by Win Blevins
“Where was she?” asked Diah.
“Walking with Meadowlark,” said Gideon. Since these two were the brigade’s last women, they usually stayed together.
“She went out of sight to pee,” Meadowlark told Diah.
“When?”
“In the last dry wash.”
Jedediah’s mouth twisted. “Almost an hour,” he said.
Gideon roared madly, “Has anyone seen Spark?”
Sam remembered how James Clyman used to tell stories by Shakespeare in the winter lodge, and one was about old King Lear lost on the heath (whatever a heath was), yelling thunderously at God. Gideon was booming thunder now.
“I seen her,” said Sumner. After a pause, the black man added, “Yesterday.”
Gideon humphed.
“Going into the willows with Red Shirt.”
Red Shirt was probably the richest man of the Amuchaba settlement, named for the wealth that enabled him to possess a garment made of cloth.
“The willows?” said Gideon pathetically.
“Red Shirt, he got a big itch,” said Sumner. The slave kept his head down, but Sam saw he was working to keep twitches of smile off his face.
Gideon turned both of his horses around, the one he rode and the one he led. Without a word he started on the back trail.
The brigade waited. They’d walked all day, and the spring beckoned. Gideon would never reach the river by dark. Coy ducked into the shade of a horse and whined. Everyone but him knew where Spark was headed.
Flat Dog said, “Gideon knows what answer he’s going to get.”
“If Red Shirt even lets him talk to her,” said Sumner.
“If he can even cross the river,” said Sam. A tired horse would have a hard time in that current.
“If some Amuchaba doesn’t decide a lone white man is a tempting target,” said Diah.
Sam, Flat Dog, and Sumner looked at each other. It was a small joke among them how Diah and most of the others called the brigade “the white men,” when half of them were people of color.
When Gideon was a couple of hundred yards out, Diah mounted and rode after him. The two of them talked for maybe ten minutes out there, as the sun slanted toward the horizon. Coy fidgeted and looked an appeal at Sam.
Eventually Gideon came back with Jedediah. Diah’s face was set, stiff and grim. Gideon was reciting words, unfamiliar words, foreign words. He made them into an incantation, a prayer, and they were mournful, words freighted with tears.
After a few moments Sam recognized the prayer. Gideon called it the Kaddish. He had said the same Hebrew words when the Shoshones killed their friend Third Wing. Sam and Gideon put Third Wing in a tree, where his body might go undisturbed, except for the sun, wind, and rain, and Gideon recited the Kaddish.
“He’s doing the prayer for the dead again,” Sam said.
“I remember,” Flat Dog answered, shaking his head. “For a woman of a few weeks.”
“No,” said Sam, “for his leg.”
Diah said, “For his life.”
The second day every head in the brigade was down, Coy’s and Paladin’s included. The only sounds as they marched were the plopping of hooves and the cries of Gideon. These were a mystery. Sometimes they sounded like songs, sometimes like chants, sometimes like prayers, sometimes like ravings. Sam couldn’t tell if the language was his mother’s Cree, his father’s Hebrew, or the French both parents spoke. Not English, for sure. Sam did know the meaning—grief.
Maybe Coy understood the meaning better than Sam, for Gideon’s cries seemed more animal than human.
The outfit edged around the southern rim of a big valley, a route marked here and there by the passage of other travelers, Indians who also crossed this wretched piece of land, for reasons Sam couldn’t imagine. Before evening the guides brought them to a small spring with a little grass. Sam took Paladin to the water for only a few minutes at a time, but often.
Flat Dog got out his pipe, took it to Gideon, and offered the ceremony of smoking. Gideon knew the power of the pipe—he himself carried one. But now he waved his friend away. Flat Dog walked into the evening to smoke alone.
Sam thought, Long time since I smoked my pipe.
At dark Sam, Meadowlark, and everyone wrapped themselves in their blankets without word or expression. If the route gives no more grass than this, Paladin will die, he thought.
