by Pat Murphy
At rest for the first time in hours, she washed in the stream, using tufts of the hardy grass that grew among the boulders to scrub her hands, washing away the blood that darkened her fingernails. The white man’s blood, she thought with a shudder. She cleaned her knife and brushed dried blood from her rabbit-skin cape.
In solitude, she wept and prayed for her grandfather, who lay dead in the swamp. She thanked the great wolf for sending Sarah to save her. She prayed for her people, who hid in the mountains, asking that the mountains keep them safe from white men who might come for revenge.
She was finishing her prayers when she heard a sound behind her. The wild girl stood beside the creek. The carcass of a dead marmot, slain by a well-aimed stone, dangled from her hand.
The marmot had been gutted; Sarah had eaten her fill of the tender internal organs. Among the wolves, eating was not a social activity, but something that was best done alone. She had brought the remainder of the carcass to the Indian woman as a wolf might bring meat to a puppy.
Malila’s actions when Sarah gave her the carcass puzzled the wild girl. Rather than eating her fill of the fresh meat, Malila first gathered bits of wood. A tough old pine tree that clung between two boulders just up the stream offered a few dead branches.
Malila made a small pile of kindling in a wind-sheltered hollow. With flint and steel from the pouch at her belt, she made sparks that fell on the dry kindling. She blew on the tiny flame, building it up into a small fire, over which she roasted the marmot meat.
Sarah watched the flames in amazement. She had seen fire before. She remembered when a rapidly burning wildfire set by lightning had swept through the foothills, burning the grass and dry foliage and leaving the trees untouched. Sarah had learned to avoid the leaping flames of wildfires. She had also seen distant campfires, but she had never been so close to one.
The scent of the roasting meat tickled her nose. The Indian woman sliced a piece of meat from the carcass and offered it to Sarah. Startled, Sarah accepted the meat.
Malila cut another piece of meat for herself. Rather than turning away to eat her meal in solitude, Malila ate in front of Sarah, as if certain that Sarah would not challenge her and take the food. She ate with her knife, slicing off bits of meat that she could pick up and eat with her hands. Sarah followed her example, relishing the unfamiliar flavor of cooked meat.
While they ate, Malila studied Sarah. “You are a very powerful spirit,” Malila said, “and you are also a young girl.” She frowned. “Your hair is like a white man’s hair. Did the white men bring you here?” Sarah looked up from the leg she was gnawing, listening intently. “I wish I could talk to you,” Malila said.
“Talk,” Sarah repeated after Malila. “Talk to you.” She smiled happily, obviously pleased to be making sounds.
Malila leaned forward. She could teach this wild spirit to speak. Her eyes on Sarah’s face, Malila pointed at the meat roasting on the fire, then at the meat in the girl’s hand. “Meat,” she said in the language of her people. “Meat.”
Sarah’s smile broadened, and a look of understanding brightened her eyes. She repeated the word after Malila.
For the next hour, they sat by the fire and Malila taught Sarah words, simple nouns. Fire. Tree. Leaf. Grass. Sand. Water.
For Sarah, this was more than a language lesson. It was a new world, a world in which sounds—sounds alone without gestures or scents—could mean things. Making these sounds awakened old memories. Long, long ago, she had learned other word sounds from Mama and Papa.
Sarah laughed and repeated the strange sounds that Malila made. She waved a hand at the fire and called out its name. Fire. Rock. Sand. Grass. Tree. Leaf. Water. She could name them all.
As the fire died down, Malila stared in the direction of Eagle’s Head. “I must go back to the village,” she said, not because she thought the girl would understand, but because it seemed right to speak with her.
Of course Sarah knew where the Indian village was. It was in the pack’s territory, where she knew every tree and every rock. She knew where the deer grazed and where the grizzly bear had her den. She knew of the path that rabbits followed in the brush and the trails that humans followed through the mountains. Of course she knew where the Indians lived.
She had always intended to take Malila back to her village, but now she felt a strange reluctance to do so. For the first time, she had experienced the pleasure of human companionship.
