Once she was decent, the girls entertained themselves with her ablutions, examining the tucking and buttons on her dress, smearing an oily salve on her cracked lips, and chattering away as they smoothed her hair with a dark-quilled brush.
Just about the time Mattie had begun to fret about finding a convenience of some sort, the girls seemed to understand her distress. One girl took her hand, and they motioned her to come out of the hut.
Blinking back the bright morning light, Mattie was astonished by the appearance of the village. There were no teepees of the sort she’d always seen in pencil sketches, only a half dozen more of the conical stick and mud huts and a larger domed structure covered with cedar bark, hidden away under the pines. Baskets of all shapes, sizes, and designs huddled outside the houses, and here and there stood wooden racks of fish drying in the sun. A red-tailed hawk sat tethered to a perch beside one of the huts, and three animal hides lay stretched and pegged to the ground nearby.
The rest of the villagers, dressed no more modestly than her two companions, stopped what they were doing and stared unabashedly at her, as if they’d never seen a white woman before. A lopsided leather ball rolled unpursued into the grass as a pack of boys no older than Hintsuli halted their game. A pair of toothless old men with woven caps stopped their argument to frown at her. A bevy of old women looked up from patting dough into cakes over the fire, and three youths with tiny red feathers protruding from holes in their nostrils crossed their arms and raised their chins in challenge. Several young women with black chin stripes shifted baskets of seeds on their hips, their mouths forming oh’s of surprise, but Mattie’s pair of escorts haughtily ushered her out of their way, no doubt jealously guarding their elevated status as her personal companions.
She was given as much privacy as the woods could afford, after which the girls returned her to the village. As a result of their friendly curiosity—the little boys encircled her, chattering like chipmunks, the older women clucked over her injuries, and the young women reverently fondled her dress, one of them actually running a brazen hand across her bosom—Mattie felt as out of place as a nun at a debutante ball.
It was clear from the scowls of the old men that though she might be a source of intrigue and amusement at the moment, she was also an unwelcome threat, like a darling baby mouse in a sack of grain.
Mattie was accustomed to disapproval. After all, she’d seen it in the faces of every Hardwicke who’d foolishly offered to take her in. But they’d at least been kin. Here, she was truly a misfit. The Konkow clothing was strange. Their food was strange. No one spoke her language. Even the kind woman who’d tended to her needed a translator. The only one who could understand her was...
"Sakote," she said to the girls. "Sakote?"
They looked at her in surprise, and then pointed to the large domed structure. But when she started toward the building, they tugged her back, admonishing her with frantic waving hands. She glared at the thin stream of smoke rising from the middle of the bark-covered hut. It must be forbidden to her, she guessed, like the silly gentlemen’s clubs in New York where women weren’t allowed.
She sighed. Her head ached, and her body hurt, and she knew that no matter how long it took her to heal, she would never understand these savages, any more than she understood her priggish family back East. Sometimes she felt like Cain, shuffling from place to place, shunned by all, cursed and alone in the world. Sometimes it seemed Mathilda Hardwicke didn’t belong anywhere.
Days passed, and the moon grew fat as Sakote watched the bruises fade from Mati’s face and saw her hands heal over with new white flesh. He even coaxed her from the hubo to come to the evening fire a few times, though she was never allowed to sit within the circle. The elders still looked upon her with hostile mistrust, and the old women with worry, though Mati ate the food of the Konkow, drank manzanita tea, and even learned enough of his language to speak brokenly with the two girls entrusted with her care.
But his mother was right. Though her body healed readily enough, her spirit was wounded. And nothing—not the bunch of lupines he brought her, not the cloak of deerskin he gifted her with, not even the clutch of newly hatched quail he showed her in a patch of buckbrush—could bring the smile back to her eyes.
In the end, it was his little brother who did that.
The boy had been poking around where he didn’t belong, as usual. He’d returned to the white man’s village, hiding himself in the bushes.
