I admitted that I did not. Religion has never held much interest for me.
?—?There is a poetry to it, he said. —?That’s what always draws me back to it. Even with all the ways it fails, I can still find that to admire. The poetry of it. At my best, I imagine it the highest of arts. An expression of what we wish we could be. There is hope in our wanting to be something better, even if we never manage it. Maybe that is what I can hold to. The wanting. Do you know what I mean, sir?
I am not sure I do. All that matters is how a man lives in this world.
Pruitt has given me his journals. I expected detailed notes of flora, fauna, geology, & the like. Not this. I have asked him to copy out all the pages of meteorological readings & mapping data. As for his rambling entries, they serve no purpose in our reports to headquarters, but would rather be an embarrassment. They are nearly incomprehensible. Yet he says he would like me to have them.
He officially resigns his commission. I will arrange for his salary to be paid through the trading post at St. Michael’s. When we meet up with the steamboat, we can likely obtain enough supplies to sustain him until then.
I take him at his word, that he seeks a life here & not a death. I hope I do right in agreeing to his resignation.
Indians passed through our camp this morning with news?—?the steamboat nears Nulato.
64°42’ N
158°08’ W
Rain.
Prevailing winds from the west.
I am set down in this valley. A cold wind washes over me like water over unearthed bones.
The land is open and wide and blown clear. The mountains are far.
Can something half-dead and rotted to pale be resurrected? Can the clean breath of this land enter me?
From whom shall I beg forgiveness?
And I will lay sinews upon you, and will spring up flesh upon you and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live.
Thou knowest.
Written aboard the steamboat Yukon, bound for the coast of Alaska
August 1, 1885
My dear Sophie,
These words do not come easily to me. Since I received your letter at Tetling, I have been seized with such emotion as I cannot express.
I am not like you. I am ill-equipped to know, much less speak of, my heart. Yet as I waited to board the steamboat, I recalled an incident from my childhood that has allowed me some small understanding of myself.
My cousin Robert & I planned to sail to Africa to search for the source of the Nile. We drew maps, made our supply list, & for months wrote letters to one another about our impending expedition. I was 10, Robert two years older. I looked up to him a great deal.
It was my poor mother who had to inform me on a summer day that Robert had drowned trying to swim across the family pond. She must have expected me to collapse into her & weep, for I was still a child, but I did not. Instead I ran to my upstairs bedroom & retrieved the box where I kept our maps & plans. I opened my bedroom window & threw it all out, so that the papers scattered through the trees & the wooden box shattered in the yard. I did not cry. Anger was all I could comprehend.
Your letter cut me deeply, Sophie. How could you so belittle me as to think that I would abandon you or lose my love for you because you suffer some ailment beyond your influence? In so few words, you lessened every act of love between us.
I cannot explain all that we have encountered on this journey, though I will share my diaries so that you might know as much as I. Yet even as we marched, half-starving & faced something of our nightmares, all the while I thought of you & our child & knew I would endure any hardship in order to return home.
Can you then know how much your letter robbed of me, not just to learn that we will not have a child, but to know that you could doubt my love? Did you believe that I loved you only for a mother you might be, rather than the woman you are? When I looked up to see you in a treetop with the schoolchildren, I fell in love with your courage & intellect & sweet voice. I thought, ‘I should like to climb trees & mountains with this woman.’ All those afternoons at the boarding house when I courted you, we did not talk of children?—?we talked about what I had seen of the wild country & all that you hoped to see. I was to show you Yosemite; you were to teach me the names & songs of all the birds. As we grew braver in our affection, what did we whisper of but how we would spend nights together in a tent? Was all this forgotten?
Sophie, it is our loss together, this child & all others that might have been born in our future, but it surely it is not all that binds us together? You left the schoolhouse, I would leave the Army, so that we might have the life each of us has always desired.
Yet I see now, recalling Robert’s death, that I am quick to anger in the face of grief. I read of your anguish & loneliness, yet I was stranded thousands of miles away. I could do nothing in your aid.