The Seven Dwarves of Mt. Diablo, Part 1

In Celebration of the Gray Fox Epistles

As we are right in the season of the tenth anniversary of the writing and mailing of my first Gray Fox Epistle (the project was unveiled on February 2nd 2013, and the first story — a retelling of the Welsh Children of Llyr—finished and mailed out for the new moon of March 11th, 2013), I thought I would share one of my favorites with you over the next fortnight.

Briefly, for those who don’t know, my Gray Fox Epistles was a stories-by-mail project. Over the course of 13 moons, timed to arrive around the new moon, I sent out physical stories to the postboxes of hundreds of subscribers around the world. These stories were attempts to explore my own relationship to the landscape of California where I was born, through retellings of old fairytales and myths native to my (very mutt-like) European ancestry that I “set loose” as it were, through my imagination and through my connection to local ecology and history. I wanted to know what would happen if “my [animal] tracking eyes, ravenous for pawprints, bits of fur, old bones, the contours of thick manzanita chaparral and all the trails it holds, collided with my myth and folktale-loving imagination?,” as I wrote in a 2013 essay for the Dark Mountain Project, “Turning Our Fairytales Feral Again” which outlines the original inspiration for the project.

At the center of the project was this question (inspired by my studies in animal tracking, my first encounter with the storytelling of Dr. Martin Shaw, and my lifelong devotion to fairytale & myth) , also from the aforementioned essay:

I wonder if the stories that my ancestors brought with them in their blood and their bedtime-tellings — the Irish ones, the Russian ones, the English and German — can find a new wild home in these lands too. If there is some transmutation in order, some shape-shifting, as tale-types have been doing the world over since the beginning, getting passed on and changed as people migrate. There are Snow White tales from West Africa to Chile, from Albania to Iraq and France to Louisiana. And while, yes it’s true, tales are born from specific landscapes, languages and cultural contexts, can they not be re-rooted? Reincorporated, re-patterned, returned to their wildness in a new place?

It was a life-changing endeavor, the writing of these 13 stories over 13 moons. It led me deep as deep can be into the hills and forests of my beloved California homeland. It connected me with hundreds of readers, all over the world. It was a labor of extreme love— the mad writing schedule, the days of wax-sealing and hand-painting envelopes, the walking and walking alone, waiting for the next story to show itself to me. It helped me to begin to know my true loves as a writer and as a girl growing up into full womanhood (I can’t believe I was only 23 about to be 24 when I started it!). It brought me to some of my dearest friends and loved ones in this world.

I’m so grateful to all of you readers who have been with me this whole time, my eyes are misty writing this :), and to all of you who find me now, with Gray Fox at my roots.

So, here is my thank you, my celebration of a decade of writing since, my toast of strongest wild blackberry mead to all those who made it possible to do that work at the time, companions both human and animal who are still with me, and those who are not, and to where it led, and where it still leads.

So — what follows is the first half of a short story written originally in 2014, loosely based on both Snow White & the Seven Dwarves and Orpheus & Eurydice (unlikely duo, I know). It’s set in a 19th century coal-mining town in the foothills of Mt. Diablo in central California.

I’ll leave it there (original introduction included at the end) and let the story speak for itself.

Audio recording is also included below, for those who prefer to listen along.

                                                                     
                                                                   1.

When he came up out of the underground at dusk with coal dust in his hair and walked the dirt path down to Nortonville, the black locusts planted between the old black oaks clicked their leaves. He wiped coal dust off his nose and forehead, his hands on his pants, knowing he would be home again soon, knowing he would kiss her then, at the door, she rising to meet him from whatever she had been doing, a warm smell of sagebrush as she came. He did not want the black dust of his days to touch her. He did not want any shade of that dark powder on her skin brown and bright as the acorns fallen across the path where he walked home nightly, swinging his metal lunch tin, breathing, thinking of her.

When he came through the door and kissed her at dusk, she put her hands right into his hair where the coal dust hid, so she could touch the place he went by daylight: the tunnels in the base of old Mt. Diablo, the pockets miles in where a hundred million year old sunlight was buried and broken up with his pick. Her mouth was too soft, too warm and pink, and the smell of her neck too much sunlight and manzanita bark; he never noticed how the coal dust got on her hands. He never saw her wipe them inside the pockets of her skirt and later, before bed, in the bathroom with the door closed and a candle lit, shake them out into that small flame and ask that wherever he went, he be protected, please oh god, may he be safe, watching the black coal dust spark constellations in that single tear of fire.

