Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality

by Pat Murphy

  She was not a wolf. She spoke with the Indians, but she was not an Indian. She watched the whites—the miners and the emigrants who passed through the pack’s territory—but she was not one of them, either. She had belonged with Wauna. She did not belong anywhere else. She thought about this as she and Beka roamed the mountains together.

  Winter came early that year. Snow fell on the high peaks and in the lower elevations, catching weary emigrants who were late in crossing the Sierras. So it was that two sisters and their children huddled around a small fire. They had set out from Missouri in the spring with brave intentions, in a train of three wagons, with their husbands, their younger brother, and their three children.

  On the Great Plains, Ellie’s husband had died of a fever. When they were crossing the Rockies, their younger brother had died in an accident. A chain had snapped when they were hauling the wagon up a steep grade. The wagon had rolled back, crushing his legs. Despite Ellie’s nursing, he had died of the wounds.

  On the grueling trail down the brackish trickle known as Mary’s River, Indians had attacked and stolen three oxen. Betsy’s husband had intercepted an Indian arrow and had died of his wound a few painful days later. That left Betsy and Ellie and their three children.

  The group had set forth from Missouri with great hope and too much baggage. They had left most of the baggage behind on the plains and in the desert, lightening the load by abandoning dishes and books and pots and pans and feather beds. Surprisingly, with their menfolk dead, the two women did not abandon hope.

  Betsy and Ellie had been raised on the frontier—sturdy, stouthearted women, disinclined to give up in the face of disaster. The two women, with their children, had abandoned all but one of their wagons. With Betsy leading the oxen and Ellie whipping them from behind, they brought that wagon across the Carson Desert and up the Truckee River canyon. At the lake where the Donner party had camped in the winter of 1846, two of the oxen had refused to go on. There, the women had abandoned their last wagon. Refusing to stay in that place of bad luck and past pain, they had packed their meager possessions on the back of the remaining two oxen.

  They were at the top of Donner Pass when it started to snow. Lightly at first, dusting the tops of the trees, then harder. As they made their way down the pass, the snow covered the trail. They had walked that all day, struggling through the snow, climbing over one ridge, and then another.

  Betsy, the older sister, led the way. By the time they made camp, she was no longer sure of the trail. Everywhere she looked, there were mountains and trees and snow. One ridge looked much like another. Her feet ached from the cold. Her eyes burned from staring into the snow, searching for any sign that others had passed this way.

  Ellie built a fire and mixed flour to make a batch of biscuits. They had left their cooking pans behind at Donner Lake. So Ellie had wrapped bits of dough on green sticks, carved from a tree with her husband’s buck knife, which she wore in a sheath at her side. Now, over the flames of a fire, she toasted the dough, cooking biscuits to feed the three children.

  “What will we do tomorrow?” Ellie asked Betsy, as the biscuits toasted on the fire. “This is the last of the flour.”

  “I don’t know,” Betsy murmured.

  “I wish we hadn’t left the Bible behind in the desert,” Ellie said. She had been fretting about the Bible ever since they abandoned it.

  “I’d read the passage about manna in the wilderness.” She looked skyward, clasping her hands under her chin. “If only the good Lord would send one of his angels to save us. It wouldn’t have to be much of an angel, just someone to show us the way.”

  Ellie had been talking about the good Lord and his angels for weeks. Betsy was happy to pray for the good Lord’s intervention, but she was getting tired of listening to Ellie talk about it.

  She poked at the fire with a stick. “We need more wood,” she murmured, and started to get up.

  “I’ll fetch some,” Tommy said. At age eight, he was the oldest of the children, a little man who tried to take care of his mother. “You stay here.” Tommy stood up and trudged off to search for wood. Shivering in the cold wind, he headed for a stand of pines.

  Sarah watched the boy approach the trees. Attracted by the smell of cooking biscuits, she had been watching the small group by the fire. The boy who trudged toward the pines was younger and smaller than she was.

