His eyes followed me as he chewed. “No need to run away,” he said.
“The greasewood is farther,” I told him, pointing to areas beyond the cluster of wickiups. “I must hurry so your lodge will not be marked as lazy by a cold fire. I can eat soggy fish when I get back.”
I found greasewood and some juniper branches and dragged them back slowly so by the time I returned to Lives in Pain’s fire, he sat as I hoped. His head nodded back in sleep, his mouth hung open like a dark cave. Unchewed salmon stuck on a back tooth, more dribbled from his fingers.
I laid the branch on the embers of his fire with careful quietness, breathed on it, felt the smoke water my eyes. The dog gently pulled what remained of the cooked salmon from Lives in Pain’s fingers, and we slipped away.
We disappeared into the shadows of the sagebrush to sit. The dog pranced toward me like a spirited horse, his strong legs stepping one in front of the other. He lowered his head for a scratch. I pulled a crumb or two of salmon from his whiskers and popped them into my mouth before he cleaned his face against my chest.
“We planned it well, Pinenut,” I said scratching the dog’s ears. “You got some salmon, too.” The dog yawned. “We’re far from his calls or kicks tonight,” I told him.
I tried not to think that we also sat far from a warm wickiup, far from the laughter of children at play or the pleasure of precious food given with kindness.
Lives in Pain’s lodge was not my usual place—I had none. I moved from wickiup to wickiup as told, a new mat to wake to every morning if someone needed help. Mostly my hands worked for old ones or those ill who coughed out orders. They said to call them Moo’a. But a true moo’a would invite her grandchildren in to share the deer meat or antelope while she talked of tender things. A child’s real moo’a would plan a naming or help to teach her grandchild basket work.
These were not the things that I belonged to. At those gatherings of people, aunties, uncles, cousins, all, I watched from a distance, did not hear the gentle chatter of their voices that put the onga’a to sleep in their cradle boards. My mind learned early to push down the feeling that forced its way out through the water pooling in my eyes.
I could not stay to watch such scenes.
Instead, I shook my head, took a deep breath, and looked for things to do. Fix a basket for a moo’a. Corner a young woodchuck, a marmot sitting on a warm rock, catch it and call it my own. Pull ticks from the scruffy fur of a dog. Watch who came and went. These I could do, though they did not take away the loneliness of watching others in their pleasures, did not relieve the longing in my chest that burned like unquenched thirst.
Watching and deciding kept me on the path I chose, learning all I could, becoming strong and separate, so someday I could leave.
I noticed that warriors with wealth like Keintpoos, who tibos called Captain Jack, had many horses, and they rode them to the gathering places and trade sites, while most others walked. They brought back puffed-up chests and news of change and showered colored trinkets on their wives and children. I dug some from the dust, abandoned. Their words caused much arguing in the lodges with the chosen headmen. Some medicine men laughed at them and said they brought back tall tales mixed with too much whiskey. Others said they threatened the safety of the Modocs with their disobedient leaving and could cause bad things to happen to all Modocs by a few stepping over the usual way things were done.
Young men of warrior age journeyed to trading places, too, but stayed for a season or more, picking up tibo words and ways. Some even worked in their wooden houses, learned English there or on the ranches in Northern California. I heard them speak of strange things like “china plates” and “ivory combs” in ways that seemed familiar. Their actions, too, brought strong words from elders. Some believed they wrapped the people’s end in their new blankets bought with tibo’s money. But I watched some elders raise new rifles in gratitude for the far-seeing ways needed to keep the Modocs strong.
Once I thought of traveling with the younger men when they left for California or the ranches, going without their knowing. I would take a separate trail and sneak like a coyote beside them, sleep beneath the stars, close enough to hear the laughter at their fires. I saw myself arriving at the boardwalks of the town at dusk, finding a dog to share a bed with and in the morning, beginning my search.
It was not the fear of a desert night that stopped me, nor of being found by men not wanting to be followed. What stopped me was not knowing how to search.
