Of Nate’s two offspring, only Evelyn read with any frequency. Zach had no interest in books. He could never sit still long enough to read.
Leaning back in his chair, Nate folded his arms across his broad chest and remarked, “You might as well get it over with.”
“I’m in no hurry,” Evelyn said. Niwot wasn’t the only one with butterflies. “I need to work out just what to say.”
Winona shot Nate a glance, then placed a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Take your time. Niwot is not going anywhere. And sometimes Ute women take two or three days to make up their minds.”
“Why me?” Evelyn lamented again.
Nate hid a grin by raising his cup to his mouth. To the young, existence seemed to revolve around them. Their worries and woes were exaggerated out of all proportion. He had been that way once. But life tended to knock the stuffing out of self-importance, and to teach that in the greater scheme of things, human beings were dust motes caught up in circumstances over which they had scant control.
“Would you care for breakfast?” Winona asked. She was concerned over Evelyn’s emotional state. What her daughter had to do would not be easy, and although Evelyn liked to act as if nothing ever bothered her, deep down she was as fragile as her Shoshone name of Blue Flower implied.
“I don’t have much of an appetite,” Evelyn said. Normally she liked a big breakfast, but not today. She looked down at herself. “What did Niwot mean by my dress gives him hope?”
It was Nate who answered. “You hardly ever wear buckskins, daughter. He must figure it’s your way of showing him that you prefer Indian ways over white ways, and there is a chance you will say yes.”
“Oh, Lord.” Evelyn was aghast at her mistake. “I didn’t think of that.” She turned toward her room. “I’ll go change.”
“That’s not necessary,” Winona said. “It’s not the dress that matters. It’s you. Go do what you must. To keep him on a tether would be cruel.”
“I suppose,” Evelyn agreed, but without relish.
The front door opened and in sauntered Zach. “Yes, sir,” he declared. “Niwot will make a fine brother-in-law.”
“Go climb the tallest tree you can find, clear to the top, and jump off head first,” Evelyn retorted.
Zach ignored her barb. “I reckon Louisa and me will be able to come visit you two or three times a year.”
“What?” Evelyn said.
“At the Ute village,” Zach said. “Niwot just told me he has no intention of living in our valley. As soon as you agree to be his woman, he’s throwing you over a horse and carting you home.” He paused for effect. “Personally, I admire a man so forceful with his woman. If I tried to tell Lou what to do, she would take a rolling pin to my noggin.”
“It might do you some good to have your brains rattled,” Evelyn said. She did not let on how disturbed she was by Niwot’s plans for their presumed future together. He took it for granted that his wishes were her wishes.
“Speaking of home,” Winona said to Zach, “shouldn’t you be at yours instead of here teasing your sister?”
“Is that a hint, Ma?” Zach asked.
“I have a rolling pin, too,” Winona said, “and you are never too old for a swat.”
“That would be a first.” Zach’s parents had never once struck him in all the years he was growing up. The Shoshones frowned on punishing children by beating them. To the Shoshones, the notion of taking a child out to the woodshed, as the whites liked to say, was unspeakably cruel. Winona had insisted on raising Zach and Evelyn in the Shoshone manner, and their father had agreed.
Just then Nate rose. “I will walk you out, son.”
“You too, Pa? A man can’t have any fun anymore.”
“Not at your sister’s expense, no,” Winona scolded. “This is a serious matter. It must be handled delicately.” Zach turned to Evelyn. “I can talk to him for you if you want, sis,” he offered. “Man to man, as they say. Maybe it would be easier on him coming from me.”
Flabbergasted, Evelyn had to remind herself that every now and then her brother did something so incredibly sweet, she would swear he was an imposter. “Thank you,” she said, “but it’s mine to do.”
“Suit yourself.” Zach reached for the latch and grinned. “You know, it’s too bad you don’t have five or six suitors. You could marry them all and have more horses and furs than you could shake a stick at.”
