by Diego Vega
The man began to move away into the shadows. Diego stepped quickly to Scar. “Who is that man? There, by the prickly pear in the churchyard. Who is he?”
“Humph!” Scar said scornfully. “That is a man of no honor. El Chollo, the bandit. He lives in the hills. We see him in the pueblo rarely. Some of the people have a fondness for him because he seems adventurous, a rebel. People are easily misled.”
Diego walked past Señora Porcana, bowing, and then toward the churchyard, motioning for Bernardo. They broke into a fast walk, and Diego whispered, “I just saw the bandit El Chollo give something to Señora Porcana. I saw it in Señora Porcana’s hand. I think it was the medal Porcana wore, the one that was missing from the body!”
They half ran through the churchyard, as quietly as they could in spurs, and went through a small door in the rear, hoping to see El Chollo’s horse riding away. Perhaps they could follow and spy on him.
They froze, hearing the double click of a flintlock pistol being cocked just behind them.
“You boys wanted to see El Chollo?”
Diego said quietly and respectfully, “Sí, Señor.”
“You boys know what cholla is? You don’t have it much around here. It’s a cactus that likes company. If you put your fingers near it, it doesn’t want you to go away. Just a touch and you’re stuck. Sticky, painful stuff, cholla. You maybe don’t want to mess with it.”
“Señor,” Diego said, not turning around, “we’re not here to bother you.”
“You’re not bothering me. I’m amused.”
“It’s just that I saw you give a medal to Señora Porcana. Perhaps the medal Señor Porcana was wearing when he died.”
“And you’re wondering if I killed Porcana?” he asked.
There were times when Diego’s eagerness overcame his good sense. Perhaps, he thought in the split second before he spoke, that’s what courage is about and why it gets so many people killed. He gulped and said, “Excuse me, Señor Chollo, but yes. No one is here with us. We are just boys. You could tell us without involving yourself in any way.”
“You don’t know much about the world, boys. Another bandit, he might be insulted by the question and blow your brains out. Another bandit, maybe. But there are bandits and bandits. You know why no one has ever caught El Chollo?”
“No, Señor.” This was one of the times Diego wished Bernardo could speak, just to take some of the load from him.
“Because El Chollo doesn’t rob poor people. They have troubles enough. I rob only the Spanish and the soldiers. I give a little back, even, and some to the church. Enough to buy me some warning now and then.”
“So you didn’t—”
“Porcana was my friend. We grew up together. I ate his wife’s tortillas many nights. I gave that medal to him, and his wife deserved it back. No, I didn’t kill my friend. If I find the men who did, they would be better off in a bonfire. I saw them ride off.”
Diego glanced at Bernardo. “You were the reason they rode off so quickly!”
“Sí, I saw them only at a distance. They were not, somehow, like our vaqueros. Their style was different, their boots and their hats, small things. So I will be looking for them. And you boys”—he tapped each one on the back of the head with the muzzle of his pistol—“have no reason to come looking for El Chollo, right?”
“El Chollo?” Diego asked. “I never heard of such a fellow. Never heard of him, certainly never saw him. I think he is one of those hill legends, is he not?”
A slow chuckle from behind them, a long silence, and when they turned, no one was there.
After the burial they all rode back toward the camp and the apartado. Bernardo was playing his flute mournfully, but Diego knew he would be listening.
“Papá, what did Padre Mendoza say about the skilled men and the kidnappings?”
They rode on for a time. Don Alejandro said, “He agrees with us that someone is capturing our craftsmen and taking them into some kind of slavery. Probably to make a colony or a kingdom, as we said. It’s vicious, wicked, ambitious, and dangerous. Mexico City won’t help us. Madrid can’t. We must find a way to unravel this mystery ourselves, hijos. Ride carefully from now on. And keep your eyes sharp.”
8
THE BEAR
MOST VAQUEROS WERE YOUNG men in their twenties. But there were older men, too. A few of them had learned their trade from the old padres, starting as Gabrieleños who had hardly seen a horse. It was a hard trade to learn, but there was a swagger to it like no other. Vaqueros were proud men.
