She looked at me with smoky eyes.
“You findum deer?” I asked.
“No findum,” she said, then, after a moment: “and you don’t need to talk that synthetic pidgin English to me. It happens that I was educated at Berkeley, and I majored in English.”
I stood on one foot then the other, trying to think of the proper comeback for that one. There wasn’t any.
Then she smiled. “What were you looking for?”
“Just walking.”
“Why are you camped here?”
“For my health.”
She let her eyes drift away for a flickering instant, then turned them back on me, as glittering as obsidian, as expressionless as ebony.
“If you would like to camp in the desert I know where there is gold.”
I did some rapid thinking. I know Indian psychology.
“I am not interested in gold. I want health, and I must live in the mountains.”
“A white man — not interested in gold!”
I shook my head doggedly.
“It is an evil. Money is only a way of storing food. But people go mad over it, and they ruin their health seeking it. I, too, had my money madness, and then I lost my health. Now I only want to live. One needs very little gold to live.”
She smiled at me, and, as I was admiring the white luster of her perfect teeth, flashing against the tawny silk of her skin, she turned and slipped into the shadows.
Two days later I saw her again. After that she made it a point to keep in contact with me. I figured the tribe had delegated her to see what I was doing and keep track of me.
I was willing.
Gradually she began to talk more. And I think I convinced her that I wasn’t looking for gold. Her name was Auno, and she was the only pretty girl in the tribe. It was just a handful of people anyway, not more than a dozen families.
After a while I got acquainted with them. Among them were Hanebagat, the chief, and Bigluk, a young fellow who was sweet on Auno. And then there was Wailo, the medicine man.
I don’t know how old Wailo was. Nobody did. He had some blue tattooing in his face, but the features had wrinkled so much that it showed only as a blotch. No design to it any more.
Age had withered him until he was a dehydrated shell of a man with wrinkled skin and shriveled arms and legs. But he was as straight as a young pine, and he had eyes that were like thunderclouds when the lightning first starts to play around the dark places.
He said nothing, although his eyes were on me all the time.
I’d been there three months before I learned about the moon ceremony.
It was an ancient rite, handed down from the time when the tribe was powerful.
It took me quite a while to get the straight of it. You see, they weren’t Piutes, and they weren’t Navahos, and they weren’t Apaches. I’d have guessed they were an offshoot of one of the Pueblo tribes that had drifted through the Navaho country, picked up some Piute and Apache customs, and then settled somewhere around the Death Valley.
Age, disease, changed conditions and white encroachments had done the rest. They were the last remnant of a dying people, and they knew it — all except Auno, the girl.
She used to try and pep them up, tell them of the future, predict that they would come back to their own. But the others watched her with somber eyes and said nothing.
It’s hard to watch anybody die. Death seems to send a shadow that hovers about the dying one for quite a while before the soul slips its moorings. It’s harder still, to watch a dying race. That shadow of death seems to be with the very infants. The children play, not like normal children, but like young corpses that are walking hand in hand with death.
But it was the moon ceremony I was thinking of.
The new moon was the time for the very young people to sit out, all by themselves, on the sacred mountain. When the moon went down it was time to go back to camp and bed.
Then, when the moon got into the first quarter, the lovers went forth into the moonlight, and returned when the moon had gone down.
The full moon was the warriors’ moon. It was for the men in the prime of life.
After that the older people came in. They went forth to worship on the wane of the moon. The last quarter was reserved for the sages.
Those Indians ushered in each phase of the moon with a lot of powwow and old Wailo would beat a tom-tom and wail through some song. It differed for each phase of the moon.
Wailo’s personal moon was the very last of the fourth quarter, the one that came up just before the sun. There wasn’t anybody else as old as he was, so he went forth alone to worship.
By that time I was down living with the tribe, almost adopted — thanks to Auno. And I remember the first time I heard Wailo at his ceremony of moon worship.
It was a little before dawn, and it was cold; cold with the dry, chilly cold of the desert places, cold with the soul-shuddering mystery just before dawn.
The old moon was riding the heavens, looking like a bit of pitted gold, and it was cold, too. I awoke with a start to hear something going boom-boom-boom.
I lay in my blankets and shivered, first with the cold, then with the awful note of that tom-tom and the song that was going with it.
It was a wailing chant, coming in from the distance, borne on the thin, cold air without an echo. It was the voice of an old man trying to sing — the song of the old moon, the song of coming death, the song of a dying race.
I tried to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t.
With the red streaks of dawn in the sky Wailo came stealing back to camp. He was all decked out in paint and he moved as silently as a gray ghost.
Then the tribe got up. Little fires began to burn. There was the sound of moccasined feet on the hard ground. And it was time for me to get up.
All this time, I hadn’t seen anything of the gold, or anything that looked like gold. But I did know that the tribe wasn’t dependent upon trading, in the ordinary sense of the word.
The women wove blankets. There were some sheep, and there was a little cornfield. But the work was all done after the manner of those who are sure of their living, and work only to get what they need.
Besides, there were the coin buttons. That’s the fashion of Indians in that country. They take dimes, quarters, sometimes even half dollars, solder a bar on the back and use the coins for buttons and for ornaments. When times get hard they clip the bar off and use their “buttons” for money.
The clothes of this tribe had silver buttons, and they never came off. Whenever any one needed anything at McLaren’s trading post, they had a way of getting it. Old Wailo seemed to be the treasurer of the tribe.
So I figured they had a placer deposit somewhere around, and that Wailo had persuaded ’em that it was magic, and only the medicine man could take out the gold.
After that I commenced to watch Wailo.
I figured he must have a stock of the gold in the village somewhere. Maybe he knew I was watching him, but I don’t think so. Anyhow, he didn’t lead me to anything. I watched him, and that’s all the good it did me.
But he never seemed to leave the village. He was always around, saying very little, his puckery lips sucked into his mouth, his thundercloud eyes darting around the camp, seeing everything.
During the dark of the moon the tribe dedicated the night to those who had already died. They sat up around big fires, talking in low tones of the dead, and there was a circle where the ghosts were supposed to sit and warm their hands. There were places for the big chiefs who had passed on.
The tribe slept most of the day, after those night communions with the dead.