The Pride of Hannah Wade (21 page)

After catching two of their packhorses, they led them to the
jacal.
Sleepy jabbered away at them from his cradleboard hanging on a
ramada
post. The packing of belongings and supplies began. The hut, which had taken half a day to construct, was quickly dismantled,
the canvas kept and folded to be loaded on the horses, the rest discarded. Each time a
rancheria
site was abandoned, the procedure was the same. Nothing would be left as it was; even the fire pit would be smoothed over so that anything that happened in this place while they were gone would not affect the Apaches when they returned.

An impatient, glowering Lutero watched them begin the long task of loading the horses. Restive and irritable, he growled at their slowness, but made no move to help them. It was women’s work. Hannah could see the dullness and lethargy of a hangover about him, the flatness that dragged at him and soured his mood. She stayed well clear of him, so it was Gatita he sent to fetch his horse.

At the first gunshot, Hannah paused to look around, wondering which liquor-laden Apache had awakened with sufficient rowdiness to do some hoorahing. When drunk, the Apaches were a noisy, brawling bunch, quick to laughter and quick to anger.

The single shot was followed by a flurry of gunfire and yells of warning. A second later, riders charged the
rancheria,
uniformed Mexican soldiers in their high-crowned, small-billed hats, flashing their sabers. Hannah spared one glance over her shoulder at Lutero as he grabbed his weapons and bolted for cover.

But joy leaped through her, the blood rushing through her body. Laughing and crying with relief, she turned and ran to meet the charging soldiers, these riders in the uniform of the Mexican army.

She waved her arms at them, shouting,
“Americano!! Americano!!”

A soldier angled his mount at her, lifting his saber. At the last instant, Hannah realized that he intended to ride her down and threw herself out of the path of his slashing saber and. his horse’s hooves. Her hands absorbed much of the impact of her fall, but it was their
darkly tanned color Hannah suddenly noticed, and the Apache dress she wore. She claimed to be white, but with her dark hair, dark eyes, and tanned skin, she looked like one of them. Her cries of
“Americano”
had probably made no more impression on the soldier than the rest of the screaming going on around them.

Hannah scrambled to her feet, finally becoming aware of all that was happening in the chaos of the moment. Apaches were running in every direction—men, women, and children, pursued by soldiers who hacked at them with their sabers. It was a bloody scene; bodies were split open like ripe melons, arms severed from shoulders.

Suddenly she heard the scared whimpering of a baby who knew it shouldn’t cry. Sleepy was still in his cradleboard, dangling from the
ramada,
his big dark eyes looking about in frightened confusion. As she ran toward the brush arbor, a soldier also caught the distressed sounds and hauled back on his horse’s reins to locate it. When he saw the Apache infant in the cradleboard, he swerved his mount toward it, saber raised.

There were no weapons within reach, nothing of size that Hannah could throw at the soldier. All she could find was a water-filled
tus,
which she grabbed and hurled at the horse and rider. The spray of water in the horse’s face startled the animal and it shied violently, unseating the soldier on its back. As he fell, he lost his grip on the saber. Hannah snatched it up and, in one swift motion, cut the rawhide strings suspending the cradleboard from the
ramada
post.

Grabbing the bulky cradleboard with the baby, Hannah ran toward the
jacal
and past it, taking a direction opposite to the marauding soldiers while avoiding the open ground. They were everywhere, shooting and slashing. The whine of bullets was all around her; some were fired by Apaches to cover the retreat of their
women and children. There was no safe direction to run, no clear way to break through the encircling ring of soldiers and escape into the mountain wilds.

So Hannah hid in the only place she could find, crawling into the small space between a boulder and some brush and hugging close to the ground. Through the sharp-edged leaves and the thorny twigs, she could see the rampaging soldiers, killing those who didn’t get away in time and mutilating their bodies, horrible scenes of children pulled apart, women eviscerated. She saw a Mexican soldier impale Cactus Pear’s young daughter on his lance and hoist her body into the air, then hurl it off, a rag-doll figure. The smell of blood and gore scented the dusty air.

