Into the Unknown

Chapter Twelve

The next week was a joy.

I spent every waking minute either sketching or painting or writing in my journal. Wildlife was everywhere, and I caught on canvas two new waterfowl, three songbirds, and a mouse never before recorded. The plant life was equally fertile, with varieties not found east of the Mississippi.

My explorations took me all over the valley floor and adjacent slopes. My hosts let me do as I pleased, and I must say, their hospitality was beyond reproach. My only nitpick was that they would not let me go anywhere alone. They continued to treat me as if I could not lace up my boots without help. I resented it, but my resentment waned as I came to relish the company of the person who served as my nursemaid.

That person was Blue Water Woman.

I hardly saw Zach. He had been away from his wife for so long that they sequestered themselves in their cabin and rarely came out. Winona hinted that they were hoping to start a family, so I could guess what they were up to.

Nate spent a lot of time prowling the valley in search of the intruders he felt certain were hiding somewhere.

Shakespeare McNair was busy building a raft, of all things. He had determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of the thing in the lake, and he intended, once the raft was done, to try and catch it.

I saw nothing of the Indians in the green lodge. Well, except for the young man, Dega, who came regularly to go on long strolls with Evelyn King. Unless I was mistaken, a romance was blooming.

Winona had too many chores to do about the cabin and in her garden. She accompanied me a few times, but the rest of the time it was Blue Water Woman, who had taken a keen interest in my work and was fascinated by my lifelike portraits and drawings. Although she was twice my age, if not more, and from a different culture, we shared an affinity of spirit. She was very much interested in the natural world and the creatures in it. But then, many Indians are, simply because they must relate to it each and every day in a manner many whites cannot conceive.

Civilization serves to separate whites from the natural order. Town and city dwellers do not need to kill their food, or skin game for hides to make their clothes. They get all they need by buying it. An artificial order is in place, a system, I am afraid, that separates us from the world in which we live.

Farmers grow and make their own food, but even many of them no longer make their clothes when apparel may so readily be purchased. They are close to the earth, but not as close as the Indians, who are so much a part of it that they depend on the creatures about them for their very existence.

I admit it. I admire the red man. They have learned to adapt to nature rather than control it. They share the world with everything around them; they do not conquer for the sake of conquering. Perhaps it is silly of me but I wish my own kind could learn from the Indians and come to regard all living things with the respect I feel all creatures deserve.

Blue Water Woman shared my belief. We talked about it many times. That, and many other subjects. She was remarkably well versed in white ways and had learned a lot about white history from her husband.

On the eighth morning after my arrival in King Valley, I proposed to ride up to the glacier. Zach had mentioned a small bird found in its vicinity and nowhere else. My curiosity was piqued. Accordingly, I had my packhorse and my mount ready to depart at first light. No sooner did I climb on and take the lead rope in hand than around the corner of Nate’s cabin came Blue Water Woman on a fine mare.

“I told you that you need not come,” I said by way of greeting. “I have already imposed on your gracious nature enough.”

“Good morning, Robert Parker,” she said. “I have nothing better to do, and I like your company.”

“Very well. But there is a chance I will not make it back by nightfall. What will your husband say, you alone with another man?”

“If you imply he would be jealous, you are mistaken,” Blue Water Woman replied. “He knows I would kill any man who laid a hand on me. And I know you would never do that, gentleman that you are.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” I said, my throat constricted. I clucked to my horse and we were off.

A stiff breeze out of the northwest caressed my skin. Out on the lake the geese and ducks were huddled close together, while in the forest the songbirds were filling the air with their first warbles of the new day.

It felt glorious to be alive. I savored the pulse of life in all its myriad variety—moments like these were the moments I lived for.

Blue Water Woman let me lead where I would. She did comment that using a game trail would be easier on the horses, but I was having too much fun exploring. Again and again a plant or an animal would spark my interest and I would rein to one side or the other. Now and then I glimpsed the white of the glacier far above, ensuring I did not drift too far afield.

Most of the morning had gone by when we entered a belt of firs. Arrayed in tall phalanx, they did not permit the sunlight to reach the forest floor. Shadowy gloom shrouded us.

Suddenly wings fluttered to my left, and I glanced up to see a bird in flight. We had spooked it. I saw it only for an instant, but I would swear it was a small owl.

My pulse quickened. The owls of the Rockies were not well documented, and it could be that the one I had seen was not a juvenile of a known species but a new species altogether. Accordingly, I slapped my legs against my horse and took off after it.

The firs were so closely spaced that I was constantly reining one way or the other to avoid them. I glimpsed the owl again and could not identify it.

We must have gone a hundred yards or more when the firs abruptly ended near the bank of a swift-flowing stream. Disappointed, I came to a stop. “I suppose this is as good a spot as any to rest the horses.”

“Did you want to paint that owl you were chasing?” Blue Water Woman asked.

“Do you know what kind it was? I mean, the name whites call it?”

Her brow knit, and she shook her head. “So far as I know, Robert Parker, it does not have a white name.”

“Then it must be a new species!” I declared, thrilled at the prospect of being its discoverer. “After we rest we must look for it or another of its kind.”

“They usually only come out at night,” Blue Water Woman said. “To see one during the day is rare.”

“I must try.” I dismounted and led my mount and packhorse to the stream. She followed suit with her animal. I doubt she was aware of it, but she possessed a natural grace I greatly admired. That, and her perpetual calm. I never saw Blue Water Woman upset or flustered.

