Love to Water My Soul (Dreamcatcher)

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Get away,” Grey Doe said, batting lightly at her hawk who raised in protest, sang his own high-pitched song. “Find scraps over there. Oh, look how he swoops,” Grey Doe said. “Gets in that pile before the dogs can catch him. Fa-a-st,” she said, her voice taking a slide from high to low.

  All seemed as it should be.

  After several days, Wren and I along with Lukwsh and Grey Doe pushed the soft organs into baskets of water and then squeezed them through a hemp sieve to ready them.

  And when the hides were moist, the hair slipping and more easily scraped with rib bones, we braced four smooth cottonwood logs against each other and stretched the hides over the ends, scraped and pulled at the hair, taking all of it, taking turns dabbing at drying hides with handfuls of water and wet hair. The work took all my energy and thoughts, gave me a place to leave my anger and frustration when I thought I saw Shard stand close to someone else.

  When the hides were smooth, we rubbed the mixture of brains into what the antelope gave us and said we did not mind that the leather felt like slick snot from our noses on cold days. The hides would keep us warm beneath our rabbit blankets, be available for trade. They had been given us because the people did what they were told to do and charmed the herd.

  The hunt proved successful, everyone said. We feasted on roasted meat, dried strips of loin in the sun. No one knew otherwise, and Wuzzie said the spirits smiled.

  Sarah did not ride our way that summer. She had married a military man named Bartlett who used sweet words, was pleasant to look upon with his yellow hair, a man who enjoyed fine horses and too much wine. The marriage was not allowed in Nevada where tibos and Indians were prevented from joining, and so she traveled east. When I heard of it, I was pleased for her and wondered if her soldier might know of a way to track backwards should I ask him, if I somehow found a name. I even wondered if the blond-haired man might be someone from my past. They were foolish thoughts, but thinking them gave me less time to think of what I did not have.

  Sarah had found someone to share time with, someone who gave his warmth away. I missed her because she talked with agents and the army, talked of how white people thought. The summer wore on with little rain and long hot days that burned our feet and dried berries on the bushes. Some said only Sarah’s words with the soldiers would keep the army filling wagons of food for those who were willing to put their bellies above their beliefs.

  My own filling up came in another way. After the charming, Shard remained. He did not return to working for the rancher or the blacksmith named Johnson. I watched to see if he sought out Vanilla Leaf. But he spent no time with her.

  Instead, my eyes found him as he fished at the Silvies in the summer, and my looks of longing seemed returned. I began to set aside my suspicious thoughts, wonder if my hot fury at the charming had cast a shadow on my judgment, forced me into a choice better left aside.

  “Walk with me,” he said in the early fall.

  Beneath cottonwood trees turning the color of yellow pollen, Shard’s white-pawed dog sniffed at Flake’s behind. They settled differences and raced with us to scatter birds at the lake and grab up rabbits on the run. Together they circled sage hens, allowing Shard to shoot them, while Flake brought them happily back to me.

  “So. My dog prefers to bring his catch to you,” Shard said smiling.

  “I am the better cook.”

  At Willow Basket and James’s wedding dance, Shard put his hand in mine and we danced the owl dance together. I knew we were both thinking of the night bird and not the difference in our skin.

  My eyes tried not to notice the scowl of Grey Doe nor the face of Lukwsh that like the winter lake, cool and smooth, covered unknown depth.

  Instead, I touched Shard’s hand, my heart beating fast as a fancy dance swirled in my head. I did not think about the future and held him in my mind no less when he just left me at my lodge than when he was gone on long journeys of some weeks. Each separation ended was like a basket empty for a lifetime, finally filled.

  We began to risk more time together.

  Once we rode followed by dogs to the place where Wuzzie found me. We spent some moments seeking a lost treasure basket.

  “Probably part of the earth,” I told him without hope, my hands scratching at the ground, moving rock pebbles. His answer warmed me.

  “Some things are worth doing no matter how they turn out. Looking is no waste.”

  “We should climb, then, too,” I said. “To see beyond the mountains where the rivers run together.”