According to Hintsuli, not all the miners were dead. A man riding on a lyktakymsy had arrived, carrying a pack full of toys, and the miners had talked with him. The man had given them gifts from the big pack—colorful tins of food, red cloth, a shiny knife, a black cooking pot. But there was one gift that turned down the corners of the men’s mouths. They talked about it for a long time, and then the man with the funny round hat and the bandaged head decided he would put it in his hubo.
Hintsuli waited until the miners left for the creek, and then he crept into that man’s house and found what he was looking for.
If Hintsuli had stolen it out of greed, Sakote would have punished the boy by making him stay in his hubo for the entire ceremony of Kaminehaitsen. But Hintsuli’s motives, if not pure, had been kind.
When the boy gave Mati the new sketchbook, along with pieces of charcoal from the fire to draw with, and when Sakote saw the shine of joy return to Mati’s eyes, he wanted to pick his little brother up and swing him around as he had when the boy could barely walk.
After that, Mati came out of the hubo more often. Her drawings of the tame hawk they kept for feathers and the young squirrel that crept into the village each morning fascinated the old women. The boys loved her sketches of them playing the hand game with bones and kicking their buckskin ball. And the young women loitered nearby when Mati had her sketchbook, hoping to have their faces captured on her pages. The elders, however, didn’t approve. They had never seen this kind of magic before, and anything that was new earned their disfavor.
They wouldn’t forbid Mati from drawing. Sakote’s mother made sure of that, for she saw how it healed Mati’s soul. But they grumbled whenever she sat by the evening fire, her fingers smeared black, moving the piece of charcoal across the paper, and when they thought Sakote couldn’t hear them, they spoke about the bad luck the white woman would bring to the tribe.
Mattie stared dejectedly at the twisted tangle of reeds perched on her lap like a long-abandoned magpie’s nest. Knowing the difference between the rye, which was round, and the sedge, which was angular, didn’t mean she could weave them successfully into a basket. Gaping holes slipped open faster than she could close them, and every few moments, the long, stiff reeds springing out from the center poked her.
Beside her, Sakote’s mother worked, weaving the splayed reeds as deftly as a lady’s maid arranging curls. Stripes of willow and redbud ran through her intricately patterned basket, and the coils were so compact that not even water could penetrate the weave.
A sedge reed jabbed Mattie’s cheek, and she sighed in surrender, letting the basket slide apart as seemed its wont. Sakote’s mother chuckled, but it was a warm laugh without a trace of scorn, and Mattie grinned sheepishly.
She’d conquered a few of the Konkow skills. Hintsuli and Sakote had taught her some of the language, and she knew how to grind manzanita berries for cider. Though she clung steadfastly to her more civilized attire, she became accustomed to the sight of the bare-breasted women around her, and she even wore a string of abalone shell beads made by her two honorary "sisters." On one morning, Sakote’s mother had taken her to gather bracken fern and miner’s lettuce for supper. In the afternoon, she learned to dig up camas and beargrass bulbs for cooking in a nest of hot rocks. She practiced making bread from acorn meal and flower seeds, and she learned to do without utensils as the Indians did, making a spoon of three fingers to eat acorn mush. Hintsuli even allowed her to participate in the sacred ritual of casting his lost baby tooth toward the setting sun.
But basket weaving, the Konkow woman’s most important skill, she couldn’t master. And it made her even more aware of how alien she must seem to them. If Mattie couldn’t fit in with her own kin in New York, who shared a bond of blood, if she couldn’t fit in at a gold camp, where she at least spoke the same language, how much less did she belong here, where her words, her customs, even her appearance were so totally foreign?
She sighed softly, but Sakote’s mother seemed not to notice, distracted by the twinkle of sunlight off black obsidian from across the camp. She followed the woman’s gaze. Sakote, crouched in the shade of a yellow pine, labored with as much natural dexterity as his mother, assembling a fishing spear, gluing the barbed stone point to the wooden stick with pitch, then wrapping it around and around with fiber.
