The Big South Country

By Andrew Beahrs

When twin brothers Nate and Sam are shipwrecked en route to Gold Rush San Francisco, they’re grateful to be rescued by the reclusive hermit Daniel Caplan. But Daniel lusts for eternal life—and is willing to sacrifice anything, and anyone, to get it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three Stone Fire Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513004389

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THE BIG SOUTH COUNTRY

Andrew Beahrs

Copyright © 2015 Andrew Beahrs

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission is strictly prohibited.

Written by Andrew Beahrs

Cover Design by Kerry Ellis

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Daniel Caplan

It was an hour before Daniel saw the boat.

He’d come down to the sea before dawn, wanting to see what the storm brought into Cauldron Cove. A big storm always brought something, and this storm had been big enough to hammer tremors up through the bluffs and the woods and into the floor of the cave where Daniel sat drinking whiskey. He loved to stand in a hard gale, tasting its copper and salt. But these tremors had recalled the far blasts of cannon; he’d known he wouldn’t go out until it was well over. Such a storm could steal him for the sea. It could batter him against rocks until he was like dead he’d seen in Mexico—couldn’t have named them, without the notes pinned to their bandoliers’ backs.

In truth there wasn’t likely to be very much on shore beyond driftwood and knotted kelp wrack. Maybe a bottle, or a length of rope. Maybe a sea-lion freshly dead enough that Daniel could cut off a steak. Not like three years ago, when eager prospectors would clamber onto river steamers or rotten hog boats or teredo-riddled snows as readily as they would onto a fine frigate or bark—when anything would do, so long as it was bound for San Francisco and the golden mountains beyond. Back then, ships heading up coast were loaded to the gunwales with men and their gear and Daniel could hope that a gale would bring him a keg of wheat flour, or a Portman traveling trunk. Even a drowned man in boots that favored him. One winter a whole deckhouse kitchen had drifted in to shatter on the rocks, scattering iron kettles like dice.

Another time—glorious day!—a living man had swum exhausted to shore, borne to safety by his own stubborn vigor. Daniel had wrapped the man in his own greatcoat and comforted him, asking after news. For a whole afternoon he heard confused tidings of the far East Coast: the death of President Taylor, the search for an Arctic expedition, the passage of a law concerning fugitive darkies. Then Daniel killed the man with his bayonet, and gave him to the Masco, and that was a gift from the sea.

But all of that was years ago. Now, in the time that a score of ships once would have passed, there might be only one. So this morning Daniel had waited until rain and wind began to weary before going out to the oceanside cliffs, above what he’d named Cauldron Cove.

A chill spread from the front seam of Daniel’s greatcoat as the sky lightened to an anvil gray. A gopher snake licked air scented with man, and retreated to hunt wood rats. Roar, and hiss, and crash: currents ran high in the darkness below. Daniel took a crumbling bite of hoecake. It was three days old and very dry, and he held it in his mouth until it was wet enough to swallow. Doing that didn’t help the taste at all, but it made the meal go easy. Chewing always made his rotten molar throb, these days—if it got any worse he’d have to head north to Monterey and pay some damn fool a pair of otter skins to yank the God-damned thing. Daniel was thinking about that when he saw the rowboat.

It was caught way out in Cauldron Cove. That happened to flotsam, sometimes. Even when waves and swells redounded from rock, crossing each other crazed, Cauldron’s main current might sweep in along the neck and retreat along the sheer northern wall, turning the whole in a patient circle. Then the cove would collect dead pelicans, and white-bellied rockfish. Once an entire oak, its naked helpless roots turning like a clock hand. Now a rowboat was caught there amid dying rain and driftwood and shreds of storm-torn water weed.

The boat looked to swim well enough, and Daniel’s mind turned to the coves bounded by cliffs too steep for even him to clamber down. With the boat he might reach them, and hunt the sea otters that he could otherwise only covet from high above. But the boat was big; plainly meant to be rowed by at least four men, if not six. Probably Daniel could guide it by himself only on the very calmest days, and even then he’d have to pole it in the shallows like a Mississippi flatboat.

No, it wasn’t nearly a great enough prize to tempt him into the water. If the ocean wanted it, Daniel thought, it could have it back.

