Free Wild Life by Molly Gloss Page A

the ground bears off sharply beneath them, and of course the rain gathers itself and shoots down the trail to the river just as if it were a log flume. In certain weathers, a person laboring uphill against the muddy stream can’t stand and get her wind, or, standing, she’ll begin to slide down again; and going down the hill the hind end of a bicycle is liable to slew around and pass the front end.
    At the edge of Sheets’s cleared field I put Margaret to rest against a tree and went on, as broken winded as an old horse, until I had come out on the highest point. I stood awhile getting back my breath,
and then I just stood and looked, because I had come up for the clear day, the view, as much as the old man. And here is the truth: I had come also for the irrational purpose of “looking” for Harriet, which doubtless some people will think is a species of prayer from a woman who does not believe in prayer, and which of course I deny.
    From that certain point at the top of Sheets’s hill, in limpid air, you can see the Columbia from Cathlamet Head to Grays Point, the bright water littered with islands and scalloped with little inlets. You can see the drift logs piled white along the narrow beaches, and the gray ribbons of the sloughs looping across the lowlands in a deep-laid design that from the water is unknowable. You can see bristling dead poles of burnt timber showing against bare mottled rock amid the immeasurable forests of the Nehalem Mountains as they break in long blue ridges southward across the sky; and the unapproachably distant peaks of Hood and St. Helens adrift like pyramidal icebergs at the edge of a purplish sea. From the top of Sheets’s hill, if the weather is soft, you can hear the low moan of the Columbia River bar more than twenty miles to the west.
    But in that immensity of woods and mountains and waters a person can also see the horses and men laboring on the fish-seining grounds at Welch’s Island, and gillnet boats upon their drifts upstream and down, and salmon traps near Puget Island, and columns of smoke from a dozen sawmills and from the Altoona Cannery. There are cleared fields and the dark dots of houses all up and down the valley bottoms, and of course everywhere the high flaring stumps of cut trees and shattered small timber where the loggers have been at work. I was struck, suddenly, by the sense of a human presence upon the wilderness, which was a reassurance and comfort more rational to me than any prayer.
    When I had taken in about all the reassurance there was, I called for Sheets and walked down through the berry rows to his little place, calling again. He will come out to you with a tender grin or hide in the trees and wait until you’ve looked, and called, and gone; this is Sheets.
    I had about given up and left a little folio of peppermints tucked into his door latch when he evidently made me out from his hiding place in the brush and broke cover at last. “Well, see who that is,” he said to the air, “it’s Mr. Charlie Bridger,” which is an old childhood name he has always attached to me, and I replied, “Yes, it’s me, Sheets, I’m glad to see you,” and I gave the peppermints into his hand.
    He has a rank smell of tobacco about him, and I suppose it’s tobacco to blame for the yellowing of his beard, but he is strongly built, his old features clean and angular, “shaped with an axe,” as my mother would say about him, and I believe he must have been catmint to women when he was young and sane. Skamokawa gossip has Sheets coming west as a result of a broken engagement, and though he is now quite unmarriageable, a thoroughgoing hermit of odd habits, I suppose there are women who would accept him nonetheless on the strength of rumors: he is thought to keep a box of gold coins buried in his yard.
    I offered him one of my Kentucky cigars and lit my own stub again, and we smoked together companionably.