Hard Land: Innocents Lost

By John Pagani

Riveting survival adventure and romance tale set along the rugged North American Pacific coast at the turn of the nineteenth century. John Daly, a severely injured US Army scout separated from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, encounters a lost, desperate young woman in a harsh, foreboding land. They unite, struggle to survive, and forge a lasting, loving bond. The two embark upon a perilous journey across the wilderness, battling nature, indigenous peoples, Mexican bandits, and predatory beasts as they fight against all odds for survival. Their travails are further complicated and challenged as they encounter mystical native shamanism and overcome the threats of a horrifying demon. Descriptive panoramas of endless forests, towering mountains, running rivers, and tumbling waterfalls are woven through all facets of the book. The stirring beauty of the roiling ocean and rugged coastline provides stunning background imagery. The story is colored with Irish folktales and sayings as well as early American pioneering customs, skills, and ways of life. This captivating tale begins as a harrowing, frightful adventure and ends as a loving romance, but not before a final battle is fought against evil in its many forms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647011185

Book preview

Chapter 1

John Daly, an intrepid young army scout, rode bareback hard and fast upon a proud cut native stallion with a rope hackamore bridle and braided horsehair reins. His legs and boots gripped the chestnut’s heaving ribs as he peered beyond the steed’s whipping long mane. Unshod hooves pounded the damp, wet soil and, in their frenzy, threw up small rocks and sticky clods of dark-brown dirt with each stride. A dull, huffing grunt echoed from the equine’s lungs with every repeated breath as fleeting white clouds of spent air blew from its gasping mouth. Spittle built up on the steed’s muzzle, and its shoulders and neck were lathered. The mount was pure speed and fury in a race of time against an approaching tempest.

Great bulbous gray-black clouds blew against the mountainous Oregon coast, John Daly, and his steed. Squall line after squall line marshalled up like the ocean waves beneath them as they released cold, drenching rain upon horse and rider. Forceful winds carried salty, sandy air over the land, stinging and burning anything and everything in their way as lightning crackled and thunder boomed through the heavens above and the coastal forest below.

Horse and rider flew like blowing wind beneath the soaking storm as they charged down a cliff line, weaving in and out of the woods along a serpentine, undulating trail. The path was hard, rocky, and bordered with tall pines and brush that battered John’s face and shoulders as he drove forward. The cliff followed the coastline south and then turned inland. At that point, it fell off fifty feet into a small hollow, at the bottom of which was a half-frozen, gentle stream and what would soon become a very consequential, mostly rotted redwood log.

At the same time, deep within the earth, a growing, fitful force was alive. Beneath the cliff top, miles into the rocky coastline, spread geologic faults, like black veins in white marble, that on this day would act as the devil’s fingers that stretched beneath the surface and yanked, shoved, and wrenched at the very stability of the earth. The fitful force which would slide and crush the granite bedrock that formed the mountains, cliffs, and valleys of this otherwise innocent, unknowing land. On this day, as John Daly and his native steed drove like zephyrs along the fated cliff, there was a sudden cataclysmic force: a terrible wrenching of stone, rock, and tree. Shockwaves pounded chests and heads alike as ears filled with the rumblings of cracking, solid stone and the splintering of toppling tall trees.

The chestnut reared. John instinctively leaned forward, clutched at the horse’s sides with his legs, and while still holding the horsehair reins, grabbed handfuls of black mane for balance. Suddenly, both horse and rider plummeted backward as the cliff edge gave way beneath them. The horse flailed frantically with hoof after hoof stabbing at the failing earth. Both steed and rider bellowed as they were enveloped in confusing clouds of swirling dirt and dust and hurtled toward the hard, unforgiving ground below. John’s left leg swung over the mount’s neck as he dived to his right toward the top of a tall conifer. His gloved hands frantically grabbed for slippery, rain-soaked branch after branch. Each eluded him as he tumbled through stiff green battering boughs that pummeled his plummeting body. As the horse fell to its neck-breaking death, John caught the crown of a smaller pine, bending it earthward as it slowed his fall. His grip held, but regrettably, the trunk did not, and he fell, still with the broken tree’s crown in his hands, the remaining height to impact.