                                                               
                                                                   2.

There is an old Rumsen Ohlone story says the world was made by Coyote, who got stranded at the top of Mt. Diablo when the ocean waters were high, right up around its craggy neck. He threw down mats of tule. These became land. He blew feathers from his paws, different kinds, and these became people. His wife little Frog Woman helped him, swimming. The world was born right out of Mt. Diablo, a womb of schist and granite, silica, sandstone and coal. The world: held up in the paws of Coyote, nudged gently by Frog.

There is an old story says once there was no death in the world, but Coyote brought it, saying yes you will hate me for this, but how else will there be renewal? How else can we all fit?

There is an old story says Coyote lost his daughter and went to the Land of the Dead to bring her home again, alive, but in the last moment, carrying her up a mountain, he slipped, he looked back at her, he lost her truly, forever. Then, he cursed the laws he had made but it was too late to change them, and so he howled long, knowing now the sorrow of humans.

                                                                   
                                                                   3.

By day, Grace Metzger Landeg, wife of Edward Landeg, was an assistant post-mistress at the Nortonville post office. The smell of stamps and brown paper and, she liked to think, the faint essences of faraway places like Swansea, like Rome, like Providence, where the letters came from, clung to her hair and hands. One evening a week she attended the Women’s Suffrage Society meeting held in the basement of the Ginichio boarding house, where Mrs. Ginichio served a rosemary tea and endorsed the vote, of course, but also the abandonment of the corset—not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the whale, she would say, and for effect cut open a demonstration corset with a pocket knife, brandishing the whale baleen within. Though Grace was a working class woman, from a working class Italian-German family, of which her mother reminded her often—a poor working girl does not have the luxury to bother with corset-protesting and such nonsense, Graciela my dear, and what man will want you, all loose?—she tucked her own corsets away, and never wore them again, immediately loving the freedom of her body as she ran up a spur of the foothills of Mt. Diablo at her lunch break.

The mountain loomed over Nortonville. She took her sandwich and a flask of tea, put her hands in the thickness of black sage. She lay down with her head under the bottom branches, put her palms on the dusty ground and smelled the sage leaves.

After she met Edward, a month from the day she began working at the post office, proud of her neat little income, her quickness with stamps and writing, her hike up the spur on her lunch break became a sort of ritual. She thought of Edward belowground, a mile down in the dark with a candle held in a tin can and his pick. For five years she came up every weekday and breathed slowly by the black sage with her palms on the earth. She lay her body against the ground and she prayed. Not to her father’s God or Nortonville’s God, who didn’t seem much good at protecting men in the coal mines from their deaths, but to the mountain she prayed, to the places the manzanita roots could reach, to the black sage and the coyote who sometimes watched her, to the red tailed hawk circling, to the coal—please, spare my Edward.

For five years, four and a half of them as his wife, Grace climbed the foothill spur of Mt. Diablo and touched her face with dust, saying his name.

She prayed with her hands not skyward but against her heart.

                                                                   4.

In San Francisco—where Grace had never been, and where Edward had only been for a night, fresh off a steamer from Wales and on his way to find work in the mines—Mt. Diablo coal lit the woodstove of every home. It warmed the feet of mining investors and dairy lords. It warmed the cold hands of prostitutes and Chinese laborers and bakers and the main offices of the whaling station called Arctic Oil Works at 16th and Illinois. Fifty miles east in the Mt. Diablo coal fields, where the dark soot-smoke from the city coal fires settled in the air on still and rainless winter days, the trains came and went daily. They crossed five miles each way on tracks just as straight as an engineer’s ruler from the foothills to the banks of the San Joaquin River delta. Their black cars were loaded and dusted with the coal that men and mules and boys heaved up from the underground, sweat drying on their foreheads in the evening air, hearts pounding and alive.