Daniel brushed rain from his hat brim, ate the second half of his hoecake, and watched. The boat turned, but there was no sign that the current might push it closer to the neck. Unless that happened, there was no way for Daniel to judge its true condition or worth. Still less would he be able to guess where it might have come from. It might have been lost by a fisherman off Monterey, or Santa Cruz, or even further away—once he’d found a globular glass float hatched with mysterious lines that could only have been made by Yellowmen. Daniel didn’t like thinking of Yellowmen living aside the same sea that he did, but he could comfort himself thinking that most of them lived half a world away and that the float might have been out there a year—glass didn’t rot, after all.

Just so, the boat might have been riding the coastal current for weeks, out there amongst the whales and murres. Once in the ocean, anything could go anywhere: Daniel took what it brought him, but stayed well out of it when he could.

Soon all that was left of the hoecake was the dusty taste of dried corn. A gull swept past. Some dozen of its cousins cried. Offshore swells rolled sulking; waves smashed gray on the cliff. There was someone in the boat.

He was only just barely visible above the gunwale—only the back of a head could be seen, and that vanished as quickly as a scouting sea lion. Weak. Unable even to push himself to sitting.

Himself...yes, it was a man, almost surely. Daniel hawked and spat sideways. There were fifteen men to the woman in San Francisco, they said in Monterey when Daniel last shambled in, near to Christmas, to take in the candles and the bells. Probably a man, and here by accident: there was no gold on the coast to tempt prospectors, and the shore was jagged enough to make fishermen quail. Trappers favored the delta, and only Daniel took fur-bearing ’coon and river-otter along the streams. It was a chance in a thousand for a fellow to drift ashore just here. Probably the boat was a lifeboat; probably the man was there from misfortune and fair chance, with no notion of where he was or that Daniel was there. Surely he wasn’t a cunning man. He’d be as weak as he seemed, and easy enough to kill.

The Masco hung in the cave. It belonged only to Daniel, as all this coast belonged to Daniel; he would never share them, either one.

Daniel rose, stretched, and looked about for a limb large enough to serve for a club. It’d been a long time since he’d hunted a lion, or a bear, or anything more dangerous than a deer. Longer still since he’d given a man to the Masco. The last man he’d seen in the country was the Indian he caught scouting among the acorn mortars last autumn, and Daniel’d never yet been so desperate that he’d offer the Masco a Skin. No more would he give it the man on the boat, not after the way he slipped down into the lifeboat’s gut. The passenger was weak. Unworthy.

Still Daniel would have to offer the Masco something, and soon, lest it go dry and Daniel’s luck and life with it. Predators would be hungry after the storm, out and hunting where he could hunt them. Maybe Daniel could start that morning. Yes: after he killed the man, he’d go out hunting lion.

The ocean churned. But the storm surge had receded, and the tide was low enough to unveil tide-pools on the far point. Sometimes a wave overcame the middle of the neck and washed foaming into the pools, leaving them pale as the whites of eyes. The boat turned, rocking heavily in the swell.

The man was trying to push himself up again. Daniel glimpsed black hair slicked down by seawater, and for a moment thought the boat was even bigger than he’d guessed—that it was almost a small schooner. But when the head again disappeared, Daniel judged the boat against a dead, floating pelican, and saw that it was a lifeboat after all. It was the size of the passenger that’d confused him. The traveler was only a boy.

Daniel rubbed his face against the cold, palms over wide-open eyes, and he thought about that. He thought about the Masco hanging in its satchel. He thought about life, and the price of life. Then he thanked God and got to work.

He worked steadily and by stages. Doing things wrong or too quickly could kill him, for Cauldron could easily worsen and make it impossible to return to shore. He needed to take one action at a time, and not begin the next until its moment had come full and proper.

Heat, that was the thing. Heat from the Masco and from fire both. To reach the boat he’d have to be flush with the inner embers that only the Masco could give. Then, should he bring the boy ashore, he’d need a way of warming them. A fire alone, for that—he wouldn’t share the Masco, never, not even if it had force and fire to spare after Daniel used to it ready himself for the sea.

He walked quickly up the narrow path, through drenched sagebrush and into the woods. Things would have been easier if he knew where the mules were, but they’d gone and fended for themselves during the storm and there was no time to track them. As Daniel walked he spread his arms wide and whipped them closed across his chest, building up heat, beating it into his flesh. Gusts sprayed caught rain from sycamores and bigleaf maples, chilling his brows and beard; by the time he reached the cave the sound of breakers through the trees had softened to a sigh.

