“None,” I said.
She said, “None at all?” She flicked my hand. “Are you kidding?”
I said, “I’ve hung out with girls, been around them in Camp 4 or at the bridge, but I never dated anyone.”
Lucy smiled and nodded.
I moved a checker but with no game plan. Moving just to move. I said, “You’d have to understand my parents. What they believe and where we live. If you saw it, you’d understand.”
Lucy tapped a rock on the slab, two beats. Three, then four.
I said, “How would I meet a girl?”
Lucy set up another double jump.
I moved to block her.
“You’d meet a girl in Tuolumne,” she said.
“Right.”
She leaned across the board and kissed me. “And you’d be so happy.”
“Yes,” I said.
Lucy was playing outside in, keeping my checkers in the middle. The game wasn’t close.
She said, “You want to keep living like that?”
“No,” I said, “I mean, maybe…” But I didn’t know.
Lucy leaned across and kissed me again. She sat back and crossed her arms. “When will you know?”
I stared at the board. There was no way to win this checkers game. I was already down four.
Lucy said, “Your move.”
I moved, but I had no strategy. Each play worse than the one before.
“Some of these things…” she said. “Some of these things are…” she jumped me again, “they are what they are.”
I was losing by five now.
I looked at the board trying to think of something to do, but saw nothing there.
Lucy’s arms were crossed, her biceps strong. I admired her shoulders. I looked at her face then, the way her lips were set as she stared at the board. Her eyes and dark eyelashes over her sunburned cheeks. The only girl.
I moved a checker and said, “We could get married.”
She’d had her head down, following my moves, but her head popped up when I said that. She said, “Are you joking?” She put her fingers to her mouth and pinched her bottom lip.
I tapped one of my rocks on the board. Looked out at the camp and the lake. “No,” I said. “Actually I’m not. Do you want to get married?”
She said, “Really?”
I looked right at her. The flush in her face. The way she held that lip with her finger and her thumb. She let go, and I saw her hand shake. “Really?” she said again.
“Yes.”
Lucy folded her legs underneath her and sat back on her ankles. Closed her eyes.
I said, “What are you thinking?”
“Okay,” she said. Her eyes were still closed. She nodded. “Okay,” she said again. She opened her eyes, leaned across the board and kissed me. Then she stood up. She had my checkers in her hand, the rocks that she’d won. She took a rock and threw it at the road sign down below. And missed.
I stood up next to her. “So, yes?”
“Yes,” she said. She threw a second rock, and that one hit the sign with a clank.
Lucy hopped forward and screamed.
I screamed too. Then I began to throw my checkers at the sign.
One by one, we threw the rocks out at the yellow road marker. A few of them hit the metal, clanking, and we screamed like lit gasoline.
• • •
I came into my parents’ camp as the sun set on the bottom of the nimbus. Sky like the underbelly of a pink ocean.
The ’46 Plymouth was in the high grass near the creek. Full gas can next to the tree. In winter, my parents slept on the bench seats, front and back, inside the car, but their summer tarp-tent was hung off to the side of camp now.
My father was sitting in front of the car, shaping a figurine out of a chunk of incense cedar, working ticks off with his sheath knife. The soft, straight-grained wood whittled off in dips.
I hadn’t seen him in almost two months. He looked older than I remembered.
He smiled when he saw me. “Did you like the job?”
“Yes,” I said, “and I met someone.” I’d decided to tell my parents right away. Not wait. I said, “A girl named Lucy.”
He turned his knife through the cedar at an eye, put pressure on the back of his knife with his thumb. A small chunk of bright came off. I could smell the sap.
He said, “So you like her?”
“Yes. We’re getting married.”
He stopped whittling. Butted the knife on his thigh, blade up.
I said, “Soon. At the end of this month.”
He wiped the splinters off his knees. Used his thumb to feel for burrs on the knife. “This month?”
“Yes.”
He said, “So you’re serious.”
“Yes,” I said.