Five towns surrounded the mines and they were named for men: Nortonville, Somersville, Judsonville, Stewartville, and West Hartley. These five towns were like the five points of a star scattered sudden as a meteor shower across the dry hills, centered around the coal veins shot through the arms of Mt. Diablo. The towns grew up quick as coal lit in the stoves of San Francisco. They grew up amidst the dry and dirt and the wise resinous scrubbrush that knew how to deflect sun, save water in its roots, wait and wait for rain. To the chamise and the manzanitas, it seemed as though the five coal mining towns were slapped up overnight. One day dry hills, the next day clapboard butcher’s shop, boarding house, post office, little Victorian cottages hastily built, flushed white and delicate as the brief mariposa lilies.

Family after family arrived: men with the old longing for gold-dust stamped out in their eyes, replaced by the grim practicality of coal, women who spoke Welsh or Italian, German, Spanish, Swedish, Mandarin. They brought the seeds of their homes—black locust, cypress, tree of heaven, pepper tree—and planted the tiny embryos like prayers: that they, too, might grow roots and branches and flourish here where it was dry, here where at night, despite the sturdy straight train tracks, the sky was huge and speckled and strange and the coyotes howled like screaming.

Old Mt. Diablo cast its shadow over their dreams. It was ragged and alien to them. It had none of the stories of their mothers or grandfathers tucked in its sandstone canyons. Instead, it hid one last grizzly bear with a cub only a seed in her belly. It hid handfuls of Ohlone people escaped from Mission Dolores, scarce and invisible as ghosts to the mining towns, because what good would come of showing yourself to any of these new people, except more of the same, and a cross tied around your neck again like a noose, when a mountain where the world of your ancestors began was the only church your heart understood, or craved?

                                                                   5.

When a portion of the tunnel bisecting the Clark Vein collapsed on Edward where he crouched, candle bobbing its flame in the dark, he was instantly buried under a rush of black stone and dirt. The Foreman would later inform Edward’s wife that he was killed instantly, but to Edward, the moment of his death was long and also sweeter than he could have fathomed, because time seemed to up and leave his body, as priests say the soul does, flitting away like a yellow bird. In its place he was with Grace. It wasn’t the first time they’d kissed, or the first time they’d made love, or even the second or third or fourth. No, it was a memory outside of time, and it spanned his death as the black rock swallowed him.

Grace was standing up, naked, her bare feet on the old blue tablecloth they’d laid out between the sagebrush, far up the ridges beyond Nortonville, where ravens lived in the pines and manzanitas grew fifteen feet tall. She was taking a long drink of water from a glass bottle she’d brought in the picnic basket, and he was watching her neck move as she swallowed, strong and slim and nut-dark, and the way her lifted chin and arms made her small breasts, high and round, lift too, the skin go taut, her nipples harden when she spilled a little water down her chest. It was summer, and dusk, but still hot. The crickets had started up a pulse of song. She looked down at him staring, made a face, then squirted water at him between her front teeth. He’d grabbed her legs before she could leap away and kissed her from her toes up, slowly, to her mouth, making her sigh against him. They’d made love then, with the fading blue sky above them a third skin amidst their own.

But that pleasure was not what Edward remembered most the moment he died. It was just Grace, standing between the sweet black sage, and the way his heart felt, looking at her, that solemnity her eyes sometimes held, a dark softness that could flash just as fast to laughter. It was Grace, and her throat swallowing water, and the way it felt to hold her all the way against him, perfectly still on the blue tablecloth on the dry and sandstone ground, her nose to his chest, her warmth like holding a prayer, like knowing that in all the spinning star-burnt universe, he had one anchor, and that was enough.

Not long after that particular afternoon in summer, Edward had asked Grace to marry him right in the middle of Main Street in Nortonville, which was really just a rugged dirt slope. She was walking to the post office for her shift and he, seeing her, thinking of his long dark day about to begin in the shafts, couldn’t hold the question quiet in his chest a second more.

A man whistled from the doorway of the barbershop when Edward went down on a knee. He tried to resist running his two hands along the edges of Grace’s hips under her linen dress. Instead he swept her hand to his cheek but she said yes, Edward, yes before he could get a word out. She knelt in the dirt too, so they were both proposing at once, and kissing then as the horse called Jim returned with Ian MacFarlane to the grocer’s with that day’s grocery orders tucked in his pocket, passing near. Ian whistled and the horse stopped and ruffed at Grace’s hair for sugarcubes.

