Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  At the far end of the valley, they returned to the road. No patrol cars were coming out this far, and now they made good progress. The road was pale in the starlight, but when the moon rose at midnight, its light was bright enough to reveal the landscape in startling detail. It was black and silver and white, and alien.

  Cluny had found the desert ugly in its apparent lifelessness; the signs of death had been everywhere, but now in the moonlight it changed, it became the land of fairy tales and dreams. He would come back one day, he thought, explore this relic of prehistory. This was a land of scars, of brutalizing forces whose marks were not erased by forests and meadows, but left there to be examined and pondered. Earthquake country in the distant past, volcanic country in the more recent past; mesas stood in sharp outline against the light sky, cones could be seen in the fragments that the wind had not yet succeeded in wearing down, pinnacles and upthrusts jutted high from the floor. Raw, unequivocal power had shaped this land, was still shaping it; nothing was hidden here.

  The wind bit into his face and neck, chafed his hands and wrists, blew through his clothes. Again he thought of Jean on foot, huddled somewhere in the shelter of a rock, waiting out the long night.

  They left the road for a ranch road, and then left that for a fire road that started to climb up a mountain. Here there were trees that blunted the force of the wind, and although they had to go slower, Robert was satisfied. They had made very good time.

  Cluny had been too cold to feel his muscles, but now they started to ache, and the last two hours seemed endless, tortured hours that were distorted and really stretched out into days, a lifetime. When they got to the camp, he had to have help in getting off the horse, and he groaned when he stood up. Robert took him to a clearing, where there were several men talking in low voices.

  “Wrap up,” Robert said, handing Cluny a blanket. “Sleep now. We won’t build a fire to call attention to ourselves, but soon it’ll be morning and warmer and we’ll eat then.”

  At first when Robert had told him Jean would join them in the mountains, he had believed. People could walk sixty or seventy miles; they did it all the time. Then he had ridden over the ruined land and belief had faded, and now, as he stood in the shadow of a pine tree, belief was gone. Robert had brought him by way of roads, rough dirt roads for the most part, but they had been graded somewhat; the road engineers had found the easiest ways to follow. For Jean there were no roads. As far as he could see looking southwest, there were gorges and sharp buttes and cliffs, but no roads.

  She would walk in the early morning hours when there were shadows to hide her, Robert had said, and again in the late afternoon. In the midday she would rest; she would not move at night when it would be too perilous on foot. She would arrive today, Robert had also said, and Cluny did not believe it.

  He heard the airplane again and knowing he was not visible from the sky, he still did not move. Damn them, he thought over and over. Damn them! Even if there were roads she could use, they made it impossible, skimming a hundred feet off the ground, searching, searching.

  “Don’t worry,” Robert said earlier, his voice surprisingly gentle. “They’re searching like white men and she’s moving like an Indian. Two different realities. The restrictions they impose on themselves will prevent their seeing her.”

  The wind blew and the sun slipped lower in the western sky, lengthening the shadows again. Now she would be moving, if she was able to, if she was not already dead, or dying. His jaw ached from being clenched so hard, and he tried to relax against the tree trunk. The sun was hanging on a peak of the distant Cascades; it balanced like a ball on the sharp nose of a seal, and then began to slide down the other side. It looked as if the peak were growing as he watched, hiding more and more of the great ball. He started when he heard Robert’s voice.

  “Look,” Robert said, pointing.

  He saw her then, a miniature figure skirting a twisting riverbed, walking down into it, up the other side. She vanished behind an outcropping, appeared again, closer, but still too far away to see her features.

  He pushed away from the tree. “I’ll take a horse down; she must be exhausted.”

  “No. If the plane came back, they’d wonder why we were moving at dusk. Let her finish alone.”

  She was starting to climb now, and Cluny could see a glint of pale hair that had slipped from under her hat. It was the color of the moon. The sky was rapidly turning violet and in the east there was a reflection of a sunset, dimmed, quiet, done in pastels. There were no clouds in the west, no sunset there, only the luminous violet sky. The wind screamed, the only sound.

  He looked at Jean again, walking faster now. Her shoulders were straight, her arms moving freely with her body motions. She moved like a dancer. How small she was.

  The plane came back and he felt his heart thump when he spotted it, close enough to see blue and white markings. He looked for Jean and could not find her. Robert was smiling faintly, also watching. The plane left, heading north, and when he looked at the fire road, Jean was there, moving steadily, easily.

  Robert whistled a low, sweet bird call; Jean raised her head, and without slackening her pace, whistled back. It sounded very faint and distant. In her faded jeans, tan shirt, cowboy hat, boots, she looked like a very young boy. Cluny rejected that. No, she looked like a dancer, with grace that was completely unself-conscious. She moved like something totally free, not male, not female, not adolescent, but all those things and something more.

  “She moves like the moon floating over the eternal sky,” Robert said. “Let’s go meet her at the end of the road.”

  They crossed the high meadow, where Robert spoke briefly to his son. Wesley grinned. “We’ll prepare her a feast,” he said.