  He laughed. “The ocean is farther than what you can see. Beyond even another set of mountains.”

  “Some things are worth doing,” I teased him.

  “Let’s climb, then, Pussytoes.” We did, carefully this time, until we reached the top. It was farther than I had ever seen.

  “It is not the ocean,” he said after some time of letting the wind blow against us, ruffling his long hair, tugging at my hair below the barrette. “Someday, I will take you there.”

  When we rode away, empty-handed, I knew that the tiny gold chain was lost forever and with it the strongest hope I had to keep on searching. The patch of pink pinafore I once wore had disappeared, too. Even the bone of a Modoc dog now belonged to the past. Nothing remained of that time before the Modocs but the knots of my memory, the search of my heart.

  We traveled south to Snow Mountain on that journey. Shard extended his hand to mine and pulled me up behind him on his spotted horse. My arms reached around him, felt the softness of his belly, the firmness of his back. His black hair scented with sage swung before my face as we rode in rhythm up the ridges.

  At a spring bubbling from beneath dark rocks, I rinsed the cloth headband he wore, hung it to dry on a juniper tree while we talked of simple things such as dogs and weighty things such as war. He picked pussytoes for me, their curled blossoms like the bottom of a cougar’s foot, stems like silver tules. During stops where we ate dried seed cakes, he told me of his journey near this place, how a mountain lion shared its power with him so Shard could enter life as a warrior and man.

  We spoke of what might happen if we joined, became as one in a marriage of the people, which wickiup would hold our baskets. We used no names, spoke to make it sound as if we spoke of others, such as Sarah and her lieutenant, and yet we thought of ourselves. I knew the talking was of us.

  To hope for more was frightening. I was afraid to speak out loud how I might feel for fear the words themselves could become jealous of the feelings, take for themselves what pleased me the most.

  We rode through thickets of timber, past prairies like palms streaked with tiny rivulets of streams. The thin soil dotted with white flowers hugged rocks between green and red grasses and stretched like moss to the sides of gorges so immense my breath caught. In the stinging winds, I hugged him closer. We were one in how we saw this world, and I was pleased beyond measure to be sharing such a feast of life and vision with someone I had come to love, someone I held now in my mind.

  For I had come to love him, fearful as that was.

  In times since, I have heard it said that first love is the one of children, that it does not bear the weight of older woes and so is considered smaller, of less value. But I have felt such love, and when I hear of it among the young, I nod in knowing. Such love is not the kind a breeze can drift away.

  Grey Doe’s scowls increased in the fall. Wuzzie’s looks alarmed. But so deep was our devotion, so blind were our eyes that we did not notice how the others walked beside us or how they watched us through calloused eyes. It seemed enough to know that when Shard entered my thoughts, I was also entering his.

  I tried especially to ignore Grey Doe’s looks. She was the grandmother who would make room at her feet for the suitor of a granddaughter, and I knew she would not. For we were different, Shard and I, arrived from different places and yet had shared a lodge.

  Shard spoke little of his feelings and looked with confusion when I told him of my pain the day he
stroked Vanilla Leaf’s cheek, the day before I left the charming.

  “I have no memory of it,” he said, his eyes looking into the past.

  He seemed to share the truth, though why the moment was marked differently for him than me became a puzzle never solved. And while his words were few, I knew by the look of his eyes when he first saw me enter the headman’s lodge for council, or the way his fingers lingered on my hand when he lifted a basket to my back, or the gentle touch of his lips on my forehead, cheek, and then my mouth, that I had been settling inside his thoughts, had been held, too, like a precious treasure.

  I did not know where this filling up would take me. I only chose to let it be, let myself imagine life here with these people and this man, stopped my search for an unknown, distant future, and accepted the present that held my hand.

  When the cottonwood leaves turned dark and dropped into the gaunt streams that trickled to the lakes with deep muddy shores, Sarah’s brother Natchez sent word to Summer Rain that he would not join her until winter.

  “He goes to the great salt lake,” she told me with a sigh.

  The sweet-talking first lieutenant husband of Sarah had resigned from the military, and Natchez, the brother-in-law, left to escort his sister back to Nevada following their divorce.

