Blood of the Devil Page 24

  Kitsizil Lichoo’ took a trail west out of the Blue Mountains down to the Río Bavispe where the trail near it made riding north much faster than across the mountains. We passed around and stayed out of sight of the villages of Bacerac, Bavispe, and San Miguel, and then took the Carretas Pass to the east side of the Blue Mountains. After a long day’s ride, we stopped at the springs near Carretas as the sun sank into the far mountains, changing the white, far horizon clouds into blazing oranges, reds, and purples. The women chopped wood for two or three fires, made little wickiups to sleep under, pulled grass to sleep on, and made us all a meal that filled us up with enough left over to eat for the morning before we rode on. While the women made shelters and cooked, Yibá, Beela-chezzi, Kah, Rufus, and I rubbed down the ponies and mules and hobbled them to graze during the night.

  After the warriors ate, we sat around a fire, smoked to the four directions, and spoke with Kitsizil Lichoo’ of his camp two days’ ride to the north. I said, “Why did you start your own camp so far away from the safety of Juh’s stronghold? You’re a chief’s son. In his rancheria, you would live well.”

  Kitsizil Lichoo’ smiled and nodded. “I left because I’m a chief’s son.” He saw us frown and laughed aloud. “A chief’s son does what his father tells him. Juh has killed a lot of White Eyes. I’ll never make war on or raid people of my blood. I didn’t want to refuse him when he wanted to take me on a raid north across the border. The best thing for me to do was have my own camp far away from the camps of other Blue Mountain Apaches and Chiricahuas.”

  He paused for a moment, and we could hear Calico Dove sitting with the Opata women telling them stories of her days in Elias’s camp. There was much laughing about her stories, mostly about men trying to court her. Out in the darkness the children played their games of tag and hide.

  Kitsizil Lichoo’ continued, “One day, three harvests ago, I hunted and rode the mountain trails to the north. I left a trail following a deer and climbed to the top of a long, flat-topped ridge following the tall tree line on the edge of a great meadow. It was there I saw a tall stack of boulders in the middle of the meadow. It stood up straight and tall, like a finger poking out of the ground, and smaller boulders, shaped like eggs, surrounded it. I climbed to the top of the finger and could just see, through the gray haze far to the north, the top of a mountain. I learned later the Indah called it Big Hatchet, and that it lay just across the border in the land of the Blue Coats. I liked the top of the boulder stack. It was a place where a guard could watch for enemies coming from a long way off or hide from those who approached from nearby.

  “An arrow from a strong bow shot from the boulder toward the east side of the ridge, would reach the edge of a line of trees and brush that covered the sides of the canyon all the way to the bottom. I climbed down from the boulder and led my pony into those trees. I heard flowing water down in the canyon, and I found a game trail down through the trees to the bottom.

  “Down on the canyon floor, I found a wide, slow-moving stream flowing around a big bench that stood about two rifle lengths above the water. Brush covered the bench and grew all the way over to the far canyon wall. I crossed the stream, never more than the length of a forearm deep, to the bench and found on the far end a place to ride my pony up on to the bench. The brush and trees thinned out as they approached the canyon wall. Birds called from the trees and great white herons swooped down the long, straight stretch of the water by the bench. It was far from villages or soldier forts of the Indah or Nakai-yes, hidden in the northern Blue Mountains, very hard to find, and far from the camps of Apaches to the south who raided across the border. I knew Ussen had shown me the place for my rancheria.

  “I rode back to Juh’s stronghold and told him what I had found and that I wanted to start my own rancheria. He argued with me for a while, saying that I should stay with the People in the stronghold, but when he saw I was determined to leave, he told me to go ahead. I told him I wanted to ask warriors in the stronghold to join me in a new camp, and he said that was all right. He didn’t think I had much of a chance to get any warriors to join me. Four warriors, two with women whose kin had already died and two without women, surprised us and said they would go with me.

