Over the passing weeks, Sarah gradually shed her clothing. She pulled off her underpants when she squatted to pee, then abandoned them where they fell. Inspired by the squirrels, she scrambled up into the low branches of one of the oaks. Once, when Dur was in a temper, she escaped the wolf by climbing higher than she ever had before. When her frock caught on a branch, she scrambled out of the garment and left it hanging in the tree. After a month in the wilderness, she wore only a tattered white petticoat that grew dingier with each passing day, and a pair of leather moccasins that her human mother had purchased from a friendly squaw on the trail westward.
Wauna worried about Sarah. This strange pup seemed healthy, but she was slow to develop, lacking the endurance and speed of a young wolf.
What worried Wauna more than anything else was Sarah’s lack of interest in meat. The first food that wolf pups eat is partially digested meat, regurgitated by wolves who have returned from the hunt. Pups beg for food by licking at the muzzles of adult members of the pack. Wolves also carry meat back from the hunt—for the pups and the adult wolf who stayed behind.
Unlike a wolf pup, Sarah did not beg for food. She ignored the meat that Wauna dragged to the sheltered hollow. Instead, Sarah continued to suckle, growing strong on the milk that would have nourished half a dozen wolf pups. For a time, Wauna was tolerant, indulging the strange pup and letting her continue to get her sustenance from milk. Having lost her own pups, Wauna was determined to keep this one healthy and strong.
Eventually, game grew scarce in the area around the hollow where Sarah stayed. The pack moved, and Sarah moved with it. Wauna stayed with the girl trailing behind the rest of the pack. The little girl walked as far as she could. When she tired, she draped herself over the mother wolf, lying on Wauna’s back with her arms locked around the wolf’s neck. Each day, Wauna would find a safe place to leave the girl while the pack hunted. Sometimes, Wauna stayed with her. Sometimes Yepa stayed.
One sunny, summer day, Sarah waited in a high Sierra meadow for the pack to return. Yepa was napping in the shade while Sarah explored the meadow.
She was hungry. The girl had suckled long after pups would have been weaned, and Wauna’s milk was drying up. That morning, when Sarah had tried to suckle, Wauna had curled up, hiding her tender nipples from the girl. When Sarah had persisted, Wauna growled softly and nipped at the child’s hand, gently warning her away. Wauna had little milk and little patience left.
In the meadow, Sarah found some tender clover and plantain leaves to eat. She devoured the leaves, but they did little to assuage her hunger. She was searching vainly for something to eat, when she noticed birds flitting among the branches of a blackberry bush on the edge of the meadow.
The birds flew away at her approach, chirping in protest at the disturbance. The birds had been feeding for some time, but a few blackberries remained on the branches. Sarah reached into the bush for a big berry. The thorns scratched her arm, but she got the berry and crammed it into her mouth. It tasted wonderful—sweet, ripe, and warm from the sun.
Thorns could not dissuade her. Patiently, carefully, she pushed her way through the branches. She found a berry that a bird had pecked and rejected, another that was only half-ripe. The little girl did not overlook any possibilities, finding and devouring the smallest and sourest of the wild berries with enthusiasm and relish.
Sarah was deep in the blackberry thicket when Wauna returned with the pack, carrying a piece of meat torn from the kill. Searching for her foster child, Wauna followed Sarah’s scent across the meadow.
A young cottontail rabbit was foraging in the meadow when Wauna returned. The rabbit saw the wolves, but when they showed no interest in him, he continued grazing. He was happily occupied in a patch of clover when Wauna suddenly appeared, bearing down on him.
Foolishly, the rabbit panicked and bolted from cover right under the mother wolf’s nose. Wauna dropped the meat that she carried and lunged for the fleeing cottontail. Instinctively, the rabbit fled toward the protective cover of the blackberry thicket.
Just as the cottontail was about to dive into the cover of the bramble patch, Sarah emerged from the bushes, scratched and grimy. She was still hungry, having been rewarded for her diligent search with just a few small berries. When the child stepped directly into the path of the fleeing rabbit, the animal changed direction abruptly. Fearing the human as much as the wolf, the panicked rabbit turned to one side.
