by Lou Cameron
The orange soda-pop the old geezer had for sale was awful, but nothing tasted better to a hungry man in predawn cold than a thick, juicy, homemade tamale wrapped in newspaper. He told the old man as much in Spanish. The old vendor was so pleased that he glanced about as if to make sure their secret was safe before he produced a thermos of real Arbuckle coffee and poured some into a tin cup for Stringer, murmuring, “That pop is barely fit for a dog to piss, and we Californios have to stick together. You did not learn Spanish in school or even Old Méjico, did you?”
Stringer chuckled and confided, “I was born and reared down the line in Calaveras County. Learning to talk to our neighbors was easier than fighting them, viejo.”
They might have gotten to be even better pals, but then the gal in the maroon skirts drifted over, smiling uncertainly at the only man she’d seen getting down off the train. Stringer was about to tell her he was a happily married man when she asked him, in English, “Might you be the one they call Stringer?”
He admitted he might be, and she said, “I am Lola Malliwah. Joe sent me. Two good ponies wait for us across the way. Come. We should be out of town and on the trail before everyone wakes up and sees us together.”
Stringer nodded, drained his cup and handed it back with a “Muchas gracias, viejo!” and followed her as she dropped gracefully off the platform. As she led them away from the platform lights he could see her point. He couldn’t see the two ponies tethered in front of a dark storefront until they were almost on top of them. But as she indicated that the pinto was his he asked her, “Why all the secrecy? And how come Joe sent you in place of himself?”
The Indian girl with the improbable name of Lola forked herself astride her own roan as she replied, “We are cousins. Joe had more than one good reason. To begin with, he is entered in a rodeo down at Weed for big prizes. He would have to let them keep his entry fee if he pulled out this late. His bigger and better reason is that, as you can see, I can pass for Mex. So far—and knock wood—the saltu where we are going have not shot at any Mexicans. They have some working for them in the Valley of Many-Colored Rocks. Joe is a full-blood and looks it. If you are spotted riding with me they might think you just picked up a puta in your travels. They are more likely to ask questions of another saltu and his fuck than to simply open fire, see?”
Having noted that the ponies seemed to have been trained by white wranglers, Stringer mounted his from the right side, which was the left unless was climbing up an Indian pony, and started to ask why in thunder he couldn’t simply ride in openly, since the mining outfit seemed to be making no secret of their whereabouts. But she told him to shut up and ride. So he did until they were well out of town and seemed to be punching through chaparral instead of following any trace or trail. As they reined in atop a rise to rest their mounts a moment, Lola turned in her Spanish saddle to stare back the way they’d come. It gave Stringer a chance to repeat his question and add, “I only need a guide to get me somewhere near the mining settlement, Lola. They’ve wired the outside world for help against your people, no offense. So why should they act surly to a newspaperman just doing his fool job?”
It was too dark to read her expression, but she seemed to be frowning with her voice as she replied, “I thought you had come to help us, not them. Joe says you were good at picking off enemy snipers when you rode with him in Cuba. That is why we put a good rifle on that saddle for you.”
Stringer had already noticed the Winchester stock bouncing against his right rump as they loped uphill. He smiled sheepishly and admitted, “I wasn’t supposed to do that, down Cuba way. I was sent in as a war correspondent, and we weren’t supposed to carry arms. But the Spaniards seemed to shoot at us a lot in any case, and, well, a man has a right to protect his fool self.”
“Joe says you can blow a rabbit’s head off at fifty yards. Joe says you fight good hand to hand as well. We did not send for you to talk to our enemies. We want you to kill them for us. Everyone already knows what they are doing on Yana land. We want them off Yana land, forever. Come, we can walk our ponies for now. Nobody seems to be trailing us. But we have far to go.”
As Lola took the lead again, down the far slope, he noticed it figured to be rough and prickly as well as far. He protested, “I’d have brought some chaps, had anyone told me we’d be riding through the shrubbery so direct. As I read the map, that new company town of Quicksilver must be a good eighty miles from here as the crow flies. So how come we seem to be zigzagging through all this high chaparral so early in the game? If it was up to me I’d follow the regular roads at least as far as Mount Lassen and start my skulking from there.”
