The Shaman's Secret (11 page)

“Not a mirage,” Aunt Hilda shouted joyfully, kneeling down at the water's edge, dipping her fingers in. “A real lake. Praise heaven. Praise everything! We are saved!”

I had a moment to think it wasn't much of a lake. The water was muddy and brown-looking. But still so cool, so real, so heaven sent.

Aunt Hilda, Waldo, Rachel, Isaac and Mr. Baker were all cupping their hands, using them to scoop up handfuls of the water. One by one they brought them to their lips. For some reason, though all I had thought of was water, I hung back, watching.

“Phhoooo!” Aunt Hilda spat out a mouthful of the water, which arced over Mr. Baker and hit Waldo in the chest. “Disgusting!”

One by one my friends were spitting out the water. I looked at them in wonder. It certainly looked a bit brackish
and brown, but water is water. When it is going to save your life, it doesn't matter how clean it is.

“Salt!” explained Aunt Hilda. “It's a salt lake.”

Waldo was swearing, while Mr. Baker had simply collapsed.

“Shouldn't we drink it anyway?” I took a drop of water in my hand and licked. It had the briny tang of seawater.

“No!” yelped Aunt Hilda. “It will only make things worse. The salt in the water dries out your body quicker—which means you die quicker, you dolt!”

“You don't have to abuse me,” I said, sinking on to the dry sand. I understood what had made the layers of white cracks, radiating away from us. They were caused by the salt in the drying earth. Beautiful, like a layer of paper snowflakes laid over the desert. But for us they spelled defeat.

I looked at Aunt Hilda, who was towering over me. A single tear welled up in her right eye and dropped down her cheek. She was crying. I couldn't remember her ever crying before.

“We
will
make it,” I said softly.

“How?” She sank down on her legs beside me. “We should never have come through this place. Never. It's called Death Valley, for heaven's sake. But, no, I was stupid. I thought it was a short cut. It would save us time.”

“It wasn't your fault,” Cyril said. “I was the one—I
couldn't wait. I didn't have much time left anyway and this route seemed the quickest—”

“We all know that you're dying, Mr. Baker,” Isaac cut in. “Doesn't seem fair that the rest of us have to join you.”

Waldo coughed. Like the rest of us he was squatting on the sand, the precious water canisters hanging from strings around his neck. All our eyes turned to look at him. All the water we had in the world. A dribble in one bottle and the other totally empty.

“No sense in going over the past. No sense in squabbling,” he said quietly. “It wastes precious energy. Only way we're going to get out of this is if we save all our energy—”

“Stop!” Aunt Hilda's tears were all gone. A new determination blazed forth from her. “I have the answer! A desperate measure, but it will save us.”

“I'll do anything!” Rachel said.

“We must drink our own urine,” Aunt Hilda announced.

“Urgh!” Rachel said. “Anything but that.”

“Revolting idea,” Mr. Baker muttered, shuddering.

“It is the only way,” Aunt Hilda said. “I believe Mr. Livingstone tried it in Africa when he was stuck somewhere. Or was it Lady Hester Stanhope? Urine is said to be quite nutritious.”

Radiating determination, she strode up to Waldo and held out her hand. “The bottle, please, young Waldo. I feel the call of nature.”

“You can't be serious,” I said. Waldo was hanging on to the empty bottle, showing no sign of giving it to Hilda.

“This is it,” she said, her outstretched hand trembling slightly. “If drinking my own … er … water … is the difference between living and dying, I'll do it … I'd go even further, I would—” Thankfully she stopped before we learned what she would do, because Waldo interrupted.

“Hilda is right,” he announced, finally giving her the bottle. “If we don't take in some liquid, we'll die. The life is being slowly sucked out of our bodies by the sun and the heat coming from the sand. I saw you, Kit.” His eyes flashed at me, blue and angry. “You were close to blacking out. I'm not going to let that happen.”

Mr. Baker and Rachel were holding back, their faces rigid with horror. It sounded awful, drinking your own urine, but I think I was ready to do it. To close my eyes and—well, I was so light-headed already I think I could stomach any taste. This journey was my fault; I couldn't let everybody die.

“I agree with Hilda,” I said softly. “We
have
to do this.”

Isaac began to laugh. He ran his hands through his hair and his face crumpled with something between laughter and tears.

“It's not funny,” Waldo said.

“I know, I know. I don't know why I've been so darn stupid. It must be the heat or something.”

“What?”

“We don't need to drink our urine,” Isaac explained. “We've got all the water we need here.” His hands gestured toward the lake.

“It's salt, you fool—” Waldo began, then stopped, and a smile spread over his face. “Can we, do you think?”

“All we need is to turn this salt water into drinking water. We need to desalinate it.”

“Bravo! Israel, you're a genius,” Aunt Hilda said. “You can boil the salt away, can't you?” Then she paused, her face falling. “You foolish, foolish boy, raising our hopes for nothing. We don't have a cooking pot. How can we de-sal-i-what's-it the water without a cooking pot? You should think before you raise all our hopes, you—”

“Whoa. Calm down.” Isaac raised his hand, as if soothing a snapping dog. “I've thought of a way.”

We drank our last water, each person receiving just enough to wet the tongue and the back of the throat. We followed Isaac's instructions carefully, digging two small pits in the sand. Using our bottles we filled the pits up with salt water from the Badwater Basin. Then we put our bottles in the water, with the tops up. We covered the pits with strips from Waldo's waterproof coat. Finally we weighted down the covering with a pebble, placed exactly above each bottle's spout.

Then we prayed.