Many years past, a redwood giant fell in this hollow and was now lying soft and sodden as punk wood on the sylvan floor. This is where John dropped, among the forgiving ferns and rotting branches, intruding upon the usually silent home of worms, beetles, and such that digest the forest’s languid scraps. He landed almost horizontally, head and chest first, against the soft, spongy redwood. The rotted trunk gave a foot or so under his weight. It cushioned his fall and created a crater into which he unconsciously sank.

Much of the cliffside came down upon John and the chestnut. As the rock and dirt fell, it was joined by brush, small trees, and branches. The horse was nearly buried by the dirt and rock, and John, lying in the caved-in sodden log, was covered more by the fallen tree limbs.

Day turned to night along the Oregon coast. Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark, John Daly’s commanders, were at the site of the future Fort Clatsop, named after the eponymous local indigenous tribe, which would become their winter shelter. Every member of Lewis and Clark’s Corp of Discovery felt the earthquake that tore at the rugged Oregon coast that day in November 1804, as the fierce storm arrived with drenching rain followed by snow, sleet, and a bitter cold.

John Daly never returned from his scout and was missed. Captain Lewis sent out several search parties led by Lieutenant Clark, who assumed personal responsibility for the lad’s loss, to explore along Daly’s anticipated route. The scout was never found. A hunting party in the early spring discovered a decomposing, mangled horse and the skeletons of two wolves.

Chapter 2

The following morning, a thick pea-soup fog enveloped the hollow in which John lay. It blanketed the land like a reaper’s shroud, bringing deep, penetrating cold. John lay within his redwood berth beneath a blanket of dirt, snow, and overhead ice-covered boughs. As the sun broke over the mountains to the east, its warming rays pierced the fog and thawed the overhead frozen precipitation that dripped icy water down upon him. His head pounded and ached. In the instant that his fall collapsed the rotted redwood beneath him, his skull fractured through its base and split its inner ear structures. This accounted for the thick dark-red, crusty blood that caked his left head and neck and for the loud noise that rumbled in his ear. All this had a paralyzing effect and left him with a throbbing, gripping pain in his head.

The ice John lay in cracked and crumbled as he slowly pushed himself up on his elbows. His filthy, worn, deep-blue and yellow-trimmed tripoint hat, which soaked overnight in the thick icy slush, hung heavy from his neck. He clawed at the snow and ice-covered tree limbs lying upon him and pushed and threw them aside. John was unable to focus as he looked out at the hollow: the trees and stream before him tossed and turned in a tumultuous kaleidoscope of confusion.

At first, he felt nothing but his throbbing head. Nothing! His hands covered by the icy slush were numb. He could not tell if his arms and legs were still part of his body. Then a freezing sensation of cold replaced all. Wave after wave of shivering, shaking, uncontrollable paroxysms gripped him. He knew to seek warmth and shelter or he would perish!

Struggling, he crawled from his redwood berth in the collapsed log. It was what saved him after his fall but would now be his frozen coffin if he could not escape from its icy grip. First a hand, then an elbow, and finally a knee brought him feebly up onto the top of the side of the redwood where he momentarily teetered, looked out upon the empty hollow, and then fell onto the snow-clad ferns and soft, soggy soil below. He unknowingly paused as he was dumb to his predicament.

Where am I? What should I do? Which way do I go? Why does my head pound so?

Eventually, gravity rolled his weakened body and directionless mind along the path of least resistance downward from the log toward a quiet, half-frozen stream. Frazil, which are ice crystals formed in flowing water, sparkled and greeted him in the early morning light. John removed a stiff, dirty glove and scooped refreshing, lifesaving water to his lips. The shockingly cold liquid helped to awaken and alert him. He doused it on his head, washing dried blood from his face and neck as he paused and breathed in the cool, refreshing air of the hollow.