I thought I might find myself among white people and then be overcome by some sweet scent, like my mother’s lavender or the bite of tobacco that once filled my father’s pipe. I needed to be older, keener, so when I set foot in the town I would know what steps to take and have a plan to carry me past a single sunrise.
Instead, I placed my winnowing baskets close beside those who brought back news of other places, risked their shouts at me, the brunt of their kicks, so I could hear. I wove mats and worked the mano against the grain to be near the storytellers, used what they shared to fuel my dreams of entering the world my parents lived in.
Older now, I see my efforts kept another vigil in those days: they helped me set aside the heaviness I felt at being there, alone. The burning that began behind my nose when I saw a mother spit on soft leather to wipe her child’s dirty cheek did not result in tears if I thought of other things. The thickness that threatened to close my throat when a moo’a placed beaded moccasins on her grandson’s feet or when she stroked his head in pride became determination, not despair. I always had a plan to think on, a way to keep deep feelings in a covered basket so the sight of others close together without my shadow in their way would not become more powerful than my plan.
I would leave someday. I would find those who did not mean to leave me. I would help them find me. I did belong, somewhere.
And so I gathered food, cleaned fish, scraped hides, made myself useful, and stayed out of the way. I did not challenge any rule, found comfort in dogs’ fur and laughter in their licks. And in everything I did, I watched, doing what I could to keep from being traded to some band less kind and to keep from being forced to leave before I chose.
Still, I had no single wickiup to call my own until the year the Modocs joined the Paiute gathering.
We had moved before, traveling with the seasons to places of food and winter preparation. We walked south to the mountains for the pine nuts that grew on bushy trees. In the east, rabbits and some deer and antelope fell to the Modoc guns and arrows. At huckleberry gatherings, they traded rifles and knives with Klamaths and Walker River people who arrived with their pointy burden baskets full of goods. But when green shoots speared through the spring mud along the edges of the wide flat lakes near the mountain called Shasta, we returned and gathered tule roots and fished.
But one fall, I did not.
The season that cools before winter came early that year, and we traveled northeast to the twin lakes, a place I had never seen. The Modocs planned to exchange goods and dances with some Paiute bands and visiting Snakes camped there. They would speak of wars and rifles. A raiding chief named Paulina was expected, seeking warriors to join him against the soldiers.
The Modocs were not a joining people, but they liked gatherings.
We wove our way north and east, around sagebrush and rabbit brush and sturdy junipers offering infrequent shade. Our feet kicked up puffs of dust in the sand. A whole village of horses and people and dogs with packs on their backs eased through the desert like a lazy snake. We stepped over scorpions and the discarded skins of rattlesnakes that lay like long, thin shells beneath the sage. The tips of a mountain range watched us leave, a single mountain named Snow that some called Steens watched us arrive.
Like most of the women, I walked, surprised that a rustling sound in the distance could become a roaring stream plunging out of rock, a murmur like distant voices could reveal a small creek guarded by red willows and cottonwoods. We filled our tightly woven water baskets there
, splashed our hot faces with the refreshing water, rested a time before moving back into the desert.
Eventually, lakes appeared in the distance, shimmering as mist settled over sagebrush easing into marsh. One lake, called Tonowama, was said to taste of salt and gave little life. The other teemed with fish and showy white birds and ducks and a hundred smaller warblers and migrating geese that darkened the sky when they lifted. Flying things fluttered with color in the waving grasses, and as they flitted through the air, unmarked children chased at them. Pink mornings that soothed like a welcome sigh eased across a sweep of sky.
Set beside a marsh with tules and reeds and dark wada seeds enough to feed the people, we gathered, joined with others who wove grass and mud houses and formed tule mats and willows to make their wickiups.
It was here, not far from the lakes the white people called Mud and Harney, that I found myself making a poor choice. After all my careful watching and listening, my plan for when to leave and how to stay, I made a choice that caused me to change my ways.
“A child weaves poorly at first,” Lukwsh told me when I had gained some years but still acted crabby with myself for making some mistake. “Best baskets are woven from those experienced hands correct.”
