Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes

Where would you go and what would you do when you arrived that was different from where you’d been?

      My sleeping bag weighed easily fifty pounds, but I had a decent pair of boots, and the rest of the necessary equipment materialized from dusty closets and sheds.

      We rendezvoused outside of Enterprise, the county seat, on the snowy slope of a mountain, taking on two new passengers, Cougan and Raven, plus their gear and a couple of dogs. I’d felt proud of the pack-load designated to me. Pouches of dried fruits and vegetables, cooking oil, rice, tin plates, mugs, a few clothes, and a borrowed sleeping bag. But when I surreptitiously hoisted first Annie’s, then Raven’s, much heavier packs, I was embarrassed, indignant, and finally resigned.

      Eventually, mid-afternoon, Glen-boy and I crawled into the back of a small canopied pickup with two slobbering black Labs. Using a spare tire for a seat, we leaned against our backpacks and tried to make ourselves comfortable.

      “If you get cold tonight, you can share my pad and sleeping bag,” Glen said, noticing my red nose, blue lips, and rigid posture.

      “Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said, hastily adding (in the event that my survival might depend upon it), “but thanks.” Forewarned by Annie that women were scarce, “three to one,” I didn’t want to plant any false hopes in Glen’s direction. I liked Glen. But I didn’t want to complicate things with a relationship. I’d had other offers, from other men. Frenchmen and college men and men with boats and men with beards and men with proposals of marriage. Men I’d hurt, loved, rejected, or been rejected by, and left behind.

      Over the rattle of the truck I listened to Glen-boy ramble and watched the high peaks of the Wallowas, snowbound and distant, disappear from the rear window of the pickup canopy. Before the pavement ran out and conversation became difficult, Glen managed to give me a short geology lesson.

      “From here to Imnaha the elevation drops two thousand feet. It will be warmer in the canyons.”

      “How much warmer, do you think?” I said, trying to gauge the temperature rating of my borrowed sleeping bag.

      “Well, there shouldn’t be any snow.”

      “Good to know.”

      From the slopes of the nearly ten-thousand-foot Eagle Cap Mountains to the rugged Snake River Canyon (our destination), the boundaries of Wallowa County formed a rough circle of about three thousand square miles. It was these geological differences, Glen noted, that combined to protect and isolate the county from exploration and settlement until the mid- to late 1800s.

      “You’ve heard about Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce?” Glen asked.

      “Yeah, I remember his story.” The fate of Joseph and his Wallowa band of Nez Perce were one classroom history lesson I hadn’t forgotten.

      “We’ll be camping in their old wintering grounds tonight.”

      I thought how only one hundred years, or the life span of a long-lived woman, had passed since they began their desperate march to Canada hoping to find freedom from persecution, prejudice, and the right to their own ways.

      An hour later we felt the bump of the wheels leaving the pavement, and Glen-boy said that meant we’d reached Fence Creek; it was just a little further now. A ridiculous amount of time later, over what felt like a run up a dry riverbed—the windows fogged over from the Labs’ heavy panting, and conversation impossible—the pickup came to a stop. The canopy opened, the dogs bounded out, and, half-sick, we shoved our gear toward the tailgate and unfolded our cramped legs. Straightening, I stepped away from the pickup, spinning slowly in a circle.

      Annie, watching me, said, “Enchanting, isn’t it?”

      I nodded, speechless.

      Steeply jutting rocky bluffs stood stacked one upon another in towering layers of color. Buff tans and charcoal browns accented with lichen and deep greens, adobe reds, and overhead, lake-blue skies. Far above us I could see ridgetops dusted with snow, but here, at Cow Creek, the early cheatgrass sprouted green and luminous among the wheat-colored tufts of native grasses. Small stands of ponderosa balanced on sloping, grassy hillsides. Cottonwoods, alders, and a brilliant red-twigged bush hugged the banks of the Imnaha River and its tributary draws, which, like the pleats of a woman’s skirt, ran down from the ridges, each varying from the other in depth and broadness, shrouded in wooded mystery.

      I stood in the wintering grounds of the original pioneers, massacred and exiled, never to return. It was impossible to imagine their grief.

      When I was eight, Mom and I had ridden the train to Oregon to visit my mom’s mom, Grandma Pearl. One evening, paging through a family photo album of stiffly posed black-and-white figures, one stood out. An Indian woman. I studied the picture. Small and dark with a kerchief wrapped and knotted beneath her chin, she stared back at me.

      “Grandma, who is this?” I’d asked, only to have her gently close the book.

      “Delilah Bullock, a Cherokee Indian. Nobody important.”

      “But why is she in the book? Am I related to her?”

      Grandma Pearl was a Baggett from Tennessee, blue-eyed and fair skinned, no trace of Indian. But from someone, I’d inherited brown eyes and high cheekbones, and at eight, being part Indian felt important. I’d also known with an eight-year-old sureness that my family was ashamed of Delilah, though I couldn’t have told you why. It was not the kind of shame that came with handmade dresses or homemade bread. It was darker and deeper. And they wouldn’t talk about Delilah Bullock, same as Grandpa Severson and Great-Aunt Regina wouldn’t talk Norwegian in my presence, saying it was the “old ways, old thinking, not for children.” Same as Aunt Regina refused to let me use the privy behind the farmhouse.

      Somehow, I would later learn that Delilah, a full-blood Cherokee, was my great-great-great-grandma on my mother’s side. That she came from a family of weavers. That she was born in 1807 and died in 1894 and was buried beside her husband James in Buzzard Roost Cemetery, Big Lick, Tennessee.

      In single file we struck a loud and lively pace, the trail narrow but well defined. The dogs barked and wove among us, scaring up a skunk, which disappeared back into the brush. Then, our group grew quiet. Beside us sang the lovely Imnaha River. I was on my first backpacking trip and entering the wilderness under a darkening sky. And like the dream, it felt like somebody else’s hands were on the wheel.

      By the time we left the confines of the narrow Imnaha canyon, the light was all but gone. My shoulders were aching from the weight and strain of the backpack, and I felt ready to accuse someone of chucking boulders into it from behind. But when I reached the Snake River and saw its heaving, roiling, shimmering water, my fatigue gave way to awe. At last, we stopped to rest, and I gratefully shed my leaden load, collapsing against it on the grassy hillside.

      The remainder of the long night passed in shadowed images, silhouettes, bits of conversation, laughter, and the moon rising silver from behind a high ridge. I heard the sucking sound of Boston Brown Bread pulled from a one-pound coffee can, and when someone placed a slice in my hand, I savored it, molasses-fragrant and raisin-sweet. Two more moonlit miles to Knight Creek, they said. We re-buckled our packs and stopped only briefly to sip water from canteens, to retie boot laces, to adjust packs, then went on, following cloven-hoofed tracks in the half-light.

      From the open hillside, I followed the others up an unyielding creek bed. Occasionally we would rip through the undergrowth, breaking free to the hillside, only to be marooned on the edge of a precipice and forced back. By slow and painful increments, I’d lost my place in the center of the pack and was now in last position, placing one disembodied boot in front of the other. I stopped to pull a twig from my hair and hitch up my pack. All around me, silence. I realized I hadn’t seen or heard from anyone else for what seemed a very long time. How I longed at that moment to be out front, or at least in the middle. Grimly, I considered my options. Sit down and have a good cry, start yelling, or forge on ahead. I heard the brush crackle above me and looked up to see the angelic, cheerful visage of my Knight Creek savior, Glen-boy.

      “How is it going back