West of Here (11 page)

JANUARY
1890

The general consensus among the Mather expedition held that with each homestead the men passed on their way through the teardrop-shaped valley and into the next gap, they had for certain passed the outermost settlement. Time and again they were disappointed by a small clearing or a crude snow-covered structure. Not until they reached the foot of the second, larger gorge did they truly leave the last vestiges of white settlement behind.

The snow kept on through the day and into the next, and the sound of their own plodding snowshoes was muffled, as were the echoes of their voices. There was five feet of accumulation in places, and for this reason Mather cut his blazes low on the trunks of trees, so that come spring the blazes would be at eye level.

The party dug in a half mile beyond the head of the big canyon and chose a low sandy bench just below camp as the site for boat construction. From the felling of the timber to the caulking of her hull, the boat took them the better part of four days. The dogs got into the bacon the first night, making off with all but precious little of it, so that breakfast each morning thereafter consisted of gilletes and coffee. The weather was not cooperative. Each morning the timbers were heavy with ice, and it was necessary to thaw them for several hours over the fire. They smoked the green wood until it was light as cork. They curved the timbers at stem and stern by heaving them with a lever arrangement. They caulked the hull with oakum and pitch until she was watertight and dubbed her
Lucy.
She was thirty-by-five at the beam, two feet deep, and decked forward and aft for bowman and steerman.

After the finishing touches were applied to
Lucy,
the men lowered the stores down the rutty bluff and packed them tight into the hold.
Reese then persuaded Daisy and Dolly aboard with the butt end of his rifle before passing the reins to a waiting Cunningham. They dragged the boat into the riffle and held her fast by the towlines. They stood upon the bank amid a light snow, where Cunningham halfheartedly attempted to solicit heavenly intervention on behalf of the expedition, leaving Reese to roll his eyes. Finally, with considerable effort, they pushed off into the current.

The boat took fairly well to the water, though she rode low beneath the weight of the stores, her nose cutting into the water beneath the rapids. Mather manned the bow pole, with Haywood at the steering oar, while Reese and Runnells struggled for footing along opposing banks with the tow line, accompanied by the dogs, who alternately bounded ahead and sniffed along the bank. The boat dragged against the swift current. Progress was extremely hard won, as the river proved itself to be a more formidable challenge than anyone expected. Surely, this was not the same river that ran flat and shoal at its mouth, the same river that promised smooth passage to the divide. This was a rock-strewn beast boiling with rapids, a heaving, roiling, serpentine devil. Where the river did not run wide, it ran braided in chutes and timber-choked shallows. Footholds were hard to come by on either bank. Reese and Runnells spent the better part of their time waist deep in the numbing current, the wind and snow in their face.

Time and again, the boat hung up on rocks and snags, and several times the force of the current overwhelmed them, and they were pushed back into the rocks they had worked so hard to clear, colliding with such violence on one occasion that Daisy reared up in the boat, and Runnells lost the towline momentarily. Mather was nearly thrown from the deck into the rapids. And Mather’s heart thrilled on that occasion, for he found no triumph in surrender, nor even in the spoils of victory, but only in the perilous clutches of the battle itself. That’s the answer he should have given Eva, that’s the spirit that drove him. Only in adventure were the senses fully engaged, the life force fully harnessed, the intellect fully immersed. Only then could one feel the magnetic forces of chaos pulling them toward the true nature of all things. And only when these forces dragged you by the collar to
the very precipice of terrible understanding, and forced you to look down into the abyss, only then did the fighting begin in earnest, only then were you truly alive.

When they crashed against the rocks, Mather laughed like a madman, even as he regained his balance, and when a quick glimpse at Cunningham revealed that the latter had lost all color, a warmth suffused the lap of Mather’s pants, and he did not fight it, but joyfully let it spread down his legs.

“Ha! What were you expecting, Cunningham, Lovers Lane?”