Wauna was on him, her jaws closing on his neck. Still running, she snatched the rabbit off his feet, breaking his neck.
Sarah ran after Wauna, her childish squeals of excitement blending with the mother wolf’s growls. Wauna jerked her head and opened her jaws, tossing the cottontail to her foster child. Sarah, running on two legs as her human parents had taught her, snatched at the rabbit with both hands. She caught the carcass (more by luck than by skill) in a tight embrace. Throwing herself down on the meadow grass, she bit at the cottontail’s neck as she had seen Wauna do.
Sarah’s teeth were not sharp enough to penetrate the animal’s hide, but Wauna’s fangs had already torn the rabbit’s fur and bitten deep into the artery that carried blood to the animal’s brain. The rabbit’s heart, beating its last, pumped warm, salty blood into Sarah’s mouth. The girl swallowed, hungry for nourishment, sucking at the wound as she had at Wauna’s teat.
She growled like a young wolf then, pulling at the still warm carcass with her hands and teeth. A young girl is not equipped to rend and tear a carcass like a young wolf, but Wauna helped, nudging Sarah aside with her muzzle. Planting a paw on the carcass to hold it in place, Wauna ripped open the rabbit’s belly, exposing the soft internal organs.
Sarah plunged a tiny hand into the warm viscera and pulled out the liver. Cramming the organ into her mouth, she chewed happily as blood ran down her chin. She feasted on the heart and lungs, then licked rich blood from her hands. Finally, sated and smeared with blood, she curled up in the grass with her foster mother.
Wauna was happy that this strange pup had fed. Now she would grow strong. The mother wolf licked the girl clean, washing away the blood of the cottontail and cleaning the bramble scratches. Sarah laughed happily, warm in the sun and well fed at last.
Meanwhile, back in Selby Flat, Mrs. Selby was polishing her mirror. That morning, she had received a letter addressed to Max, sent care of Selby’s Hotel. From the return address Mrs. Selby knew that the letter came from Audrey North.
As she polished the mirror, Mrs. Selby thought sorrowfully of little Sarah. Without stopping her work, Mrs. Selby muttered a prayer for the little girl, a plea that she find happiness in her mother’s arms in heaven. Little did Mrs. Selby know that Sarah was far from heaven. Smeared with blood and dirt, in a wilderness meadow, Sarah had indeed found happiness and a mother’s love.
An hour later, Sarah woke from her sleep and licked blood from her lips. She was not a young wolf—no, she could not be that—but she had taken a step toward savagery and survival. She had eaten raw meat and relished it. She wanted more.
Wauna was a patient teacher. Under her tutelage, little Sarah learned to flush rabbits and mice and ground squirrels and quail from cover and send them running into Wauna’s jaws. Once, when a young quail was slow to escape, Sarah snatched up the bird and broke its neck, her first kill.
Hunting and killing became a part of her life. Like her savage ancestors, she ate her meat raw, licking blood from her hands and relishing the salty taste of it.
Having learned to eat the fresh meat from these kills, Sarah began supplementing that diet with meat from the pack’s kills, which Yepa and Wauna brought her. She could not bite through the hide of a downed deer as her packmates could, but she could pick at the scraps of flesh once the hide was torn away by the teeth of the wolves.
In the afternoons, while the pack rested and played, she foraged for other foods. She competed with the birds for the fruits of a variety of plants, snacking on wild strawberries, gooseberries, thimbleberries, and Sierra pl
ums. Craving greens, she ate the leaves of miner’s lettuce and clover.
She had the face of a cherub-sweet blue eyes and delicate features surrounded by a halo of red-gold hair—but she was as dirty as any child could ever hope to be. Her hair was a glorious tangle; her face, smeared with berry juice; her arms and legs tanned from the sun. But she was happy for all of that. She hunted, and she thrived in her new family.