The old hands woke stiff and wrapped their aching knees and elbows in flannel rags to warm them before the sun came. They hobbled to the cook fire for porridge and hot chocolate.
Diego awoke stiff and sore. He rode every day, but he didn’t herd cattle on cow ponies: this was another kind of riding that used a new set of muscles. And every one of those muscles was aching. His eyes were crusty and his tongue felt like a saddle blanket. Bernardo brought him a mug of chocolate and pointed toward the horses. Most of the vaqueros had saddled their first mounts of the day.
“I’ll be ready in a heartbeat,” Diego said.
Later they stopped their first mounts at a little stream to wash their faces. As they knelt in the sand, Bernardo pointed to a patch of soil nearby. There was a big print in it, still moist and clear.
“St. Bernard’s bees!” Diego whispered, then looked quickly around for danger. “That’s one big grizzly bear! I don’t want to meet him, and for sure not in a gully like this. Let’s get out of this streambed.”
They splashed another handful of water on their faces and mounted up. Then they heard the roar and the squeal.
It was a deep, throaty rumble, as loud as a landslide. The squeal was from a horse in pain. Diego’s horse sidestepped nervously, but he touched the flanks with his spurs and got up the slope.
A stone’s throw away they saw a massive grizzly bear, as big as a haystack. His brown, loose fur quivered and shook as he roared again, one massive paw on the neck of a downed horse that was kicking feebly, screaming in pain. Some of the camp’s tethered horses had pulled out their stakes and were galloping away, trailing their tethers between their legs. Some of the stakes held. The horses tied to them reared and screeched, their eyes almost all white in terror.
Diego was frozen, so frightened he couldn’t move. He could see Bernardo in the corner of his eye, just as terrified by the awful spectacle.
Over the earsplitting roar, they heard whoops and drumming hooves. Scar, Juan, and most of the crew galloped almost right up to the grizzly. It was difficult for Diego to understand, but they seemed delighted.
The grizzly’s rubbery nose was turned up, and his lips pulled back to bare his teeth as he stood his ground. He wasn’t giving up his prey. The bleeding horse whimpered; the tethered horses continued to scream.
The vaqueros circled, their reatas whistling above their heads. Scar’s was the first to dart out, tightening around the bear’s thick, shoulderless neck.
The bear swiped at the reata, sending a jerk along it that jolted Scar and his pony, but they held firm as Juan’s loop folded around the bear’s head over Scar’s. Both men dallied and backed down their ponies. The loops tightened.
The grizzly’s roar rose. He wanted to swat these new creatures with the snaking vines, but their vines choked him. Angrier than ever, he rose on his hind feet, bellowing defiance.
Mesmerized, the boys leaned back in unison. A grizzly on all fours was big. A standing grizzly was huge, taller than a man on a horse. They had only heard of elephants, but they couldn’t be any bigger than this!
The bear dropped down on all fours to make a charge, but as soon as his hind leg rose for another step, a third loop from Pedro Cinque caught it. Another loop caught his neck. Another snagged his forepaws as he swiped the air. The circle of ponies backed down unsteadily, straining at the live load. The grizzly toppled to the grass, bawling and flailing.
Diego’s mind was working at an incr
edible rate. He saw everything sharply, in the same way that ideas and solutions sometimes came to him. The grizzly’s claws were as big as boot knives. He could see the wet, quivering nose, the big pouchy cheeks, the tiny eyes set deep.
The vaqueros were excited. This was their own grand sport. Spaniards could talk about bullfights with their fancy matadores, but let them come to California and see a real contest! Here a few vaqueros and their cow ponies made sport of tying down the biggest, strongest predator anywhere.
Juan Three-fingers sang out a long, excited yelp. “Keeeee-yi-yi-yi! Look at this big fellow! He is bigger than a mountain! He could eat a ship! And angry! This big, hairy fellow wants to eat all of us for lunch! Be careful there, Bernardo! You are just big enough for this bear to pick his teeth with!”
The crisis wasn’t over. If any one of these reatas broke, there would be big trouble.