But she knew that the Indian woman could not live among the wolves. She knew that she had to take Malila back to her own people.
Sarah led Malila up the mountain, following the stream at first, then cutting across an area where a rockfall had cleared the slope of brush. Though she could smell the Indians’ cooking fires, she continued on her way, taking Malila to the edge of the meadow where her village stood. They could see the bark lodges of the Indians, the smoke rising from cooking fires.
“Come with me,” Malila said, taking Sarah’s hand in hers.
Sarah pulled her hand away. Though she had spent the day with Malila, she was a wild thing still, wary of humans.
“You will go back to the mountains,” Malila said. “Back to the wolves.”
Sarah listened to the words, understanding none of them.
“You will come back to see me,” Malila said. “You must.” Still Sarah listened without understanding.
“Here.” Malila lifted the necklace of bone and shell from around her neck and placed it around Sarah’s. “This is to thank you and keep you safe and bring you back.”
Sarah touched the necklace and smiled. Then she turned without a word and vanished into the forest.
That evening, Joseph rode into the mining town of Hell’s Half Acre, burning with the desire for justice.
“Injuns! Injuns killed my brothers,” he shouted as he rode up to the log cabin that served as bar and boardinghouse. His brothers’ bodies were slung over their horses; he had not stopped to bury them. “Murdering Injuns!”
A man stepped from the cabin, lifting a lantern high. “Injuns?”
He squinted at Joseph, glanced at the bodies, then frowned at the mule. He stared at Joseph, still frowning. “You take that mule from the Injuns?”
“That’s my mule,” Joseph said impatiently, swinging down from his saddle. “The Injuns were stealing it when they killed my brothers.”
The man with the lantern glanced at the bar. Three other men stood by the door, staring at Joseph. One of them had a bandaged head. “That your mule, Nathan?” he asked.
“Sure is. And that’s the fellow who took it.”
Nathan had a hard head. He had survived the brothers’ attack and climbed out of the gully. Just by luck, a miner heading back to Hell’s Half Acre had found him lying on the trail and had taken him to town.
Joseph never did get a posse up to pursue his brothers’ murderers. In the town of Hell’s Half Acre, he was hung for a mule thief and buried with his brothers.
After Sarah left Malila, she returned to the pack. But she was restless. She hunted with the wolves, but she thought often of Malila.
Sometimes, she repeated the words that Malila had taught her. “Tree,” she told Beka. “Leaf. Grass.” The wolf responded with affection—licking Sarah’s face, rubbing against her hand—but that was no longer enough for the girl. She wanted more.
Her mind buzzed with new thoughts. She still wore the necklace that Malila had given her. Sometimes, she touched the beads and wondered what Malila was doing.
A few weeks later, the pack’s travels brought them near the Indian village. It was early in the afternoon, and the pack was resting in a shady hollow, having brought down a deer in the early dawn hours.
Sarah left the pack for a time. She was drawn to the village. Her meeting with Malila had awakened something in her. She wanted to talk with Malila again; she wanted to learn more words. A young girl, raised without human contact, she also longed for friendship. She burned with a desire to figure out the world and
discover her place in it.
She was just to the south of the village when she caught Malila’s scent on the breeze. She followed the trail of that scent to a thick patch of deer brush on a dry hillside.
Sarah heard Malila before she saw her. The Indian woman was singing softly to herself, a wandering tune that blended with the humming of bees in the deer brush. Silently, Sarah made her way toward the sound, following a rabbit trail through the bushes. Breathing deeply, Sarah inhaled the minty scent of bruised yerba santa leaves and the warm aroma of Malila herself.
Through the branches, she caught a glimpse of Malila and stopped where she was. Malila’s back was to Sarah. The woman was gathering leaves from a yerba santa bush and dropping them in the basket at her feet. For a moment, Sarah simply watched her.