  “You need to be with your own kind,” Max had told her. Was this her own kind?

  She watched him search beneath the trees, picking up fallen branches and bits of wood. He looked thin and hungry. He was no threat to her, that was clear.

  “Rallo,” she said.

  The boy stopped where he was, staring at her. His eyes were wide and frightened. “Rallo,” he said. He didn’t move, just stared at her. She stared back, studying the boy. “Are you an angel?” he asked.

  She frowned at him. “What is an angel?” she asked. Max had not taught her that word.

  “One of God’s helpers,” the boy said. “An angel come to rescue us. We’re so hungry and so cold and my little sister, she’s crying’ cause she’s so hungry and so cold and my mama doesn’t know the way.” He was almost crying himself, blinking fast and shivering a little in the cold. “It snowed, and we lost the trail.”

  Sarah studied him. She had wondered why these people had strayed from the track followed by most of the emigrants.

  “Please.” The boy reached out and took her hand, holding it tightly in his cold fingers. “Please come help us. Tell my mama the way. Please.”

  She could have broken free easily enough. The boy clutched his firewood in one arm, tugged on her hand with the other. But she followed him, curious about these people by the fire.

  “Mama,” Tommy called. “Mama, I found an angel.”

  One of the women at the fire stood up, staring at her. “An angel?” she said. “Or another lost soul?” The woman held out her hand. “You poor girl. Come and get warm.”

  It was the tone of the woman’s voice that won Sarah. Until Betsy spoke, Sarah could have still turned her back and returned to the mountains. These people were not part of her pack; they were none of her concern. But the woman’s voice was warm and caring. She reached out and took Sarah’s hand, pulling her into the circle of warmth around the dying fire. She put her arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “Where did you come from?” the woman said.

  Sarah stood for a moment in the protective circle of Betsy’s arm, blinking at Ellie and the two little girls who sat beside her. “You are hungry?” she asked the little girls. They both nodded. She looked at Betsy, and said, “You stay here.”

  She returned to the forest, leaving the women by the fire. She had killed a marmot earlier that da y, a fat animal that had put off hibernation for one day too long. The animal was too big for one meal, so she had cached half the meat in a snowbank for later retrieval.

  She brought it to the hungry women, who roasted it on the fire. They ate meat while Sarah ate burned bits of their biscuits, hungry as always for bread.

  “What kind of animal is it?” Ellie asked, and Betsy shrugged. “Some kind of rabbit, I reckon. Don’t ask too many questions.” When Ellie and the girls went to sleep, wrapped in blankets by the fire, Betsy and Sarah and Tommy sat up. “Where did you come from?” Betsy asked.

  “I live here,” Sarah said.

  “But where are your folks?” Betsy asked.

  “Where’s your mama?” Tommy asked.

  Sarah thought of Wauna and stared at the fire, not answering.

  “I think her mama is in heaven,” Betsy said to Tommy. She put her arm around Sarah and hugged her close. Maybe this mysterious child was an angel, as Ellie maintained, but it seemed to Betsy that this was an angel in need of a little mothering. “You need to be fattened up,” she told Sarah. “If I had you at my kitchen back home, I’d feed you apple pie until you got a little meat on those bones.”

  But Betsy never got the opportunity to fatten Sarah up, to add a layer of
fat to her hard muscle. In the morning, at the first sign of light, Sarah woke them, waited while they packed their meager possessions on the oxen, then led them to the trail.

  She walked with them all morning, setting a brisk pace and carrying the smallest of the girls when she lagged behind. “Can you smell the smoke?” she asked the little girl. The little girl shook her head.

  “Can you smell the smoke of the campfires?” Sarah asked Betsy.

  “Maybe.” Betsy sniffed the cold air. “I think so.”

  “There,” Sarah said, pointing down the trail. “Go down there, and you will see a cabin. They will help you.”

  “But what about you?” Betsy said. “You come with us. You can’t…”

  Sarah put the little girl beside her mother. “Good-bye,” she said. Without another word, she disappeared into the trees.

