The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932

by Jim Fergus

  More recently, the ranchers had been expanding their range, their cattle and vaqueros penetrating the People’s country. The vaqueros were hard, cruel men, and well armed, and ever since Indio Juan had begun his bold daytime predations, they killed on sight every Apache they happened upon in the high country, man, woman, or child, beheading or scalping them in order to collect their bounty. And so the People’s numbers were being steadily reduced, the survivors driven farther south, ever deeper into the mountains.

  The Huerta boy cried throughout the first day’s travel, and most of the next day, and Indio Juan finally told the women that if they had not quieted him by nightfall, he would kill the child. He knew that Fernando Huerta had surely formed a posse by now and that the boy’s cries would give them away. So the women and girls of the band cooed and cuddled and fussed over the boy, as if he were the most important person on earth; they rode with him on their warm laps, holding him in their pungent brown arms; they gave him precious chunks of sugar to suck and they spoke to him in Spanish as well as Apache.

  Little Geraldo was grateful for their attentions and their kindnesses and soon they even encouraged from him an exhausted smile and by the evening of the second day he had stopped crying, and he did not cry again. Within a week he was speaking Apache and within a month he remembered his old family mostly in dreams from which he awoke disturbed, disoriented, in that strange shadow limbo between his new life and the old.

  She dreams that the People are traveling and she is an infant riding in a cradleboard strapped to her mother’s back. It is springtime and the motion of her mother’s walking stride bounces and jostles her gently and she sleeps peacefully, waking from time to time to look up at the trees and the clouds moving across the sky, to hear the birds singing. And she sleeps again.

  They come to a stop for the day, and her mother lifts her out of the cradleboard to bathe her, dips her into the warm water and holds her there, floating on the surface, secure in her mother’s sure gentle hands. She dreams that she is back in her mother’s womb, surrounded by water, floating, warm and safe. Daalk’ida ’aguudzaa. It happened long ago. And you are again among us as both man and woman, child and elder, hunter and suckler of babies as we make our way up the Yukon to Canada following the caribou herds into the upper Mackenzie drainage, from there over the millennia down the eastern edge of the Rockies and out onto the Great Plains, where we follow the great herds of bison.

  Over the centuries, we drift south, to take up residence in the southern plains, where another tribe of fierce enemies, the Comanches, themselves driven out by the even more numerous Sioux, come down upon us from the north, pushing us west into the mountains and deserts that are to become our new homeland. And you among us as both man and woman, suckler of babies and slayer of enemies. White-Painted-Woman, mother of all Apaches.

  She opens her eyes and looks up to see the old man peering down at her; it must be Yusen, the life-giver, and she is being born again onto the earth, how many times now in this endless cycle of birth and death? And although she does not wish to give up the comfort and safety of her mother’s womb, suddenly she has no air, her lungs ache to breathe, she struggles clawing for the light, thrusting violently from the water, fully awake now and trying to draw breath, gagging and choking.

  She knows this place where she is now, recognizes this spring; many times the People have stopped here to water. And suddenly she is overcome with a terrible thirst. She drinks water from her cupped hand but it makes her cough again.

  “Do not drink too much water, too quickly, child,” says the old man, “for it will make you sick.”

  “Who are you, Grandfather?” she asks.

  “My name is Goso,” says the old man. “I am ch’uk’aende. My mother was a sister of the great chief Cochise. I once lived in this country myself. I am taking you home to the People. I am taking myself home to the People.”

  “If you are really ch’uk’aende, Grandfather,” she answers, “why do you ride with White Eyes?”

  “My tsuye and I,” the old man says, “have taken these White Eyes captive. They are our slaves.”

  She leaves the water and dries herself in the sun as the old man and the others set up camp. She sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, and all the while the old man talks to her. He tells her of his own people, and of those with whom he rode; he speaks names and places she recognizes from the old stories. She understands that the old man is a di-yin, that he has Power, that somehow he has rescued her from the Mexicans. And that he is taking her home. She drinks a little broth, but she is so tired and she must sleep again. She crawls into the wickiup they have built for her, warm and snug on the sleeping place they made of soft pine boughs covered in blankets. She sleeps, and as she sleeps she dreams this life of the People from beginning to end. Daalk’ida ’aguudzaa. It happened long ago.

  Now the Spaniards come up from the south, thousands of them in their suits of armor, they slaughter and enslave the People, sending them to dig holes in the center of the earth, or to Mexico City to work as servants in their homes. And she among them, howling in the darkness.

  Those who survive have hardened into a nation of raiders and warriors; they attack the missions and presidios, mercilessly slaughtering the soldiers and the Black Robes, stealing their stock, making captives of the women and children; in this way they drive the Spanish, finally, from their land. And thus for a time the People rule the country others called Apachería. And she among them as both man and woman, child and elder, suckler of babies and slayer of enemies. White-Painted-Woman, mother of all Apaches.

