considered the calluses on his big hands and wondered how many lava boulders there were in fences that totaled … how many miles did Jesse say? He didn’t dare to calculate.
Chapter 7: The Death of Compotwas Doctor
#66
After the shaman had fled, it was the girl’s aunt who came to cleanse her body. When her mother had gone outside, weeping loudly, never again to say her name, her aunt came with the cloths and water. Silently, the woman washed the girl’s scratched face and closed her eyes. She washed each torn arm and leg, her torso, her bruised feet. Where the girl’s legs met her body, her aunt washed the darkness, a bruising. She unclenched the girls fists. She combed and braided her hair. She put the new dress on her, the one meant for the celebration that would end her womanhood rites, but now useless for that. When her aunt had finished and had folded the girl’s arms across her breast, she brought the white buckskin and wrapped her in it. And then the men came in.
They lifted her onto the tanned buckskin carrying blanket and, one at each corner, hefted her up the ladder as her mother wailed; her mother, with her hair already cut short, her face blackened, her head smeared with pitch. They lifted the girl’s body head-first out the door, her head toward the west. They carried her toward the rocky promontory, the rest of the village following. Parents tried to send children away, but the children, grown stubborn and silent, unwilling to be sent off by themselves, persisted. They hung onto their parents’ hands or legs, watching.
Some of the women had already gone ahead to the place the men were taking her. They had set aside the raised platform’s small stones, smoothed the ashes from earlier pyres, laid down the logs and sagebrush, piled up more to be used later. Her uncle, Keintpoos, stood with the fire-drill, ready to light the new fire.
Her wrapped body stretched out, head toward the lowering sun, she could have been anyone. The fire-tenders stood with their long poles, urging the flames to burn higher. Then they too sat down, joined the others, talked quietly as Fire, Lóluk, did his work. The children were hushed. The men paused now and again to fill and smoke their pipes, blowing softly. It was only a small pile of her things that sat waiting for the flames to burn high enough. Nothing good enough for anyone to claim. Occasionally someone broke a string of beads and tossed a few on the fire. They listened as her mother cried out that the girl should not be dead, not a child any longer, not a woman yet. They shushed her mother as they did the children, telling her not to cry so.
Her uncle accepted the black buckskin bands for his wrists, just as her mother did, to remember in the days to come not to give in to laughter, to remind others that he must mourn her.
All the rest of the day and into the night they sat together, the fire-tenders rising occasionally to stir up the sparks or shove the logs closer to the dwindling bundle. And when it was finished, after the women had replaced the small stones on the still-warm ashes, they went home; her mother to wail each morning and night, heard by the whole village. Her uncle, after his ritual mourning, to follow northward with his men in the direction the shaman had taken, along the trail back up to the Klamath reservation.
#67
Louisa Boddy paused again to shade her eyes and peer at the smoke. From the look of it, something was burning up there by the ford. At first she had thought of a range fire, but the smoke hadn’t spread. From time to time the column would grow thicker, and then it would die back to almost nothing only to rise again. There was this odd thing that happened when the smoke got high enough. It turned to cloud up there, and puffs would drift off until they evaporated and were gone. She hadn’t seen that before, and it made her wonder if maybe Crawley wasn’t burning something. But she couldn’t figure out what -- taking the whole afternoon and acting like that.
#68
It was like tracking a deer, one that was gut shot, with no bleeding outside. Usually you had to figure out where to find him, think where he would go to die. But sometimes you just knew it, could go straight to the place without any tracking and find him waiting for you. Inside, eating at him, the bullet or arrowhead would be causing the black bile to spill into the body cavity. And you could only find it when the deer was finally dead and you thrust your knife through the thick skin and let the guts rush out onto the ground. Then you could see why the deer died. Its tongue showing somewhat through the side of its mouth, its still-opened eye going glassy.
That was how the kiuks looked and how he died. Inside he was all black bile, the same poison he had shot into the girl filling him, too, so that his face showed it, and his throat, the engorgement. It had been just one knife thrust after they shot him, and he took it.
No telling why Compotwas Doctor had done what he did, who had put him up to it. Keintpoos would have to watch now, see if any other of his family sickened, or if he himself ran onto signs someone was working against him. Maybe someone who stayed behind on the reservation when he busted loose. Maybe even someone who went with him. He thought of John Schonchin and Black Jim, always telling his boys to go raiding; Curley Headed Doctor who even counseled war. Maybe it was Hooka Jim. He would have to watch them for some sign.
At dawn, they had hauled the shaman’s body all the way back to the reservation and dumped it, he and Walcaumchuks and Boston Charley. They left it there outside the relatives’ place, where the dogs would find it, and the family. But the coyotes wouldn’t. So they could burn it, the family, just like his people had burned his niece, on the raised stone and sand bed. Burn it-- or bury it if they wanted to, now that they were reservation Indians.
And all would be done then, at least for the time being.
There would be more to it later, he knew, but he didn’t know what. You didn’t kill a shaman so easy, even if you had to. One year, they said -- and he knew it to be true, one year and you were dead for doing it, even if he had it coming. He calculated:
Now was the water-lily time, after the birds had taken off from the lake, gone up toward The Dalles and maybe further since the cold had let go. Now was the time of Sun bringing everything back: the grass, the choke-cherries and plums, the young. There would be the season of ripening and gathering. There would be the running of the mullet and the drying of them on the big racks. Then the birds would come back, riding in front of the cold wind, landing in white wave upon white wave all over the surface of the water, far as you could see, mixed in with the little teals and ducks that never left. And then would be the time for them all to hurry up and get the wocas put away, the water-lily seeds cached against the storms, the jerked deer and beef and antelope packed up and laid into the stone caches where they could get at it easy, but the animals couldn’t. Time to pull back, too, to the permanent camps, letting the summer mat and reed houses go. Settle down to sleep long nights and listen to the stories that never seemed to stop in the earth houses, days and nights of them, old ones. While the ice crusted over the pond edges and the snow came. A skiff of it at first, then more, but usually not enough to cover the rocks for long or much. The wind would whistle it away -- the witsduk-- and pile it in the lee of some ridge, but then Sun would finish it off, and finally it wouldn’t come any more. Just a little cold rain, then, to say the time was changing; not much, not long. Just some. And then would be the time for waking up the grasses again, for the green that spread over it all, held for a few days, then faded. Time enough then for him to reckon
