Authors: Pat Murphy
Unlike the women in the poems of Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Sigourney, the captain’s wife shed no tears. The bell in the village tolled, calling her to church, but she did not go. The rumble of thunder drowned out the bell. Lightning split the western sky. As rain lashed her face, she raged with the stormy sea.
Max found the poem both impressive and unsettling. In a return letter, he praised the poem for its lack of sentimentality and revised his mental image of Audrey. Initially, he had pictured her as a sweet and delicate New England lady. After reading
The Captain’s Wife
, he imagined her as stout and courageous—a broad, no-nonsense woman built rather like Mrs. Selby.
Recently, a Boston publisher had published a collection of her poems. “I have met with some small success,” she had written. “I find that rather gratifying.”
She had taken the liberty of showing Max’s sketch of the miners and his story about Socks and the lost child to the editor of
The Ladies Repository
. The editor had published the story, sent him a bank draft for twenty dollars, and clamored for more. Every now and again, he would send another sketch and another story about life in the mines.
When Max’s work was published back in the States, the San Francisco newspapers had taken notice. As a result, the demand for his work had increased and he regularly published sketches and short essays in several newspapers. It was, as Audrey would put it, “rather gratifying.”
Over the years, he and Audrey had corresponded very honestly about all manner of things. At that moment, he was writing to her about the civilizing influence of women.
“Take, for example, Mrs. Selby,” he wrote. “Before a miner goes to Selby’s Hotel, he combs his hair, washes his face, perhaps trims his beard. He cleans up his language as well, banishing blasphemies. Under her benign influence, Selby Flat is a far more civilized place.
“Compare Selby Flat to other towns, like Humbug or Hell’s Half Acre or Rough and Ready. There is no comparison. Consider, if you will, dozens of men camped along a river for months on end, digging in the mud each day, cooking their own grub each evening. There is no laundry, no proper latrine, no facilities for bathing other than the river itself. The men wash their clothes primarily to reduce the insect population before the itching drives them mad. Under these conditions, men—even the best of men—become shaggy and grimy and far more aromatic than the polite society of women would allow.”
Max heard footsteps behind him and looked up from his letter. Mr. Selby had stepped from the barroom. He sat down on the bench beside Max, opened his tobacco pouch, and began to fill his pipe. “Care for a smoke?” he asked.
Max set aside his letter, leaned back against the sun-warmed wall, and settled in to catch up on the news. He’d been up on the North Fork, visiting Downieville and the mining camps along the river for an article that would appear in the
Nevada City Gazette
. Max accepted the pouch and filled his pipe.
“I hear that you’re about to elect a sheriff,” Max said.
Mr. Selby nodded. “That’s so,” he said. “Election will be next week. I reckon we’ll be electing Jasper Davis. He’s been buying drinks for the past week, and everyone figures him to be a fine fellow.”
Max puffed his pipe thoughtfully. “He’s done well for himself, has he?”
“No question about it. He’s a smart man and he’s a lucky man and he’s done very well.”
“Lucky? How’s that?” Max asked.
“You hear about the big fire in Grass Valley?”
Max nodded. A fire had swept through the city, leaping from one wood-frame structure to the next, burning stores, saloons, hotels, and homes, leaving the city in ruins.
“Jasper was building a new hotel in Grass Valley when the city burned. Handsome place, made of fieldstone rather than wood. Said he liked stone ’cause it was solid. It was out on the edge of town, a ways from the nearest building.”
“So it survived the fire?”
Mr. Selby nodded. “Didn’t even get singed. After the fire, he was the only hotel still in business. Everybody went to Jasper’s place to do their drinking and gambling and such. He did all right.”
Max nodded again. Some men, he thought, made their own luck. He wondered if Jasper happened to be one of those. But he kept those thoughts to himself.
“Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.”
—Mark Twain
F
ROM THE TOP OF A SUN-WARMED
granite boulder, Sarah watched the man who sat by the lake. She had been watching him, on and off, for the past two days, leaving only to hunt, and returning to find the man still there. He puzzled and intrigued her.
