“I’m thinking of one battle in particular,” said Neil. “A battle where the white men came off pretty badly, and the Indians did well.”
“There were a few of those,” said Billy Ritchie, shaking his head. “I heard tell of a massacre of ten white farmers and their families by the Wappos up at St. Helena, and there was an ambush of three white squatters by Wappos in York Creek. Maybe the worst, though, was the time they say Bloody Fenner took a league of land from the Wappo Indians in exchange for leading twenty settlers and their families into a trap set in the forest up at Las Posadas, close to Conn Creek. The settlers had trusted Fenner, you see, and paid him in gold to act as their scout and interpreter, so that they could lay out claims to farmland in Bell Canyon. But he took them slap-bang into a Wappo ambush, and they were all killed. Twenty farmers, and their twenty wives, and fifty-three young children.”
Neil licked his lips. “Did anyone prove that it was Fenner who did it? Or was it just hearsay?”
“What proof did anyone have in them days?” asked Billy Ritchie. “The land was rough and the folks were rougher. You stayed alive if you were hard and dogged and used your gun without thinking twice. But the stories say that Fenner was the only white man who came out of that massacre alive, and that’s suspicious in itself. He said that he left the settlers, and rode back along Conn Creek to bring help from his Mexican soldier friends, and there’s nothing to say that he didn’t. But if he did bring help, it was a sight too late to save anyone; and what was oddest of all, the settlers’
bodies were all scalped, and their ears cut off.”
“What was odd about that?” asked Neil. “The Wappos were pretty fierce sometimes, weren’t they?”
“Oh, they could be. But what they didn’t do was take scalps, or ears, or genitalia, like some of the Indians did. It wasn’t their style. They were diggers, not fighters, and all they cared about was protecting their good agricultural land from the white men.
They weren’t interested in trophies.”
“You’re saying that Fenner took the scalps? A white man took white scalps?”
“You don’t have to look so shocked. It wasn’t unusual in them days. In fact, some of the old-tuners say it was white men who taught the Indians to take scalps in the first place.”
“That’s horrific,” said Neil.
Old Billy Ritchie shrugged, and swilled some bourbon down with a mouthful of beer.
Neil said, “Did you ever see a picture of Bloody Fenner? An engraving or anything like that?”
Billy Ritchie shook his head. “The only drawings I ever saw of Napa Valley in them days were landscapes. Mainly forests, it was. But I don’t think nobody ever took it into their heads to draw Bloody Fenner.”
“There’s something else,” said Neil. “Did you ever hear of a prophecy connected with Bloody Fenner? Something that was supposed to be written on a stone redwood tree?”
Billy Ritchie thought about that, and then shook his head again. “No, sir, I can’t say that I ever did.”
“Then how about the day of the dark stars?”
Billy Ritchie lifted his head slowly and stared at him. For the first time since Neil had walked into the house, he stopped stroking the cat, and his old hand lay on her black fur like a dead, dried leaf.
“Did I hear you right?” he said, in a soft, unsettling tone.
“The day of the dark stars,” repeated Neil. “That was all I said.”
The old man quivered in his chair, as if a cold wind had blown across the room. But the air was still, and growing stuffy, and outside it must have been close to 100
degrees.
“Where did you hear about the day of the dark stars?” he asked Neil. “I lay my life I didn’t believe I’d ever hear that phrase again.”
“I don’t know,” said Neil, reluctant to tell the old man about Toby until he knew what the “day of the dark stars” was, and why the mention of it seemed to be so unnerving. “I guess I just kind of picked it up.”
Billy Ritchie looked at Neil as if he knew that he was only telling him half of the truth, but then he piloted his wheel chair across the room, and silently poured himself another large shot of bourbon. As he screwed the cap back on the bottle, he looked up at Neil, and said: “The first and last time I heard of the day of the dark stars was from a trapper I met when I was a young man up in the Modoc Forest. This man was old and he was thin as a polecat, and he had scars on every spare inch of his body from fighting Indians and annuals. We spent two nights and two days together, and then we went our separate ways.”
“But what did he tell you?” asked Neil.
Billy Ritchie’s eyes were rheumy and distant. “He told me all about the old days in Modoc country, just so that I could pass his stories on, so they wouldn’t be lost. What he said was that once the Indians knew they couldn’t hold back the white man any longer, they kind of bowed their heads and accepted their fate after a fashion, because they always knew that their gods would give them revenge. It was a Wappo belief, for instance, that for every Indian who died from cholera or smallpox, or was shot down by scalp hunters, a white man would die in return. They said that it might not happen in a month, in a year, or even in twenty years, but that one day the stars would go dark because they would call down the most powerful and evil Indian demons there ever were, the demons they didn’t even dare to call down in their own lifetimes, like Nashuna and Pa-la-kai and Ossadagowah, and that the demons would slaughter a man for a man, a woman for a woman, a child for a child.”
Billy Ritchie took another.swig from his glass, and then he said, “The way I heard it, Nashuna was the demon of darkness, and Pa-la-kai was the demon of blood, and Ossadagowah was a land of a beast-thing that nobody could even describe, a kind of a wild demon that scared everyone witless.”
“You sound as though you believe it,” said Neil, carefully.
The old man gave a wry smile. “I’d believe it before I believed some of the words I read in the Bible,” he said, quietly. “Them Indians knew their lands, you see, and they knew their skies and their waters, and they knew all about the spirits and the demons that dwelled in those lands and those skies and those waters. The way that trapper told me, the day of the dark stars was going to happen before the twentieth century turned-he wasn’t sure when, but that was what he was told.”
Neil raised his eyebrows. “Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But who’s going to call these demons down? I’ve been to powwows at a couple of Indian reservations, and there’s an Indian who comes down to Bodega Bay to fish, and it seems to me that there isn’t much magic left in any of today’s red people.”
“It’s not today’s red people you’ve got to worry about,” said Billy Ritchie. “It’s the spirits of the red people from out of the past. What this trapper told me was that the greatest of all the medicine men, the twenty-two most powerful wonder-workers from all the main tribes, all of their spirits would come together, God knows how, and they’d call down the worstest demons they could, and get their revenge.”
“You mean the ghosts of twenty-two old-time medicine men are supposed to be getting together to punish us? Come on, Billy. That’s a tall story and you know it.”
Billy Ritchie didn’t look offended. ‘People have said that before,” he said, philosophically. “But let me show you something, before you make up your mind that all those old Indian legends were nonsense.”
He propelled himself across to a small bureau which stood in the far corner of the room and opened the top drawer. He shuffled through a heap of untidy papers and news clippings while Neil watched him silently and drank his beer.