Stranded

by Matthew P. Mayo

  But it didn’t, other than the crash of the stove to the floor of my little shelter. It was dim in there, the only real light coming in from the top where the smoke hole was and from the doorway, neither hole of much size. But they shed enough light to let me know the little stove was muddy and messy but not broken.

  I was steamed up by then, so I muckled onto it and managed to walk it like a crawfish over to the spot it needed to be. Close enough, anyway. I patted it, sat on it, and rested. Then climbed back out through that doorway and retrieved the rest of its parts. And that is the story of how the little stove made it from the wagon to the nest.

  Of course, only after all that work did it come to me I could have avoided a whole lot of work if I had put more planning into the venture. I could have dragged that stove all the way down there before I built the nest. When I thought of that, I had a laugh. A real belly laugh like I’d not had in a month of Sundays.

  I’d like to say the rest of it went smoothly, and for the most part it did, but I ran out of daylight and since I had to spend the night in the new shelter, there were more things to do on the list in my mind that I had time to do them. I was not able to cut pine boughs for the floor that first night, but I did arrange a trunk and two crates to serve as a bed of sorts. It would be a luxury to stretch out fully and sleep like God intended me to. I made sure the quilts all stayed off the muddy floor.

  The larger items, such as the trunk, I had to empty and carry the innards down over many loads. I dared not leave anything up by the wagon that I could not bear losing or that might get soiled should we get snow in the night. What I could not bring, I covered with that grubby tarp. I prayed as I made my last load down to the nest that the critters would not be interested in it that night.

  Turns out I ended up having to leave a fair number of goods up at the wagon, mostly spare tools, a second bucket, the wash basin, the larger of the two Dutch ovens—cooking for myself I have little need of the one I use, let alone two of them. They are items that will not be bothered by a little hard water (Papa’s words for snow). I managed to cover them well enough with that tarp.

  The most work I put into ferrying goods to the nest, after the heavy little stove, of course, was the salted meat. But I most definitely daren’t leave that out for the critters. By now it gives off no scent of blood or meat smell that I am aware of. I know dogs, which must include wolves and coyotes and whatnot, can sniff much better than humans, but I did my best to cover it up well inside the nest.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1849

  * * *

  Late yesterday afternoon, I was so cold and tired when I finished gathering wood that I decided I could do away with having to change out of those sweaty clothes. I should have known better. I did know better, and that is the thing of it. Today I awoke stiff and chilled to my marrow. I should not have neglected such a basic chore, and yet I did. Isn’t that the way with people?

  Thomas knew he should not stick his hands time and again in the jerky pouch, and yet he did just the same. It is as if each of us must see how much we can get away with in life. Always testing ourselves, our situations, thinking that one day we will find a better way to do a thing. Perhaps that is why people are the smartest of creatures. Then again perhaps we are not.

  I do not know the answer, but I do know that from now on I will take care to lay out dry, if not warm, clothes to change into even if I am unable to bathe first. Anything would be preferable to how I feel as I write this.

  I do not think much of heading out into the day, though it is a bright one with a blue sky overhead. That first snow caught me unawares and I can’t let that happen again. So now, Janette girl, it is time to put down this pencil and once more make my way to the woods.

  It is many hours later and the exertion of dragging more wood back to my nest was what I needed. I warmed up again and with it, I am afraid, I stank to high heavens, as Papa used to say when he’d return from scything or trudging behind Clem.

  Though I am alone in this forsaken valley surrounded by mountains and little else, I do my best to keep my dignity when I am bathing. In truth, I long to peel off all these clothes and lie right down in a bath large enough to hold my entire body. Now wouldn’t that be a luxury!

  I must settle for heating water atop the stove and stripping off my shirt, blouse, undergarments, all the rest of it from the waist up, washing with a flannel wrung out in warm water. I start with my face, since the flannel is still clean and not yet smelling like sweat and little else. Then I pull on the layers of clothes I have hung up for the day to dry in the nest.

  I tried putting damp clothes outside, but it is a rare day when the sun can do its job quicker than the cold air. I came back to the camp less than a week past and found shirts, socks, a dress, and a set of long underwear frozen stiff like planking. I was disappointed, but when I peeled them from the rock where I’d laid them out to dry in the sun but a few hours earlier, they retained their shape.

  The longhandles reminded me of dancing with Thomas or William or Papa. Mostly Thomas because he loves to “step lively,” as Papa calls it. Like Mama, he’d say.

  William and Papa are similar peas sharing a pod, at least in that respect. They do very little to call attention to themselves. Though as a rule Will appears more lost in his own thoughts than Papa.

  But on that day I danced around that camp, tired as I was, doing my best to remember the steps and calls of the square dances. Allemande left! Promenade! Do-si-do!

  I laughed and I did not care who or what might be watching from behind a rock or tree or that cursed ridgeline. Let them watch. I was dancing.

  Then the suit began to flop and bend in all the wrong places.

  Soon it was as if I was holding a tired partner, and then just another piece of wet clothing. The red suit, long since faded to pink, matched my cheeks. “We must do this again, kind sir,” I said, draping the longhandles to dry by the meager fire.