“I would like to shake one at you and hit you with it,” Evelyn told him, smiling. But the smile was a sham. She did not feel lighthearted. She felt as if a knife had been thrust into her gut and was being twisted back and forth.
Nate and Zach went out. Through the window Evelyn saw them stop and talk to Niwot. “Why couldn’t he pick a Ute girl?” she said under her breath.
Winona heard her. “He is in love with you, daughter. The color of your skin is unimportant to him.”
“Are you trying to make me feel worse?” Evelyn asked. “There is no reason you should,” Winona said. “Never once, by word or deed, have you so much as hinted to Niwot that you considered him more than a friend. He sees love where none exists.”
“I should have discouraged him long before this,” Evelyn said. Although Niwot wore his affection for her on the sleeve of his buckskins, she had never imagined he would take so drastic a step without encouragement on her part.
“We are not soothsayers,” Winona noted. “We cannot predict the future.” The closest she had ever come was when she met Nate. Somehow, call it intuition or instinct or wishful thinking, she had known Nate was the one for her.
“Common sense should have told me,” Evelyn said. If she had been smart, she would have told Niwot months ago to stop coming around. But she had been loath to hurt his feelings.
“Our hearts do not always want to do what our heads tell us is best,” Winona remarked.
“Ain’t that the truth.” Evelyn never ceased to be amazed at how well her mother understood her sometimes. Granted, they were mother and daughter, but Winona was Shoshone born and bred, while Evelyn was a product of both the white and the red worlds. And until recently she had much preferred the former. Until she learned that the white world was not the paradise she thought. Until she discovered that just like the red world, with its dark underbelly of counting coup and occasional torture, the white world had a dark underbelly, too, a shadow realm in which humans made slaves of one another, or sold their bodies for money, or worshiped at the altar of greed.
“Isn’t,” Winona corrected her. “Isn’t that the truth.”
“Isn’t,” Evelyn said absently.
Nate and Zach were moving off along the lakeshore.
Zach beamed at Niwot and wriggled his fingers in parting.
“Here goes nothing,” Evelyn declared, and went out. She blinked in the bright glare of the morning sun and licked her suddenly dry lips. Her stomach was doing somersaults.
“Blue Flower!” Niwot happily exclaimed, using her Shoshone name. “You make answer?”
Evelyn hesitated. His sincerity could not be denied. When they first met, Niwot did not speak a word of the white man’s tongue. Months of hard effort had resulted in his broken English, an accomplishment of which he was justly proud. And all to please her, so they could talk without having to use sign language.
“Blue Flower?” Niwot said.
Evelyn looked at the horses. They were fine animals. The furs were exceptional. Long hours of tedious work had gone into their skinning and curing. “You flatter me, Niwot.”
“That good?”
“Very good, yes,” Evelyn said, and was crushed when he brightened like a lamp that had been turned all the way up.
“It make you happy?”
“They would make any girl happy,” Evelyn hedged.
“Then why you have sad eyes?” Niwot asked.
Evelyn decided to quit beating around the bush. He deserved that much. After all, he had always treated her with the utmost respect, and never once overstepped himsel
f. “I hurt for you, Niwot. Because I like you, I truly do. As a friend, as a good friend. But not, I am sorry to say, as someone who could be the father of my children.” It was strange, her saying those words. She never, ever had given any thought to having a family of her own.
“Oh.” The young Ute was crestfallen.
“Please don’t be upset,” Evelyn said. “We can still be friends, can’t we? It’s not as if I never want to see you again.”
Niwot managed a wan smile. “You so pretty, Blue Flower.” He had more to say, but he was prevented from doing so by an arrow that streaked out of nowhere and sheared through his throat.
Two
Green was the color of their world. Green grass, the green leaves of the oaks and maples, the willows and elms, the beech and other trees. The green of the dense thickets and brush, the green of moss, the green of sweet clover. Green, green, everywhere, befitting the thick woodland and rolling lowland the Nansusequa had roamed since time out of mind.
