Death Rattle (17 page)

Their hosts actually lived on both sides of the Colorado. Three other villages stood across the muddy river. No sooner had the pale-skinned visitors shown up than the inhabitants of the other towns began to noisily cross the roiling current on flimsy rafts constructed of reeds lashed together with a fibrous rope. These white strangers were nothing less than a curious spectacle. Never before had the Mojave seen many outsiders pass through their country.

These were a strong, athletic people. Part of the Yuman family, they had a reputation for being fierce and aggressive warriors. For generations beyond count, the Mojave men had practiced extensive body tattooing using strong plant dyes—red, blue, and even white, to adorn their swarthy skins with potent symbols. Most of the men wore only a short, reed breechclout, and all went barefoot, using no moccasins of any description. When off on a rare hunt that would keep them away from their village for several days, most men wore nothing at all.

It was the custom of the women to wear nothing more than a short reed skirt around their hips. All that exposed
flesh of breast and leg only served to entice the Americans into offering a handful of buttons or a yard of simple cotton ribbon in exchange for a few minutes of heated coupling behind one of the squat huts.

From the way the headmen instructed their most alluring young women to post themselves around the periphery of the trappers’ camp that afternoon, Titus figured the Mojave were not only eager to trade for some of the strangers’ goods but also exceedingly anxious to have white bloodlines mingle with theirs for generations to come.

These simple people lived in small, four-sided log-and-mud shelters, a crude roof of thatched brush over which the Mojave tossed sand for added insulation from the heat. For a tribe not prone to do much hunting that would have to take them far from this canyon of the Colorado, it was an uncomplicated life. Instead, the staple of their diet was the salmon they speared or caught in fibrous nets. Too, the Mojave cultivated extensive gardens of beans and corn, water- and muskmelon, and even some cotton. A mainstay was their wheat, which they stored in tall, upright, cylindrical granaries with flat tops, until they were ready to grind their wheat into flour.

While the men did not often hunt, the Mojave did nonetheless relish horsemeat. Rather than using equine animals for transport from place to place, these Colorado River Indians instead caught, raised, and even stole horses simply to eat. Much easier, Bass thought, than walking out of this valley to search the surrounding desert for a few scrawny rabbits or tortoises.

Here after their long, torturous ride through a barren, desolate canyon country devoid of game or good water, a trackless desert waste fit only for the likes of lizards, cactus, and spiny toads … why, to Titus Bass this fertile, green valley where these dark-skinned people raised their horses and cultivated a variety of crops seemed like a veritable Eden.

Late in the afternoon while the trappers were stoking their supper fires, eight of the Mojave men left their village, heading for the white man’s camp. But just short of
the trappers, those eight stopped and dropped armloads of wood onto the grass. While a half dozen of the men turned on their heels and made for the village once again, two of them began to sort through the wood, selecting a few lengths of timber. For the next few hours Bass watched the men erect a small scaffold from the wood those six others continued to deposit near the white man’s camp, lashing the timber together with a fibrous rope the Mojave women braided from rushes and reeds. Beneath the low, upright braces, the men piled smaller brush and limbs. But it wasn’t until long after supper that he learned the purpose of that empty scaffold.

As soon as the sun had passed behind the far western wall of the canyon, the entire valley was thrown into shadow. With supper finished and the air cooling, most of the trappers sallied off from the fires, headed for the village and those young women who waited just close enough to the white men to make their willingness known. Everyone from their mess had departed for the village and a long-overdue coupling except for Bass and Roscoe Coltrane. They sat smoking their clay pipes, staring at the flames or the newly emerging stars. Twilight was already smearing the shadows into night when they heard the approach of many feet.

Both trappers turned to find more than fifty of the Mojave headed their way. At the van of their march, four men carried a long form on their shoulders. Behind the quartet walked two women holding torches that sputtered, licking at the evening breeze. Stopping beside the scaffold, the four hoisted the body atop the low platform. As they stepped back, the two women came forward, accompanied by a lone man who now recited a long, mournful dissertation.