Pedro, one of the young vaqueros, was jumping with excitement. “This big oso will make a good fiesta spectacle. We can put him in a ring with some bad bulls and watch them fight it out! It’s not far to the pueblo, Jefe,” he called to Scar. “Let us drag Señor Oso to the mission stock ring for the fiesta.”
Diego and Bernardo had seen bull-and-bear fights. They didn’t like them. For some it was a fine spectacle, letting brutes fight each other. They were both dangerous enough. Rampaging bulls and surprised bears had killed a few Angeleños, true enough. But it was a messy, sad show. There was no real point. The bear always won, killing bull after bull. Sometimes it tired and was gored by a fresh bull in the end. It was a cruel thing, taunting something wild.
Scar sat on his straining horse. He shook his head no. It was too far to the pueblo, all day to drag and tease a bear to the mission’s stock ring. That was too much danger for his men and their horses. And for what? Still, this big raiding bear couldn’t be allowed to eat the rancho’s horses whenever he wanted a meal.
“Diego!” he called. The boy rode around the circle of vaqueros and reatas to Scar. “My horse,” he said. Diego leaned down and took the reins of Scar’s horse.
Scar swung down from his saddle, taking the short musket, the carabino, from behind his saddle in the same movement. He checked the flintlock, looking at the priming powder before he walked into the circle, approaching the bear. He brought the musket up, cocking it, steadied its aim, and fired. There was a double ball of white smoke, one from the musket’s flintlock, one from its muzzle. The big bear quivered, grunted once, and sank to the ground like a tent with its pegs knocked out. No one moved for a long moment.
“Stay away from him,” Scar said. The dead didn’t rise, but the dead weren’t always dead. He walked back to his horse, the only person not looking at the bear. He took his powder horn and bullet pouch from the pocket of his saddle’s mochila and quickly reloaded the musket. Then he waited a few more minutes.
No one slacked his reata yet.
It was quiet for a time. Juan Three-fingers had stopped the grunting and labored breathing of the injured horse with his boot knife. The scene had become almost peaceful.
Scar approached the bear from behind and prodded it with the muzzle of the carabino. Nothing, no movement. He nodded. Now the reatas slacked and the vaqueros stepped down to loosen their loops and coil them. Juan opened the jaw of the bear and shook his head with a little shiver, looking at the yellowish-white teeth, terribly big.
“Juan, round up those horses.” Scar pointed in the direction they had bolted. “Esteban, Julio, Carlos, Arturo—keep working these next valleys.” They mounted and galloped off in their excitement.
Bernardo looked at Scar and waited.
Scar nodded, as if to himself, then glanced back at the bear. “Big fellow. Big enough for a rug,” he said. “Pedro!”
The young vaquero stepped down from his horse.
“You and the boys skin Señor Oso out. Drag his carcass over to that ravine and put some brush on it.”
Scar was a mestizo. His mother had been a Gabrieleño. The bear was a sacred animal, part of the human family. It was well known that the most powerful sorcerers, perhaps even White Owl herself, had at least one bear parent. They were respectful of bears, even in death.
Pedro nodded.
“Then back to work.” The vaquero nodded again.
“Bernardo, Diego, you wrap up the bearskin tight and cut out a good pony.” He gestured to the horses Juan was rounding up. “Pack the skin on the pony and ride up to White Owl’s village. Give her the horse with my compliments. Ask if she will have some of her women prepare the hide and the head for a rug that will go in the hacienda, yes? The horse should be enough payment for curing the hide and bringing it down later this week.” Scar looked up at the sun’s place in the sky. “You can be up in the village before dark and join us down near the river by late morning.”
Pedro tied his horse to a sapling and took off his jacket, hat, shirt, and sash. The boys did the same. It would be a long, bloody afternoon.
9
THE VILLAGE
BY LATE AFTERNOON DIEGO and Bernardo were up out of the grasslands and into the forest. Mile by mile they rose into the cooler air of the mountains. The trail was narrow but well worn. It followed a streambed that tumbled out of the peaks in a long, singing series of little waterfalls.
