The Daughter's Walk (35 page)

When July arrived without contact, images of my mother's pretending we'd make our walking deadline loomed. I admitted the truth to myself and decided Olaf wasn't going to follow his interest in farming with me. Maybe he'd decided working for the Elstads suited him fine. But he might have written and told me so.

I'd locate a farm without his help. That's what I'd do.

“It really isn't necessary, is it?” Olea said. “Extending yourself further by purchasing a farm? And you're upset now. Why not wait until you've had more time to think about this.”

“It's an investment,” I said. One day it might support a breeding farm like the Finns', only not with silver foxes but with mink. I didn't tell Olea that. She would have thought me daft. “I can find someone to perform the labor. It'll be a good place for Lucky to run. They're still talking about the reclaiming act, and when it passes, prices will only go up. It's better to buy now.”

Louise actually found the farm I purchased. She'd taken the dog for a long walk and talked to the farmer out in his field. No stranger that she is, he was soon telling her of his daughter's wish that he and his wife would move to Seattle to live closer to her. Louise walked home, got me, and before the week was out, I owned a wheat farm of one hundred sixty acres. I could raise a passel of chickens on it too.

We rented the farmhouse to a young couple, and the husband agreed to work on shares. It was a perfect arrangement.

I didn't need my brother.

“At least he might have written to me,” I complained. We'd bought peaches from a local farmer and were putting them up in Ball jars. “He said he'd always talk to me, and now he won't.”

“Go see him again,” Olea said. The heat of the day and our canning had left moisture above her lips. Birdsong merried the air beyond the open window.

“No. He knows where I am. It's up to him. It's only right he contact me.” I rubbed my forehead with my forearm. It was so very hot in the kitchen.

“But you're the one distressed. You can be right, Clara, but not be very happy about it.”

“I wouldn't be happy begging him either,” I said.

“You think it's begging to find out what might have gotten in the way of his contacting you again? He's surely not out to hurt you. It's in your best interest to believe he is doing the best he can. Maybe he's sick or had an accident and can't contact you.”

I hadn't thought of that.

Still, he could ask someone to write to me. Maybe Erik Elstad. Or one of my brothers and sisters. He would find a way if he was really interested.

Obviously he wasn't. Like my fantasy involving my father, I'd created a story with Olaf in it. Both stories had the same real-life ending: neither wanted contact with me.

F
EBRUARY 1904

F
ranklin arrived for a visit, much to the delight of the women, and me too I guess. The snow was deep in the stream ravines, but he and I snowshoed a distance into the timber so he could see the land. Afterward, we sat in my little shack, the wood stove crackling. It was his first look at the land I'd been trapping.

He assessed my pelts, commented on their size, pointed out the cuts I'd made in the fisher hide when fleshing it. “You've reduced its value,” he said. “You'll get the hang of it. Otherwise, they look good. We didn't see many beaver dams. Not as many tracks as I'd hoped for to indicate there'll be ample harvest in the future. Makes me wonder if it's overtrapped, or maybe disease has taken its toll and they haven't reproduced as we'd expect. Stress in the coats suggests that too.”

“Are they good enough to sell on our own?” I asked.

“Some are. But we'd do better at the auction because you don't have that many quality pelts.”

“Yet,” I said, but his words stung. I'd messed up with my knife in my learning, reducing the pelt's value.

Franklin shrugged. He was like my brother Olaf in that way, not openly disagreeing but still expressing caution. “I've never been to an auction.” I'd sold my first season's pelts in Spokane. “I guess now is the time.”

We all decided to go to Seattle and make an adventure of it, as Louise said. She contacted a neighbor boy to look after Lucy, and Lucky went out to the farm for the few days we'd be gone.

At the Seattle auction, we women sat in the back while the male buyers lifted their hats or flicked a finger beside their noses to indicate the lot of furs they wished to buy. Excitement crackled in the air between those representing the trappers and the buyers hoping to get the best profit for their manufacturing firms.

Pampering ourselves, we stayed at a fine hotel in Seattle and ate at the best restaurants. The eyes of my friends, Olea and Louise, sparkled in recognition of a buyer from Quebec they hadn't seen for a while and the wife of a grader who sat with us after the auction.

“This is what I mean by passion,” Olea told me that evening as we prepared for yet another party. Her eyes sparkled. “Isn't this grand?”