John, feeling faintly renewed, dragged himself across the small stream and inched slowly up its opposite bank like a snail: on his belly as elbows pulled and knees pushed. Left behind was a haphazard trail of his body’s struggle for safety in the snowy, gravelly sand. He crawled beneath the lowest branches of the first small spruce he encountered and insinuated himself between the composting carpet of leaves, needles, and moss on the ground and the overhead cover of snow-dusted, icy boughs. There he rested safe from the elements. He was not warm, but he was no longer morbidly freezing in the cold fog and icy slush.

John had to heal his fractured skull and other painful, debilitating injuries. Most of all, he needed to regain his wits. In the days that followed, his world became a delirium of wake and sleep. He could not tell if it was night or day. The roaring in his ear sounded like a mighty tempest blowing through the heavens. John wondered if the strength in his arms and legs would ever return. If he arose lame or crippled, he would certainly quickly perish in nature’s storms or be killed by its ravaging beasts. His greatest peril was that he did not know who or where he was!

At times he prayed out loud to himself and the heavens, Good Lord! Help me! Tell me where I am! Tell me what to do!

Time passed as John lay nestled in his forest refuge. He recalled rolling back down to the small stream to drink at least once, or was it twice or more, and then returning to his bed on the forest floor. He had always carried dried meat, fish, or pemmican in a small pouch on his belt, but now it was empty and he was starving.

About this time, not-so-distant muffled snarls and growls awakened him. John peered with stark, frightened eyes from his forest bed through the dense fog hanging in the hollow. Shadowy, predatory shapes in the dying morning twilight carniverously danced upon a dark hulken form ripping and tearing at its flesh. John rubbed his sleep-worn eyes, peered closer, and realized there were two wolves tearing and ripping at the haunch of his dead horse. Ravenous, glaring stares searched the empty hollow about them, protecting their precious treasure. Their breath huffed like the exhaust of chugging locomotives with gray-white roiling clouds of hot air rhythmically blowing from their nostrils. Each steam-like puff was accompanied with a loud, gruesome snort. Blood-tinged spittle drooled from their mouths and splattered upon the snow and ice-covered horse carcass before them. They often shook their beastly heads while savagely tearing at the horse’s flesh. Such is hunger, the hunger that young John Daly would come to know all too well.

John feared the two wolves as they unabatedly ripped at the horse’s carcass. He panicked they would discover him huddled beneath the sheltering tree boughs not fifty paces away, for his flesh was warmer, softer, sweeter, and not yet frozen hard by the bitter winter. He feared their growling, spitting, and barking at each other, anything or everything imagined or real in their territory. When their gluttonous bellies were full, or for whatever reason, they retreated but never too far from the carcass. Then the coyotes, carrion birds, and other hungry opportunists would gradually appear and glean whatever meat they could quickly steal. All the while, the never distant amber-eyed predators awaited their next helping.

Sometimes at night, when there was a cloudless sky and a bright moon and the wolves were settled beneath a tree or leaf-bare but ice-crusted bush, John could see light reflecting as red dots from their eyes, cautioning him to their presence. When they blinked, the red dots would seem to flash on and off like a warning signal: Danger! As the wolves turned their heads or moved their eyes, the red dots would move from side to side and sometimes disappear. They could reappear as a pair, as one alone, or sometimes remain gone altogether. John wondered if his eyes reflected light back at them. He hoped they did not. This prompted him to stay deep within the shadows.

After three or four days in cautious, secretive convalescence, John awoke to a cloudy night when the butchering cacophony of the wolves stilled and everything seemed calm. He slowly and silently crawled from his secret forest bed, this time retreating on his back, pulling with his elbows and pushing with his heels by inches and feet up the gentle embankment behind him.

John went deeper into the narrow strip of trees forming his side of the hollow to hide from the wolves. This is when he found the strength in his arms and legs again. He finally reached the cliff base behind him and felt well hidden by many rows of young conifers and stands of thick, bushy undergrowth. Here, as his senses slowly cleared, John began to focus.