A quarter mile upstream from the collision, two giant firs, six and seven feet in diameter, lay fully across the river. The men were forced to drag the boat to a rocky bar and tether the mules. They regrouped over a loaf of wet sourdough, a small fire, and a pan of warm water. It took the remainder of the day to cut through the downed trees with hatchets and whipsaws. And though the chore greatly depleted their store of dogfish oil and elbow grease, it did not deplete their optimism.

Spirits were high around the campfire. Prune pie and whiskey fueled their celebration. Cunningham alone seemed rattled by the day’s events. He chewed at the stem of his pipe and stirred the fire restlessly. Reese was uncharacteristically giddy, at one point patting Dolly upon the muzzle with something resembling affection. Despite having spent the first half of the day chest deep in the chill rapids, clutching a frozen towline that tore his hands to tender shreds, Runnells felt a warmth in his bones. Even the mild Haywood, who preferred polite deference from the forces of nature to the grueling business of conquest, could not help but revisit the day’s adventures with relish.

At the end of the night, as Mather lay in the tent, wrapped in his shell of woolen blankets, staring into a blackness that may well have been the back of his eyelids, he afforded himself an image of Eva, and what it might have been like to feel her body pressed against his own in the darkness. He soon fell asleep.

DAWN SNUCK INTO
the tent, as though with the slightest stirring, she might withdraw back into the night. The morning was cruel — dark,
blustery, but not quite ominous. Yesterday’s triumph still cast the palest of light on the new day. The tents were sagging with ice when the men awoke, and Mather discovered crystals in his thick beard; leaning up on his elbows, he shook them off like a bear might have, with three big sweeps of the head and a pawing motion. Outside the tents, the snow came down the valley in windblown sheets, stinging his face and hands. The coals were completely dead. The pemmican was tough. But the coffee sharpened his senses and awoke his spirit.

They found the boat’s hull mired in ice, and even before they could begin the day’s journey, they were forced to hoist her up on blocks and put the fire to her. When she was dry, they recaulked her hull for good measure. It was early afternoon before they packed the boat back up, dragged her to the edge of the bank, and guided her into the water. Beyond the two firs, the river ran deep and narrow for a stretch, and the boat dragged against the current like never before. Footing was impossible along the steep banks, and Cunningham was useless with the towline. Reese battled hard, knee deep in water, scrambling for footholds between the slick rocks. His grasp was all but frozen to the towline.

Emerging from a high-banked gulch they hit a tough stretch of flat white rapids which offered no possibility of circumnavigation. Mather rode them straight up the gut for a hundred glorious feet, grunting, and roaring, and laughing and cursing, before it became impossible to gain headway, and Mather and his men submitted to defeat. They eased her back down river to the nearest possible landing, a narrow stone promontory along the left bank.

Forced to portage the cargo, they guided the empty boat to the head of the rapids, and pulled her over a knee-high fall of jagged rocks, an effort requiring as much guile and tact as brute strength. The chore left every man exhausted. They ate gillettes and did not linger by the fire.

That night, the snow relented, along with the biting wind, and even the current was in good humor throughout the next morning, during which they covered the better part of a quarter mile. Mather felt
confident that the worst was over, that the river would lead them through the remainder of the foothills to the divide, where they would face a bold new set of challenges in the high country.

The river ran flat for a quarter-mile stretch, offering relatively little resistance. By midday, they’d wended their way through the next gap to the base of yet another dark fold of steep wooded hills, the tops of which were shrouded in mist. The closer they drew to the interior, the more rugged and dramatic the lay of the land revealed itself to be. The hills grew more imposing with each successive layer, from the rolling foothills below the first canyon, to the hulking ogres that followed. The hills they now confronted were heavily buttressed, great shouldered beasts that sprouted out of the earth as though they were still growing, still pushing their way up, opening chasms and shaking off boulders, shedding their igneous skin as they reared upward toward heaven. And still the party was nowhere near the outer perimeter of the larger ranges, still they had hardly ventured twelve miles from the mouth of the Elwha. How far was paradise? Where amid this chaos of mountain terrain was the golden valley?