She glanced at Sakote’s mother. Now the woman was looking at her with a curious expression, almost as if she could read her thoughts. Then she returned to watching her son as he knotted off the tie and cut it with his teeth. She called him over, and they exchanged words.
"My mother says you should only make baskets when you are contented," he said, "or they will remain as empty as your heart." He hunkered down beside her, picked up her poor excuse for weaving, and flashed her a wicked smile. "She thinks I should show you how to hunt for yellow-jacket eggs instead today."
The way he looked—his bound hair glossy in the sunlight, the shadows dancing upon the bronze muscle of his shoulders, charm lighting up his eyes—she couldn’t stay gloomy for long. The sun shone bright, the world was fresh and young, and when he winked at her like that, she thought she’d gladly follow him anywhere, hunting for yellow-jacket eggs or fire-breathing dragons.
She nodded a shy farewell to his mother. Sakote wriggled a slow-burning log from the fire and took her by the hand.
Mattie felt like a truant child as they left the village, wading through the young meadow grass strewn with wildflowers, watching the black swifts race against the sky, listening to the lazy drone of bumblebees. The sun beamed wonderfully warm upon her face, and it seemed impossible that it was the same sun that blazed down upon the busy streets of New York.
As they hopped from boulder to boulder, she wished she’d relinquished her stiff boots in favor of the more supple Konkow moccasins. Sakote insisted on climbing mountain faces instead of circling on the path like the miners did. He’d told her once it was to hide from enemies, and it only occurred to her much later that the enemies he spoke of were white men.
They stopped in a sun-splashed clearing. A tiny spring meandered through the thick grass, and the air was alive with red dragonflies and blue damsels.
Sakote handed her the burning brand and plucked a puff of down from a nearby milkweed plant.
"We must feed and trap the first yellow-jacket," he told her.
"They eat...that fluff?"
He smiled and shook his head. "They eat blood."
Before she could continue her line of questioning, Sakote unsheathed his stone knife and pressed the point of it to his thumb. Blood welled forth almost at once, and Mattie gasped, almost dropping the log.
But Sakote only chuckled. "It’s a small offering for what we’ll take from the yellow-jacket."
Mattie didn’t think he should take the loss of his blood so lightly. No matter how he smiled, that cut must have hurt.
He squeezed a drop of blood onto the milkweed down. Then, popping his thumb in his mouth to stop the bleeding, he carefully placed the trap a few feet away, beside the trickling water.
"Let me see that," she said.
"What?" he mumbled around his thumb.
"Your thumb."
He showed it to her. She sucked her breath between her teeth as blood seeped again from the tiny cut.
"It’s nothing." He shrugged, taking the brand from her.
"It is not nothing."
He stuck the thumb back in his mouth.
"Don’t do that! What if there’s infection? What if it—“
"Shh!" he said, jerking his thumb out and pointing toward the spring.
Already a wasp hovered near the trap, its striped hindquarters pulsing. It neared and retreated, neared and retreated. Then it settled slowly down upon the bloody puff, its antennae twitching as it sampled the fare. It apparently decided this was too great a feast to eat all at once, so it collected the feather-light prize and rose into the air.
Sakote exploded from his crouch, yanking Mattie after him.
"Come!" he cried. "We must follow him!"
He must have lost his mind, Mattie thought. Why else would a grown man leap and gallop and dodge and weave across a meadow after an insect? Yet she went mad right alongside him, for she never let go of his hand. Giggles like bubbly champagne spilled out of her as they dashed crazily through the grass after the yellow-jacket, which took a route more circuitous than a courting swain driving his sweetheart home. By the time it arrived at its nest, Mattie had laughed and run so hard she could scarcely breathe.
Sakote’s chest heaved, too, and his eyes shone with a hunter’s triumph as he spotted the papery abode clinging to the underside of a pine limb. He murmured a string of words in his own language. She didn’t need to ask what he said. She’d learned that the Konkows thanked and blessed whatever they took from nature, be it rock or plant or animal.
"Now what?" she asked, laughter still rippling under her breath.
