An Afternoon Walk in the Woods

This happened on Paiute Mountain when Joanne was about five years old. Call it 1939. At the time Sid was up on the mountain and working at or had some connection with the sawmill. Possibly Norwin, Esther's brother, was there as well along with his daughter Beverly. Audrey and Bev were probably thirteen at the time.

At the time the cook at the sawmill was a girl in her middle to late teens. Audrey and Bev used to go up to the sawmill because it was another girl, some company. After breakfast was served the cook persuaded Audrey and Bev to go for a walk with her. So off they went for a walk. The girls didn't know that their friend the cook was running away.

In due course the three of them were missed and somehow Esther got word of it. She grabbed Joanne and Fritz, loaded them into the family flivver and went to Nick Williams. Nick asked Esther to wait for a little bit. They had some lunch. Then they drove to where a canyon emptied into Walker Basin. “Now, call to them,” asked Nick.

Audrey adds a few things to this account since she was an actual participant in the adventure. “I was the most timid and didn't want to leave (the sawmill) in the first place, but Beverly wanted to go and they chided me for being a coward, which I was. …

“Beverly always felt that no one wanted her and I think that was why she was so adventurous. She told me later that she was just showing off when she climbed one hundred feet up a big pine tree and swung the top of the tree back and forth... . She needed someone to take notice of her. The other girl was simply bored. I just wanted to go home and be safe.

“The canyon was shaped like a funnel. About halfway down the canyon it was so narrow it was hard to find a place to put our feet...At one spot there were a lot of rocks with the water running down and between them. We had to slide twenty feet down these rocks, which were very steep, once down we could not go back up. Fortunately there were leaves all over the rocks so we slid, not scraped, our way down, but the men following us were not so lucky and they had torn clothes and scratched bottoms from the slide.

“They were very angry and threatened us with having an axe handle broken over our butts.

“When it was nearly dark and we were coming to the desert, I wanted to build a bed by the river so we could sleep near water. We built a little shelter and then the mountain lion started screaming. Then they (Bev and the other girl) finally became scared too, and so we ran down to the desert floor where we met the biggest rattlesnake I have ever seen. By that time the men were close behind us and killed the snake just before Mother called us to the truck, which was parked on a dirt road nearby.”

Joanne adds that Esther called to the girls and they answered. Soon, they materialized out of the brush. Williams knew from the trail they had taken where they would have to come out in Walker Basin, and he didn't even need a global positioning device. Ranching all of your life and seeing the land from the back of a horse gives you a pretty good sense of the lay of the land.

Sid. And possibly Norwin, came out soon after the girls. He had found the tracks of a mountain lion following them. Probably the cat was curious about who was trespassing on his range.

Audrey adds, “I got to see Nick's place and one thing I remember was a huge service area with a long table and on it were large metal bowls with cream and butter in them.They looked so rich to me.

“Driving back to the mountain it was dark and cold. The headlights of the pickup brightened the bottoms of the trees and rocks, the wind blew our hair and faces, and it was silent except for the sound of the car, and the stars were bright and the feeling was eerie to be safe in the dark as the car struggled up the hill. We did not speak.”