Page 8 of Ellen Found
Life and death can turn on a dime. I owe Ellen more than I can ever repay. More later.
GWEN PENROSE PROVED a welcome addition to the “kitchen staff,” as her father described them. When the cook scoffed, he wagged a finger at her. “Mrs. Quincy, when I work with one other carpenter, it’s the two of us. When I add another, it’s a crew. Staff sounds nicer for ladies.”
Ellen could tell when Mrs. Quincy was amused by how hard she tried not to show it. “You might as well add Plato to the staff,” she replied, which made Gwen nod seriously.
With the men working inside the inn, the whole building reverberated with noise that Mr. Reamer stated was music to his ears. “June is coming, so the louder, the better,” the architect announced after breakfast one morning.
Interested, Ellen stood in the kitchen doorway as Charles Penrose took everyone through the day’s tasks. The architect was there too, sketching designs and plans on the underside of leftover shingles. When he finished, the shingles went into the kitchen ranges.
“By the end of next week, every room on each floor will be roughed in,” Charles told her as they finished their morning coffee. “We’ll close the big doors off the second-floor mezzanine and finish those rooms after the lobby is done.”
As if aware of the need, winter held itself at bay, teasing with snow flurries and an overnight addition of a few inches, easily swept away from the porch and off machinery. Plato remained ever vigilant, perhaps mindful in his cat brain that cold weather meant mice were seeking warmer shelter too.
“You’re getting a bit of a belly on you,” she told him one night, as she prepared to blow out the light in her glorious bedroom. Plato assumed his usual place, curled up by her feet. He still ignored the men who trooped in and out of “his” hotel, hammering and sawing, but he didn’t hiss at them. Even alley cats can change , Ellen thought. Maybe someday he’ll let Mr. Penrose pet him .
She felt herself changing, too. At the Mercury Street Café, her usual morning routine was a quick swipe at her hair and then an old shoestring to pull it back. If she could fix Gwen’s hair into French braids every morning, she could do hers, too.
She didn’t think anyone noticed, but Charles Penrose did. She saw it in his eyes, which pleased her more than words. Corporal Dan Reeves of the Old Faithful soldier station noticed too. One morning he gave her a string of Indian seed beads. “You could weave these in,” was all he said, but it warmed her heart for a week.
On orders from Major Pitcher, acting superintendent at Fort Yellowstone, Dan and his three privates took over a corner of the hastily built boardinghouse, closer than their regular soldiers’ station. Mr. Reamer made note of the addition. “They’re here to protect us from bears and poachers,” he announced one morning after breakfast.
Maybe it was the good coffee and biscuits. Maybe it was the tablecloths, or even the warmth from the two Majestic ranges. No one rushed off in silence anymore. “Things are different now,” Mrs. Quincy said, and Ellen heard no irritation.
“Plato, we have landed in a good place,” she announced one night as he turned around a few times on his woolen square that Gwen had given him and plumped down on her bed.
Ellen sighed with contentment, thinking of the chaotic order around them as twisted tree limbs, cast-offs of lodgepole pines, filled in the spaces below the handrails on the stairways up from the lobby. “Nature is naturally chaotic,” Mr. Reamer said one morning. “Visitors want the rustic experience. Here it is.”
Other chaos came home one morning when, elbow-deep in bread dough, Ellen heard shouts and carpenters running. She looked around, but there was Plato, slumbering between the warm Majestics, not guilty of a single hiss .
Followed by Gwen, she opened the glass-paned door between the lobby and the dining room when someone shouted, “Hey, bear! Hey, bear!”
She slammed the door, her arms tight around Gwen, as a bear charged down the hall, picked up speed, and raced across the lobby to the open front door. He was a blur followed by men with brooms, who slammed the door after him and laughed nervously.
“We found him all snug in his bed for a warm winter’s nap in one of the rooms at the end of this hall,” a carpenter said and pointed when she opened the dining room door just a crack this time.
Charles Penrose came on the run. He pulled all the men off the lobby to shore up the wall where the determined bear had worried open a spot to crawl through. “Let’s go around again, men,” he said. “Let’s be certain. I’ll sleep better when every bear is denned up away from here.”
For a week Ellen opened that door cautiously, which made One-Eyed Wilson laugh at her. “It wasn’t a big bear,” he assured her .
“He looked huge,” Ellen said, with all the dignity she could muster.