When the killing ended, the burning started, and the Mexican soldiers scoured the
rancheria
and the surrounding terrain to flush out wounded victims. The smoke from the burning, half-dismantled
jacals
was thick and choking. As the soldiers passed close to her hiding place in the crevice under the brush-shielded boulder, Hannah struggled not to cough and reveal her location. Sleepy made protesting little movements, but issued not a sound. Her fingers rested lightly against his mouth, ready to smother any cry he might make, but there was none.

For a long time—it seemed hours—she heard the soldiers moving about; there came the stamp of a horse’s hoof, the distant utterance of some command in Spanish, or the clip-clop of a passing horse. Then there was nothing but the crackle of flames burning low or the crash of a collapsing wickiup’s charred frame. Still Hannah didn’t leave her hiding place with Sleepy.

Buzzards began a slow circling overhead, surveying the scene before coming in to land near the bloody corpses scattered about. The flap of their long wings was an ominous sound, nearly as unnerving as the sight of their cadaverous heads. Other wildlife, frightened
away by the gunfire, screams, and smoke, began to return. Their presence reassured Hannah that the soldiers were no longer in the vicinity.

She’ had started to crawl out from beneath the shielding branches when the buzzards took off with a lumbering flap of wings. Immediately she pressed her body flat to the ground, breathing in the sharp-scented dust while her senses strained to locate whatever had disturbed the scavengers. Her heart pounded loudly in the stillness of the smoke-trailed scene, only a scattering of burnt ruins within her range of vision.

A second later, Hannah saw Lutero’s deep-chested figure walking among the smoking fires and heard the first mourning wail of an Apache for his dead. The Mexican soldiers must be some distance away and under observation, or none of the Apaches would have risked returning to this place. Hannah scrambled from her hiding place, carrying the cradleboard with Sleepy in her arms, and hurried to join the gathering survivors of the small Apache band.

All that remained of Lutero’s
jacal
were the fire-blackened ribs of the bent saplings. There were charred and smoldering shapes in the ash-strewn center, none of them recognizable. A distraught Gatita stumbled around it, blindly looking around.

“Hola!”
Hannah called to her, relieved to see that she had survived the attack.

Gatita cried out with joy at the sight of her son alive and well, and rushed to take the cradleboard from Hannah. Hugging and touching the baby, crooning to it while she assured herself it was unharmed, Gatita hurried to her husband so both could share in this miracle. Then together they faced Hannah, a deep gratitude welling even in Lutero’s look.
“Asoog’d,
thank you,” Gatita said simply. Something Hannah had never heard expressed before by any of the Apache.

“De nada,
it was nothing,” she assured them, but she smiled faintly, for the first time feeling a warmth of emotion—and a reciprocation of it.

Then the destruction around them reasserted itself. Death’s stench permeated the air with its reek of blood and roasted flesh. In shock, Hannah gazed about her. Some of the dead had been thrown onto the pyres of flaming
jacals;
others had been eviscerated or horribly mutilated, breasts removed from the women and genitals from the males. She recoiled from the sight of all the bloodied heads from which scalps had been hacked away and ears cut off. Such butchery was sickening. That soldiers had done it—soldiers, regardless of whose army—was beyond Hannah’s ken.

Altogether fifteen of their small band had been brutally murdered; all but three of them were women and children. With the threat of the soldiers’ return ever present, the dead were quickly removed from the scene and carried deeper into the mountains to be walled into crevices that would, become their burial chambers.

Virtually nothing could be salvaged from the
rancheria.
Everything had been destroyed except what they carried on their persons and the clothes they wore. All else was gone—their foodstuffs, their household goods, their weapons, everything. Hannah kept thinking of all the food they had gathered and spent hours preserving; their entire store of winter supplies—gone. Homeless, they had nothing—no food, no blankets— and the time of Ghost Face was approaching. Only two ponies from their herd were recovered and one of those horses was lame, but they brought the limping beast along. If nothing else, it would provide the night’s meal for the surviving members of the band.