One day at the lake she had slipped on a rock and fell, banging her knee. She did not throw a fit of temper, as I would have done. Instead, she calmly got back up and smoothed her buckskin dress.

“Didn’t that hurt?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered. She tested her leg, limping with each step. “But the pain will soon go away.”

“You are always so composed, so in control of yourself,” I mentioned. “Doesn’t anything fluster you?”

“My husband, when he leaves his dirty clothes lying around, or when he butchers an animal outside our door and does not bury the remains, or when he goes off somewhere and does not tell me where he is going and then he is gone for hours on end—” Blue Water Woman stopped, and self-consciously grinned. “You men have a knack for flustering us women.”

I chuckled. “For all that, you love him very much, don’t you?”

She gazed down the mountain at the cabins along the lake and a longing came into her lovely eyes. At that instant I envied Shakespeare McNair as I never envied anyone. “I love my husband with all I am. He is everything to me. Were he to die, I would slit my wrists so I could follow after him.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” I chided.

“I speak my heart, Robert Parker. For all his silliness, Shakespeare is everything to me. My breath, my life. I heard someone say once that it is possible to love too much, but I say that too much is never enough.”

“McNair is a lucky fellow. I would give anything to be in his boots.” I quickly added, “And have a woman who cares for me as deeply as you care for him.”

“If you look for a wife as devotedly as you look for birds, you will find her,” Blue Water Woman said.

I often wondered about that. I am a man; I have certain urges. But I have never given any thought to a family and a home. My relationships have all been dalliances of the flesh more than anything. How, then, am I to find a woman willing to spend the rest of her days with me? It would help if I stopped traipsing all over creation, but I am not about to quit anytime soon. Heaven help me, I would rather devote myself to science than to a wife.

As if she were able to read my thoughts, Blue Water Woman said, “Give yourself time, Robert Parker. You are fairly young yet. When that special woman comes along, you will know.”

I changed the subject. “Tell me, fair lady. Can you write?”

“Yes, my husband taught me. I do not do it as well as Winona, but it is legible. Why do you ask?”

“It would benefit me immensely if you could make a list of all the animals you know which do not have a white name and where to find them.”

“There is a purpose to this?”

“Odds are, if they do not have a white name, they have not been discovered. Those are exactly the animals I came west to find. A list would save me a lot of time and effort.”

“It will take a while, but for you I will do it.”

Again my ears burned. “You can start now if you want.” I brought her a pad and bid her sit on a log. My head was swimming with all the new species I might find. I would be famous. My discoveries would be on the front page of every newspaper. I would be hailed as the leading naturalist of my day and might secure a prestigious position at a university. I did not become a naturalist for fame and fortune, but neither was I averse to recognition and a comfortable income.

I walked to the stream and knelt. Cupping my hands in the cold water, I splashed my face and neck. It brought me out of myself, out of my fancies and to the here and now.

“Do you want every animal I can think of?” Blue Water Woman asked. “Snakes and bugs as well?”

“Everything without a white name, yes,” I reiterated. “No matter what kind, no matter how big or how small.”

“It will be a long list.”

“Good!” The more new species I discovered, the better. I went to the packhorse and got out my journal, figuring I might as well catch up on my entries. I became so absorbed in my observations and descriptions that when a shadow fell across me, I gave a start.

It was Blue Water Woman. “I am finished.” She held out the paper to me. “If I have not written enough I can add more.”

She had done a marvelous job. First, she had listed birds, then mammals, then reptiles, then insects. She even put down a short list of fish. To give but one example, her first bird was “A small brown hawk that hunts above the timberline. It has a yellow beak and big eyes.” She had numbered them. I ran my finger down the list to the last and exclaimed, “Thirty-nine? That many?”

“It could be that whites know of some of them, but I do not know the white name because when my husband and I talked about them, we talked in my own tongue.”

“McNair speaks Flathead?” I stupidly asked.

“Fluently. With a memory as good as his, he learns new tongues easily. Not as easily as Winona, but close.”

“You keep bringing her up,” I said.

“She is my best friend. I am in awe of how quickly she learns things. What would take me six months, she learns in a week.”

“You exaggerate, surely.” I scanned her list again, and something gave me pause. “Wait a minute. What is this? You wrote here, ‘A giant bird that carries off buffalo and sometimes people.’”

“Yes. My people call them thunderbirds. It has been many winters since they were last seen, but in my grandfather’s time my people lived in great fear of them.”

“So you have never seen one yourself? This is more of a legend?”

“You said everything, big or small,” Blue Water Woman reminded me. “I did not write about the giants or the little men, though, since they are people like you and me.”

“The what?”

“Long ago, when my people, the Salish, first came to the country where they now live, they fought with giants who lived in caves and wore bearskins. From time to time one would sneak into a Salish village at night and steal a woman.”

“Legends,” I stressed.

Blue Water Woman did not seem to hear me. “The little people had dark skins. They lived in the thickest woods where it was hard for men to travel, and they would signal one another by beating on a tree with a stick. The bow was the weapon they liked best. They made pictures on rocks, but no one could read what the pictures said.”

“Honestly, now,” I interrupted. These accounts bordered on fairy tales. “And where are the giants and the dwarfs now?”

“The giants were killed off long ago. They were a terror and had to be stopped. The dwarfs did not hurt anyone, so the Salish left them alone. My grandfather saw one when he was a boy.”

I was about to say how preposterous all of this was when a jay took wing squawking on the other side of the stream, and a few moments later, a handful of sparrows, twittering noisily, did the same.

Blue Water Woman raised her rifle. “On your feet, Robert Parker. We are not alone.”