  And she is again among them after the Spanish became the Mexicans, the People’s hatred of them undiminished. As both man and woman, child and elder, warrior and bearer of children, she rides with the raiders as they plunder villages in Chihuahua and Sonora, stealing stock and murdering the townspeople, taking prisoners of the women and children. Then the scalp hunters come to claim their bounties—one hundred pesos for the scalp of an Apache warrior, fifty pesos for that of a woman, twenty-five pesos for the hair of a child, and many of the People, and she among them, go to the Happy Place without their hair.

  Some of the scalp hunters are a strange new race of man with pale skin and white eyes, and soon from all directions more come into their country, trappers and miners, soldiers and ranchers, and there is more war and more butchery. She rides with the various bands of the chiefs known as Chuchilla Negro, Juan José, Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, following a long trail of blood and death, of killing, dying, running. The People murder and are murdered in kind, pushed deeper into the twisted canyons of the Chiricahua, the Mogollon, the Dragoon, the Huechos, the Sierra Madre, raiding on both sides of the border, stealing stock and killing the hated Mexicans, killing, too, the hated White Eyes and taking their children to make of them Apaches. Nana, Chato, Loco, Geronimo, Victorio, Juh, with their bands she rides as both man and woman, warrior and mother; she runs from their pursuers through the night, a cradleboard strapped to her back.

  But so many of the People are exhausted now from the endless wars, the constant flight, and they surrender, finally, to the White Eyes and are taken to live on the reservations. Others are sent by train to the iron house in Florida, hated place with the air hot and thick as wet wool, and many die there of disease, heartbreak and madness, die in the sweltering dark of their stone cells. And she among them, howling in the blackness.

  Now there is nothing more that can be done to her or that she can do to her enemies, no more tortures or murders or suffering that she has not already endured, has not already inflicted in the brutality of centuries she has dreamed. She is curled up in warm blankets atop soft pine boughs in a wickiup in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and she sleeps, dreaming this life of the People from beginning to end. White-Painted-Woman, mother of all Apaches.

  THE NOTEBOOKS OF NED GILES, 1932

  NOTEBOOK IV:

  Into the Sierra Madre

  19 MAY, 1932

  From our camp i
n the foothills of the Sierra Madre

  For all the dire premonitions of my last entry, the past days have been nothing if not an idyll, the easiest, laziest, most carefree time we have yet spent. A small river courses down the valley just below our campsite. The water is perfectly clear, running over a freestone base, with deep pools and riffles and full of fat trout. Tolley has given me the loan of one of his bamboo fly rods and I go out early every morning, or in the evening just before sunset, to fish for an hour or two. It’s nothing in that time to catch a couple dozen trout. I save a few for breakfast, rolled in flour and fried in bacon grease, or for dinner variously prepared by whoever is cooking that night. Strangely, the Apaches will not eat fish as they consider it to be unclean. Although they remain very closemouthed about revealing anything to us “White Eyes” concerning their religious or cultural practices, with some delicate prodding from our resident anthropologist, the old man finally admitted that they consider fish to be the spirits of wicked women.

  During our first night here, we heard a pitiful wailing issuing from the girl’s wickiup, a sound of such pure, primeval grief that it raised gooseflesh on me as I lay in my bunk. In the morning she emerged from the wickiup with her hair hacked off at the shoulders. When we asked Joseph about it, he would only say that she had borrowed his knife for the job, and that it was the Apache custom for women and children to cut their hair upon the death of a close family member.

  “Who died?” Margaret asked.

  “We do not ask such questions,” Joseph said. “It is not a good thing to speak of the dead.”

  “Now that she’s back among the living,” Tolley asked, “do we have to worry about her running off?”

  “She won’t run off,” Joseph said. “She has no place to go yet. And she has heard Billy Flowers’s dogs barking.”

  In the few days that we have been here, the girl is making an astonishing recovery. At the beginning, she spent most of her time in the wickiup or squatting by the fire, silently watching us. Now, day by day, she seems to be coming back to life, as if she takes her sustenance from the country itself, from the mountains and fresh air and sunlight as much as she does from food and water. She is a pretty girl, even with her crude haircut. Slender, lithe and fine-boned, with small, perfectly formed hands and feet, she has an an extraordinary way of moving that is difficult to explain in physical terms, a kind of grace that seems almost otherworldly. Margaret obtained some clothes in Bavispe for the girl to wear—a skirt and blouse of brightly colored Mexican fabric—and Joseph has made her a pair of traditional Apache moccasins, and a breechclout to wear for riding. Already it’s hard to remember the filthy, naked, hissing creature crouched in the corner of the dank jail cell.

  She is still shy with us … by us I mean especially the white people … unable even to look us in the eye, though I have the oddest sense that she recognizes me, for she seems even shyer in my presence, and I catch her watching me furtively from time to time. I think she remembers that I washed her in the jail cell and is ashamed of such an intimate act being performed by a stranger, a man and a White Eyes at that.

  She seems fascinated, too, by Margaret and yesterday before dinner actually approached her, reaching out to touch her blond hair with a kind of timid wonder. Margaret stayed perfectly still, the way you might do to avoid frightening a wild animal, and then very slowly she reached out herself and touched the girl’s cheek. “There,” she said. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” And she smiled at her and the girl smiled back.

