But Kinipai had argued that their whole nation was on its deathbed and so they had to use strong medicine, without waiting for the right season. So she’d won out, for the time being.
Longarm could picture it, having sat in on such powwows in his own time. Indians could argue the finer points of religion and tradition with the fervor of preachers or lawyers debating, with neither a Good Book nor a law book to be found. Oral tradition depended entirely on human memory, and all humans tended to remember things the way they should have been, whether they’d been that way or not.
So Kinipai had held one Night Way, and then another, and the officials had still gotten off the D&RG Western to start working out the details of a mighty long walk.
They’d let her hold one more. When that hadn’t set the white eyes packing, they’d drawn the line on a fourth mystical try. Failing four times was much worse, for some medicine reason. But as those vinegar ants had just found out, the small but strong-willed Kinipai could act determined as hell for a gal. So she’d put on her black-and-red paint, black for protection and red for victory—or sorcery, as some chanters believed—donned her black antlered mask, and picked up her basket drum and medicine stones to drive the white eyes away. She’d barely started before the others grabbed her and hauled her up the slopes to execute her the safe way. For the only thing her kind feared worse than a haunt was the haunt of a witch. It was likely to pop right out of her mouth the moment she was dead!
Longarm asked if the Indian Police knew anything about her being declared a witch. When Kinipai told him she’d been performing her Night Ways far upslope from any reservation settlement, he saw he could forget about reporting fellow officers and bade her to go on.
He had a better grasp on the unusual situation he’d just found her in when she explained how some wise old hitali had decided they could best avoid her chindi chasing them down the mountain in the dark by fixing it so she’d die after sunrise, after they were all holed up behind their prayer sticks and such. They’d bound her above that big ant pile, knowing the ants wouldn’t really get to work on her naked flesh before the warm sun and some of her sweat inspired them to really buckle down. They’d smeared her with clay and wood ash to mask her protective paint and make her gray, the color of evil spirits and spooks. He had to allow she’d looked spooky as any chindi to him, over yonder in that cleft. He agreed with her that it seemed hardly likely that any of the witch hunters who’d left her to a slow agonizing death were likely to come back by moonlight. He already knew why you didn’t start night fires in Apacheria, where a night watch was kept on every high point and the flare of a match could be made out at three miles when the moon clouded over.
He said, “That Hudson Bay blanket is four beaver skins’ worth of thickness. I was planning to bed down on top of it, not under it, this time of the year. So I doubt you’ll freeze, wrapped up in it till we can find you some more formal wear. How are your feet now?”
She said, “That was strong medicine you rubbed on them for me. I am too strong to scratch the bites and make them worse. Why have you been so good to me, Belagana? Are you an outlaw those pindah lickoyee are after too?”
Longarm said, “I hunt outlaws for the same Great Father. But I think he is wrong about you Jicarilla. Hear me. I have nothing to say about the move to the Tularosa Agency. I have been sent on other business. I was only passing through here on my way to La Mesa de los Viejos. My fight is with other white eyes, not your nation.”
The Indian girl sat up straighter, eyes wide in the moonlight, and flatly warned him, “You will find neither your kind nor mine in the dry canyons of the Anasazi. Nothing lives there but the chindi of the long-dead Old Ones. Haven’t you been told that the mere sight of a chindi will make a living person drop dead on the spot? That is why the chindi prowl the nights this side of the gray spirit world. They want to take us back there with them. They are lonely—lonely—in the ashen world of the dead because the grayness stretches out in many directions, forever, and one can never make it seem less empty!”
Longarm smiled thinly and said, “All in all I’d as soon take my chances with the limbo land the Papists tell of. I still got to get on over to that mesa and, seeing I got two ponies, is there anywheres I can drop you off where you might be safer?”
She sighed and said, “I have no place to go. I have nothing. The very clothes I wore this morning have been declared ahidahagash and burned to nothingness. I suppose I had better go on with you to take my chances with the chindi of the Old Ones. They could hardly be any crueler than my own people will be if they ever catch me!”
CHAPTER 4
In good times or bad it was best to travel at night and hole up by day in Apacheria, lest neighbors six or eight miles off gossip about your every move. So they watered the ponies good at a wider creek a ways down the eastern slope, and made day camp atop a pinyon-covered ridge beyond. For it was best to hole up on high ground, away from natural campsites, in Apacheria.
Pinyon was pine that grew about the size and shape of crab-apple trees, and offered fair cover and shade. Kinipai agreed that the many chewed-up scattered cones they saw meant none of her own folks harvested pine nuts along this ridge that often.
She was the one who spotted smoke-talk as Longarm was tethering the ponies deeper among the trees, with canteen water and cracked corn in their feed bags. Being Na-dene, she didn’t call out to him. She joined him and the riding stock, silent as a shadow wrapped in a cream-and-black striped Hudson Bay. He’d been noticing for quite some time she had a pretty little face, by the standards of either race. For while different sorts admired somewhat different marks of beauty, everyone found regular features and a healthy young appearance pleasing.
She was letting some of her other charms show, now that her bare body had warmed up enough to feel a tad stuffy under that thick wool blanket. Jicarilla were more modest than Paiute, but not as worried as their Navaho cousins about unavoidable flashes of flesh.