He drank water from the rain rivulets running from plant leaves and dripping from rocks in the cliff face. John had no food to quell his cravings, but he prayed, which allowed him to live through the pain in his gut. Protection from the animals was paramount. He cleaned, loaded, and primed his trusty flintlock, which had been drowned in the sloppy, frozen slush of the redwood forest bed into which he fell. From a close young aspen, John harvested a long section of trunk using his trusty Tennessee twelve-inch blade. The trunk became a spear as he fashioned a very sharp point on its tip. He learned the value of a spear and how to use it back in his youth in Tennessee from his boyhood Cherokee brother Secumteh.

Although John still saw double at times, had a terrible whirring in his left ear, and was unsure where he was and why, he began to plot against the wolves and what became the carrion horse before him. His hunger drove him for a piece of the animal’s flesh—strike quickly, retreat, and run wherever safety lay! If the wolves attacked, shoot one and spear the other! If more was needed, he still had his long blade and tomahawk!

The next day, a cold, clean, crisp morning dawned upon John’s future. Blue skies above were punctuated with great white clouds that sprinted quickly onshore driven by a brisk, steady gale. Treetops rustled as the wind swooshed through, around, and over them, knocking old cones and loose, dead branches from their heights down onto the cold, snowy, sandy bank. John neither saw nor heard the wolves. The presence of two large black-plumed vultures with ugly, grizzled red masks savagely picking at the carcass across the hollow seemingly served as a sense of the wolves’ absence. The hunger pangs in John’s stomach convinced him this was the time to take his chance and make his move. He wrapped the remainder of his old leather shirt about his left forearm for defense lest he be attacked. John gathered up his few belongings, rechecked that his rifle was primed for deliverance, if need be, and grasped his sharply honed spear. The knife and tomahawk were on his belt. He rose and stood on wobbly and recently untested legs, mustered up courage enough, and exited his deep conifer refuge.

Standing alone by the stream, with only its continuous ripples and the wind in the trees breaking the hollow’s silence, he gazed upward, reaching out to God for strength and success as he faced his challenge: first as large a piece of the hind quarter of his old mount that he could manage and then the gear he could gather without drawing the wolves’ fateful attention. He signed the cross, bowed his head in prayer, and proceeded.

Crouching, John approached the dead horse with all the focus, attention, and intensity he could muster. His left hand, with its sweaty, slippery palm, grasped both rifle barrel and spear, and his right, with a twitchy long index finger, was ready to squeeze the gun’s trigger, whose hammer was already cocked. John made one silent step after another so as not to alert or arouse nearby wanton predators. As he crept forward, he was finally on his knees at the dead horse’s rump, drawing his knife to split the brown hide and take his meal—salvation to the constant hunger he had been suffering!

When the knife pierced the animal’s flesh, the scavenging birds startled, squawked, spread their great black wings, and with their stuffed bellies slowing their ascent, rose up off the carcass to safety. The visual void left as they lit upward was filled with two large glaring, cold amber eyes! The nostrils beneath them flared repeatedly, taking in the visitor’s scent. Large pointed ears went up and then back to lie sleek against the beast’s head. All the while the hair on the creature’s back rose like a wave, cresting from crown to rump, giving the wolf a great, long black terrifying ridgeback. When lips curled, fangs gleamed and a low, pervasive, insidious growl began. It soon became terrifyingly loud, filling the surrounding hollow and echoing hauntingly back and forth within John’s injured skull and dulled senses.

Before the creature could pounce, John jumped back from the carcass and dropped the knife and spear to the ground. He shouldered his weapon and with a keen eye discharged it into the wolf’s glowering face at deadly close range. The beast tumbled backward with a death screech and agonal thud among the smoke and burning powder. It was not to rise again.