“I know. That is why it has been so easy to avoid you saltu until recently. It is bad enough to make your way through the mountains on horseback, even if you stay off the trails. Horses can be seen and heard from far away. That is why you saltu have beaten all the Horse-Indians to the east. Even the Horse-Indians used to laugh at my kind and call them root diggers. But many of us are still here, living the true way, because we were never tempted to ride and fight in the saltu style against greater numbers and better weapons.”
“Some Miwok kids I played with down to Calaveras County showed me how easy it was to lie doggo in the brush just off the trail and let our elders just ride past us. Miwok were a holy terror at Halloween, and I once got back at a mean teacher with some Indian lore. She usually caught the white kids who tipped over her outhouse. They didn’t know how to become invisible, like me and my Miwok pals. But, no offense, Miss Lola, ain’t you and your cousin Joe living sort of off the blanket to be jawing about this pure way of yours?”
She sighed and said, “Our elders moved onto a reservation when we were little. The true way is hard, and the rations the BIA can be so free with are very tempting.”
She seemed to consider her own words for a time as they rode on. Then she said, “Sometimes I miss the way we roamed when I was little. But coming in wasn’t all bad. They taught us to speak saltu and even read and write it a little. I like to wear these clothes, during the cold moons at least, and we get to eat a lot more. The old free ways could be hungry ways, and while it was fun for the young and healthy, it was very hard on the old and sick. Sometimes I don’t know which way is best. I like canned beans and soft white bread with butter and jam on it. But sometimes I feel a craving for yuna meal boiled with banhia fat, the way my mother made it when I was little.”
He backed her up on the Yana words and she said, “Oh, I am sorry. I keep forgetting you are saltu. You speak so softly and polite. ‘Yuna’ are acorns. ‘Banhia’ means deer. There are oaks and deer on the reservation, but not enough for us to eat a lot of either. Preparing acorn meal to make it edible is hard work, and men content to stay on the reservation all the time are too lazy to hunt deer. Those with ambition, like Joe, go down to Fat Valley, where they can work for money now. One time Joe brought a whole side of elk he paid for to Grandfather Tetna. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Grandfather Tetna was very cross. But he ate all that elk meat just the same.”
Stringer said that didn’t sound too dumb and asked, “Might your grandfather be the old gent Joe told me about in his letter?”
“Yes. He has a new girlfriend, an old Yana woman who’d been chased out of the Valley of Many-Colored Rocks. Joe says he is glad. Old men can go crazy, jacking off all alone. Oh, damn, the sky to the east is starting to grow pale. I was hoping we could get farther away from any trail before we had to hide from the sun and those bad saltu.”
Stringer frowned. “If there’s a trail within a mile of here, the whites who laid it out admired steep grades. But I’d rather talk about your grandfather right now. If he’s a reservation Yana and both you and Joe are living so white, how come your family is feuding with those mining men so far off in unclaimed country?”
She reined her pony through a clump of poison oak as she said, “Come. I know a nice campsite this way. I don’t understand your questions about Grandfather Tetna. His new girlfriend
is Yana. We are Yana. Even if the BIA has us down as Shasta, I think. The old woman who came to us wounded has a just injury to be avenged. Don’t your people understand such customs?”
He sighed. “Some of us MacKails must have, back in their old country. My uncle Donald likes to brag about feuds we had with other clans over injuries going back so far that even the Scotchmen avenging them had lost track of who did what to whom and with what. As an American, I have to say the custom seemed more trouble than it could have been worth. The English never could have whupped us if we hadn’t spent most of our energy at war with one another. But, now that you put things that way, I follow your drift. Blood is thicker than water, and a Yana is a Yana, even eating beans instead of acorns. I wonder if those mining men know what they’ve started. It might make more sense for me to tell them than to skulk about in the woods with your kinfolk. I hate to say it, Lola, but the map says that rough country betwixt Mount Lassen and the Nevada line is empty federal land, open to mining claims. We could be talking as much about a natural misunderstanding than malicious intent by either side.”
