Stringer and the Lost Tribe Read online

  “Your were right,” she said. “It’s too late in the autumn for much swimming. But wasn’t that fun? Hold me in your arms and warm me up a little, will you? I’m still freezing.”

  He told her cautiously, “I’d sure like to, Lola. But to tell the truth, I don’t know how cool we’d be able to stay if I did as you just asked.”

  She said simply, “I know. But I think fucking is fun too, don’t you?”

  He laughed despite himself. “Since you put it that way, I’ll have to admit I’ve never found it painful. But we have to study on how your cousin Joe might take it if we were to, ah, follow this trail much farther.”

  She stared up at him innocently, her big sloe eyes more confused than flirty. “Why? Joe has nothing to say about my fucking. We are cousins. The way forbids us from having fun together that way. Did you think you had to ask him before you could fuck me?”

  Stringer sighed, rose far enough to dust fern leaves off his raging erection, and rolled atop her to put it where they both seemed to want it. “Well, I won’t tell him if you won’t,” he said, and then she was wrapped around him, bumping and grinding as she crooned to him in her own lingo while he said some mighty nice things in English, knowing promises made at times like this didn’t count as outright fibs.

  She climaxed ahead of him in a natural, no-nonsense way: to her way of thinking, sex was a simple pleasure rather than a thing to worry about, like one’s next meal or getting a toothache no medicine man could do much about. He was glad to oblige her as she begged for more, and then, lest he tire before her, he let her get on top. They were enjoying the best of both their worlds, he knew, as he lay there in the ferns admiring the way the dappled sunlight rippled on her smooth brown bounding breasts. He was sophisticated about sex for a white man, but still enough the product of his Edwardian times to be excited by the sight of female nudity in broad daylight; while she in turn found it exciting, if not as shocking, to be taking such pale flesh up inside her. Stringer was only suntanned where he generally wore no pants. As she lovingly stroked his lower belly, she said, “You look so soft and pale down here. But your belly is so firm and hairy at the same time. How come you people don’t pluck all you hair out down here as we do?”

  “1 don’t know. Now that you mention it, a hairless crotch does seem to have a lot of things going for it.” But she said she was glad he’d never plucked his pubic hair, because it tickled her so much. So he rolled her over in the ferns to get back on top and tickle her right.

  There was no way, of course, to spend a full day at even such fine rutting. So they slept for a spell, then woke up to make love some more and swallow some tomato preserves she’d brought along. Then they went back to sleep, and the next time they woke up, the sky above their secluded love nest had turned pink and they were starting to get goose bumps. So they warmed up by making love again, and then it was time to wash off, bolt some more beans, and move on.

  As they rode out of the little glen, Stringer picked some manzanita to nibble along the trail. They looked like bitty apples, and he didn’t need her to tell him that manzanita would give you a bellyache if you ate too many of ’em. He said he just wanted to nibble on ‘em from time to time in order to recall that pretty little clearing back there.

  “Pretty is ‘dambusah,’ in my tongue. I think you are dambusah, too. Do not worry about forgetting the day we just had back there. The place where we must hide tomorrow is even nicer, and now that we are such good friends, we can get to some good fucking sooner.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They sure could. The next few days and nights went a lot like Adam and Eve might have enjoyed exploring the Garden Of Eden before that snake messed up their heads. The western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, before so-called Christians came to mess it up, had been as close to a Garden Of Eden as the North American continent could come.

  In what the Indians wistfully recalled as the Shining Times, at least five hundred nations with almost that many separate dialects had inhabited what was now the state of California more densely than it was inhabited at the moment. Though dismissed and despised as mere diggers by whites and more truculent Horse-Indians alike, Stringer knew that the Sierra tribes, at least, had led a far more sophisticated and prosperous existence than the true Desert Diggers of the barren Great Basin on the far side of his native range. In its pristine state, as it was up this way, the well watered western slope offered plenty of plump game-critters, from rabbit and quail to elk and bear. But the staple of the California tribes, and the secret of their ability to live at relative peace with one another in such great numbers, had been the acorn. Various species of oak trees grew like weeds from sea level up to the evergreen line of the higher crests to the east and all of them, from the dwarfed chaparral oak to the giant valley oak bore acorn crops for the gathering.

