Wild Child

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” John Muir’s sentiment has been shared by man American since the European conquest, including fictional characters from Natty Bumppo to my own Lauren Maxwell. To some degree characters are stand-ins for their authors, made up not out of whole cloth but imagined from inside the author’s own psyche. And sometimes the words those characters say, the attitudes they manifest, the actions they take and the thoughts they think actually astound their creator—“I didn’t know I thought that!” Which is exactly what happened to me when I created Lauren Maxwell and set her loose in the mysterious wilderness.

Not that I should have been surprised when Lauren proved to be a passionate advocate for wild places and wild things. After all, I grew up in the wild, spending my earliest summers in the cool, fern-screened hemlock and conifer forests of New York’s Adirondack mountains, darting down paths cushioned by fragrant needles and dolphining in waters that mirrored fleecy clouds against a robin’s egg sky. Natty Bumppo knew that forest and those waters.

In adolescence, spring and autumn weekends and glorious summers were spent in the sun-dappled glades of the Finger Lakes, where maples and birches added pale green lace to the springtime woods and vivid splotches of gold and red to the autumn forest. The original inhabitants of the area were wiped out in Natty Bumppo’s time, but their name lives on in the lake, Canandaigua, and in the legend of the monster which lurks in the deepest water.

In adulthood, my path took me to wilds of a different sort far from the trails trod by Hawkeye and Uncas, first the salt-sprayed dunes and bogs of Cape Cod and Nantucket, and finally the river-creased mountains and forests of Oregon. Not long after I moved west, a new friend remarked, “Living here must be a big change for a city girl like you.” I startled us both by blurting out, “I’ve never been a city girl.” Which was the truth, but one I’d not recognized until that moment. While I had long inhabited cities, I actually lived in the wild. And so does my sleuth. Lauren Maxwell is a wildlife biologist who lives in the largest remnant of wilderness in North America and does her damnedest to preserve and protect the wild places and wild things of Alaska.

In her first outing, Murder Most Grizzly, as she stands on a deserted beach on Kamishak Bay and watches a humpback whale breach again and again, Lauren declares her credo:

In my world there is a place in the sea for whales and a place on the land for grizzlies. For I know with dead certainty that if there is no room on this earth for the wild, then there is no place on this planet for me.

And she explains the special lure and danger of Alaska’s mysterious wilderness:

Indigo oceans, lavender mountains, turquoise skies—that’s Alaska. A vast immensity of beauty that’s home to plenty of beasts as well—the cold, the dark, not to mention the bears. Awesome beauties and merciless beasts. My kind of fairy tale.

The wilderness adds to life dimensions of danger as random and deadly as the violence found on mean urban streets, but those who are at risk are far from easy rescue. In Murder Most Grizzly, Lauren is certain that the mauling death of a bear biologist is actually murder, and in the course of her investigation she comes face-to-face with a very angry specimen of Ursus acrtis horribilis:

The [grizzly] whoofed and then whoofed again. When Belle stopped, so did I, braced for the attack and ready to drop. Fetal position. On your side. Hand behind neck. What good would it do? Didn’t you see those teeth? Can’t you see those claws?

The deadliest beast on the planet is man, and in the wilderness, Lauren Must face that threat as well. In Murder Most Grizzly, the human threat comes from the air, catching her in the open at the McNeil River Wildlife Sanctuary, with no means of escape beyond a thicket:

Now a zipper of rifle shots chased us, tossing up chunks of grass and soil. I headed for the poplars. CRACK-CRACK-CRACK…I bellied forward, angling to the right for a thick fence of saplings, fear bittering my mouth. My God, [he] had killed Roland! And he was ready to kill again.

