Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI.
HOME.
PECULIARLY nervous man suffers from a mental ailment as distinctly as from a wound. He grows weak under the sense of mental distress the same as an ordinary man does from the loss of blood. Re move the cause of apprehension, and he recovers the same as the wounded man recovers. Eree the mind, and you stop the flow of blood. He grows strong again.
We moved on a little way that day, slowly, to be sure, but fast enough and far enough to be able to pitch our camp in a place of our own choosing, with wood, water, and grass, the indispensable requisites of a mountain camp, all close at hand.
To the astonishment of all, the Doctor unsaddled his mule, gathered up wood, and was a full half-hand at supper. At night he spread his own blankets, looked to his pistols like an old mountaineer, and seemed to be at last getting in earnest wit h life.
The next day, as we rode through the trees, he whistled at the partridges as they ran in strings across the trails, and chirped at the squirrels over head.
How delightful it was to ride through the grass and trees, hear the partridges whistle, pack and unpack the horses, pitch the tent by the water, and make a military camp, and talk of war ; imagine battles, shoot from behind the pines, and always, of course, making yourself a hero. Splendid ! I was busy as a bee. I cooked, packed, stood guard, killed game, did everything. And so we journeyed on through the splendid forests, under the face of Shasta, and over peaceful little streams that wound silently through the grass, as if afraid, till we came to the head-waters of the Sacramento.
Sometimes we saw other camps. White tents pitched down by the shining river, among the scat tered pines ; brown mules and spotted ponies feeding, and half buried in the long grass ; and the sound of the picks in the bar below us all made a picture in my life to love.
Once we fell in with an Indian party ; pretty girls and lively unsuspicious boys along with their parents, fishing for salmon, and not altogether at war with the whites. They treated us with great kindness.
At last we branched off entirely to ourselves, cut ting deep into the mountain as the winter approached, looking for a home. The weak condition of the Doctor made it necessary that we brou ght our
journey to a close. We had taken a different route from others, for good and sufficient reasons. The trails and tracks of the hundreds of gold-hunters, who had mostly preceded us some months, lay considerably west of Mount Shasta, striking the head of the Sacra mento river at its very source. They had found only a few bars with float gold, not in sufficient quantities to warrant the location of a camp, and pushed on to the mines farther south. Some, how ever, returned.
We sometimes met a party of ten or more, all well armed and mounted, ready to fight or fly as the case might require. The usual mountain civilities would be exchanged, brief and brusque enough, arid each party would pass on its way, with a frequent glance thrown back suspiciously at our Indian boy with his rifle, the invalid Doctor leaning on his catenas, the Indian girl with her splendid hair and face as bright as the morning, and the majestic figure of the Prince. An odd-looking party was ours, I confess.
Paquita knew every dimple, bend or spur in these mountains now. The Prince entrusted her to select some suitable place to rest. One evening she drew rein and reached out her hand. Klamat stood his rifle against a pine, and began to unpack the tired little mule, and all dismounted without a word.
It was early sundown. A balm and a calm was on and in all things. The very atmosphere was still as a shadow and seemed to say, " Rest, rest! " We
were on the edge of an opening ; a little prairie of a thousand acres, inclining south, with tall, very tall grass, and a little stream straying from where we stood to wander through the meadow. A wall of pines stood thick and strong around our little Eden, and when we had unsaddled our tired animals and taken the aparrajo from the little packer, we turned them loose in the little Paradise, without even so much as a lariat or hackamoor to restrain them.
The sun had just retired from the body of the mountain, but it was evident that all day long he rested here and made glad the earth; for crickets sang in the grass as they sing under the hearthstones in the cabins of the west, and little birds started up from the edge of the valley that were not to be found in the forest.
An elk came out from the fringe of the wood, threw his antlers back on his shoulders with his brown nose lifted, and blew a blast as he turned to fly that made the horses jerk their heads from the grass, and start and wheel around with fright. Brown deer came out, too, as if to take a walk in the mea dow beneath the moon, but snuffed a breath from the intruders and turned away. Bears came out two by two in single file, but did not seem to notice us.