She swore in Yana and said, “Don’t call my grandfather’s new girlfriend a liar. She follows the true way. Those saltu who came to spoil her gathering grounds knew people were there. They talked to some of them before they started to do bad things to them. I am not a stupid person. I know about mining claims. We had to move to the reservation when less cruel saltu claimed our best acorn grove as a gold mine. The Indian agent made them pay us to move. A copy of their claim was given to our chief, and it still hangs on the wall of our watt-goorwah. I’m sorry, I mean council house. It says the saltu have the right to dig up gold. I know what gold is. It says nothing about their having the right to dig up dead people. My cousin Joe says that even when saltu die they are buried with respect, and nobody is allowed to dig them up and laugh at their bones.”
Stringer didn’t answer. He knew how casual some whites could be about Indian burial grounds. It had always struck him as a sort of shitty way to look for pots and arrowheads. He doubted any mining outfit would be mining human bones as its main line of business. But perhaps some of their work force was in the market for mementos of their days out west. There was hardly a rail stop west of the Mississippi these days that didn’t have a shop selling blankets, baskets, and machine-made moccasins. It was a shame some tourists couldn’t seem to be content with such stuff. Nobody back east was likely to ask where you had picked up that cigar box full of arrowheads.
The sky above was just turning light enough to see colors by when they forged through a wall of fruit-laden manzanita and satin-barked madrone to find themselves in a sweet-smelling glen lined with soft sedge grass and feathery knee-high ferns. A little waterfall at the east rim of the natural bowl ran over a lip of black rock to fill a modest swimming hole of crystal-clear water. This emptied in turn via a little brooklet that snaked off to the west through a tunnel of tangled sedge and willow.
Lola reined in. “You are the first saltu who has ever seen this place. The sun cannot give us away here. Anyone riding the ridges around us will only see what seems to be a brush-filled canyon, too tangled to cross. We will stay here until wakara, I mean the moon, tells us it is safe to go on. Do you not find this place dambusah?”
“It’s damn pretty, too,” he said as he dismounted and led his pinto to the brooklet to tether it where it could both graze and drink at will. He saw she didn’t worry as much about her roan. So as soon as she was off it he tethered it beside the pinto. He felt no call to chide her about her casual attitude toward her mount. A heap of romantic nonsense had been written to the contrary, but most Indians were rough on horses and mean as hell to their dogs, compared to white folk.
As he unsaddled both ponies, Lola asked him why, pointing out that they’d only be here until dark and that they’d just have to saddle up again at sunset. He said, “I can see your nation has been mighty pedestrian until recently. Call me a sissy if you will, but I just hate to ride a pony with saddle sores.”
He dropped the saddles in the dry ferns up the slope a bit and began to rub both ponies dry with one of the saddle blankets as Lola rummaged in the saddlebags. She got out some canned goods and moved over by the edge of the pond to hunker down, calling, “Come. We dare not build a fire. But I chose canned food that can be eaten without cooking.”
He hung both blankets over a branch to dry out. Then he hauled the Winchester from his saddle’s boot and moved over to join her. “What’s your hurry?” he asked. “We got all day to nibble and nap in this fool clearing. I’d have brought along a good book to read, had I known we’d be traveling this cautious. We can’t be within seventy miles of that damned mining camp. So why are we acting like this was Apache country?”
She began to open a can of beans with a bowie and rather ominous skill as she replied, “This is enemy country to me. Joseph said to follow the true way all the way from Los Molinos. It is not our way to be seen by anyone as we move from place to place in a world so full of strangers. That is why so many of us still roam these mountains, unknown even to the BIA. Nobody can count you unless they can see you. Does that sound so strange to you?”
He said it did, adding, “Neither of us is wanted by the law, and even the Wild Bunch rides by daylight when they’re not out to stick anyone up. Old Joe walked around natural when he was in the Army down Cuba way. Who in thunder could he be worried about way over here on the west side of Mount Lassen?”
