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I've never subscribed to a rational view of the world, or set much store in what is referred to as "normalcy," so I thought I might share this experience with you.
I just sent off the manuscript to a new novel titled Light of the World. In it, Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel and Gretchen Horowitz are spending the spring and summer at the home of their friend Albert Hollister, at the gateway of the Bitterroot Mountains. At the back of Albert's house is an arroyo that bleeds down from the hilltop into an apron of fescue and clover behind his office. The arroyo is the exact spot where in the 1870s Chief Joseph and Looking Glass led the entire Nez Perce tribe in the dark down to Lolo Creek in their flight from the United States Army.
Joseph and Looking Glass eluded the ambush set up by the Army at Fort Fizzle (so named because the ambush was a failure), but they were attacked and massacred at the Big Hole River, then again twelve miles from the Canadian boundary, and they and all their people were shipped to a reservation in Oklahoma Territory. The massacre on the Big Hole was like those at the Washita, the Marias, and Wounded Knee: women and children and the elderly were not spared.
We live right on the spot where Joseph came down the hill in the dark. I found a stone ax in our pasture, not far from the arroyo. I've often wondered if the spirits of Joseph and his people are not still out there.
Recently I got up at about 2 a.m. and gazed out the back window and witnessed an unusual if not bizarre phenomenon. We'd had a heavy snow, but the temperature had dropped and the early morning hours had broken clear and the moon had risen over the ridge behind my office. The arroyo that Joseph and his people had descended is thickly wooded, to the extent that even in summer it stays in almost perpetual shade. But something had changed. The moonlight was blazing as brightly as quicksilver on a snowy path that led from the crest of the hills down to our yard. I can only compare it in appearance to a stream that was so white it was almost blinding. On either side of it were deep shadows that reflected no light, even though the entirety of the slope was covered with snow. I don't know how the moonlight, which was shining down at angle, could illuminate only one part of the arroyo, namely, the place where Joseph and Looking Glass and the others had walked, and not the rest of the area.
The next morning I climbed up the arroyo and looked for footprints. I didn't find any, of course. But who says the world is not a mysterious place?
Best,
Jim
