Years later, 1887
Mrs. Margaret Sarah Jones, 83, sits now rocking slowing on the porch of her Oregon home. Her husband of many years has just passed, leaving her little to do during the days except care for herself and keep the small cabin she and her husband shared tidy.
During her long and happy married life, she thought often of what happened to her as a girl. When she was rescued, she was pressed to explain her “ordeal.” “Ordeal” was used often; it was their word for what had happened to her.
It was many years before she found a decent man willing to have her as a wife. And that was only because David Brian Jones wasn’t aware of the details of her years with the hairy men. Margaret did not tell him everything, him or anyone else. All that kind-hearted David knew was she’d been taken by one of the hairy men of the mountains.
She told him they used her as a slave of sorts, and that she’d watched over several of the hairy men’s offspring, gathered food and helped build shelters when the group was on the move through and over the high mountains.
About Fellow she never spoke a word. And about their two children left behind, she never said a word. (No children were born alive of the union with her husband.) She expected that life would be lonely for her now, now that all her family had passed on.
She crossed her ankles and pulled a woolen throw over her knees, bunching it over her lap, covering her hands. The view before her eased the sore heart beneath the calico bib of her homemade dress.
The yard and field before her sloped down to a tangled thicket of blackberry bushes, a long line of them, shoulder high.
Again the thought of Fellow came to her. It was at such a thicket where Lome the hairy man came from nowhere and threw a great arm around her middle and barreled down into a near drainage ditch completely covered with a canopy of thick trees. She screamed the whole time, but there was no one to hear.
She’d walked the two miles to the berries by herself. She had walked it often, for she was twelve. Old enough to take care of herself, she assured her mother and father.
When she was rescued by the road crew at eighteen, her father and mother were quick to say that they were concerned over her disappearance, but her mother repeated often, “We thought it was Frank Roy Blain. . . .You remember him? We were sure you’d gone with him and his family to Missouri. You were really sweet on him.”
And then her father repeated his own string of words, primed by his wife’s, told in just the same way over the years, never changing a word: “A splendid vision you were, when we finally recognized you.” Margaret’s father sniffed in just the same place, telling after telling, trying mightily not to let the tears show and the running nose give away his feelings for his only girl child. “Mercy, mercy such a vision!”
Margaret cried in grief now, for her husband of all these years, and for Fellow. What had become of him and their children? At least he was not left alone, he had the children.
“What a remarkable life I’ve experienced,” she thought, “first in the high mountain forest, and then with my gentle David here on the edge of this small Oregon town. Would even one soul have believed me, believed my story, if I had of told the whole of it?”
She guessed not. So, she didn’t bother. She kept it all to herself and only nodded her head when a passerby would call to her on the porch, or one of the local newspapers reported, “A young girl (or boy) disappeared last week while picking berries.”
It was no surprise to Margaret Sarah Jones; after all, her children, her grandchildren would need mates, living there in the mountain mist along with the ancient hairy men. That is if they wished to produce families.
For a quick instant, Baday flashed across her mind. She ground her old teeth and before she gave any thought to it, she yelled out across the berry thicket at the bottom of the yard. It was her own version of the yell of the hairy men. Now in hoarse voice, she whispered to herself, “Fellow I hope you still live. I hope you and our children have mates, have families!” And then in loudest of voice she yelled, “F-e-l-l-o-w, where are you?”
(The story and names are fiction.)