Maybe the bear wasn’t so big. She took the crew’s good-natured ribbing in stride, but welcomed every degree that the thermometer dropped, driving bears away to their wintertime sleep, once they had eaten everything in sight.
“Maybe I’m a goof,” she told Gwen a week later as she bundled up the child for their walk to the log cabin where she and her father “batched it,” as Corporal Reeves said.
Charles had asked if Gwen could stay with her until seven, because he had a meeting with Mr. George Wellington Colfitt, blacksmith from Livingston, who had braved the cold and snowy roads with two iron workers to bring his own plans for a makeshift forge here.
She assured Charles she could walk Gwen to his cabin, not so many steps from the back entrance. “I’ll walk you back,” he said.
She wanted to tell him that wasn’t necessary. All he had to do was stand in the open doorway and watch until she was inside the lobby again. Still, it was a nice gesture.
She handed Gwen a packet of meat and cheese from the supper that Charles had skipped. “You know, just to tide him over until breakfast.”
By now, she knew her way in daylight or gloom, but something was off in the lobby. She stopped and sniffed, wrinkling her nose against an unfamiliar odor, wondering about that meat and cheese.
The bear came at them from behind, snuffling, moving fast, and chunky from eating everything in sight. She stopped, its outline barely visible because of a sliver of moonlight from the randomly placed dormer windows overhead, the ones calculated to bring the outdoors indoors. The outdoors indoors...
She grabbed Gwen, but there was nowhere to go. The bear, much closer, came between them and the dining room door. The outside door looked farther and farther away as the seconds passed. They were stuck. The bear kept moving.
“Toss him the meat packet,” Ellen whispered to Gwen.
Misunderstanding her, Gwen threw the packet as hard as she could into the bear’s face. It reared up, roared, and charged .
Gwen screamed and screamed as Ellen snatched her up and backed toward the stairs. She knew she couldn’t outrun an angry bear up the stairs, but they were suddenly desperate, two people out of their element in bear world.
She grabbed Gwen tighter and darted under the stairs instead. Kneeling, she shoved Gwen against the bottom step, forcing her as far in as she could go, and crawled after her. Cramped into the tight space, she threw her arms around Gwen and covered her with her own body.
To her horror, the bear crawled after them. Thank God he was too big, too bulked up for winter. He growled and swiped at Ellen’s back, ripping through her dress and scoring her shoulder. As blood dripped from her shoulder, she cried out in pain and tried to make herself smaller.
The bear wouldn’t stop. Blood meant food. He swiped at her skirt and managed to hook a claw in it. He tugged as Ellen clung to Gwen and tried to wrap her arms around the bottom rung. She sobbed as the bear inched her out farther. To let go and save Gwen? She had no choice .
Through the bear’s deep breathing and Gwen’s screams, Ellen heard Plato growl—Plato, who had vanished after supper to gnaw on mice somewhere. No, Plato, no , she thought as the bear tugged at her skirt.
The fiercest tomcat who ever roamed the mean streets of Butte growled and hissed. She had heard him warn away stray dogs and hiss at carpenters. This was different. This was the sound of life or death, and she knew it.
The bear grunted, then roared in pain. Looking behind her, Ellen saw Plato leap on the bear’s head and claw at its eyes, an impossible task for a cat too small to fight a bear, a cat possessing nothing but puny claws and a heart so big that even the lobby couldn’t contain it. “Plato, run,” she whispered. “Please. Please .”
With a roar that echoed off the distant ceiling, the bear grabbed her cat, chomped down, and flung what remained against a far wall. Tears streamed down her face as Ellen clapped her hand over Gwen’s mouth and held her tight against her body.
She waited for the bear to grab at her again. When it didn’t, she looked over her shoulder at the beast to see it rubbing its eyes where Plato had clawed and bit. The bear whimpered, distracted, unsure.
After years and years, she heard the back door slam open. She watched, dull with pain of the heart worse than the claw marks on her back, as Corporal Reeves went to one knee, took deliberate aim, and fired. The noise reverberated in the huge room and her ears rang. He fired again and once more until the bear lay still.
Ellen felt herself pulled gently from that too-small space. Some primitive reflex made her cling tenaciously to the little girl, even though the more rational part of her brain assured her the ordeal was over. Someone carefully pried her fingers from Gwen, then kissed her hand.
“Ellen, my debt to you is eternal,” she heard before she closed her eyes and wept.