Some men say that the bear is deprived of the sense of smell in the wild state. A mistake. He relies as much on his nose as the deer ; perhaps more, for his little black eyes are so small that they surely are not equal to the great liquid eyes of the buck, which
are so set in his head that he may see far and wide
at once. But the bear carries his nose close to the
ground, while that of the deer is lifted, and of course
can hardly smell an intruder in his dominions until
he comes upon his track. Then it is curious to ob
serve him. He throws himself on his hind legs,
stands up tall as a man, thrusts out his nose, lifts it,
snuffs the air, turns all around in his tracks, and
looks and smells in every direction for his enemy.
If he is a cub, however, or even a cowardly grown
bear, he wheels about the moment he comes upon
the track, will not cross it under any circumstances,
and plunges again into the thicket.
We had a blazing fire soon, and at last, when we had sat down to the mountain meal, spread on a canvas mantaro on the ground, each man on his saddle or a roll of blankets, with his knife in hand, Klamat looked at our limited supply of provisions, and then pointed to the game in the meadow.
He pictured sun-rise, the hunt, the deer, the crack of his rifle, and how he would come into camp laden with supplies. All this, he gave us to under stand, would take place to-morrow, as he placed a sandwich between his teeth, and threw his eyes across his shoulder at the dark figures stealing through the grass across the other side of our little Eden.
The morning witnessed the fulfilment. Paquita was more than busy all day in dressing venison, and drying the meat for winter. The place was as full
of game as a park. No lonelier or more isolated place than this on earth. We walked about and viewed our new estates. The mules and ponies rolled in the rich grass, or rested in the sun with drooping heads and half-closed eyes.
Even the invalid Doctor seemed to revive in a most sudden and marvellous way. He saw that no white man s foot had ever trod the grasses of this valley; that there we might rest and rest and never rise up from fear. He could trust the wall of pine that environed us. It was impassable. He stood before an alder-tree that leaned across the silent, crooked little stream, and with his sheath-knife cut this one word : HOME.
A little way from here Paquita showed us another opening in the forest. This was a wider valley, with warm sulphur and soda springs in a great crescent all around the upper rim. Here the elk would come to winter, she said ; and hence we could never want for meat. The earth and atmosphere were kept warm here from the eternal springs ; and grass, she said, was fresh and grew the winter through.
This is the true source of the stream which the white men call Soda; the proper Indian name of which is Numken; arid here we built our cabin, reared a fortress against the approaching winter without delay, for every night his sentries were coming down bolder and bolder about the camp.
This was the famous " Lost Cabin." I t stood on
a hillside, a little above the prairie, facing the sun, close to the warm springs, and on the very head of the Numken, and was not unlike an ordinary miner s cabin, except that the fireplace was in the centre of the room instead of being awkwardly placed at one end, where but few can get the benefit of the fire. This departure was not without reason.
In the first place, the two Indians, constituting nearly half of the voting population of our little colony, insisted on it with a zeal that was certainly com mendable ; and as they insisted on nothing else, it was only justice to listen to them in this.
u By-and-by my people will come," said Paquita, u and then you will want an Indian fire, a fire that they can sit down by and around without sending somebody back in the cold."
Again, you cannot build a cabin so strong with one end devoted to a chimney, as if it is one solid square body of logs. Then, it is no small task to build a chimney out of stone with only your hands for a trowel and black mud for mortar.
All these things considered, we placed the fire in the centre of the cabin on the earth-floor, and let the smoke curl up and out through an opening in the roof, as it always does and always will, in a graceful sort of way, if you build a fire as an Indian builds it.
The Doctor was getting strong again. As this man grew strong in a measure, it is a little re markable that my sympathies were withdrawn proportionably.
I state this as a very remarkable fact. As the pitiful condition of the Doctor daily grew less, his crimes began to loom up and grow larger. They had sunk down almost out of sight ; but now as this man began to lift up his hands to take part in the life around him, I shrank back and said to myself, There is blood on them human blood.
