Native Gold (42 page)

Part of her wanted to stay, the part that threatened to crumble into a thousand pieces if she had to think about life without Sakote. But she couldn’t. Already she caused strife between Sakote and his people. Already she brought danger to the Konkows. He would grow to hate her if she stayed.

No, she had to end it now. Quickly. For him. For his people. For her sanity.

"I have to go back. I
want
to go back," she said, nearly gagging on the lie. She lowered her eyes, unable to bear the pain in Sakote’s face.

Surprise loosened his grip. "You don’t wish to live here?" His voice sounded like dead wood, hollow, empty.

The brittle laugh she forced to her lips clanged in her own ears and echoed bitterly in her soul. "Here? Among savages?" She felt his hurt in the way his fingers tightened on her shoulders. Yet it was what she must do—hurt him. "I’ll admit, it’s been fascinating, these last weeks, seeing how your people live in these little huts and eat roots and berries. But surely you didn’t think I meant to
live
in your village?" she continued, her voice too bright, too cruel. God, she hated herself, hated what she was doing to him.

His eyes smoldered dark gray now, resolute and dangerous. "You will stay,
kulem
," he said, softly this time, but unyielding, uncompromising. "
Akina
." He extinguished the torch in the dirt and crawled between the layers of rabbit fur. "You will stay."

Mattie chewed on her knuckles to stifle her weeping and climbed in beside him, but dared not torture herself by touching him. She waited until she heard his deep, even breathing, then stole silently from his side.

She took only one memento with her, and when Noa saw it, his eyes went as dark and sweet as molasses. He tossed a deerskin cloak over her and, bidding farewell to Towani, helped Mattie find her way in the night back to Paradise Bar.

Fourteen days later, Zeke was still talking about it.

"You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when Miss Mattie sashayed into camp," he said, wincing as Tom, the closest thing Paradise Bar had to a doctor these days, poked at the puckered pink flesh of his healing gut wound. "She sure did go pale as a frog’s underbelly when she first laid eyes on us."

Tom rocked the hat back on his bandaged head. "Well, what do ye expect, with all the lass has been through? First that Harrison devil terrorizin’ the camp and then bein’ kidnapped by the Injuns. ‘Tis a wonder she can hold her hands steady enough ta tie her own bonnet."

Swede, almost as good as new except for the extra navel Harrison had carved him, scratched gingerly at his stitches. As a point of fact, Mattie
didn’’t
tie her own bonnet. Actually, she didn’t wear a bonnet at all. She’d taken to pulling her hair back into a long tail like the Injuns and wearing moccasins. And even though Granny had offered to make some bone buttons for her, she’d refused, preferring to keep the rawhide laces on her dress. But Swede was afraid dressing like a primitive wasn’t the only thing she’d picked up on her visit with the savages, which was why he’d called the meeting this morning.

Tom was partly right. Mattie had been to hell and back over the past several weeks. The miners had been worried sick about her. At first, they thought she’d died in the fire. Hell, they’d even given her a proper funeral, or what little they could manage in their state of affliction, and put up a cross right beside the ones for Dash and Bobby. It wasn’t till Amos went to visit his friend Noa in the valley that they learned the truth. Mattie was living with the Injuns. And right then and there, the boys decided to hit the warpath, to pay the Diggers a visit and get back what was rightfully theirs.

It never got that far. Later that evening, right after the men returned from panning and took down the cross that read "Miss Mathilda Hardwicke, The Sweetheart of Paradise Bar," the formerly deceased, a little weathered, but pretty as you please, waltzed into camp with Noa.

Of course, she was overjoyed to see him and the boys alive and sad to hear tell of Dash and Bobby. She was laughing one moment and weeping the next. Swede had grinned and told her it’d take more than buckshot and a Bowie knife to do him in. But there had been a tear in his eye when he said it, because for a while there, nobody had been sure he’d recover from the nasty gash in his belly that had drained him almost dry of blood.

They moved Miss Mattie into Bobby’s cabin right away and gave her provisions to fatten up her scrawny bones. But though she seemed glad enough to see the miners, the light in her eyes never made it much above the flicker of a short-wicked candle.

Of course, they’d been doled their share of misery, too, thanks to Doc Jim’s brother. Hell, they’d buried a couple of good men, and it was only by a pure miracle that young Ben Cooper was still breathing. That bullet had come damn close to his heart. The rest of the boys were pretty cut up, too. Harley had lost a couple of fingers, and Jeremy had come within inches of getting himself gelded.

The door to Tom’s cabin swung open with a leathery creak, letting in a blinding flood of sunlight along with the miners who’d come to hear what Swede had to say.

"Howdy, Doc." Jeremy leaned on his homemade cane as he limped in. He’d taken to calling Tom "Doc" on account of him sewing up his family heirlooms so nice and neat.

Harley waggled his fingers in greeting, all three of them.

"How is the patient, eh?" If Zeke didn’t know better, he’d swear Frenchy had positioned himself just right for that rakish knife scar he now sported proudly just under his cheekbone.

"Good as new," Tom declared, lifting Zeke’s shirt up so the whole world could take a gander.

"Damnation!" Zeke groused. "I ain’t on exhibition!"

Close to two dozen miners milled in, crowding into the tiny room which was really only fit for three. Still, being the biggest cabin in Paradise Bar, it was the most fitting place to convene.

They all agreed something had to be done. Mattie wasn’t well, hadn’t been for days now. And it wasn’t just the trauma she’d been through. Swede was afraid it might be some disease she’d contracted from the Injuns.

