Native Gold (34 page)

The second girl possessed wide eyes that couldn’t conceal her curiosity as she timidly handed Mattie her garments. Mattie’s brown dress and accompanying underclothes had apparently been washed and then dried over a fire, for the bloodstains were faded, but the skirts reeked of smoke. At least they covered her more modestly than what these ladies wore. Their reed skirts reached no farther than their knees. Graciously, she accepted the clothing, shuffling awkwardly into it beneath the rabbit furs and the wondering stares of the two girls.

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.