I’m not the only one who can’t sleep. There’s rustling everywhere. Whispering. Sighs. Babies’ cries as they try to settle, parents’ reassurances as they try to hush them. Any sleep tonight, if it comes, will be troubled.
I am half asleep when I feel our cedar blanket shift. I think it’s just Maria turning in her sleep but when I look, I see a koliuzhi man. He’s kneeling beside Maria and gently shaking her shoulder. She turns her head, looks, and freezes.
“Baliya,” he whispers.
She doesn’t move and neither do I. What does he want?
“Baliya,” he whispers again, 
[12]
Baliya. That’s how he pronounces Maria’s name. There’s silence and it’s evident that most of the koliuzhi are asleep. No one’s listening. Nobody is going to help us understand what he wants.
“
Chi
ali
wáyolilo lobáa,”[13] he says. Assured she’s awake, he rises and waves his hand as though he wants her to also get up.
She and I sit up. On the other side of the fire, across the house, two women and several men who’ve gathered around the eyebrow man call out and gesture when they see us. “Baliya!” they cry.
They want Maria. The watchmen around the door shift nervously and glance back and forth between the eyebrow man and our corner.
“The koliuzhi want you,” I say. “They’re calling you over there.”
The man standing beside our bed continues speaking with some urgency. The man with the staff of feather and bones, who’s still posted next to the injured man, shakes his staff as if she might understand that instead of the spoken words.
Maria’s eyes flit back and forth among the koliuzhi, but she remains next to me, her fingers curled around the edge of the blanket, refusing to let go.
“You better go find out what they want,” I say, “before they get angry.”
Stiffly, Maria rises to her feet and lumbers across the floor. When she reaches the bench, she bends. I can’t see her anymore. The fire in the house is burning low and there’s almost no light.
Finally, she comes back to our sleeping place.
I hold up her cedar bedclothes so she can slide in more easily. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I think they just wanted me to look at that man.”
“Is he dead?”
She shakes her head. “He’s asleep now. But his wound is terrible.”
“Is he bleeding?”
“No. It’s stopped—but it’s black. They put medicine in it.” She pauses. “And he needs a splint.”
“Is he going to live?”
Silence answers. Lightly I touch my silver cross.
“They know your name.”
Maria grunts.
“They called your name. Baliya, they said. Now they know your name.”
“Go to sleep.”
As soon as I awaken the next morning and sit up, the koliuzhi call out. “Baliya! Hákwot
i akw!”[14] They want her back again.
She rolls over right away, and pushes herself up until she’s sitting on the mat. She must have been awake. “You come with me this time,” she says.
“They’re asking for you.”
“You have to come,” she insists. “Come and see. You have to help me.”
“There’s nothing I can do.” I’m afraid to see the terrible wound up close, but I feel sorry for Maria. The eyes of the watchmen at the door follow us across the floor.
Sweat is beaded on the eyebrow man’s forehead and upper lip. His eyes are red and filmy, and they don’t shift toward us. His eyebrows look lifeless. The wound is covered loosely with a small hide. A woman rolls it back. Maria is right. Something black has been crammed into it. The surrounding flesh is white and swollen, and water oozes from its lip. Maria places her hand on his forehead, drags it down to his cheek, and tenderly cups his face for a few moments. “He’s feverish.”
“You already took out the musket ball. Isn’t he getting better?”
She shrugs. “He needs medicine.”
I point to the black substance that fills the hole. “He has medicine. Their medicine. Isn’t it working?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what medicine it is.”
The peasants use rustic medicine. Onions. Old bread. Concoctions made of wild plants and roots they harvest from the meadow and the forest. Even magic spells and pagan chants. My father believed these were foolish—the ways of the superstitious—and he would always rather call the doctor, just as any adherent to the Enlightenment would. The doctor’s ways and the elixirs and powders he compounded in his chambers seemed just as mysterious to me, but they were, of course, based on science.
“Can you do anything for him?”
“He needs a splint.”
“Then give him one.”
“After that—I don’t know where to start.”
“You have to save him,” I insist. “You have to try. Or they might kill us. Give him some medicine. Some herbs or something. Some roots.”
“Where am I supposed to get medicine?”
Her iron stubbornness is impenetrable. “Where you usually get it.”
She waves a hand dismissively. “I don’t know anything about what grows here. Or about their medicine.”
“Lamestin,” says the koliuzhi woman. “Baliya lamestin?”
I’m not really listening—I think it just more words that we can’t understand. Then the face of an old tutor flits to mind—long, dreadful French lessons, conjugating verbs and struggling to wrap my tongue around a language that never fit.
“Maria,” I say. “It’s French. I think she’s speaking French.”
“How would she know French?”
I ignore her question. Instead, I turn to the old woman—she’s silver-haired and wearing a belted cedar dress that covers her neck to ankle but leaves her arms free and bare. She has a ring in her nose and a long necklace of feathers, beads, and shells that rattles as she moves. I point to the black tar in the wound. “Le médicament?” I exaggerate my lips the way the tutor showed me.
“Lamestin,” she says and smiles, showing gaps in her teeth. She lisps a bit because of the missing teeth, but I’m sure I heard correctly. It’s not exactly French, but it’s close.
What is this lamestin? Did they make it? Where did it come from?
“Maria, it is French. I think she’s trying to say medicine.”
“D’où est-ce que vous avez trouvé lamestin?” I ask the koliuzhi. Where did you find this medicine?
“Lamestin,” she repeats. She has no idea what I’ve just said. If she knows French, it’s maybe just this single word.
“If you could find the right herbs and roots, could you help her?” I ask Maria. She furrows her brow, presses her lips firmly together. “Would you at least try?”
“Don’t get hopeful. This isn’t my home and I don’t know anything about this place or their ways.”
It takes gestures, pointing, and repeating this single word, but finally the old woman leads Maria and me into the forest. A koliuizhi man, armed with bow and arrow, accompanies us. He may be here to ensure we don’t flee or harm the old woman, but it’s more likely he’s here to protect us all.
The lamestin woman has a knife with an iron blade tucked into her belt. She also has a small, soft-sided basket of tools made of stone or shell or bone—impossible to tell without examination. Our watchman has a breechclout of hide and a cedar mantle, but it’s ragged and short and barely reaches his waist. I wonder that no one has given him a new one or even a simple shirt to keep him warm outdoors. The lamestin woman leads us along a path that skirts the river.