working, like us. Then we wouldn’t have to wonder.”
This would be her own hut, too, the girl figured, in the time that lay ahead. With pride she checked each day now to see how her breasts were coming along. At first she had not believed it was happening to her, the twin swellings. She had wondered whether anyone else would even notice that she was changing. But her mother had put away her doubts about that when she came up behind her, folded her arms around her with her crossed hands sheltering each one a budding breast.
“Time soon,” her mother had whispered so no one else could hear.
So this was the hut she would stay in for those days, this new one the women were calling forth from the willows she was bringing. They had found the old one torn down when they came back into the Lost River camp and dumped the stuff they were carrying. All the willow and reed houses had gone down -- under the hands of the settlers, the men had said. Her uncle prodded them to get at the rebuilding. But this little house came first, the women insisted. Ellen’s Man’s wife’s baby wasn’t going to wait much longer. And practically every other woman in the camp, except the old grandmothers, would need it every month for her time apart.
The matting was handed up and secured in place for the roofing.
“Who told old woman Koalákaka she could say whether the betrothal gifts were enough? Isn’t that up to her son and daughter-in-law?”
“Since when did grandmothers get chosen to decide these things?”
“Since Koalákaka’s daughter had a baby!” someone said, and again the laughter spurted.
The girl felt her face flush when she thought that for her this was going to be the place, and they had let her help build it. When she stayed here alone that first time, she would not be afraid. She would be able to see the marks of her knife on the butt-ends of the willows where she had been allowed to cut them for the women. She would feel the same pride then that she felt this morning at the woman that was swelling within her.
#52
After a while the woman came out of the hut with Ellen’s Man’s new son all rubbed with bear grease. And while she rested up, Ellen’s Man took off to do his praying. Then it was just a few more days until the Hot Creeks went on another walk, this time back over to their old homes by Lower Klamath Lake, back to where Fairchild had his ranch. Steamboat Frank and his band -- his brother Jake, Ellen’s Man, Bogus Charley, and four other men, their women, their boys and girls, their old parents, and the new baby -- split off for their places over by Mahogany Mountain. By then the Lost River men were at work. They got the timbers squared away again and braced back up. They laid the roofs back in at Keintpoos’ and Scarfaced Charley’s big houses. Over on the other side of the river, Hooka Jim turned to it with Curley-Headed Doctor. They fixed up the kind of place Hooka’s father-in-law would need, being a kiuks, for his ceremonies. The women set to weaving fresh matting for the floors and the willow-framed roofs of the summer houses.
For it would be the hot season soon. Hardly time now to get it all done before they would have to scatter again, each family off in its little group, a day’s march, maybe more, to gather the inch-long epos roots. They would camp then in their brush-wood shelters, and the women would take their fire-hardened digging sticks and probe in the rich, moist places near the edges of the marshes they always visited. All day long the women would dig, munching at the bitter-sweetish roots as they worked, gathering all they could find to be dried and sacked up for winter.
For now, though, Keintpoos’ people turned their ponies out into the pastures newly fenced off by the squatters. Here and there along the lakeshore reaching off to the east you could see the cabins they had just thrown together. But the Bostons kept pretty much to themselves, only showing up now and then to beat the ponies back outside the fences and put the rails back up.
The men got the dugouts up from where they had sunk them with rocks when winter set in, before the Meacham had come to herd everybody up to the Klamath Agency. And after they set up the weir at the stone-bridge river crossing, they started out again to mend the old fish seines. They had cached them at the end of the last season, but now they would be needing them. Food was scarce since they had taken their stores away with them when they left in the wagons, and they hadn’t been able to carry what was left back again. Besides, there were more of them now: the ones who had set out with the Meacham and, in addition, the Sprague River Modocs who had come along off the reservation. It would be all right again when the fish-run came. Fish beyond counting would clog Lost River during the spawn as they always did: the silver- and black-sided trout, the suckers; but that was way off in the future. Sooner or later the people would get the small white lake-fish dried for the winter. But first they had to catch them. There was plenty to do. For now they would all of them have to work like women.
There was the grain the squatters had laid by. If things got bad before they got set up again, maybe they would take some of that.
They turned to and did what had to get done. In a bit, things sifted down to the place where they were working out good again. Better, anyhow, than when some Klamath was breathing down your neck, or some agent was telling you where to live. And so it went until it was pretty much set the way it had been before they left. Except that now there were more Bostons around them.
#53
“You can stay, or you can go,” Keintpoos said. “There’s no one here going to tell you what to do.”
The cluster of Sprague River Modocs stood before him as he sat on the incline of his house, half way up to the smoke-hole. He plucked at the green shoots that had begun to show on the packed earth of the roof, turning each one between his fingers to examine it before casting it away. Old Schonchin stood with a scattering of his Sprague River people, looking up at the younger man. Maybe there wasn’t room here for the two of them. He, the one the Boston tyees had set apart as the chief of the Modocs to talk to; and Keintpoos, a renegade turning toward being a war chief, maybe even a la`qi. Getting more like his father had been up till Ben Wright time. Old Schonchin had been thinking of this while he kept watching Keintpoos’ village coming back to life, this village and Hooka Jim’s on the other side of the river. Maybe he ought to give in and go back now to where he had come from. Maybe his people would follow him back to their own river. Keintpoos sat on the roof as if to hold it down, in just this place. This here was Keintpoos’, not his. And now he saw himself and his own band of Modocs in the little sprigs of grass the man plucked and examined and tossed away.
“We should go back to Sprague River,” one of his women said.
“You can go on back to the reservation,” his brother John Schonchin said from his perch behind Keintpoos. He made the last word stand out for ridicule. “But we made up our minds. We’re gonna live like we were meant to. This is what will feed us.” He swung his arm in a wide circle out toward the horizon. “What’s here is ours, like it’s always been. You can go for the white ways if that’s what you and your people feel like. But as for us, this is how it’s supposed to be. We finished our working, and now maybe it’s even time to raid ourselves some ponies over on Pit River. Get ourselves some to trade. You go on back if you want to. We’ll stick here and get rich. You go sit where the Boston tyee tells you.”
Keintpoos let John’s boasting fade away for a while before he said to Old Schonchin and whoever wanted to listen: “My