I did enjoy the hoopla and Franklin's attention as well. Mostly, I eavesdropped to hear anything I could about what the Finns were doing, how the industry was moving. If I mentioned their ranching program, people scoffed. “Oh, you know those Finns,” they said. “I'll bet it's just rich gentlemen playing at a hobby. Why spend money gathering food for animals when the forests can do it for you?” A trapper's wife interjected that it would be nice to have her man at home in the winter with a ranching operation, and the other women nodded. The conversation moved on, the idea of farming furs something for those dreaming Finns. When the auction events were over, we walked with
Franklin to the train station. He'd head next to Montreal; we'd return to Coulee City. Louise and Olea had already boarded our train. I stood with Franklin, realizing I enjoyed his company and would miss it. Our friendship lacked pressure, carried the comfort of when I spent time with my brother, and had the added spark of bantering between two people who respected each other.

“I'll write more often if you'd like me to,” Franklin said as we stood in the station.

“Do you think we need more information from you?” I said. He kept the women updated quite well, I thought.

“No,” he smiled. “I'd like more response.”

“Oh. Well, I can write reports more frequently,” I said.

“Clara. It's you I'd like to hear from, not only the official correspondence of my women.”

“About my trapping?”

“I'm interested in you more than in trapping. Will you allow me to write of other things? More importantly, will you write back?”

I was glad he couldn't hear my heartbeat. I liked the current arrangement. We were separated by miles, and I wasn't sure I wanted that distance shortened by his knowing me better or differently. The train whistle blew over any answer he might have heard if I'd had the voice to give one.

“I'll write back,” I told him, but I didn't say about what.

By the next winter, I no longer felt baffled by the traps, though I still had much to learn about knowing where to set them. I still had two lines going now, both productive.

The Warrens were neighborly enough. At Christmas, they left me
a wild turkey they'd shot. Once a salmon hung on a hook by my door. I set a packet of tobacco out for them, and it was gone by morning.

Louise worried out loud when I came home. She said that I seemed to grow taller but thinner and expressed concern about how hard I worked. Olea said more than once that she didn't think this whole “trapping thing” was the best use of my time. It was difficult, cold work, though Lucky made it less so. There were occasional disputes about my not appreciating the work the two women performed at home or my “apparent preference for furs over friends.” The latter charge wasn't so, but I could see how they might think so. Franklin's letters spoke of designers he'd met with in Montreal and of bringing finished products back from Hong Kong to sell in the furrier shops of New York. He reminded me that design work was “much warmer than what you're about with those traps.” He signed his letters,
Affectionately yours
.

The challenges made me more stubborn. No one was going to tell me what I couldn't do. I didn't take the time to listen for Isaiah's words about what way to walk. That season I didn't collect enough prime pelts, so I offered the Warrens good prices for theirs. I took all of the furs to the Spokane auction myself instead of having Franklin come west. No sense cracking muddy waters best left frozen. The pelts brought an average price, but I made little over what I'd paid the Warrens. My paltry contribution of my own pelts added a small profit, but I wasn't going to become financially independent this way. I'd have to consider livetrapping to begin fur ranching, and I needed to let Olea and Louise know what I had in mind for the farm.

The boardinghouse earned us additional funds, and we split it three ways. Olea furnished the rooms and Louise cooked and I provided the
house, so it worked. I added my profits to a fund I had for buying land. In 1905 I found sixteen more acres along the Spokane River bordering my three hundred twenty. It had timber in addition to river frontage, and I thought it a good investment. It came with an apple orchard. My cash reserve grew smaller. With trepidation, I took out a small loan at the bank for wheat seed, a few apple starts, and twenty chickens.

“Don't overextend yourself,” Olea warned.

“But you said one has to invest in order to get a return, right?”

“Yes, but caution is essential.”

“I've studied yields and expenses. I'm diversifying,” I said, remembering Olea's brother-in-law's advice. I didn't add that I thought her latest enterprise promised less return than my wheat fields. She and her sister, Priscilla, had begun importing European furniture into America. Olea used a few pieces to furnish the boarders' rooms and our living quarters; some she placed in the Spokane house she still owned, where she met monthly with society women looking for the perfect settee or that English burl elm Chippendale flattop desk (which she told everyone came from a royal estate). I was surprised by the prices people were willing to pay for secondhand items and wondered if they were moved to spend by the romance of the stories Olea spun.

Fortunately, we had bountiful rain that year. The grain harvest not only allowed me to repay my bank loan and interest, but it made all my expenses, the labor I hired, and feed and seed for the next season. We butchered several chickens and sold them in Spokane, but I knew that when I was ready for raising my fur-bearing animals, chickens or their eggs would meet the protein needs. I used a little of my small profit to buy Louise a new Monarch stove and Olea a signed first edition of Audubon's 1827
The Birds of America
, published in France. If I could repeat my success each year, I'd have a nice little nest egg soon. I was
doing what I'd set out to do, making my way with sound decisions that hurt no one else. I still wished I could tell Olaf of my success, but he'd made his choice. I'd made mine. Louise and Olea and even Franklin—at arm's length—were my family now.