Native Gold (19 page)

"Come," he said, and in one swift movement, he swept her into his arms, cradling her like a babe, and carried her toward the water.

His chest was firm against her, but resilient and warm, like her father’s leather wing chair after he’d been sitting in it. But unlike the chair, which smelled of pipe tobacco and macassar oil, the Indian’s scent was laced with wood smoke, rawhide, and a potpourri of intoxicating herbs.

The pond deepened sharply, and Mattie gasped as he fearlessly waded forward.

In three steps, he was thigh-deep in the water.

On the fourth, he dropped her in.

"Oh sh-!"

That was all the woman could yell before she went under. Of course, Sakote instantly hauled her up again by the waist and tugged her to shallower ground as gently as he could, despite her floundering like a netted salmon and sputtering words he’d never heard, even from Noa.

Her hair lay flat on her head now, wetted to the color of last year’s baskets, and her eyes burned through strands of it like hot coals prodded to life. She shuddered, and he wasn’t sure if it was with cold or anger.

"You said it wasn’t cold!" she finally managed to spit out.

"It
isn’t
cold." He settled her onto a ledge of stone just beneath the water’s surface and rucked up the drenched hem of her underdress to inspect her knee. "When the snows come, then it’s cold."

He washed water up over her leg.

"Ah!" she cried.

"Be still, Little Acorn."

"But it’s freezing!" she complained, shrieking when he splashed another wave over her.

"You scream like my little brother at his bath." He ladled more water over her.

"You make him bathe in th—?" She gasped again as he rinsed the wound. It was almost clean now. "What kind of heartless scoundr—?" She shivered at the next splash and fell silent, but that did not keep her from speaking to him with her eyes. They fired at him like serpentine-tipped arrows.

"Now your arm," he said, ignoring her glares as he’d done Hintsuli’s many times. Sometimes children didn’t know what was best for them. It seemed the same was true for Mati.

"I am
not
going to put my arm in that icy water," she said, thrusting out her chin like a Yana warrior.

Sakote considered her for a moment. She’d fight him if he tried to force her into the water, and she’d only hurt herself. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. Perhaps there was another way.

"What if I give you a prize for enduring this trial?"

That earned her attention at once.

"What kind of prize?"

He shrugged. He’d always offered Hintsuli small things for his concession—an arrow, an extra bite of his acorn bread, an afternoon playing the grass game. What would please a white woman?

"A squirrel for your supper?" he asked.

She wrinkled her nose. Perhaps, he thought sourly, she wouldn’t have liked the rabbits he’d killed for her either. He tried to think of the silly trinkets that gave his sister joy.

"A string of clamshell beads?"

She bit her lip, clearly not impressed.

How difficult this woman was. "A grinding rock."

She only stared at him blankly. He was about to make his final offer—that he wouldn’t “shake the stuffing out of her,” as Noa liked to say—when she came up with her own prize.

"I know!" Her face lit up. "You must let me sketch you."

"Sketchoo?"

"Yes. You must let me make a drawing of you. If I endure this torture without a peep, you must sit quietly for me so I can draw your picture."

How strange her request was. Why should she want to make a picture of him with the writing sticks?

He narrowed his eyes. "You won’t make magic with this sketchoo?"

"Magic?" She lifted her brows. "You mean, will I steal your soul?" She smiled. "Of course not. It’s only a picture."

He wasn’t so sure. He’d seen the pictures Hintsuli had stolen, and he understood why the boy believed the animals were trapped on the page. They were so perfect that they seemed to need only the breath of Wonomi to come to life.

But these were fears of old times. The white man brought many things, tools and toys, that seemed at first to be magic—the spinning top, matches, rifles—but they were no more magic than the caterpillar that turned into the butterfly or the oak that grew from the acorn. They were only unknown to the Konkow.

He nodded his agreement to the terms, and her smile blossomed as bright as a dogwood flower.

Mati was not quite silent while he bathed her, but she fought hard to keep her whimpers sealed behind tightly closed lips. There was little flesh left on the base of her hand, and just for a moment, before he remembered who she was, he felt sorry that she wouldn’t be able to grind acorns for many days. In the end, she was braver than Hintsuli would have been, despite the fact that her face was as white as birch bark and her lips pale and shivering.

He pulled her, dripping, from the water, and set her on a flat rock beside the pool. Then his gaze dropped past her face, past her shoulders and lower, and he stopped comparing the woman to his little brother.

He couldn’t understand why the white people wore such thin clothing. It offered no protection against the snows of
ko-meni
. Why didn’t they wear deerskin? Good white deerskin didn’t turn to mist when it became wet.

By The Great Spirit, he could see every part of her body as if she wore such a mist now—the points of her breasts, tautened with cold, the delicate ridges of her ribs, the shallow cave of her navel. And lower, he glimpsed the tousled nest of her woman’s curls.

Sakote swallowed hard, as if he swallowed an acorn, shell and all, and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he’d never seen a naked woman. He’d played pleasure games with many women from the surrounding Konkow villages. They seemed to enjoy his company and his body, and many wished to become his mate. But they were his people. They were Konkow. Never had he looked thus upon a white woman. Never had he imagined that their woman’s parts were nestled in gold.

It made him want to take her, here, beside the pond. He wished to lay her back on the sweet grass and lick the droplets from her shoulders, to fondle her breasts through the mist-cloth, to plunge his thickening spear into the golden tangle of her woman’s hair and...

"W-w-will you s-s-sit for me now?"

