Tisha (3 page)

Four men and a woman were waiting for us. The sod roof of the cabin they were standing in front of
must have been over a foot thick. There were still some vegetables left in the garden that had been growing on it, and I thought to myself that my Grandmother Hobbs would sure like to have seen a garden growing up in the air like that.

The men were glad to see us, but they seemed a little shy when they saw me and went right to the pack animals instead of saying hello. The woman wasn’t shy at all. Her name was Mrs. Ross. Short and fat, with jolly red cheeks, she was stuffed into a lumberjack shirt and a pair of Levis rolled up at the bottoms. She came right up to me, took in my flowered hat and the apparition underneath it and said, “Good Lord, what’na hell happened to you?”

She wasn’t expecting an answer and I didn’t give her any. “One of you galoots get this poor thing down from there,” she said. A man came over to me and lifted me out of the saddle as if I was a toy. When he set me down my knees gave way, and the next thing I knew the woman was practically carrying me into the cabin.

She sat me down beside a cookstove that had all kinds of things warming on it, took off my coat and jacket and told me not to move. I didn’t have to be told. If she’d have wanted to kill me I wouldn’t have raised a finger to stop her. She was swabbing my arms and hands with a washcloth when somebody started to come in. Whoever it was shut the door right away when she told him and everybody else to stay out until I came back to life.

I told her my name while I dried myself off with a towel she gave me, and she asked me where I was headed.

“Chicken,” I said. “I’m the new teacher.”

“Chicken! Honey, from the looks of you, you ain’t even gonna make it to Liberty.”

She was so hearty and outgoing that she made me feel better right away. If she’d been wearing a shirtwaist and long skirt she’d have reminded me of Miss Ivy, a teacher who’d taken me in when I was still in high school.

She didn’t let the men in until she was sure I wasn’t
going to faint or cry, then she served up a delicious lunch of hot bear soup, hot sourdough bread and moose pot roast.

The men at the table didn’t have too much to say, talking a little with Mr. Strong about their “clean-up”—the gold they’d taken from the ground—and speculating about the kind of winter they thought they were in for. I could tell they’d have liked to talk to me, but they were being polite and letting me eat. I was starved and ate so much finally that I could hardly move when I was done.

Mrs. Ross shooed them outside as soon as they finished so that I could lie down for a while. A half hour later when it was time for me to get up, I was glad the men weren’t around. The insides of my thighs were so chafed I waddled around like a duck for a few minutes.

Before I got on Blossom again Mrs. Ross gave me an old stained pillow to put under me. It made it a little harder for me to balance myself, but it helped.

Once we were out of Gravel Gulch the going was easier. The country smoothed out into a series of gently sweeping hills, and I wished I weren’t so saddle sore, so that I could really appreciate it. Sometimes, when we’d be riding across the crest of a hill I could see for hundreds of miles in every direction and I’d feel expectant and afraid at the same time. It was all so big that it made me feel as if something exciting was going to happen, yet so quiet and lonely I felt lost in it. But as big as it was, when we’d stop to water the horses at a creek and have a drink ourselves, there’d always be an old tin cup sitting between some rocks or hanging from a nail driven into a tree.

Darkness came slowly after a long twilight, but once the sun was down it became cold fast. It was past eight o’clock when we reached Liberty, and I was so bone-weary I hardly paid any attention to what was going on. Even if I had there would have been nothing to see but an old sagging cabin and a smelly stable nearby.

All I wanted to do was get into a bed and never wake up, so when Mr. Strong told me that after the horses were unloaded and stabled we’d have something
to eat, I asked him just to show me where I was going to sleep. An old man who tended the stable for him hobbled ahead of me to a one-room cabin that smelled stale with sweat He took three bedrolls down from a shelf and laid them out, then put some horse blankets on them. Before he left he told me that I’d be most comfortable nearest the stove. There was a kerosene lamp hanging over a homemade table, and some water warming on the small stove, but I didn’t even bother to turn the lamp down or think about washing or brushing my teeth. I just lay down on the bedroll, pulled a couple of blankets over me and tried to sleep.