The men of Nortonville would have been surprised to learn that it wasn’t this moment— knees in the dirt together laughing and touching lips and smelling one another’s necks in the way of lovers, inadvertent and intoxicated with it—that Edward remembered as he died. It had been the talk of the town for a week or two, a minor scandal, to be seen kissing on your knees in the street, but most of the men had quietly envied Edward the sweet abandon of that woman in his arms, her bold eyes which the women called saucy, too strong, and the men called velvet and wine. What man, in his heart, did not long for a love that brought him to his knees, and a lover with mariposa lilies in her hair?

They did not know, because they had not loved as Edward had, that sometimes one memory can hold all the others in it, that sometimes it is the softest, smallest moments that bring a man to his knees: a woman, water pooled at her chin, swallowing; Grace, folding herself to his chest with that bit of water still on her chin, and the anchoring of it, of loving her.

And so he was there with her again, anchored, as the coal and shale collapsed over him and held him down until he was still.

None of the men could get near enough to Edward’s body to haul him out, because as the shaft collapsed, the rock released a toxic hiss of hydrogen sulfide. It sounded almost like a voice, and the men, in terror, fled aboveground.

                                                                   
                                                                   6. 

The first time Grace had seen Edward five years before, she eighteen and he twenty, she was giving the grocery order to Ian MacFarlane for her mother while the horse Jim blew air out his lips and shifted on his hooves. Edward, on his way to the mines for the day, looked long at her as he passed, then nodded his head with a small smile when she met his gaze. In that one moment she saw him perhaps more fully, as a whole being and a whole mystery, than she ever would again. All he was that day to her was a young man, striding in faintly striped denim workpants and dirty boots, with pale strong hands, a close-cut hat, a can with a candle in it, a round lunch pail, suspenders and a dusty workshirt over his torso, which moved upright and broad and a little proud, like a songbird’s. And though she didn’t know him, she saw him absolutely.

Her own chest had moved and warmed at that smile, which was wide because his lips were wide, and curved up ever so slightly. When grinning, his nose flattened and came close to his lips, and the shadow of a beard moved with them. His eyes, blue, crinkled and softened looking at Grace, and she knew it, right then, that she wanted those eyes to wrinkle and that nose to dip at her every morning and every evening. A thought fell into her mind from nowhere: that a man, beloved, can be a whole country, his veins roads, his heart the place in the center that you seek, and, upon finding it, you take your shoes off and open the door, having found it, having found a home.

                                                                   7.

In the dark of the Clark Vein mine tunnel, with all the miners and their tin can lights aboveground, a man’s heart glinted under collapsed rock like a carnelian. It glinted like a cut ruby, like volcanic tuff, just made. It was a perfect stone. It had love in every capillary and tube, every valve and curve of muscle, every brook of blood, now still.

Dwarves can smell a perfect stone like bears to a newborn fawn. A heart like that, a loving one, a loved one, and human—such a thing might light a dwarf’s own hearth for years, heat his whole home, deep in the central veins of Mt. Diablo, where the world began.

Every mountain has its dwarves, tunneling far inside as moles do the earth, not to hoard beryl and silver and coal and cinnabar, as we might, but simply to know her, their mountain, to know every dip of mica and ribbon of oceanic crust all packed with tiny spiraled shells, to rustle up her stories, the mountain’s song, and then guard it with their lives. They sing not work songs, but mountain songs.

The seven dwarves of Mt. Diablo heard part of the Clark tunnel collapse. They came, through their own rougher tunnels, from seven separate ends of the mountain, rolling as rocks will. They had each been touching with their serpentine hands, their granitic hearts, some old mountain story—here, the ocean floor folded, there, a volcano covered the body of a mammoth, there inside the coal, the old spirits of the first ferns and the sun they ate, here, sandy beach, buckled and pressed between scrapings of the Sierras.

Normally, when a shaft collapsed, it was because they had sung up a song of rending, a song of release, and whoosh, the mountain took her small vengeance upon the men tapping at her coal-veins. Then the seven dwarves came to dance upon that caved-in pile, to dance away the men with picks and lanterns and sad-eyed horses hitched to carts, the boys young enough to wet their beds with fear later that night. But nothing scared them enough to leave for good, nothing scared them enough to keep their hands off the coal, which was the sun’s own graveyard, and not theirs to take.

