The Shadow Catcher

“Day is young,” he said and then he took off at a trot into the woods toward the cliff and the distant sound of water. “Will you not take breakfast with us…Edward?” she called out, just as a lantern light began to shine from the small window in the barn. She went back up the steps with the two pails of water and lit the lantern in the kitchen and, tucking in her hair and pinching both her cheeks in case he should return, set to work, starting a flame beneath the kettle, measuring out the flour, lard and water to make bread and biscuits. By the time the first low rays of sun sliced the air between the trees outside, she had four loaves cooling on the basket trays, the table set and a fresh chicken on the boil for the travelers’ lunch.

“What are you going to do, all by yourself?” Eva asked, appearing crisp, dressed for the journey. “You should change your mind and come with us,” she urged. “There will be bachelors there and you might meet someone.”

“Is that all you want, then, Eva? To meet someone?”

“Don’t you?”

It was still only seven thirty in the morning when Clara finally waved them off, standing in the yard in the bright sun as the buckboard pulled away, Hercules standing in the back signaling farewell with his arms as if about to fly. And then as soon as they were out of sight the Indians appeared. Like liquid, Clara thought. The way her father had once showed her about aquatint, the way it spreads into the paper — the way a liquid, once it’s spilled, flows into an empty space. That’s the way they seemed to move — Edward, too, she realized — waiting for their moment and then taking shape before one’s eyes, as if from the air, like shadows. They waited while she went inside to get her charcoal and a piece of paper, as was her custom, but when she handed them the sheet of paper there was nothing drawn on it. They looked at her, their eyes like wax. She made a gesture to communicate nothing, crossing her arms in front of her then spreading them wide open while shaking her head — and still they looked at her, their blank expressions impossible to interpret. “Nothing, understand?” she said aloud. “Everyone has gone away. No meat, no fish this week.” I may as well be talking to two fence posts, she thought — their faces registered neither comprehension nor emotion nor intelligence and she was reminded yet again of the Indians she and Hercules had seen on the train platform in Dakota Territory, those Indians whose faces gave no hint of inner life, of hope or of humanity. Those Indians had seemed to her not to care whether they sold their wares or not, but these two, Mopoc and Modoc, showed up every week like clockwork willing, if not eager, to barter services for money. She thought, too, of the children selling heated stones for pennies on the railroad, remembered the feeling she had had when she’d thought how close she and Hercules had come to being reduced to that condition, to that state of near penury, one step away from outright begging. She could give these two a dime to make them go away but she remembered the chafe of charity, the rash it left on one’s own dignity, the irritation on the back of one’s own neck as one bowed her head in gratitude. These Indians wanted work. They wanted work for the same reason that she did and to send them away with charity’s coin in their hand or, worse, empty-handed, would be to rupture the chain of responsibility. She didn’t like these Indians but she had entered into a tacit contract with them and if she were the first to break with that understanding then who knew what they might do or what might happen next, so, while they watched her without moving, she drew a picture on the piece of paper. If they were going to hunt for her today, then she wanted them to bring back something big. She drew a buffalo.

It was perhaps an act of mockery she realized, too late — there was no reason that these two Pacific Northwest tribesmen would have ever seen or heard of an American bison, but when they looked at the drawing she could see a shift in their expressions, not so much a movement in their eyes as a darkening.

“Bear,” one of them said, gravely.

“No bear,” she said — she did not want bear meat with its stench and hair and grease. Buffalo, she said.