Sarah was wild, and she was shy as wild creatures are shy. For a moment she thought about slipping quietly away through the brush and returning to the pack. Beka would lick her face; she could curl up in the shade beside Wauna. Her heart was beating quickly, as if she had been running. She hesitated, watching the slim Indian woman pluck leaves from the bush, listening to her song of gratitude, as she thanked the plant for giving its leaves to help the tribe.
As Sarah watched, Malila stopped humming and lifted her head, as if she had heard something that caught her attention. She turned away from the bush, and spoke. “Is someone there?” She saw Sarah, staring through the bushes, and she smiled. “Sarah,” she said.
Sarah stepped from the shelter of the bush, her hesitation forgotten when the young woman smiled. “Malila,” she said softly, each syllable separate and distinct. She enjoyed pronouncing the strange sounds.
She circled the woman, as she would have circled a member of her pack, grinning, stroking Malila’s hair.
“I knew you would come,” Malila said, though she knew that the words meant nothing to Sarah. “I knew you would come and find me.”
Malila still held a yerba santa leaf in her hand. Playfully, Sarah snatched the leaf from Malila. “Leaf,” she said. “Leaf.” Such a strange sound.
Malila smiled and held out her hand. “Hand,” she said to the wild child. She took Sarah’s hand in hers. “Hand.”
Malila taught Sarah more words, all through that long summer afternoon and many afternoons after that. All through the summer, Sarah came to the village when the pack was nearby.
At first, Sarah only approached Malila when she was walking outside the village. But one sunny afternoon, Malila persuaded her to go to the village. She walked with Malila among the bark lodges, staring back at the wide-eyed children, growling at the skinny dogs that came to sniff at her legs.
Malila led her to a lodge that smelled of drying herbs. “This is my home, Sarah,” Malila told her. “You are always welcome here.”
Sarah was intrigued by the Indian village and the people who lived there. With Malila, she learned to weave baskets from reeds, to braid rope from plant fibers, to cure animal skins to make leather, to make a fire with the sparks that leapt from stones.
She noticed that the people in the village treated Malila with deference and respect. The young woman was high in the hierarchy of this pack.
The summer days were growing shorter when Sarah asked Malila to show her how to make arrows.
“I don’t know how to do that,” Malila told her. “That’s men’s work.”
Sarah frowned.
“I will see if I can find someone to teach you,” Malila said.
And so Sarah met Notaku, the tribe’s best stone worker and weapon maker. On a summer afternoon, he showed her how to shape an arrowhead from obsidian.
“Press hard,” Notaku said. “Like this.” He laid his hands on top of hers and pressed down, pushing the deer antler tool against the roughly shaped obsidian arrowhead. With a high-pitched cracking noise, a circular flake of obsidian broke free, leaving a razor-sharp edge. “Again,” he said, repositioning the tool on the arrowhead. “You do it, this time.”
He sat back on his heels, watching as Sarah pressed against the tool. Another flake, a circular flake no bigger than the fingernail on her littlest finger, broke free, extending the sharp edge. Sarah looked up at him, smiling, and he nodded, returning her smile. “Again,” he said.
He glanced at Malila, who sat on the ground beside him. The young woman had become the village’s shaman and healer, a position that set her somewhat apart from the rest of the village. She lived alone in the bark house that she had once shared with Hatawa. She spent many hours gathering medicinal herbs, walking in the hills alone. And often, she spoke of the white man’s spirit, the spirit called Sarah, who came to her when she was alone.
Malila had asked Notaku to teach this spirit to make arrows, and he had agreed—from friendship for Malila. Sarah was, Malila said, a powerful and playful spirit. She wanted to understand the ways of the people, and Malila was teaching her.
“Why would a spirit need to know how to make arrows?”
Notaku had asked her.
“She is a white spirit,” Malila said. “And she is very young. She does not know how to make arrows. I think it would be good for a spirit of the white people to understand our ways.” She spoke of balance—of how the white man was out of balance with the world. She thought, perhaps, that this wild spirit, who took the form of a child, might help bring balance back to the white man.
