Longarm figured he’d made it over the Divide when they came on a streamlet purling toward the east in the moonlight. He reined in and let the ponies water themselves as he swapped saddles again. Then he took off his hat and belly-flopped in the stream-side sedge to water himself just upstream. Nothing from a canteen or even a pump ever tasted half that refreshing. He’d heard of a spring back East, maybe in York State, where they bottled the water and sold it to rich folk in the cities like it was beer, for Gawd’s sake. The odd notion made a tad more sense as he sipped such fine water after a spell of canteen water on the trail.
He sat up but didn’t rise, seeing the Indian ponies were ground-rein-trained and seemed to be enjoying that lush sedge along the stream so much. He plucked a juicy green stem to chew. It tasted all right, but he felt he’d enjoy a smoke better. So he felt for a cheroot and his waterproof Mex matches as he sat up straighter, with the intent of lighting up before they moved on.
But he never did. Striking a match after dark in Apache country had been known to take years off a man’s life, even when there wasn’t somebody singing soft and sad in the middle distance!
Longarm put the cheroot and matches away as he eased to his feet, moved over to the ponies, and slid the Winchester out of its saddle boot. There was already a round in the chamber, adding up to sixteen if you counted the regular magazine load of fifteen. A Winchester ‘73 cranked sort of noisy, and that first vital round could ride fairly safe in the chamber with the hammer eased down to half-cock. He knew a pony trained not to drag its grounded reins could only be relied on to a point. So he quietly led the pair of them back upslope to a pine they’d passed earlier, and made certain neither would run off when or if it got noisier in these parts. Then he took a deep breath and cocked the hammer of his saddle gun all the way back as he eased in the general direction of that eerie singsong chant.
A friendly Na-dene singer he’d had fun with during a spell of ceremonial drumming had tried to explain the difference between the different “ways,” or what he pictured as Indian psalms. But when you didn’t savvy the lingo and the chanters only seemed to know one tune, they tended to sound a lot alike as well as sort of tedious. A Chinese gal he’d befriended out Frisco way had informed him just as certainly that she’d be switched with snakes if she could hear any difference between “Dixie” and “Marching Through Georgia.” So it was likely all in the way your ears had been brought up.
He worked close enough to get a surer line on the direction that sad singing was coming from. It sounded like a gal, and she seemed to be sounding off in a spooky way, in that inky patch of juniper or whatever growing between two massive moonlit boulders. He felt no more desire to call out to her than he might have had moving in on any blind alley in Ciudad Juarez. He’d read about this place where cruel-hearted gals called Sirens called out to passing strangers just to get them in an awful fix. So he had a better notion, and crabbed sideways to ease in on one blank wall of moonlit granite instead of sticking his paw smack in the bait pan. There was no practical way to scale the slightly sloping rock quietly with his Winchester. But that was one other good reason for packing a side arm. He placed his Winchester against the clean bare rock and, leaving his six-gun holstered, he took a deep breath and went mountain-climbing.
He could hear the singing better as he scraped his denim-clad belly over the top. The words didn’t make a lick more sense to him, of course. But the gal singing alone down there—he hoped she was alone—sure sounded hopeless and resigned as he slithered forward to peer over the edge at her.
He could see she stood alone, her hands up as if she was holding herself erect by gripping a sapling to either side. Longarm recalled the notorious Arapaho solution to caring for sick or elderly kin. He wasn’t sure the Na-dene made a habit of abandoning old ladies to die of starvation if the wolves failed to get them first. It sure looked as if the poor old gal had been left all alone down there by somebody.
He let himself back down the outside surface, partly to give a white man on a mission time to think. He knew he’d never been sent all this way to play nursemaid to some sick old Jicarilla asdza her own medicine man had given up on. Such medicine men weren’t all just rattles and dust-puffing. They cured sick Na-dene at least as often BIA surgeons did, and it sounded as if the old gal was resigned to becoming a chindi in the mighty near future. So there was no sensible reason for him to act like some fool Samaritan.
Then he had both feet on the ground. So he called himself a fool, picked up his carbine, and moved around to enter the cleft, trying to sound soothing, the way you talked to a critter, as he called out, “It’s out of my way, ma’am. But I got a spare pony you can ride as I get you back to Dulce for some proper attention.”
