Native Gold (11 page)

She wearily punched her pillow flat and smirked. Some mountain man she was.

Mattie hadn’t used a broom since the time she’d picked up the maid’s when she was twelve years old, only to have it slapped out of her hand by her Aunt Margaret. But she soon found there was no trick to it, and despite the tenderness of her shoulder, by late morning, every cobweb, ash, and ball of lint had been swept from the tiny room and out the door.

Encouraged by the improvement, she decided to make use of the scraps of dirty calico drooping on nails stuck into the walls. She ripped them down, wet them in the bucket of water she’d hauled up from the creek, and set about wiping down the shelves, table, chairs, even the stove, which blackened the fabric beyond redemption.

Of course, she thought, tossing the rags into the inky water and flopping down on the bed, now something would have to be done about the enormous cracks in the walls. Apparently, wallpaper was out of the question. More fabric was in order, she supposed, something in a cheery yellow, something flowery. She’d have to send for some chintz from Marysville the next time the express man came. By then, with any luck, she’d have harvested enough gold from the good doctor’s claim to pay for improvements.

The following month she’d purchase a new down mattress and coverlet. Then she’d order new oilcloth for the table, curtain fabric, and a pane of real glass for the window.

If she planned carefully, setting aside the profit she didn’t need for food and a new frock now and then, by the end of the year she might have, if not a mansion, at least a well-furnished cottage of which she could be proud.

She let her gaze drift to the tools propped in the corner—the pickaxe, shovel, and miner’s pan. Tomorrow she’d make her first attempt at gold panning. Thank God there was gold in California, or she might find herself destitute indeed. There was no occupation for a decent lady with limited domestic talent, unless she resigned herself to becoming wife to one of the callus-handed miners of Paradise Bar.

It shamed her to realize she wasn’t honestly ready to settle down, despite the fact that marriage had brought her here in the first place. Now she considered Dr. Harrison’s passing a blessing in disguise. She might have found herself shackled to a man who gambled every afternoon and drank himself senseless every night. In fact, if the collection of empty bottles behind the house and the half-drained flask of spirits Mattie found tucked among the calomel pills and quinine powder in his black bag were any indication, the doctor had imbibed to excess.

No, Mattie would take her chances first with the Harrison claim, a fertile plot of streamside land with treasure ripe for the picking.

Today, however, she’d put her house in order and learn to cook.

Now that the cabin was free of dust, she felt safer starting a fire for her midday meal. She tucked a couple of chunky logs inside the stove and used Amos’s trick for romancing the flame, cramming handfuls of dry pine needles between the pieces of wood. The fire caught on the first match, and ten minutes later, still burning, it chewed slowly away at the undersides of the logs.

A victorious thrill coursed through her until she realized she had to fetch another bucket of water for the beans and coffee. Peering in anxiously at the blaze and adding one more log for good measure, Mattie prayed it wouldn’t extinguish itself. She dumped the dirty water next to a pine sapling off the porch and scurried off to refresh her supply.

Thankfully, the fire was still burning when she returned. She distributed the water between the pots for coffee and beans, saving out a little to mix with the flour and the sourdough starter Amos had given her to make biscuits. A half hour later, her first home-cooked meal bubbled and baked atop the stove.

Dusting the flour from her hands, Mattie decided to do a bit of drawing while the beans simmered. A pair of baby blue jays had recently hatched in a nearby nest lodged in the low crook of a sugar pine, and she wanted to capture the fuzzy-headed, greedy-beaked creatures in her sketchbook.

She clamped a pair of pencils between her teeth and, sliding the finished drawings from her portfolio onto the table, tucked the sketchbook under her arm. There was just enough time before the biscuits baked to make a decent drawing.

Of course, once she’d sketched the nest, complete with intertwined twigs, bits of eggshell, and scrawny chicks with gaping maws, Mattie spied a wild tiger lily hidden among the grass, begging to be rendered, its black spots stark against the bright orange hue of its petals. Mattie couldn’t resist. And after that, she spied a tiny lizard sunning itself on a rock in its mottled gray armor, flexing its elbows and winking its sleepy eyes. She’d wandered far from the cabin, putting the finishing touches on a study of lichen lace on rough oak, when she remembered the biscuits.

PROUD MOTHER.

Hintsuli’s heart fluttered as he held the thin white hide between his trembling fingers, staring at the...what did his friend Noa call them?.."letters" at the bottom.

He should not be here in Coh-ah-nuya’s cabin. Sakote had warned him away. The child-eater might return and want to add him to her supper.

But Hintsuli was transfixed by the quail on the strange hide, the quail that he could see, by the pale sunlight leaching through the cloth window, were real, but somehow not real. He ran his thumb over the feathers. He could feel nothing. The quail lived on the piece of hide. They looked like they might scurry off at any moment, but something kept them there. Magic. Coh-ah-nuya’s magic. The quail spirits were trapped on the hide. Coh-ah-nuya had trapped them.