  Since those clothes were still wet, I had to seek out others. Hauling wood, trying to build a snare for rabbits, and gathering pine cones and anything dry that might burn, I was soaked through all my layers. That was no way to hole up for the evening. So I rummaged in Will and Thomas’s trunk. You will think it silly of me that I had not so much as peeked in there before, but it is the truth.

  As I unstrapped the leather flaps buckling it closed and raised the flat wooden top, I fully expected to hear William or Thomas rush up behind me, shouting for me to get out, that I had no right to look in there. No right at all! I was a girl, those were their things, boy things.

  I’d not raised the lid much at all when I thought thus, then came the knowledge they were not with me, would not be any time soon. I stopped my thoughts there, lest I give over to tears again. And that would be a waste of time, as I have well learned. In the next moment, as I creaked the lid higher, I smelled them, smelled their brother smell, wood smoke and lye soap and . . . something that cannot be put into words nor set on a page.

  It is much too much of that. It is the smells of my brothers. And in that moment, as I tipped the box open, I was overcome with so much more feeling than I’d felt since the morning they left. The tears came readily and I did nothing to stop them. I buried my face in the sweet-smoky, soapy brother smells of their shirts, their tunics, their trousers, their long johns, their socks, their undergarments, and long minutes passed before I could stop myself.

  And it was not that night that I could bring myself to wear their clothes. I stoked the fire and warmed a ragged, salty hunk of beef over flame. I ate it like an animal in a cave might, hunched in the flickering shadows, my face and hands feeling bare warmth from the small fire, my knees pulled up tight to my chin. And I felt good and sorry for myself for a long time that night until I fell asleep.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1849

  * * *

  It has been a number of days since I wrote here in my journal. I’d like to say it bothers me not to write, but I have been so busy I didn’t much think about it. I s
ometimes wonder why I am writing all this down, if I am truly the only one who will ever see it, and I hope that is the case, for I will keep it with me always. But what if . . . ? What if something should happen to me? Or what if nothing happens? The thought has been a constant visitor in my head.

  As Papa says, the best way to get over a hurt you know is coming, or something that is plaguing you, is to get on with it, get it over with. So I will say the thing I don’t want to think about, but that’s busting to be told: I might never be found. I might never make my way to some place where people live. Any people, even Indians. Well, I don’t know about Indians. But then again, if I do not know, then what’s the harm in wondering?

  If I am not found, my journal will rest with me for eternity. If I am found, I will have it with me, and at the end of my days I will have to determine what to do with it. If I am found, but I am dead, someone might well take the journal and . . . what? What is the worst they could do with it? Read it? Would I care? Not a whit at that point, as I will be, as Papa says of the deer and squirrels he kills, past the point of caring.

  Enough of this maudlin thinking. I will go back over what has happened to me since I last wrote so many days ago. These have been some of the busiest days of my entire life, mostly for the chores I must keep up with daily—checking on my food, adding to my supply of wood, making sure the wagon cover is fastened down ’round the outside of the nest, washing myself, washing clothes, checking for footprints of creatures and trying to figure out what they might have been that visited me in the night. Rather those I heard prowling outside. Visiting is too friendly a word for what I believe they had in mind.

  To a wolf or lion or bear I am a toothsome treat, nothing more, nothing less. But to something smaller, say a rabbit, I am the one who views it as food. That is the way of the world, so says Papa. And while I know that to be true, it is doubly painful when you have to kill to survive. Killing in battle, I imagine, is easier than killing something to eat. If Papa could read this now, he would be worried I might be turning soft.

  I am not soft, but neither am I hard-hearted. It is my concern about running out of food that drove me to fashion snares to catch the rabbits. I saw the tracks and the droppings, so I knew I had such visitors, and not too far from camp. I also know how to skin a rabbit. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  I saw what a fine sky I had been presented with, so I decided to venture afield, dressed warmly and armed with the shotgun and a hip knife. The day was a bright one and the sky extra blue, but all that means to me, given that it is November and given where I am located, is that I would be cold sooner each day, once the sun begins its slow slide down the river valley.

  I set off upstream with a light heart, hoping for some luck to help me find a rabbit. In my mind I could taste Mama’s stewed rabbit, smell the warm, thick odors that filled the kitchen of our old home. Where did they all go—those long-ago, far-off days and their people? Nowhere to be seen, I told myself.

  I kept on walking, lugging my supplies. I scanned for sign and found a track a few days old. Nothing fresh. But then I’d only been out very far from camp a few times. I looked around myself.

  To the north, snow lay draped like clean linen over the great gray jags of stone of the mountains. I shuddered and moved on. I have been alone for a month and nearly two weeks, and have spent much of my time in these woods. I have learned to move slowly, take but three or four steps, then stop. I look around, moving only my eyes, then slowly turn my head.

  I am not sure if this is how one must hunt, because Papa never took me hunting, but it appears to be what the animals do. I watched a deer, different than the ones we had back home. Ours were whitetails. Here, they appear mostly to be what I call blacktails. They look like the white tails, but they are larger and thicker. They also have black hair on their backsides. But what concerns me most is how they act.