Beasts aren’t the only danger posed to wilderness mysterians. Far from manmade shelter, even those who have plenty of wildwood wisdom can find themselves stalked by the silent killer hypothermia. In Lauren’s second adventure, A Wolf in Death’s Clothing, she brings her young son to the summer fish camp of an Athatbascan elder whose grand-daughter has been shot and left for dead on her own doorstep, and she must slip with him beneath the icy water of the Yukon River in hopes of eluding a sniper:

Cold. So cold. The extremities went first. The toes seized up, immovable. The feet grew dense and heavy, like rocks. The hands grew hollow and brittle, like glass. Except where my fingers twined with Jake’s fingers. His touch became my focal point. As our world withered away, the touch of Jake’s hand became my still point at the center of the universe.

A mishap on the trail can have potentially deadly consequences. In Lauren’s third outing, Lamb to the Slaughter, set at a conference staged in the shadow of magnificent Mt. McKinley in Denali National Park, she takes time out from her investigation of the murder of a Russian botanist to organize a hike to a newly-formed lake, leading a group of eminent scientists to an overlook on the lip of a steep ravine, where one takes a nasty tumble:

She lay across the hill in a fetal curl, head slightly lower on the slope, a good position for combating the inevitable shock. Blood oozed from a nasty scrape on her forehead, trickling into the parsley fern matted under her head. Dust dulled the brightness of her hair, and twigs adorned her crooked French braid. The violence of her fall had shredded the palms of hands now limp against the hill and bloodied the bruised knees which poked through torn pants.

Even when a wilderness rescue seems at hand, the complex confluence of extremes of weather, landscape, technology and endurance can push deliverance just out of reach. In Lauren’s latest appearance, Killer Whale, her job takes her to the mist-shrouded islands of the Alexander Archipelago, where a global gathering of environmentalists prepare to do battle with scientists determined to capture 12 specimen whales. The confrontation turns deadly when the nephew of Lauren’s close friend is found floating in Cordova Bay, and she later battles her own exhaustion and the relentless battering of the sea to escape a cunning killer:

One foot after the other, hand over hand, I inched my way up that net. Somewhere below, [the killer] howled with fury….Somewhere above, another man shouted my name, but I ignored him, too. The breeze nudged against me, and maintaining my foothold required all of my concentration. So I looked straight ahead, focusing on the gleaming white steel of Le Mistral’s hull, gratified each time a neat line of rivets hove into view, wondering when I would reach the first line of portholes? Surely, I’d climbed that far by now? Then the net slipped and me with it. My feet slid off their toeholds, dangling free in the air.

Although my path through life has carried me and my sleuth Lauren Maxwell far beyond the wild Eastern places inhabited by Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales, somewhere deep down the impulses that send us into the wilderness are the same. Some scholars claim Cooper’s frontiersman is the archtype from which the contemporary American mystery hero evolved, and certainly the lure of the wild is an enduring American theme. In the mysterious wilderness can be found all the usual suspects of the genre—interesting sleuths, vivid villains, convoluted plots and heinous crimes—and more. The dangerous beats, extremes of weather, remoteness of rescue and survival dependent in large part on simple good luck add hefty measures of suspense and tension to the mysterious wilderness and provide plenty of opportunity for action.

Lauren likes action, and so do I. While I don’t carry a .45 caliber Colt automatic or make a habit of tracking down killers, I do test myself in the wild by rafting whitewater rivers, biking and hiking remote trails, skiing extreme slopes and pitching my tent far from car campgrounds. And though I didn’t need Lauren Maxwell’s help to learn that I lived in the wild — my friend helped with that — she did help me to understand why:

I didn’t really understand [my late husband’s] need to push life to the farthest edge, to learn over that precipice and risk it all….But recently two things happened that changed all that….After those incidences, the air smelled sweeter, the sun shone brighter, my heart beat stronger, and I finally understood…

John Muir and Natty Bumppo understood the lure of the mysterious wilderness, and thanks to my sleuth Lauren Maxwell, so do I.

* Originally published in the summer 1997 Mystery Reader’s Journal.

Copyright 1997 © by Beth Quinn Barnard of text.  All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Grizzly photo by Jean-Pierre Lavoie is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.