Killer of Witches: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache Page 5

  He Watches handed me a leather sheath from which protruded the bone handle of a fine, polished steel knife.

  “This blade is strong. I took it from a brave man many seasons ago. He fought well and died with courage on the wagon road when I still ran and rode like a warrior. When you sleep, you should keep your weapons by your side. You never know when you will need them in fighting for mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, and all the Shis-Indeh. Carry it when you run, and your legs will not be all that defends you. Carry it hunting, and animals will know its strength. Use it well, my son.”

  “This I will do, Grandfather,” I said, bowing my head to him.

  He Watches said, “Caballo Negro and I agree. I am your teacher in many things a man needs to know. Caballo Negro’s wishes are my own. I will help you grow strong and grow to be a mighty warrior for Shis-Indeh, but it will be a long, hard ride, a warrior’s journey. Are you ready?”

  I looked in the eyes of old He Watches, saw the firelight flickering in them, and said, “I am ready, Grandfather.”

  Caballo Negro nodded. “So it begins, Ish-kay-neh. Be strong, and you will become a man. Show weakness and not even the Indah Lickoyee will accept you.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Shináá Cho

  * * *

  I had a hard time sleeping the night my father gave me that bow and old He Watches gave me the warrior’s knife. I lay still and, staring up into the darkness, felt the handle of the long blade in the sheath beside me and wondered what a crippled old man might teach me about a warrior’s skills. As I went to sleep, I decided it must be something special, something worth waiting and working for, perhaps even a special gift of Power from Ussen.

  The dark outline of Caballo Negro pushing aside the tipi blanket door after returning from a visit to the bushes awakened me. Darkness outside the tipi was tinged with dawn’s gray light, and a few birds were beginning their calls. Time to run. I left my warm blanket like smoke rising into the cold gray air, and tied the blade in its sheath around my waist, the blade so long that, by comparison to my height, it might have been a sword on a grown man. From the drinking jug, I took long, cold swallows of the sweet water I had brought to the tipi for my mother from the stream near the camp. I went outside and lifted my hands to the dawn, thanking Ussen for the coming day, singing the prayer my mother taught me.

  From his blankets, Caballo Negro said in a low voice, “Run as far as you can today, and a little farther each new day. Learn to pace yourself as a warrior paces his horse. Run the watched trail down toward the llano. You are not yet strong enough to defend yourself against the ndolkah (cougar) who might try to carry you off for his morning meal. The guards will watch and help you if he comes. I will watch for your return. Now, go.”

  I ran down the path between the village tipis and along the trail toward the low canyon. At first, I ran too fast, and my breath came hard in gasps and wheezes, but, as dawn pushed the night aside, making it easy to see the path falling away toward the big black mouth of shadows from the low canyon walls opening before me, I found my rhythm and didn’t labor as hard as when I started. I reached the steep part of the trail and ran down into the darkness that swallowed me. I ran too fast down the switchbacks into the low canyon. My breathing was fast and struggled to keep up with my racing heart.

  At the end of the first switchbacks, I picked a juniper growing by the side of the trail to use as a reference marker for my run to go past the next day. I ran around it and headed back up the trail, feeling shaky and weak. Knowing it would be a hard climb, I took deep breaths and ran on. The distance from Cha’s camp to the turnaround juniper was longer than I thought. Returning up the canyon trail, my legs churned as if caught in river mud. I thought, Maybe I won’t have strength to make it back to the camp unless I stop to rest. The thought of stopping shamed me, and I kept running, no matter how weak I grew.

  When the trail reached the higher plateau, a twisting pain began to grow in my side. The air was colder than in the lower canyon; every breath I took felt like fire filling my lungs, and my side cramped and hurt more with each step. I made each foot take one more step as I ran through camp to my mother’s fire. Running was not fun as it had been the day before when I was just a little boy. The trail I ran now was hard and long, and it gave me great thirst.