  “What is this young lady’s name, Joseph?” Margaret asked.

  “She does not have a name,” he answered.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It is the old way to change the name of women and children upon the death of a close family member,” he said. “To protect them from the deceased’s ghost. Thus the girl has given up her name and will not speak it.”

  “What do you call her, then?” Margaret asked.

  “It is not necessary to call her anything,” Joseph said. “In the old way, Apaches do not greet each other by name, for it is impolite to call a person’s name to his face.”

  “And so is it impolite of me to call you by name?” Margaret asked the old man.

  “I am a civilized man,” he said with a smile, “baptized in your church.”

  “She has to have a name,” Margaret said.

  “Right now she is la niña bronca,” Joseph said. “That is sufficient. Later on something may occur that will cause people to call her another way, and then she will be given a new name that will fit her.”

  “You let us know when that happens.”

  We have been making short exploratory rides every day in the vicinity of our camp. Joseph serves as our guide. He knows all this country and has already shown us some extraordinary sights: the pueblos of the ones he refers to as ilk’idande, the “ancient people,” with the remains of small stone dwellings thousands of years old; there are pottery fragments scattered all over the ground and dozens of metates, the large stones, cupped in the center, that were used to grind corn. Many of the hillsides are elaborately terraced with rock walls, so that they resemble giant natural amphitheaters. Margaret herself has studied these earlier civilizations in her university classes and tells us that the walls are called trincheras and were constructed by the ancient people for agricultural purposes.

  La niña bronca rides one of the pack burros on these outings and by the third day had already regained sufficient strength to put on a performance worthy of a professional trick rider. Suddenly she swung off the burro, trotted alongside it, swung back on, twirled around on the animal’s back, dismounted on the other side, moved to the burro’s rear and catapulted herself onto its rump, stood up and walked to its shoulder, spun around and walked back, moving with her strange and indescribable grace. All the while she laughed with pure joy and abandon, the first time we’ve heard laughter from her, a lovely trilling sound.

  “Apaches are the finest horsemen in the world,” said Joseph, who watched her performance as proudly as a grandparent. “In the old way of living, children learn to ride before they can walk. But now the young people on the reservation are losing these skills.”

  The girl has started talking more frequently to Joseph, and to a lesser extent to Albert. It’s frustrating for the rest of us not to be able to understand their conversations and Joseph and Albert are taciturn about revealing much of what is said. And so we’re all trying to learn Apache, although the language seems nearly impenetrable to our ears and tongues. Only Margaret, because she has already studied the southern Athapascan languages, seems to be making some progress. The girl also clearly understands Spanish because whenever Jesus speaks in his own language, she appears to be listening to him, although she has not yet spoken it herself. Joseph, too, speaks Spanish and says that all the Sierra Madre Apaches have learned the language due to the fact they have had contact with the Mexicans, and before them the Spanish for at least a couple of centuries. “In the old days, many of us took Mexican women as captives,” he said. “I myself once had a Mexican captive. Her name was La Luna. She became just like an Apache.”

  We tease Jesus mercilessly because he is still terrified of the girl; he watches her warily and always keeps a certain distance from her. He is so afraid she will slit his throat in the night that he has set out booby traps around his sleeping place to alert him to her approach, a kind of necklace of tin cans which he has strung together in a circle around his bedroll and tied to his neck so that the noise they make if she violates his inner sanctum will wake him. As it is, we hear the cans rattling every time the boy shifts position, and so it is mostly our sleep being disturbed.

  Other than that, thanks largely to the provisions Tolley brought with him, we’ve been eating and drinking rather well, although Tolley informs us that his wine supply is already running low and he’s thinking of sending the boy back to Bavispe to collect his last case.

  We take turns cooking, although some
are more skilled in that department than others. After a day of exploring and a dip in the springs, “cocktail hour” and dinner are festive times. We had all begun to notice of late that Albert, so generally outspoken, has become tongue-tied and shy when he’s ever around Margaret, and she herself seems uncharacteristically quiet and self-conscious in his presence. A couple of nights ago Tolley embarrassed them both by suddenly announcing: “Okay, I saw that, you two are making goo-goo eyes at each other, aren’t you?”

  “Shut up, Tolley,” Margaret said.

  “I thought you said that you didn’t believe in having love affairs in the field, darling,” Tolley asked.

  “We’re not having a love affair,” Margaret said.

  “It won’t do you any good to deny it,” Tolley said. “We’ve all noticed. And I’ve heard you sneaking around in the night. You’re among friends, darling, why not just get it out in the open and move into the big injun’s tepee?”

  “I said, shut up, Tolley,” Margaret said. “You’re just jealous because you can’t have him.”

  “That’s true,” Tolley admitted. “I’ve always wanted to have a fling with a real savage. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, Albert.”

  “I must tell you, Tolley,” Margaret said, “one thing I’ve learned in my studies is that the Apache culture, unlike that of many other Native American tribes, is not in the least bit tolerant of sexual deviations.”

  “That is true,” Albert said, nodding. “In the old days homosexuals were considered to be witches and were usually put to death.”