  “On the way to the new place, we rested overnight in the camp of Elias. I found many warriors in Elias’s camp who wanted to leave because Elias had gotten too many of them killed or wounded in his raids. But few wanted to take the risk of starting a new camp. I talked and smoked a long time with them before eight decided to come with me. That was nearly one in four of Elias’s warriors. They were all warriors, but young, and had not yet taken a woman.

  “Until now, there are still only three women in our camp, and one of them is my first wife. She says there is too much work to do alone and to find her a sister. My warriors have even talked about slipping off to San Carlos to steal women. These Opata bring us much that I once thought would take a long time to find. Now the warriors won’t need to cross the border to steal women. We’ll be different from Apaches to the south.”

  It grew quiet around the fires. The women and children slept. We smoked, alone with our thoughts. Somewhere up the canyon trail, a googé (whip-poor-will) called, and a night bird squawked.

  I said, “How will your camp be any different from the camps to the south except that you’ll only raid Nakai-yes?”

  Kitsizil Lichoo’ poked at the fire’s coals with a cane stick and said, “We’ll stay in one camp harvest to harvest until we’re found by the Nakai-yes. Then we’ll leave. I’ve already found another place nearby that’s even harder to find than the one we have now. The canyon protects us from wind in Ghost Face time and from most of the sun during the hottest times, from the Season of Many Leaves until the time of Large Fruit. We’ll have lodges better than ones with skins or cloth over wickiups or tipis. We’ll have lodges with walls made of stone that will be as good and long lasting as any Nakai-yi lodge.”

  He laughed again when I frowned in disbelief. “How will you do this? Can you make stones obey you?”

  “I can’t, but we have a warrior who can. He is one with black skin who escaped from the White Eyes when he was a slave on a trader’s wagon Juh attacked. He looked so different from the White Eyes that Juh kept him for his own slave. The black slave had worked on stone fences made by the White Eyes to the east. He had learned how to make stones stay where he put them. In the stronghold, he showed us what he knew by building a short fence out of stones. He tried to show some of Juh’s warriors how to make the stones obey, but they didn’t want to learn. They wouldn’t do something slaves did. I remembered that stone fence and asked him if he could make lodge walls. He agreed to come to my camp and show us how. Now every warrior in my camp builds a lodge with walls of stone, cool in the time of Large Fruit, and warm in the Ghost Face Season. He knows how to make a stone lodge by himself.

  “We’ve also made corrals from brush and Indah pesh-diwozhí (barbed wire) thorn ropes that will help keep our ponies and mules and the cattle we take from the hacendados in one place when we need them. We’ll have room for our women to work without fear of attack from Blue Coats or Nakai-yes. We’ll have many children, and our band will grow strong. Our warriors won’t die faster than our women can have children to replace them. Come stay with us. You’ve killed the witch who destroyed your People. You don’t have to live on a reservation.”

  I nodded. “I’ll think on this. Show us your camp.”

  We left Carretas Springs, as the dawn brought gray light, and moved along the eastern side of the Blue Mountains, passing west, above and hidden from a big hacienda built against the steep wall of a high ridge rising alone up out of the llano. There were many cattle in small groups scattered across the llano, and, from the high trail we followed, I used the Shináá Cho to see vaqueros in several small camps herding and protecting them from Apaches and banditos.

  We reached El Paso Pulpito and took a side canyon north. By the time the sun was falling into the western horizon,
we came to the end of the canyon and stopped to camp at the beginning of a trail west across the ridges.

  With the coming of the sun, we were climbing switchbacks up the first ridge. We crossed four high ridges that day, and when the sun was four fingers above the horizon, we rode down a narrow trail into a deep canyon. From the top of the trail, I heard water flowing in the bottom of the canyon. At the bottom, a wide, shallow stream flowed across wide, flat stones covered with green moss. The sun was nearly gone, and shadows were long and black, but Kitsizil Lichoo’ easily followed a trail along the eastern bank until he came to a wide brush-covered bench and turned into the trees where light flickered from fires near the canyon wall.