  Whites who’d bothered to try eating an acorn tended to think this only served to prove how miserable and primitive the damned old Diggers were. For as every Anglo-Saxon since Robin Hood could tell you, acorns were just plain inedible, and, like the olive and banana, they were as they came off the tree. Olives had to be cured in brine, and banana stalks had to be ripened off the tree before anyone could eat them without getting mighty sick. Acorns required even more sophisticated treatment before they were fit for anyone but a rooting hog. But once Indian women had ground the bitter acorns to a course meal, leached their tannic acid out with endless rinsings, or suspended their acorn baskets in a running stream for a day or more, the results tasted a lot like ground chestnuts and could be boiled as a tasty mush or baked like bread.

  The men and boys had done the hunting while the women and girls had gathered acorns, along with berries in season and a dozen or more varieties of onionlìke bulbs. “Digging” was a mite more sophisticated than it looked. A lot of white settlers had tried it and wound up eating death camas, deadly snakeroot, or poisonous mushrooms, albeit only once. Stringer had learned as a boy, from Miwok neighbors, how to rustle up a pretty good free lunch along Manzanita Creek, down home in the Mother-Lode country, even though hydraulic mining had spoiled the best digging and Uncle Don’s cows tended to get at the good stuff first. So Lola was surprised the time he rolled off her in yet another little clearing to pull up some onion grass to go with her beans and his tobacco. She was even more surprised when he plucked some jewelweed later to rub over their bare bodies. She giggled and said it tickled. He kissed her and explained he just hated to itch from poison oak and that they’d sure passed through enough of it by now. She pulled him down against her bare breasts, pouting her lower lip as she told him in a mocking way, “I thought I had a saltu boyfriend. Now I see you are at least part Yana.”

  “It was a Miwok gal I once went swimming with who showed me how to avoid oak itch, as a matter of fact. My own saltu elders showed me how to keep from getting lost in the high country. They’d learned that before they left the old country, being highlanders to begin with. You seem to be leading me in circles, Lola. Even by moonlight you can see the snows of the mountain you call Waw-gamupah and we call Lassen from many a rise, and, no offense, your star sisters tell me the same tale about the odd way you’ve been leading me. I enjoy a sort of outdoor shack-up as much as any man, but would you mind telling me why we don’t seem to be getting anywhere important?”

  She said she was too hot to talk about it right now. So he made love to her a spell and then repeated the question. She sighed and said, “You have a mean memory, don’t you? I was hoping you might not notice. I would rather make love than explain the ways of my wild cousins. They do not think as you, or even me.”

  He insisted, “We’re not screwing at the moment. Explain why we’re wandering around up here so casual, damn it.”

  She sat up, brushing a clump of five-finger fern from her love-damp naked belly as she said, “We dare not go any farther on horseback. It would be almost as dangerous moving in the rest of the way on foot without a guide who knows just where the bad saltu from that mining camp patro
l. As you guessed, I have been moving us back and forth with the snow cone of Waw-gamupah behind us. By this time the real people should have spotted us. When they feel like talking to us, they will come to us. Can I get on top now?”

  He shook his head and said, “The notion of a naked Indian aiming an arrow at my naked ass has sort of cooled my desire for the moment. Are you saying we have to wander about like lost kids until we’re ambushed friendly? How are the Yana up this way supposed to know we’re on their side? When we have our duds on, I look like any other strange white man, and you could pass for Mex, no offense.”

  She nodded. “I have been thinking about that. Maybe it would be better if I braided my hair the old way and went naked above the waist from now on. If they took us for a saltu in the company of a Yana girl, and saw you were not cruel to me, they would come closer. Joe says that old Yana woman sent word to her band that a brave wanasee was on his way to help them. She may have neglected to tell them you were a saltu. They could be expecting an Indian called Stringer. Hoksah, that must be it.”