He found a small burr and examined it. Took granite granules from next to his chair and set them on the sideways blade. Ran them across with a pressed thumb. He said, “And you’ve thought this through? Thought about everything?”
I saw a loose rock at the fire ring. I squatted to wedge it back in, took a smaller granite piece and puzzled it tight. I said, “No. I probably haven’t thought of everything.”
I looked at him and he raised his eyebrows. Still working that burr with the granules across his knife blade.
I said, “But I will.” I shimmed the loose rock with another flake. Wedged it tight. I said, “She and I will.”
My father popped the burr. Held up his blade and looked across. Popped again. Then he scraped the knife sideways on a block of wood to see for catch. He said, “So you’re willing to make a mistake.”
I found another loose rock in the fire ring and worked that one. Shimmed with flakes.
My mother returned to camp with full water buckets, looking too thin to carry the weight. She set the buckets down and hugged me. I could feel her ribs.
My father pointed his knife at me. He said, “Tenaya says he’s getting married.”
My mother’s fingers curled, made a fist. Her exhale sounded a note.
My father said, “This month.”
I hugged my mother and she gripped my back. I felt the ten points of her fingertips.
CHAPTER 4
This is how the war starts. Miners shoot a Miwok trapper in the back and call him a “brave.” They tell the newspaper that he’s been a horse-thief Indian.
The next war party leaves the mangled bodies of Boden’s four companions, one of the men skinned alive. These are true stories, your history.
The Miwoks are divided. Juarez and Jose Rey are preparing for war. Those leaders are in the mountains, waiting. Others are living in mining camps, forgetting former lives, their wives and children. Drinking whiskey in the daylight.
During the militia’s first campaign into the mountains, twenty-two Indians are killed without a single death among the settlers. The soldiers light the wigwams with irons from the fire, and the panicked warriors run out without any organization. Jose Rey is one of the first to be shot down, and the soldiers believe he has died.
The Yosemiti hear everything through runners. They hear that the ghosts will never come to the Valley, and they believe the story.
Tenaya is up north in the high country. Watching past North Dome. He sees a great cloud come from the southwest and blow over Glacier Point, filling the U. It drops down and hangs like fog among the trees. But it is not fog.
My father said, “It’s like 1850.”
“No. It isn’t,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It is now. There are new things going on.”
I threw my water bottle on top of my day gear. Cinched my pack. Then I hiked out of camp.
• • •
The night of the mountain lion. Lion like winter storm, like the metal mirrors in the Camp 4 bathrooms, dull, reflecting, and scratched. Of the winter flood and flashes.
I took the path across Swinging Bridge. Saw the logjams left over from the swell in January when the Merced flowed a quarter-mile ac
ross, fifteen feet above the top of the bank. The bears come now to paw at the watermark, wondering about all the berry bushes lost downstream.
I hiked Four Mile Trail under Sentinel, Union, Moran, the granite dust puffing in the heat. The smell of every summer, the dust and the green acorns not ripe hanging on the trees, and the bitter taste of the soft, green nut that wicked the moisture from inside my cheeks.
Up in the pines I met the Pohono Trail near Glacier Point. Then I could run, had to run to catch her before dark. I wanted to talk to her, ask her about the New Parks Plan, hear that everything was okay. I wanted to see if she was still real.
To North Wawona, past Bridalveil, maybe North Wawona by eight or nine o’clock. Running hard above the meadow, I noticed the easy cool in the trees and the smell of the wind coming over the high stream. The half-light slant like mist filling. The new dew smell.
And I saw the lion.
Up on split granite, rock that sluffs old skin, the lion waiting, hoping for a short hunt. I ran underneath him. But I saw him too, saw him as his body tensed.
The lion jumped soft yellow above me as I stepped back. Then he hit me and we fell downhill toward the meadow. Both the same size. Both animals. It was like that in the meadow, and I gouged at his eyes and kept my forearm over my own throat. I’d watched lions kill deer in El Cap Meadow in the spring and I knew what he would do.