The Masco’s leather satchel hung in its place. Daniel had made the frame to hold the Masco above his tumbled heaps of skins and kegs and gear, lashing together stag’s ribs and knobby oak until the frame was tall as he was. Now the last of the storm infiltrated the cave, swinging the satchel gently. So gently. Almost as though it wasn’t moving at all.

Daniel watched it for a while, lips slightly parted like those of a boy hoping for honey. My thanks to you, he said at last. Never thought to have such good fortune as you’ve brought me. He went on like that for a while. He told the Masco of the life he would bring it. He asked it to bless him in turn.

When he’d said all that was in his heart Daniel dug about in the ashes of his three-stone hearth with the toe of his boot. A few embers yet survived, casting a soft glow on a copper kettle and the charred, bison-bull collarbone that served as fire-shovel. Daniel brushed ashes aside with the bone, laying bare two hand-widths of coals he at once covered again with dried sagebrush.

Soon fire cracked and licked the air, casting strong light on the stone walls and the wooden framing and his armchair. The cave filled with cottony smoke. Daniel’s eyes teared and blurred; still he threw on another limb. Even now the fire would scarcely be hot enough for what he meant to do. The stone itself had to warm, the cave become a low oven.

Daniel passed his hands through the fire as quickly as he would fingers through a candle. He did that until he was sure it’d burn down to coals without tending.

Then he sidled between piles of deerskins and salt-crusted rope and to the Masco’s satchel. Slowly, carefully as though probing a sunken crevice, he slid in his hands. He cupped the Masco between his palms. The tips of his fingers did not quite touch. Beneath its mantle of crumbling wild sage the heart was hard as a hempen knot.

Daniel let his mind go empty. He let the Masco fill it.

Perhaps a beat. Perhaps a beat. Then—yes. A beat. A beat; the Masco beat. Soft as quilting, sure as an axe, the Masco beat.

Daniel breathed out, breathed in. Breathed out. The warmth began in his hands, easing further into his flesh with each soft throb. It spread past his wrists, his arms, his shoulders; it slid into his core, the home of his life. The ache in his rotting tooth receded, then vanished. Warmth simmered like oil in Daniel’s heart and belly.

Out of the water, he guessed, the heat might last him for a day. In it? No way of knowing. Maybe half an hour, or a bit more if he was lucky.

Now Daniel was as full and warm and strong as he could be, considering how long it’d been since he’d made the Masco a proper offering. More than ever he regretted the stormy winter months he’d spent holed up without a proper kill. But there was no point in worrying about that now, and Daniel held the Masco for two long breaths more before returning it gently to its place. The Masco was sinewy tough, but it was best to hold it gently. To show respect. Fail at that, and who knew how soon it might seek another supplicant.

Daniel took up the coil of rope he used to descend bluffs, and he went out.

Soon he was struggling towards the end of the point beneath a knotted hunk of driftwood heavy enough to bend even him. Daniel had cleared a path to the very end of the neck, cleaning out seaweeds by crushing poison oak in likely footholds (there were wider vistas from the bluffs, but from the point he could regard the land as he would from the sea; someday, he thought, that might be useful). Still, seaweeds grew back quickly, and Daniel could only carry a piece of wood as big as he was without risking a fall. The wood was damp with rain, and crooked as a mule’s haunch, but its heart was dry; it would make a steady float.

The ocean was relentless, the cove seething. The lifeboat rocked, slapped by swells. Daniel stood amid the cypresses, eying the swells until he understood their set and roll. There was a main current, constantly charging; a counter-current rebelled, the two clashing in a barbarous welter of sea.

Daniel hadn’t considered entering Cauldron since he first came to the country, alkali still white in his uniform’s weave. An hour after he first came to the coast, he’d known he would stay; an hour more, and he’d known that he’d never seek abalone or crab in Cauldron. There was plenty of coast, and plenty of shellfish to pry from the rocks. There was only one place at once so enchanting, furious, and grim. Cauldron Cove was the angriest place he knew and he’d known from the first that he’d stay right out of it.

Now the weather to the west was gray but high. Cauldron was changeable, but hadn’t worsened. The Masco warmed Daniel; the cold sea wind washed over and off him like waves off stone. A harbor seal eyed him warily, but there was no human save for him and the passenger for a dozen leagues of water, a dozen leagues of land. It was time.

Daniel set his boots neat beside the cypress. Black greatcoat, denim trousers, flannel shirt; his clothes heaped higher as he undressed, quickly as though eager to dive into a lake in summer. Soon he wore nothing