And Meadowlark? The baby? He told himself that people were tougher.
The third day was worse. For November, the weather was hot. They tramped west and a little north, keeping barren mountains on their left, to an even smaller spring, which in fact turned out to be more of a hole. After taking water to drink and cook with, Diah let Coy at it, and then the horses, and they drank the hole dry. There was no grass.
Gideon had lapsed from moaning eloquence into morose silence.
Sam lay awake worrying about Meadowlark and their child. Their child. It felt like a big idea to get his mind around, their child.
He stroked Coy’s head idly. If all the men died, the coyote would survive. And would Paladin? Would her nose take her to some small spring or seep the guides didn’t know about?
In the wee hours Meadowlark wore him out with love, and he finally slept.
The captain roused the outfit early the next morning so they could travel in the cool morning air. At midday they reached another small spring and a little grass. The spring ran so little water that the animals lapped it dry several times, but the liquid kept seeping in and at last they had their fill. Sam made sure Paladin got all she could drink, a little at a time.
When the men had drunk, Coy eyed the spring, panting, circled around it, put a paw in it, rolled in it, got a coat of mud, and ran off acting afraid of being caught. Everyone smiled, but they didn’t have the energy to laugh. Sam was envious of the cooling mud.
The men spent the afternoon squeezed into spots of shade, separated from each other. Talk would have been good. Music would have been good. A communal pot would have felt nice. Instead the men were isolated in ones and twos, napping or staring out at the desert.
On the fourth day they started early again, paused briefly at some holes of brackish water, set off across a lake bed of pure white alkali. It looked like the perverse opposite of a lake. The water had evaporated into the air or sunk into the sands, leaving only the powder.
To everyone’s surprise, under the rough alkaline grain on the surface, barely farther down than the press of a horse’s hoof, was a layer of pure salt, fine and white enough for any table.
They crossed the dry lake, which was shaped like a fat thumb. “Maybe fifteen miles the long way,” said Jedediah. Sam looked north, the long way, but the white, flat lake bed melted mysteriously into the gray mountains—he couldn’t have said five miles or twenty-five. He reminded himself to pay more attention, look at Jedediah’s maps, and gain this skill. But in the evenings, in fact, he was too tired to do anything but pant.
That night, on the far side of the dry lake, they found holes with salt water. When they dug other holes, the water was better. The men boiled their corn and beans, and animals nibbled at a few strands of green. Coy prowled, hunting for small rodents that looked like pack rats.
Sam looked around the country in irritable amazement. The dry lake was perfectly flat and perfectly innocent of vegetation. Around its edges, mountains cut jagged lines along the horizons, or plains angled into infinity. The mountains, alone of all Sam had seen, were jumbles of rock, ashen or cinnamon-colored. Nothing at all grew on them.
Sam remembered Tom Fitzpatrick telling how a scientist had shown him a spoonful of river water in a microscope once, which was like a telescope. Thousands upon thousands of small creatures, much too small for an unaided human eye to make out, lived in the water.
On the dry lake and in the mountains nothing lived, exactly nothing. The broken flats were too barren even for cactus. There was no point in looking for game. No creature could survive without water.
Sam tho
ught that the red-rock desert they came through, the country north of the Siskadee, with its whorled red stone and the hoodoo shapes, was some of the most beautiful country a man could see, even if it was hard traveling. This country was hard, double hard, and triple ugly.
He stretched out next to Meadowlark that night without a word, and Coy curled up near his feet. They lay under the open sky. Putting up the tipi, or doing any other work, seemed too much effort. Like everyone else, Sam and Meadowlark didn’t speak, because they thought that either the brigade wouldn’t find water, or the food they’d brought would give out, or the horses would die and the men wouldn’t be able to carry the food. Then the entire brigade would evaporate, or sink into the sands.
Sam supposed Coy alone would survive.
Tonight the only human sounds were Gideon’s groans. Sam thought the bear man was only a step ahead of everyone else in his misery, and men’s faces said they thought the same.