  “She should have married one of her own,” Grey Doe said, and at first I was not certain if she spoke of Sarah or of Summer Rain waiting for her Nevada man. We sat together in Grey Doe’s lodge forming rabbit pelt chains. I tried to make myself small with her talk of what didn’t belong.

  “Her sharp tongue scares them off,” Summer Rain answered. “Or maybe like moths she is attracted to bright light even if it does burn.”

  Grey Doe grunted. “They are more wary of changing color.”

  Wren touched the back of my hand, and I mouthed the words, worked my fingers.

  “It does not rub off,” Wren said then and tied her rabbit skin through its eyehole, dropped her rope in her lap. “See?” She showed her feet, then her hands, turning them this way and that before us.

  Grey Doe motioned her to put her feet down.

  Wren continued. “They did not stay pink even with my white sister rubbing and rubbing with honey,” she said. She held her palm up for all to see, and I noticed also that the scar that once sliced there had faded.

  “No? Look at us,” Grey Doe said, pushing her chin into wind. “When we are finished with this rope, we will twist it as the white men do instead of the old way. That is how it rubs off, before we even know it.”

  “Is it so bad, Mother-of-my-husband?” Lukwsh asked. “The blanket is made faster. Has anything been lost?”

  “Our old ways.” Grey Doe yanked on the string of hides I held, surprisingly strong with only one hand.

  “The old way is sacred just because it has always been?” Lukwsh said. “You do things differently than your mother because of your wound.”

  Her words were followed by a hush and dropped eyes. I had never heard Grey Doe’s shriveled side discussed before.

  “A blend of the old and new will make a stronger rope, na?” Lukwsh continued. “Like old clay and new clay make the best pots.”

  Grey Doe sat silent a long time before she grunted her response. “You have been too long in the presence of an owl. You forget who took my arm’s strength. Quiet now, before your bloodless color rubs off on lesser beings.”

  Lukwsh’s eyes dropped, and I saw the flash of pain that crossed them. Her far-seeing was not appreciated, or perhaps it was her sadness for Sarah, who could think distinct, that bothered Grey Doe. I wondered about Sarah’s sorrow with her sugar-word lieutenant now gone.

  “Will Sarah still speak with the army?” I asked.

  Grey Doe grunted. “She gives us no gifts with that effort.”

  “Some have gotten food and more cloth,” Lukwsh said.

  “What?” asked Wren, and I told her.

  “It is a trick, to get us to agree to that reservation they still speak of,” Grey Doe said.

  “The calico is nice,” Wren offered, one step behind each thought.

  “Maybe her man leaving her will teach her who is safe to listen to and who should be left alone,” Grey Doe said.

  I wondered of my own place as Grey Doe hung on tighter to the past and showed fresh resentment of anything new.

  The lakes froze over deep that winter, though in places the ice was as thin as our faces. Wind blew as though it had much to say each day. We huddled in the headman’s lodge for stories that helped us forget how our stomachs growled. The horses wandered farther to scratch for grass through more shallow drifts of snow. The sky was as dark as a duck’s bottom and promised wetness. Antelope meat disappeared faster than we imagined, and even the rabbits we’d driven to their deaths at the first sign of snow were all gone now, their hides warming our backs but no longer our bellies. The land became stingy with its roots and seeds, the lakes low with limited fish, the geese flew high and early. We entered winter thin, lived from the fat of our hips if we had them, grew haggard if we did not.

  What We-ah-wee-wah had foreseen had come to pass. Little food remained.

  Wuzzie sat in the headman’s lodge. He wore a rabbit rope robe that flowed from his shoulders and spread like wings around him, covering his legs as he sat. His hands were hidden beneath the white fur folds twisted the old way with the rabbit’s feet still on. He sang a song none of us had heard, could not have heard because he had just received it from the spirit land where he said he had resided, dead.

  Five days earlier, Lukwsh had sent me to Wuzzie’s lodge, told me to take dried nuts to him, and so I did. And there he lay, dead.

