they had just thrown together. But the Bostons kept pretty much to themselves, only showing up now and then to beat the ponies back outside the fences and put the rails back up.
The men got the dugouts up from where they had sunk them with rocks when winter set in, before the Meacham had come to herd everybody up to the Klamath Agency. And after they set up the weir at the stone-bridge river crossing, they started out again to mend the old fish seines. They had cached them at the end of the last season, but now they would be needing them. Food was scarce since they had taken their stores away with them when they left in the wagons, and they hadn’t been able to carry what was left back again. Besides, there were more of them now: the ones who had set out with the Meacham and, in addition, the Sprague River Modocs who had come along off the reservation. It would be all right again when the fish-run came. Fish beyond counting would clog Lost River during the spawn as they always did: the silver- and black-sided trout, the suckers; but that was way off in the future. Sooner or later the people would get the small white lake-fish dried for the winter. But first they had to catch them. There was plenty to do. For now they would all of them have to work like women.
There was the grain the squatters had laid by. If things got bad before they got set up again, maybe they would take some of that.
They turned to and did what had to get done. In a bit, things sifted down to the place where they were working out good again. Better, anyhow, than when some Klamath was breathing down your neck, or some agent was telling you where to live. And so it went until it was pretty much set the way it had been before they left. Except that now there were more Bostons around them.
#53
“You can stay, or you can go,” Keintpoos said. “There’s no one here going to tell you what to do.”
The cluster of Sprague River Modocs stood before him as he sat on the incline of his house, half way up to the smoke-hole. He plucked at the green shoots that had begun to show on the packed earth of the roof, turning each one between his fingers to examine it before casting it away. Old Schonchin stood with a scattering of his Sprague River people, looking up at the younger man. Maybe there wasn’t room here for the two of them. He, the one the Boston tyees had set apart as the chief of the Modocs to talk to; and Keintpoos, a renegade turning toward being a war chief, maybe even a la`qi. Getting more like his father had been up till Ben Wright time. Old Schonchin had been thinking of this while he kept watching Keintpoos’ village coming back to life, this village and Hooka Jim’s on the other side of the river. Maybe he ought to give in and go back now to where he had come from. Maybe his people would follow him back to their own river. Keintpoos sat on the roof as if to hold it down, in just this place. This here was Keintpoos’, not his. And now he saw himself and his own band of Modocs in the little sprigs of grass the man plucked and examined and tossed away.
“We should go back to Sprague River,” one of his women said.
“You can go on back to the reservation,” his brother John Schonchin said from his perch behind Keintpoos. He made the last word stand out for ridicule. “But we made up our minds. We’re gonna live like we were meant to. This is what will feed us.” He swung his arm in a wide circle out toward the horizon. “What’s here is ours, like it’s always been. You can go for the white ways if that’s what you and your people feel like. But as for us, this is how it’s supposed to be. We finished our working, and now maybe it’s even time to raid ourselves some ponies over on Pit River. Get ourselves some to trade. You go on back if you want to. We’ll stick here and get rich. You go sit where the Boston tyee tells you.”
Keintpoos let John’s boasting fade away for a while before he said to Old Schonchin and whoever wanted to listen: “My father’s ashes are here. You can go ask Knapp or Ivan to bury you in their ground if you want to. But that way’s not for me. The dogs can come and carry your skull off somewheres if you like, but I figure to join the wind and spread over all this place. It got given to us before any Boston laid eyes on it.”
He paused for a moment, then gestured back over his shoulder. He said to Old Schonchin, “Your brother here talks for me. But sometimes, he goes past where I would. He and some others keep pushing on me to take back everything that was ours. They tell me they could get those cabins over there burned in a day, and the fences could be undone in less time than it takes to spit. Then as far as you could see there’d be only what we always had. I listen to them and keep on turning it over in my head. But I don’t think we could do that.”
“No,” said Old Schonchin, “you could not. I give up on that. And I heard you say you did, too, at the treaty. That day we signed, you understood me when I told them, ‘I thought if we killed all you white men we saw, that no more would come. We killed all we could, but you came like new grass in the spring.’ You remember: the tyees just laughed at us and showed where we should mark on the paper. That was long since, and now they’re all around you. Even then, when they were way fewer, I couldn’t get them killed enough to make them go. Less so can you, Keintpoos. You going to have to choose the way I chose.”
“No. I tried it. They can’t keep our enemies off us. We’re going to do it our own way. We’re going to have our own reservation, right here, where we belong. With no agents. These here whites can keep what they got; we don’t plan on harming them long as I say something about it. The rest we will all use together, us and them. That’s the only way I can be a reservation Indian. I can’t go as you go.”
“You’re both wrong,” John Schonchin said. “You can’t make a talk with the Boston tyees. The white man speaks only one language truly, the one that comes out of his gun. Give me a gun good as his, and I’ll speak to him so he understands me. I say no more reservation at all for us, here or anyplace else. Both of you are cowards. You’ve forgotten how to fight. The Modoc way: black as night, hot as fire, hard as the rock that bled out of that mountain over there.” He pointed to the horizon. “Now you’re whiter than it is. There ain’t enough heart between the two of you for either of you to lead. There’s others here who think the same about that.”
The sun fell warmly on all of them, with the words leaving nothing settled. Off in the distance, beyond Mahogany Mountain, stood Shasta -- Mlaiksi -- still white with the snow from the winter. They all knew the mountain was the burned heart of Tûtats, alive always, where great talkers and brave warriors might go to hear wisdom. But now it was silent, looked only on itself and said nothing. Along the riverbank, the willows were leafed out, the new growth a soft green. There was a cleanness to the air that shimmered in the distance beyond the lake, softening the lines of the hard landscape.
“I feel sad for you, Keintpoos,” Old Schonchin finally said. “You can’t follow me; you don’t dare lead my brother where he wants to go. I’m not sure what else that leaves you.”
#54
The day was almost finishing, and they would have to hurry if they didn’t want to get caught in Yreka by the dark. Keintpoos and Scarfaced Charley left the building and headed for their horses. They had left them with the black man who kept the livery stable. He had let them, as part pay for the pony they had brought along to sell him. Now, in the gathering dusk, Keintpoos stopped where the big street crossed another one on its downhill run to the gully. He pulled the buckskin pouch from under his shirt, tugging to get it clear of his chin. Then he picked with his fingernails at the twine he had knotted around it. He took out the wad of papers and spread them, smoothing the new sheet to square with the old ones. He folded the lot together, new sheet in, to protect it. Then he stuck them back in the pouch and cinched it. He shoved it again inside his shirt front.
“I hope you don’t have to get to that fast,” Scarfaced Charley said, grinning. “They’ll have us shot before you can show it to them.”
Keintpoos looked at his translator