The rifle’s recoil staggered John backward but not off his feet. His ears rang from the blast, and his nose and eyes burned from the blistering powder and smoke in the air. He coughed repeatedly. Even through the gun’s insult to his senses, off to his right through the cloud of smoke, he could detect a skulking, low gray form entering his field of view from under thick, low-hanging, snow-dusted branches. John used his right arm and hand to fan away the blinding smoke for a more accurate look. The crouching, gray second wolf, pausing and starting, creeping and stopping, over and over, surveyed this new stranger in its midst. John saw the glaring amber eyes, swept-back ears, rising ridgeback, and fangs and heard the insidious growl again. He searched for his spear and found it on the ground, next to his knife, both hopelessly unreachable by half between him and the gray wolf. His single-shot muzzle loader was discharged. John stood woefully naked and seemingly undermatched in front of this vicious predator!

Immediately, the wolf pounced, knocking John backward onto his back and the spent rifle away from his grasping hands. The beast’s nails scratched and tore at the clothing on his chest and belly. John’s heavily wrapped left forearm went into the gray’s gaping maw, blocking its savage, sharp fangs from penetrating and tearing his neck’s or head’s flesh.

John could feel the wolf’s hot breath blowing onto his face and eyes. With every ounce of strength in his left arm, he held the wolf away from him. John’s jaws were clinched, and his lips were in a fearful grimace! His eyes were big as silver dollars as they met the wolf’s steely amber counterparts! Sweat poured from his face! John’s right hand went to the tomahawk on his belt and, as he mustered all his strength, cried out for God’s help as he swung it, sinking the bit deeply into the side of the wolf’s neck. As John drew first blood, the wolf pityingly yelped and fell off to his assailant’s left. Great streams of bright-red blood rhythmically spurted from the beast’s neck onto the snowy ground as the gray wolf failingly tried to stand. Rising to his feet and looming over the animal, John pounded the tomahawk into the growling head once, twice, and again and again. The fearsome wolf growled no more and lay silent as blood puddled and slowly coagulated in the snowy, icy sand around its moribund body.

John collapsed to his knees, wet, muddy, and splattered with blood. His world began to spin again, and there was a great whirring in his head. He leaned against the stream bank halfway between the gray wolf’s body and the dead horse. John’s body trembled and his hands shook. He breathed deeply, gasping for air. Nausea came over him as he vomited the scant liquid in his stomach. The young scout lost consciousness and fell into the brittle branched, frozen stream-side bushes.

Hours passed until John regained consciousness. The sun was directly overhead, peering in through sparse evergreen boughs and white clouds. As John lay within the bushes, he relived the few moments of horror and terror when he confronted and killed the wolves and escaped without injury. He thanked the Lord and prayed to Him.

John pulled himself to his feet using his rifle as a crutch. He approached the horse’s carcass to take his pound of flesh, only to find it grizzled and spoiled. Apparently, the rump, which was exposed to the sun, wind, and air, was not frozen and preserved like other parts. Upon inspection, those other parts were so mangled and devoured so as not to leave anything palatable to quell his starvation.

John turned and spied the gray wolf’s lifeless body lying in the snowy, gravelly, blood-soaked sand. It was only paces away and still warm. With his long blade, he carved off a hindquarter, fur and paw included. He washed the blood and dirt from the grizzled leg in the stream and returned to the horse where he gathered the supplies he could: coil of rope, canteen, bed roll, and saddlebags of gear.

John left the carrion horse and prepared to break camp such as it was. He stopped across the stream and settled near his first resting spot beneath the spruce tree to repack and adjust his gear.

John was dumb to know where to go, what his goal was, or how to achieve it. He again stood alone, lost, dazed, and confused for the longest time, staring at the little hollow that had been his sanctuary.

Knowing nothing else to do, John stepped up to the little stream, filled his canteen, took one last long drink, and started his journey. Left led out of the hollow, to the beach and beyond on what would be a lifetime’s fateful journey.