  Lukwsh, too, believed him dead when I raced to her. But she saw slight breath in the coldness of his lodge, and so we stayed and built a small fire in the fire pit he had allowed to burn out. I thought of Lives in Pain’s charge that a poor fire was a sign a lazy man lived inside. It did not seem to fit for Wuzzie, for even in his sleep I suspected he worked and planned.

  Many took turns keeping his fire up and waiting to offer water if he awoke. On my day, Flake’s tail beat against the floor, the only sound in Wuzzie’s lodge filled with the scents of strange herbs and baskets of all shapes and sizes. The temptation proved too great. I looked around, touched a thing or two. There sat the tin of honey he said did not heal. In the shadow area, beyond the smoke hole, I found a burned stick, a stick Wuzzie maybe placed to his eyebrows to singe the hair away, or did he pluck them? When I bent to pick it up, I leaned over a spot of hard water and jumped back, startled by a face moving toward me, then back when I retreated.

  It was my face reflected in the water that did not flow, my face with its straight, narrow nose. My face, with wisps of desert-sand hair falling across clear brown eyes, across hollow cheeks. I touched my fingers with broken nails to lips as red as choke cherries and judged what I saw—the face of a woman-child who did not belong.

  After five days, Wuzzie awoke. It happened while I sat there, watching and waiting. His words startled, soft though they were.

  “Get Grey Doe,” he whispered.

  Flake yawned at his words, stood, stretched front feet low, tail high, then sniffed at the man on the mat.

  “And Thunder Caller,” Wuzzie said as I rose, adding ominously, “you, do not return.”

  My feet took me along the paths made icy by tromping moccasins of sagebrush lined with fur. I wrapped my own blanket around my shoulders, felt the rabbit fur tickle my nose as I ducked into Thunder Caller’s lodge. I delivered my message, then ran to Grey Doe.

  “Wait here,” she said as she threw her shoulder through the door, brushing past me.

  Much activity followed. I could hear it outside in the muted sounds of feet on snow, the chatter of lowered voices. The sun came out and burned in a blue sky but offered no warmth. My body chilled beneath the blanket.

  I heard voices directing the people to the headman’s lodge where Wuzzie counseled about his dream-state and what his spirits told h
im. For a moment, I wondered if Shard believed in such spirits and thought that I would ask him, share my own questions of such things, when I heard shouts for Stink Bug.

  Oytes broke into the activity as I watched from the lodge opening. He and Stink Bug were dispatched to carry Wuzzie in his weakened state. I decided to leave Grey Doe’s space, chose to locate Lukwsh or Shard, did not like the gnawing feeling growing as I stood alone.

  I met Shard, who touched his hands to my cheek, smiled reassurance to my eyes, but said nothing. I walked, hopping like Wren used to, to keep up with his long strides. Breathless, we entered the wickiup of the headman together.

  The air was smoky, like fog rising over the lakes, and so I knew the pipe had already begun around the circle. Through the warm din, I saw Grey Doe raise her eyes at me, scowl, follow Shard as he slipped into his place not far from authority. I eased behind Willow Basket kneeling with her toddler child who peered around her shoulder now, smiling. I stretched my fingers out to the wide-eyed girl and touched her toes. She reached back, and I took her, then let my eyes look around her mother’s broad backside, seeking Lukwsh, Wren, Stink Bug, and Wuzzie, identifying my allies and my foes.

  Wuzzie started his song then, a high, plaintiff call without benefit of drums. It was not unlike a loon’s. He sang, it seemed, for hours, though it was not so long as that. The air in the lodge smelled warm and smoky, and the scent of wintered bodies and tanned hides and children welled up in the space. Even the sweet grass smoke was not enough to keep some from sneezing, feeling their breaths thick in their throats. I felt almost dizzy and even started to doze, when the singing abruptly stopped.

  “It has come to me,” Wuzzie began in his voice that sounded almost as high-pitched as his song, “as it did to the prophets of my father’s time, that we must rid ourselves of what does not belong.”

  His eyes were closed, his head slightly back, his arms forward, palms up in appeal.