The People of the Forest, they called themselves, and no name could be more fitting. The forest was their home. The forest was their mother. The forest was their father. The forest nurtured and protected them, and in return, the Nansusequa nurtured and protected the forest. They lived as part of the land without defiling the land. Every plant, every animal was precious, part of That Which Was In All Things, including the Nansusequa. It was why they always wore green. Why they dyed everything they wore green. Never any other hue but green. Green shirts, green pants, green breech-clouts, green dresses, green blouses, green skirts. It was said that in ancient times they even dyed their skin green.
It was surprising, perhaps, that neighboring tribes did not call them the Green People. But it was not the green that most impressed their neighbors. It was the fact that the Nansusequa had existed longer than any tribe known. Their beginning was lost in the mists of antiquity. They had always been, the stories had it, and thus were they called the Old Ones.
While many of their neighbors lived in wigwams, the dwellings of the Nansusequa were communal. Built to withstand the fiercest of storms and the coldest of winters, the Great Lodges, as the Nansusequa called them, were, not surprisingly, painted green inside and out. Thick timbers, treated so they arched, supported the roof and braced the sides, which were constructed of tightly interwoven boughs and covered with bark. A central aisle ran down the center of each Great Lodge. Partitions separated the living areas of each family.
The largest was known as the Council Lodge. Long enough and wide enough for the entire tribe to gather, it was decorated with their sacred totems, including the most sacred of all, the green hickory circle that represented That Which Was In All Things, or the Manitoa. The name was so sacred that the Nansusequa rarely spoke it aloud. To do so, it was believed, invoked powerful forces beyond the ken of human understanding.
The leadership of the People of the Forest was hereditary, passed down generation to generation. The current leader, Hunumanima, was deeply respected for his wisdom and compassion. Gray at the temples, his face seamed by the wrinkles of his advanced years, he now stood on the platform that overlooked the Council Lodge and raised his thin arms to silence the murmur of voices. At once, the Nansusequa fell silent.
His body nearly lost inside the green robe he wore, Hunumanima stepped to the edge of the platform and gravely intoned, “You have heard the words of Wakumassee. You know what his son Degamawaku has done. Now we must decide what to do.”
Closest to the platform stood the elders, resplendent in their striking green garments and headdresses. It was one of the elders who spoke the thought uppermost in all their minds. “There will be trouble with the whites. They will want revenge.”
More murmuring broke out and was again stilled by Hunumanima. “The whites are not without reason. I will talk to our friend, the one they call Stilljoy, and seek his advice.”
One of the elders made two fists and held them knuckles-to-knuckles, a sign of disagreement. “Stilljoy is no friend of the Nansusequa. He visits us not to learn our ways, but to impose his ways on us. He wants us to believe as he believes, and drink of the blood of the man he calls his God.”
A barely perceptible shudder rippled through the room. The idea of spilling human blood was abhorrent to the Nansusequa. Although they would fight to defend their territory, they were not, by nature, a warlike people. To them, the spilling of blood was something to be avoided, not embraced. Which made Degamawaku’s bloodletting all the more unacceptable.
Hunumanima responded to the dissent. “Yet Stilljoy does spend time among us, which is more than most whites do, and he listens, and treats us kindly. Talking to him can do no harm and might do much good.”
“I am uneasy around him,” said the dissenter. “He treats us as children.”
The faces of many mirrored their agreement. Hunumanima stood in thought a bit, then said gently, “There is much about the whites we do not understand. Their ways are so strange, they do not seem normal to us.”
Another elder spoke. “It is said they take all the land for their own. It is said they have wiped out many tribes, or driven the tribes west, to get the land.”
“Are we to believe stories told by those who offer no proof?” Hunumanima asked. “The whites have not tried to take our land, have they?”
The same elder answered. “It is said they seek an excuse to take ours. Degamawaku has given them that excuse.”
