Chapter 5

There were cries of delight from the women when Danny came up with two steelhead. He'd taken time to go to a pool he knew.

There were just enough slices to go around, enough to point up the excellence of hashed brown potatoes fried with onions and a vast pot of canned wild blackberries with dumplings.

Must be the chill air, thought Sheila, enjoying every bite.

Plopped up in her makeshift bed that night, she wrote to Andy. There seemed little to say. Her father had picked out a claim just east of their own. She would return and file on it later when the men came in for supplies.

She sealed the letter, then started writing Welma, her pencil flying over pages. Now that it was over, her trip seemed comical.

"Once when I was a kid I was out picking huckleberries. I'd found a fine stand of them. Heard someone on the other side stripping the branches, and yelled this was my patch. Then I looked up and there, towering on the other side, was a big brown bear. I went one way and I think he went the other; I didn't stop to look.

"This Jed Justine is as frightening as that bear. He towers and growls, only he doesn't run the other way."

He growled the next morning. Since she was filing, she knew, didn't she, that she'd have to have shelter on her claim? That meant a stove of some kind, water buckets, a real coffeepot. And did she have a tarp of her own until they could get a roof up?

"Thank you," she said gravely. "I'll take care of it this morning."

"And don't forget," he added, "there'll be no place to store doll rags for months. There's a lean-to shack on your claim, but it has to be knocked down, moved, and a face put on it."

"I'll be very glad to pay scale."

"Oh, for Pete's sake-" barked Jed, and strode off.

Sheila retreated behind the nearest tree to bring out her billfold and count her money. Thank goodness she hadn't shopped for clothes.

Shocked, Sheila found she had a hundred and sixty dollars.

"Mother," she wailed, rushing over to where Mrs. Norris was frying mush, "I've got too much money. I only spent six dollars for a five hundred and twenty mile trip."

"Wonderful; you should tell your Dad how you did it."

"But I didn't. Jed must have put in gas at night and other times when I was in a cafe. And he paid for the last motel, because I waited and he said it saved him bus fare. Oh, dear, I can't take-"

The spatula nearly struck Sheila as Mrs. Norris wheeled. "That's enough. Accept whatever Jed does for you. It's not for you; it's for your father. Nate did something for the Justines when you were too young to remember. Now write out your grocery list and let me check before you go into town."

Chastened, Sheila found a rustic seat with a table and, huddled in the cold morning air, tried to write. Coffee, oatmeal, beans.

"Mother," she raced back, "how much has Dad spent on that jeep?"

Mrs. Norris cast her eyes toward the fog and shrugged her shoulders. She did not know.

"Well, I can't eat if you're hungry. I have a hundred and sixty dollars and fifty-eight cents."

"Your own?"

"Yes. I also have a hundred of Andy's."

"We'll go shopping," agreed Mrs. Norris, and beamed. "I just knew food would be forthcoming. But don't tell your Dad what you have; he'll wheedle it out of you for some piece of machinery."

They laughed together over Nate's great weakness.

Only Danny Johnson, Jed Justine, and the Norris family breakfasted together that morning. The party was beginning to break up preparatory to going to individual claims.

A reluctant Nate was pulled from the jeep just as it gave its first prolonged cough of life, and covered with grease and oil, was sent to wash.

"Isn't this something?" he asked on his return, and Sheila, remembering the man she had seen on the street below her apartment, agreed it was. "Nobody," he informed them, "can fry mush like my wife. Crisp on both sides."

Mrs. Norris took a look at the car and said they would have to empty it if she were to bring back what she'd need, but they unpacked only the truck.

Hours later they returned with gear sticking out the windows and far out of the back where a red flag warned of an excess load. Sheila was worn but thankful her mother had accompanied her.

"Sleeping bags are fine, but should you have to leap out at any time, you'd feel trapped."

Sheila had bought a used steel cot and mattress for half what a bag would have cost. She had blankets.

She'd fallen in love with a small potbellied stove, but Mrs. Norris had pointed out a tiny three-foot-square range would also bake, and she'd be a long way from the bread counter of a grocery store.

As for groceries, Sheila had uttered protests as her mother had piled food packages on her cart. Mrs. Norris had stood stock-still to say, "Child, you've lived in the wilds. This is only January. We can still have a heavy snow. We know we'll have rain. There are no bridges yet. If you remember the picture Dad drew of your claim, streams sweep down on either side to converge just beyond the witness tree."