You cannot disembowel a hill, a piece of a mountain, and expect that she will not hate you, and one day make you pay. Not because she does not have enough coal to give, but because you did not ask, and if you had asked, you would have known that one day, one day far away, you would regret it, you would beg her forgiveness, and it would be too late.

Sometimes the dwarves sang, teeth clacking like silver, and lanterns blew out, and toxic gases leaked, hoses exploded, horses slipped, but still the train came and weighted down ships in the San Joaquin River with coal shrouded in the nightmares of every man who’d hauled it out. It burned hot enough, and that was what mattered—keeping the pistons pumping, do not let it fail, do not let this tower fall.

But when a little section of Tunnel No. 3 in the Clark Vein gave way, killing Edward, the seven dwarves were not expecting the glint of red at his heart. They were not expecting the vision of a human woman, of Grace, that rose up through the dust. The dwarves were not used to animal love, so quick and yet so deep, so full of blood and electricity.

Seven small quartzite and sandstone and gold-veined beings shaped like men gathered around Edward, peering at that glow of red. Gingerly they moved the rubble from his body in their broad arms. Softly they sang the song they normally used to mourn the cart-loads of coal as they were torn from their veins and lurched once more into the sun. They had never much considered the men, soft bodies, soft veins, killed in the mines by accidents, just as the men with their picks did not consider the ancient sun at rest, at last, in the coal they tore free and took away from its bed.

But now, tenderly, their fourteen hands lifted Edward’s broken body from the cleared rubble. All seven peered closer at his chest, where his heart rested, quiet, pure carnelian to their eyes, heavy in him as an anchor. Compared to their cold stone bellies Edward was hot, hot as coals. They held him close and carried him all the way to the center of Mt. Diablo, to the place the world began when Coyote made it and the ocean was high.

                                                                   8.

A widow sounded to Grace like a woman with a weight against her body, a weight and a pain she doubled over against in her belly at night when no one could see or hear her scream and scream into a pillow that smelled like him. A widow was a woman with a long shadow, a late winter afternoon shadow that was not hers at all, but the one she lost. A widow sounded like a woman hollowed out, just a ribcage with no drum in it anymore.

Grace was a widow for one night. She was all of these things, and by morning, she could not bear it. She went to the Foreman at dawn and he wanted to weep too, seeing her come up to his porch, her clothes from yesterday rumpled, her face red and wet and drawn, her eyes swollen and sleepless, hands in fists. She demanded he take her to Tunnel No. 3. She demanded to see her husband before she would believe it. It’s too dangerous darlin’, a gas leak, it’ll kill you, he told her trying to be kind, and she’d looked at him long and cold and almost snarled, he thought later, like a wild thing. Take me there, and then, after his silence, poison and the roughness of a miner’s own language rising up in her, fuck you and your goddamn mine, fuck this goddamn place, a sob, turning on her heel, stumbling out.

Grace ran up to the place under the manzanitas then. She screamed before the sunrise, she screamed into the pale blue winter hills. A woman in her house, where the previous morning she lay with her husband, is a widow with a ghost in her arms and a cave in her chest, but a woman out in the rocks under the fading stars by the winedark arms of manzanitas can slip out of her humanness for a while, slip screaming out of herself and into the mountain, which is big enough to hold such things. She can stop being a woman at all, for a while, and be only her voice, yelling, her body curled in the dirt as the sun passes through the sky, rocking.

A woman like Grace, she would have torn the walls of her house down by evening, to push away the empty place yawning in her as the shaft had yawned down, collapsed, leaving emptiness above. She raged so that she wouldn’t have to stop, and sit, and know that Edward was never coming home to her again with the coal dust all but brushed from his hair. That Edward’s face would not be next to hers at dawn, blue eyes and flat nose hooked toward his lips which were always warm like his hands, tomorrow morning or any morning ever again.

When her voice was hoarse and her chest an ache from crying, the sun was lowering toward sunset. She lay on her back under the green sprays of chamise, put her palms to the earth like she always did. In her mind she went back to yesterday morning, when it hadn’t happened yet, and stayed there for hours as the night gathered.

                                                                   9.