Chapter 3

The midday winter sun slowly drifted overhead as the onshore wind buffeted John and burned his eyes. Oceanside air felt wet and cool on his face, but the salt and sand within it stung his skin as the moisture dried. He tugged at his old tripoint hat to keep it securely on his head and from blowing down the beach. John was loaded down like a pack animal. His belongings were piled on his back and shoulders, causing him to slump and bend at the waist under their weight. Securely gripped in his left arm was his bedroll wrapping the wolf haunch soon to become his dinner. John’s rifle was over his left shoulder with a rope coil and saddlebags over his right and the spear in his right hand.

The speckled, cream-colored sand beneath John’s feet was smooth, hard, and flat. His ragged boots slowly shuffled through the pristine surface, leaving a clear track of his past but no idea as to his future.

Being from Tennessee, John had never known an ocean, but what he saw at this moment was breathtaking. The tide was out, exposing a sweeping coastal panorama. A broad, flat crescent of sand stretched to the horizon—cream colored inland from cliff and dune to the caramel, glistening stripe recently revealed by retreating waves. A great mist blew toward the shore as the waves broke from near to far in crashing, curling stripe after stripe of rolling, roiling white frothy foam. As they rushed across the sand, the waves brought a bustle of loud tumult and excitement to the coastal solitude. Gulls rode on wind currents overhead, calling constantly and carelessly to themselves, their brethren, or no one in particular on the sea and land or in the sky.

The relentless, never-ending power of the sea brought nature’s trappings to the sandy shore as it was scattered with shells, kelp and most impressively, driftwood. The latter came in many variously sized and shaped sun and sea bleached logs and trunks. Some were like long, straight poles with stubby arms, and others were twisted into fantastical shapes. Whatever their form, they appeared like scattered bones from dismantled skeletons of large ancient beasts. They were cast across the endless beach as if some giant had discarded them as unwanted items from the bottom of a pack or pocket. From them, John spied several logs crowded up against a small rock stack half buried by the sand. They would make a shelter, which would give him protection from the sun and wind. There was a small rivulet close by to provide water. The smaller logs and sticks would serve as kindling and fuel for the fire upon which to cook his meal. John dragged some deadwood close to the fire to later burn and then settled into this new, small camp.

That first day was relatively pleasant and blessed because of the warming sun. Then John’s luck turned as nature’s curse brought him frigid wind and rain for days. There was a dense fog every morning. He kept a small fire burning. Much of the wolf haunch had been consumed, and some of it dried for the days ahead. John split its leg bones with his knife to yield the scant, fatty marrow.

John was confused as to how he came to this far-off land. The splitting headache and roaring in his ears lessened but still plagued him. John realized he was alone on a foreboding coastline in a harsh world and had only himself to rely on for food, shelter, and protection from natives, wild animals, and the elements. Not knowing where to go or what to do, he continued his trek southward.

As John continued down the coastline, his memories started to return. He remembered traveling in a large company of men, initially in riverboats and then on horseback and on foot, who were well armed and quite gruff to each other and the natives. Few of the natives bore no ill will and naively greeted the travelers. Most were hostile from their first encounter. It was the latter that was his last recollection, and for that reason, he began to worry about his isolation and vulnerability. Certainly the fire, lest the natives see or smell its smoke, should go. Care must be taken firing his rifle unless it became a clear and loud clarion call for their attention. Tracks in the sandy beach would give him away. All this required a reconsideration of his passage through another man’s land.

John walked constantly in his broken-down boots with the sun on his left shoulder in the morning and on his right at sunset. His clothes were tattered but kept him warm. He discarded the old leather shirt he used on his arm for protection against the wolf back in the hollow. He had only a wool undershirt beneath his worn, tattered, old revolutionary-era coat. Leather trousers he made in the autumn while in the Bitterroot Mountains were frayed around his ankles and torn at the knees. His elbows, knuckles, and knees were constantly abraded, scabbed, and weeping. John’s beard, long and scraggly, was caked and matted with food, blood, and phlegm. When the air was freezing, small balls of ice would form upon it around his nose and mouth. The wind and sun burned and chapped his exposed flesh. Several days past he tripped on a log, falling and cutting his forehead. It left a crusty red-black scab and the trace of a small drop of now dried blood that ran from his temple down onto his cheek. Wilderness beaten and battered, he continued south.

