"Do you think the weather will be clear long enough for these to dry?" Naduah spoke as she hit at the persimmons with her stick, knocking them to the ground.
"Yes. We will have two or three days of clear weather."
"How do you know, Mother?" Since the first early frost that had turned the persimmons from sour to sweet the sky had been uncertain, and she'd been unable to read the clouds.
"The spiders told me."
"The spiders?"
"Their webs are long and thin and they're spinning high off the ground. The weather will be clear and dry."
"What are they like if it's going to rain?"
"Everyone knows that, Naduah," said Star Name. "They spin short, thick webs, low to the ground." And Naduah packed that information away. Her first year with the People had come and gone, and it had been crammed with learning. This bit would be added to her store of weather information. Smoke curling down instead of rising meant rain, as did ants in a line rather than scattered. And insects were supposed to bite more just before a storm, though they bit so much anyway it was hard to tell if they were biting more. And of course, there were the clouds to read. There was no end to it, the things she had to learn. Sometimes she despaired of ever knowing it all.
She climbed down with Star Name and Something Good and they all gathered the fallen fruit, piling it onto buffalo robes and dragging them to the large, flat rock nearby. With wooden clubs they started beating the fruit to a pulp, chattering as they worked, and enjoying the pale warmth of the late October sun. When they finished they would separate out the seeds, form the pulp into cakes, and leave them to dry, with Naduah and Star Name standing guard, waving off the birds with long branches.
The grapes and plums had already been dried and stored in bags, ready to boil later. But the persimmons were special. They were for pemmican. Most of the People in the Wasp band preferred persimmons in their pemmican. No one wondered why. They just did. Other bands might use walnuts, or plums or cherries or pecans. But the Wasps used persimmons if at all possible.
The three older women had gone back to their chores, leaving the two girls sprawled on their backs, watching the cloud sculptures and picking out forms they thought resembled things they knew. They waved the long, plumed branches slowly back and forth, and talked.
"In a few years we can be naivises." Star Name was a year older and that much closer to adolescence.
"You mean when the boys get all dressed up and parade around the village showing off?"
"It's called taoyovises when the boys do it. Naivises when we do it. The older girls did it after the fall hunt last year, remember?"
Naduah remembered. She also remembered, now that Star Name had brought it up, that it hadn't been done this year. Perhaps the hunt had been too disappointing for anyone to have the heart to show off and celebrate. But it had been fun a year ago.
The older, unmarried boys and girls had spent days getting ready. They polished their ponies' coats until they shone, and oiled their own skins and hair until they gleamed too. They decorated their saddles and bridles, dressed in their finest clothes, and paraded on horseback through the village. They were thronged by the adults and the younger children, all calling out how beautiful and handsome they were, and how proud the People were of them. Naduah had been thrilled at the sight of them, young and strong, the future of the band.
She remembered thinking that her pony, Wind, was more beautiful and better trained than any of the horses there. And she dreamed of the day when she and Wind would prance down the street, and she would show everyone what Wanderer had taught her. And he would be there to see her, tall and graceful and proud.
She had drifted off into her favorite fantasy, when she felt the slight vibration of the earth underneath her. She and Star Name both reared up together. Good, she thought. This time I felt it as soon as she did. They looked for the source of the tremors. A lone rider appeared from the dense bushes behind them. It took them a few seconds to recognize him.
" Deep Water!" They both shouted it at once and ran toward him.
"Are you alone? Where are the others?" Naduah was almost afraid to ask.
"Dead." He hardly glanced at them, but moved on toward the village at a walk. His pony was tired, and they were both covered with dust. No other horse followed him, not even a pack animal. There was a small bundle tied to the pony's rump, a buffalo robe rolled and lashed on top of that, and his weapons, but that was all he carried with him. As he passed close to them, looking neither to the left nor to the right, they realized why it had taken them a few moments to recognize him. His face was pitted with scars, and looked like a piece of ground that horses had trampled.