On that morning, Grace had woken up in their wooden bed under the feather-stuffed quilt which had been her mother’s wedding present, sewn with scraps of fabric saved from her own childhood. The sun was not yet more than a blue hem in the eastern sky, and Grace felt nauseous. Edward stirred as she stirred and she slipped her hand under the covers, held onto his thumb. He made a small, sweet noise and rolled closer to her in the half-light until his legs cupped hers. She felt the wiry hairs on them, and smiled, whispering, “I love you, Edward,” to which he kissed her neck just where her hair ended.

He made them breakfast that morning in their red-painted kitchen—oatcakes, his own mother’s recipe. They filled them with cooked apples, drank coffee pale with milk. Grace felt better with a little food in her stomach, and smiled at the way Edward only ever used a fork, not a knife too, and heard a chickadee in the tree out the window.

“MacFarlane’s hired me to repaint the grocery store next week,” he said between mouthfuls of oatcake and a thick swallow of coffee. Grace’s heart eased, a great movement of release in her chest she hadn’t realized she’d been holding there. Finally, work other than the mines. Edward had been practicing the confidence and smoothness of brush strokes on their own house for months, so that each of the four outer walls was a slightly different shade—gray and blue and cream and white—the inside bolder—yellow for the entry room, a red kitchen, a deep blue bedroom.

In the bedroom, he’d begun, on the wall behind their bed, a strange, dreamlike pattern as well. When Grace came upon him working at it, crouched there on newsprint with a finer brush, hunched with focus, his eyes elsewhere inside the painting, she turned quietly and left him. On those mornings she loved him even more, and also felt a sadness she normally kept packaged and sealed like the parcels she handled daily, deep down in herself. Who would they be, the two of them, and what would they do, if they didn’t need the coal, if they didn’t have to scrape their living together monthly, a post office assistant and a coal miner? She’d asked Edward that question, some weekend morning in bed together, with a tray of tea she’d made naked, curtains closed.

“I’d be an adventuress,” she had said, taking a big gulp of her tea, milky dark and strong.

“And a tea guzzler,” said Edward, pinching at her hand on the teacup. “Leave some for me, won’t you?”

“I’m that already,” she replied. “No I mean it, I’d follow the San Joaquin, not the way all the coal goes, no I’d follow it in, across the middle, the big Valley, and then I’d go to the Sierras, me and my mule, we’d head right for the snow peaks. And you too, I suppose, if you wanted to come. Not for the faint of heart.” She grinned, prodded his chest. “Maybe I’d become a botanist, discover some new wildflower.”

“Aha! And have it named after you, Graceus beautificus. I see now! Your secret desire is to become immortalized by a wildflower, very practical.”

Grace gave him a kick under the covers. “Well, what about you, Oh Reasonable One?”

“I’d still be here, naked, in bed, tea, with you and a house painted four colors and the dry scrubby hills. Because you would be here.”

“Mining coal?” Grace shifted, her breasts coming out of the covers, and leaned to look at him and the lines, just a few, starting to form on his forehead.

“Painting houses, maybe, giving them new skins. I like that.”

“Open air, too, and sunlight.” Grace gulped the rest of her tea, hiding the sad, dark place moving in her ribs that was shaped like coal veins, shaped like a train heavy with that dusty rock, shaped like black smoke from city furnaces. The sad dark place cried out, loud as trains on their tracks and the blaring of their horns—you will never get out of this, you’ve made your bed of coal, your walls of coal, your kisses have coal dust in them. You cannot put it away, that coal, now it’s dug up.

The morning of the day Edward died, their lives had started to change. There had been a glint of something else ahead, a brightness, the way Grace was to Edward every day he spent underground, better than any candle, the thought of her face. Now, this work painting houses was a light too—sunny, simple work with paints and fresh air and turpentine. Grace had felt a lightness in her too all day at the post office, blessing Ian MacFarlane under her breath. She handled the letters from tiny Italian and Irish, German and Swedish villages, battered and bent by months of travel, with extra tenderness, thinking of the sorrows her parents did not speak of, the languages they did not utter in the house, only English. She held all that love and gossip and the sadness of families folded up so neat in her hands, and thought of Edward, and the painting of houses, and how maybe it was the coal dust touching their home that had kept them from conceiving a baby; but now, maybe, a family?