As John traveled, he walked sometimes on the beach, at other times on the dunes, and when possible on the high cliffs overlooking the forever-reaching blue-green sea. On the cliffs, the footing was easier and the panoramas before him were revealed. When clear, the sky was deep blue often with dusky, gray-white clouds in the distant heavens. Birds seemed always overhead, and occasionally he saw seals sunning on the rocks by the shore below. Grasses grew on the cliffs as great clumps and tufts seeking sustenance out of the dry, sandy soil and salty sea air. They sent out long blue-green arching, spear-like leaves into the air over older brown dried brethren that slumped to the soil after living their days. There were no coastal wildflowers yet since this was winter on the North American Pacific coast.

Water was plentiful because of the very frequent rains. Food was always a problem. In estuaries, John occasionally speared or caught fish with his hands. Small mammals and rodents were hard to find since it was the winter season. Snakes were deep in their dens because of the cold. Shorebirds did not lay eggs until the spring. Once he caught a gull, which would not have been palatable if not for his all-consuming hunger. In the foothills above the coastal dunes, there were occasional fruit trees and mounds of berried bushes. Any fruit he could find was already grazed over by the local fauna and usually not fit for consumption. John’s thinning arms, legs, and torso were proof to his near-starvation existence.

Solitude also became a problem. John did not know how many weeks he had been lost, afraid and alone on this shore. He had only his thoughts, beliefs, and nature with which to have discourse. John’s amnesia prevented him from drawing on his life’s previous ventures and interactions. He continued his trek south, for if he did not, what was his alternative?

In one of the saddlebags, John kept an old brass telescope. He would frequently retrieve it to scan the coastline, dunes, and cliffs for signs of the native peoples who he wanted to avoid. John occasionally saw their tracks or villages, which he would shun.

Once, while gazing over the distant sea through his telescope, he saw a group of immense black and white creatures breeching the ocean’s surface and blowing great gusts of spray into the wind. They had giant tails with fins that would slam the water’s surface, sending large, tumultuous splashes into the air and pushing small waves across the sea’s surface. John had never seen any creature so grand and marveled at the wonders of this new world in which he accidentally and innocently traveled.

At another time, while looking out over the endless sea, John spied a ship. It was too far away to signal, lest he risk discovery by the natives. The banks of white sail on mast after mast were billowing, blown, and quite spectacular. While studying the ship through his telescope, he could see the sailors on the deck scurrying like nervous little ants on a floating leaf. A regal, imperious-looking fellow in dress and royal stature stood aft. John spied the ship’s great flapping flag: three horizontal bands of red and yellow with an emblem or symbol in its center. It rippled in the brisk wind. He could not place the flag’s country, but it brought back memories of the banner under which he rode. It was with the army explorers that brought him out west. That banner was red, white, and blue and covered with stripes and stars. It was his country’s flag! John remembered being a part of the United States Army! It was beginning to return to him who he was and why he was on this wilderness coastline! He was a scout in the Army, and he held fast to that thought: God bless it should be enduring!

John also noted on the inside of his saddlebag a name carved in the leather, which was made easier to read, thanks to the years of dirt that were ground into the cuts in the top flap. John Daly, it read, which was familiar. It must be his name. Now the memories started to return. He began to recall his family back in Tennessee—his wonderful mother Catherine and sister Joan, all his brothers, and his friend Jack, who was the son of two Scotch Irish immigrants. He was a big, strapping boy who was always joking and pulling pranks. John paused for a moment as he recalled his Cherokee Indian boyhood friend Secumteh. He remembered their friendship warmly as he took the Indian’s tomahawk from his belt and twirled its handle in his hands.

