Soon, I would also learn that Charlotte was a dead shot, as gifted with a rifle at a great range as I, though she never let another man other know it. This was not because she thought her skill unladylike—she never bothered with such pretense—but rather that she never dared show off or indulge any impulse for extravagance. Her poise was such that it exposed the ladylike as the pale imitation of the womanly and, in so doing, showed itself as entirely innate, given to her as surely as the ground beneath her feet. Though Charlotte was the last to take even that ground for granted—as she spent her entire childhood with it quaking underfoot.

Charlotte's infancy was an itinerant one, but she was taken in by a local schoolmarm before her third birthday. A local schoolmarm? No, the local schoolmarm—perhaps the only Anglo-American one in all of California! Charlotte's adoptive mother had traveled West as the wife of a missionary who expired not long after he crossed the Sierra Nevadas. It would have been simple enough for his widow to marry—given the stunningly low number of virtuous White women beyond the hundredth meridian in the 1830s, or simply any White women at all—but the widow quietly gave up both her intent to spread her faith and her intent to continue her own bloodline at her husband's death.

Rather, without muttering so much as the slightest complaint to the sky, she took in all the children she could for whatever length of time was necessary and formed a family in which the pater familias was a man who'd never seen the Pacific, yet whose ghost presided over an entire brood of its children.

Usually, Mrs. Toler placed her foster children with any other family, as quickly and as best as she could, urging that the luck they'd had in crossing should somehow be repaid as a debt to this fledgling society. And, so, she built a sort of ad hoc community around her good deeds, but Charlotte was a different matter: the red-headed foundling was the first she had taken in and, I suspect, that even at the age of three, she could see Charlotte's beauty might become a hazard to the little girl's own welfare. She took Charlotte as a special charge and raised her to fend for herself in the wilds to which she'd been abandoned, yet with the shield of her own family name.

Charlotte Toler was an orphan of the land, sure as she stood on it, and no matter what special attachment her adoptive mother garnered her, the hopelessly rotating cast of siblings reminded Charlotte she was never truly among her own; much as Mrs. Toler instilled in Charlotte the idea that she was always amongst her own so long as she walked amongst fellow human beings, Charlotte learned those associations were doomed to be ephemeral.

This upbringing made Charlotte, if not so much a secretive person, then an incredibly private one, loath to reveal that which sustained her. The only time alone she knew, she knew in Nature and the time she spent with it, all alone, bordered on the sacrosanct. Logistically and practically speaking, one might say this was to be expected from a girl who never had space to herself and was constantly at work as a helping hand.

However, on a deeper level, I think Charlotte had to hone an understanding of the land around her that allowed her to tolerate the nature of her family life: the falling of a seedpod onto the forest floor or the smashing of a tempest's greatest swell upon the rocks of the shore all the same reminded Charlotte that all that would be born would die, all that could give life could destroy, and all parts of that process would somehow provide. She could play her role in that and nothing more, but it was within this grand scheme and this grand scheme alone that she could find, if not meaning, then stability. Charlotte was sustained by a larger-scale understanding of her existence more so than anyone I have ever known and, quite frankly, I still do not understand it.