Ivan answered. “Something over three hundred.”
“No, dammit!” Knapp said. “I know that without your telling me. How many did he bring with him when he came in? You passed out the blankets to them!”
“Oh, that!” Ivan said. “You were with them. Depends how you count, I guess. Forty-one, I believe, if you just count braves. More like one-hundred and fifty if you throw in the women and children.”
“So we’re down now to practically no Modocs.”
“A few, I guess. Those who had some reason for hanging on here. But you’ve lost your chief with Old Schonchin gone.”
“Well, Ivan, you’ll have to go get them.”
“Me, sir? I don’t think so. This time it will take an army.”
“And our young commanding officer has made it clear enough. He’s only here to protect settlers.”
The agent stood glaring down the road where the soldier had just disappeared. For a few moments he was silent, then he said, without turning:
“Well, then, Ivan. That’s it. If you can’t get the Indians, you’ll have to go and get me the settlers.”
Chapter 6: Yreka
#51
The hut needed finishing, and they had to hurry up. Pretty soon Ellen’s Man’s wife would have to go in it, from the looks of things. You could see the baby was having a hard time waiting. At least that was what her mother told her, pointing to the woman’s belly. It sagged so she had to hold it up. It forced her to arch her back and spraddle her legs out for balance when she stretched to lash the willow branches into the domed roof. When the others chattered at her to watch out she didn’t start things happening, Ellen’s Man’s wife scolded them for wasting strength talking. They all should hurry up and get this done.
“We’re coming!” someone said. “We’re coming! How come you didn’t do this long time ago, when you first knew it? You laid around long enough to get this way. How come you didn’t get up and get this hut going? You knew you’d be wanting it.”
Ellen’s Man’s wife threw down the branch she was stripping and glared hard at them until they all laughed. They knew she couldn’t do any hut building till they got back down here to Keintpoos’ old camp.
“Don’t worry!” they said. “We won’t let you down.”
The girl thought to herself: It was nice to watch them work, to see the little house take shape. It was good, when she tried to join in, that they didn’t run her off the way they used to when she was little. Good, too, to go off alone to the riverbank and slide down to the willows, take the knife to them and toss the sticks up the hill to where she could bundle them to carry back to the women. “Come with me, Willow,” she said. “Make us a place to be a woman in.” The women nodded to her where to put down her load of greening branches. It made her feel good to watch their brown hands weave the withes together, like it was their hands weaving not just the hut but the day.
As they worked, the gossip flew about among them.
Whose husband had cut up a deer in the wood? someone wanted to know, and by that spoiled the snares.
“Whose?” they agreed.
Hadn’t they heard about it?
“Not Kéis this time!” someone joked. “Not Rattlesnake! Can’t blame him!” The one who said it laughed at the idea.
“No!” another exclaimed. “I think it was Whim done it.”
“Then we’ll know it! He’ll be down to only two teeth!” The woman let go of the willow branch she was weaving into the roof ribbing and held out two fingers, like fangs, in front of her lips.
They laughed together then, everyone, including her mother.
“Tomorrow, when his wife shows up here, we’ll ask her! Maybe this time he’ll admit it!”
“She should have been here today, working, like us. Then we wouldn’t have to wonder.”
This would be her own hut, too, the girl figured, in the time that lay ahead. With pride she checked each day now to see how her breasts were coming along. At first she had not believed it was happening to her, the twin swellings. She had wondered whether anyone else would even notice that she was changing. But her mother had put away her doubts about that when she came up behind her, folded her arms around her with her crossed hands sheltering each one a budding breast.
“Time soon,” her mother had whispered so no one else could hear.
So this was the hut she would stay in for those days, this new one the women were calling forth from the willows she was bringing. They had found the old one torn down when they came back into the Lost River camp and dumped the stuff they were carrying. All the willow and reed houses had gone down -- under the hands of the settlers, the men had said. Her uncle prodded them to get at the rebuilding. But this little house came first, the women insisted. Ellen’s Man’s wife’s baby wasn’t going to wait much longer. And practically every other woman in the camp, except the old grandmothers, would need it every month for her time apart.
The matting was handed up and secured in place for the roofing.
“Who told old woman Koalákaka she could say whether the betrothal gifts were enough? Isn’t that up to her son and daughter-in-law?”
“Since when did grandmothers get chosen to decide these things?”
“Since Koalákaka’s daughter had a baby!” someone said, and again the laughter spurted.
The girl felt her face flush when she thought that for her this was going to be the place, and they had let her help build it. When she stayed here alone that first time, she would not be afraid. She would be able to see the marks of her knife on the butt-ends of the willows where she had been allowed to cut them for the women. She would feel the same pride then that she felt this morning at the woman that was swelling within her.
#52
After a while the woman came out of the hut with Ellen’s Man’s new son all rubbed with bear grease. And while she rested up, Ellen’s Man took off to do his praying. Then it was just a few more days until the Hot Creeks went on another walk, this time back over to their old homes by Lower Klamath Lake, back to where Fairchild had his ranch. Steamboat Frank and his band -- his brother Jake, Ellen’s Man, Bogus Charley, and four other men, their women, their boys and girls, their old parents, and the new baby -- split off for their places over by Mahogany Mountain. By then the Lost River men were at work. They got the timbers squared away again and braced back up. They laid the roofs back in at Keintpoos’ and Scarfaced Charley’s big houses. Over on the other side of the river, Hooka Jim turned to it with Curley-Headed Doctor. They fixed up the kind of place Hooka’s father-in-law would need, being a kiuks, for his ceremonies. The women set to weaving fresh matting for the floors and the willow-framed roofs of the summer houses.
For it would be the hot season soon. Hardly time now to get it all done before they would have to scatter again, each family off in its little group, a day’s march, maybe more, to gather the inch-long epos roots. They would camp then in their brush-wood shelters, and the women would take their fire-hardened digging sticks and probe in the rich, moist places near the edges of the marshes they always visited. All day long the women would dig, munching at the bitter-sweetish roots as they worked, gathering all they could find to be dried and sacked up for winter.
For now, though, Keintpoos’ people turned