In the morning, he would pack out, he decided. That would be the prudent thing to do.
He tried to sleep, but the pounding rain kept him awake. The roar of the creek was punctuated by falling boulders, washed from the hillside by the rushing water. At midnight, he heard a crash. Peering into the rain, he saw that the bank had collapsed beneath the log bridge. The rushing waters churned around one end of the fallen log, rolling it into the torrent.
Morning dawned, and still the rain fell—a deluge of biblical proportions. The muddy water of the creek was lapping at the granite slab beneath his tent. He packed essentials, taking his gold, his food, his knife, his rifle. The water was washing up to the door of his tent when he abandoned it.
There was no way back to the south side of the creek. Even if he could have reached the south bank, there would be no way out in that direction. From his tent, he could see that the steep trail that they had followed down into the canyon had washed out.
On the north side of the canyon, the prospects did not look much better. The north canyon wall was formed of granite slabs, slick in the rain. One slip, and a climber would fall to his death. But Tom could see no other way. The creek was rising and he had no choice.
Tom began to climb. A crack in the granite offered a series of precarious handholds. His feet found footholds, rough patches in the granite, tiny ledges. In minutes, he was chilled to the bone. His hands could barely feel the rock to grip it. He glanced down only once, and that terrifying glimpse convinced him not to look down again.
He looked up, searching for the next handhold, the next precarious foothold. He could see the top high above him, silhouetted against the sky. He decided that it would be best not to look at the top. It would be best to concentrate on where to place his feet, where to grab hold. One step at a time.
He climbed until his arms shook with fatigue. Just when he thought he could cling to the rock no longer, he reached a ledge. A little more than two feet wide, just a few feet long; big enough that he could stop and rest.
He stood with his face to the wall, unwilling to turn and look outward. He was afraid to look at the drop below him. He leaned his forehead against the cliff, ignoring the rain that dripped down the rock and splashed on his face. The rain had died back to a drizzle, just enough to wet the rock and keep him soaked.
As the trembling in his arms eased, he looked upward. The top was close, so close—maybe twelve feet above him. But the rock that separated him from the top was polished granite, a sheer expanse. He could see no handholds, no footholds, no way up. He reached up carefully and felt the rock, hoping that it was not as smooth as it appeared. His hands confirmed what his eyes had seen: slick and smooth.
No way up. And there was no way he could climb back down. He stood frozen in place, his hands stretched above him.
At that moment, looking up, he saw a movement at the top. Someone’s head, popping over the edge of the cliff to look down.
“Halloo!” he called. “Is someone there? For God’s sake, help a miserable soul. Halloo!”
A girl’s face came into view, and Tom knew he was dreaming. A pretty girl with red-gold hair and a dirty face. A hallucination, to be sure.
A rope came snaking over the smooth rock, dangling down past the ledge. He took hold of the rope. A strong rope of braided leather. A hallucination, he knew, but a very comforting one. He was glad that his hallucinating mind believed in quality products. The rope was secured to something above; it held when he tugged on it.
He tied the rope around his waist, knotting it securely. Then he called up again. “Halloo!”
The girl’s head popped back into view and took another look at him. “You climb,” she said.
He climbed, trusting his hallucination and pulling himself hand over hand by the rope, using footholds where he could. At last he reached the top, pulled himself over the edge, lay at full length, eyes closed, hands on the solid ground. “Thank God,” he muttered. “Thank God.”
He opened his eyes when he felt a tug at his waist. The girl was untying the rope from around his waist. She had already untied the other end, which had been knotted around a sturdy pine. She wore a red-flannel shirt and a pair of men’s trousers, cut off at the knees. Her legs were bare. He stared at her legs, then shook his head. It did not seem wise to ogle.
At that moment, a wolf trotted up and stood beside her, wagging its tail and looking for all the world like a big, friendly dog. Tom blinked as the hallucination began to make a kind of sense.
“You’re the angel, aren’t you?” Tom murmured. “I’ve heard about you. You saved some travelers last year. You live with the wolves.”
She pushed a handful of wet hair out of her face, watching him with unnerving intensity. The wolf nudged her leg, and she turned away, as if she might leave him there.
Tom sat up. His hands were still shaking—from cold and from muscle fatigue. “Wait,” he said. “Please wait. I don’t know the way from here.”
She looked back at him, a puzzled look on her face. “That way,” she said, pointing. “You’ll find a trail.”
“I’ll build a fire first,” he said. “I have to get warm. And maybe…” He frowned, trying to remember what he had heard about this rescuing angel. She was dirty; she was wild; she liked biscuits. He had some flour in his pack, the last of his food. “I could make biscuits,” he said.
Sarah helped the man gather wood and sat with him by the fire for a time. She listened to him talk and happily ate his biscuits.
“You saved my life,” he told her. “How can I thank you?”
She shrugged and ate another biscuit. He had nothing that she wanted. She had seen him climbing up from the creek—a long, hard climb—and had lingered to see if he would make it. When he stopped so close to the top, she had decided to help him. So much effort, she thought, should be rewarded. And the biscuits were good. “You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he was saying. “It’s a rough life for a man—and no life for a woman. A girl like you—you should be taken care of.”