  Caballo Negro sat in front of mother’s wickiup watching me come up the trail, sweat streaming down my body, very tired and weak. He nodded and said, “Enjuh!” as I staggered to the fire. “My son, running to the limit of your strength makes you grow strong.”

  He motioned me to sit beside him while he finished a bowl of stew made with meat from an Indah cow stolen in his last raid. My mother, her belly swollen with the new baby growing inside her, moved slowly. She had made a stew with wild onions, dried mesquite beans, potatoes, and Nakai-yi peppers she traded from another woman for one of her baskets. She gave me some water, filled my bowl with stew, and handed it to me, smiling, after I drank. I knew she was proud of me.

  Caballo Negro smiled, too, his dark eyes studying me. “Not too much water so soon after a run. It will make you sick. Grow strong, and you will not need as much. Eat, take water again, and then rest a little. He Watches takes you today. He goes to his place on top of the mountain. Take your bow. Be ready when he comes. He waits on no boy.”

  I was so weak my hands were near to trembling, but I said with a rasping voice, “I am ready.” I slurped gravy from the edge of the bowl my mother had given me. I’ve never forgotten the hot, spicy tingle of her stew gravy sliding down my throat. Because I ate too fast, gravy ran from the corners of my mouth and down my jaw. I felt strength returning to my bones and joy coming to my heart as I wiped the gravy from my face. I knew I had done well. I had made my father proud.

  Finished, I handed the bowl back to Sons-ee-ah-ray and said my thanks. She gave me a cup of strong coffee made from piñon nuts, and I sat with Caballo Negro, who was still drinking his coffee.

  I didn’t know the place where He Watches sat to watch the llano. Children were told to stay away from the high ridge above the camp. My mother had demanded I never go there alone. She said it was too easy for a little boy to fall off the rugged cliffs on the ridge crest. The climb to the top of He Watches’ ridge filled me with surprise. Grandfather, crippled and using his staff, moved faster and stronger up the hard-to-see path than I did. I struggled for air when we came to the top of the world. He Watches stopped to let me catch up and see the unending llano far below that I had first seen in the dim light of dusk when we had come to Cha’s camp two years before.

  My eyes grew big. Just to the west, I saw the peaks the Nakaiyes called Guadalupe and El Capitán rise above us. To the east, beyond the mountains, water occasionally threw points of bright light at us. He Watches told me they came from the same river that ran by Bosque Redondo, the one the Indah called Pecos. At the bottom of the cliffs, ruts of an Indah wagon trail twisted through the foothills off to the east and threaded around a few mountains and back again to the llano heading for the great white salt beds to the west that the Nakai-yes and Indah had fought over many times.

  He Watches led the way along the top of the ridge to a shelf of rocks on the edge of the cliffs. Rocks circled ashes and charcoal from earlier fires, and dry juniper branches and weed stalks were piled nearby to make more. He Watches climbed down the cliff side of the shelf rocks and disappeared. I climbed to the top of the shelf and looked over its edge expecting to see him on a ledge, but he was not there. Surprised, fear jumped in my guts. I thought he’d fallen, but then he called to me, “Come, Grandson, walk around the edge as I did.”

  I worked my way around the cliff side shelf and discovered it formed a shallow cave about ten feet down the cliff face, facing due south. It was a shady place, and the air in its shadows cool. Several blankets smelling of smoke and showing a few scorched places lay stacked to one side along with three full water bladders, and toward the back, there was a small fire pit in a natural hollow in the rocks with
firewood and an ax beside it. He Watches sat on a blanket in the shade against a big, smooth boulder, his stiff leg crooked out in front of him. He smiled and said, “Take a blanket, Grandson. The rocks are hard, and the day is long.”

  I opened one fold of a blanket, and spreading it beside him, sat down and pulled my bow and quiver of arrows over my head to lay them on the edge of the blanket. He Watches fished in a big leather pouch slung over his shoulder and brought out a yellow metal tube with a large, clear rock with a shiny, smooth, curved surface on one end and another like it but much smaller in a large, black circle on the other end. I had often heard stories from men sitting around the campfires of the power of his fetish. My heart raced with excitement at seeing it for the first time. He handed it to me.