"Now we find a dead pine branch with needles."
Whatever he planned, it certainly seemed an elaborate scheme just for a few yellow-jacket eggs. She wondered what was so special about them anyway.
He found what he was looking for and lit the needles with the brand. Smoke curled off the tips, and Sakote blew on the ends to insure they would continue burning. Then he slowly waved the smoking branch around the wasp nest. Mattie cringed. Surely the smoke aggravated the yellow-jackets with their angry buzzing and their twitching tails.
But to her surprise, they seemed to calm. A few of them dropped off of the nest, and the movements of the rest slowed. Sakote handed her the brand and the smoky branch and used the flat edge of his knife to brush the remaining wasps off the nest. Then he carefully cut the nest from the tree and tucked it into the satchel he wore at his waist.
"What do you do with them?"
"The yellow-jacket eggs?"
She nodded.
"Eat them."
She wrinkled her nose. It sounded like another food to add to her list of Konkow delicacies she’d rather not try.
Still, she had to admire their resourcefulness. Never would she have suspected one could survive like this, living not from a cook’s daily excursions to the local shops, nor even out of the tins a delivery mule could pack to the mining camp, but off of the gifts of the land. It pleased her. And while some of the suppers she’d shared with the tribe qualified for that list—acorn bread was stiff and gritty and slightly bitter, and acorn mush was downright bland—there was nothing quite so tasty as fresh-caught salmon and wild mint tea, roasted hazelnuts and sweet manzanita cider.
"You’ll try them," Sakote told her, his voice half-teasing, half-warning. She supposed he hadn’t gone through all those antics to have her turn up her nose at the fruits of his labor.
"All right, I’ll try them." Then she reconsidered. "You do cook them, don’t you?"
"Yes. They’re my friend Noa’s favorite."
She’d heard of Noa before, mostly from Hintsuli, once from Sakote. She knew only that he was from Hawaii, that he had toys, and that he was married to Sakote’s sister.
"He says they taste like your sweetcorn," he said.
He said it just like that, sweetcorn, as if it were one word. She smiled. The way he spoke could be so charming, like the way he said Mah-tee. It wasn’t the Konkow way to use proper names. They referred to each other as brother, mother, friend. But sometimes she ignored Sakote until he was forced to call for her by name, because she liked the way Mah-tee rolled off of his tongue.
"Have you ever tasted corn?" she ask
ed.
He grinned and shook his head, and Mattie suddenly experienced a profound longing for this savage who seemed to be half-boy, half-man. She wanted to introduce him to the pleasures of her world—oyster soup, mince pie, and tinned peaches—as he had shown her his. "You would love corn. It’s warm and sweet."
He smiled again, and Mattie saw the devil enter his eye, the sly twinkle that meant he was up to mischief. "It couldn’t be as warm and sweet as the kiss you make for me."
He stared directly at her as he said it, unashamed, forthright, apparently unaware of the intimacy of his words. Mattie’s cheeks grew hot. In New York, her Aunt Emily would have expected her to put the knave in his place. Men didn’t speak so blatantly about such things.
He was staring at her mouth now, and the smoky charcoal of his eyes made the blood surge in her veins. The corner of his lip curved up, and her own lips parted in response. Then he tipped his head and bent toward her. Goodness, he was making a kiss for her now. She let her eyes flutter closed and waited breathlessly.
CHAPTER 22
The kiss never came.
Sakote leaped back with a loud yelp and a string of Konkow words Mattie couldn’t decipher. He smacked his hand across his naked thigh and began leaping about as if the devil had a hold of his soul.
"Come!" He snatched the now extinguished pine branch from her, casting it to the ground, and relieved her of the brand as well. Then he seized her hand, and they were off and running again. Mattie figured out what all the fuss was about when she glanced behind to see a cloud of angry wasps coming straight for them. While she and Sakote were speculating on that kiss, the effects of the smoke had evidently worn off, and now the yellow-jackets were hot for revenge.
Vote Then Read: Volume III Page 119