark when Sarah heard Rolon’s voice, leading a chorus of howls. Beka had led the pack to the bear’s carcass. Sarah stood up and responded with a howl that echoed across the lake.
Max shivered, staring up at the girl. The firelight touched the delicate features of her face with crimson; her voice was that of a wild animal. She smiled at him and said something in the guttural language she had spoken when he met her at the bear carcass.
He gazed into the darkness, where the wolves howled. She touched his shoulder as if to reassure him, to tell him there was no cause to worry. And she left him, running into the night.
Max leapt to his feet, starting after her. But she had disappeared into the darkness before he could take two steps. “Sarah!” he called after her. “Sarah! Come back!”
The banshee chorus of wolves was the only answer he received.
12 The Savage Life
“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond;
cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.”
—Mark Twain
MAX STAYED UP FOR HOURS, feeding the flames and listening in the darkness, hoping that Sarah would return. The frogs sang in the marsh by the lake. Bats swooped low over the lake, feeding on insects. At last, the half-moon rose, casting a glowing path of silver on the surface of the lake.
The girl had not come back. Max retired to his tent, where he spent a restless night.
He was frying flapjacks for breakfast when the girl returned, carrying a haunch of bear meat. She greeted him with a radiant smile. The angelic beauty of her delicate features contrasted sharply with the bloody meat that she carried.
He accepted her gift of meat, motioning her to sit by the fire. She stayed with him that morning and ate his flapjacks with great gusto. When he fried up some of the bear meat, she sampled the cooked meat carefully.
Throughout breakfast—and throughout the rest of the morning—Max taught her English. She was a quick student, remembering the words he had taught her on the previous day and adding to that vocabulary eagerly. Behind those angelic blue eyes was a sharp intelligence, Max realized, and a hunger for knowledge. In the early afternoon, she left him, indicating with gestures that she would be back. She returned in the late afternoon with a freshly killed rabbit. Her wolf trotted along behind her and shared in the rabbit, devouring the intestines while they dined on the meat, roasted over the fire. Max gave her another language lesson, during and after dinner. When the sun set, she and the wolf left him, summoned by a chorus of wolves.
Over the next few weeks, this became their pattern. She arrived each morning with gifts of fresh game and edible wild plants. Sometimes her wolf was with her; sometimes she was alone. He cooked for her—she had a passion for biscuits and flapjacks, and she came to tolerate cooked meat, though she preferred to eat it raw. He taught her English, expanding her vocabulary from nouns to verbs and helping her construct short sentences. “This is a tree.” “I am hungry.”
He worked to teach her concepts as well as words. The knife, the lariat, Max’s cooking fork—these were all tools. This is my knife; this is your knife.
He had so many questions for he
r. How have you survived for all these years in the wilderness? Why haven’t you made contact with anyone before now? Where did you get your clothes, your weapons? She could not understand his questions yet. But given time, he was confident that she would understand him.
At first, she was wary around him, keeping an eye on his every move, always alert. Her wolf—Beka was the animal’s name—was also watchful.
But after a time, both she and Beka began to relax. On the third day, Beka accepted a biscuit when he offered it, and by the end of the week she leaned her big head toward him so that he could rub her ears. Between lessons, Sarah and Beka would play in the grass, chasing one another in a game that looked very much like tag.
The first time one of their games ended in a wrestling match, Max was horrified. Sarah and the wolf were rolling in the grass, growling ferociously. Beka’s teeth flashed in the sun as she snapped at the girl, but somehow, miraculously, the girl’s hands were always out of reach when those cruel jaws snapped shut.
“Sarah!” Max shouted, grabbing a stick from the pile of firewood, a club that he could use to beat the wolf and drive her away from the girl. “Beka!”
The two stopped their play—for it was nothing more than that—and stared at him. He stopped where he was, holding his club and frowning.
“Oh,” he said. “You’re just playing.”
“Playing,” Sarah agreed. She was sitting beside Beka, leaning against the wolf. As Max watched, she reached under the wolf’s chest and grabbed a paw. With a quick movement, Sarah flung her weight against the wolf’s shoulder, toppling Beka. The game was on again.
Sometimes, when lessons were done, Max sketched Sarah. Once, on a long sunny afternoon, as she and Beka napped in the meadow, he sketched the two of them. Sarah curled up in sleep, knees drawn to forehead, arms wrapped around knees, feet tucked close to buttocks. Beside her, Beka lay at ease, her head leaning against the girl’s leg, her paws twitching as if she were running in her sleep.
Sarah’s hands, clasped around her knees, were so small, so delicate. There was a thin line of dirt beneath each broken fingernail. Three scars, spaced about as far apart as Beka’s teeth, marked the back of her left hand—souvenirs, he suspected, from a play fight that had been too rough. An assortment of cuts and scratches decorated her knuckles, the inevitable consequences of an active life. A scrape on one hand from climbing the cliff; a cut on the other from a fishhook (he had taught her to fish).
Max remembered a hot summer night, many years ago. He had been sitting on the porch with his wife. His daughter, just five years old, had fallen asleep, half-sprawled across his lap. Sweet Nell—awake, she was all arms and legs, elbows and knees, a noisy blur, always in motion. Asleep, she grew soft, rounded, her breath coming and going as quietly as the wind in the trees.
He wished he had drawn her then. But he had not known then how precious that time was. That knowledge had come too late.
A breeze from the lake blew a strand of hair across Sarah’s face. Max reached out to smooth it back. Before he could touch her face, her eyes were open, watching him. Relaxed, but always alert.
He glanced at Beka. The wolf was watching him, too.