The girls dropped their branches and followed him, keening for Owl and Name Giver, She Laughs and She Blushes. When he reached the outskirts of camp, Deep Water pulled his buffalo robe up from around his waist to cover his head and shoulders, signaling his sorrow, but with a subtle touch of anger in the angle of his robe as it framed his face. Grief spread from him like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond. For six months there had been no word of Name Giver and his family. Now they would find out what had happened. Blocks The Sun took Deep Water to the extra lodge to rest and eat while the men of the council gathered in Pahayuca's tent. Deep Water joined them later, and they were there until late at night, surrounded by the wails of the mourners.
Sunrise always told Takes Down what had been discussed in council, unless he had been sworn to secrecy. It had taken Naduaha while to realize it, since she so rarely heard Sunrise speak. And Takes Down was seldom silent in the privacy of her own lodge. But Sunrise did speak, so softly sometimes that she had to strain to hear him. As she had to do now. He had waited until they were all gathered for the evening meal, Black Bird and Star Name and Upstream too, all of them exhausted and with heads aching from a night of grieving. Naduah had four cuts on her arms, two parallel diagonals on the inside of each forearm. As she sobbed and wailed, remorse and guilt mingled with her grief; she had slashed her arms, and kept the cuts open now so that they would scar and remind her always of Owl and of Name Giver. And remind her never again to take a friendship for granted as she had Owl's.
After the evening meal, when the family usually shared their day's experiences, Sunrise told them Deep Water's story.
"Deep Water said he would speak of the thing that happened to his family once in council, and then never again. He has made a vow. Do not ask him questions.
"For three days after the Wasps left, the arrow maker and his family were very sick. Their skins were on fire and there were terrible pains in their heads and backs. Then, they began to feel a little better, and Deep Water thought they would get well. But a rash appeared on their faces, and arms and legs, and on Deep Water's too. When the rash became sores and the sores became filled with pus, he knew they had the sickness that had killed those of the village of death. He did what Gets To Be An Old Man had told him to do.
"Even though every movement felt like it was driving hot lance points into his eyes, he carried stones to the lodge to make steam. When they had all lain in the heat, he helped them, one by one, to the river and made them plunge into its cold, spring waters." Sunrise's quiet voice broke, and there was silence, interrupted only by the sobs of those around him and the wails of those still mourning in other parts of the village.
"The water wasn't as cold as in the mountains, but it was still cold. The blind one, his grandfather, was the first. Deep Water says he was dead when he pulled him out of the river. He laid his grandfather's body on the bank and rested. He took his mother and then his aunt to the river and back to the lodge. His sister was last. She died last, but they all died. Deep Water lay down, too weak to go to the river himself and too weak to bury his family. He says he could hear the dogs and coyotes arguing over his grandfather's body where it lay by the river, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He tried to fire arrows at them, dragging himself to the door of the lodge, but the river was too far away. And
he hadn't the strength to pull his bow anyway.
"That was the worst, he said. Hearing the animals fighting over his grandfather's corpse. And lying there as the rest of his family began to smell of death. He drank the last of the water in the lodge and began chanting his death song. When he woke up, he was in the lodge of Big Bow. A Kiowa hunting party had found him and taken him there, knowing that Big Bow is a friend of the Wasps. The sores on his face began to dry up, but they left the scars you see now. The disease is like no other he has ever seen. It rots a person's face while he still lives.
"He stayed with Big Bow until he was well enough to travel. Then he went back to bury the bones of his family. He had to hunt up and down the river to find his grandfather's. He burned his family's lodges; even his own new one, and everything they owned. The horse he has is one Big Bow gave him. For months Deep Water has been traveling, looking for the source, the reason for the sickness."
"Did he find it?" Medicine Woman asked the question that everyone but Naduah wanted to ask.