They had one wisp of hope. The guides said this lake was created by a river that sank into the sand. Couldn’t be much of a river, they thought.
Tomorrow they would find the watercourse and start up it, however thin a trickle it was.
A thought jolted him. My pipe. Hannibal had said he should call it the sacred pipe, but those fancy words felt funny to Sam. I should smoke my pipe and ask for wisdom.
He didn’t have a lot of words around his pipe. Living with the Crows, marrying into a Crow family, he’d become a pipe carrier. He’d given a sun dance. He’d seen something, and what he saw guided him well. That was enough.
He got the pipe out of his possible sack and carried it in its wrapper of deer hide out into the desert. He broke twigs off bushes, made a tipi of them, and with his flint and steel made a little fire. While it got started, he held the stem and bowl of the pipe up to Father Sky and joined the two. Then he filled the bowl with tobacco.
Waiting for coals, he fished his medicine bag out from under his shirt. He always wore this bag around his neck. It held a patch of buffalo fur, the thick fur from the skull, and a piece of paper with words handwritten on them. Now Sam unfolded the paper and looked at the words. Though he couldn’t read them, he knew exactly what they said. At the rendezvous of 1825 he’d asked his friend Hannibal McKye to write them down. At a critical moment, they’d been very influential on Sam’s life. Now he spoke them slowly, from memory:
“Everything worthwhile is crazy, and everyone on the planet who’s not following his wild-hair, middle-of-the-night notions should lay down his burden, right now, in the middle of the row he’s hoeing, and follow the direction his wild hair points.”
This was the guidance that had brought him, ultimately, to this desert and these troubles. It had also brought him Meadowlark, the West, his life. “I still believe this,” he said, putting the paper away.
He picked up an ember with two sticks and dropped it into the bowl. He drew deep. Ritually, he offered the smoke to each of the four directions, the earth, and the sky. Then he asked for help. He asked for a clear mind. He asked for wisdom. He asked to know what to do to protect his family.
Once all the tobacco was ashes, he tapped it onto the ground and went back to camp. Maybe he didn’t have any bright ideas, yet, but he felt at peace.
Meadowlark was already asleep. At her feet, Coy whined through his slumber. Dreaming of water, Sam would bet, and crooning to it.
The river turned out to be a joke.
The teenage guides hadn’t mentioned that, most of the time, the streambed was dry. Jedediah named it Inconstant River. But the standing water they came on now and then was a godsend. After everyone and every critter had drunk, Sam led Paladin into the water to stand. No way to get too much.
That night they ran nearly out of food.
The captain thought he’d brought enough food for ten or twelve days, easily enough to reach the mountains beyond the desert and the game that would be there. This was only their seventh camp. The lesson to be learned, Diah told Sam, was that men used to eating meat will gobble down a lot more vegetables than you think.
Sam told himself to remember, but he was too angry to care. Why should he try to train for a job when his wife and child were in danger? Why should he force himself to think when the whole brigade was about to evaporate into the parched air?
He gave a much bigger damn about Meadowlark. And the child in her belly, and Coy and Paladin.
The next day the guides disappeared on an errand. They returned to camp that evening with manna. Their people had cached some food nearby for an emergency just such as this. They bore several loaves the size of bread, but hard as rocks.
Sam chipped a little off with his knife. “Tastes like … candy!” He couldn’t believe it.
The men broke up the loaves with an ax, and everyone set to. Candy for sure. Smiles everywhere.
Coy licked a little on the ground, sniffed at it, and turned his back, but Paladin ate it eagerly out of Sam’s hand.
When the guides explained laboriously to Abraham Laplant in their limited Spanish, he told the captain that the crystalline loaves were made from cane grass. The Indians picked the canes, dried them, threshed the sugar off the leaves, and baked it.
Sumner said, “Wish they’d known about granulation.”
Sam noted to himself, as he often had, that Sumner knew a lot of surprising words.