Wuzzie found me, lying in rocks at the bottom of the rimrock ridge, my once strong leg twisted like a dog-chewed bone, broken.
He waited without moving so that at first I thought I dreamed him, his image rising up like fog lifts over lakes. I tried to float above my pain to see him. He waited, deciding whether to startle me awake or take me on into heavy, painless sleep.
“Reckless,” he said finally in a language I understood.
He grunted, became a man with a strange voice that vibrated like wind through an eagle-bone whistle.
“Modocs fail to teach you how to climb,” he said.
He did not wish my thoughts or I would have told him that it was my wish to stand at high places, to see as far as I could see, that brought me to that lava ridge, not poor training by the Modocs. I did not like places where rocks and hills or tall trees broke my eyes from seeing far. In high places, I imagined the vastness of the land my parents were drawn to, the waters where all rivers were said to end.
My wish to be above things did it, and the moccasins of tules that I wove that were too slick and did not dig into rocks well enough to catch me when I slipped.
Before I fell, half the day had passed, and I had climbed to the top of a ridge that rose from the flat desert like a face pimple that arrives overnight, pointed and out of place. The ridge overlooked the lakes and blue-green sage. Once there I hoped to see the world, wide and broad as a lake bed, as rich with interest. My heart would open as it could not do inside the valleys we walked through on our way from the Modocs’ place. And most of all, in a wish I did not let myself speak of often, I hoped to gaze north, to see a glimpse of the trail, a military trail, I had heard the warriors speak of. Such a trail would lead to tibo’s towns and forts and camps. And closer, I imagined, to my parents.
Voices from camps below rose up to meet me. Voices of people I did not know, Klamaths, Wadadukas, Nez Percé and Teninos, some Snakes and Bannocks, Shastas, Umatillas, other Paiute bands—the Modocs, too, who brought me, like one of their best dogs, to carry things.
Lives in Pain lay resting. Long Braids kept busy with her children. Many gathered to trade, to winnow seeds, to hunt ducks and fish and dance and remember stories of the people who belonged here, land of people who called themselves Wadadukas, “seed eaters.” Each enjoyed this time of feasting and gathering. No one knew or cared that I walked beyond the reach of their call; no one expected me to be there or to leave. None would notice until they needed firewood or food brought from their baskets.
A gentle wind blew strands of my hair across my face, into my mouth. The sun had turned my hair the color of a young antelope, the hue of dirty sand. Pulled back from my face, the hair came to an arrow’s point in the center of my forehead. I chopped the ends too short to braid, but the shortness kept bugs from finding a place to live, and I scratched less than the dogs. Like the Modocs, I rubbed duck grease into it to make it smooth and shiny and darker, the color of my eyes, hoping to disappear among the people, make myself unseen so I could be a better watcher.
A foolish wish since my skin was still pale and I grew more slender than most of the children and had a thin face, unlike the others. And the nabawici forever marked me.
Duck fat taste entered my tongue. My fingers pulled me upward as I spit the hair out. Those fingers were strong that twisted mats, stripped sagebrush and wove strands into the skirt and shirt I wore now. Few Modocs would waste buckskins on an unbelonging child.
I reached for a rock above me, higher with each step, imagining how far my eyes would see when I reached the top. My nose itched from lichen tickling it as I hugged the nubby lava rock, each step closer to the highest point. A spider ran across my fingers and I startled.
My treasure basket stayed thonged to my waist. Once discarded by a careless woman, the tule reed basket no bigger than my palm now belonged to me, to hold my meager wealth. I patted at the scrap of pink pinafore, the tiny gold chain, and a special bone shared with a dog on a rainy day.
A nosy hawk arced toward me, caught the breeze, and maneuvered out into a camas-blue sky. My eyes watched him, envied his freedom and speed and direction. He took my gaze from the sharp rocks beneath my strained fingers.
My foot slipped. I recovered, caught my breath, rested. Sun beat like a friendly hand steady on my head. Sweat trickled beneath my arms, beaded against my chest beneath my sagebrush shirt. I took another step.