"He traveled far to the north, north of the land of the Kiowa and into the territory of the Cheyenne. He learned that the sickness comes from the white man, from the places where he trades. The southern Cheyenne told him what they had heard from their brothers, the northern Cheyenne.
"North of the Cheyenne lived a tribe called the Mandan. They camped near the whites' trading posts. They are no more. Their tribe is gone. Their whole tribe." He stopped a moment as the impact of that hit them. "Deep Water says the Mandan went crazy with the sickness. That warriors would ram arrows down their throats, or dig their own graves and shoot themselves so that they fell into them.
"Deep Water does not know how the sickness came to the camp of our brother, or why his family caught it. He blames himself, I think. And he asks why he was spared. That is a hard thing to live with. I think there are scars on Deep Water that we cannot see, scars inside him."
"What did the council decide, Husband?"
Sunrise reached around to his waist and pulled his scalping knife from its scabbard on his belt. He held it up so that its metal blade glinted blue in the firelight. "There are many who favor trading with the white men. No one wants to go back to using flint and bone knives and stone ax heads. They say that Deep Water doesn't really know where the sickness comes from. That he has only heard from people who heard from people who heard from other people."
"What do you think?" Takes Down spoke softly, drawing Sunrise out as usual, getting him to state his own opinion, which he rarely did unless asked. That was why he would never be a chief, although chiefs consulted with him.
"I think Deep Water is right. We should avoid contact with whites as much as possible. But he is wrong too. We have traded with the white men and the Spaniards for many years. And this is the first time the sickness has come among us. We can trade with them. But very carefully. We should avoid the places where many of them live, and we should allow to visit us only traders that we know and have traded with in the past."
"Did you tell Pahayuca that ?" Takes Down knew that Pahayuca valued her husband's opinion and would ask what he thought.
"Yes, he agrees. And so do most of the men on the council. Buffalo Piss would prefer to use only those things of the white men that we take from them. But he's always felt that way."
"Does this mean we will do anything differently than we have always done?"
"No. The most important thing now is to get through the winter.
We have to have as much pemmican as possible. Pahayuca and I and some others will go hunting tomorrow for fresh meat. Use all the buffalo meat for pemmican. Do not save any of it."
For days the women had been coming in from their fall food-gathering expeditions. Their ponies were laden with pecans and mesquite beans, walnuts, acorns, fruits and berries and roots. In front of each family's lodges the women bent over piles of the nuts and dried meat, pounding them into powder to be made into pemmican. Takes Down and Naduah had a pile of jerky between them. The meat looked like strips of leather one to three feet long and one-quarter of an inch thick. Cut against the grain so they would have alternate layers of lean and fat, the strips dried in less than two days. They didn't even have to be watched, since they were too thin for flies to lay eggs in.
Inapa, the People called it. Charque in Spanish, Jerky. Jerked meat. The word had been handed up the continent from Peru like the stone that gets passed from one team member to another in the hand game. Inapa had its uses as a ration, quick and easy to prepare on the trail. But pemmican, tara-hyapa, was better.
Using a log with the top sliced off as a cutting board, Takes Down chopped the strips of meat into small pieces, her wrist and hand flashing in a blur. She passed the pieces on to Naduah, who pounded them with a heavy wooden club. At that point, the meat was too, powder, and could be saved to put into boiling water for broth. But they couldn't spare much for that this year.
The pounded dried meat would be mixed with the partially dried persimmons and melted fat. Then they would stuff it into large intestines, cleaned out and saved from the hunt. Takes Down would pour melted tallow over the top of the pemmican to make it airtight before she tied off the intestines. The pemmican would keep for years. What wouldn't fit into the intestines was stored in rawhide boxes, two or three feet long and about twenty inches wide. A good size for hanging on either side of a pack saddle.
"Samarayune, pound the meat thoroughly," said Takes Down as she chopped.
"I am," sighed Naduah. "Will we be camping with Old Owl's band soon?"
