a miniature wickiup, a shelter of twigs and branches favored by the region’s Ute tribes. Patiently, with weak and quavering fingers, she generated enough of a spark with her flintlock to bring the little pyre to life.
When the bleeding from her thigh finally stopped, when the glinting yellow cat eyes did not appear in the light of her campfire, and when her body overpowered her mind, Mathilde gave in to sleep.
As the story went, she woke at dawn, cold and hot and delirious, but of sound enough mind to know that death would likely find her before her husband did. The fire in her pit had gone out, but the fire in her leg was an inferno of infection, and her will wasn’t enough to get her on her feet. She had no hope of gathering wood or retracing her bloody steps of the day before, and her mind filled with images of all the wild animals who might bring fate to her in their teeth: grizzly bears, mountain lions, wolves, and lynx.
She asked God to send death swiftly, and without fangs.
As she lay with her cheek on the dirt, breezy fingers stirred the dry ash of her fir trees and levitated tiny pieces. They fluttered like tiny attention-starved insects in front of her eyes, which gazed on her predicament from a despairing, sideways vantage.
It was a blessed distraction, a mesmerizing dance of nature, until some of the soot floated onto her face and stuck to the tears that wet her cheeks. When she reached up to wipe it away, the ash smudged and left a greasy gray residue on her fingertips. The stain reminded her of the purple stains left on her hands when she applied iodine to her husband’s mining injuries.
Mathilde had no iodine with her, but the ash smudges brought to mind a distant idea that the ash might have similar effects. And this lent her some hope.
Even for a woman of her predicament, hope would rear its head. Garner supposed this was part of the story’s allure for him.
She reached into the burned-out pile and scooped out a handful of warm ash. Spitting into the flyaway flakes, she made a muddy poultice and plastered her slashed leg with it, making several small batches in her palm until she had covered her wounds and packed the pasty goo deep in her muscles.
Historians speculated that this simple procedure probably extended Mathilde’s life long enough for the surgeon who eventually treated her to do her some good. The antiseptic properties of ash had long been recognized and in her case, in spite of the unsanitary way it was prepared, managed to slow down the infection.
But Garner and others had always considered that part of the story a simple tale of good luck and quick thinking, though Mathilde’s journal claimed it was God’s hand that stayed the infection. That was not the miracle that drew people to the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet assembly.
The real appeal was rooted in what happened next: after three days in the wilderness, without food or water or fire or the ability to walk; after the limited search-and-rescue skills of the other miners gave out; after her husband collapsed of despair, having found the awful remains of her mount, Mathilde was carried into the tiny settlement on the back of a lovely Spanish horse that no one had ever seen before—and after three more days, never saw again.
She rode in on her stomach, slung over the gray-dappled white hide like a pile of trapper’s furs, unconscious and dangling but alive, her unbound hair sweeping the dirt. Fine beads made of pottery, along with three eagle feathers, were woven into the horse’s fine mane.
If she hadn’t been so near death during the ensuing week, she might have been more overtly mocked when she finally told her story of how the horse presented itself. Mathilde claimed that on the morning of the third day, after hours of begging God for death had morphed into disoriented dreams, the sun woke her. She watched the white beams turn blue in the morning air, and then she saw them touch the ashes of the fire that had died the first night. The sun’s blue rays were like the spoon of her stew pot on the hearth at home. It stirred the remains into a dusty whirlwind that gradually produced the physical forms of the horse and a man, a Native man with coarse dark hair, clothed head to toe in winter