Longarm shook the match out and reached in his jeans for his penknife as he moved closer, warning, “Try not to bust the crust of the ant pile any more if you can, ma’am. I know the feeling. I’ve been nipped by red vinegar ants. But they only bite more if you rile them up.”
He was sure she was cussing him sarcastically as he got to work on the rawhide thongs binding her wrists. He said soothingly, “Step atop my toes whilst I free you. The little buggers can’t quite bite through that much leather, ma’am.”
The naked Indian lady followed his suggestion, getting white ash all over the front of his denim as she plastered her naked body to his, a bare instep across each of his stout cavalry stovepipes. He wasn’t sure he wanted to feel that way about a gal that spooky-looking. But he’d told her to do it. So he could only be a sport and cut both wrists free, even though she grabbed him like a long-lost lover with the first arm he got loose.
Then she was hugging him with both arms, and legs, as he backed off the ant pile with her, saying, “I got some aloe lotion amongst my possibles. Lucky for us both, red ants don’t act as wild after dark as they can in daylight.”
But she didn’t seem to be listening. She’d already unwrapped her ash-plastered form from his to run bare-ass down the slope and belly-flop in that whitewater rill. The water was only inches deep and maybe a foot across. But she still managed a heap of splashing as she wallowed like an overheated pig set free in a mud puddle. She was already tougher to make out in the moonlight as she washed all that ash and clay from her saddle brown naked skin.
Longarm knew that, unlike true desert Indians such as Pima or the Paiute, some called Diggers, Na-dene set more store in modest dress. So while she dunked herself in ice water from head to toe, he went over to the tethered ponies to break a Hudson Bay blanket out of his bedroll and a lead-foil tube of aloe-and-zinc ointment from a saddlebag. As he ambled back to the naked asdza sitting upright in the rill with the moonlight glinting off her wet hair and hide, he told her, “You’d best get out and wrap yourself in this blanket before you catch cold, ma’am. I got some salve here I packed in case of burns. It ought to sooth them ant bites some.” She said she’d been stomping like that to kill as many of the red vinegar ants as she could while they were bedded down for the night inside that big mound. He didn’t ask why. She allowed she had managed to get her bare feet and ankles nipped enough to matter. So he helped her out of the rill, wrapped her in the blanket, and sat her on the grassy slope to hunker down and rub salve all over her nether extremities as she told him her sad story. She said her name was Kinipai and that her maternal uncle had been a powerful hitali, or medicine man. She swore four times she’d never lain with her own uncle, making it so, unless she was risking the wrath of all the spirits and holy ones by lying four times. When she said four times that neither she nor her uncle had even robbed the dead, he began to follow her drift. He’d been told by others that incest and grave-robbing were the first steps to bahagi’ite, or witchcraft. Kinipai went on to explain how she’d been the victim of what a white man of the cloth might have called “a theological dispute.” Her uncle had taught her many “ways” or chants before he’d been struck dead by a diamondback he was chanting with. It was thought a bit odd for women to take part in some of the way ceremonies, but it was not forbidden. So when they’d heard Little Big Eyes in Washington was sending white eyes to see whether the N’de would have to move or be allowed to stay, Kinipai had decided to hold the Night Way, a mighty powerful ceremony. But older folks, best described as some sort of chanters’ guild, had protested that everyone knew the Night Way was supposed to be held in wintertime, between the first freeze and greenup thaw. Then they’d argued that the Night Way was meant to cure the really sick, and only when all the other ways had failed and only strong bishi or dangerous spirit lore might save them.
But Kinipai had argued that their whole nation was on its deathbed and so they had to use strong medicine, without waiting for the right season. So she’d won out, for the time being.
Longarm could picture it, having sat in on such powwows in his own time. Indians could argue the finer points of religion and tradition with the fervor of preachers or lawyers debating, with neither a Good Book nor a law book to be found. Oral tradition depended entirely on human memory, and all humans tended to remember things the way they should have been, whether they’d been that way or not.
So Kinipai had held one Night Way, and then another, and the officials had still gotten off the D&RG Western to start working out the details of a mighty long walk.
They’d let her hold one more. When that hadn’t set the white eyes packing, they’d drawn the line on a fourth mystical try. Failing four times was much worse, for some medicine reason. But as those vinegar ants had just found out, the small but strong-willed Kinipai could act determined as hell for a gal. So she’d put on her black- and-red paint, black for protection and red for victory—or sorcery, as some chanters believed—donned her black antlered mask, and picked up her basket drum and medicine stones to drive the white eyes away. She’d barely started before the others grabbed her and hauled her up the slopes to execute her the safe way. For the only thing her kind feared worse than a haunt was the haunt of a witch. It was likely to pop right out of her mouth the moment she was dead!
Longarm asked if the Indian Police knew anything about her being declared a witch. When Kinipai told him she’d been performing her Night Ways far upslope from any reservation settlement, he saw he could forget about reporting fellow officers and bade her to go on.
He had a better grasp on the unusual situation he’d just found her in when she explained how some wise old hitali had decided they could best avoid her chindi chasing them down the mountain in the dark by fixing it so she’d die after sunrise, after they were all holed up behind their prayer sticks and such. They’d bound her above that big ant pile, knowing the ants wouldn’t really get to work on her naked flesh before the warm sun and some of her sweat inspired them to really buckle down. They’d smeared her with clay and wood ash to mask her protective paint and make her gray, the color of evil spirits and spooks. He had to allow she’d looked spooky as any chindi to him, over yonder in that cleft. He agreed with her that it seemed hardly likely that any of the witch hunters who’d left her to a slow agonizing death were likely to come back by moonlight. He already knew why you didn’t start night fires in Apacheria, where a night watch was kept on every high point and the flare of a match could be made out at three miles when the moon clouded over.
He said, “That Hudson Bay blanket is four beaver skins’ worth of thickness. I was planning to bed down on top of it, not under it, this time of the year. So I doubt you’ll freeze, wrapped up in it till we can find you some more formal wear. How are your feet now?”
She said, “That was strong medicine you rubbed on them for me. I am too strong to scratch the bites and make them worse. Why have you been so good to me, Belagana? Are you an outlaw those pindah lickoyee are after too?”
Longarm said, “I hunt outlaws for the same Great Father. But I think he is wrong about you Jicarilla. Hear me. I have nothing to say about the move to the Tularosa Agency. I have been sent on other business. I was only passing through here on my way to La Mesa de los Viejos. My fight is with other white eyes, not your nation.”
The Indian girl sat up straighter, eyes wide in the moonlight, and flatly warned him, “You will find neither your kind nor mine in the dry canyons of the Anasazi. Nothing lives there but the chindi of the long-dead Old Ones. Haven’t you been told that the mere sight of a chindi will make a living person drop dead on the spot? That is why the chindi prowl the nights this side of the gray spirit world. They want to take us back there with them. They are