"Not for a while. His people haven't had a good hunt either. The men will try again before we camp together. So many people in one place makes hunting difficult. We'll see them later. And you'll see your brother. If he isn't off with a raiding party."
Naduah opened her mouth to protest that he was only seven years old. Then realized that her mother was teasing her gently as usual.
"Who will tell us stories this winter, Mother?" The thought bothered her. A winter without enough pemmican or Name Giver's stories was too dreadful to contemplate.
"There are many storytellers. Old Owl is a wonderful storyteller. And so is Medicine Woman."
"But none of them is as good as the blind one. And who will play Guess Who with us? Remember when the arrow maker put that white robe over his head and pretended to be a ghost? And we screamed and squealed and hid all over the lodge? My heart was thumping like Old Man's drum."
"Pay attention to your work, child." Talk of one who was dead made Takes Down anxious. And she couldn't help looking over her shoulder. Perhaps not all the blind one's bones had been buried. Perhaps one lay, gnawed and bare, outside a wolf's den. Perhaps the old man's soul still walked, sighing and moaning on the cold wind, looking for paradise, as in one of his stories. Who knew what terrible things the new sickness could do. Takes Down shivered as she took up a wooden club to help her daughter pound the dried meat.
CHAPTER 26
In the cold hour before dawn, when the early December sky was the color of ashes streaked and smudged with soot, a buffalo blundered into the side of a lodge on the outskirts of Pahayuca's camp. The force of the collision and the animal's moans and bellows roused the family and the neighbors. As the bull staggered through the outer circle of tents, everyone turned out, clutching their sleeping robes around them. Fires flared to life, and several people brought torches with them. Naduah stood, her hand resting on Smoke's quivering back as the pronghorn cowered next to her, her huge eyes even wider with alarm.
The buffalo's hair had been singed off and his skin was shriveled like the warty bark of a hackberry tree. His knees were scraped raw, probably from falling, over and over again, as he raced blindly across the plain. His eyes were swollen shut, and his face was blistered and burned. He panted, steam blowing from his nostrils and his sides heaving.
The seared linings of his nose must have affected his sense of smell, which normally would have steered him well away from humans. But now the noise of camp,
the shouts and the clamor, caused him to veer off toward the river, which lay close by at the base of a sheer, fifty-foot cliff. Before the men could catch him, he reached the edge, then he could be heard, still crying, as he fell, until he bounced on the rocks below. A few ran toward the narrow path used to fetch water, to try to recover the body, but Pahayuca's deep voice boomed after them.
"Come back." He pointed to the east where the sun would soon appear. It seemed to be rising early. There was a reddish glow that spread across the horizon. Naduah watched, fascinated, as it grew before her eyes. She had heard of grass fires, but she had never seen one. Medicine Woman stood next to her, her hand resting on her granddaughter's shoulder.
"We never should have camped here." She seemed to be talking to herself. "We're trapped."
Naduah looked up at her, startled. She tugged at her grandmother's thin hand, trying to pull her to action.
"If we hurry we can escape it. It's still a long way off."
"No, little one. We can't get around it. And we're backed up against that steep drop-off to the river. There's no ford here, even if we could get five hundred animals packed and down that narrow trail. When the wind picks up at dawn, the fire will move much faster." Medicine Woman never hid things from her granddaughter. And she never minimized a bad situation.
"Why can't we just leave everything? We aren't going to stand here and be burned alive, are we?"
"Quiet, child. Pahayuca and the men are discussing it." The knot of men that had formed broke up, and Pahayuca and Buffalo Piss were shouting orders. But still Medicine Woman and Takes Down stood quietly. Sunrise had gone on a hunting trip, as many of the men had, trying to find game for their families.
"At least the hunters are safe. They crossed the river farther down."
"How much time do you think we have?" Takes Down looked at her mother-in-law. Black Bird and Star Name had joined them, and their eyes asked the same question.