We were face to face, and I could smell the rotten meat smell of his breath. Then we rolled and I saw the patterns of the pines above us like woodcuts displayed along the lodge wall.
Each moment clipped, with a gap between to keep it slow, slow at the freeze, that slow.
The lion rolled and I rolled with him. Then he bit my hand. He was growling, thrashing and biting, and I was yelling, and I didn’t know at first that my hand was caught. I didn’t see it go into his mouth. But I felt the bones give, felt the bones crack with a wet sound, a dull wet like saplings, not dry sticks, not short and pop pop but a slow clssst clssst sound.
My hand turned in the lion’s mouth, the pain striking up my wrist, up the sinews of my arm, and my shoulder twitched hard with the sudden shock of pain and the wrenching. Then I felt the Valley in me, everything tighten, down, close and close, and the Valley was with me, and the Valley was me. I was with the Valley in the meadow, and slow now. Slow again.
I felt my broken hand ball up inside and began to force it down, push and force it down the lion’s throat, slow, catching and sliding, forcing until that fist was fifteen inches down, down to the elbow. I felt the choking of the whole animal, the lion seizing.
• • •
The lion was on top of me, over my legs, a blanket of rocks. I pushed it to sit up. Struggled and cleared my legs, but my arm was still inside. And I saw that the animal was not breathing, that he was dead, something inside him broken when I forced my fist down into the bottom of his throat.
I felt the lion on my right arm, his whole weight, 150 pounds, and I ripped at the mouth, punched his teeth and jaw. Punched myself too, my right arm that was fixed inside and my punching was nothing, and the skin nicked off my left fist’s knuckles when I hit his yellow teeth, the backs of my knuckles turned red from the yellow sharps of his teeth, turned red and dripped.
I punched once more, and hit my own bicep. Pink to swell. I watched the colors.
• • •
My father says, “You’ll do this to me?”
“To you?” I say. I don’t know what he means.
“Yes, to me. My whole life. And yours. Everything I’ve told you about the history.”
I say, “This has nothing to do with you.”
He laughs. He is retying a double half hitch at the tent corner. “Is that right?” he says.
“That’s right,” I say. “It doesn’t.”
He looks at me. “I never touched you,” he says. “Not one time. You’ve lived soft, Tenaya.”
I look downhill at the dark trees. The slope where the granite scatters. “I don’t think so,” I say. “Maybe you’ve been good, but never soft. And I’m not.”
He hooks his thumbs in the sides of his shirt, pulling the edges out into triangles. He says, “I don’t ask much, but I’m asking now.”
“What,” I say. “What are you asking?”
• • •
I moved the lion between my legs, like a huge dog. The waxy scent of its hide and new urine. It’d let go on my legs and shoes when I choked it, the smell of acrid wet on my wool socks.
I made myself count to hold off panic, a trick I’d learned while climbing. Pause between each number. Count up slowly and count down.
My heart was two pieces, ore-heavy, an echo knocking into itself da-duh, da-duh, da-duh. I could feel the metal at my lungs. And it was darker now. Night coming. The blond hair of the lion beginning to glow in the last light, glowing like one tent in a meadow.
And she looked like that. Fifteen years ago. Her skin. Whiter on the riverbank, whiter against the gray rock. Pale-blue lips. She seemed to glow. I remembered the cold of her cheeks, the color of river stones.
I opened my eyes. My heart still thumping but my head slower now, and I could think. I used the point of my left elbow and my body weight to force the lower jaw of the lion. I leaned until the jaw snapped under the point of my elbow, until the jaw broke like a beer bottle inside a towel. With the jaw broken, the lion’s mouth was not as tight, and I began to pry at the throat, pulling to retrieve my broken right hand.
Sweat dripping. Pulling and slow progress now. Big drops of sweat off my nose down onto the glowing fur. Prying and pulling, my sweat wetting the lion’s head, and pulling still.
