now, every time he got a chance, Curley Headed Doctor had fixed his eyes on the Meacham, trying to figure how he was going to go at getting rid of the shamans. He guessed it wouldn’t be long before Meacham would show it. Far as he could figure, though, Meacham didn’t himself have medicine. Of that he was now pretty sure. But he had things that had medicine in them, maybe put there by people who could get it. Euchoaks didn’t know who they were; he knew he hadn’t met them. But whoever they were, he would be careful when the time came.
This Meacham, he thought, was more like a war-leader. But he wasn’t one of them either. He must have been a sub-chief, sort of like Blowe was for the Klamaths, going around making orders that some people listened to and others didn’t. Like all chiefs of all kinds, he could talk.
Like at the peace ceremony the other day, when he was saying there was to be no more gambling: he wouldn’t just come out and say that it that he didn’t like it, but that it wasn’t good for you. It would make the Klamaths go over against the Modocs again; it would make both tribes put up their women and children for bets. Curley Headed Doctor supposed Meacham was right, but it didn’t please him. There was more to gambling than what the superintendent said.
He himself didn’t like it too easy for the Lost River Modocs back here on the reservation. It wouldn’t hurt him any if a fight broke out, on this spot, so Keintpoos would wake up, before it was too late to get out of here again and back to Lost River. He knew it: by the time they got back there, there would just be more Bostons -- putting up rails for corrals, laying down roads for their wagons. No, it wouldn’t make him lose any sleep if there were to be a big gambling against the Klamaths and it ended up in an all-out fight.
But this Meacham. He had medicine from someone else. He knew things. Right now he was saying something none of them had ever heard about. He said it like it was right.
Sun didn’t move. Stayed still. In the center. You just couldn’t tell it. The earth they were on, both the land and the water, moved. You just couldn’t see that, either, since it looked like things were always the same place. Moon, never went following where Sun went. Just looked like it. And the earth? Just a big old ball, hanging somewhere in the sky, going around Sun.
Curley Headed Doctor spat in the dirt while all the Indians -- Klamath, Modoc, Snake, whoever -- looked at Meacham with their mouths open and asked him to tell them more foolish things.
The Meacham showed how ignorant he was. No one thought Moon went where Sun did. But Meacham thought they thought that. They all knew how it was: Sun went every night to the Land of the Dead. Trouble was, just because the Boston guns were better and their other stuff was better, like matches were better than fire drills -- foolish Indians started listening when someone like Meacham started in about where Moon went! Next they started in thinking not that the Meacham was wrong, but a shaman was.
Curley Headed Doctor had been right, back at Lost River when he said they should kill this Meacham. Jack should have listened!
“This is the year eighteen-hundred-and-sixty-nine,” Meacham said. The Indians were silent, not knowing that number, waiting for what he would tell them next.
“This is day three-hundred-and-sixty-five, and it is ending. You saw the sun set.”
They had, they said so. Yes, that was true.
“So now the old year, eighteen-hundred-and-sixty-nine, is all used up, and soon it will be dead. The new one will be eighteen-hundred-and-seventy.”
There was the sound of confusion among the people, who were saying that wasn’t their way of it. But he continued:
“And it will be day one. Then will come day two, and so on.”
“When will this happen?” someone shouted amidst the excitement.
“Soon!” Meacham cried.
He took out his watch from his pocket and held it up to them. He went over to the fire so the light could fall on it, then swung it around so that the flames glinted from it.
“You can’t see from where you are sitting,” he said, “but when both hands of my watch, the little one and the big one, point here, to the top, then it will be a new day, the first one of eighteen-seventy. It will be the New Year. That will happen in just two minutes.”
“And where will be the Old Year?” someone else asked.
“It will be finished,” Meacham said. “Dead. With the new one just born.”
This was the kind of thing that made Euchoaks think at first that the man made medicine. But now he saw that he did not. It was the one who made the special watch who was the medicine man. This Meacham was but some sub-chief for the Boston Tyee in Washington. Who could say that this watch-maker was not the most powerful shaman of all?
“Let me shoot my gun once just when one year dies and the other is born!” David Allen shouted.
“All right,” said Meacham. “You must get ready. Stand up and shoot into the sky.”
No! Euchoaks wanted to shout. You must not do that! But he didn’t know why he held that idea, so he kept silent.
“When I tell you, now! Get ready!” said Meacham, staring into the fiery watch in his hand that could make it be the year. “Three!” he said, pausing. They waited. “Two! … One! … Shoot!!” he cried, and David Allen’s gun roared out. All the Indians leaped to their feet, spun west and shouted, bidding the dead year goodbye as it started on its way to the Land of the Dead. Then they wheeled and cried out to the east, welcoming this thing, the new year, that would be coming along on its journey with Sun: eighteen-hundred-and-seventy.
More than anything, Curley Headed Doctor thought, he must get himself a watch like the Meacham’s, a thing to make a year with.
#36
He had spent days talking and listening, making laws, marrying and divorcing, naming babies, settling difficulties. When at last he was ready to leave the agency, the Klamaths had started out with him, telling him to come next summer and stay one moon and make laws, build the mills, tell them about his religion. All of it he promised.
All things considered, the year had not been a bad one. He wouldn’t want to say it, but as he left the agency and turned his horse into the track toward Ashland and, beyond it, Salem and home, he had the feeling that for the first time in his life he had laid his hands on his destiny. It was as if he had only been waiting all these years while his life was being made ready. The life that had seemed so delayed unwound cheerily now before him.
He had humbled himself and his family ripping sod, raising sheep, breaking and maintaining toll roads, feeding and housing the miners crossing to the gold-fields in Idaho. He had turned his hand ungrudgingly to all kinds of toil, figuring that was what was asked of him to prove that he was worthy. He had prepared himself for it.
Forty-four: a ripe age, and it had taken this long to feel as if the life he was living was his own. He had not gotten to this moment of achievement one second too soon.
A new year, and time for promises and stock-taking. So much had been good: the fortune, for instance, that had taken him to Washington. Last month the President had finally decreed his Quaker
