Without expression the Indian watched him approach. If anything, there was a faint look of disdain in the intelligent, black eyes. When Gideon was ten feet away, the naked shoulders tensed slightly, and the feet shifted to a squarer stance. The spear was more firmly grasped.
Gideon stopped and stretched his lips in a smile. “I come in peace,” he said in Yahi.
In response he got a slight curling of the Indian's upper lip. The man was taller than Gideon had thought, massively muscled, slender only in the hips and legs. His face would have done better on a lordly Mayan than a lowly Yahi. Gideon had seen similar ones carved on the ruined walls of Tikal and Palenque: a high-bridged, lavishly curved nose, delicately angled, almond-shaped eyes, sensual, exquisitely formed lips. All were set in an oval, flat face of blank planes and angles, so that the total effect was oddly disturbing, as if a seductive and willowy youth peeked through the eye slits of a stony, brutally masculine mask.
'I come in peace,” Gideon said again.
The sybaritic eyes behind the slits continued their leisurely inspection. The shapely upper lip curled once more. In Gideon's world it would have been a sneer.
Gideon felt an active dislike begin to simmer. That, he knew, would not do. He was not thinking like an anthropologist. What, after all, did he know of the nuances of Yahi posture and tone? Nothing. The sneer, the arrogant pose were artifacts of Gideon's own ethnocentric perspective. How could he tell what they connoted in Yahi culture?
'Bullshit,” he muttered to himself—the man, the fallible human being, addressing the schoolish scientist. “I know when I don't trust somebody.'
The Indian on the rock suddenly turned loquacious. Gideon could not follow everything he said, but it seemed to be a sort of welcoming speech. He heard “friends” and “peace” more than once. When he had done, the Indian jumped lightly down from the considerable height of the rock and joined the old ones. He moved, as Gideon knew he would, with a casual, surefooted grace. Like a movie Indian, Gideon couldn't help thinking. The others were not like movie Indians. They huddled together in a woebegone clump, shoulder to hunched shoulder and elbow to elbow, quaking and terrified.
The young one shouted something and gestured with his spear, apparently urging Gideon and Julie to come forward.
When they hesitated, his full lips twisted—it was unquestionably a sneer; Gideon would bet on it. Ostentatiously the spear was flung to the ground and the Indian's open, empty hands were displayed to them. The ax in his belt remained where it was.
Gideon was far from easy, but he had come to meet with them, and meet with them he would.
He turned to Julie. “You stay here,” he said. “See how it goes with me.'
'No way,” she said, and came from between the rocks to stand at his side.
'Now, you listen—'
'Gideon, we don't want to have a scene in front of them, do we?” She reached for his hand again. Her fingers were not as cold as they'd been.
'All right,” he said, smiling. “I think it's going to be okay.'
'Of course it will. But keep your eye on the big cheese.'
'Don't worry, I will. Let's go.” One more squeeze of her hand and they walked cautiously forward. Gideon took the opportunity to study the four elderly Yahi. The one who had been straightening the shafts was the oldest of them, with a fierce-eyed, hawklike patriarch's face but a spine so contorted by disease or injury that his torso was like a gnarled old tree trunk, lumpy and asymmetric, and twisted nearly into a knot.
The man who had been stone-chipping had a big, kindly face badly pitted by what appeared to be smallpox scars, and a squashed, meandering nose that sat on his face like a baked potato. His eyes were very large and very gentle. At about sixty-five he was the youngest of them and the largest, with a broad, fleshy chest that once must have been powerfully muscled.
The third person, Gideon realized belatedly, was an aged woman, with scanty hair cut as short as the men's, and flat breasts like wrinkled, empty paper bags. Her clothing was almost the same as the others': She wore a skirt a little longer than the small aprons that fronted the men's breechclouts, and her cape was of feathers rather than skins. In her hand she held the twine she had been working on, and Gideon's inner anthropologist recorded with approval that, among the Yahi, women's work was still done by women. Her head was tipped alertly, as if listening for something, and she stared fixedly off to the side. She was, Gideon understood, blind.
The other old man appeared to be no less frightened than he'd been at the gravel bar. As he had then made pitifully threatening motions with an ax, now he gestured feebly and intermittently with the wooden-pronged harpoon he'd been binding.
With every step of the two intruders, the four old people drew closer together still, drawing strength from each other's nearness. When Julie and Gideon, moving very slowly, were ten feet away, the oldest man could bear it no longer and spoke nervously to the young Indian. The others quickly joined in, so that all four of them were chattering at once in whispery agitation. The young one barked a few curt words and they stopped immediately, looking, Gideon thought, a little sheepish.
He had grasped enough of the words and body language to understand the exchange. The old ones were frightened and wanted to run off right then; the young man, surprisingly, had told them that would be unthinkably rude,
'I bring gifts in your honor,” he said. “I apologize for their being poor and worthless and not to be compared with your own belongings, but I beg you to accept them.'
He delivered his little address with what he hoped were properly expansive gestures, but nonetheless he experienced a slight sinking sensation as he spoke. A rubber turtle in their honor?
The four older Indians, who were still huddled together, showed for the first time that they could understand him. Quick glances moved among them, and the man with the big, gentle, pockmarked face looked him shyly in the eye for an instant before shifting his gaze downward.