  “Come on, Betsy,” Ellie said. “I can smell the smoke. Let’s go.”

  Reluctantly, Betsy followed the others down the trail.

  “The Lord sent an angel to save us,” Ellie told the miners. The men had fed them, given up their tents for them.

  “An angel,” asked one miner. “What did she look like?”

  Ellie frowned. “Not what you might think,” she said slowly. “A dirty red-flannel shirt, moccasins. Not nearly enough clothing.” Ellie wet her lips and went on. “She was beautiful, but she was very dirty. She liked biscuits. And her eyes were wild, like an animal’s.”

  “You’re sure she was an angel,” the man asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Ellie said. “There’s no doubt.”

  “She sounds rather dirty for an angel,” another man said dryly. Ellie lifted her eyes from the fire. She smiled, an innocent smile that would make any man ashamed of teasing her. “Of course she was an angel,” Ellie said. “But she was wild. A wild angel.”

  15 LEADER OF THE PACK

  “When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.”

  —Mark Twain

  THE NEXT SPRING, Max traveled to the lake where he had met Sarah the previous year. He camped alone. At night, he listened to the distant howling of wolves. He called Sarah’s name until the mountains echoed. But Sara did not come.

  He waited.

  He fished in the mountain lake, standing on the shore and casting his line. More often than not, he caught fish and fried them up for supper.

  He wrote to Audrey North and reread her latest letter to him, a long and thoughtful missive. She seemed undismayed by his description of Sarah’s table manners, thrilled by the news that she had been dubbed the Wild Angel of the Sierras. She wrote of her desire to come west and visit the lake with him, to see her niece after all these years. “When my husband returns from sea, I will consult with him on this matter. I cannot leave without his knowledge, though I would like nothing better than to travel westward. I find myself dreaming of mountains and wolves and my heart aches when I wake to my house on the shore.”

  He told himself that he was working on another book. Rather than picturing the men who made their living in the mines, this one would depict the wild beauty of the land. That’s what he told himself he was doing. But what he was really doing was waiting.

  Sometimes he had the feeling that he was being watched. When he stood on the lakeshore, he scanned the surrounding hills, but he saw nothing.

  One night, after he had been camped by the lake for almost a week, he sat by the fire, baking biscuits in a Dutch oven. Every night, he had made biscuits, hoping that the aroma of baking would lure Sarah from hiding. On this night, he had waited until dark to build a fire and cook his supper. The moon had not yet risen. Above him, the stars blazed in the sky.

  Around him, the world was dark. But he knew she was there. He could feel her watching him, unwilling to reveal herself. While the biscuits baked, he lay back on the ground, looking up at the stars.

  “I wonder how many stars there are. More than you could count, I wager.” He spoke in a conversational tone. By the lake, the spring peepers sang. In the fire, a pine knot crackled and popped. Otherwise, the night was quiet.

  He waited for a moment without speaking. A breeze stirred his hair, tickled the back of his neck.

  “I’ll lie here and count them,” he said. “One, two, three, four…” He had taught her to count to one hundred. She had delighted in numbers. He could smell the biscuits baking and knew that she could smell them too. “… seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…” He caught the first whiff of burning biscuits. “… thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four…”

  “The biscuits are burning,” Sarah said.

  He continued gazing at the stars. Her voice had come from behind him. She was still outside the circle of firelight, he guessed.

  “… thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”

  “Max! The biscuits are burning!”

  She was closer now, but he did not turn to face her. “…forty-two, forty-three…”

  “Max!” She stood over him, glaring at him. “Take the biscuits off the fire.”

  He sat up then. Leaning over, he hooked a stick through the handle of the Dutch oven and pulled the cast-iron pot away from the fire. The biscuits were a little burned, but not too badly. “Hello, Sarah,” he said.

  She was a year older, a year taller. She still wore the flannel shirt he had given her, and a pair of ragged, cut-off trousers. She looked healthy.

