‘I guess it did, huh?’
‘No shit,’ Wild Bill said. ‘Always.’
Tilly drove them north the next morning to the Huta Point trailhead at the edge of the Yolla Bolly Wilderness. Along the way she and Wild Bill figured out the resupply plans, deciding on a monthly interval, with the food and equipment to be cached in two metal footlockers near the old crossing on Balm of Gilead Creek. She hugged them briefly in farewell. Tilly was the last human being Wild Bill and Daniel would see for six months – besides each other, of course. They would see plenty of each other.
Daniel followed Wild Bill down and then up dark slopes of old-growth Douglas fir. He refused to ask where they were headed. Wild Bill didn’t offer a destination. He remained uncommonly silent, applying his breath to the trek, maintaining a steady pace.
They camped that night on the Middle Fork of the Eel. Each had brought his own tent. Wild Bill had explained, ‘I hired on to teach you, not sleep with you. And anyway, I’ve been known to do some late-night meditating that your snoring wouldn’t encourage.’
They finished pitching their tents as the last light faded. Daniel, ravenous, was eager for dinner, but Wild Bill told him that they hadn’t done their sunset meditation, which they were now adding to the other three. Its purpose was simply to sit and let the river roll. While he was on the subject, he informed Daniel that meditations, by ancient tradition, were doubled in duration while in the mountains.
‘That’s six hours a day!’
‘Eight for me. I normally do a half-hour at midnight and another at two. You probably should be doing eight hours yourself, but I’m easy.’
‘Does the question-time get doubled to ten minutes?’
Wild Bill ignored the sarcasm. ‘No. Five minutes is already too much work.’
Daniel had tried not to anticipate the question, but he had assumed it would be perceptual, not personal, and was caught slightly off guard when Wild Bill poked the fire and said, ‘Why haven’t you asked where we’re going?’
‘Because it makes no difference,’ Daniel replied.
Wild Bill rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, bullshit. When has that ever stopped you? I think it’s adolescent perversity myself. It’s wasted on the mountains. Just be real, that’s all it takes. And since you haven’t asked where we’re going, I’ll tell you.’
Their destination was a geomorphological anomaly called Blacktail Basin. In the center of the basin was a twenty-acre lake. Wild Bill claimed he’d never seen the lake on any map, thus giving credence to the local Indian legend that a Nomlaki shaman had cast a spell of invisibility on it after his first encounter with a white man. Since the lake was spring-fed – ‘filled from within,’ as the Nomlaki described it – they considered it a place of great power, and thus a place to be protected. Although Wild Bill had discovered it independently some fifteen years earlier, he contacted the Nomlaki elders whenever he planned to go there. They always let him. In their view, he had ‘seen through’ the spell, which could only mean the place had chosen to reveal itself to him. Who were they to grant a permission that was already so clearly given?
Since the lake was under the spell of invisibility and therefore didn’t exist, it couldn’t have a name – a referential problem the Nomlaki had neatly solved by calling it Nameless Lake.
Wild Bill spoke highly of Nomlaki culture. ‘The Nomlaki were known out to the coast and up to the Klamath for their shamanistic powers, healing and sorcery in particular, which are two of the tougher arts. And you’ve got to like a culture where the most precious thing you can own or trade is a black bear hide to be buried in.’
They crested the lower rim of Blacktail Basin late the next afternoon and headed down toward what Wild Bill assured Daniel was the lake, though it wasn’t visible. Daniel had expected the basin would be dramatic, but in fact it was quite shallow, with less than a four-hundred-foot elevation drop from the low southern rim to the center. The basin was heavily forested along its upper slopes. As they made their way downhill, the trees grew farther apart, and the fern and gooseberry understory gradually thinned away. Despite the change in density, the flora seemed arranged in such a way that while you had a feeling of open forest, you couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of yourself. Daniel almost walked into the lake before he saw it.
Daniel followed Wild Bill around the lake to a terracelike meadow. Sheltered by the steeper northern rim, nicely oriented to the sun, with an unobstructed view of the lake, the meadow was a perfect campsite.
Wild Bill slung off his pack. ‘Goddamn! It’s a pleasure to get out from under this load.’
‘How high is this lake?’
‘High as you wanna get.’
‘I meant elevation.’
‘Close to three thousand feet,’ said Wild Bill.
‘We’ll probably get some snow then, right?’
‘Just enough to occasionally change the view.’
Stretching, Daniel looked around. ‘I can see why the Indians think it’s under some spell – the trees are a natural screen.’
‘What you don’t see,’ Wild Bill told him, ‘is that the shaman moved the trees.’
With a playfulness that both allowed and protected his mild disrespect, Daniel said, ‘Whatever you say, Teach.’
‘You’re learning. And I say we set up camp and then jump on the chores.’
When camp was squared away, Wild Bill announced, ‘All right, we’re home. Now to the chores. There’s only two: fishing for dinner and gathering firewood. Take your choice.’
Daniel said, ‘I’ll fish.’
‘That’s my choice, too,’ Wild Bill told him.
