In the Wilderness Read Online Free PDF

magical. As poor as we were, we ate well. In summer, we picked huckleberries big as cherries, jerked trout from the shadowed bends of creeks, wrapping them in leaves of skunk cabbage. For Nan and Aunt Daisy, the cold-water char were a delicacy, so different from the muddy catfish they lived on as children. Fried in cornmeal and lard, the small brookies turned golden. Each year until 1988, when my grandmother died, I took her my first catch of the season. Sheadded nothing, only the fish neatly arranged across her plate—no fork or knife, only her fingers pulling from the bones sliver after sliver of pure white meat.
    The men could step a few yards from camp and take their limit of deer and elk, enough to fill several town lockers with stew meat and roasts. I still associate the smell of blood, the mounds of entrails steaming in new snow, with fall. One season, it was a bear they hung from the loader’s boom. Gutted and skinned, it swung in the cooling wind, pink and muscled as the body of a man. It was the one thing my mother could not eat, sweet and tallowy, like the mutton she despised as a child.
    My mother found herself surrounded by mountains. The friends she had left in Oklahoma had by now finished their schooling. Most were having babies of their own, keeping house in Tulsa or moving into Oklahoma City to clerk at Woolworth’s. The few letters she received she kept tied in a ribbon, tucked away in some secret place.
    She rose before dawn each morning to fix my father’s breakfast—venison steak and eggs, home-baked bread toasted on the cast-iron stove top, coffee boiled black in its aluminum pot. While he ate, she packed his lunch, filling the dented bucket with sandwiches and fried pies—golden half-moon pastries made with dried apricots. His work clothes hung from the beams, the thick flannel shirt and black pants washed the day before and ironed to a shine.
    After his kiss at the door, she watched him climb into his truck, its blue exhaust disappearing into the dark sky like a heaven-bound spirit. When I awoke, she lay sleeping beside me. The kerosene lantern still burned, its reflection lost in the sunlit window.
    We hauled laundry to the wash shed, where the gas-poweredwringer washer sat like a giant toad, all belly and noise. Uncle Clyde had connected a large reservoir to the woodstove there, and by building a popping fire, we had enough hot water to wash our clothes and bathe. While I splashed in a small galvanized tub, my mother hummed in the makeshift shower stall fed by pipes running from the water tank.
    When Nan first arrived in Idaho, Aunt Daisy had immediately set about matching her younger sister to one of the numerous eligible loggers. She settled on Elmer Edmonson, a widower, known locally as the Little Giant. His small stature belied his strength, and his reputation was that of a hardworking and fearless lumberjack. He and my grandmother moved out of the woods to Lewiston, into the house he had shared with his first wife, who had died of cancer. Nan set up housekeeping with the dishes and linens of another woman, grateful to have what was given her.
    Soon after their marriage in 1956, while working a site near Craig Mountain, my step-grandfather was severely injured ducking beneath a log to secure a choker cable. The log rolled, crushing his skull. By the time they got him to the hospital in Lewiston, his head had swollen to the size of a watermelon, the flesh split from the pressure, yet he never lost consciousness. My parents shudder when they speak of it. No one less strong and determined could have survived, they say.
    My grandmother nursed him constantly, and it was only as an adult that I was told how the kindly, shaking old man could turn suddenly manic, returning home from the grocery store with gallons and gallons of ice cream or giving away every dime in his pocket to strangers on the street. He hadviolent seizures and hallucinations, and the family would have no choice but to commit him