  Stringer sat up in the knee-high ferns, feeling more naked than he had when he’d flopped down in them with Lola to begin with. He had a good look-see at the surrounding wall of canyon oak and mountain bay, even though experience and common sense told him you never saw an Indian in the shrubbery unless he wanted you to see him. He muttered, “This is a hell of a way to run a railroad. We’d better get dressed.”

  “Why? The sun still smiles down on us warmly, and it won’t be dark enough to ride for many hours.”

  He reached for his nearby jeans as he insisted, “We’re in no fit condition to receive callers. Don’t you have some way to signal any Indians about that it’s all right for them to come calling, Lola?”

  She shook her head and began to braid her long black hair. “No. Any smoke or noise we made would be heard by the bad saltu as well. The Yana are a quiet people. They cut down trees by chewing the wood with beaver-tooth knives because the sound of an ax carries far among these hills. They know we are here. We just have to give them time to make up their minds about us, see?”

  He shook his head as he hauled on his boots. “Last night there was a whiff of snow in the air before dawn. We don’t have all that much time before this nice Indian summer comes to a blizzardy halt. I grew up in the Sierra Nevada, honey, and nevada means snow in Spanish. We got enough of the stuff down south in Calaveras County. You have to get more up here.”

  She laughed. “Su-wah, but we have plenty of time . before the snow moons come.”

  He shook his head again as he buttoned his shirt. “I’ve noticed your folk don’t go in for clocks all that much. But the time to gather news is while it’s happening. If you and your kin want the San Francisco Sun to run an expose on that rough-and-ready mining outfit, it’ll have to be soon, not next year, after both sides have spent the winter snowed in and not able to do all that much to each other even if they wanted to.”

  He rose to his feet and strapped on his gun rig. Lola just sat there bare-ass, braiding her hair. When she saw him don his jacket and old Rough Rider hat she asked where he thought he was going in the daylight. “Maybe up to the next ridge,” he said. “I know some Miwok hand signals. It’s worth a try. Your way is just too slow.”

  She told him he was being silly and went on braiding her hair as Stringer strode up out of the glen and worked east until he had a view of the apparently empty valley beyond. Way off to his right, on the valley floor, some manzanita branches were moving just a little. He knew Indians were more careful than that, and that deer just loved manzanita fruit. He was looking for a high point he could signal from with the sky behind him when he heard the sound of steel on stone and froze where he was, with his back to a bay tree. He knew Yana rode no ponies to begin with, let alone a steel-shod pony. He drew his .38 and stared hard in the direction of the distant sound, waiting to see what came next.

  What came next was that a Winchester snicked to full-cock to his left and he was told in English to drop his damned gun. So he did. As his S&W crunched in the forest duff at his feet, Stringer turned, hands polite, to face the two white men who’d circled and suckered him on foot. They were dressed like a pair of saddle tramps. One was covering him with the Winchester, which seemed reasonable, while the other was covering him with a bow and arrow, which didn’t. Stringer smiled thinly at them and asked, “Are we playing cowboys and Indians?”

  The one with the carbine nodded. “You might say that, Stringer. It’s your own fault for being so nosy. Now, sad to say, we’re going to have to carry you into Quicksilver after finding you arrowed and scalped up here in the hills.”

  Stringer blinked. “I sure hope you boys are just greening me.”

  Then the one with the archery set let fly his arrow. It missed by a yard. That was way too close for Stringer’s comfort. But as the would-be Indian nocked another arrow to his bowstring he swore and said, “Hell, let’s just shoot him and shove arrows in the bullet holes, Mike.”

  The one called Mike muttered, “Try again, at least once.” So the one with the bow drew it back again as Stringer tensed to make a dive for his gun and at least go down trying.

  But then other arrows were humming in out of nowhere, aimed better, and as one dropped Mike another hit the white bowman in the back so his own arrow thunked into the gray bark high above Stringer’s head. Then it got very quiet. Stringer stared soberly down at the two white men sprawled face-down on the leaf litter with both their backs nicely pincushioned with reed arrows. It seemed a piss-poor time to bend over for his own gun, so he just stood there until a half-dozen Indians materialized from the surrounding chaparral. They wore fringed deerskin breech clouts and little else save for beads and otter-hide arrow cases. Their bows were compounded of juniper wood and elk sinew. He was pleased to note that none of them seemed to be aimed his way. But a couple were still nocked with arrows. One of the Yana addressed him in what might as well have been bird chirps. Stringer smiled as friendly as he could manage and tried, “No savvy Yana.”