The bitter smoke of Coh-ah-nuya’s supper was beginning to fill the cabin when Hintsuli heard a noise from outside. His heart bounded against his ribs. Coh-ah-nuya returned! He must run! If she caught him...it was too terrible to think about.

He glanced at the magic hide. Sakote had told him it was wrong to take the things of the white man. But he couldn’t leave the quail behind.

Clutching it to his belly, he slipped out the gap in the window’s cloth covering and lit lightly on the grass outside.

Wonomi, The Great Spirit, was with him, for the woman didn’t see him, even when he crept past the entrance of her
hubo
.

When he reached the forest, he ran. And he kept running until his chest ached.

He stopped not far from his village, but he wouldn’t go there yet. Sakote had told him yesterday to stay away from the white man’s camp, from Coh-ah-nuya, and he had disobeyed. If Sakote found out... Hintsuli let out a great sigh, imagining his brother’s fierce frown.

Hintsuli wasn’t to blame. He couldn’t resist adventure. Even his sister said he was cursed with the curiosity of the raccoon.

He flopped down on a mossy mound and gazed up at the pine boughs overhead, woven together like a Konkow basket. Hintsuli wasn’t afraid of the white man. The
willa
were interesting. They had food that came in little cans and knives made of shiny metal. Their faces were full of hair, like the bear, and their skin was sometimes pale like moonlight and sometimes as red as sunset. They didn’t gather acorns or seeds or grasshoppers, but were given gifts of food by men who arrived every new moon on
lyktakymsy
—riding-dogs—which Noa called "horses." They didn’t hunt for fish in the streams, but instead searched for little yellow rocks that made them whoop with joy. And they had...toys.

Noa had given him the white man’s spinning toy. It had power. Hintsuli would sit in one place while the sun walked across the sky, spinning and spinning it. He could keep it spinning by itself for as long as it took Sakote to eat a bowl of acorn mush. It was a magic toy, and Hintsuli wanted another one of the white man’s playthings.

He rested his head against the lichen-covered oak trunk and looked at the quail on the hide again. This was surely a magic toy. Maybe he could learn its secret. If he discovered how to release the quail spirits, maybe he could use the magic hide himself. He glowered hard at the flat gray birds. If he set them free, if he made the hide empty, he could fill it again with whatever he wanted. He could trap bad spirits there. His eyes widened. He could trap Coh-ah-nuya there! How proud Sakote would be then. The tribe would sing victory songs for him, and the Konkow people would tell his story for many leaf-falls to come.

For a long time he sat in the speckled sunlight, concentrating, frowning at the hide, pleading silently with Wonomi, but the quail stuck fast.

With a sigh, he carefully folded the hide and tucked it into his breechcloth. He must return to the village now, before Sakote began to worry. Perhaps it wasn’t the right time. Perhaps the hide’s magic wouldn’t work now. He would carry it with him until the time was right, until Wonomi granted him the power to use it.

By the time Mattie dashed in the door, the cottage was filled with noxious gray smoke and the biscuits were burned to charcoal. Upon closer inspection, she found the coffee a thick black tar that clung to the sides of the pot, and the handful of beans, still hard as pebbles, had swollen to proportions fit for an army.

"Damn!" she shouted for the first time in her life, waving the blanket from her bed to shoo the smoke out the door.

When the haze diminished, she sank dismally onto the stool in the middle of the room, which tipped back and forth on its mismatched legs—just for spite, she was sure. The day was getting on. There wasn’t time to cook another supper. Reluctantly, for she knew they were hard to come by, she took a tin of peaches down from the shelf and made a meal of the sweet fruit. At this rate, she thought, in another month she’d be able to fit
two
of her into the rich satin ball gowns she’d left in New York.

It took Mattie the better part of an hour and the last of her strength to scrub the burnt residue from her pots. By then, so little daylight remained that she had to light several candles to see.

She’d tossed her new sketches atop the old on the table, and she took a moment to study them now. The baby blue jays made her smile with their fuzzy, wrinkled necks and ugly, straining beaks. The lichen had been difficult to depict, with its curious texture and convoluted form, but she’d managed to recreate the contrast of the tiger lily’s spots without the use of color, which pleased her.

Shuffling through the old sketches, she could see improvement. These newer illustrations possessed more detail, more life. The pencil strokes were surer, well-defined, bold. The animals looked as if they might leap off the...

Mattie frowned and perused the drawings again. Something was missing.

PROUD MOTHER—her sketch of the quail. It should be on top. She leafed through the pages. Nothing. One by one, she sorted through them again. There were drawings of monkeys and Panama natives, New York harbor and the Sacramento dock, renderings of old men and young squirrels, dozens of tiny studies of branches and hands and blossoms. But nowhere could she locate her family of quail. She glanced quickly around the room. Where had she left the drawing? It wasn’t as if there were many places for it to hide.