A short ways into the dark cleft, they hit a foul stretch of rapids, where the river emerged from a chute of basalt and promptly met with the confluence of another churning stream. The Elwha was a frothing cauldron, the roar of it deafening. Cunningham lost the rope repeatedly, but Reese was able to hold her each time, until sweeping around the port side, Reese lost his footing and was caught in the current, relinquishing the line as he was pulled under by the rapids. The world flashed on and off as the river took possession of him.

The instant Reese lost the line, the mules reared, and the boat was forced back by the current with such sudden violence that she spun forty-five degrees, and Haywood lost the steering oar, and the boat crashed upon the rocks. Haywood and Cunningham and Dolly were all thrown free of the boat and swallowed up by the river in a terrible instant. But Mather hung on, even as the boat broke free of the rocks with a groan, even as it spun out of control. She was taking on water through the hull, over the sides, everywhere he turned. The remaining
mule was now on her feet and pitching violently backward. The world had come undone. Mather’s head was spinning with a delectable violence. He was one with the chaos, immersed in the savage truth of all things, when the stern was wrenched out from under his feet, and he was struck as though by a bolt of lightning, and time, as he knew it, ceased to exist.

JANUARY
1890

Something was strangling the life out of Mather, some cold hand had gripped his torso like a vice, and pulled him beneath the rapids again and again, swept him along against his will, and Mather would have surrendered gladly to its pull, if only he could have drawn a single breath. Instead, he fought desperately for air, blacking out in spotty flashes. Above the dull roar of rapids he heard the dogs barking on the bank and heard the panicked baying of Daisy, still captive on the unmanned boat as it careened out of control. A blurry figure lighted upon the far bank, splashing into the shallows, shouting between cupped hands. Suddenly, something grabbed hold of Mather by the waist and dragged him under the riffle, grappled desperately with him, entangling him in its clutches. When he fought his way to the surface and managed at last to fill his lungs with one desperate gasp, he found himself face to face with a deathly pale Cunningham, who was still clinging for dear life to Mather. A wide gash had opened across Cunningham’s forehead. Not until Mather glimpsed the naked fear in Cunningham’s eyes did he feel the tingle of his own sharpened senses, the electric chill of fear down his spine. And it was fear that gave Mather the strength to shoulder Cunningham, fear that drove him in hard-fought increments toward the bank, even as the rapids shot them farther downstream, until Mather at last managed to get his feet underneath him and stop their terrible progress, wading to shore with the dead weight of Cunningham still clinging to him. Upon terra firma, Cunningham stood and walked upon his own strength.

The dogs came first. Sitka lit out from the underbrush and nearly bowled Mather over when she reached him, licking his face and pawing
at his shoulders as she balanced on two legs. The other dog came down the bank, wet and panting, but nonetheless enthusiastic. Runnells appeared a few moments later, alone, limping along the far bank. He was hatless and his pants were split down one leg. He threw his arms up and shrugged, then nodded and lowered his head and kept walking until he was directly across from Mather and Cunningham, where he crouched on the bank and put his head in his hands.

For a half hour they walked the banks calling for Reese and Haywood until little hope remained in the frayed edges of their voices. They sat and waited, Runnells on the far bank, and the other two men opposite, until Cunningham swore he heard the braying of a mule from up the hill. Mather listened intently. Soon there was a great ruckus in the understory behind him, the clatter of snapping limbs and a sharp exclamation laced with superlatives. Haywood emerged from the brush leading Dolly. And behind the mule came a disconsolate Reese dragging his heels.

They found Daisy a quarter mile downstream pinned between two rocks, grinning hideously with her shattered jaw rent in opposite directions. Her legs were twisted into impossible configurations. But in her final miraculous act of stubbornness, she was still breathing weakly. Mather could not bear to look at her. The brutality of her disfigurement, that a life could be ripped apart so violently and thrown aside like a thing, seemed a violation of all that was natural. That the thing should continue to breathe and suffer in such a maligned condition was sickening. The dogs would not let Daisy lie, and Mather shooed them away angrily. Without a rifle to end the mule’s misery, he was forced to stave her head in with a hefty stone. Her skull caved like a melon, and Mather would not soon forget the sensation of it.