Most people that she had followed over the years were very busy. The Indians hunted, fished, and gathered plants for food. The miners scratched holes in the dirt and mucked about in the streams and rivers. She did not know why they did the strange things that they did, but they were always busy, always doing something. Though this man looked like a miner, dressed like a miner, smelled like a miner, he seemed to spend most of his time sitting in the sun, doing just about nothing. Sometimes he stared at a small rectangular object for hours at a time; sometimes he seemed to be moving a stick, as if making marks on a different rectangular object. And sometimes he just sat and stared, watching his mule graze in the meadow, studying the surface of the lake, the mountains that surrounded it.
Once, early in the morning, she watched him sit quietly, staring at a doe and fawn that grazed in the meadow. At first, she thought he was stalking the deer, but he did not move, did not approach the animals. At last, when the wind shifted, the deer caught his scent and bounded away. He made no move to chase them.
At night, he slept in a canvas tent beside the lake. In the early morning, he fished in the lake’s cool waters. Sometimes he cooked biscuits—she could smell the tantalizing aroma drifting across the lake. On the second night he was there, she sneaked into his camp. By the remains of his campfire, she found a few broken and burned pieces of biscuit, which she devoured. Bread was a rare treat, and she relished it when she found it. The rectangular things that the man stared at each day were hidden inside the canvas tent, protected from her curiosity. She slipped away, still curious.
Sarah was twelve years old, a well-armed, young savage. She wore a knife at her belt and carried her lariat, her bow, and a quiver filled with arrows slung over one shoulder. In warm weather, she wore moccasins and a pair of men’s trousers, cut off at the knee and held up with suspenders. She liked the trousers because she could carry stones in the pockets. In cold weather, she wore moccasins, long trousers, and a rabbit-skin cape, a gift from Malila.
She knew the ways of the wolves. She knew something of the ways of Indians, for she had continued to visit Malila over the years. Learning to speak the Miwok language had satisfied some urge within her that the language of the wolves had not. But though she visited the Indians and watched the white men, she always returned to the wolf pack. They were her family. Beka remained her frequent companion, following the girl on many of her long journeys away from the pack.
Sarah stretched in the sun, lazy and warm. She and Beka had gone hunting at dawn. One of her arrows had brought down a fat marmot. She and Beka had breakfasted on its warm flesh. Then Sarah had come to the lake, to see what the man was doing. Beka, not sharing Sarah’s fascination with the human who camped by the lake, had wandered off to explore, while Sarah continued to watch the man.
He was moving the stick again—for most of the morning he had alternated periods of staring at the lake with bouts of scribbling.
Max sat on a broad granite slab beside the lake, writing a letter to Audrey North. “I have fled to the mountains,” he wrote, “escaping the eager, young men who come to the gold fields with copies of my book tucked under their arms. Everywhere I go, I see young men dressed in sensible canvas trousers and cotton shirts, carrying precisely the make of shovel and pick and canteen I recommended, with their scarves tied just like the miner in the sketch on page 5 of
A Young Man’s Guide to Gold Fields
. I know that if I were to look in their packs, I would find all the items from the checklist on page 45 of
A Young Man’s Guide to Gold Fields
.
“They are all dreadfully earnest young men. They make me feel quite ancient and creaky. I feel quite spry for my advanced age of forty-one, but they treat me with such deference, asking my advice on any number of things that I have no business advising them on. I confess, they bring out the worst in me. A sweet-faced young fellow asked me the other day which hotel I would recommend, and I sent him to one right next to the lodge of E Clampus Vitus, where the sound of the Clampers’ drunken hilarity was sure to keep him up all hours. Damned if he didn’t come back the next day to thank me. He had, it seemed, joined the Clampers and had a fabulous time. Ah, for the stamina of youth.
“How strange it is to have struck paydirt in a profession I would have thought even chancier than mining. In your last letter, you protested that my book would have succeeded without your assistance. Though I hesitate to question your expertise in the area of publishing, I beg to differ. Without your encouragement and assistance, I would still be writing an occasional article for the
Nevada City Gazette
. If you hadn’t shown my essay to your editor, I would certainly never have written a book that has garnered me more gold than all my mining efforts.
