The Egg and I (19 page)

Man works from dawn to setting sun
But woman's work is never done.

Who Bothers Whom?

W
ho said that wild animals won't bother you if you don't bother them? Whoever said it must have lived in an apartment house and just finished reading
Bambi
. The longer I lived in the mountains the more I realized that Gammy had something when she told us, "Animals are
beasts
and a
wild
animal is a
wild beast
!" Which somehow seemed to make their wildness deliberate and malicious.

Our trouble with wild animals began in the summer. Of course, we had had many encounters with bats, weasels, owls, hawks, wood rats and field mice, but I'm talking now about the large wild animals like bears, cougars, wild cats, skunks, deer and coyotes.

Our summers came early—about May. The sun began to stretch and yawn a little after five and was up, fully dressed and ready to begin a day's work, before six. The days were hot and bright and the house was wrapped up like a Christmas package with roses and honeysuckle whose heavy scent flowed through the windows if the wind was right; and if the wind was wrong I comforted myself with the knowledge that manure was what made the roses and honeysuckle so vigorous and prolific.

The work seemed easier in summer. Washings bleached white and dried quickly, the wood was dry and anxious to ignite, the chicken house floor didn't get soggy, and the paths to all of the outbuildings were clean, dry and hard. It was pleasant to go out in the cool quiet of an early summer morning and hoe the feathery carrots and delicate green ribbons of corn; to transplant lettuce and stake beans; to search hopefully for signs of life in my coldframes until the wonderful smell of percolating coffee hunted me out and warned me it was time to get breakfast.

In summer we made our trips to town in the early morning and were home before the heat of the day. One morning we were fed and scrubbed and in the truck by seven, only to find, after coasting to the county road, that the truck had developed a consumptive cough over night and had become so debilitated it couldn't even make the mild hill back to the house, let alone the vicious grades hemming us in on east and west. For an hour Bob tried to persuade it to go toward town; then in desperation attempted to guide it up the driveway to the garage. It would reel ahead a few steps then slide back, limp and gasping. Finally I was dispatched to retrieve one of the Kettle boys from under one of the Kettle cars to see if he could diagnose the trouble.

I put Anne in her carriage, told Bob to keep an eye on her, cantered down to the Kettles' and persuaded Elwin to come up and fix the car. Elwin ungraciously acquiesced and elected to drive up in the most sinister-looking of all of the jalopies, so I took the trail through the logging burn instead.

For a while the path ran beside the Kettles' stream and was well-travelled and shaded by second growth. Then it became a perilous scramble through giant jackstraw piles of slashings and discarded logs. I threaded my way around brambles, through brush, stepping on logs which either swayed alarmingly over dark bottomless-looking pools or else gave way entirely and left me clinging to slender twigs and feeling for footholds over bramble-filled pits. There were still many great virgin trees left, for this logging had been done by a sloppy small outfit, and the woods were dark and cool and quiet. Occasional birds twittered, and chipmunks slithered over logs and then paused to stare at me glassy-eyed, but there was none of the twig-snapping, brush-rustling, chirping activity that had marked my walk along the road. At last the path miraculously reappeared and wound steeply upward along a ravine and through uncut virgin timber. Halfway up this home stretch I was aware of an uncomfortable feeling as though something were following me. I heard brush crackling across the ravine—even saw branches sway; but when I stopped the noise stopped and finally I convinced myself that I was imagining things. Then I leaped to the ground from a fallen log and there was a terrific crashing across the ravine. Certain that I had not made that much noise, I stopped again to listen, and this time the crashing continued and sounded as if, whatever it was, it was heading across the ravine to
me
. I broke into a lope and at last, panting and scared, I reached home and threw myself on Bob who patted me comfortingly and said that he didn't think that anything would follow me.

Before I could think of a suitable rejoinder Elwin appeared, and while he towed the truck into the yard and started taking it entirely apart, even to removing little tiny nuts and bolts, Bob took Sport and the Kettles' Airedale and went into the woods to look for a good cedar tree to cut into fence posts. He came back almost immediately to get his gun, saying that the dogs seemed uneasy and he thought he'd take a look around.