No Indian had as yet, so far as we knew, dis covered us. Paquita had from the first, around the fire, told her plans ; how that as soon as she should be well rested from the journey, and a house was built and meat secured for the winter, she would take her pony, strike a trail that lay still deeper in the woods, and follow it up till she came to her father s winter lodges.
How enthusiastically she pictured the reception. How clearly she pourtrayed it all. She would ride into the village at sun-down, alone; the dogs would bark a great deal at her red dress and her nice new apparel. Then she would dismount and go straight up to her father s lodge and sit down by the door. The Indians would pass by and pretend not to see her, but all the time be looking slily sidewise, half- dead to know who she was. Then, after a while, some one of the women would come out and bring her some water. Maybe that would be her sister. If it was her sister, she would lift up her left arm and show her the three little marks on the wrist, and then they would know her and lead her into the lodge in delight.
One fine morning she set forth on her contem
plated journey. I did not now like the place so
well. For the first time, I found fault with the
things around me. The forest was black, gloomy,
ghostly a thing to be dreaded. Before, it was
dreamy, deep a marvel, a something to love and
delight in. The cabin, that had been a very palace,
was now so small and narrow, it seemed I would
suffocate in the smoke. The fires did not burn so
well as they did before. Nobody could build a fire
like Paquita.
Back from our cabin a little way were some grand old bluffs, topped with pine and cedar, from which the view of valley, forest, and mountain, was all that could be desired. A little way down the Numken, from the warm springs, the waters of the valley came together and went plunging all afoam down the canon, almost impassable even for footmen. Here we found fine veins of quartz, and first-rate indi cations of gold both in the rock and in the placer. The Prince and the Doctor revived their theories on the origin of gold, and had many plans for putting their speculations to the test.
Klamat was never idle, yet he was never social. There was a bitterness, a sort of savage devilry, in all he did. A fierce positive nature was his, and hardly bridled at that.
Whether that disposition dated further back than a certain winter, when the dead were heaped up and the wigwams burned on the banks of the Klamat, or
whether it was born there of the blood and bodies in
the snow, and came to life only when a little, naked,
skeleton savage sprung up in the inidst of men with
a club, I do not pretend to say, but I should guess
the latter. I can picture him a little boy with bow
and arrows, not over gentle it is true, but still a
patient little savage, like the rest, talking and taking
part in the sports, like those around him. Now he
was prematurely old. He never laughed ; never so
much as smiled ; took no delight in anything and
yet refused to complain. He took hold of things,
did his part, but kept his secrets and his sorrows
to himself, whatever they may have been.
Klamat never alluded to the massacre in any way whatever. Once, when it was mentioned, he turned his head and pretended not to hear. Yet, somehow it seemed to me that that scene was before him every moment. He saw it in the fire at night, in the forest by day. There are natures that cannot forget if they would. A scene like that settles down in the mind ; it takes up its abode there and refuses to go away. His was such a nature.
In fact, Indians in the aggregate forget less than any other people. They remember the least kind ness perfectly well all through life, and a deep wrong is as difficult to forget. The reason is, I should say, because the Indian does not meet with a great deal of kindness as he goes through life. His mind and memory are hardly overtaxed, I think, in remem bering good deeds from the white man.
Besides, their lives are very monotonous. But few events occur of importance outside their wars. They have no commercial speculations to call off the mind in that direction ; no books to forget themselves in, and cannot go beyond the sea, and hide in old cities, to escape any great sorrow that pursues them. So they have learned to remember the good and the bad better than do their enemies.
This cabin of ours in the trees on the rim of the clearinggrew soon to be a sacred place to all. Here was rest absolute, unqualified repose. Eight-hour laws, late or early rising, in order to conform to the fashion of the country, did not concern us here. There were no days in which we were required to remain in to receive company, no days in which we were expected to make calls. We named the cabin the " Castle," and the Doctor cut out wooden cannon, mounted them on pine stumps before the door as on little towers, and turned them on the world below.