6 ROMULUS AND REMUS
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
—Mark Twain
MICHAEL DAY, A MAN GENERALLY known as Socks, wasn’t looking for a lost child. He wasn’t looking for gold either, though he wouldn’t have complained if he had stumbled across a rich pocket. But he wasn’t a miner—he had spent a few days working a rocker and the work didn’t appeal to him. He wasn’t inclined to spend his time standing in mud, shoveling mud, staring at mud, and hoping to spot a glimmer of gold.
No, Socks was hunting for deer and packing the venison down to the mining towns, where hungry miners would pay a handsome price for fresh meat. There were many ways to strike it rich in California, and Socks figured it was easier to take the gold from men who had dug it up than to go prospecting for gold himself. So he’d bought a pair of pack mules and he was hunting.
Socks was used to hunting alone. In 1835, when he was eighteen years of age, he had drifted westward to St. Louis. There he joined an expedition of trappers heading into the Rocky Mountains. For the next decade, he’d lived in the mountains, wearing buckskins, living with the Indians, and sporting the fur cap that was the mark of the mountain man. In 1845, when beaver was just about trapped out, Socks had headed west, going along on an exploratory expedition to California. Then in 1849 he’d guided a wagon train full of emigrants along the trail west. After that, having had his fill of nursemaiding greenhorns and city folks, he reckoned he’d just stay in California for a time.
That’s how he’d come to be camping high in the hills, beside a lake with water as clear as the air. Hunting had been good. With his Hawkens rifle, he’d brought down three deer. He’d butchered them and hung the carcasses to bleed. That evening, as he lay in his bedroll, he listened to wolves howling.
On the way across the plains, the fools who had hired him shivered like women when the wolves howled, terrified by the wailing voices that sang to the moon. Socks didn’t mind the wolves. He’d shoot ’em if they came prowling around his camp, but otherwise he didn’t pay them no mind. He pulled his fur cap low over his ears and fell asleep listening to their singing.
The wolves knew Socks was there, of course. They could smell the smoke of his fire, the biscuits that he had made for dinner, the reek of his tobacco, the dried blood of the deer he had killed. But the pack had brought down a young doe that evening, and they were well fed. They had no reason to nose around the mountain man’s camp.
But Sarah was intrigued. The smells of his camp awakened memories. The woodsmoke and aroma of baked biscuits lured her close. Those were smells that reminded her of her mother, of camping with her family on the trail west.
Before dawn, when the pack was stirring, while Socks still slept, Sarah crept to the edge of his camp, drawn by curiosity. She prowled through the camp, moving as silently as any wild creature frightened by the presence of man. She had been with the wolves for four months, and she had come to move as quietly as they did, her moccasined feet noiseless on the pine needles that covered the ground. Beside the mountain man’s fire pit, she found a tin where he had put two biscuits away for breakfast, sealing them in the tin so the varmints wouldn’t get them.
Sarah could smell the biscuits inside the tin, but she could not get to them. Still moving quietly, she carried the tin away from the camp to the shore of the lake. Among the wolves, she had learned that it was best to take your food to a secluded spot and eat alone. Beside the still water of the lake, she pried open the tin.
These were biscuits that her mother would have scorned. Rather than baking them properly in a cast-iron Dutch oven, the mountain man had toasted them on a stone by the fire. They were burned on the outside, half-raw on the inside, tasting of wood-smoke and ash. As the sun rose, Sarah crouched by the lake and devoured them with gusto, eating even the blackened bits.
Socks woke at dawn. A thin mist hung over the lake water. The air was cold; the first sunlight touched the water with a glimmer of silver. As he watched, a fish jumped, and Socks smiled without moving in his bedroll. He might catch a mess of fish for breakfast, before packing up and heading down to the mining camps.
A movement on the shore of the lake caught his eye. Something grayish white, moving along the shore, where the way was flat and easy. He squinted at the shape, not quite believing his eyes.
A little girl was making her way along the lakeshore. She wore only a pair of moccasins and a grimy petticoat that had once been white. Her hair was a tangle of coppery curls. By the color of her hair, he knew that she wasn’t an Indian child.
As he watched, she crouched by the lake and put her head down to drink. She lifted a dripping face and wiped the water away with a careless hand. Then she bent her head to the water again, her eyes fixed on something in the shallows.