  Warriors surrounded us as if they were ghosts appearing out of the air. Kitsizil Lichoo’ raised his rifle in greeting and said, “Ho! Brothers, I come with a new sister for my wife and bring you wives and children saved from the witch, Sangre del Diablo, killed by the Mescalero, Yellow Boy, and his brothers and an In-dah friend who ride here with us. Welcome them. They are great friends and brothers to us.”

  I saw the Opata, both women and children, bravely look in the eyes of the warriors who surrounded us and knew their hearts raced with uncertainty. Would they be accepted or driven away? A warrior, tall and strong, who I remembered from Juh’s stronghold, stepped toward us, his rifle in the crook of his arm. He nodded and said, as he motioned toward the fires, “Hondah (Come in; you are welcome).” Other warriors, saying the same thing, walked, smiling, to the children and women’s ponies and helped them dismount. The children were shy and looked at the ground, but I knew they were fast warming to these strange warriors who accepted them. The Opata women smiled at the warriors and seemed relaxed in their company.

  Calico Dove slid off her pony and was met by the smiling first wife of Kitsizil Lichoo’, Steps in Water, who took her hand and led her toward a large lodge with stone walls and a blanket-covered doorway near one of the fires. The Opata women and children followed them to the fires.

  The warriors took the reins of the Opata ponies and led them to a brush corral where they kept their own ponies. They helped my brothers and me unpack the ponies, carrying the loot we had taken back from Sangre del Diablo. The warriors carried the loot back to the fires, and we brushed down all the ponies while the women worked to make a feast.

  We left the camp of Kitsizil Lichoo’ after five suns. The Apache warriors and three women were happy the Opata had come to them, and they worked well together. I think their mutual need made them a good match.

  In the early morning light with mists rising from the stream, they all gathered to watch us ride up the trail to the top of the ridge on the far side. The night before, Kitsizil Lichoo’ had said, “My brothers, if you ever need a camp or warriors to help you, come here first.” We promised to remember the camp of Kitsizil Lichoo’.

  Kitsizil Lichoo’ told us of a trail that was shorter than the one we thought to take that took us past Janos and then north toward the great river and around the big village of Indah and Nakai-yes on the border at the great pass of the north, El Paso del Norte. The trail Kitsizil Lichoo’ showed us led from the finger of boulders on top of the far ridge down into a series of canyons along a stream Kitsizil Lichoo’ said the Nakai-yes called the Río Bonito.

  We crossed the border at what the White Eyes called the playas, in the Animas Valley, a great, white place where water stood like a great lake a few inches deep in the time of rain, but was soon gone by the Season of Earth is Reddish Brown (late fall). We made our first camp in a canyon in the Little Hatchet Mountains, near a well pumped by a windmill.

  We sat and smoked to the four directions, and Rufus, who had said little, except for long talks with Yibá, since the Río Piedras Verdes where we had wiped out the witch, surprised us and said, “Boys, I know yore anxious to git on home, but now we’re in the land of the Indah, and it just got a lot more dangerous than down there in Mexico. Folks up here see four Apaches with an old Indah geezer? They’re likely to shoot first and find out later if maybe they made a mistake. I’m thinkin’ we ought to be ridin’ at night and holin’ up during the day. What’d ya think?”

  I looked around the fire, and all the Mescaleros were nodding. I’d been thinking the same thing. Beela-chezzi said, “Roofoos Peak speaks wise words. I, too, think we must now ride at night.” We all agreed and would have ridden on, but the ponies needed rest.

  The next night we rode nearly all the way to the great river and rested at a natural tank that was nearly dry. The following night was an easy ride from the tank to Rufus’s rancho in the Organ Mountains. We took care of Rufus’s mule and our ponies while he cooked us bread, beans, and chiles.

  Before the light showed behind the eastern mountains, we had all found sleep. The Mescaleros slept out by the cattle pool where we had camped before, although Rufus said we were free to sleep on his porch or under the shed at the corral. At the coming of night the next day, we thanked our friend Rufus, promised we would come to his hacienda again as he had asked, and rode for our canyon on the reservation.

  It was early morning when we saw smoke rising from our tipis. I counted the notches on my day stick. We had been gone twenty-eight suns. Sangre del Diablo was no more, and the moon was as bright as it had been when we left to send him blind to the Happy Land.