Her words startled Sakote from his vision, and he scowled in self-disgust. What was he thinking? How could he desire to lie with the woman? It was crazy. She was not of his world. She was white. And she was the mate of a bad
kokoni
. She was willful like the bear, stubborn like the coyote, and, like the squirrel, she seemed to chatter on and on. How could he want to lie with her?

And yet he did. He wanted to stretch out beside her, and he wanted to press his lips to hers in that white man’s ritual—the kiss—he’d spied between Noa and his sister late one night, the one that had made Towani sigh.

She stared at him now, her bottom lip shivering, and he wondered—did her mouth taste salty like the dried meat the miners always ate? Or bitter like their dark coffee? Was her breath warm with the white man’s whiskey? Or sweet with mint?

A tiny frown crossed her face, and he realized he hadn’t answered her question. He’d been wasting time with his dreaming. He forced his gaze back to her eyes, his thoughts back to her pain.

"First I must finish with your wounds." His voice was a hoarse whisper, and he hoped his breechcloth hid the proof of his lust.

A patch of milkweed grew in the crevice between two great slabs of granite. With a whisper of thanks to the plant, he plucked several stems.

"W-w-what is that?"

"It will heal you."

She eyed the plants with mistrust. "B-b-but it..."

"It will heal you."

He dribbled white juice from the plants onto her knee first, and she sucked a quick breath of pain through her teeth.

"It’s good," he assured her. "It will stop the bleeding."

He lifted her arm to drip the liquid down its length, trying to ignore her moon-white breast with the pink bud visible through the wet cloth.

For her forehead, he tore one leaf and gently dabbed the edge of it to her cut, holding her head still with his other hand. She winced, but didn’t complain.

"You aren’t cold anymore?" he asked.

"The pain has distracted me from the cold."

He grunted, amused. She sounded as grumpy as an old grandmother.

"
Akina
." Finished, he dropped the spent stems into the water. "Now I’ll bind your wounds."

He tore the edge of her brown dress quickly, before she could protest, for he knew how women were about their clothing. As he expected, her jaw dropped open and her eyes grew wide.

"What the devil are you—“

"I told you. I have to bind your wounds."

He shouldn’t feel guilty. There was no other way. He’d try to tear as little as possible, but he had to use her garment. Perhaps he’d bring her another. Yes, that was it. The white man’s clothing was useless for winter. Perhaps he’d bring her a Konkow garment—a soft deerskin cloak or a robe of rabbit fur. How beautiful she’d look all in white, like a winter deer…or the eagle of his dreams.

"Are you a...medicine man?"

"No." He carefully wrapped a strip of the cloth around her knee.

"Then how do you know what you’re doing?"

"All the Konkow know this."

"What’s a Konkow?"

The white people were so full of questions.

"My people." He tied the ends of the strip to secure it.

"Konkow," she repeated. The word sounded strange from her mouth. "And do you have a family?"

He nodded and began to wrap the second strip between her thumb and finger, around the pad of her hand.

"A mother? Father?" she asked.

"A mother."

"And your father? Is he...alive?"

Sakote drew an uneasy breath in through his nose. He had not spoken of his father in four years, not since Noa had asked him the same question.

She sucked suddenly through her teeth.

He glanced at his handiwork. He’d wound the cloth too tight. He unwrapped it and started over.

The woman spoke softly, sorrowfully. "My mother and father are both dead."

He paused, but didn’t meet her eyes. "You mustn’t speak of them."

"Why?" She seemed truly bewildered.

"It’s dangerous to speak of the dead." His mother had named her second son, the son of Sakote’s uncle, after Sakote’s father, Hintsuli, so that she wouldn’t slip and speak the name of her dead husband.

The white woman became quiet then and very sad, and he almost regretted his words. The air seemed too quiet without her chattering.

He’d wrapped the last coil of the cloth around her arm and was knotting the ends when she finally broke the silence.

"Do you have a wife?"

He almost tied his thumb into the knot. Why did she want to know if he had a
kulem
? Was she interested in him? No, he decided, it must be his imagination. He finished the knot. "No."

"You don’t...want a wife?" Now she was like a chipmunk, poking her nose in the acorn flour where it didn’t belong.

He rocked back on his haunches and considered ignoring her question. But it was an interesting one, one he’d left in the shadowy part of his mind for a long time. He liked the women of his tribe, and there were even a few from the neighboring villages he’d considered taking to wife. But starting his own family was always something he’d placed in the seasons to come. He was too busy raising his little brother, seeing that his sister found a mate, protecting the tribe from the dangers of the white men, dangers that the elders, the shaman, and even his wise headman uncle didn’t understand.

"I’ll have a wife," he conceded, "one day."

She seemed satisfied with his answer. "Will you sit for me now?"

He wasn’t sure what she wanted from him, and he felt very foolish as he lowered himself onto the grass beside her so she could make his picture.

"Now sit very still," she said, reaching for her sketchbook and the drawing sticks.

It was easy for him to sit still. He did it all the time when he hunted. The difficult part was having her stare at him as if he were a fawn and she a wolf, hungrily measuring every bite of him with her eyes.

Mattie’s fingers shook as she touched the pencil to the page. That same hunger—the possession—that she’d felt the night before, depicting the Indian from memory, overcame her. He was magnificent, even more glorious in her presence, and it was a daunting task for her to translate that magnificence to paper.

She began with the eyes. They were calm now, steady—twin jewels of polished jet. They caught the light off the sun-washed granite and shone like candles at midnight. The crinkles at the corners spoke of laughter in his life, but the furrow between his finely arched brows told her he was just as wont to brood.

His nose was prominent, not hooked, but with a bold ridge that complemented his proud cheekbones. Her pencil faltered as she imagined how it would feel to have him nuzzling her neck.