John recalled some of the schooling that his mother pressed upon him. Oh, she was a tough one! That toughness paid off now as he began to recall some of his learnin’—specifically, at this moment, geography. He remembered maps of North America with the United States on the East Coast and spreading westward. The Louisiana territory, which was ceded by Spain to France in 1800 and then sold to the young United States in 1803, lay like a leftward-leaning triangular shape across the center of the continent. New Spain extended from the south up the West Coast. John figured he would find no one but dangerous natives if he left the West Coast and tried to go east. The Spanish had settled on the southwestern part of the continent for centuries. This is the direction he had been heading and this is where he would aim his tracks in the future.

John passed his days walking southward, keeping a keen, reckoning eye for natives and food. All the while, John recalled more and more of who he was, where he came from, and his desire to return to his home in Tennessee. His recovering memories were a godsend; they were like camaraderie he had in the Army that he was so seriously missing now.

Chapter 4

John spent the last night hunkered down atop a bluff in a small depression on the leeward side of a grove of great wind-swept, nature-bent cypress that overlooked the cold, bitter sea. The trees’ coarse and weathered boughs and trunks, bowed inland by the constant tempestuous winds, wrapped around and over this innocent traveler in this hard land and afforded him a meager degree of protection but little comfort from the elements.

It rained throughout the night, and in the morning, John arose shivering and wet. He gathered his gear, tried to quiet his empty, growling stomach, and again headed south. Soon, after reaching the crest of a small rock- and grass-covered rise on the bluff, he froze and then immediately dived to the ground, slipping and sliding in the muddy soil. In the distance along the coast, John saw smoke coming from a small inlet. He took out his telescope and spied several dreary gray smoke columns drifting together into one large eastward-blowing sluggish cloud.

Indians!

He would have to skirt their village, and that meant heading inland up to higher elevation.

The coastal mountain range rose to several thousand feet above the Pacific. John gazed upward and saw slowly rising, rolling brown slopes topped with gentle rounded peaks. Because of the rain, there were many streams running westward in crease-like depressions between the rounded peaks down to the shore. These were commonly punctuated with waterfalls of varying heights and often fed by mountain lakes. The gentle rounded mountains were covered with a winter amalgam of hardy shrubs, conifers, and brown winter grass, which would provide him with a degree of cover.

John climbed slowly, not because it was steep or arduous, but because of his injuries, his lack of food, and his constant surveillance for natives. He scampered from one tree or bush to the next, always mindful of his surroundings. By late day, he reached an escarpment, a dirty brown rocky outcropping at the top of a small valley overlooking the ever-present ocean and the native’s village below. There was a welcoming blue wind-rippled lake nearby, which gave rise to a flowing river that tumultuously tossed itself down the small valley toward the village.

The escarpment provided a good vantage point as John peered through his telescope down into the native village. It was in a small cove with a short spit of land jutting out into the blue-green sea from each end of the sandy and rocky shore. There were yellow-brown cliffs along the northern side of the cove, while a gentle wooded slope made up its southern bounds. Many offshore, hard, jagged rocks abruptly and confusingly disrupted the rhythmic, repeated flow of frothy green waves searching for the coastline’s softer, gentler sandy beach. Farther offshore, dark green-brown wriggling strands of bobbing kelp repeatedly broke the surface of the glimmering, continuously rolling ocean. Large gray and white gulls hovered overhead. Seals, which he frequently saw in days past sunning along the rocky shoreline, did not frequent this place. Several large canoes lay on the cove’s shore. They had colorful shapes and figures painted on their beams, bows, and sterns. Some of the painted shapes resembled beaked birds or burly bears, while others were less recognizable. John saw many tall, carved, and similarly painted poles scattered throughout the village but did not know what they were. Inland from the shoreline were many tall conifers most likely fir, pine, and spruce. They gently swayed in the breeze, and their differing shades of green and silvery needles created a patchwork of varying forest canopy colors and textures. There were also deciduous trees, mainly maple and alder, which were leafless; their branching, crooked limbs looked like