Without thinking, Gideon leaped forward to meet it. His outthrust hand caught the plummeting wrist, caught it and brought it up short. Wild black eyes glared crazily at him, inches from his own, while the ax teetered and then toppled over, heavily thumping Gideon’s shoulder and sliding down his back. Long before it hit the ground he had balled his right fist to ram it into the gleaming, dark abdomen. His shoulder muscles had already bunched to drive the blow home when the red, mindless haze of sudden violence abruptly cleared. He saw who stood before him.
Startled Mouse.
With a shudder of pity and revulsion he dropped the writhing, slippery wrist-as frail and scrawny as Abe’s. The old man, too, shook himself, as if with disgust at the saltu ’s touch, and screamed what might have been a Yahi curse or only a wordless shriek of loathing. He ran a few feet along the top of the boulder, spiderlike and dragging his mutilated foot after him, to where a jumble of loose stone fragments lay in a rough depression, and tried to pick one up. It was too heavy, and the old man moaned his frustration. He grasped a smaller one in both hands and jerkily raised it over his head, grimacing with the effort.
Again there was a shout in Yahi from the other side of the boulder. "Ciniyaa!" Big Cheese stood below, his smooth face raised in the gray rain to the old man. Startled Mouse looked over his shoulder at the cry, and Gideon saw his sound foot slip a few inches on the wet rock. Off-balance from the weight of the stone, he began to tip backward over the edge of the boulder.
"The rock!" Gideon shouted. "Throw it down!"
Gideon sprang toward him, and Julie started from the sleeping bag, hands outstretched. Below, Big Cheese moved a step, his arms raised to catch the old Yahi. Gideon knew none of them would reach him in time, and knew that they knew it, too.
Startled Mouse knew it as well. The rock was held aloft on rigidly extended arms. The collapsed old face was defiant, the flaccid, nervous mouth for once clamped shut. Like a bizarre statue toppling from its base-a tilting, pathetic Moses hurling down the tablets-the old man inclined slowly backward and hung impossibly over empty air. Gideon had very nearly reached him after all when the rock finally fell away, and Startled Mouse dropped headfirst after it.
Mercifully, the clatter of the stone drowned out the sound of fragile, thinly cushioned bone striking the rocky ground ten feet below. Gideon clambered quickly down the side of the boulder, but Big Cheese was there before him, on his knees.
The old man was dead. He had landed on the back of his head, and the brittle skull had ruptured, so that brains and blood were already mixing with the rain. His face was undamaged, but the mouth hung loose again, and the eyes were eerily askew, one nearly shut, the other open and unfocused.
Gideon heard Julie come up behind him. "Oh!" she said softly. Instinctively, Gideon knelt and gently closed the old eyes with two fingers. He looked up to see Big Cheese, his face streaming with rain, staring strangely at him. There was a long, long moment of silence. The Indian sat back on his heels. The sensual nostrils flared as he drew in a lengthy breath.
"You know," he said in flawless English, "he had a legitimate grievance."
Chapter 19
"Yeah," Big Cheese said, "I’m Dennis Blackpath." The onetime graduate student leaned forward to blow on the dry shreds of moss and bark that had come from the deerskin pouch around his neck, and the crawling spark flickered, gasped, and puffed into flame. In the young Indian’s hands the fire drill had been ridiculously easy to use. Now he added bits of wood, gradually increasing their size. When the fire was going well, the three of them, sitting on the ground, leaned close to it. Julie and Gideon shivered in their wet clothes. Blackpath, with the moisture beaded on his greased skin, didn’t seem cold.
"You’ve been living with them all this time?" Julie asked, not bothering to conceal her astonishment. "Since 1975?"
"That’s right," Blackpath said, adding more wood. "Nobody believed there were Indians, but I found them. And once I found them, I stayed. I’d had enough of the white man’s rotten world. I went to live as my forefathers had lived, in harmony with nature. In tranquillity."
It was the sort of cant Gideon ordinarily found banal and tedious. But Blackpath was another matter. He had committed seven years of his life to it; he’d actually managed to bring it off. Except for the tranquillity.
"I suppose," Blackpath said moodily, flexing a long, thin stick like a fencer testing an epee, "you want some explanations."
"That would be nice," Gideon agreed.
"About the killings." His head down, Blackpath spoke to the stick, as surly in English as in Yahi.
"That seems like a good place to begin," Gideon said mildly, but his hackles were rising. If anyone had reason to be aggrieved, it was certainly he, with two attempts on his life and a painful dent in his head, and not this pampered student- cum -wild Indian. Something in his tone must have given away his feelings, because Blackpath suddenly looked up at him and snapped the stick in two.
Julie cut in. "You said that Startled…What was his name? I don’t want to keep calling him that."
"Their names are private," Blackpath said curtly. "Startled Mouse is good enough." For the likes of you.
Julie did not respond in kind. "You said he had a legitimate grievance," she said quietly.
Blackpath tossed the pieces of the stick into the fire. "You saw his foot?"
"Yes," Julie said.
"It was shot away, a long time ago-"
"In 1913, when he was a little boy," Gideon said slowly, remembering. "And his mother was killed when they rifled a cabin on Canoe Creek. They stole two hard-boiled eggs."
"You talked to Pringle," Blackpath said.
"That’s an awful thing," Julie said, "but-"
"But what?" He was answering Julie, but his stare challenged Gideon. "It’s no excuse for killing people seventy years later?"
Gideon looked at him without speaking. Something sagged inside Blackpath. His gaze dropped to the fire. "Ah, hell," he said, "it’s funny speaking English after all this time." He paused. "You’re right, you’re right. It’s not an excuse." He seemed to be searching for the precise words he wanted, then gave up with a small shrug. The dawn had come; Gideon could see him more clearly and was struck anew by the strange beauty of the mask-like face.
"I really loved the old man. Really loved him." The words could hardly be heard. "He was the first one of them to accept me. He called me Grandson. I called him Grandfather." He cleared his throat. "But, God, how he hated the saltu. I think he’s always been a little crazy." He was, Gideon thought, genuinely close to tears.
"I think he killed some people when he was young," Blackpath went on, "but when I found them he wasn’t any kind of menace. Then they built that damn road right through here-"
"The Matheny trail," Julie said.
"Is that what it’s called?" he asked without interest. "Well, he went wild. Killed the first hiker he saw."
"But he’s so frail," Julie said, "so small-"
"This was six years ago, remember. He was stronger. Besides, he used an atlatl. A spear thrower." Blackpath was picking up moist earth, crumbling it in his palm, and letting it run from his cupped hand. "I talked with him again and again, tried to explain the killing couldn’t do any good. I thought I had him convinced. And then he clubbed someone else."
"Hartman," Gideon said.
"Whoever. I found the poor guy on the trail with his head bashed in. A mess…" H e stopped. Gideon knew he was thinking of Startled Mouse, who lay where he had fallen, covered with Gideon’s poncho, on the far side of the boulder. Blackpath closed his eyes. "I took him back to the village. Back to here. Keen Eagle-that’s a good name for him-remembered how to trephine, and I thought for a while the guy might live. But he died."