It seemed hours later when Elwin and I heard the shots. There were four or five close together—then silence. Dead silence. I hallooed. No answer. I began to be frightened and asked Elwin, who was sprawled under the truck, to go out and see what was happening, but he merely stuck his head out, shook his mane of hair out of his eyes, grinned his wide foolish grin, and said, "If he don't come back he's probably dead and there's no use of us both getting kilt, ha, ha, ha!" Then he went back to his tinkering under the truck. After another long wait Elwin came in for a drink of water and, after three dippers full, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, "Well, looks like you're a widder-woman, ha, ha, ha!" I'm sure I would have killed him if the truck had been fixed, but it definitely was not, so I had to content myself with withering looks and a scathing silence.

Bob at last came limping in, his shirt in ribbons, a great jagged bloody gash across his chest, and wearing a beaming smile. "Stepped into the root pit of a fallen tree and a she-bear jumped me. Fired five shots in her general direction and I guess one of 'em stuck because she's deader than a smelt."

"That gash!" I said weakly.

"Oh, that," he said looking offhandedly down at it. "Must have happened when Joe," he affectionately pulled the ear of the Airedale, "yanked the bear off me. Joe grabbed her hind leg just as she jumped and I guess you could say he saved my life." Then he and Elwin climbed into the jalopy and drove cross country to bring in the carcass.

I got out iodine, bandages, sleeping tablets and my self-control, because, though Bob was being brave and careless in front of Elwin, alone with me, he would act as if the bear had laid open both his lungs and his large intestine, and would spend many happy hours looking for the first signs of blood poisoning. It occurred to me then, that no mention had been made of our dog's part in the fray.

Bob and Elwin returned much later with a large black bear which reeked of iodoform (natural she-bear smell, Elwin said) over the hood of the car and a report of two cubs up a tree. I asked about Sport, but Bob said that he hadn't seen him; that he disappeared just as Joe, the Airedale, got the scent. I looked toward the stove and was relieved to see the dejected tip of a dark red tail. "That's all right, boy," I murmured, "I'll slip you a bone later on just to let you know that I feel the same way about bears."

Bob fixed a sumptuous meal for Joe who was so emaciated that we could follow the progress of each bite. I asked Elwin why Joe was so thin and he brilliantly replied, "I dunno—he should be O.K. We been grainin' him!"

Oh, well, Elwin had fixed the truck, and it ran with purpose and vigor. With the five dollars Bob gave him he said that he was going to buy a fog light for his awful car, which at that time had no lights at all.

After Elwin had left, I hesitantly mentioned the fact that I may have been right in thinking something was following me earlier in the day. Bob said, "Didn't sound like a bear. Could have been, of course—the berries are coming on now—but it was more likely squirrels." With which odious remark he collapsed on his bed of pain and I was allowed to dress the wounds and listen to the stories of the attack.

Now, were we bothering that bear? Of course, some people will say that the woods were the bear's natural domain and just by being there Bob was bothering her. But those woods were
our property
!

I wrote a full account of the bear hunt to the family, and Mother replied that she would love to have the bear skin and Gammy wrote, "Do not leave the clearing"—this made me feel just like a pioneer woman in a long calico dress and a sunbonnet—"please be careful of the baby and why don't you move back to town?"

I had about recovered from the bear, when the blackberries began to ripen. These were the low-growing small blackberries—not the Himalayans which were also plentiful and wild, but came later and did not compare in flavor—and we intended to gather enough for jelly, pies and wine. The summer before we had spent hours in the broiling sun in the old logging works down by the Kettles, getting scratched and stung and burned while we filled five-gallon cans with these elusive blackberries. The resultant jelly and wine were well worth the effort, we thought in the winter when the burns and scratches were healed and summer seemed far away; but here it was blackberry time again and it seemed that even the baby wasn't going to keep me from doing my share, for Bob had found a new picking ground—one where we could take the baby.

