Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 56

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 their ponies out into the pastures newly fenced off by the squatters. Here and there along the lakeshore reaching off to the east you could see the cabins 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.