st 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 bones to which torn skin clung in tatters.
At the pinery, the woodcutters’ main camp, lived a black cook from Texas named Hampton Brown who, with his white common-law wife, had found work in this most isolated and distant of frontiers where their dangerous union might be tolerated. Kirkland referred to them as a “notorious Texas Negro known as Nigger Brown and his white woman known as Virgin Mary.”
Brown thought Larcena to be a ghost. He had been walking down the trail when he saw the white-clothed figure, bloody hair hanging down in front, crawling toward him. He ran back to camp and got his gun, and with several others, returned to investigate this ghostly apparition.
The figure gasped out that she was Larcena Page.
Brown put aside his gun and picked up the frail, emaciated woman in his strong arms. He carried her to camp, where the Virgin Mary tenderly washed Larcena, removed the stones from the soles of her feet and the thorns from her flesh, cleaned out her festering wounds and fed her. She then carefully dressed Larcena in clean clothes.
Larcena asked for some tobacco and then went to sleep. Fifteen days had passed since the Apaches took her.
Tom Childs, one of the woodcutters, galloped to Canoa with the news. Kirkland was there, preparing to help escort the last group of Pinal prisoners to Ewell at Aravaipa Canyon. He gave Childs a fresh horse and sent him on to Tucson to find Larcena’s distraught husband.
Although the Apaches had said his wife was dead, Page had not lost hope. Now the revived man was galloping south to Canoa with Childs, Tucson Dr. C.B. Hughes and Ed Radcliff of Tubac. They rode all night, reaching the ranch just as Kirkland was leaving. They pushed on the final dozen miles to the lumber camp and were stunned by what they found.
“What a sight,” Radcliff declared, “emaciated beyond description, her hands and knees and legs and arms a mass of raw flesh almost exposing the bones, caused by crawling over the cruel rocks, up hill and down hill.”
Doctor Hughes told Page he had no hope of saving Lar