  She frowned at him. “You did not bring that man.” He shook his head. “I did not bring him.”

  Warily, she crouched by the fire.

  “As soon as the biscuits cool, we can eat them,” he said. He was afraid that she would run away again.

  She was not ready to abandon the subject of Jasper Davis. “He is a bad man.”

  Max nodded. “Sarah, I’m sorry. He told me he thought Beka was chasing me. He was shooting at Beka.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he is a very bad man.”

  Max bit his lip. He could not argue with her, in good con science. He had never liked Jasper Davis. There was something shifty about him. Nothing that Max could put his finger on, but something not quite right.

  Max shrugged. “He said he was shooting at the wolf. He said he wanted to help you. I couldn’t see any reason he’d be lying.”

  “What is that?” she asked, frowning.

  “What?”

  “Lying. What does that mean?”

  He blinked. He had, the previous summer, managed to introduce Sarah to a number of abstract concepts, but lying was not among them. “He didn’t tell the truth.”

  She continued to frown.

  Max scratched his head, trying to figure out how to explain. He was glad that Sarah had come to speak with him. She did not seem to hold a grudge against him for bringing Jasper to the lake, but she was puzzled.

  “Look in the pan,” he said. “How many biscuits are there?”

  Sarah counted. “Four.”

  “I say there are three biscuits.”

  She stared at him. “You are wrong. There are four.” She pointed. “One, two, three, four.”

  “When I say that there are three, I am lying.”

  “Lying means you can’t count.”

  “I know there are four biscuits, but I say there are three. I am lying.”

  She stared at the biscuits. “There are four. Why would you say there are three?”

  Max shook his head in frustration. “Here, would you like a biscuit?” He used a stick to poke one of the least burned biscuits to the edge of the pan, when he could pick it up with his fingers. He gave it to Sarah, who devoured it.

  “Now there are three,” she said. “One, two, three.”

  “So if I said that there were four, I would be lying.”

  She studied his face with a baffled frown. “That man. What is his name?”

  “Jasper Davis.”

  Sarah repeated the name
several times and nodded. Her fascination with words had extended to names. Words and names intrigued her. In the fashion of the primitive savage, she seemed to believe that knowing the name of something gave her a power over the person or thing. For some reason, the name “Jasper Davis” seemed to hold a particular interest. She frowned as she said it, as if the name itself made her uneasy. Looking thoughtful, she ate another biscuit, using the blade of her knife to scrape it from the pan.

  “You do not like Jasper Davis,” she said, after licking the last crumbs of the second biscuit from her palm.

  “That’s true.” He nodded.

  “You are afraid of Jasper Davis.”

  He frowned at that. “Afraid? Not at all. It’s true that I don’t like the man, but…”

  Sarah watched him blustering about Jasper Davis. His shoulders were hunched high and stiff; his eyes blinked a little too quickly; he did not meet her eyes as he spoke. It was clear to her that he was afraid, very afraid. And yet he said that he was not. His words and his feelings did not match. How strange that was.

  She laughed, interrupting his monologue. “You are lying!” she said with delight, understanding the concept at last. “You are afraid, and you say you are not. You are lying.”

  The summer passed. Max taught Sarah more English. He asked her to take him higher into the mountains with her, and she complied, taking him on long hikes away from the lake into the wild lands that she knew so well. He took his notebook and sat and sketched, while Sarah and Beka roamed and hunted or slept or played.

  Once, on a sunny afternoon after a long hike, they rested for a time on a mountainside. Sitting beside Max as he sketched, she asked him a question that had been troubling her. “Max, where is your pack?”

  He looked up from his drawing. “I don’t have a pack. People don’t travel in packs.”

  Sarah frowned. His answer did not match her experience. Most of the white people she had seen over the years were traveling in groups. “Ellie and Betsy were traveling in a pack.” She had told him about her encounter with the emigrants.

  “That’s a family,” Max said. “Mothers and children. Not a pack.”