California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (8 page)

"Get up, goddamn it!"

She shook her head slowly. "I...
can't."

He walked over, pulled the shawl and the
baby away, and took a step back. "You'll get up or I'll leave you here and
go on with the kid myself."

She started to cry.

Mosby looked up. The snow was beginning
to thicken.

"Here, goddamn it!" He handed
her the infant and began breaking and gathering branches again. Over the uneven
terrain the snow pack around them had formed a small, concave depression. Mosby
covered most of the snow well with pine needles and boughs, then spread more
over the floor of the eight-foot oval. So tired she could hardly lift her arms,
she lay down on the branches with John Alexander, staring at the green needles
above her as Mosby cleared a small circle in the center of the floor. He left
her in terror for fifteen minutes, but then came back with an armload of wood
he had stabbed loose from a fallen trunk. Removing the wrapping from a cigar,
he started the fire, lighted up, and sat there smoking and staring at her.

It was much later when she awoke
suddenly, her face pressed through the pine branches into the snow, the tip of
her nose practically frozen, remembering the baby. Rolling on her side, she
tried to nurse it. She was vaguely aware that there was no feeling between her nostrils;
none in two fingers of her left hand. Dimly, instinctively, she knew the liquid
was the last she had in her breasts. Involuntarily, she licked her lips. They
were split and caked with dried blood in a half dozen places. But she was too
weak to do anything but lie there.

Mosby stared at her breast, at the
suckling infant. He knew he would never get out of this alive with the two of
them on his back. He was ravenously hungry. And now, his gaze locked on her
pale, pink nipple, the sucking sounds filling his ears, another craving rose in
him. He got up and moved toward her.

She tried to protest when she felt Mosby
pull the baby from her arms, tried to scream when she saw Mosby toss the baby
aside, but she was too weak even to summon sound. For a moment she thought she
was imagining it all, dreaming. But then she saw the stream of sparks suddenly
rise up over the edge of the fire where the infant had fallen.

She tried to understand what was
happening, but the facts would not stay coupled in her mind. She closed her
eyes and tried again, but then she was distracted as Mosby tore her dress open
and began draining the last of her milk.

You must not do that,
she thought woodenly.
It is all I have, and John Alexander needs it.
She
lifted one arm partway off the ground to push him away, but it fell back and
she could not raise it again.

You must not... He can't be.
This is a dream...

She felt him turn her over when he was
through with her breasts. She opened her eyes, tried to scream again as he
untied the strips of leather securing her slitted skirts to her legs. Her eyes
would not stay open. No sound came out of her throat.

He
didn't bother to position her, remove her undergarments. Instead, he simply
ripped through the bloomers, tore open the lower buttons on the long johns she
was wearing, then yanked them down far enough to thrust into her just before
she blacked out.

He was gone when she feebly lifted
herself up the following morning. The contents of her carryall bag were
scattered all over the floor of the shelter. She was not aware that Graves's
gold pocket watch was gone. Not comprehending, almost in the preliminary stages
of shock, she picked up the journal and stared at the sooty thumbprint on one
corner of the first page. Sitting up and cocking her head in confusion, she
turned the journal over. The other half of the hide strip she had found in
Stanton's pocket, wedged until now between two pages, dropped into her lap. She
stared at it for a minute, not knowing what it could be, then picked it up. She
hesitated for a moment, distracted by the severe whiteness of two fingers on
her left hand. She wondered where her gloves were.
In a moment,
she
thought hazily.
In a moment I will look for them.
She stared at the
strip again. Without knowing why, she put it in her mouth and began chewing.

While she was searching for her gloves,
placing everything back into her bag again, she found John Alexander. Her
senses blunted completely, she didn't notice the pale blue color of his skin or
the dark, charred flesh where the edge of the fire had burned through the shawl
and the left arm of his little coat. Dropping the bag, cooing at her son
soothingly, she picked him up, rearranged the shawl, and rocked him back and
forth until she was sure he was asleep.

Under a bright blue sky she walked again
as she had before finding Mosby and the Indian. An unseasonably warm sun
crossed over her from left to right. Vaguely, she was aware she was going
south. Sometime in the afternoon, she veered west. Near sunset she came upon the
snow-well floored with stripped green branches where the snowshoers had waited
out the Christmas storm for five days.

There were five bodies lying in the
concave hollow. She recognized the faces of four of them: Antonio, the Mexican
herder; "Uncle" Billy Graves; Patrick Dolan; Mrs. Murphy's
thirteen-year-old boy, Lemuel. She thought she smelled smoke, turned and saw
the dead pine tree, fallen now, that the rest of them had set afire after the
storm broke. She looked at the bodies again, rocking John Alexander back and
forth, and tried to understand.