A cache of extra food and supplies had been stashed in the Florida Mountains of New Mexico earlier in the
year. With it, they would have a chance of making it through the winter. They started out, on foot, for the Rio Grande.

All along the way they encountered Mexican patrols. There was constant skirmishing, with the braves and war women engaging the soldiers to cover the escape of the women and children. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion were their constant companions on the dangerous journey.

On a cold, moonlit winter’s night, they waded across the wide river. All Hannah could think of when they reached the American side was that the Mexican army could not pursue them past this river. They were safe at last.

They recovered their cache of supplies from its walled-in hiding place in a cliff face, then headed for the site of the
rancheria
in the Mogollons where Hannah had been taken as a new captive, the one located atop the mesa and reached by a narrow, tortuous defile. The stronghold was virtually impregnable, the mesa rising sheerly from the desert floor. The narrow, snaking trail was the only access to the top. With his band thus safe, Lutero took three of his men and went to raid and replenish their storehouses with the essentials.

They were lean times, cold times. Many times Hannah went to sleep with little food in her stomach, huddled close to the small fire by the
ramada,
staring at the icy stars visible through the brush-thatched roof. Often she heard Sleepy whimper with hunger inside the
jacal
and guessed that Gatita did not have enough milk to satisfy the fast-growing infant.

When Lutero returned, his booty was considerable— ten horses plus twenty head of
wohaw,
agency steers, which he’d herded into a grassy canyon. The grazing would keep them there and allow the Apache to hunt
and Kill them as meat was needed. The blankets Hannah recognized as the kind issued at the reservation. She could guess where Lutero had done his raiding. The bags of flour and some of the other staples bore the stamp of the Indian Agency. Strangely, she did not particularly care how or where Lutero had obtained the goods. The needs of the
rancheria
were desperate; even the children were gaunt and hollow-eyed.

Now they could feast on
wohaw,
and the cowhide would make them new clothes, new moccasins; the blankets would keep them warm on the cold nights. She did not wonder at this new attitude of hers but accepted the bare comforts.

With a blanket draped over her head and around her shoulders as a shawl, Hannah left the fire and walked into the chill of a desert winter morning. She carried the empty wicker jugs that held their water and walked toward the spring that supplied the
rancheria.

The water at the spring was icy cold, numbing her hands as she filled the
tus.
She rubbed warmth back into them, then started back to camp. Halfway to the
rancheria,
Hannah met Lutero on the trail. This was the third time in as many days that she had encountered him away from camp. She was wary of this sudden interest he was showing in her and these meetings when she was alone.

Against the cool temperature, he wore a long-sleeved buckskin shirt with fringe on the shoulders and the forearms of the sleeves. The long tails of his breechcloth helped protect his legs in their high moccasin boots. Lutero watched her approach with an impassive expression. Hannah avoided his eyes as she drew near him, catching the fragrance of wild mint on his body.

His hand moved toward her; she thought he intended
to grab her, and jerked back. Belatedly, she saw the carcass of a cottontail rabbit in his outstretched hand. She ventured a glance at his broad, flat features, plucked smooth of all facial hair. He watched her impassively. The preparation of small game was women’s work, so Hannah took the dead rabbit from him and started again for the
rancheria.
Lutero. didn’t follow her.

In her months of captivity, Hannah had learned the Apache way of cooking, specifically the Chiricahua method. Small animals were partially roasted whole, then skinned and gutted and cooked the rest of the way. That was the method she used to cook the rabbit back at camp. While it was roasting over the fire, Lutero returned and set to work making arrows.

When the rabbit was done, she took it to him. He regarded her gravely before he accepted it, a satisfied expression finally showing on his face.
“Enju,
it is well,” he said.

“Anh,
yes.” She nodded and returned to her work.

Late that day, Hannah knelt beside the large, flat stone called a
metate,
grinding cornmeal. The accumulated meal flour she gathered and placed in the
tsah,
a shallow basket; then she put more kernels in the stone’s natural depression and picked up the oblong
mono
to pulverize it. Gatita came and sat cross-legged on the ground at an angle to Hannah.