Notaku had agreed to meet this Sarah. He was a brave man. A man less certain of himself might have refused, unwilling to put himself in the way of such power.
When he met the spirit called Sarah, he knew he had made the right decision. She was quick to learn, more patient than the boys he had taught, more careful with her hands. She watched him with uncanny concentration, devoting her full attention to his words. She had the bright eyes of an animal who is thinking of nothing but what she sees in front of her.
Such a strange spirit, he thought, looking down at her curly red-gold hair. Like a child in so many ways. Malila said that she hunted with the wolves, that she fought like a wolf. Legends told of children who lived with the wolves and learned to become wolves.
Another flake broke free, and another. Under Sarah’s patient hands, the arrowhead was taking shape. Next, he would teach her to shape a shaft from the wood of the wild currant bush, to bind the arrowhead to the shaft with sinew, to feather the arrow with split hawk feathers, to make a sturdy bow of juniper wood.
He smiled at Malila, the smile of a teacher who is watching a pupil do well. This wild spirit, this Sarah, would understand the ways of the people. Beneath Notaku’s deft hands, something new was taking shape.
10 THE CAPTAIN’S WIFE
“Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.”
—Mark Twain’s Notebook; Mark Twain
ONE SUNNY DAY EARLY in autumn, Sarah lay atop a boulder that she had climbed. From that vantage point, she could see a cow that had grown tired of traveling, a bony beast worn thin by the long journey across the plains. The cow seemed to think that the South Yuba River valley might be a nice place to settle down. The animal ambled along the rocky river bottom. The frayed end of a rope dangled from her neck; she had gotten loose from the back of the wagon she had been following for a few thousand miles.
The cow would have been easy prey, but Sarah was not hungry just then. She had, with a well-thrown stone, killed a rabbit that morning, and her stomach was full. It was a warm afternoon, and the pack was resting, about a mile to the north. Sarah was not interested in hunting, but she was always curious. So she had come to where the trail passed, so that she could spy on any passing emigrants.
A man on a horse rode along the trail, in pursuit of the straying cow. On his saddle, he carried a lariat made of four strands of braided rawhide. Frankly, it was a better lariat than the man was a cowboy. He’d purchased the rope from a Mexican cowboy who was down on his luck. The cowboy thought he needed a drink more than he needed a lariat. So the man bought the lariat and the Mexican cowboy bought the drink and everyone did wel
l on the deal except of course for the cow. The man who bought the rope had, from that day on, persisted in trying to rope that cow, whether she needed it or not.
He was bringing the cow to California because he had heard that milk was in short supply there. A practical man, he figured if he didn’t strike it rich in the gold mines, he could always sell milk to the other miners. On the long journey across the plains, he had grown reasonably adept with the lariat, much to the cow’s dismay.
As Sarah watched, the man took the lariat from his saddle and tossed the loop over the head of the wayward cow. The cow kept moving until the loop tightened around her neck. Then she stopped, having been through this before. The man kicked his horse into a trot and the cow followed.
Sarah stared after them. That lariat seemed like a very handy thing to have.
That night, while the pack was hunting, Sarah crept into a copse of trees not far from where the man with the cow had stopped for the night. The man and his traveling companions had made camp in a grassy valley by a small stream. The livestock was tethered in the meadow, grazing contentedly. Enticing smells drifted across the meadow: baking biscuits and frying bacon. The men’s voices carried across the open valley. They were talking about finding gold and making their fortunes and such.
Sarah waited, listening to their voices without understanding. Among the wolves, she had learned to wait patiently until the time was right. While she waited, she thought about what she might do with that lariat, once she had it.
The wolves lived in the here and now. They did not plan for the future. They remembered the past, but only as far as it was useful to do so. Rolon remembered places where the hunting was good, places where there was danger from humans or other packs. But he did not think on the past and consider how he might have done differently; he did not imagine the future and plan for it. Sarah had grown up among the wolves, hunting with them, running with the pack. But she had a human imagination, a capacity for planning, an innate cunning that her packmates lacked.