  “Grandson, take care you do not drop it. Do you know what it is?”

  “Pesh-klitso (yellow iron)?”

  He Watches smiled. “It is strong like pesh and colored like klitso, but it is different. The Indah do not dig in the ground like badgers for this pesh-klitso. It is the same pesh-klitso in the shoots-many-times rifles warriors take from the Indah, and I took it from a wagon driver on the road down there below us many years ago. He defended his wagon with a long knife when we ambushed it. His long knife wounded several warriors before he went down. I needed four arrows to kill him, the last in his throat. He was a great bear before wolves, a worthy opponent for a warrior, and he died well. I looked for weapons in his wagon, but found none as good as ours, only big, straight sticks of wood. These we burned. His cloth I gave to Socorro, who shared it with the other women in camp. I thought this the only thing worth taking. At first, like you, I thought it pesh-klitso. I learn it is not the same, but stronger, harder, not as easy to scratch with a blade.

  “It took awhile to understand this thing. It grows long.” He Watches took it back from me and pulled on the end with the small clear rock. The tube grew to the length of my arm. I watched with surprise and asked, “A war club that grows small except for fighting?”

  “I, too, thought that for a little while, but I never struck anything with it, for it has not enough weight to be a useful war club. One day I saw light pass through the big end and out the small one. Maybe, I thought, maybe the shiny ends are like the burning glass I saw an Indah use once to start a fire with sunlight. I looked in the little end and saw trees on the mountains far, far away. I could not tell there were even any trees there with my own eyes. This thing is big medicine. When I use it, I see things no one else sees. It helps me watch the road for Blue Coats and wagons with supplies. It helps protect the Shis-Indeh.” He turned the small end toward me and pointed toward a curve in the road.

  “There is a big green bush there. Can you see it?”

  I stared at the curve. “Maybe, I cannot tell for certain.”

  “Look at it through the Shináá Cho, and tell me what you see.”

  I held the small end of the tube to my eye. It took a moment to point Shináá Cho toward the right place. I saw a bush as if it were only steps away. I looked at the bend in the road from around the tube and then back through the Shináá Cho. I saw things I did not see with my eyes and, nodding, handed it back to He Watches.

  “Truly, the Shináá Cho is powerful medicine.”

  “You speak true, Grandson. I use it often. Now you know how to use it if you have need, but take care when you do. The clear rocks on the ends are the sources of its power. If these rocks are broken, it will no longer have medicine. An Indah, who measured the land—why he wasted his time doing such a thing I never understood—taught me this. He showed me how to take it apart and make fire with the clear rocks and how when they were gone, it no longer had Power. For this, I let him live.”

  “Can I use it today?”

  He Watches pointed toward a dark spot in the rough foothills far below us.

  “Use the Shináá Cho and tell me what you see there.”

  I finally found the spot after squinting alongside the long barrel a few times to be sure it was pointed where I thought.

  “I see . . . I see a cliff in shadows, and at its bottom, there is a river or maybe a big arroyo that runs in front of it. The top of the hill is flat, and the arroyo or river winds east and west among the hills, and the east end seems to swing back in this direction. To the west of the cliff are small hills. They look like stacked circles of dough my mother fries when she makes bread.”

  He Watches nodded. “You describe the place good. You will be a powerful warrior one day. You have good eyes for important details for one so young. What if a great gaagé (raven) came and took you while you slept and left you on top of that flat top hill? You have never been there, and there is no one to help you. It is half a sun’s run away from here. How would you find your way back?”

  I looked at Grandfather and started to say I didn’t know, but pride choked off the words. If a question, then an answer. I know I can find it. I stared at the flat top hill through the Shináá Cho and then looked for landmarks along the most direct path I might walk. I tried to imagine what the cliffs where we sat looked like from the flat top hill so far away and thought of what signs to look for that showed where the camp was.