“I do not think the whites will go on the warpath against us. The furs we trade are too valuable.” Hunumanima turned to the abashed family that stood in a row between the elders and the rest of the Nansusequa. “But it could be they will want a life for a life.”
The family of five betrayed no emotion. In the middle stood the father, Wakumassee. Among the People of the Forest he was noted for his great love of peace; he was the tribe’s peacemaker. Broader of chest than most, he had a high forehead and a noble bearing.
On Wakumassee’s right stood Tihikanima, his wife. She was noted for two things. First was her beauty, for her features were the epitome of all the physical traits the People of the Forest admired: fine, high eyebrows; a slender, small nose; upturned lips; and wide, doe-like eyes. The second thing for which Tihikanima was noted was for being the daughter of their leader, Hunumanima.
On her right stood their youngest child, Mikikawaku, a sprite of a girl who had seen barely twelve summers. She was too young to be noted for anything other than being a dutiful daughter.
On Wakumassee’s left was Degamawaku. He stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge the many glances bestowed on him. Some of those glances were kindly, but most betrayed worry, and more than a few showed resentment.
On his left was Teni. She burned with the desire to speak in her brother’s defense, but she could not unless called on by their leader or an elder.
Hunumanima beckoned for Dega to approach the platform. “You are sure the three whites were dead? There can be no mistake?”
“None,” Dega confirmed.
“This day you have planted a seed that could grow into hatred,” Hunumanima said sorrowfully. “The whites will resent what you have done. They will blame all of us for your actions.” He stopped and looked at Dega expectantly.
“I will not say I am sorry, if that is what you want. I did what I had to in order to save my sister.” Dega refused to feel shame for doing what was right. Had he to do it over again, he would do exactly the same.
“But was it necessary to slay them?” Hunumanima asked. “Could you have struck them down without killing them?”
In his fury at the violation of his sister, the idea had never entered Dega’s head.
“I did not hear your answer.”
“They had guns,” Dega said, which, in itself, was not justification. But everyone there shared a disquieting unease about the alien weapons that crashed like thunder and spat fire and smoke—and small pieces of metal—to lethal effect.
“Many whites carry guns, as we carry lances,” Hun
umanima noted. He switched his attention to Tenikawaku. “Have you anything to say in this matter?”
Grateful for the opportunity, Teni said, “Only to repeat what I have already told everyone. The whites meant to have their way with me. Had my brother not come along, they might have killed me.” She added, “Or I would be dead by my own hand.”
“My heart is happy that you were spared,” Hunumanima said. “But my heart is also heavy with misgiving. We must prevent the spilling of more blood. The best way to do that is to talk with the whites and explain our side of things. I will arrange a meeting with Reverend Stilljoy. You and your brother will accompany me.” Wakumassee started, mute appeal on his face.
“You wish to speak too?” their leader asked.
“Yes, Hunumanima.” Wakumassee had a deep, resonant voice that carried to every corner of the Council Lodge. “Whites often behave rashly. They also have short tempers. The sight of my son and daughter may be too much for them, and they may kill Degamawaku and Tenikawaku without giving them a chance to explain.”
“His words are wise,” an elder observed.
“I will send a messenger to Reverend Stilljoy,” Hunumanima proposed. “I will ask him to come alone to the clearing by the black tree. I will take Degamawaku and Tenikawaku with me to give their account. We will ask his advice. Does this meet with your approval?” Hunumanima gazed along the rank of elders, then at Wakumassee. “I hear no objections.”
The messenger was sent to New Albion. The young man entrusted with the task was the fastest of the People of the Forest. By nightfall the runner returned with word that Reverend Stilljoy had agreed.
The meeting was to take place at midday. The black tree had once been a giant maple, a magnificent patriarch of the woodland, which had had the misfortune to be struck by lightning. The bolt set the tree on fire and much of it was burned before rain from the same storm extinguished the flames.
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