They were all naked, their clothes strewn
about haphazardly. The bones of Patrick Dolan's arm and legs were visible where
the others had finally stripped the flesh from them. There was an enormous
opening in Graves's chest where the skin and muscle had been sliced open, the
ribs smashed and pulled apart. Vaguely aware of what she was looking at, she
climbed down into the well and sat down next to Antonio's partially stripped
body. One of his wrists lay in the edge of the dead fire. Where his hand had
been, there was only a ribbonwork of crisp, black ash.

She sat there for half an hour, trying to
think it all out. She was unable to. Finally her will to live and the
unquenchable desire to get her baby to safety made her get up. Still clutching
the child she methodically removed the knife from the sheath attached to
Antonio's belt. Then she walked over to little Lemuel Murphy and cut away as
much flesh as she thought she would need.

Numbly, she fanned up a fire in the
charred, still smoldering trunk of the fallen pine, thawed out some of what she
had, ate, pressed some to the baby's mouth and let the liquid drip between his
lips. Certain he was nourished, singing to him, she wrapped the rest in the
shawl and lay down close enough to the dead pine trunk to stay warm without
being burned.

The following day, after removing the
soggy boots and shoes on her feet and replacing them with two pairs lying in
the snow-well, she reached the west base of Indian Peak. By the time she
crossed the sloping, broad bowl beneath the escarpment, she was totally
exhausted again. She found a cave at the base of a bluff, slept in it, ate
again in the morning, then pushed on. Continuing on an increasingly downhill
path, she followed a series of streambeds and stumbled onto the narrow, snow-
and ice-covered South Fork of the American River at noon. Somehow—delirious,
her nose and extremities half-frozen, her mind almost blank—she sensed the
river would eventually flow west and down toward a valley and settlements.

She began laughing and singing when she
briefly pictured a ranch house, a dog barking and smoke rising from a chimney.
Stopping to rest, she ate the last of what was in the shawl, then continued
downstream. An hour later, no longer singing, she approached a point where the
river widened abruptly and the layer of snow on the ice was more shallow. For a
few seconds her mind was clear. It came upon her that her energy was almost
gone, that she would not make it much farther, that she and the baby would
perish. She remembered Mosby and shouted at the top of her lungs:
"I
will not die! Oh, God, I will not die!"

Her mind blank again, she kept on
shouting it every few minutes until she turned a sharp bend and heard, amid the
sounds of a waterfall, two shrill high notes that could have been made only by
a living creature. She was certain it was her imagination.

The
two Miwok Indian boys squealed with delight as they stared, fascinated, at the
trout darting under the clear stretch of ice halfway down the South Fork. The
sound of something moving toward them from upstream brought them to their feet.
They were only fifty yards from their village, and though they could not see
their people through the dense growth of evergreens, they were not afraid,
simply alert, the pointed sticks they carried aimed in the direction of the
sound coming from around the bend in the river. When the figure came into view,
swaying unsteadily as it moved toward them on the ice, they were sure it was a
spirit. Sun dancing off its ice-encrusted, windblown garments seemed to them a
supernatural halo. And they were certain the small blue form the figure carried
partially concealed under its shawl was a strange and fearsome weapon they had
never seen before. Overwhelmed by terror, they dropped the sticks, scrambled
through the crust of snow on the shallow riverbank, and raced toward their
village.

Elizabeth had been walking down the river
on the ice since noon the day before. When she first saw the blurred figures
dressed in skins, she thought they were deer. Delirious from hunger and
exhaustion, her senses warped by what had happened in the mountains on this
side of the pass, she saw the blurred movement of the two creatures up the
riverbank as the reaction of two frightened fawns. She no longer possessed the
capacity to reason that it was too early in the year for such young deer to be
at large. For a moment the fragmented thought crossed her mind that had she
been stronger, if her vision was not so strangely blurred, if she were more
cunning, she might have somehow surprised and killed one of them. Numbly she
chided herself for losing the opportunity to obtain food for John Alexander and
herself. Perhaps the baby could not eat the meat, but the warm blood would have
nourished him. Enough perhaps to sustain him until she found a settlement. Even
in her present state of mind she had been certain, once she found the river and
became hazily aware that it followed roughly the westward path of the sun
overhead, that sooner or later she was bound to find the lowlands and people.

If she managed to stay alive.

"I will not die!" she shouted
for the hundredth time. "I WILL NOT DIE!"