He smiled, knowing that however small and frail she looked, Sarah was far from helpless. “Sleep,” he said.
“Sleep,” she repeated softly.
Sarah found the language lessons both fascinating and tiring. She was eager to learn how to communicate with this strange man named Max.
As her language skills improved, he asked her about her past. How had she come to live among the wolves?
It was difficult to communicate abstract concepts. Max managed to get across the idea of “yesterday,” but for Sarah all of the past was one long yesterday. Yesterday, she killed the bear. Yesterday, she was a pup. Yesterday, she suckled at the breast of her mother, Wauna.
One warm afternoon, they sat on the granite slab, looking across the lake, talking together as best they could. “Yesterday,” Max said. “You lived with the wolves.”
Sarah nodded.
“Yesterday before that,” he said, “you lived with the wolves.”
“Yes.”
“And before that?”
“Many, many yesterdays,” Sarah said. “With the wolves.”
“Before that,” he persisted. “Where did you live then?”
She frowned then, thinking of Mama and Papa. She felt a tension in her throat and her chest, as if a great hand were squeezing her heart. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
He was studying her face, and she sensed a tension in him. After all the time they had spent together, she could read him as she could read the wolves in her pack. “I think you do know,” Max said. He touched her hand. “Do you remember your mama? Tell me.”
She growled then, pulling her hand free. She leapt from the sun-warmed granite and ran away. When Max called after her, she did not look back. She joined the pack, where no one would ask her about times past. Yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday—they did not matter. That was done with. That was gone.
She curled up with Wauna and Yepa that night, sleeping between them, taking comfort in their warmth. She groomed her foster mother’s thick fur, trying not to think about yesterday. That was over.
Sarah did not return to Max’s camp until sunset of the following day, appearing beside the fire when Max had all but despaired of seeing her again. “Hello, Sarah,” he said, looking up from the fire. He had decided that he would not push her to remember if she did not want to. “Are you hungry?”
She accepted the biscuits he offered, crouching by the fire and holding them tight in her hands. For a moment, she did not eat.
“Before the wolves,” she said at last, “before the wolves, there was Mama. There was Papa. Then something bad.” She used a word from Malila’s language that meant “wicked, evil.” “And I go with the wolves.”
Max nodded, imagining little Sarah running away from the scene of her parents’ murder, weeping and finding comfort among the wolves. He put his arm around her shoulders. She was trembling, and Max knew it wasn’t from the cold. “Here now,” he said soothingly. “You don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to remember.”
A week later, Max left the lake and returned to civilization. He had never intended to stay in the wilderness for as long as he had. He had used the last of his flour, the last of his oil, the last of his coffee. The nights were growing cold. He shivered in his bedroll, wondering where Sarah slept, how she kept warm as the nights grew longer.
“I must go soon,” he told her one morning. “I want you to come with me.”
“Where do you go?” she asked.
“Back to Selby Flat.” He had, over the past week, prepared for this moment by telling her about Selby Flat. He had talked about Mrs. Selby, a woman like her mama, and about the wonderful foods that Mrs. Selby would make for her. Biscuits and bread and apple pie. He had talked about her aunt Audrey, who would be so glad to learn she was alive. It had been hard to come up with any other enticements. Sarah did not like clothing; she did not trust people. But he knew she liked biscuits and he thought she’d like Mrs. Selby and her aunt. “You’ll see Mrs. Selby there. And your aunt will come and get you.”
Sarah studied him. “Many people in Selby Flat,” she said. “That’s right. Many white people like you. Will you come with me?”
She shook her head. “No.” She offered no polite excuses, no explanation. Just a simple answer.
“Why not?”
She frowned, puzzled by his need for an explanation. It seemed so obvious. She had never been in a mining town, but she had seen many miners, studying them from hiding. She could imagine a place with many miners crowded together. Why leave the mountains to go somewhere crowded and dirty? “I do not like the mining town,” she said.
“You need to be with your own kind,” he told her. “You need to be with other people.”
She stared at him, remembering the white men she had encountered before
she met him. The man who shot Omuso for no reason. The brothers who had killed Malila’s grandfather and assaulted her. Crazy men, who attacked without warning. “White people are dangerous,” she said.
Max bit his lip, but did not reply for a moment. Watching his face, she thought he might agree with her. After all, he had come to the mountains alone. She thought that he had his doubts about white people, too.
“No,” he mumbled. “No, you can’t think that way. Some people are bad—but there are many good people. You must come with me. At least for a little while. You can always come back to the wolves.”
Again, she shook her head, frowning. “I stay in the mountains.”
“There are many things there that you will like,” he said. “Mrs. Selby makes excellent biscuits. And apple pie like you’ve never tasted!”
She shook her head stubbornly. “I stay here,” she said.
“No. You have to come with me.” He talked a great deal then—about Selby Flat and her aunt and civilization. She did not understand all of the words he used, but she understood enough to know that he wanted her to go.
“Later,” she told him.
She left not long after sunset. For a time, Max sat by the fire, watching the flames die to coals. Then he went to bed, where he tossed and turned, unable to sleep for wrestling with his conscience. He could not leave the child in the mountains alone. Yes, she thought she was happy, but it wasn’t right. He would not be able to explain to Audrey that he had found Sarah and lost her again. She had to come with him. If he had to hog-tie her and sling her over the back of his mule, he’d take her back.
From a sheltered hollow by a granite boulder on the far side of the lake, Sarah watched Max’s campfire die down. She leaned against the stone. It retained the heat it had absorbed during the day, warming her as it cooled in the night air.