If Isaac was right, the natural heat in the sand, which was boiling hot, would cause the water to evaporate and collect in droplets on the waterproof-coat covering above, leaving the salt behind on the sand. The droplets of clean water would run down the covering toward the pebble placed above the spout and drip into the bottle.

Isaac is very often clever about things I have no understanding of at all. We all hoped that this was one of those times he would be right. While we waited, time ticked on, the sun sinking under the horizon and shadows lengthening around us. I heard the howl of prowling wolves, or perhaps coyotes. At one stage Isaac lifted the cloth. A puff of vapor rose in the darkness.

Waldo had disappeared to see if he could find anything edible around the lake. We still had a few strips of the dried meat pounded with berries called pemmican, which is a staple food of American pioneers. The bandit, who had so callously left us to expire in the heat of the desert, had at least left us a few strips of this. Probably because he couldn't stomach it himself. Horrible tasting, like eating pieces of old shoe leather, but it had saved our lives.

Time passed, and then with an excited cry Isaac held up one of the metal water canteens.

“Ladies first,” he said, and handed the bottle to me. I smiled at Isaac and then passed it to my aunt.

She didn't stand on ceremony. She tipped her head back and drank from the bottle. Then, soon, it was my turn. I drank. There was not too much, just a dribble, enough to wet my mouth and keep away the worst of the thirst. It was warm and brackish, with a taste of roots and sand. Never mind. It was delicious. Life-giving.

Waldo had returned with a few roots and berries, which he pronounced edible. I believe one of them was called mesquite. We sat, huddled in a circle, and ate and drank. The leathery pemmican. The odd, tangy berries and roots. Our voices rang low in the desert, set against the call of wild things in the dark. There was life here, slithering things that hunted at night. The rattlesnake, the coyote, the road-runner. The magnificent golden eagle that soared far above. We were each other's protection, so we sat tight together, lighting a fire not for heat but for safety.

I thought of other feasts I'd had. Magnificent seven-course dinners. Trifle. Chocolate cake. Those sweet-sour Chinese dumplings. Apple pie and normal things like hot toast. The butter dripping into the crunchy bread. Nothing could compete with the joy of that simple meal in the desert, that tough old meat eaten with a few mashed berries and washed down with gritty water.

I was happy that night with my friends so near. Confident we would survive. We would distil more water and fill our
canisters with at least enough to keep going. We would eat roots and berries. We would make it out of the desert and reach our goal of the Grand Canyon. That was when darkness descended in my mind, for who knew what we would find there?

Something was digging into me as my dream slipped away. Hoarse voices, gunfire and screams. Rachel was screaming, Isaac was screaming, Cyril was screaming. Blearily I opened my eyes and saw a face looming over me.

A stranger's face, his gun digging into my shoulder.

It belonged to a boy, maybe sixteen years old, with a piece of scarlet calico wound round his head. Long black hair framed a strong, tanned face, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. In the light of the stars they appeared very dark.

He was looking at me as if
he
was frightened. But he was the one standing over me with a gun pointed at my chest.

“Apaches,” Waldo whispered in my ear. “God help us.”

The boy was still looking at me. Not at me, exactly. At my body. I jerked up, crossing my bare arms.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He couldn't understand me, for not a flicker crossed his face. He continued to gape at me, as if he had never seen
a white girl before. Then he turned round and called out. Our fire had died to a few embers, but there was enough starlight to see that we were totally surrounded.

The circle we had made last night as we curled up to sleep had been ringed by a group of Indians on horseback. There were four or five men and a few young boys dressed in flowing robes and ponchos made of woven cloth and dyed deerskins. Some wore porcupine quills or feathers as decoration. Others wore cowboy hats or strips of dyed cloth round their long hair. One man had a buckskin hat decorated with eagle feathers. They trotted around us on their fine horses and grunted to each other in a hoarse tongue.

“They'll scalp us,” Mr. Baker said.

I hushed him because they were watching us, and who knew what they could understand. The man in the buckskin hat was talking to the first boy, who was gesturing to me. The words flew fast in their strange, guttural language. As they were talking, I tried to remember what I had heard about Apaches, if indeed this was an Apache band. They were meant to be fierce, ruthless warriors. While many other tribes had been defeated by the white settlers and government soldiers, groups of Apaches held out under the leadership of a great brave called Geronimo. So far the government in Washington had not been able to capture him.

I'd had an argument just a few days ago with Waldo about it. He had called Indians savages, and said they should all be rounded up and placed on reservations—if not killed outright. My mind was more confused. Indians had lived in America for centuries before the coming of the white man. They had roamed the plains, lived in their tent-like tepees, tended buffalo, worshipped their gods of the stars and the earth. Did not the land belong to them?

Waldo had become heated and said I had no idea what I was talking about. He said something about “manifest destiny”—which apparently meant that the white man was fated to rule this land. “They fight with bows and arrows and we fight with cannon,” he said, which was true enough. It didn't make it right, though, did it? Were the settlers not stealing their land? “You can't stop progress,” he'd said. “The gun will always win against the spear.” Perhaps because he was so stubborn, I took the opposite view. In the end he'd called me a nincompoop and turned aside. This was before he had stopped talking to me altogether.

Now as these wild men on their horses circled us round the dying campfire it was hard to believe in my own fine words. They looked wild and smelt of blood. They would kill us without mercy. It was clear that civilized notions of pity were unknown to them.

We sat silent while they talked. What could we do? We had no guns or knives. The Apaches were arguing amongst
themselves. After a while one of them, the man in the feathered buckskin hat, seemed to come to a decision. He called out to the others, and one by one they hauled us to our feet. I thought they would make us walk, but instead each of us was jerked behind a man on one of the horses.