When
the ringing of the words faded, she heard the crunching of snow crust again and
turned toward the sound. The creatures had returned. They were greater in
number now, and some of the animals were larger than the first two. Larger than
any deer Elizabeth had ever seen. They could not be deer. They were all walking
on their hind legs. One of them dropped to a crouching position, but to
Elizabeth the animal seemed to have gone down on all fours. Now they did not
move. Only the wind and the muted rush of water beneath the thick ice at her
feet broke the stillness. Then the two smaller ones pointed their claws at her.
Bears,
she thought.
Bears.
The largest of them was enormous, and
now he took a step toward her. Somehow, the absurdity of it amused her. After
all that had gone before, a family of bears. For a moment, before she fainted,
she shrieked hysterical laughter as a slowly melting, nonsensical picture of
them sitting around a campfire and tearing the baby and her to pieces floated
erratically across her mind.

Even to Miwokan, the head of this Indian
village, Elizabeth was at first a forbidding sight. Her long hair blew wildly
off to one side in back and lay tangled and matted down over her ghostly white
face. From a distance of ten yards there was no demarcation between her deep
brown eyes and the dark circles around them. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were
caked with soot. Even the whites of her eyes, almost enveloped by dull-red
blood vessels, blended into what looked to Miwokan and his wife,
Solana,
like enormous, eyeless sockets in a
bone-white skull.

When she began shrieking, even Miwokan
flinched involuntarily and took a step backward. But after she crumpled onto
the ice and the pale blue object slid out of her grasp, he collected himself
and sifted what he saw. He took several steps toward her. She wore a
puffed-sleeve blue dress and cape that had seemed something else when the
slitted skirts and untied leather thongs attached to them had flapped in the
wind. He motioned to the rest of them to stay where they were and moved out
onto the ice cautiously, spear in hand. He looked down at her. Two fingers
tightly gripping the strap of a pouch slung over her shoulder were a greenish
black. Blood was crusted around her mouth and smeared faintly across one cheek.
A curious shell-color encircled the tip of her nose. She wore a white man's
work boots. He saw now that the strange, scalloped shape that had danced along
the side of her head was only a blue bonnet similar to ones he had seen worn by
white women at the Mission Santa Clara.

Reason and wit quickly overcame his
apprehension. He crouched and held his ear to her breast. The heartbeat was
barely discernible and fluttering wildly like a bird's. She was breathing, but
so rapidly, so shallowly that he knew she was near death. He was about to call
two men to carry her to the village when he remembered the pale blue object.
Walking to where it lay several yards off, he stared down at it for a full
minute before motioning the warriors to do his bidding. He called his wife to
his side. Standing there,
Solana
struggled
to hold back a moan. Staring up at her were the open, lifeless eyes of a
fifteen-month-old male child. Wisps of sandy blond hair curled over his tiny
ears. His arms and legs were frozen in a fetal tuck. His skin was almost the
color of an early evening sky.

Miwokan
bent down and picked up the rigid little body. Only then did he and
Solana
see the diminutive arm that had been
pressed against the ice. It was charred down to the bone from shoulder to
wrist.

She was first conscious of a sudden,
strange, tingling pain in the last two fingers of her left hand. The dream
about talking and screaming at the bears, strange bears that knew how to build
fires and tried to feed her clear liquid that tasted like fish, was over. But
she could remember the moment, lying prone in their strangely symmetrical den,
when the notion that they were bears was confirmed to her. Blurred as they
were, standing and crouching over her, the nearest one, lying perpendicular to
her on the floor of the den, was clearly visible. She remembered screaming at
the sight of his bared fangs and then laughing when he did not open his eyes
and she became aware that he was magically capable of flattening his entire
body to a breadth of an inch when he slept. She laughed again, and wondered why
the bear who climbed under the fur with her and wrapped her in his arms had
felt as smooth as silk.

The tingling sensation in her fingers
returned as she felt her left arm lifted. She heard two quick sizzling sounds
and the aroma of something akin to beef frying in a skillet filled her nostrils
for a moment. The nature of the pain in her fingers changed from stinging to
burning. Oddly, the sensation was up inside toward the knuckles and not on the
surface.

She opened her eyes and was certain she
was staring at God's face. She forgot the dull pain, absorbed with Him.
Strange. He was not the way she had always pictured Him. He looked more like
Father Christmas. Without a beard. Perhaps God shaves His beard off in the
summertime, leaving only those marvelous muttonchop sideburns and glorious
moustache. It did not matter. It was warm, almost too warm here in heaven, but
she was not about to complain. God was smiling and holding her hand tightly,
the one that did not tingle. It was marvelous, the way He made you feel as
though you were floating when He held your hand. And it was positively magical
the way He made Himself appear, disappear and reappear so quickly and yet so
gently, so slowly. For a moment she was conscious of the sun behind Him. It was
small, so they must be far from earth, she calculated. God and the sun began to
spin wildly before her. She closed her eyes again and realized that she was now
a graceful white bird, floating, circling, warmed from above by that same sun
and from below by warm columns of air rising from a luminously blue ocean.

