Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (11 page)

The snows had melted in the high country, and the streams were full. The air was cool and carried the scent of green, growing plants.

Before the white men came, Malila’s people had lived on Rock Creek. It had been a rich land, abundant with deer in the hills and fish in the streams. A few white men came, then more, and still more. Then many, many white men, as numerous as ants on an anthill. The white men were as busy as ants, busy destroying the world. Tearing down the hills and throwing dirt into the streams to poison the fish. Cutting down trees and building dirty, crowded villages to which more white men came. Poisoning themselves with their own powerful firewater and letting the visions tempt them to fight and kill their fellow white men—and any others who strayed into their path.

Malila’s people grew sick with diseases—fevers and poxes that killed without mercy. Her mother died of a fever, though her grandfather treated her with herbal medicines and chanted over her sweating body. Against Hatawa’s wishes, Malila’s father went to work in the white men’s mines, saying that he would return with food and clothing and an understanding of the ways of these strange people. But his friends returned without him and told Hatawa that the riverbank had collapsed in an avalanche of rocks and dirt, burying Malila’s father.

When Malila was twelve years old, her village had moved away from the place where their ancestors had lived, building a new village higher in the hills, where the winters were colder but the streams still ran clear. That same year, Malila had been visited by powerful dreams that convinced her grandfather that she had the potential to become a shaman.

High in the mountains, Malila had gone on a vision quest. For three days, she had fasted and prayed. Alone beside a creek, she had drunk a tea that Hatawa had brewed, a sacred drink that brought visions. As she sat in the sunshine, she listened to the creek whisper and babble as it flowed among granite boulders.

One boulder drew her eye. Mottled gray granite, worn smooth by flowing water and blowing wind, it resembled a wolf that had curled up to sleep. Sunlight reflecting from the flowing water played on the boulder’s surface, making the stone look like fur, rippling in the breeze. Malila squinted at the stone, surprised by how much it looked like a sleeping wolf. A shadow formed an ear; two dark streaks marked the animal’s eyes.

As she watched, the stone that was a sleeping wolf opened her eyes, pricked up her ears, and lifted her head to look at Malila. The wolf’s eyes shone in the sun like the gold that the white men sought. Malila closed her eyes, startled at the vision.

She felt hot breath on her face and opened her eyes. A great gray wolf stood before her. The animal’s nose was just inches from Malila’s face. Golden eyes stared into hers. In the pupil of each eye, she could see her own reflection: dark hair, dark eyes wide with excitement.

The wolf spoke to her. “I am glad you have come, my daughter. You will join my pack.”

Malila saw that the other stones were moving, too. A black boulder shook itself and became a black wolf with green-gold eyes. A mica-streaked stone was a silver-gray wolf with pale blue eyes. The landscape shifted around her as the wolves came to sniff her face.

“You will come with us,” the first wolf said.

Once, as a child, her cousin had jumped from a high cliff into a deep pool in the river. Not to be outdone, Malila had followed him, launching herself into space. In that moment of falling, there was joy and terror, an exhilarating rush ending in a splash of ice-cold water.

As she stared into the eyes of the wolf, Malila felt that rush again. She was falling, dizzy, tumbling through space with a rush of joy and terror. Then the rush changed to the headlong rush of running—she was running on all fours. All around her were wolves, great beasts with sharp teeth, grinning and running in pursuit of a deer. The terrified deer stumbled, and the lead wolf, the great wolf who had come to Malila first, leapt up to grab the animal’s nose and pull her head down. The pack was on the deer then, ripping at her haunches and tearing at her throat. Malila was attacking with the others, her teeth bared, her heart burning with a fierce joy.

She came back to her body in the woods with the taste of blood in her mouth. The great wolf still stood beside her. The others surrounded them.

“You are one of us,” the great wolf told her. “You are a wolf. Listen.” Malila listened, and the great wolf sang a song that ebbed and flowed like the voice of the river, a sweet meandering tune like the lullaby a mother sings to comfort her child.

“Remember this,” the wolf said. Then the animal curled up beside the creek, closing her eyes. She became a gray stone beside the water, nothing more.

Malila laid her hand on the stone, and it was warm—perhaps from the sun, perhaps from the wolf within. There by the flowing water she sang the song the wolf had taught her.

Strong magic, her grandfather had said when she told him of her vision. She had to be strong to contain such a powerful spirit. He worked with her over the years—teaching her to channel her power and use it for healing, teaching her the ways of the shaman.

Now, four years after the wolf had visited her in a vision, she was a self-assured woman of sixteen. She helped her grandfather in ceremonies. When they needed medicinal plants that grew in the lower altitudes, she went with him down the mountain.

The sun was low in the sky when Malila waded out of the water and walked up the creek to where her grandfather was working. “Grandfather! If you stand in the water too long, you’ll need this nettle root as much as the chief. I will make a fire and cook dinner.” That night, they sat by the fire, eating acorn mush. Malila was tired. It had been a long day’s journey from the village to the swampy ground where the horsetails grew, followed by hours of digging to unearth the nettle roots.