“I have begun work on my next book—at least that is the excuse I have given for fleeing the questionable civilization of Selby Flat and camping at this remote lake. It is a beautiful spot. The other morning, I sketched a doe and her fawn, grazing not one hundred yards from my tent. So far, I have spent more time fishing and sketching than I have writing, but I have great hopes. It seems to me that writing is a bit like prospecting in that regard: One must always have great hopes.”
Max stopped there, putting his pen down. He leaned back on the sun-warmed granite, contemplating the play of light on the water of the lake. The morning mist had burned away while he had been writing. The still blue waters of the lake reflected the mountains and the pines. It was time to be moving.
He had decided to hike around the lake to reach the bare granite slopes on the far side. From that location, he wanted to sketch his camp, a lonely tent beneath towering pines. Besides, he thought that the fishing might be better there. So he packed his fishing pole and his notebook in a rucksack, put on his hat, and set out around the lake.
Halfway around the lake, the granite slope rose to a sheer cliff. Here and there on the cliff face, bushes and trees clung to cracks and ledges, forming patches of green and brown against the gray of the stone.
A dense thicket of thorny bushes grew at the base of the cliff, leaving a narrow patch of marshy ground at the edge of the lake. Max had the choice of picking his way through the brambles or squelching through the mud. He chose the mud, though he saw a patch of broken branches where some large animal had chosen to blunder through the bushes.
His boots sank in the mud and he could feel cold lake water seeping in through the seams. The bushes leaned out toward the water and he had to step carefully over the branches. It was slow and unpleasant and he was wondering if he had made the right choice when he reached a dead end. There, the bushes grew down to the water’s edge, forming a thorny barrier to further progress. He could try to hack his way through brambles, he could go for a swim, or he could turn back. He was considering these options when he heard the sound of a large animal crashing through the brush behind him.
Startled, he turned to face the sound. A grizzly, a beast with a reputation for a ferocious and unpredictable nature, burst from the bushes and glared at Max with angry, red-rimmed eyes. The animal stood by the lakeshore, blocking Max’s retreat to his campsite.
Max backed away until the barrier of bushes made further retreat impossible. There, he froze, hoping the bear would return to the bushes from which it had come. He had no rifle, no pistol at his side.
Staring at the bear, he remembered what he had written in the
Young Man’s Guide
. He had advised would-be miners against carrying firearms. “A pistol seems like a useful weapon,” he had written. “That is, it seems useful until you bet your life on it. Then the persnickety thing misses fire, blows up in your hand, or sends its bullet a country mile to one side of target. A beginning marksman can hit a target with a pistol—as long as the target is at least the size of a barn and the marksman is no more than ten paces away. As for the rifle, it can be a fine weapon in the right hands. If you’re handy with a rifle, you already know that. Mine aren’t the right hands. If you’re a city-bred fellow, yours may not be the right hands either. More greenhorns end up shooting themselves in the foot with their newly acquired rifle than ever hold off a ravaging wolf or a charging bear.”
It was good advice, he thought. He stood by that advice. It was fine advice for all the young men who were coming west. But as a man who had been in the West for some time, he wished he had not followed that advice.
The bear reared onto its hind legs, roaring a challenge to the puny man who had disturbed its rest. As the beast moved, Max saw the dark slash of an unhealed wound in its powerful shoulder. The animal had been injured. Probably, Max thought, by some fool of a greenhorn who had armed himself, not following Max’s advice. Now the animal was wounded and angry, and Max had, unwittingly, disturbed its rest.
From a ledge no more than fifteen feet above Max’s head, Sarah watched the man with interest. She stood on the leaning, twisted trunk of a pine tree that had managed to take root in a crack in the granite. Her back was braced against the rock. She had followed Max around the lake, taking cover behind boulders and brush, moving as silently as a mountain cat.