She listened to what he was saying, but it really made no sense. Once he had built his fire and stopped trembling, he had become very sure of himself. He seemed to have forgotten that she was doing just fine out there, that she had saved him. He was talking about how she really didn’t belong out there in the wilderness. He reminded her of an overconfident pup.
He was toasting the last biscuits when Beka decided that it was time to go. Sarah, having eaten her fill, left with her. “Hey, wait!” she heard the man shout behind her. She didn’t stop.
He was, she decided, not one of the dangerous people. Nor was he really a nice person, like Betsy. He fell into another category—not dangerous, friendly, but silly.
Over that winter and the winters that followed, she helped other travelers, bringing them, food, showing them the way. In Selby Flat, Max heard stories of the Wild Angel, a beautiful savage girl who came to help the unfortunate, then disappeared into the wilderness.
In the summers, when the snow melted, Max went to the mountains. There, he taught Sarah and she taught him, taking him high into the mountains and showing him her world. Each fall, he tried to persuade her to come back with him. Each fall, she refused, preferring her life in the wilderness to what she had seen of human civilization.
PART FOUR
1863
17 PROFESSOR SERUACA’S WAGON Of WONDERS
“I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the family.”
—Following the Equator; Mark Twain
IN THE SPRING OF 1863, Max did not come to the lake.
Each year, Sarah had met him there when the snow melted, before the first spring flowers opened their blossoms. But that year, he did not come. She waited, hunting in t
he area and returning to the lake every few days to look for him. Beka was with her.
The violets bloomed in the meadow and still Max did not come to the lake. Mountain bluebells bloomed in the moist shade beneath the pines, the wild iris opened its pale blue flowers on the marshy shore of the lake, wild strawberries bloomed in the meadow, and still Max’s camp was empty.
Sarah puzzled over his absence—not worrying exactly, but thinking about where he might be. He had rarely talked of what he did when he wasn’t with her, and the little that he had said had not made much sense to her. He had said he wrote books and he had showed her one of his books. She had liked the pictures. She had recognized many of the places he had drawn as spots to which she had taken him. She knew he went to Selby Flat, to Sacramento, to San Francisco. But these places were mysterious, distant and unknown.
The meadow was bright with lupine flowers when Sarah grew tired of waiting and decided to look for Max. She and Beka made their way downward into the rolling foothills.
She did not have a plan, exactly. She was hunting as a wolf would hunt, traveling, looking for signs of her quarry. She went to the foothills because that was an area where white men were common. She was looking for his trail, searching for a sign of him. That was how Sarah and Beka came to be resting in the shade on the bank of Rush Creek when the traveling circus came through.
Sarah heard the circus coming long before she saw it. A man’s voice, shouting: “Hey, Professor! Are you sure this is the right trail?” The creaking of a wagon and the sound of horses splashing through the stream.
She and Beka moved quietly undercover. A nearby cottonwood tree was overgrown with wild grapevines. Sarah ducked behind the vines, where the lush leaves screened her from casual observation. There, she waited.
The wind shifted, and she caught a strange scent, mingling with the scent of man sweat and horses. An animal, but no animal she had ever smelled before. A grass-eater, by the smell of it—the smell of sweat was accompanied by a faint aroma of hay.
Sarah was staring between the wild grape leaves when a bizarre creature stepped into view. As gray as a granite boulder, as big as a log cabin, it had wide, flat ears that flapped like leaves in the breeze, and an enormous nose that writhed and twisted like a snake. As Sarah watched, the beast dipped its nose in a pool of water, lifted the end, and squirted the water into its mouth, flapping its outlandish ears happily.
A man rode on the strange beast, his leg spread to straddle its thick neck. The rider wore a bowler hat tipped back on his head at a jaunty angle. His neatly trimmed beard and thin mustache gave him a roguish look. As Sarah watched, he patted the beast’s neck in a friendly fashion. “What a fine elephant you are, Ruby,” he murmured. “A gem of an elephant.”
A horse-drawn wagon followed the elephant. It was a woodensided wagon, in the tradition of European gypsy caravans. Sarah stared as it passed, fascinated by the pictures that were painted on its wooden sides. In one, a man juggled knives and flaming torches. In another the fantastic beast—the elephant, that’s what the man had called it—stood on her hind legs, holding a smiling woman with its amazing nose. In yet another picture, a strange-looking animal—a poodle, though Sarah could not identify it as such—leapt through a flaming hoop. Above and below the pictures, gilt lettering proclaimed this to be PROFESSOR SERUNCA’S WAGON OF WONDERS AND TRAVELING CIRCUS.
Sarah stared. She could not read the words, but she needed no words to realize that these were not ordinary travelers. She squinted at the driver of the wagon. The strange-looking animal painted on the side of the wagon was sleeping on his lap.
Professor Gyro Serunca’s Wagon of Wonders and Traveling Circus was making its way from French Corral to Selby Flat on an extended tour of the mining camps. The elephant’s name was Ruby, and she was a good-tempered and well-trained beast. Professor Gyro Serunca, the man who rode on her back, had transported her from the exotic kingdom of Siam to California at a considerable expense. Professor Gyro Serunca was an animal trainer, a magician, a purveyor of Oriental medicines, and a master of Oriental mysteries.