One evening after supper, armed with Bob's will power and impeded by two five-gallon cans, two lard buckets, the baby buggy, Sport and the puppy, we trekked a half mile or so through the woods in back of the ranch to a clearing where the blackberries were thick and ripe. Some twenty years before, this clearing had housed a small farm, but the farmer, an elderly bachelor, complained of hearing babies crying in the woods and spent most of his time in town pleading with the sheriff to organize searching parties to find "the little ones." Mrs. Kettle had told us about the bachelor when she heard we intended to pick blackberries back there. She said that the "little ones" crying in the woods were cougars which have a plaintive cry not unlike a lost child and that the woods were alive with them. Bob pooh-poohed this story and said that the old man had probably heard coyotes. Cougars or coyotes, the old man went completely insane and was put away, and no one in that country could be persuaded to move on to his farm. His debtors took his livestock, his neighbors stole his furniture and equipment, and the mountains took over the ranch.

The road which had once connected our farm with the old bachelor's was completely obliterated by fallen trees, vines, salal and huckleberry bushes, until Bob happened on it early in the spring when he was searching for an approach to a large fallen cedar. He cleared the road enough so that he could get the dragsaw in and haul the wood out, and even I could tell it was a road when he pointed it out to me, because it had two ruts and following it was a little less arduous than just lowering my head and charging through the brush. Pushing a baby buggy over its rooty, spongy, brushy surface was a maneuver which delighted the baby and made me seasick.

From the edge of our potato patch to the second growth, which marked the boundaries of the old farm, was dense virgin timber. The trees, some of them eight and ten feet in diameter, went soaring out of sight and it was dank and shadowy down by their feet. Thick feathery green moss covered the ground and coated the fallen timbers and stumps, which also sported great sword ferns, delicate maidenhair ferns, thick white unhealthy looking lichens and red huckleberry bushes beaded with fruit. The earth was springy, the air quiet except for our grunts and gasps as we extricated the buggy from the grasp of a root or lifted it over a sudden marsh. Bob pointed out the upturned toes of the tree where the bear had attacked him, and I suddenly remembered the cubs, which had disappeared during the night after the death of their mother. Bob stated reassuringly that they were probably still in the immediate vicinity and good-sized bears by that time. It was a distinct relief to reach the second growth of the old clearing and to have the familiar bird and insect noises begin again. Even the air had a different feeling, the pale green silky deep-forest air being replaced by the regular sharp evening-mountain variety. Sport and the puppy, who had been following in stately and unaccustomed dignity, began racing through the brush yapping and yipping at each other, and Bob and I forced the carriage through the waist-high grass to the whitened bones of the cabin and barn where the blackberries were.

When we were finally settled and the berries, as large as thimbles, had begun to plink into the lard buckets, twilight was upon us and so were the mosquitoes, which spiralled out of the woods like smoke and made a direct line for the baby buggy. I slapped and fanned while Bob picked, but it was no use. The mosquitoes crawled into the crevices of the wicker buggy, up Bob's trouser legs, down our necks and inside our sleeves. I took the baby, Sport and the puppy and started home.

Going back through the dusky woods I found it difficult to guide the buggy and at the same time to search the underbrush fore and aft with nearsighted eyes, for cougars, coyotes and bears. It was also disquieting to know that my vision was so myopic that a wild beast would have had to lay its lip against mine and snarl before I could recognize it. In my haste to reach the farm I gave Sport and the puppy the impression that we were having a race and they went bounding out of sight leaving me alone in the gloom. Twigs broke with a loud snap to the left and right of me; overhead the deep quiet was broken by the loud sudden rush of wings. It was most irritating since I was intently trying to listen for a pursuing wild animal. Then just as I reached the point where I was going to scream "Shut up, so I can hear something, will you!" I saw our potato field and our lovely cozy farm buildings dead ahead.

I was putting the baby to bed when Bob came in on the run. "Have the dogs been barking? Have you heard anything?" he breathlessly demanded, as he threw open the closet door and began shuffling through his guns. I showed him Sport and the puppy playing tug-o'-war in the front yard with a piece of rope and asked what sound he had in mind? He snorted impatiently and said, "I was kneeling, picking berries under the leaves [where they hide long and black] and I had that prickly feeling you get when something you can't see is watching you. I looked up and the long grass between me and the woods was waving back together, closing the gap made by the passing of some animal. Some one of the cat family, I'll bet, because there wasn't even a rustle. Not a single sound. It gave me the creeps to think that something had passed so close to me I could have reached out and touched it and it hadn't made a whisper of noise." I thought of my recent trip through the woods with the baby, and the little blood I had left turned so cold my veins recoiled from it in horror.