he had been stabbed repeatedly
in the back, but she could not reach the lacerations to clean them. Her head throbbed, and her blonde hair was a mass of clotted blood. She had no idea how long she had lain unconscious against the tree—a day, two, perhaps three.
The sun was warm. She drew strength from it. She was naked, save for her chemise and petticoat. She slowly gathered her wits and her bearings. Looking westward from her precarious perch, she could make out Huerfano (Orphan) Butte, in the Santa Cruz Valley. The cone-shaped hill, a solitary sentinel on the desert floor, was the last thing she remembered seeing before the lances struck her. It was her compass.
Larcena knew the butte was just to the northeast of the Canoa ranch. She was far too weak to crawl back up to the ridgeline, so she eased herself as best she could down the mountainside. Every inch was agony. When she finally reached the level ground below, she fainted and slept until the next morning.
The warmth of the morning sun aroused Larcena. She painfully pulled herself up and braced against a tree. She dared go no farther down into the valley since she knew it held no water. The tree-shaded mountains still offered a few patches of snow. Using the distant Huerfano Butte as her guidepost, she began making her way toward Madera Canyon and the lumber camp. Each bare-footed step was agony as she struggled across the rocks, thorns and brush. She had not gone far before she collapsed.
Larcena soon lost track of the days. The warmth of the sun would wake her from the frigid night, but it also beat down on her, burning and blistering her fair skin. She melted snow in her hands and drank, ate grass and berries and once found some wild onions that boosted her spirits. Her feet were now lacerated, with pebbles working under the skin through the open wounds, so that she could no longer walk. Sometimes she moved like an animal on all fours, but usually she simply crawled.
She came upon a large nest of dried grass and crawled into its warm embrace. She was almost asleep when she realized that she was in a bear den. She crawled away as far as possible and scratched a hole in the sand for her bed.
The mountains provided few easy passages. She crawled up a steep ridge only to lose her balance and slide back down. She wound up farther down the mountain than where she had begun. It took her another full day to regain the lost ground. The skin on her arms and legs were lacerated so badly that the skin peeled away from the bone.
She kept on, driven by an indomitable will that defied all the physical obstacles, heartbreak and pain that raw nature could inflict on her. She crawled day after miserable day, curling up into a pathetic ball of torn flesh night after freezing night.
Then, amazingly, one morning after the sun had warmed her enough so that she could move, she found herself on a ridge high above the road leading into the canyon and up to the lumber camp. She heard voices and saw two men driving an ox team up the road. She screamed as loud as she could, but they did not hear her. She ripped off her tattered slip and tied it to a stick and waved it, and waved it, and waved it. Then they were gone. She had no tears left to cry with.
The Ghost at the Camp
Larcena knew the lumber camp must be close, perhaps only a mile or two away. She crawled on. A day passed, then another, until finally she found herself back in the ransacked camp from which she had first been taken.
Flour and coffee still lay in piles on the ground. She picked the flour out of the feathers from her ruined featherbed and made little flour cakes. The men had left a fire smoldering by the creek, and she breathed life into the red coals. Crawling to the creek, she mixed water with the dough and cooked it. She ate her flour cakes and then slept.
When she awoke, she heard the welcome sound of distant voices and the thud of axes against trees. Unable to muster the strength to rise, she crawled toward the trail that led up to the pinery at Big Rock. She was nearly naked, burned red by the sun, and a mass of bone