Then he almost shot the ghostly apparition staring at him with big black hollows as she pranced like hell, both arms held high and shouted, “S’s’suhah, Litcaiga Haltchin!”
But Longarm only half believed in chindis, so he struck a wax-stemmed match and saw that what he’d been looking at was a stark naked gal, smeared with clay and wood ash, with a wrist tied to a springy aspen sapling to either side of her as she did a sort of barefoot Irish jig on a good-sized ants’ nest. She must have seen what he was by the same flickering light, for she hissed in English, “Put the light out before they see it and you find yourself in the same sort of trouble!”
Longarm shook the match out and reached in his jeans for his penknife as he moved closer, warning, “Try not to bust the crust of the ant pile any more if you can, ma’am. I know the feeling. I’ve been nipped by red vinegar ants. But they only bite more if you rile them up.”
He was sure she was cussing him sarcastically as he got to work on the rawhide thongs binding her wrists. He said soothingly, “Step atop my toes whilst I free you. The little buggers can’t quite bite through that much leather, ma’am.”
The naked Indian lady followed his suggestion, getting white ash all over the front of his denim as she plastered her naked body to his, a bare instep across each of his stout cavalry stovepipes. He wasn’t sure he wanted to feel that way about a gal that spooky-looking. But he’d told her to do it. So he could only be a sport and cut both wrists free, even though she grabbed him like a long-lost lover with the first arm he got loose.
Then she was hugging him with both arms, and legs, as he backed off the ant pile with her, saying, “I got some aloe lotion amongst my possibles. Lucky for us both, red ants don’t act as wild after dark as they can in daylight.”
But she didn’t seem to be listening. She’d already unwrapped her ash-plastered form from his to run bare-ass down the slope and belly-flop in that whitewater rill. The water was only inches deep and maybe a foot across. But she still managed a heap of splashing as she wallowed like an overheated pig set free in a mud puddle. She was already tougher to make out in the moonlight as she washed all that ash and clay from her saddle brown naked skin.
Longarm knew that, unlike true desert Indians such as Pima or the Paiute, some called Diggers, Na-dene set more store in modest dress. So while she dunked herself in ice water from head to toe, he went over to the tethered ponies to break a Hudson Bay blanket out of his bedroll and a lead-foil tube of aloe-and-zinc ointment from a saddlebag. As he ambled back to the naked asdza sitting upright in the rill with the moonlight glinting off her wet hair and hide, he told her, “You’d best get out and wrap yourself in this blanket before you catch cold, ma’am. I got some salve here I packed in case of burns. It ought to sooth them ant bites some.” She said she’d been stomping like that to kill as many of the red vinegar ants as she could while they were bedded down for the night inside that big mound. He didn’t ask why. She allowed she had managed to get her bare feet and ankles nipped enough to matter. So he helped her out of the rill, wrapped her in the blanket, and sat her on the grassy slope to hunker down and rub salve all over her nether extremities as she told him her sad story. She said her name was Kinipai and that her maternal uncle had been a powerful hitali, or medicine man. She swore four times she’d never lain with her own uncle, making it so, unless she was risking the wrath of all the spirits and holy ones by lying four times. When she said four times that neither she nor her uncle had even robbed the dead, he began to follow her drift. He’d been told by others that incest and grave-robbing were the first steps to bahagi’ite, or witchcraft. Kinipai went on to explain how she’d been the victim of what a white man of the cloth might have called “a theological dispute.” Her uncle had taught her many “ways” or chants before he’d been struck dead by a diamondback he was chanting with. It was thought a bit odd for women to take part in some of the way ceremonies, but it was not forbidden. So when they’d heard Little Big Eyes in Washington was sending white eyes to see whether the N’de would have to move or be allowed to stay, Kinipai had decided to hold the Night Way, a mighty powerful ceremony. But older folks, best described as some sort of chanters’ guild, had protested that everyone knew the Night Way was supposed to be held in wintertime, between the first freeze and greenup thaw. Then they’d argued that the Night Way was meant to cure the really sick, and only when all the other ways had failed and only strong bishi or dangerous spirit lore might save them.