I stood close to the end of my journey with my foot solidly wedged into rock. With one hand, I adjusted my treasure basket, checked the cover. I took a deep breath and reached for the top.
I was so prepared to breathe in the stretch of land before me that I almost did not feel the rock break beneath my foot.
My fingers ached at the jerk and the task expected of them. They looked as though they belonged to someone else, and then they too slipped. I lost my grip, and my legs and arms belonged to space.
Pain like a new knife sliced my body as it scraped against ragged rocks, split open skin on my arms and my sides. I slid downward, downward; lichen and broken lava splayed across my face until my head slammed against the ground. Dirt and dust sprayed up around me.
The hawk screeched, dipped high above, closer to the view I never saw, and soared away.
It took some moments more before my breath returned, pushing against sore ribs. My head ached and pounded behind my eyes. My arms were tingling, and I felt a dark, sticky stain beneath my leg pushing through to numbness. I touched the pale shaft of bone lodged beneath stretched flesh. It pushed against my skin but not through it. When I tried to move, the pain jabbed me like a jagged spear, and the fear of what this meant began to throb inside my head. My teeth chattered against themselves from the stinging breeze and the sharp edge of my bone and skin gathering wind.
No chubby-faced hitse stood by me while another ran to tell my mother. No father came running with worry and fear set upon his face. I had no hope for scolding wrapped with relief that I still lived.
I wondered if I could drag myself back to the village and who would help me if I did? Maybe I would die. I almost wished it, at the thought of winter coming and this wounded leg.
There Wuzzie found me.
Once he decided to become a man instead of a bad dream, his fingers felt warm, like coarse sand. He rubbed them against my prickly skin.
I startled at his touch, tried to push away, braver now that someone joined me.
“I can do it,” I told him, my voice sounding unfamiliar.
It was more a prayer of hope than a description of what was. He ignored me and felt my leg again.
“No!” I tried to brush his hand away. “Please, I can do it.”
Even in my pain I heard the fear in my voice, as though I knew already what fate would greet
me if I could not care for myself.
But Wuzzie acted as if he didn’t hear and moved his spindly fingers around my leg, his body bent over me like the crooked end of his sagebrush walking stick. He laid his stick beside my injured leg, and then he spoke.
“Stupid children should not go off by themselves into strange places.” His voice fluttered, neither high nor low. He stood concealed behind an antelope skin that sheathed his chest and lower body like a valued knife. His chest heaved with effort, and I imagined him hot and wondered why he wrapped himself, then how he found me and why he bothered. But when my throbbing pain spoke again, I found I did not care to know the answers. Other things came first.
“I can,” I said and tried to push myself again, fighting off the threatened darkness carried with the pain.
He stopped his hands moving at my leg and stared. Then as though remembering something important, he lifted one of the baskets from his chest and handed me a water basket made of tule twists and offered me a drink.
He gave me cool water, a surprise in this hot place. And sweet, not with the taste of lakes—spring water, refreshing and clear.
As he lifted my head, he spoke trade language words I could understand.
“You do not belong in this place,” he said. I looked at him over the water jar and stared into a face as smooth as a shelled pine nut, as dark as washed jasper. He took the jar from me and dabbed at my face gently with wet fingers, a gesture so unexpected I felt tears form and fought them back, not wanting to look weak as well as stupid, frightened as well as marked.
He reached again for my leg. The treasure baskets hung crisscrossed from his chest and bobbed on his body when he moved.
“No!” I told him in the jargon, to be sure he understood. Refreshed now, I thought I must do this alone.
“Even more reckless to resist,” he said.
I pushed myself up on bruised elbows. I tried to lift my leg, but the pain that followed felt as though I’d stepped into a fire, and I swallowed back a sickness from my stomach.
He grunted as if he expected this would happen. With head lowered, the little man thonged sagebrush sticks to either side of my leg. I remembered seeing him among the Wadadukas. I had overheard someone say he was poohaga’yoo, but I had little interest in such things. He did not seem powerful with his little size and odd shape, but I hoped he had strength enough to help me back.