Thirty-Seven Days

Think about what's in your pockets right now. Truman Everts was about to find out what his were worth. September of eighteen seventy. Everts is about fifty four, out of a government job, taking one long look at this country with the Washburn party before he heads East with his grown daughter, Bessie. His eyes are poor. Off beyond the south end of this lake the timber's so thick and so tangled that the men have to hunt their own way through it, and he strays out of sight. It doesn't trouble him. He beds down alone, expecting breakfast with the others. Next morning he climbs off to study the ground, leaves his horse unhitched the way he always does, and it spooks. He turns in time to watch it go, with his blankets, his guns, his fishing tackle and his matches. He's left with his clothes, two knives, and a small pair of opera glasses. He comes down to a lake, and out on the water he sees a canoe, one man paddling, coming his way. He runs down the beach to meet it. It stalks up out of the water, and it's a pelican. He gave that lake his daughter's name, Bessie. That same evening he pulls a green plant out of the ground, and the root tastes like food. It's a thistle, and thistles will carry him the rest of the way. A mountain lion trees him that night. A storm comes in with a foot of snow and freezes his feet, so he beds down on the warm ground between two hot springs, and in his sleep the crust gives way and scalds his hip. And with no fire, he quits. He starts thinking about some kind of marker, so a stranger might someday learn how he died. Then a bit of sun lights up the lake. He looks at those opera glasses. He takes out a lens, and a thread of smoke curls up off a stick in his fingers. If the whole world were offered him for that spark, he wrote, he'd turn it down. He comes up against a wall of mountains with settlements on the far side, and he means to climb it or die. And there stands an old friend, a clergyman he calls Doctor, who is nowhere near Yellowstone. Go back immediately, the Doctor says. Everts argues with him. He loses. He turns around and walks back the way he came, and he never did feel sure about it. His friends called that insanity. He called it Providence. When the Doctor quit him, his arms and his legs and his stomach took up the walking alongside him, and they talked. The stomach complained the whole way. Two or three days from the end, he reaches for the lens at nightfall, and it's gone. He lies down to die. Then he gets up and walks five miles back over the hills in the dark, and there it is, where he'd slept. Day thirty seven, in a storm. Two men on a hillside, Jack Baronett and George Pritchett, out after a six hundred dollar reward. Are you Mister Everts, they say. Yes, he says. All that is left of him. By one account he weighed fifty pounds, by a kinder one eighty. He thanked them in print. But the reward never got paid. Everts held he could have walked out on his own. Years later Baronett called on him in New York and got so cold a welcome that he said he wished he'd let the son of a gun roam. Almost nothing else was known of the man until August of nineteen sixty one, when a son of his walked into park headquarters with some facts, ninety one years after that horse ran off. Everts wrote that he meant to come back in a happier time and walk the beach of that lake with his daughter's name on it. I can't find where he ever did. Some still evenings along this shore I'd swear there's a thin old man at the water's edge, with a piece of glass held up to a gray sky, waiting on the sun.