From the start I kept drifting in and out, too exhausted to wake up and too sore to fall into a deep sleep. I felt the floorboards move under me when Mr. Strong and the old man came in and lay down, and during the night I heard one of them snoring.

I kept dreaming that I was still on Blossom and that he was walking all the way back to Eagle with me. No matter what I did I couldn’t stop him. When we arrived I felt terrible. I’d been riding for two days and I was back where I started.

It was dark and cold the next morning when Mr. Strong shook me. “There’s hot water on the stove, madam,” he said. “You will have twenty minutes to wash up and prepare yourself. Then we shall have breakfast and be on our way.”

Ordinarily I loved getting up early and starting a new day, but after he went out I had to force myself to move. It took me five minutes before I could even stand. I had charley horses in both my legs and I didn’t know which part of me hurt most. On top of the
potbellied stove there was a kettle of water. I limped with it over to a wooden counter, poured some hot water into a basin, then got some cold water from a big barrel. The water didn’t look that clean so I decided I’d skip brushing my teeth.

It was just starting to get light when we finished breakfast and were ready to go. But this time when Mr. Strong cupped his hands to boost me into the saddle I was too stiff to raise my foot. He and the old man had to get together and lift me.

Our next stopover for the night, Mr. Strong told me, would be Steel Creek, twenty-four miles away. “We’ll stop at Dome Creek for lunch,” he added.

“Everybody here in Alaska seems to live either on a creek or a river,” I said.

He didn’t think too much of my observation. “It’s natural enough, madam. If they didn’t they wouldn’t have any water.”

I was tempted to say they could always dig a well, but I didn’t.

He’d found a smaller saddle for me as he’d promised, and it helped a lot at first by not rubbing me where I was raw, but after a while it started new raw places.

I’d thought Blossom had been mean the day before, but today he was even worse. Now that I had a smaller saddle I thought I’d be able to make him mind me. Instead he showed me right from the start who was boss. He’d stop whenever he felt like cropping some late grass or a few leaves that were still green, then to make up for lost time he’d jog along till he caught up with the pack train, punishing every bone in my body. I told Mr. Strong about it and he gave me a small box of chocolate creams. “Feed one to him every so often. It will keep him in a good mood.”

They kept him in a mood, but it wasn’t good. He was as smart as he was mean. After I gave him the first chocolate he kept turning his head every few minutes for another, whinnying and making terrible throaty sounds until I gave in. Twenty minutes later I gave him the last chocolate, showed him the empty box and tossed it away so he knew there was no more. After
that he was worse than ever. I couldn’t do anything to make him obey, until finally I just stopped caring. I rode hunched over, only seeing the creeks we crossed as Blossom splashed through them, and once I watched his legs turn blue as we sloshed through a patch of late blueberries. Sometimes I fell as much as a quarter of a mile behind the pack train.

It was about an hour after we left Gravel Gulch that I looked up to see the pack train halted and Mr. Strong waiting for me. Up ahead was what looked like a field of cotton. A light wind rippled its surface, and it was so beautiful that it made me forget how bad I was feeling.

“What’s that?” I asked Mr. Strong.

“Tundra.”

“I mean the white stuff.” I didn’t think it could be cotton, but it was.

“‘Alaska cotton,’” Mr. Strong said. “From this point on, madam, you’ll have to look where you’re going. We’re going to cross all that.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I said.

He stared at me owlishly. “Have you ever crossed a niggerhead flat?”

“No …”

He wheeled his horse and the pack train started forward. I soon found out what he meant. At first I enjoyed myself. We rode through acres and acres of silvery bolls, their long silky fibers waving like pompoms atop a slender stem. Then we hit swamp. Out of it grew big hummocks of matted grass that looked like giant mops. They grew so thick that I thought of getting off Blossom and walking on them. Like the other animals, he wasn’t having easy going. The mud sucked at his hoofs, and he kept slipping all over the place and stumbling over submerged roots. We slowed way down and soon fell behind the rest of the pack train.

I was so busy holding on that I didn’t see the herd of caribou until we were almost on top of them. I heard them first, making peculiar coughing sounds. Then, as though they’d come out of nowhere, there they were a few hundred yards ahead on solid ground. They were grazing, eating some kind of white moss, a forest of antlers over their heads and a shawl of white around
their shoulders. The closest of them lifted their heads, big eyes staring curiously. Then they went back to grazing as if they hadn’t seen a thing.