  They went on to the first turn of the road that was being reclaimed by the land so fast that it was hard to say where it began and ended. They stopped. Before them the road curved again. There were no shadows now under the deep violet sky and on this side of the mountain the wind was a faraway wail, like an echo of itself.

  She walked around the curve and smiled, as if she had been expecting them. Cluny wanted to break and run to her, but when Robert didn’t move, he resisted the impulse and waited also. She walked faster and Robert held out his arms for her. She went straight to him.

  “My little sister. My daughter. I am very proud,” he said, holding her tight against him. For the first time Cluny realized that Robert had been worried and afraid for her. Robert and Jean drew apart and he held her shoulders and studied her face. “The desert treated you well,” he said huskily.

  “Yes. I’m well.”

  Looking at her, from her to Robert and back again, Cluny knew something very important had passed between them, something both of them understood and held in reverence. He sensed a new relationship between the tall Indian and the tiny blond woman. Robert was deferential in a way Cluny could not quite grasp. He watched, bewildered, as Robert removed her hat and touched her hair very lightly, let his hand rest on her head momentarily, and then smiled at her.

  Jean turned from him to Cluny. “I’m glad you’re here. I knew you would be. Did Doris tell you all about it?”

  They walked into camp, but Cluny felt baffled and excluded by something he could not identify or comprehend.

  That night they all sat around a small fire. Jean was wrapped in a blanket that covered her entirely, leaving only her face showing.

  “Will you tell us about your trip?” Wesley asked.

  She nodded, and with no trace of self-consciousness, began. “The sun was coloring the day, preparing the sky, and I sat down and forgot and was one with the desert and the sun. At first it was very warm and gentle on my eyelids, then it was in me, and then it went through me. . . .”

  Cluny half listened to her; he was very sleepy, so tired he felt dopey and leaden. Her voice was low and musical, soothing, as his mother’s voice had been when she used to read to him. . . . He roused with a start and glanced about to see if anyone
had noticed. They were all listening intently, their gazes unwaveringly fastened on Jean. He blinked; her face was floating, he thought; it looked like the moon floating in the black sky.

  “. . . shadows like caves,” she was saying, “and the caves hid me from their airplane. My sleep had refreshed me, and I knew the desert was no longer hiding. Redtail flew close to look at me, and a lark sang to me. . . .”

  Why was she doing this? Playing this game? But more important, why were they listening like that? Raptly, reverently. She was going to describe every rock, every lousy juniper tree, every rotten sagebrush, every living creature. . . .

  “. . . across the valley was the ranch and I thought it would be good to spend the night under the roof, but the wind led me along the butte and then the plane came back and if I had been down in the valley, they would have seen me. . . .”

  Cluny drifted, returned, drifted further, came back. She had been talking a long time, he thought sleepily, listened again.

  “. . . sat as still as possible and on the other side of the juniper tree I knew coyote was sitting still also. He didn’t laugh again, but he waited, and finally I began to tell him about the work I was doing, and he listened very quietly. The moon rose and put out the stars and I kept talking to him, explaining it all, not to make him understand, but to help me understand. I couldn’t see coyote, but I could almost see him, see a shape there. I waited for him to say something for a long time and I was getting sleepy and finally I turned around to ask him to comment, and I saw that he had put a sagebrush there to fool me, that he had come and gone, laughing at me for talking to a bush. As I lay down to sleep, I heard him laughing at me from on top the butte, and I had to laugh too.”

  Her story finally ended, and the Indians began to murmur in Wasco, asking her questions that she answered in Wasco. They would have kept it up all night, Cluny thought, if Robert hadn’t said, very firmly, that they would all go to sleep now. With obvious reluctance, the Indians began to wrap themselves up in their blankets, some of them still talking in low voices.

  He watched Jean withdraw into the shadow of a lean-to that Wesley had constructed for her. He wanted to go in after her, to make her drop this act, to make her be the girl he remembered from so many years ago. To make love to her, he thought with a jolt. Not to possess her or dominate her, or even use her. He wanted to know who she was. He wanted to know her.

  What had happened to her? He felt certain he would have recognized her if he had run across her before she left the university, while she was still working for Arkins. Or in the Newtown. Then she had spent a year with the savages and had become a savage herself. Savages, he thought bitterly: Davies and Murray, Robert, Dan Brighton and his own father, the mobs of roving youths, Ward Blenko . . . If aliens had left the message, if they came back, if they chose to count the savages, who would they count?

  Jean had said something about the importance of what happened to these Indians, he remembered, and now he understood what she had meant. For hundreds of years Indians and whites had lived in the same world, shared the same land, and they knew little about each other. The Indians were mysterious to him, unfathomable to him. How had they resisted the pressures of the conquerors? What did they know that let them endure? What had sustained them? What had sustained Jean during her long trek across the hostile desert?