  That didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere until he heard what sounded like “Stringer” among the bird chirps. He patted his own chest and tried, “Hoksah, me Stringer.”

  That seemed to work better. One of the Indians came over to pick up his S&W and hand it to him. As Stringer put it back in its holster, the Indian pointed northeast, and while the words meant nothing his meaning was clear. Stringer said, “Hold on. I left one gal and two ponies down yonder the other way.”

  But the Indian who’d just saved his hide repeated the demand in a firmer tone. So Stringer saw he had little choice in the matter until he could find some fool Yana who savvied English.

  That was easier said than done. The warrior band he’d met up with were legged-up better than Prussian infantry. Every time Stringer tried to pause on a ridge for breath they nudged him on until it felt as if they’d marched him at least all the way to Nevada. Stringer was in good shape for a white man, but his high-heeled Justins had never been designed for skipping over hill and dale along no trail at all as far as he could see. They moved him upslope at quick-march and made him double-time downslope until, just before he felt sure he was about to drop in his tracks, they bulled through a wall of madrone and poison oak to run him into a hole in the ground.

  It was a lava-tube cave, he saw, once they were inside it. The volcanic Mount Lassen to the west had never blown its top in human memory, but Stringer still hoped it wouldn’t decide to erupt for another year or so. That was about the only thing that hadn’t gone wrong since he’d received that pesky letter from Joe Malliwah, and Lassen was a volcano, when one studied on it.

  The once molten rock walls of the long but low-slung cave were cool and shiny black glass now. Stringer saw the glow of firelight ahead, and when his guides—captors or whatever—led him around it he saw even more Indians: men, women, and children gathered around a stone circle filled with mostly glowing coals and a few flickering blue flames. He knew manzanita r
oots burned like that. Nobody but the kids stared at him. But they must have known they had company. An old man wearing a rabbit-strip robe dipped two fingers in the pot of acorn mush in front of him and shot Stringer a questioning glance. Stringer had been taken home for supper by Miwok in his schoolboy days, so he knew enough to nod and rub his stomach as he hunkered down across from the old man.

  A pretty, moon-faced little gal served Stringer a watertight basket of mush with a smile and no spoon. Stringer dipped two fingers in, tasted, and tried, “Achoo chubb,” which meant it was good, he hoped, and that made all the Yana smile and get down to the business of eating.

  The acorn meal base of the stew gave it a wild piney substance, while the bits of quail and rabbit stirred in gave it flavor. He knew there’d be at least a little deer liver in the stew if they were hunting more freely during the last good hunting moons. Joe had said the white intruders had fucked up the Yana way of life in these parts.

  He wished there was some way he could make them understand he understood. He knew that while the higher ridges of the Sierra furnished some hunting and gathering, the lower mountain meadows were where the good stuff came from. Though not exactly farmers, the Sierra tribes had depended, in the Shining Times, on what amounted to yearly crops of nature’s bounty, gathered at different times of the year from different parts of their ranges. Sweet toyon berries and spring bulbs grew best near running water in the valleys between dryer ridges. Nobody caught many trout or salmon on the higher slopes, either. With winter coming on, the deer would be moving down to the flat valley floors, and elk seldom grazed anywhere else. This acorn mush would taste a lot richer, he knew, if the women had gathered the nuts from fat valley oaks instead of scrubbier canyon oak, as they’d no doubt had to. He could see why they wanted their valley back. Skulking up here in the hills offered mighty few luxuries, and it figured to be cold as hell as well come winter, when the sensible way for Indians to live was in an earth-covered lodge close to a handy stream and sheltered from the raw winds that could likely whistle through this glass cave like it was a big old flute. But the hell of it was, he had no way to help folk he couldn’t even talk to. He’d picked up a bare handful of Yana words and phrases from old Lola, and, try as he might, he just couldn’t make them savvy that he had a fine translator handy if only they’d let him go back and fetch her.