  I studied the scene for a long time before I said, “I know the camp sits near a high place. The arroyo by the high cliffs I see makes many great turns but moves toward the mountains here. I would follow it in this direction and save my strength rather than climb many hills. Perhaps I would find green spots where there is water. When close to the cliffs, I would search east and west looking for signs of horses and mules and follow their trails up into the mountains here. If it was night, I could look for signs of fires. I know of no other ways, Grandfather. Teach me.”

  Grandfather smiled and said, “You cannot walk along the sides of these mountains and expect to find a horse trail. The ground is too rocky, and has too many paths you might follow. If you found a real one after several suns of walking, you would have great luck. Instead, choose a trail or a path to a high place on the cliffs. Climb high. Climb to the top if you can. From there, you would see places you would recognize, and then you would know how to return to the camp. Listen to my words. Someday not far now, one of your manhood tests will come like this. He who cannot find his way home will be a long time becoming a man. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. “I understand, Grandfather. It is a good lesson.”

  “Are you ready to learn something harder? Something that will take a long time to learn?”

  “What can possibly take a long time to learn? Teach me, Grandfather. I am ready.”

  “Your father’s name, Caballo Negro, you know that it is a Nakai-yi name, meaning Black Horse in their language. Why does your father take a Nakai-yi name and not one the Shish-Indeh gave him?”

  The question had never entered my mind until He Watches asked it. I had always called my father Caballo Negro. As I thought about it, I realized that all of the best warriors in our camp used Nakai-yi names.

  “I do not know, Grandfather. Why does he take this name?”

  “The Nakai-yes fear the great warriors. They know who they are and give them names in their own language. It is a sign of respect, of honor. For Shish-Indeh warriors, it means our enemies fear them and know who they are. A warrior keeps that name because it is an honor, and he is recognized by the people that way. Perhaps someday you will have a Nakai-yi name. Do you want this?”

  “Yes, Grandfather, I want this.”

  “Enjuh. If you are given such a name, you need to know what it means in the tongue of the Nakai-yi. Do you want to learn the words of the Nakai-yi, to speak in their tongue? It takes a long time and many lessons to do this.”

  “I am ready, Grandfather.”

  The old man smiled once more.

  “Bueno.”

  I frowned, and the old man laughed and said, “Your first lesson in the tongue of the Nakai-yes, my son. ‘Bueno’ means ‘good.’ ”

  I laughed and tried the unfamiliar word. “Beyeo . . . bue .
. . eno . . . buen . . . bueno. Is that correct, Grandfather? Bueno?”

  “You learn quickly, Ish-kay-neh. Today I will teach you the Nakai-yi words for colors. Remember them well.”

  He pointed at the sky and said, “Azul.”

  CHAPTER 7

  NAH-KAH-YEN

  * * *

  Caballo Negro, finishing his stew, speared the last chunks of meat out of the gravy with his knife, slid the juice-dripping morsels in his mouth, and then drank the remaining gravy directly from the bowl. Wiping the grease from his mouth and rubbing his hands over his legs and high-top moccasins, he turned to me, now fourteen years old, and nodding toward the wickiup doorway, said, “Come.” Outside, the cold night air puckered our skin making it prickle in the light from the falling sun, nearly gone.

  We walked to our horses near a tall, ancient juniper. Caballo Negro tightened his saddle cinches and swung into the saddle in a smooth, cat-like leap. He waved his hand up, motioning for me to do the same.

  My heart pounded with excitement as I tightened cinches for my black and white pinto and swung into the saddle. I had watched him mount many times and practiced how he did it. I could do a near perfect imitation of Caballo Negro’s mount.

  Caballo Negro said, “You have your knife and a bladder of water?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Enjuh.”

  Guiding our horses to a spot outside the camp, we joined five mounted men and their sons, all about my age. Caballo Negro, a leading Cha warrior, spoke for the men.