She wasn’t eating. Even when Amos made her a mince pie, she took a few bites and pushed it aside. When Tom brought her Hangtown stew made with his last tin of oysters, she turned a singular shade of green and puked her little heart out on the front porch. The next day, she fainted in the middle of the road and would have hit the dirt if Frenchy hadn’t been there to catch her.

"Did ye take her breakfast?" Tom asked Amos.

"Made her my best sourdough rolls and peach puddin’. Didn’t touch a thing."

"She’s still feelin’ poorly?" Tom asked Ben, whose turn it was to keep a secret watch on her.

"All mornin’ long, every half-hour or so, she come runnin’ out of the house to retch into the bushes."

"If she keeps this up, she’s like to die," Jeremy announced, and Ben whacked his brother for stating the obvious.

Jasper scratched his stubbled chin. "Maybe we ought to get ourselves a doc, a real doc, to take a look at her."

"Pah! It is her heart, I tell you," Frenchy insisted, as he’d been insisting for days. "She is in love. She cannot bear the thought of—“

"Oh, for Pete’s sake!" Granny elbowed her way to the front of the crowd, shaking her head. "Don’t you fools know nothin’? The dang filly’s a-breedin’!"

Silence hit so sudden and complete you could have heard the crack of dawn. Swede thought the boys looked the way deer did at night when you came upon them unawares with a lamp—all stiff and fascinated and confused.

Finally Tom whispered, "Do ye think?"

"Of course!" Granny answered, irritated at the ignorance of menfolk. "I’d say, by the look of things, the timin’ and whatnot, it was some Injun planted his papoose in her."

Everyone gasped, but Swede knew just who that Injun was.

"The savage!" Frenchy hissed in outrage.

The cussing flew loose and long and loud then, so loud that Swede could hardly make himself heard.

"Calm down, boys! Calm down!" He finally resorted to grabbing Jeremy’s cane and banging it on the floor to get their attention. "All this whoopin’ and hollerin’ ain’t gonna fix nothin’. We gotta take action. Seems to me it’s high time we scared up a man for Miss Mattie."

Sakote watched the trout circle again and tried to focus his thoughts. The fish’s dull gold scales caught only a small shimmer of sunlight. It swam against the current, hovering for a moment in the swirling water. Sakote drew the spear slowly back, waiting, waiting. Then he hurled it forward. It hit the stream with a sloppy splash, and the fish swam away, unperturbed.

Behind him, Hintsuli giggled. Sakote managed a rueful smile for his little brother, but the expression didn’t come easily to his face. A man shouldn’t hunt or fish when his heart was troubled, and Wonomi was showing him the folly of this. He’d fished all afternoon with Hintsuli, who sprang from rock to rock, talking to salamanders, making pictures in the mud with a stick, laughing at Sakote every time he missed another fish with his spear, and still he had no catch.

It was amusing for Hintsuli to see his big brother, whom the headman had praised as the village’s greatest hunter at the Kaminehaitsen, fail so completely. But the boy didn’t understand how unhappiness weakened a man’s arm, how grief made his aim unsteady. He also couldn’t envision the cold times that would come at the end of
se-meni
, autumn. He’d never seen what happened to a people when there weren’t enough fish harvested from the stream, not enough deer hunted, when the oak trees slept and the snows of
ko-meni
came, killing the plants that kept the bellies of the Konkows full.

Sakote had been such a boy once, before the sickness stole his people, before the white man stole his food. He’d grown out of his innocence, and he’d thought there was nothing left for the
willa
to steal. He was wrong. One of them had stolen his heart.

He hauled the fishing spear back in by its fiber line, letting his gaze drift along the sun-flecked ridges of the water, remembering the pain of Mati’s betrayal and the brave mask he’d worn at the Kaminehaitsen.

A vision had come to him in the dream world on the night that he decided to challenge the headman’s sons. The white eagle with two eggs had flown over him, but this time she didn’t come to his hand. Instead, she flew away until she was a speck in the sky. And though he understood the vision, he didn’t understand how to change it. By the time he awoke on the morning of the challenge, the eagle had fled. Mati was gone.

His heart had cracked like an obsidian point into many pieces, so many he feared it couldn’t be repaired. He’d snapped and snarled at Noa like the wolf at an enemy, but his harsh words mended nothing. And so, for the sake of his people and his pride, like the strong warrior he was, he bound his heart up again with sinew and didn’t speak of its weakness.

The next day, the first day of the Kaminehaitsen, Sakote danced with the long feather ropes to the beat of the
kilemi
. He sang songs to the music of the
yalulu
, flute, and he rattled the
shokote
with his Konkow brothers. Since Mati was no longer in the village, no mention was made of the Nemsewis’ challenge, and the tribes made peace.

Sakote played the hand game with the men from Tatampanta. He even stood patiently while his mother’s husband presented him to three giggling Nemsawa girls of marrying age. But on the ending day of the celebration, when the elders made the ritual marks of acorn paste on the entrances of the
hubos
, Sakote turned his face away in anguish, for painted on his
hubo
was the symbol of an eagle with two eggs.

After Mati left, the elders would not speak of her, and so, to the rest of the village, she didn’t exist.

Hintsuli was too busy chattering about the initiation rites of
yeponi
his Konkow brothers had boasted of to notice her absence. Only his mother knew of Sakote’s pain, and though she looked upon him with the sad and wise eyes of the owl, out of respect she didn’t speak of Mati.