He nodded. “Son of a bitch loses a lot of its bite in Spanish too. We were talking about Changing Woman?”
She said, “Asdza Nadle’he, or Asdza Nadle’che, is the mother of the Hero Twins who killed all those evil spirits, and sees that all things change as they should change, from birth to death. Her name can be written down in English as Changing Woman or White-Painted Woman if you change one sound a little. Our tongue is not easy for others to learn. Your tongue is as simple as baby talk. A pony is always called a pony, whether someone is riding it or not, whether it is in sight or off on the range somewhere. Do you wonder that sometimes we have a hard time explaining why we have to fight your people, whether you can see why we are cross with you or not?”
He had to admit his own kind had managed to get mighty cross with others speaking the same lingo. But that war he’d run off to once was water under the bridge now too. So along about noon, seeing those smoke signals didn’t seem to be rising to the west anymore, he got dressed and carried the nose bags and his Winchester back down to the creek.
Nobody bothered him as he filled them and lugged them back upslope to the tethered ponies, while wishing they were mules. For though it wasn’t too hot and dry that afternoon, horseflesh still needed far more water than either human beings or mules did.
As he was putting the nose bags back on the two ponies, Kinipai came over bare-ass to tell him it seemed dumb to take such chances. She said both brutes were N’de ponies who didn’t get watered as often as the fat pets of his kind.
He said, “I’ve an extra shirt in my saddlebags. We’d best see how it fits you if I’m not to spend the whole fool day with a hard-on. As to fat pet ponies, I’ll tell you a dirty little secret of the U.S. Cav if you promise not to tell your treacherous Apache pals.”
As she said with a sigh, she had no friends among her own people, Longarm moved over to the grounded roping saddle to rustle up that pale blue workshirt, saying, “All that guff about noble Indian steeds in those Street and Smith dime novels by Ned Buntline is off the mark by a country mile. Us white eyes don’t worry about stud books, horseshoes, and proper care because we’re stupid. We invented horsebackriding, long before the first Indian ever saw the first horse on this side of the main ocean.”
He handed her the shirt, and Kinipai put it on, saying, “Oh, this is so pretty, it is blue as the hair of Turquoise Woman. But hear me, I still say our ponies are tougher than your ponies!”
He showed her how to button up as he dryly observed, “Let’s hope we can keep your boys from tangling on horseback with those troopers at Fort Marcy, then. Your boys can hide amid the rimrocks just fine on their glorified billy goats. But no Indian pony can outrun a real horse on open ground. Do you know how many Pony Express riders the Indians ever caught up with between Omaha and Sacramento? None. Not a single sissy, oat-fed pony. The company lost one rider, arrowed in the back as he rode through an ambush. But his pony, and the mail, got through. It was the transcontinental telegraph that finished off the Pony Express. This Jicarilla riding stock I got off your agency police would make an army remount sergeant cry, but they’re in better shape than your average grass-fed Indian pony. So if we baby ‘em just a tad more, they might just save our lives in a running gunfight. You do know how to shoot a pistol, don’t you?”
She sniffed and said of course. So he got out the double derringer he usually packed in his more formal tweed vest and unsnapped it from his watch chain, saying, “We’ll have to figure some way for you to pack this. I know; we can use one of my spare socks as a sash, and you’ll not only show less ass in that shirt when the wind blows, but you’ll have a handy place to pack a gun. Mind you don’t lose it, and expect it to kick like a mule if you really have to fire it.”
She seemed more delighted by that kind offer than by the magical blue shirt. He cinched her up, and when they found they could improvise a sort of holster from one toe and the hole in the sock’s heel, he issued her some spare cartridges and showed her how to reload the simple two-shot belly gun.
Then, seeing how friendly all this had made her feel, they both took off all their duds to get friendlier on that blanket for quite a spell. They even managed some sleep, taking turns on guard. And then it was dark again and they ate more canned grub, watered their ponies and grazed them a mite nearer that creek, and mounted up to move on.
They followed the mostly north-and-south grain of the mountains, and made good time by moonlight. When the sun rose again they were south of Stinking Lake, after circling the fair-sized and not-all-that-smelly body of water in the wee small hours, when the Jicarilla camped around it had been trying to sleep and not listen to the owls all around.
Kinipai, being more educated than most of her kith and kin, was only scared, rather than terrified, whenever a screech owl cut loose in the timber they were riding through. Owl was one of the totems of Mister Death. When he asked Kinipai if she’d ever really heard any owl calling out somebody’s name, she demurely replied, “Of course not. Only the person Owl is calling can hear Owl pronouncing his or her name. If I’d ever heard Owl calling my name, we wouldn’t be talking about Owl like this. I’d be dead and you’d be talking to my chindi!”
Then she assured him that if ever she met up with him as a haunt she’d try to remember they’d been pals. She didn’t know whether chindi gals got to spare old pals or not. She said she’d never been one or talked to one. He had to agree a chindi might not talk or think like a real live gal.
An owl who wouldn’t quit as the sky pearled ever lighter led Longarm to a swell campsite in blackjack oaks on a rocky rise. But Kinipai didn’t cotton to their avian neighbors at all.
The owl kept screeching because it had holed up for the day close to a crow rookery, and the crows were mobbing it with some mighty noisy remarks of their own. But when he explained the natural noises to the Jicarilla gal, she said Crow was almost as wicked a spirit as Owl. She naturally meant the “were-crow” ogre of her nation’s religion. She knew the big black birds mobbing that real owl were only critters. But she said they still gave her the creeps as he insisted on making camp under nearby trees.
He told her that was the reason they were doing it. He figured none of her own folk would want to poke around close to owl or crows without an urgent reason, and he’d been careful about the path they’d been riding over slickrock and gravel.
By the time they’d tended the ponies and spread his bedroll upwind between two boulders, that owl had given up and flapped off to a quieter neighborhood with the crows calling insults after it. Longarm opened one of their last cans of beans as he asked an expert on the subject what she’d think if she heard an owl hooting in broad daylight with no crows as an excuse.
Her sloe eyes widened as she stammered, “I would run away, as fast as I was able, before I heard it call my name! Everyone knows only Real Owl could behave in a way Changing Woman hadn’t meant all living things to act. Why are we talking about the Holy Ones? Don’t you want to ravage me anymore?”
Longarm chuckled and said, “Let’s eat first. I can give a fair imitation of an owl. You know how country boys fool around as they’re growing up around critters. So what you’re saying is that if I hooted at some Jicarilla heading this way to gather acorns or-“
“Nobody gathers the acorns of this sort of oak,” she said with a wry expression. “They are bitter, bitter.”
He said, “I know. Try some of these beans. My point is that I’d as soon not hurt or even swap harmless shots with any already peed-off Jicarilla during the current political crisis.”