“I s’pose they’re praying,” Bass whispered to Coltrane.

Roscoe nodded, but uttered not a word.

With a wave of his hand, the Mojave shaman inched back, gestured, and gave the order to the two women. They leaned forward on either side of the scaffold and jammed their torches into the thick nest of driftwood and
dried grass stuffed beneath the body. A quiet, eerie chant began as the flames caught hold, an off-key dirge that grew in volume as the fire grew hotter, leaped higher, licking all around the deceased, beginning to consume him.

“Ever you know any folks what burn their dead?” Bass asked of Coltrane.

Captivated, Roscoe never took his eyes off the ceremony, his face illuminated with the dancing light from those flickering flames as he shook his head.

“Me neither,” Bass replied.

He watched as one Mojave after another stepped from the crowd, carrying a few meager items in their hands. A woman carried a bow. Another female had some crude fibrous clothing draped over her arm. A young man raised aloft a club for all to see, while a young girl moved forward carrying a short spear in both hands.

Titus said, “I figger they’re gonna burn ever’thing that man had to his name. Like some of the Injuns in the mountains give away all a man has after he’s dead.”

The shaman continued to reel off more of his foreign and mystical words, then paused before he gave the order. The individuals who held those few meager belongings now tossed them atop the body being consumed by flame, then every one of them quickly shrank back from the great heat the funeral pyre generated. Its growing light reflected off the striated orange and reddish-brown canyon walls as exploding fireflies of sparks spiraled skyward from the river valley.

As the scaffold collapsed and the flames began to recede, members of the dead man’s family retrieved a few burning limbs from the fire and set off behind the shaman when he started the crowd back for the village. The group stopped at one of the huts, where the family came forward together, setting the dry walls aflame with those faggots carried from the funeral pyre.

“Almost like he never lived,” Bass whispered morosely. He saw Coltrane wag his head sadly, then turned again to watch the flames greedily lick away at the brush and log shelter. “Rubbing out ever’ sign he ever was.
Ever’thing he ever had is gone in less’n a goddamned night. Not a single trace that fella was ever around … ’cept for his kin still breathin’.”

As the bonfire died and many of the village finished obliterating almost every clue of a man’s existence among them, night deepened in the valley of the Colorado while most of the white men cavorted with the willing young women of the Mojave.

After brooding on it there in the fire-lit darkness beside that silent man, Scratch finally admitted, “I s’pose that’s just about all there’ll be for any of us, Roscoe. Things come an’ things go, and when we die we don’t need ’em no more. Maybe burning all his plunder’s a fair notion of things. Older a man gets, he finds out such foofaraw wasn’t important anyway. Maybeso these here Injuns got a good notion when all’s said an’ done … for what’s truly important still remains long after any of us is gone.”

Coltrane turned and gazed at Bass’s face, then the once-mute man spoke for the first time in many weeks. “What’s important to you?”

Initially startled by the reticent man’s sudden speech, Titus finally declared, “Kin, Roscoe. Kinfolk, and what few friends I can count on.”

Three more days passed while the white men languished in this unexpected Eden.

During those long, early-summer days most of the men ate or slept or frolicked in the river with some of their newfound female friends. And when night came down, the exuberant trappers stomped and jigged and sang, until they could wait no longer and slipped back into the shadows to couple with one of the Mojave women.

At the fires each evening, Frederico stammered through his poor Spanish, explaining his childhood in California, while Peg-Leg translated haltingly for the others. The young Indian described how in his youth he chose to become a novitiate working in the fields among hundreds of other Indians, all of them living under the
rigid strictures of the padres’ church. But the lessons he learned were not the sort that would save his heathen soul from an eternity of damnation. Instead, Frederico, like the hundreds of primitive California Indians living in the hills and vales surrounding every Catholic mission, soon discovered they were nothing more than slaves who toiled in the vineyards, sweated over the extensive fields, tending to virtually every need or whim of the Mexican friars and those soldiers posted nearby.

