“The Methows too?”
“Methows too. Uncle Sam picks Moses to run the Colville Reservation. Consolation prize. Moses invites his buddy Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to come live with him. Really pisses off the Colvilles. See, the Nez Perce used to kill Colvilles, before the Army run ’em off.”
Kawika wouldn’t let Chief Joseph distract him. “That’s not the end of the story.”
“No, it ain’t the end of the story. Because the Great White Father, he sets it up so any Indian who don’t want to follow Moses to the Colville, well, that Indian can get land from the old Moses Reservation. One square mile. You know how much that is, Hawaii?”
“A square mile? A mile on each side?”
“You’re a genius, Hawaii. A square mile is six hundred and forty acres. But almost no one took it.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Indian didn’t get to choose his own square mile; the white man chose it for him. We still got cliffs around here called Indian Henry’s Choice—big old cliffs, filled with rattlers.”
They had reached a ridgeline—the ridge of Fawn Ridge. Kawika cast his eyes over the sweeping view as he waited for Jimmy to resume. Looking north, Kawika saw the deep Methow Valley girded with high peaks white with snow and glaciers, running in parallel lines up past the Canadian border. To the west he saw the jagged summits of the Cascade Sawtooth. To the east, high forested hills. To the south, more of the valley, more mountains. A stunning panorama.
“Now about the winterin’ shelters,” Jimmy continued. “The Methows lived here thousands of years. They hunted and fished, gathered plants and berries. Winters, they just dug in, covered up, waited it out. Took a lotta work—these shelters were big ol’ pits with rock walls. The old people, they picked the best sites, where the game wintered too. When they needed fresh meat, they popped their heads out, killed a deer or a moose, dragged it inside.
“Well, about two hundred years ago, the Methows got horses,” Jimmy went on. “Soon they couldn’t live without ’em. But horses couldn’t winter here: too cold, no food. So every winter the Methows just headed south with their horses and fell in with Moses’s people. Abandoned the winterin’ shelters. Never used ’em again.”
“So why would anyone destroy an old shelter if he found one on his land?” Kawika asked. “You’d think Fortunato could’ve made it a sort of feature of the resort.”
“He thought of that. But then he learned somethin’. The Great White Father, he made a special rule for the Methows. A Methow Indian could pick his own square mile, if it had a winterin’ shelter on it. The shelter proved his tie to the land through his people, see? And you remember how big a square mile is, Hawaii?”
“Six hundred forty acres, you said.”
“Right. And how big was Fawn Ridge?”
“Fifteen hundred acres, wasn’t it?”
“Very good, Hawaii,” Jimmy replied. “So figure it out. Your Athabascan buddy Ralph stood to lose almost half of Fawn Ridge because of one old shelter.”
“Wait—you mean a Methow Indian could still claim that land today?”
“That’s one way of lookin’ at it. The other way is, the law never allowed a white man to get title to land with a Methow winterin’ shelter on it. Any white man on that land, he was a squatter. And your Apache friend, he was fucked, thanks to that shelter. He was developin’ a resort, and you can’t develop a resort without ownin’ the land. You probably know that.”
“So I’ve heard,” Kawika said, meeting Jimmy’s sidelong glance.
“But Ralph didn’t understand,” Jimmy resumed. “Not at first. He found the shelter and thought, ‘Hey, somethin’ to help sell real estate.’ Like ‘Now you can winter where the Lost Tribe wintered’—that sort of thing. So he shot his big mouth off. Shoulda kept quiet, just bulldozed the sucker. Once he learnt how the shelter messed up his title, he bought some dynamite, blew it sky high. That got attention. The man always had big plans, yet he never did slow down to think.”
Jimmy paused, as if about to add something. But then he said simply, “And that’s the last thing I’m sayin’ about that Assiniboine. He was a hothead and a dumb fuck.”
“He—” Kawika began.
“Yes, here we are at the end of the property. Time to turn around.”
On the way back, Jimmy talked about the land. “This land, when it was Rattlesnake Ranch, it was a mile wide and better’n two miles long.”
“Where’s the wintering shelter?”
“You just breathed some of it. Sky high means somethin’ when you’re dynamitin’. Anyway, the Conservancy, they give me and Madeline some land. Wanted us to have it because of the shelter—also so I’d look after the rest of their land here. They ain’t developin’ it, they’re preservin’ it. So I got me a payin’ job. I do a bit of irrigation, same as I used to.”
“I thought the water rights—”
“The Conservancy ain’t greedy. They’re just usin’ what the ranch used before Ralph. And mostly I’m fightin’ weeds without no irrigation. No chemical sprays neither. See, you break the sod out here, you’re gonna get weeds. The trick is to keep ’em down with no water. I want to find the best grass for buildin’ sod again. Somethin’ that don’t need nothin’ but rainfall and snow. What is that? Blue bunchgrass? Tufted wheatgrass? Don’t know yet. But I aim to find out.”
Further on, he pointed to a ravine where saplings grew in individual wire cages to protect them from deer. “Plantin’ native trees where they grew once,” he said. “Got some serviceberry in there too. Good bird habitat.”
When he talked about restoring land, Jimmy sounded almost rhapsodic. He explained about vegetative cover: what vegetation different animals favor, the distances from cover they feel safe venturing. He described working with local farmers to intersperse their fields with small groves of trees, lines of shrubs, patches of longer grass—all to provide more cover for