What happened next went so fast that it was over before I knew it. We were about forty feet away from a caribou mother and a calf that were separated from the rest of the herd. All I saw at first was something moving fast—a humpbacked shape that was charging down on the calf in one moment and in the next was launching itself through the air.

It was a huge grizzly, and it landed on top of the calf with a terrible bone-crushing sound. The calf tried to get out from under but it didn’t have a chance. I watched, horrified as the grizzly, snarling and raging, held the struggling calf down with one paw. Then, like a wrestler, it wrenched the calf’s neck back, snapping it.

Blossom reared and I went tumbling into the mud, praying he wouldn’t fall on me. Scrambling and stumbling, he managed to stay on his feet, then ran off. The whole herd started to move at the same time, antlers clacking, all of them pushing and shoving at each other in a panic to get away. A few stumbled and fell, but were back on their feet in a moment. Then the whole herd was bounding off.

Only the mother stayed, watching as the grizzly tore a great chunk of flesh from the twitching body. I started to back off, but I must have moved too fast. The grizzly dropped what he was eating and snarled at me, flashing bloody fangs.

I was too scared to move until I was sure he was more interested in his meal than in me. Then I started to black off slowly, the mud sucking at my shoes. Finally I turned and stumbled away.

After I felt I’d gone a safe distance, I turned around. My heart almost stopped as I stared into a pair of eyes.

The caribou mother had followed me. Only ten feet away, she looked enormous now that I was on foot. She let out a mournful wail that scared me even more and I screamed at her hysterically. “Go away! You hear me? Go away!” I started to cry.

At that she wheeled and loped off. I saw why a few
seconds later: Mr. Strong was riding toward me, leading Blossom. Covered with mud from head to toe, aching all over, I couldn’t stop crying. There was even mud up my sleeves. Mr. Strong got down from his horse and came over to me and I threw my arms around him. He stood straight as a statue, giving me a soft pat on the shoulder once or twice. “Now, madam,” he said after a couple of minutes, “you mustn’t take on so. Whatever happened you seem to have weathered it.”

Finally I was able to blubber out the whole story.

“It is something you must get used to in this country,” he said. “We will find some dry ground and after you change clothes you will feel better. Can you ride now?”

“I guess so.”

“Madam, where is your hat?” “Back there somewhere. I don’t care about it anymore.”

He rode back a ways before he found it. When he returned with it and I saw the shape it was in I told him to throw it away. He said he’d prefer not to.

“It is very becoming on you. Perhaps we can wash the mud off at the next creek.”

The revolver lay heavy against my thigh. I hadn’t even thought to use it, I realized. I mentioned it to Mr. Strong.

“It was fortunate you didn’t. That grizzly would have torn you to pieces.”

As soon as we reached some dry ground he unpacked the horse that had my things on it, then turned around so I could change. Luckily, I’d bought an extra pair of knickers back in Eagle, but having to put on a pair of practically new pumps, I wished now that I’d bought some boots. Mr. Strong had advised me to, but I wanted to save the money.

“After this,” he said before we mounted up again, “I want you to keep up with the pack train.”

“I’d like to, but I just can’t get Blossom to mind me.”

That made him mad. Without saying a word he walked over to a tree and broke a branch from it. He
swished it around a couple of times, then grabbed Blossom’s rein. First he jerked Blossom’s head from side to side, punishing his mouth with the bit, then pushed him backwards until he almost fell. Blossom was scared and so was I. He tried to rear, but Mr. Strong held onto the rein. Then he lashed out at Blossom’s neck with the switch while he held the rein tight Blossom snorted and whinnied in panic, but Mr. Strong wouldn’t stop. Dirt and stones were flying all over the place. How he held onto that big animal I didn’t know, but he must have hit Blossom on the neck and face about twenty times. When he was done Blossom was quivering so badly I felt sorry for him. Mr. Strong’s hat had fallen off. I gave it to him when he handed me the switch. He was sweating, and with his hat off, the top of his head bald, he didn’t look so forbidding.