A couple of pounds of candy per man—a feast, and another feast tomorrow.
The next day they began to see sign of game, and Harrison Rogers, the clerk, killed an antelope. Coy lapped the blood that spilled onto the ground. Hell was easing into Purgatory.
That night one of the guides disappeared. His companions said he had expected to find his family here. Disappointed, he’d gone back to the Amuchaba villages. But the two remaining would stay with the outfit all the way to the mission, they promised.
Soon the brigade neared the foot of the mountain, and the guides led them to a small village of Indians, their own tribe. These Indians made the trappers welcome, fed them the first evening on acorn mush and pine nut bread, and then staged a big rabbit hunt to put on a feast the next day.
The brigade took that day to rest. This country was full of a kind of tree they’d never seen before, a big yucca with arms that twisted strangely toward the sky—like they were praying, some of the men said. Every man now was praying to get over the mountains and to California. Even Coy was perkier. It seemed like he knew that mountains meant better times.
On the third day beyond the small village, they came down from the mountains and into a fertile valley gleaming absurdly with small streams and, miracle of miracles, cattle. These bore a brand, which the guides identified as the mark of the mission.
The brigade was hungry again. When Jedediah in desperation decided to shoot a cow, he found that he had to hunt them like wild buffalo. But that night and the next the men gorged on beef, and there were plenty of scraps to throw to Coy.
Sam was relieved. Meadowlark looked fine. Meat, plenty of meat, was what her people ate.
Coy brought Sam a stick and pranced around until Sam threw it. They played fetch for a few minutes. Sam marveled at how Coy, however hard the times, perked up after one decent meal.
The men looked around. Yes, a mild climate, even in early winter. Plenty of grass. Maybe a man could grow crops year round, if he had a mind to. California looked good.
The thoughts Jedediah recorded in his journal, though, were less optimistic:
It would perhaps be supposed that, after numerous hardships endured in a savage and inhospitable desert, I should hail the herds that were passing before me in the valley as harbingers of better times. But they reminded me that I was approaching a country that was inhabited by Spaniards, a people whose distinguishing characteristic has ever been jealousy, a people of different religion than mine and possessing a full share of that bigotry and disregard of the rights of a Protestant that has at times stained the Catholic religion.
They might perhaps consider me a spy
, imprison me, persecute me for the sake of religion, or detain me in prison to the ruin of my business.
As they got closer, the men passed a farm where Indians were working. Now Jedediah added another worry:
They gazed and gazed again, considering us no doubt as strange objects, in which they were not much in error. When it is considered that they were not accustomed to see white men walking with horses packed as mine were with furs, traps, saddlebags, guns, and blankets, and every thing so different from any thing they had ever seen, and add to this our ragged and miserable appearance, I should not have been surprised if they had run off at first sight, for I have often been treated in that manner by savages.
Arrived at the farmhouses, I was kindly received by an elderly man, an Indian, who spoke Spanish and immediately asked me if I would have a bullock killed. I answered that I would, and away rode two young Indians in a moment.
Part Two
CALIFORNY
Seven
The Mission
Father Jose Sanchez, the head of San Gabriel Mission, was not what Jedediah expected. Elderly, rotund, and cheerful, he welcomed the captain genially. First he offered cigars to his visitor, and insisted the captain take the whole handful. Then, to Jedediah’s distaste, the friar insisted on a toast with rum. Finally he treated Jedediah and Harrison Rogers to sumptuous meals, at which the friars got merry in their cups. Far from despising Captain Smith as a declared Protestant, Father Sanchez congratulated Jedediah on having “escaped the gentiles,” meaning the Indians, and reached a Christian country.
Meanwhile the men of the brigade located themselves in the quarters that were offered—rooms with actual beds, and candles to provide light. This was luxury. Meadowlark and Flat Dog took turns stretching out on the bed in Sam and Meadowlark’s room—they’d never even seen a bed before. Coy looked at the beds like they were weird, sniffed elaborately, and hopped right up.