“Hey, Professor,” the wagon’s driver shouted again. “I really don’t think this is the right trail. It certainly wasn’t meant for a wagon.”
“Of course it’s the trail,” the Professor said amiably. “It has to be. We haven’t seen anything else that looked remotely like a trail.” The driver shook his head. His name was Cassidy Orton, and he was the juggler depicted on the side of the wagon. Cassidy, who came from an old British circus family, was a man of many talents. In Professor Serunca’s show, he juggled knives and torches, threw knives, and performed acrobatics on horseback.
Cassidy was, at that moment, surrounded by the Professor’s poodles. He had Snowflake, the smallest poodle in his lap. Two medium-sized black poodles lay on the boards at his feet, and three standard-sized poodles were in the wagon behind him. All the dogs were sleeping soundly.
Cassidy wagon lurched through the rocky creek bed. “Most of the trails in these parts don’t look like trails,” he called to the Professor, “but this looks less like a trail than any of them. I think we’re lost again.”
“I don’t agree.” Professor Serunca was a confident man. “Remember what that fellow told us. We were to follow the trail down into a valley, then continue on the trail along the creek…”
“But we aren’t really following a trail, Professor. We’re in the creek itself.”
The Professor waved a hand airily. “A minor distinction. I am confident that this is the correct path.”
Cassidy shrugged, disturbing the poodle in his lap. Snowflake lifted her head, studied the creek for a moment, then yawned and returned to her nap. She seemed resigned to go wherever the Professor led. Cassidy stroked her head and decided to adopt the same policy.
The Professor’s confidence seemed to increase in direct proportion to how far they were off trail. Cassidy had experienced this effect several times during the past month, as they traveled on the poorly marked trails that crisscrossed California’s foothills. He wondered how long it would take the Professor’s confidence to wear off this time, and guessed that he would start wondering about their location at around suppertime. Then he’d suggest that they make camp, and find the way in the morning.
Cassidy missed the other members of the troupe. Lulu, the young woman in the painting on the side of the wagon had been lured away after the show performed in San Francisco. A wealthy miner had wooed her and won her, marrying her three days after they met. In the mining town of Hell’s Half Acre, Charlie, the World’s Tallest Man, had tried his hand at gold panning, found a nugget as big as his thumb, and immediately staked a claim. He had tried to talk Cassidy into staying and staking a claim, but Cassidy had decided to stick with the Professor. He didn’t feel right abandoning him.
Gyro Serunca was an old family friend. Cassidy’s father had traveled with him, many years ago. Professor Serunca had stopped to visit the Orton family on his way to Siam and had, quite casually, asked Cassidy if he wanted to come along and be part of a California tour. “You could meet me in San Francisco a year and a half from now,” the Professor said. “After I arrange for an elephant.”
During his travels in the States, the professor said, he had heard a phrase used by those setting forth for California. “I am going to see the elephant,” they would say. According to legend, a farmer on his way to town with a wagon of vegetables had encountered a circus parade. Startled by the elephant, his horses had bolted, overturning his wagon and ruining his vegetables. The farmer had reacted with equanimity. “I don’t care,” he said. “I have seen the elephant.”
An exotic adventure with a high price—that was seeing the elephant. “I think it is only appropriate to bring an elephant to California,” he told Cassidy. “It seems only fair that those who have gone to see the elephant can truly see the elephant.”
When Cassidy told his father of the Professor’s plan and asked for advice, Cassidy’s father had been unequivocal. “
If you have a chance to travel with Gyro, take it,” he said. “He is one of the greats. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be the adventure of a lifetime.”
With his father’s blessing, Cassidy had left the family show and traveled to California for the adventure of a lifetime. At present, the adventure looked rather bleak. The show was at a low ebb. But Cassidy knew that the Professor would revitalize it somehow. He was as confident in that as the Professor was in the trail.
It was late afternoon when the Professor called to Cassidy and said in a tone of great puzzlement, “We seem to have lost the trail.”
They had followed the stream into a wide valley. The dry brown grass showed no sign that people had passed that way.
“Yes, I’d say we have,” he agreed. He did not bother to remind the Professor that he had suggested this some hours earlier.
“Well, perhaps it would be best to camp here.” The Professor gazed around him, considering the valley. “It’s a beautiful spot, after all. We’ll find the way in the morning.”
And so Professor Gyro Serunca’s Wagon of Wonders and Traveling Circus made camp on the edge of the meadow where the horses could graze, not far from the creek where Ruby could bathe.
Sarah sat in a cottonwood tree across the meadow from where the Professor was working with the poodles. She had watched as the scent, but they looked nothing like the mangy curs that lived at the Indian village.
As the dogs left the wagon, the Professor had crouched in the grass and greeted each dog individually, scratching this one’s ears, rubbing that one’s belly, wrestling just a bit with another one. Cassidy hobbled two of the horses, then put them out to graze. He tended to the third horse, a white mare, currying the dust from her coat and talking to her as he did so. The elephant grazed with the horses.