Then the hand came out. My hand. I saw the turned claw, the broken fingers rounded down and in, like a black bear’s paw, my hand no longer human. All four bones behind the knuckles were fractured like the fingers in front of them, the fourth bone sticking out through the skin. I couldn’t feel the pinky, or the small bone coming out behind it. I couldn’t feel that side of my hand at all, and I used my left thumb to push the stick of bone back through the skin, back into place. Then I flattened my palm on the ground and straightened the other fingers against the dirt.
I knew I would feel the hand soon enough, when everything came in, when my heart slowed. But my heart was still beating like stones, pounding and pounding. And I couldn’t stop that beat, even with my mind quiet.
I knew the pain could rush like a spring. Turn the cracked block of ice in the river until it hit the sweep at the top of the falls, and wait, edge heavy.
I couldn’t make North Wawona now. Not in the dark. But I could pull together a drag pile, a debris shelter. So I scavenged. Kicked at things with my feet until I found one big stick that I pulled over to a split rock. Then I found cross boughs of deadfall, and laid them as tight as I could with one hand. I couldn’t interlace them, so I covered them thick with whatever I could find, built up an insulation layer over the top. Then I scraped piles of needles with the insides of my feet, big piles of fresh needles, and smaller piles of loam, kicking them into the shelter before swimming in with my good arm.
Lucy would be gone in the morning. She was off to Merced with her aunt and I wouldn’t catch her now. I tried to picture her face riding in a car.
Then it was all the way dark and the pain seized. Pulsing. Pain from my fingertips to my shoulder, down the back of my neck, the muscles next to my spine cramping with the ache. I closed my eyes to shut out the throbbing. Then I waited. Pounding and waiting. Waiting through the dark with my eyes open, for the first hint of morning light, waiting until I could begin walking toward North Wawona again.
At dawn, my hand was so swollen that I couldn’t open or close my fingers. I used my shirt for a sling, pulled the knot tight with my teeth, and hiked all morning to the tourist camp. The first-aid tent there was staffed by Berkeley and Stanford medical students. A medical student came out to meet me, her clothes bright and clean.
She said, “Come here often?” She smiled. She was a l
ittle older than me but young. Pale and blue-eyed.
I tried to smile back. “No,” I said. My hand looked like meat turning rancid, purpled and gray.
She saw the hand and my small bone poking through the skin, pushed out again by the pressure of the swelling. She said, “Well, that doesn’t look good at all.”
“No,” I said. “It was a lion.” I picked at the bone, touching where it stuck out. I traced the dark purple circle around the puncture.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “A mountain lion?”
I nodded. “Last night near Bridalveil Creek.”
She tucked her blond hair behind her ear, then called back to the aid station. She said, “Guys, I think you’d better come see this.”
As she examined my hand, the other medical students asked me to explain what happened. I told the story from when I first saw the lion above me on the rock. I told about rolling downhill, the fight, how the lion choked on my fist.
One of the students kicked at a hill of dirt. Another squinted his face and shook his head. I knew they didn’t believe me.
The young woman who was inspecting my hand said, “Can a man really kill a mountain lion with his fist?” She looked at the other medical students.
No one said anything, but they all shook their heads.
She said, “If you wait until this afternoon, we’ll have an orthopedic resident come in. He’ll be able to reset your hand and cast you if it doesn’t need surgery.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem. Why don’t you come in here and we’ll make you more comfortable?”
I followed her into the medical tent. She pointed to a cot draped with a white sheet. “You can lie down there.”
She left and came back a couple minutes later. She had a little white cup in one hand, two pills inside, and a Dixie cup of water.
I swallowed both pills. Drank the water.
She said, “That’ll keep the pain down. You’ll feel a little loopy, dreamy, but it’ll help a lot.”
I said, “Thank you,” again. My hand felt like I was holding it in a fire.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll go see about some food for you.”
The pills hit and my head floated. I lay back on the cot. Watched the tent’s ceiling drop toward me and back up. When a wind gust came, the tent shivered like my father when he washed himself in Ribbon Creek.
Graphic the Valley Page 6