Late in the afternoon, they began to see charms hanging from the trees—a doll made of tied grass, a bird skin spread on a forked stick, quartz rocks in a little net. These bits of local magic announced the presence of a shaman, a sorcerer, so that evil spirits would stay away from the village. Perhaps it worked, because White Owl’s village was almost always a peaceful place.
Now they saw the red ocher paintings on boulders framing the trail and knew they were entering the village.
Entering a Gabrieleño village was not like riding into a pueblo. It didn’t start with corrals and buildings and shops. Except for the charms and the markings, it didn’t seem to start at all. The village was a kind of living circle for spirits. It was not just where the homes were, but a larger place for things that could be seen and things that could only be imagined.
Smoke curled through the trees ahead. They smelled the sweet, pitchy pine smoke from the sweat lodge fire. Then they heard whoops and loud, happy voices. As they came into the clearing, half a dozen voices called to them, “Diego! Bernardo!”
A shouting knot of thrashing runners, their sticks clattering against one another, rushed past them. They had ridden into the middle of a lacrosse game. The leather ball shot out of the crowd, and an out runner seized it with his netted stick. Everyone ran after him.
A boy at the edge of the pack spotted Diego and Bernardo. He yelled to his teammates, “Now we’ll beat them. We take Bernardo.”
“Not when we have Diego,” another boy replied.
Diego held up his hand as if holding them back. He replied in Shoshone, “If we don’t pay our respects to my grandmother first, she’ll turn us into cockroaches.”
Snow Wren, the wife of their friend Otter Tooth, was watching the game as she sewed a deerskin bag. Bernardo spotted Light-in-the-Night seated beside Snow Wren. She barely raised her eyes from her sewing, but in the brief exchange of a glance, Bernardo’s heart pounded.
“I like to hear boys show respect,” Snow Wren said. “And good sense. We’ll see you later at the fires, then. Your grandmother is fixing a meal for you.”
Diego shook his head and looked back at Bernardo. It was a little annoying that they couldn’t make a surprise visit to the village. One way or another, the village always knew they were coming.
They walked their horses into the neighborhood of houses. It was a parklike area of cleared ground under trees. A few of the homes were simple brush lean-tos, but most were high domes thatched with rushes. A few larger lodges were near the center of the village, decorated with colored rushes woven into the thatch.
The very heart of the village was the holy circle, the yovaar. White Owl stooped out of a tight little beehive-shaped house beside it. “There
you are, finally,” she said gruffly. “I haven’t seen you for weeks. You don’t pay much attention to your grandmother.” But they could tell she was happy to see them.
The boys walked to her and bowed their heads so she could place her leathery palms on them as a blessing. “Well, it’s good you’re here safe,” she said. “Give me your horses. I’ll put them near some grass. I’ve laid out clean things inside so you can take a bath before we eat. You’re filthy.”
“Grandmother,” Diego said, “we have an errand from our mayordomo, Scar.”
“A good, decent man,” she said, as if most of the people living on the grasslands weren’t.
“He sends you this horse and asks you a favor. We were forced to kill this angry bear.” He put his hand on the pelt slung over the packhorse’s back. “We don’t think it was anyone in disguise or a sorcerer. Just a bear grown tired of his own place in the forest.”
“Sometimes a bear is just a bear,” White Owl conceded. The Gabrieleños thought that she and her fellow sorcerers could turn into bears if they wished. Diego didn’t think it was likely but knew that his grandmother wouldn’t argue about it.
“Scar believes it will make a good rug for the hacienda. He knows that the tribe has some skillful tanners. Could they prepare it and bring it down to the rancho later this week?”
She ran her hands through the thick, dark bear pelt. “My daughter will approve. There is some power in a good bear rug,” she said. “Scar is a good man. But impatient,” she said. “He wants everything yesterday. We will prepare it in the time it takes to prepare it well. This is all I will promise him. And the horse is a good trade.” The boys nodded. “Now get those filthy things off and sweat yourselves clean. I have made something for you to eat. Not much. A few scraps.”