When they drove into camp they found it deserted, all signs of anyone ever having stopped there gone, except for a stack of kin dling and small wood. Tied to the largest piece was a note.

"If that isn't like a man," cried her mother, reading it. "The boys have gone on to move that shack down for you so you'll have a place for you-"

"Junk?" asked Sheila.

"Well, yes," conceded her mother.

It wasn't too late to stop them, Sheila realized. They could drive on to the last stopping place and follow their trail. Jed might think he was doing this for Nate Norris's daughter, but he was doing it for a strange man as well. She couldn't be indebted to Justine; or allow Andy that indignity. She'd go back to her original plan: stay with her parents until she were free to return to town.

Mrs. Norris smiled at her. "Have you decided?" she asked.

"How did you know?"

"I've been living with your father thirty years. You are a lot like him. You'll give all you've got, but you can't take."

"I think I could take if it were for me alone," she mused.

"It has to be, at first, Sheila. You're the one who'll file the claim. That's the way it should be. Later if Mr. Carter wants in on it, you can sell him half and repay your Dad and the boys." Sheila nodded.

As long as the men wouldn't return until the next day, Sheila treated her mother to a night at a motel. Mrs. Norris enjoyed every minute of it, from a shampoo under a hot shower to the one-station television program.

Sheila, who'd made two trips to the camp for her possessions, spent the evening outside in the chill fog repacking, sacrificing beautiful boxes, wrapping china in fine linen to save space and eventually laying aside pieces of crockery to take to the second-hand store and trade for a slat-back folding chair with foot rest, a card table and a water-damaged bolt of Dutch blue denim.

The proprietor, amused, gave her a moth-eaten back pack she admired.

She filed the next morning. Her father had left her the description and had spoken to the county assessor about her intentions. She found him a friendly person, slightly amused at her seriousness.

"Afraid you won't find much gold there," he said paternally, "but a lot of living. Come to think of it, that's what life's for, isn't it?"

Outside the courthouse, she stood a moment watching the town appear and recede as wind pulled fog out and puffed it in. Unexpectedly, she was enjoying this.

I guess every woman likes to shop, she reasoned.

In the next block she spent a reckless two dollars on seeds.

She scowled as she walked on. Jed, unemployed, had wasted money on juke boxes.

"Moms," she asked, coming into the motel, "just why aren't Jed and Danny working? They're log truckers, aren't they? And they must be union, or they wouldn't have had those trucks to deliver. So why-"

Mrs. Norris hesitated a moment. "Oh, young folks like adventure. They've probably saved enough out of back pay to take a chance. Well, girl, shoulders back; from now on we rough it."

Danny came for them shortly after noon. Nate and Jed were putting the finishing touches on the shack. They'd been able to haul it down to within shouting distance of the Norris claim by jeep. The women folks would sleep there until Nate had a shelter of his own.

He made a final quick run into town, and Sheila's eyes squinted when she saw what he brought back: a stack of flattened cartons and a roll of celloglass.

Then they were off. The Norris car would follow the jeep to the first claim taken by their party, just off an access road. It would be safe there. Necessities had already been transferred to the jeep.

"I'm beginning to understand why so few treasures came across the plains," Sheila confided to her mother as they started out. "If you broke the heirloom china you couldn't stop at a store to replace it because there were no stores. So you traded for unbreakables before you got under way."

"Ummm," murmured Mrs. Norris. "Look ahead. We're coming out of the fog."

They had left the coast highway to climb steep county roads, pass ranches set farther and farther apart. Below them fog billowed like a sea of dreams; above, hilltops gleamed red in the sun, splotched with small stands of trees.

Ranches gave way to wilderness. Occasionally there was a crude building of old lumber, eyeless and deserted. Once a woman came out of one to wave, and Sheila was thankful she had joined her parents. Her mother could otherwise have looked equally lonely.

An hour later they turned up an access road to find one of the party trailers not too far off the road. Children were milling around a father and brother throwing up a cabana they would close in for extra room on rainy days.

Their visit was short. Transferring to the jeep, they went on, Sheila shivering despite the parka she'd donned. A wind came sweeping down from the Sisklyou range, beautiful but ice-covered.

And then they saw the cliff ahead, rockbound, aloof, its top in line with the tip of an old giant of the forest that had defied timber men. The boundary marker: the witness tree.

Sheila let her mother fill her pack, then started the ascent.

Her father and Jed waited at the top; Jed quickly relieved her of the pack.

"Your land," he greeted her.