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North of Pueblo Los Angeles and the southerly convergence of the coastal range of mountains with the interior range is cradled a great valley.
Deep in that interior valley, known as the Ton Tache, or Tules for its many lakes and marshes lined with cattails, a tall, wide-chested, solidly built man, his torso bare, a loincloth covering his hips, his legs in leather leggin’s over calf-high moccasins, knelt in a heavy growth of willows. A dozen tule elk grazed nearby.
On the man’s left hip rode a bag filled with two dozen foreshafts, some tipped with stone arrowheads, some merely fire-hardened. A few had tules woven in a bulb near the point. These bulbed foreshafts, when fitted onto the ends of one of the half-dozen arrowshafts he carried in a coyote-skin quiver on his back, were for waterfowl. When fired across the water, the bulbs would cause them to skip, maintaining an elevation just above the water, just high enough to break the back of a duck or goose.
But ducks and geese were the furthest things from his mind at the moment. Frozen in the shadows, he stood stark still as the elk grazed nearer. Ever so slowly, he pulled a lilac-root foreshaft with a two-inch striated obsidian point and fitted it into the hollow end of a two-foot oak arrowshaft. He admired the red hawk-feather fletching on the arrow and prayed silently to his brother the raptor to guide his arrow straight.
Just a few more steps, Brother Elk, the warrior silently prayed, and you will be in range. Just as he decided to begin the slow stealthful process of raising the laurel bow into position, the lead elk, a bull who would later in the year sport great four-foot horns raised his nubbined head.
The big bull snorted his displeasure, and the others, too, raised their heads and tested the wind. Then, as one, they spun and bolted away. A pair of lanky gray wolves broke from the cover of a nearby stand of buckbrush and trotted halfheartedly after them but knew it was in vain. They left the trail, put their noses to the ground, and disappeared into the underbrush in search of an easier meal.
“Oh, Brother Wolf, you have deprived my tribe of a meal,” Cha thought aloud, then threatened, “I will wear your hide to warm my shoulders before the cold comes again.”
He left the cover of the willows and began his long trot back to the Ton Tache village. When he arrived, he paused only long enough to drink from a water gourd then began his unpleasant chore—inspecting the dwindling stores of the band.
He walked from room to room of the woven tule mat in the willow-frame greathouse, seventy paces long and only four wide. The whole band shared one structure, its rooms end to end along the lakeside. The branch stubs were left on the willow frame on which the tule-mat walls were hung and could be rapidly removed or rolled up in case of fire or flood.
Finely woven baskets—warp of willow and woof of sedge-rood or redbud bark—held the roots, acorns or acorn flour, and wild buck-wheat of the tribe. A few baskets were finer than the rest, holding the charms of each family. The finest of these sported a hundred mountain quail topknots woven into the topmost woofing, with a milkweed strand almost as thin as a human hair used to bind each fine feather upright.
More practical stone mortars and pestles and flat metates—frying stones of steatite or granite—lined the walk of the hut. Willow hoops lay near each family’s cooking fire, and cooking stones rested around its perimeter. Superheated in the fire, they were lowered into cooking baskets with the aid of the hoops.
As Cha moved among the women busy mending and grinding and gossiping, he checked each basket and haunch of hanging game. He swept shoulder-length black hair out of his worried eyes. A few elk had been taken in the spring and a few deer, but the primary food they had left was the bulb of the tule, so abundant on the lakeshore nearby and throughout the valley floor. But it was not enough. It was not yet summer, and already the land was drying up. It was time to ride the old trading trail to the sea and drive the horses home.
In his lifetime, Cha-ahm-sah, a Yokuts chieftain and shaman of the Ton Tache, had seen his people evolve from an acorn-gathering culture to one dependent upon the horse, not only as transportation but as their major food source.
Cha paused near a hut where children played a stick game. They had made miniature atlatls, or throwing darts, and practiced flinging dry cattail stalks. “It is good,” he thought, “for the children to learn skills early.”
He knelt by the fire of a woman who was busily heating rocks, picking them out of the fire with a hooped and sinew-bound willow and dipping them into a cooking basket full of kawwah, wild buckwheat. Her mush was almost done. She looked at him with interest but said nothing. Unlike the other men of the tribe, the chief could take more than one wife in his household. And it was better to share the chores with more than one, but she was old and knew he would take only young women to join his three wives.
As a boy, Cha had seen the Spanish soldados invade the valley and the tribes of the west side of the great Ton Tache valley driven across the mountains to the missions. He had escaped from just such a drive. Now, as they had been for several years, more than half the villages of the valley were vacant, their cooking fires and hollow cooking stones long cold.
But the Mexicans had brought his people an unexpected gift in return for those taken away. In those great roundups of Yokuts by the soldiers, horses had been lost to the wilderness. They bred, and the herds grew, and the People captured them. The tribe not only learned their value as transportation but learned the value of horsemeat. Now meat, not acorns, was the staple of the tribe. Great herds had once roamed the valley, but they had been decimated by the People, bears, wolves, and pumas. Now only a few bands could he found, and they were wary of men and stayed well out of bow range.
But the missions and the ranchos of the coast still had horses, thousands of them.
If he did not take his warriors to the coast again, the cooking fires of the Tache village would be cold forevermore. In years past, the ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes covered the surface of the lake near Tache, the greatest of the Yokuts villages, and had been plentiful. Now the birds that marked the lakes surface were only coots, and the bald eagles got more of them than the People managed. After several years of drought, the duck and goose crop had not been good, and the lake had shrunk to less than half its former size. The great tribal house had been moved a half-dozen times to stay near the lake’s edge. The men of the village had to spend days hidden under their reed floats, paddling around the huge shallow lake, to slip under the water to capture even one goose by its legs. In years past, a dozen ducks and geese a day would have been no problem.
The village was tired of eating roots and was beginning to look at their riding stock with hungry eyes. It was not a good thing for the riding horses were needed for the hunt and were the lifeblood of the village.
Yes, he decided, he would call the People together after Father Sun had made his run across the sky. A hundred Yokuts warriors would ride, and a thousand horses would be driven back to the valley. Enough to replenish the canyons of the nearby hills. Enough to guarantee the survival of the tribe for years to come.
It would be different this time, for this time the Yokuts had the firesticks. A dozen muskets and the shot and powder to feed them. A Mexican force of cholo soldados, soldiers from Mission San José, had been careless, and the ones that were not killed by the attacking party of Yokuts had fled north, leaving all their stores behind. Thanks to some of the Yokuts who had lived at the mission, the People had learned the fine points of the old flintlocks.
The cholos, who had killed so many of Cha’s men in years past, would be in for a great surprise. This time their musket fire would be answered in kind. No longer would the Yokuts have to get within bow range.
“It has been decided,” Cha thought, and nodded solemnly.
He saw two of his men arrive, each with a throwing stick and a pair of homokes, jackrabbits, draped over their shoulders, a thong lacing their hocks together. They also had a dozen till, quail, in carrying nets hung from their broad shoulders. These
hunters had gone far to find their game. The till had the high topknots of the mountain quail found miles from the Tache camp.
Some of the People will have meat tonight, Cha thought, but not all.
Not nearly all.
But the cooking baskets and roasting racks would be heavy with horsemeat when they returned from the land of the leatherchests if they could avoid the Mexican soldados, or, if they could not, if the musket balls would penetrate their heavy leather armor.