Captain John Augustus Sutter turned to
Doctor John Marsh and nodded. "Neatly done," he said. He motioned to
the two Kanakas who had been holding Elizabeth down. They removed the butcher's
cleaver, the chopping block, and the two blackened fingers and left the room on
the main floor of the fort. When they were gone, he turned back to Marsh, who
had moved the lantern away and set the white-hot hunting knife in a pail of
cool water. He wanted Marsh's silence about this woman. He did not know why,
but he did, and he had long since begun listening to what instinct told him. He
knew exactly how to keep Marsh from revealing to anyone the circumstances, even
the fact that the woman was here.

"John—"

"Do you suppose she's one of the
Donner Party?" Marsh interrupted.

"I seriously doubt it. A lone woman
crossing the Sierras in midwinter?"

"It does seem unlikely—"

"Be that as it may. I want you to
listen to me and listen carefully. I have sent many patients your way, have I
not? I have always called you in medical emergencies here at the fort."

"Yes, but—"

"Hear me out. I have for some time
known that you are not really a doctor. That you have never had a day of actual
schooling..."

"You don't know what you're talking
about!" Marsh snapped.

"I do, but I do not mean to prove
it—ever—to anyone. You perform with greater skill than most physicians,
surgeons it has been my misfortune to come across."

"Then what...?"

"I simply ask a favor of you. One I
do not fully understand myself as yet."

"What favor?"

"I want you to speak to no one of
what you have seen here today. This woman, her condition, anything."

Marsh looked at Elizabeth. "What do
you know about her? What are you concealing?"

"Nothing," Sutter lied.
"No more than you do."

"Then why...?'

"I want to wait at least until she
is conscious and capable of telling me who she is and where she came
from."

"You think she may be running from
someone, some
thing
?"

"I told you, I don't know. But the
circumstances are so extraordinary that I wish to allow this woman, who has
gone through so much, to have a voice in what happens to her when she is
well..."

"
If
she gets well, you mean.
I don't like the looks of that nose. And she's very weak from the continuing
fever."

"You have told me what to watch for.
If there are signs of it worsening, I will call you immediately."

"It
will
get worse. It should
be done now."

"Try to imagine, Doctor Marsh, what
it would be like to walk the rest of your days if your nose was taken from you."

"Amputated."

"Amputated, then. Do you
understand?"

"I suppose I'd rather be dead."

"Exactly."

"All right, we'll wait and
see."

"And I have your word no one,
I
mean
no one
, will hear of
this?"

"Not from me." Reluctantly, but
with no choice, Marsh shook hands on it with Sutter. "What about the
others here at the fort? The Indians?"

"Only a few of the white men are
here. I sent Big-ham, the blacksmith, to Sonoma. Vallejo needed some horses
shod. None of the others know of her arrival. As for the rest, I expect they
will soon tire of celebrating their one-sided victory over the Mexicans at
Santa Clara and return by the end of the week. I doubt they will think anything
of it.

"The Indians?" Sutter went on,
thinking for a moment. "Only a handful of Miwokan's people know anything,
and they understand none of it.
I
will speak to Miwokan, and word of it among them will cease."

Marsh nodded. He glanced at Elizabeth
again. Under the laudanum he had given her she would sleep at least twenty-four
hours. "Cleaned, without those fingers missing and that nose, she'd be a
beauty."

"Yes,"
Sutter said, ushering Marsh to the front door and saying good-bye as he pressed
several gold coins into his hand.
Someone's beauty,
he thought. He
closed the door, walked to his study, opened a chest, and took Elizabeth's
satchel bag out, spreading the contents on his writing table. Once again he
thought of the dead child as he fingered the thin gold wedding band he had
removed from her finger when Marsh was ready. Then he sat down, opened the
leatherbound journal beside the money belt containing nearly three hundred
dollars, and read the handwritten pages a second time.

When the whites returned to the fort,
they paid little attention to the fact that Manaiki, one of Sutter's two
Hawaiian common-law wives, was tending to a sick woman in his quarters. They
assumed she was a settler. It was not unlike Sutter. During the seven years he
had been here, he had established himself as the veritable baron of thousands
of acres of rich valley land granted to him by the Mexican authorities in
Alta
California. He had not only wooed
settlers from Oregon and east of the Sierras, he had gone out of his way to
help them. No one was turned away from the fort. When he learned of emigrants
in trouble or short of provisions on the trails, he invariably sent several of
his men and mules laden with enough food and supplies to get them through. When
they arrived, he showered them with hospitality. If they did not wish to settle
and farm on his lands—for a percentage of their crops—he helped them find
homesteads and work elsewhere.