Dear Josh,
Thanks for taking the time to describe Alpine for me. I’ve often thought about the boom that came to that area after the Colonel’s expedition and the changes it must have brought. I always had it in my mind that Alpine must be a good-sized town. Is there any mining going on around there anymore?
Good on you, getting your meat in for the winter. I’d be curious to taste caribou. I did a fair amount of deer and elk hunting when my knees were still up to it, but it’s a disappearing way of life I’m afraid. Most of these namby-pambies down here wouldn’t know how to wring a rooster’s neck if their lives depended on it. Doesn’t matter which side of the fence you look, you can’t squeeze a drop of common sense out of the whole bunch. I’ve canceled my subscriptions to most of the magazines, and I can’t stand to watch television anymore. I’m starting to think it’s just as well that I won’t be around much longer. I don’t have much desire to see where these idiots take us.
You’ll find a check enclosed, just a small donation to help with the work you’re doing there. I wasn’t thinking when I sent you everything that in order to preserve it and make use of it, it would require some effort on your end. I only wanted to find a good home for it all. I hope the money helps some, and have no qualms about taking it.
Last of all, let me say, your letters are the most interesting correspondence I’ve received in some time. It is “weird” indeed that it seems the Colonel’s nemesis made an appearance 100 years prior. Maybe it’s coincidence?—?two Alaskan natives in history with similar peculiarities. Or maybe one was mimicking the other. But I suspect it might not be as simple as all that. As I’ve said, those papers have long caused me to question how I understand the world. Now with you going through the papers, and sharing your own background and knowledge with me, I’ve got even more to think about
I won’t lie. I’ve had some lonely years since I retired from the highway department. I used to go down to the cafe some days to catch up with the guys I used to work with, but they mostly want to gripe about how the new hires don’t know how to plow the roads, or tell me about their grandkids or their golf scores, which is all fine and good but not of much interest to me.
When I think on the Colonel and my great-aunt, I can’t help but wonder what I could have been doing all these years. My life hasn’t amounted to a whole hell of a lot. It’s not a very uplifting thought to sit alone with all day.
But then one of your letters comes along, and I’ve got something interesting to put my mind to. I used to check the mail every week or so, because it was nothing but bills, catalogs, and advertisements. Foolish as it sounds, I go out every day now, and sometimes as soon I see the mail carrier pull up to the box. Yesterday, darned if she didn’t say, “Any more letters from Alaska?”
Sincerely,
Walt
Foetal Pulsation?—?By far the most important of all the signs of pregnancy, is that which is associated with the name of Mayor, of Geneva, who was the first to discover that the heart of the foetus could be heard beating through the abdominal and uterine walls.?.?.?.?These pulsations are much more frequent than those of the mother and are, like them, distinctly double.
?—?From A System of Midwifery Including the Diseases of
Pregnancy and the Puerperal State, William Leishman, 1873
Lieut. Col. Allen Forrester
Trail River
The strange baby will not stop its cries. We wander through the forest but find no sign of a village. For many hours we were lost in thick brush, could not find our way back to the river.
It will not leave my mind. That rooty flesh, that umbilicus string of hideous origins. Clear fluid bubbling up from the ground. Clotted blood & moss one and the same. Can it be true? At times I no longer know?—?am I awake or dreaming?
Maybe we should leave the infant where it was found, like an orphaned fawn. Yet it would starve, freeze, suffer greatly. This creature has no mother to come for it. —?Kill it, Pruitt said. —?What difference is it?
He’d seen it himself, he raved. White babies dead by wasting disease. Indian babies slaughtered like calves by white men. He once watched a half-dead Sioux woman give birth in mountain snow, only to be forced by his fellow soldiers to?.?.?.?I shouted at him to stop. He has a blackness about him that could sink a man.
Tillman carries the infant. In his coat, swaddled against his chest. He would not leave it, said he’d sooner kill a weasel like Pruitt than an innocent child, weirdly born as this one is.
What could I have done? Ignore the muffled cries? Walk from the forest as if I hadn’t heard?
I alone saw them. Four wolves. At a smooth trot along the far side of the river. Silent. Between the trees like shadows. All gray. But the last. It was black. None looked in our direction. Before I could alert the others, they were gone.