  CHAPTER 37

  JICARILLA COME TO MESCALERO

  Yibá took the reins to our ponies. “Your families must know you return safe. Go. Make their spirits glad; fill them with happiness that you return. Your ponies, I’ll care for.”

  Beela-chezzi, Kah, and I faced him. Beela-chezzi said, “Yibá, you did well in your apprenticeship. This day, you’re a warrior. This day you’re a man. We’re proud when you ride with us. You honor us with this last favor. Don’t make your mother wait a long time for you to return to her tipi.”

  Yibá held up his chin and looked each of us in the eye. “You’re truly my brothers. Áshood (thank you) for your approval. Now go.”

  I crept through the trees until I was just outside the blanket covering the opening into Juanita’s tipi and stood there listening to her speak to Kicking Wren like someone grown rather than a two-harvest child barely off the tsach. I heard Juanita moving pots and baskets around the fire, slicing and chopping food with her knife against her smooth, flat piece of wood, a gift from the sawmill. I heard her giggle, and my spirit filled with joy and relief. I grew impatient waiting for her to open the blanket and thought, Maybe she’ll stay inside all day.

  I reached to pull the blanket aside when the whole camp heard Beela-chezzi’s young son, Shiyé, yell, “Beela-chezzi!”

  The door blanket snapped back before I could touch it, and there she stood, squinting against the sun’s glow in the early morning mists. Her fingers flew to her lips as if her spirit tried to leave her when she saw me. Kicking Wren held to her skirt, peeped out from behind her, and, seeing me, laughed, covering her mouth like her mother. Faster than Coyote after Rabbit, Juanita grabbed my vest and pulled me inside before wrapping her strong, trembling arms around me.

  “My man has returned to us. I’m glad to see him again.”

  Out of sight of the rest of the camp, she gave me hugs and tears of joy, just on the other side of the door blanket, in our private place, which was the right thing to do. Juanita always did the right thing. She laid her ear against my chest where my heart beat like dahtiyé (humming bird) wings. “You found the witch? Did he wound you or the others? Have you killed him? Are we free of his power?”

  I whispered, “One question at a time, Ish-tia-neh (Woman). The witch is no more. I killed him. I have a long scratch across my back where his Segundo nearly killed me before Rufus sent him to the Happy Land with his big thunder rifle. Beela-chezzi has kept grease and herbs on it. Soon it will be only a scar. We’re free of this evil. You and Kicking Wren, you’re good?”

  “Now we’re good. You’re in the tipi. I would see your wound.”

  “I’ll show you later. Now, I
have hunger.”

  I reached down, grabbed giggling Kicking Wren under her arms, and swung her high. Truly a warrior’s heart stays with his family.

  Much happiness filled our little camp. My mother, Sons-ee-ahray, and her adopted daughter, Lucky Star, Juanita’s sister, Moon on the Water, and even Maria, Juanita’s mother, who broke the son-in-law avoidance way, visited us to see that I was in fact alive after facing the witch and to thank me for killing him and to wish good things for us. All the women visited all the warriors that morning, welcoming us as if we had come back from the Happy Land of the grandfathers.

  Later that morning, my friend, Chawn-clizzay, who looked after my family and relatives while we were gone, stopped at Juanita’s tipi. He stood before the tipi entrance blanket, holding his pony’s reins, and said, “Juanita, Chawn-clizzay stands before your tipi. Can I provide anything for you or the others before I go to the agency?”

  I put the edge of my fingers before my lips for her to be quiet, moved to the blanket, flipped it back, and stepped out to meet him. “You’ve done enough, my friend. Áshood (thank you). We all owe you a great debt.”

  His jaw dropped, and his face filled with a smile as he grabbed my shoulders and looked in my eyes, not yet certain I wasn’t some kind of spirit. “And you, my friend, you and your friends killed the witch? You’ve done this great thing. I can see it in your eyes. All Mescalero will dance to your return. I must ride today and tell Branigan and Tata Crooked Nose. They ask often if you return.”