She handed him an open can of beans as she replied, “It is better to be seen by no one than to find out too late that they are enemies. My cousin says you are famed among even your own people as a fighter. You have exposed a lot of bad saltu with your writings, too. How do you know the bad saltu we are after may not be expecting you? If I were a wicked person with bad deeds to hide, I would set a trap for you so that you could never tell on me.”
He started to tell her how silly that sounded. Then he chewed some cold beans, swallowed, and said, “I did have trouble with a man last night, on the Oakland ferry, and, come to study on it, they did say he had Indian blood.”
He swallowed some more and decided, “That won’t work. The fool Indians around here are supposed to be on my side. Even if old Turk was a bad breed, hired to head me off, there was no way the other side could have known just when I’d cross the bay aboard that ferry.”
She naturally wanted to hear the whole tale. So he told her, leaving out the last part, which could get him in trouble if she blabbed about it to the wrong ears. She swallowed some of her own beans and said, “It sounds like my cousin could have been right. That mining company does have Mexicans and some wicked breeds working for it. No Yana, of course, but you know how bad Shoshone are. You say the man you fought with acted drunk but used to be a man who fought for prizes. What if they had him waiting in ambush across your trail?”
He started to say it seemed farfetched. Then he said, “Hmmm, they did say he’d been riding back and forth on the ferry a lot and I was the only one he finally picked a fight with. Anyone knowing I’d be coming up here from San Francisco would likely know I’d have to take that ferry sooner or later. But he packed no gun and… Right. He was big as a moose and may well have had me down as a sissy pencil pusher he could handle bare-handed. As a known local troublemaker, he’d have had to worry about the cops on either shore patting him down for weapons now and again. But I still like him best as just a crazy-mean drunk. It gets so damned Machiavellian your way.”
She asked him what that big word meant. By the time he’d explained the sneaky ways of old Niccolò Machiavelli to her he was sorry he’d ever started. But she listened with interest, and when he’d set her straight she said, “I wish I knew that many big saltu words. But there is something I do not understand about you, Stringer. You know many big words, and you write for a big newspaper, yet when you talk, you sound like the other saltu cowboys my cousin rides with. The saltu teachers at the reservation school say it is wrong to say ‘ain’t.’ Yet you
say it without blushing. Do you write for your newspaper as you speak?”
He sighed and said, “Nope, and you ain’t the first one who’s asked me about that. ‘Ain’t’ is a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word, but you’re right—my editor seems to think it’s just awful. So I write in what’s considered proper English. But I have no more reason to talk like that than Walter Scott had to say ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ when he sat down to supper. Can we get off the subject now? I just don’t feel up to teaching the rules of grammer to a Yana gal right now.”
She tossed her empty can away and said, “Good. Let’s go swimming. That’s more fun.”
Then, as he gazed up at her slack-jawed, Lola sprang to her feet and proceeded to shuck her already immodest Mex outfit as if she thought she was the gal on the second landing.
Having seen both ladies bare-ass now, Stringer had to admit old Lola could give that model in San Francisco a run for the money when it came to naked curves. The Yana gal was shorter and plumper. So she curved even more as she gave a wild laugh and dove her tawny nude body headfirst into the pool, cutting the surface with next to no splash at all. He watched her dart off underwater like a sleek brown otter, and then he wondered what he was waiting for and just shucked his own duds to follow her into the clear clean water.
He was sure he’d made a dreadful mistake as the water closed cold as ice around his own naked body. But it felt better as the shock wore off, and the two of them were soon splashing water and laughing at one another like innocent skinny-dipping kids. It was easy to feel innocent with your balls puckered back to boyhood by snowmelt. He began to notice how numb the rest of him was starting to get as well. So he called out, “I’m getting out before I freeze to death, damn it!” and, suiting actions to his words, he crawled out of the ice water to flop face-down in the sun-warmed ferns. He was glad he was lying face-down when Lola came out to flop naked beside him, face-up. It was surprising how quick a gent’s privates could thaw out in the company of a stark naked lady with a pretty little baby face.
