To the surprise of Captain de la Vega, who had thought he was a dead man, a dark pool was rapidly forming around the chief, and the proud wolf’s head was turning red. Padre Mendoza crowned his inappropriate jubilation with a stout kick to the inert body of the fallen chief. All he had to do was smell the gunpowder and he had reverted to the bloodthirsty soldier he had been in his youth. Almost instantly, the word spread among the Indians that their chief was down; they began to fall back, at first hesitantly and then at top speed, vanishing into the distance. The victors, dripping with sweat and half suffocated, waited until the dust of the attacker’s retreat had settled before they went outside to draw a breath of fresh air. A salvo of shots fired into the air was added to the crazed ringing of the church bell; that and the boisterous hurrahs of men and women with a new lease on life drowned out the moans of the wounded and the hysterical weeping of the women and children still locked behind the altar, swooning in the smoke.
Padre Mendoza rolled up the sleeves of his blood-soaked cassock and set about restoring his mission to normal, unaware that he had lost an ear and that the blood was not his enemies’ but his own. He totted up the mission’s minimal losses and sent two prayers up to heaven, giving thanks for their triumph but also asking forgiveness for having lost all trace of Christian compassion in the heat of the battle. Two of his soldiers had suffered minor wounds, and an arrow had pierced the arm of one of the missionaries. They had one death to mourn, that of a fifteen-year-old Indian girl who had helped load the weapons. She had fallen faceup, her clubbed skull cracked open, her large, dark eyes wide with surprise. While Padre Mendoza was organizing his band to put out the fires, bind up the wounded, and bury the dead, Captain Alejandro de la Vega, with another sword in hand, was searching the nave of the church, looking for the body of the Indian chief, with the idea of impaling his head on a pike and planting it at the entrance of the mission to discourage anyone who might cherish the idea of following his example. He found Chief Gray Wolf where he had fallen, barely a pathetic bundle in the puddle of his own blood. With one sweep of his hand the captain jerked off the wolf’s head and with the toe of his boot turned over the body, which seemed much smaller than it had while flourishing a spear. Still blind with rage and panting from the exertion of the battle, de la Vega grabbed the chief by his black hair and lifted his sword to decapitate him with a single stroke, but just before he swung, the Indian opened his eyes and looked at the captain with an unexpected expression of curiosity.
“Blessed Virgin Mary, he’s alive!” exclaimed de la Vega, stepping back.
Even more than the fact that his enemy was still breathing, he was surprised by the beauty of his elongated, caramel-colored, thick-lashed eyes, the limpid eyes of a deer set in a face covered with blood and war paint. De la Vega dropped his sword, knelt, and put his hand beneath the chief’s neck, carefully pulling him up to a sitting position. The deer eyes closed and a long moan escaped the parted lips. The captain looked around and found that they were alone in this part of the church, very near the altar. On an impulse, he lifted the wounded Indian, meaning to throw him over his shoulder, but the chief was much lighter than de la Vega had expected. He carried him in his arms as he would a child, threading his way among sacks of sand and rock, weapons, and the bodies of the dead, which still had not been removed by the missionaries, and stepped outside the church into the light of that autumn day, which he would remember for the rest of his life.
“He’s alive, Padre,” he announced, laying the wounded chief on the ground.
“Too bad, Captain, because we will still have to execute him,” replied Padre Mendoza, who by now had a shirt rolled around his head like a turban to stanch the blood flowing from his lopped-off ear.
Alejandro de la Vega could never explain why instead of seizing the moment to decapitate his enemy, he hurried off to look for water and rags to sponge his injuries. Helped by a young female neophyte, he parted the heavy black hair and rinsed the long wound, which began to bleed again at contact with the water. He palpated the skull, verifying that there was an angry wound but that the bone was intact.
He had seen worse in war. He took up a curved needle used for making mattresses and a length of horsehair that Padre Mendoza had put to soak in brandy, and stitched up the scalp. Then he washed off the chief’s face, noting the light skin and delicate features. With his dagger he slit the bloody wolf-skin tunic to see whether there were other wounds, and as he did so he grunted with shock.
“He’s a woman!” he shouted, horrified.
Padre Mendoza and the others came running up, only to stand and stare, mute with amazement, at the virginal breasts of the warrior.
“It’s going to be much more difficult to kill him now,” Padre Mendoza sighed finally.
Her name was Toypurnia, and she was barely twenty years old. She had been able to convince the warriors of several tribes to follow her because she was preceded by a legend. Her mother was White Owl, a shaman and healer from the Gabrieleno tribe, and her father was a sailor, a deserter from a Spanish ship. He had lived for years in hiding among the Indians, until he was carried off by a bout with pneumonia; his daughter was an adolescent at the time. Toypurnia learned the basics of the Spanish language from her father, and from her mother, the use of medicinal plants and the traditions of her people. Her extraordinary destiny was manifest only a few months after birth, on an afternoon when her mother left her sleeping beneath a tree while she bathed in the river. A wolf had approached the bundle wrapped in skins, picked it up in its jaws, and dragged it off into the woods. A desperate White Owl followed the animal’s tracks for several days, but found no trace of the baby girl. During that summer the mother’s hair turned white, and the tribe continued to search, until the last hope of finding the child had evaporated. At that point a ceremony was performed to guide her to the vast plains of the Great Spirit. White Owl refused to participate in the rites and never stopped scanning the horizon; she felt in her bones that her daughter was still alive. One early morning at the beginning of winter a filthy little creature emerged from the mist; she was naked and covered with dirt, and she was crawling with her nose to the ground. It was the lost child, growling like a dog and smelling like a wild animal. They named her Toypurnia, which in the language of her tribe means Daughter-of-Wolf, and they raised her as if she were a boy, with a spear and a bow and arrow, because she had come out of the forest with a fearless heart.
Alejandro de la Vega learned these things in the days following the battle, straight from the mouths of the Indian prisoners who were locked in the lodge, moaning over their wounds and humiliation. Padre Mendoza had decided to free them as they mended, since he could not hold them captive indefinitely, and without their chief they seemed to have returned to their former docile and indifferent state.
He did not want to whip them, as he was certain they deserved, because punishing them would merely provoke more resentment, and neither did he mean to convert them to his faith, because it seemed to him that none of them had the makings of a Christian; they would be rotten apples spoiling the purity of his flock. It did not escape the padre’s attention that young Toypurnia exercised a strong fascination over Captain de la Vega, who looked for any excuse to keep going down to the underground wine cellar where they held the captive. The missionary had two good reasons for choosing the cellar for her prison: first, he could keep it locked, and second, the darkness would give Toypurnia opportunity to meditate on her actions. Since the Indians assured him that their chief could turn into a wolf and escape from any confinement, he took the additional precaution of tying her with leather thongs to the rough planks that served as her cot. The young woman hovered for several days between unconsciousness and nightmares, bathed in feverish sweat, and fed spoonfuls of milk, wine, and honey by Captain de la Vega’s own hand. From time to time she waked in total darkness and feared that she had been blinded, but other times she opened her eyes in the trembling light of a candle and saw the face of a stranger calling her name.