pound her hard from behind in the cool ridgetop breeze. Meanwhile, off to the west, others were whipping wet blankets or deerskins on and off smoldering piles of green brush to dot the blue sky with white puffs.
He knew it would only upset the gal he was dog-styling if he told her there were three sets of smoke signals now. It unsettled him enough as he tried to read their meaning. The new smoke was rising more to the south, not too close, but in line with the very direction he’d been planning on heading as soon as it seemed safe to move out.
As she arched her spine to take him deeper, Kinipai moaned, “Hear me! I don’t want them to kill you too. I think you should make a run for the Chama Valley alone. I do not think they would attack you if they saw you were not helping a condemned witch!”
To which Longarm could only reply, “Neither do I. But we get out of this together or nobody gets out at all, you pretty little thing.”
They spent the day smoking, screwing, eating canned beans and tomato preserves, but mostly talking. Longarm wound up learning more about Jicarilla medicine ways, or witchcraft, than he’d have ever bothered looking up in any library. But he listened tight because you just never knew when some bit of useless information could come in handy.
Kinipai confirmed what he’d already thought about the Jicarilla being as close to Navaho as the other official Apache nations. The Mexicans to begin with, and the Anglos coming afterwards, had accepted the Pueblo classification of Na-dene-speaking strangers who’d never known they were different nations. “Apache” came from the Pueblo word for any sort of enemy. The Jicarilla qualified as Apache by hunting and raiding a tad closer to the Zuni and Tanoan pueblos down the east slopes of the Continental Divide. “Navaho”or “Navajo,” the Mexican term came from the Pueblo word for a cornfield, Navaho. But none of the Na-dene involved gave a damn. The ones who were an inconvenient distance away for raiding corncribs had gotten captives to show them how to grow their own. The so-called Navaho had raided with almost as much glee until Kit Carson and the U.S. Cavalry, with some field artillery tagging along, had shown them the error of their ways back in ‘67. The Jicarilla had gone on raising hell as late as ‘73, making them Apache raiders instead of the domesticated Navaho. But Kinipai seemed to talk the same way about the same spirits as a friendly Navaho gal he’d met up with a spell back over in the Four Corners country. But when he allowed he’d heard that the Chiji, as they called Chiricahua, worshipped White-Painted Woman instead of the Navahos’ Changing Woman, the condemned witch laughed and told him his kind wrote things down silly.
She explained, or tried to, that neither term was exactly what an Indian meant in evoking the friendly Holy One known to them as Asdza Nadle’he, or Asdza Nadle’che.
When he said both names sounded much the same to him, she smiled and said, “The Chiji speak with a different… accent? When white eyes with pencils come to put down the names of the Holy Ones on paper, my people try, but the words do not come out the same in English. I wish I could explain this better, but I can’t, even though I have been taught both ways of speaking.”
Longarm nodded. “I follow your drift. Sort of. A French Canadian once assured me the worst thing you can call somebody in French is a camel, a critter with a hump on its back and an evil disposition. But try as she might, and speaking English almost as good as me, she just couldn’t say why it was dirtier to call a Frenchman a camel than, say, a dog or pig. She said those were insults too. But nothing to compare with ‘camel.’”
Kinipai nodded. “When one of my people is so cross that killing would not be enough, he may say, ‘Yil tsa hockali!’ And if anyone has one shred of honor, they must kill him for cursing them that dirty. Yet there is no way to translate the curse into English, Spanish, or even Zuni. You have to be N’d and think N’de to understand the terrible thing that’s been said about you.”
He nodded. “Son of a bitch loses a lot of its bite in Spanish too. We were talking about Changing Woman?”
She said, “Asdza Nadle’he, or Asdza Nadle’che, is the mother of the Hero Twins who killed all those evil spirits, and sees that all things change as they should change, from birth to death. Her name can be written down in English as Changing Woman or White-Painted Woman if you change one sound a little. Our tongue is not easy for others to learn. Your tongue is as simple as baby talk. A pony is always called a pony, whether someone is riding it or not, whether it is in sight or off on the range somewhere. Do you wonder that sometimes we have a hard time explaining why we have to fight your people, whether you can see why we are cross with you or not?”
He had to admit his own kind had managed to get mighty cross with others speaking the same lingo. But that war he’d run off to once was water under the bridge now too. So along about noon, seeing those smoke signals didn’t seem to be rising to the west anymore, he got dressed and carried the nose bags and his Winchester back down to the creek.
Nobody bothered him as he filled them and lugged them back upslope to the tethered ponies, while wishing they were mules. For though it wasn’t too hot and dry that afternoon, horseflesh still needed far more water than either human beings or mules did.
As he was putting the nose bags back on the two ponies, Kinipai came over bare-ass to tell him it seemed dumb to take such chances. She said both brutes were N’de ponies who didn’t get watered as often as the fat pets of his kind.
He said, “I’ve an extra shirt in my saddlebags. We’d best see how it fits you if I’m not to spend the whole fool day with a hard-on. As to fat pet ponies, I’ll tell you a dirty little secret of the U.S. Cav if you promise not to tell your treacherous Apache pals.”
As she said with a sigh, she had no friends among her own people, Longarm moved over to the grounded roping saddle to rustle up that pale blue workshirt, saying, “All that guff about noble Indian steeds in those Street and Smith dime novels by Ned Buntline is off the mark by a country mile. Us white eyes don’t worry about stud books, horseshoes, and proper care because we’re stupid. We invented horsebackriding, long before the first Indian ever saw the first horse on this side of the main ocean.”
He handed her the shirt, and Kinipai put it on, saying, “Oh, this is so pretty, it is blue as the hair of Turquoise Woman. But hear me, I still say our ponies are tougher than your ponies!”
He showed her how to button up as he dryly observed, “Let’s hope we can keep your boys from tangling on horseback with those troopers at Fort Marcy, then. Your boys can hide amid the rimrocks just fine on their glorified billy goats. But no Indian pony can outrun a real horse on open ground. Do you know how many Pony Express riders the Indians ever caught up with between Omaha and Sacramento? None. Not a single sissy, oat-fed pony. The company lost one rider, arrowed in the back as he rode through an ambush. But his pony, and the mail, got through. It was the transcontinental telegraph that finished off the Pony Express. This Jicarilla riding stock I got off your agency police would make an army remount sergeant cry, but they’re in better shape than your average