Growing more and more disillusioned with the cruelty of his religious taskmasters, Frederico determined he would run away to those mountains lying far to the east of the mission. With two companions he escaped during the return of a work detail, the trio managing to hide until nightfall when the three young men started for the distant foothills. But they soon learned that even the foothills and high slopes covered in their evergreens were no sanctuary. Mounted Mexican soldiers caught up to them.

Rather than return to the mission and the torment he would have to suffer, one of the young men threw himself off a rocky ledge, his broken body tumbling into the chasm below. Frederico and his friend were promptly clamped in shackles and turned around for the mission.

When the pair hobbled along too slowly to keep up with the soldiers’ horses, the boys were lashed with braided horsehair quirts. Stumbling and falling constantly, they finally reached the mission, where both collapsed at the feet of the friars—who immediately ordered their most trusted Indian servants to bind the runaways to a pair of posts erected a few yards outside the walls. There a stern, steel-eyed, and militant padre took a rawhide cat-o’-nine-tails from his rope belt and turned the runaways’ backs to ribbons of blood and tattered strips of flesh.

With pooling eyes now, Frederico related how he had passed out with the severity of the flogging, unable to endure the pain or loss of blood any longer. The last sounds he heard were the unearthly cries of his young friend. Later, when he awoke in a cell where his feet were shackled, Frederico asked a friar when he could see his
friend. The priest declared that his friend had gone away mysteriously … and would never be coming back.

Yet in his bones, Frederico knew that last part was nothing less than the ugly truth. Few of the escaped slaves ever survived their recapture. Their deaths simply served as a vivid example to the other Indians forced to witness the brutal public flogging of those who attempted to flee their cruel bondage to these self-righteous and most holy Mexican taskmasters.

Not long after Frederico’s recapture, his two young sisters were transferred from the mission, taken away to join a group of women who were consigned to the nearby soldier barracks where they served as concubines for the Mexican cavalry. Overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, eaten up with utter hopelessness, Frederico realized he alone could do nothing to free his sisters from their fate. All he could do was to attempt another escape. That, or die trying.

This time when he made his dash east to the foothills of those beckoning mountains, he did not tarry to hide among the timber and the boulders. Instead, Frederico scaled the slopes, pushing all the way to the top of a narrow pass, where he gazed down upon that impenetrable desert below him. One last time he peered over his shoulder to the west where lay nothing but a legacy of misery and pain. There wasn’t a thing left for him but torture and death at the hands of his Mexican conquerors if the soldiers ever recaptured him. The young Indian crossed over, pitching himself into the desert.

Discovered near death where he lay huddled in the skimpy shade of a patch of cactus, parched with thirst and unable to move, Frederico was rescued by a few young Mojave warriors who had ventured onto the wastes in search of wild horses, hunting for any branded animals that might have escaped the California missions and extensive ranchos. Taking the half-dead slave to their villages on the Colorado, the Mojave hissed and snarled when Frederico explained why he had such a patchwork of terrible scars across his back and shoulders.

From that day, his rescuers never asked again of the
pale-skinned strangers far to the west. The Mojave had saved his life and given him a home.

“Will you guide us back through that pass in the mountain?” Peg-Leg Smith asked Frederico when the young Indian had finished his dramatic tale that third night at the fire.

“You will not be lost,” Frederico replied, wagging of his head with reluctance.

“What do you want to lead us?” Smith inquired. “Tell me what I can give you in trade. We need you to show us the pass through the mountains that will take us to the ranchos.”

This time Frederico shook his head more emphatically. “There is nothing you can give me that would make me take another step across that desert. Nothing in this world that will make me return to the land of my murderous captors.”

In the cool, shadowy dawn that next morning, the booshways had their grumbling men rolling out early, ordered to bring their horses and pack animals into camp. Onto the pack saddles they tied skins filled with horsemeat they had traded from the Mojave. Every man went to the river one last time to fill his gourd or oaken canteen, along with those skin bladders the booshways had purchased from the Indians.