Socks was not a man given to flights of the imagination. It made no sense to him that a little white girl would be wandering alone in the wilderness, but he accepted the evidence of his eyes.
As she sat up, Socks saw a movement in the brush behind her.
He kept his eyes focused on that spot, until he saw the movement again. What he saw made him reach for the rifle that he kept, always ready, alongside his bedroll.
A grizzled, old wolf was crouching in the alpine laurel beside the lake. Ears up, the animal watched the little girl splashing in the water. Not ready to pounce just yet, Socks thought. In no hurry for his breakfast. The old villain had no reason to rush. Breakfast was there whenever he wanted it. The child was unprotected—easy prey.
No, Socks thought. She was not unprotected. Sitting up in his mess of blankets, smelling of deer blood, tobacco, and sweat, his fur cap on his matted hair, Socks was an unlikely hero. But he saw himself as a hero, as the child’s savior, rescuing her from the perils of the wilderness. Moving slowly to avoid drawing the eye of the wolf, he carefully loaded his rifle. The wolf did not move as Socks sighted on its head—a clear shot, an easy shot.
Sarah knew Omuso was behind her: she heard the wolf moving through the bushes and smelled his scent on the breeze. The others were on higher ground, away from the man’s camp.
Sarah was happy. Her stomach was full and the first rays of the morning sun were warm on her head. On the lake bottom, she had found a pretty white-quartz stone. She was going to show it to Omuso just as she had shown pretty pebbles to her mama, so long ago.
She was turning from the water when she heard the crack of a rifle shot. She smelled gun smoke and saw Omuso fall, his right eye suddenly gone, replaced by a bloody hole. She looked in the direction of the sound and saw the man, his rifle at his shoulder.
A memory—sudden, sharp and clear. She was holding a white pebble out to her mother when she heard the crack of gunfire. She looked toward the sound and saw a man with a rifle. Her mother fell whispering to her: “Run. Run and hide.”
Sarah ran. Her heart pounding, her legs pumping, she fled without looking back, through the brush and up into the trees, running to Wauna, to the pack, to safety. She took with her a valuable lesson. Men were dangerous; men killed without warning; men killed at a distance. She had seen this happen twice. She understood it now.
She got away for one simple reason: Socks did not sleep with his boots on. He had learned, in his first year of trapping, that his feet stayed warmer at night if he took off his boots, took off the socks that he had worn all day, and put on a pair of wool socks. His mother had knit those socks for him before he had left for St. Louis, and he had promised to wear them to keep his feet warm at night.
He had kept his promise, and when the socks his
mother had lovingly knit for him wore out, he purchased another pair and continued the same routine. This routine was, of course, the reason for his nickname. In the community of mountain men, where bathing more than twice a year could get you a reputation as a dandy, Michael Day’s nightly changing of socks seemed the ultimate in fastidiousness. Each night, he put on sleeping socks; each morning, he put on his ordinary socks, which he washed every few weeks.
When Socks crawled from his bedroll to go to the rescue (or so he thought) of the little girl he stopped to change his socks and pull his boots on, giving Sarah a significant head start. There wasn’t a terrible rush, he reckoned. The wolf was dead. The little girl would recognize him as her savior and come when he called. So he could take a moment to put on his boots.
But the little girl didn’t come when he called. The wolf was dead, sure enough. A clean shot through the eye; a damn fine shot, he thought. But the little girl was gone. Vanished, leaving behind the prints of her moccasined feet in the sand by the lake.
Socks followed the little girl’s trail up the slope for a bit. He found sign of other wolves: tracks, tufts of fur in the grass where wolves had been sleeping, the gnawed bones of a deer kill. It looked like the little girl had run right to where the wolves were sleeping, but there was no indication that the animals had attacked her.
He followed her trail a little farther, calling as he went. “Rallo! Rallo! Little girl! Come back!”
She didn’t come back. He lost her trail on a granite slope and could not find it again. He spent a day by the lake, searching for the little girl without success. Then he packed the venison on his two mules and headed to Downieville, the nearest large town, to sell his meat and tell his tale.