  They walk so silently into a place. I can be watching the meadow near the camp, thinking of nothing and everything, all at once, and then there will be deer, one, two, or five, not but eighty feet before me. Right there. And I watch them, partly because they are so gentle that having them close by makes me feel reassured somehow. As if I had friends not far away. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true. And as it’s my journal, I don’t care what anyone else may think on the matter.

  They walk forward, nearly as a group. Though they are scattered, there is a way they go about this, with some of the group looking behind them while others dip their heads down to paw at the snowpack to get at the grasses beneath. They sample all the bramble plants and leafless branches around the edge of the field, but they are always looking, slowly walking. They rarely take a step forward that they don’t match with a held step, looking all around themselves. Their eyes are on the sides of their heads, Papa pointed out to me one day on a deer he had shot. That way they can see in more than one place at a time.

  “How come humans can only see forward?” I recall asking him.

  He looked at the deer, looked at me, pushed his hat back on his forehead and said, “I reckon it’s because we have to figure out other ways to defend ourselves. We are not often the ones who are pursued, but we are often the ones doing the pursuing.” He brought the end of a long finger to that space at the top of his long nose, between his eyes. “And for that,” he said, “we mostly need to look forward.”

  Now that I am in a position of being both the pursued and the pursuer, I believe Papa is mostly right on that account. Though I don’t know if he has ever been pursued. Mama once told me he fought in skirmishes he did not talk about. Perhaps men pursued him, tried to run him aground like an animal. My mind had better stop this terrible thinking right now.

  I stood in the woods, past the place in the trees I marked in my mind as the boundary where I feel safe. That is the lone boulder half covered with mosses that shone in the sun even this late in the year as a whole mix-up of shades of green. I stood my ground, held my gun crosswise before me, as Papa showed me, ready to swing it up should I see something I could eat or that might take a fancy to eat me. Either way, I hoped I would get off a shot before I lost out.

  Other than the high-up hushing sound of the wind in the tops of the tall pines, there was precious little commotion. I was aware of a woodpecker rapping his beak somewhere not far off. To the northwest, a songbird, likely a thrush, was searching for another. I notice songbirds favor sunlight, so hearing him didn’t disrupt me much.

  I was fixing to move as the deer, so after my good look-see around the place I lifted my left boot and was about to step forward. I was careful to look toward the ground, patches of bare earth with sparse snow deep in the trees. I looked for sticks and twigs that might snap underfoot. As I lifted my foot something huge and covered in black hair moved from out of the darkest part of the woods, right where I was headed.

  I would not have seen it had I not been glancing up from where I wanted to set my foot down. That thing did not make a sound as it moved. It stepped away from the darkness and then I saw it was not black but brown-black, as an arm of sunlight angling through the trees lit a strip of fur like momentary fire. Another did the same as it shuffled forward.

  The light laid slowly across its face—the blunt snout, the dark, wide-apart pig eyes, ears so small they almost were not there. It was a bear. As it moved, looking as if it were on a Sunday walk, it swung its head from one side to the other, slow as you please, its black nose curving and sniffing all on its own.

  Its big, wagging shoulders reminded me for all the world like those of a buffalo, only with a hump that wagged as it walked. But this was no buffalo. I knew it was a grizzly bear, as Papa had pointed them out to me and the boys a number of times on the trail. We’d only ever had black bears at home. As I stood there with my heart frozen like a winter stone in my chest, I recalled something else Papa said about them. You cannot outrun them.

  I had very little in the way of wits about me, though I remembered he also said they have poor eyesight, but they
can by gum work those sniffers of theirs. A grizzly will pick up a scent of a rabbit or ripe berries from a great, long distance.

  As if he was whispering in my ear, I heard more of Papa’s advice about grizzly bears echo in my rabbity mind: “Pray the wind is at your face if the thing’s in front of you. Then it won’t smell much of you and you might be able to stand stock-still. And maybe, just maybe you’ll be passed by.”

  I did that, though I had no idea where the wind was coming from—front, back, or sides. For all I knew at that moment it was headed straight down from heaven on high. I’d like to say I bested that great beast, but the truth is I am one lucky girl, Papa. I stood stock-still because I don’t think I could have recalled how to work that great booming gun you left me with, even if I had to.

  The bear kept on walking, not toward me, I saw with great relief, but angling off to my left, southeastward. Toward camp. That was another thing I decided I’d worry about later. At the moment all I wanted to do was not make a squeak or a peep, not dare to breathe . . . though of course I had to breathe, and my breaths went in and out in tiny puffs. And that is what nearly got me ripped apart as I stood there imitating a foolish deer.

  You will recall I said my left foot was all but lifted and ready to set down again. Well, while I watched the bear and hoped he wasn’t watching me, I had been mostly balanced. But mostly is not all the way, and I finally had to let my breath out. The bear was not but sixty feet or so away from me, snuffling and taking his sweet time to cross through the pine grove, his massive feet padding one after the other. The nails were great long raking tools like the hand cultivator we used on the garden back home, waggling every time he set a foot down again.