Then, at dusk, the Foreman himself came to the post office to tell her, with his hat off, which was never off. His hair underneath was damp and flattened. She knew before he opened his mouth. She did not scream, not yet, only stopped breathing, and held her stomach, and lowered to the floor with the high-pitched sound of a small child.

                                                                   10.

The part of Grace’s mind present under the stars—Orion risen, Pleiades bright—under the chamise and manzanita, on the cold sandstone, and not elsewhere remembering the morning before, a morning a year ago, five, anything to keep away from now, and the hollow hauled out place in her chest, that part of Grace hoped she would just die on the ground, her lungs collapse spontaneously like his had. That way she would never have to be all the way here again, dusty and cold and without him.

So when the female grizzly bear shook her way through the chamise, and appeared three feet from Grace’s head, snuffing at her, she did not scream or even flinch, because it felt no more like a nightmare than anything else did, and maybe she would die after all. She cried in relief at those huge golden paws, that wide ursine nose, those dark, dark eyes, and thought that being inside a bear would at least be like the belly of a mountain, where Edward was.

                                                                   11.

The only way into the mountain is by bearlight, the light of a mother grizzly with a baby, tiny as a lupine pod, in her belly. That spark of a baby is a lantern, a candlestub, just enough light, bear-made, to see your feet, one in front of the next.

A mother bear with a cub just made leads a human mother with a baby just made in her own belly, though hers is too small to know it yet, and the body will keep its mysteries, the baby drifting, a coiled light inside his mother, until the time is right. It is a coiled light that only a bear can see, glowing there just above the pelvis, through all that wool and a blue coat torn with chamise thorns, a glow in the belly of the woman who is lying on her back in the manzanita scrub which is the bear's home, screaming.

She is a widow newly made, a woman with a hollowness and a piercing grief just sown inside her ribs, a mine shaft and coal hauled out where a husband, that morning, lay. The woman, that speckle glowing at her womb, pounds and claws at the dry ground under the manzanitas, between the stalks of black sage, begging to be let in, down there where the coal is, where her Edward is buried, let me see him, dear god, let me see him once more.

The only way into the heart, past the coal mines, of Mt. Diablo is by bearlight. A grizzly in 1881 in California knows the sound and the taste of grief and of losing husbands. She, unlike the human people, has pity for beings not her kind. She takes the woman by the scruff as gently as she would a cub. The woman, already screaming, goes silent, goes soft, looks back at the bear big as a bed, big as a horsecart, golden gray and clawed and lustrous.

For one second they are sisters, two glows at their bellies, two hollows in their ribs where mates should be—gunshot, skinned; mine shaft collapse, coal-dusted. For a moment, they are the same.

© Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2014

Stay Tuned for the CONCLUDING HALF OF THE STORY on March 4th

---

BELOW is the original introductory text to this story, included with it in 2014:

The seeds of this story have been stirring in me for many months, somewhere deep down in the tunnels of my mind—this vision of the dwarves of Snow White as true elemental mineral rock-made mountain-beings, somehow guarding the hearts of these Coast Range peaks, the worlds of geological uplift and creation made tangible, and close at hand. When I visited the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve in December, and peered down gated old coal mine shafts, breathing that cold clay dankness of the underworld, the story began to unfurl again, this time with strands from Orpheus and Eurydice, far older than Snow White, tangled in.

Over the course of this Epistle’s creation, the dry hills of the Mt. Diablo foothills at the Black Diamond Mines have remained dry, and gold, and parched. We have had virtually no rain. We have, as of the last few days, officially entered one of the most severe droughts in the state’s (albeit short) 160-year record. There has been a High Pressure Ridge locked over the Pacific Ocean for the past 13 months, deflecting all storms from reaching our hills. It is as big as the Sierras— 2,000 miles long, 4 miles high. It will not let go, and nobody knows why.

The uncanny stillness and dryness and heat of these January days seeped into the making of this story, which is, after all, about the mining of coal, and what it may cost us, in the end. So with this Epistle heading out via airplane as far as Australia (beyond that High Pressure Ridge!), I send a prayer, for the sake of the wildflower seeds, the salmon, the cougars, the crops, our own thirsty hearts—rain, please, rain, by all things good and holy, by all things reborn! And may we endeavor to deserve it.