  He fell asleep thinking of how she had talked about the desert, as if it had been her ally, not the hostile barren wilderness he knew it to be. She had talked as if the desert had opened a path for her, had sheltered her when she needed shelter, had provided hiding places when the plane had circled low overhead, had guided her to berries, to a spring in the dry Dog River. She had talked of a coyote keeping her company during the long nights. And they had listened with unmoving attention, respectful, assuming the same deferential manner that had altered Robert subtly. He dreamed that Jean was seated in a classroom where he was the teacher, demanding explanations that she gave over and over, patiently and kindly, as if trying very hard to make him understand, and he could recognize not a single word of the language she used.

  CHAPTER

  18

  “BY now they must have roadblocks at every track, trail, and highway leaving the state,” Cluny said the next morning. He ached and was sore, but not as much as the previous day. Jean looked untouched by her ordeal, except for a deep suntan.

  “How do you think they’ll proceed?” Robert asked.

  “They probably think Jean holed up waiting for me to come, and when we join forces, we’ll make a dash in the van. They’ll be watching the places where it could travel cross-country, and all roads leading from the state.”

  Robert nodded. “And you have a plane waiting at Boise?”

  “Yes. Until further notice. We didn’t know when I’d be wanting it.”

  “Okay,” Robert said, standing now. “We’ll go to Boise.”

  Cluny drew in a breath to explain again, but Jean nodded.

  “We should start soon,” she said. “They may decide to investigate this camp at any time.”

  Robert spoke to Wesley briefly. The youth joined them and shook hands with Cluny, and then looked at Jean for a moment before he clasped her to his chest, as his father had done the day before. “Little Olahuene,” he murmured. “Take care. You’ll come back to us one day. I’ll watch for you.”

  “I’ll come back,” she said. “I’ll miss your wedding. I’m sorry.”

  In two days the Indians would start the cattle drive back to the reservation. The watchers would concentrate on them, Cluny knew. They would think he and Jean were using the dust and the confusion to cover themselves, as they would be doing, but on the eastern border of the state.

  They rode in high, sparsely timbered country all that day, among junipers and pines, tan, dead-looking clumps of grass, and sagebrush. Cluny wondered how the cattle survived such a diet, how anything could live in this land. They rode single file, Robert leading, Jean last, and Cluny in the middle. He knew that he was inexperienced, that riding with no saddle was the hardest thing he had done in many years, but even more than his own discomfort, he disliked the thought of Jean as his protector. She looked like a child on her horse, had to have a hand to mount it, slid off as if from a sliding board when they stopped.

  At dusk Robert selected a campsite so sheltered among mammoth boulders that when their three bodies were around the tiny fire, not a spark could be seen ten feet away. After they ate, Robert drew out the dictionary and handed it to Jean. She had not seen it yet.

  “It’s so little,” she said in dismay.

  “It’s a perfect start,” Robert said firmly. “We will add to it.”

  “Why do you even want it?” Cluny asked then.

  Robert looked away from him, his face shadowed and remote. “You know all the theories about two cultures? Your people came and it was like a cloud settling over us.” He moved one hand over the other, held it there. “Everywhere there was your way—your lifestyles, your science, your tools, your gadgets—and we came to doubt the value of everything of our own. Neolithic savages: we even accepted your name for us, and began the process of change that would make us like you. Our people were ashamed that they didn’t look like your people, that they couldn’t think like them. The very concepts were ungraspable—economics, ownership, domination over the land, superiority over the animals. All very strange, unknowable. We went to your schools and tried to learn your ways, but in our hearts we were still resisting because we found that cultural heritage is a very potent force, Dr. Cluny. Your cloud and its shadow over us obscured too many things we sensed were important, even though your people seemed unaware of them.”

  He looked at Jean then. “I didn’t think we could live side by side ever. The two realities are too dissimilar. But perhaps we can. When the drought ends your people will come back, but this time your shadow must not smother us. We must live side by side, overlapping, no doubt, but without the overwhelming pressure to become white. We can’t become wh
ite. We both have to be able to select or reject what the other offers. At first we didn’t understand, and when we began to, it was too late. We’ll need to be able to talk. Our children must not forget, or it will be as it was the first time. We need a written history of our people, a written dream of our future. Our children must not forget.”

  It wouldn’t work, Cluny thought. They would be driven from the land finally, and in the Newtowns they would adapt or die. It seemed very simple, very final.

  Robert stood up. “I’ll check on the horses, and then we should sleep. We’ll start again at daybreak.”

  Cluny watched him until he vanished among the junipers. “Noble savages,” he said cynically, turning toward Jean.

  “No. They were a dying culture. Now they see a chance to survive. They’ve grabbed at it. They had one of the highest birth rates anywhere on earth, and it’s down to simple replacement, or slightly less. The number one cause of death in the reservation was accidents, and they aren’t having fatal accidents any more. Juvenile delinquency was as high as in the slums of any major city; it’s no longer with them. Alcoholism was rampant and now there’s no alcohol. The shadow was killing them and now they can breathe again. They’ll still die,” she said softly, but with no regret. “If the desert keeps advancing it will kill them, but it’s better than dying in the Newtowns. They’ll be hungry at times and cold and lonely, and that’s better than being fed and warm and in the Newtowns. For them it’s better.”

  “Anything’s better than death,” Cluny said flatly.