Her grandfather must have been tired, but he didn’t show it. He sat by the fire, placidly eating the acorn mush she had prepared. She had seen him in rituals, dancing and calling on the spirits, and she knew his power. But that power was hidden now. The firelight revealed only a tough old man, as enduring as the manzanita bushes that clung to the mountainside. The flames danced in his dark eyes; his skin shone in the firelight like burnished leather.

Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled. Another joined in, and then a chorus. From another direction came an answering howl. Malila glanced at her grandfather, then added her voice to the chorus, letting the wolves know, in their own language, that she was passing through their territory, that she meant no harm.

“They call to me,” she told her grandfather. “Sometimes, I dream about running with them and never coming back.”

He nodded. “You have the wolf in you. But you belong to the people, too.”

She nodded, smiling because she knew what he would say

next. “I must find the balance between the wolf and the woman,” she said.

He returned her smile, nodding. “You know it all now. You don’t need my advice anymore.”

The wolves howled again and Malila responded.

When Malila howled, Sarah was not with the rest of the pack. She and Beka had been wandering along the edge of the creek—Sarah was foraging for greens while Beka hunted for mice and rabbits and other small game. Beka was four years old, an adult wolf. When Sarah strayed from the pack, Beka came along, more often than not.

That day, their trail had crossed that of three white men, traveling up the mountain. Sarah had followed them for a time, out of curiosity. Beka had tagged along.

Sarah didn’t like the smell of the men: they reeked of tobacco and gunpowder. When the men had made camp on the creek, she had lost interest. When Rolon howled, summoning the pack, she and Beka were heading back to rejoin them for the evening hunt. She and Beka had responded to the pack’s howl—and then Malila had responded as well.

Beka had headed straight back to where the pack waited. She had spent the day exploring with Sarah and was eager for the hunt. But Sarah had delayed, following the sound of Malila’s voice until she could see the light of the campfire. There, she hesitated, testing the breeze. She knew by the scent that a man and a woman sat by the fire. No tobacco, coffee, or whiskey—scents that predominated at the camp of the miners. Just the warm aroma of acorn mush.

She crept closer, curious about the pair of Indians. She could hear their voices, soft and guttural, blending with the croaking of frogs in the swamp. The moon had not yet risen and darkness hid her as she moved silently through the trees. Crouching behind a low shrub, she listened to the Indians’ voices, though she could make no sense of the sounds they made. From her hiding place, she could see the man’s back and the woman’s face. She watched as the woman lifted her head to howl again.

Miners sometimes howled to the wolves, but their howls would not have fooled the most simple-minded wolf. They sounded like wolves to no one but themselves.

But this woman truly howled like a wolf. Her voice was rich and low, carrying a wealth of meaning. I am here, she was saying. I am resting, not hunting. I will not interfere with you, but I am here.

While Sarah watched, the woman stood up, said something to the man, then walked away from the fire, into the darkness. She was walking toward Sarah, her head up, her eyes wide, staring into the darkness.

Sarah stayed where she was, confident that the woman could not see her, wondering what the woman would do. She posed no threat; she had no weapon that Sarah could see.

The woman stopped just a few yards away from Sarah. For a moment, she stood motionless. Then she began to sing.

Sarah had heard miners singing around their campfires. She had heard Indians chanting and singing as they gathered acorns in the fall. But she had never heard a song like this. It rose and fell like a mother’s lullaby, like the whimpers with which a mother wolf comforts her pups in the den. A human voice, singing like a mother wolf.

Sarah lay in the shadows, listening to Malila sing.

The Gold Rush brought all kinds to California. There were good men who were willing to work hard and hoped to get rich from their labors. And there were bad men—gamblers, swindlers, cutthroats, and thieves—who hoped to get rich without working quite so hard.

The men that Sarah had observed earlier were of the second variety. Joseph, Andrew, and Frank, three brothers from Missouri, had traveled overland to California. Unlike most emigrants, they had profited by their journey, stealing horses from one wagon train and mules from another.

The brothers thought California was a fine place. There were plenty of men with money in the gold country, just waiting to have that money taken away. That night, the brothers were particularly cheerful. Along a lonely trail, they had found a man prospecting alone. Without a pang of conscience, they had whacked him on the head, taken his gold, his grub, and his pack mule, then tumbled his body into a gully, leaving him for the coyotes to dispose of. Among his provisions, they had found two bottles of whiskey, and that had made them quite jolly. That night, they drank themselves to sleep.

In the morning, they did not feel nearly so cheerful. “Where is that mule?” Joseph snarled. He was the oldest brother and, as such, he had claimed more than his share of the whiskey. That had been very well the night before, but now his head was aching. His temper was not at its best (and truth be told, his temper was never very good). “I told you to tie it up last night, Frank.”

“I reckon it pulled up its stake and wandered off.” Frank, the youngest brother, could not remember whether he had ever tied up the mule, but he suspected that he hadn’t. If he had gone off to tie the mule, he would have missed his turn at the whiskey bottle.

“Well, I reckon you’d better go find it,” drawled Andrew, the middle brother. He was the smallest and the smartest of the three. Joseph was a large-framed man, tall and broad-shouldered, with hands large and strong enough to strangle a bear. Frank was shorter and softer, a big-bellied youngster with a hint of a whine in his voice. Andrew was shorter than either of them, a slender man who made up for his lack of size with cleverness, a sharp customer who cheated at cards.

“You’d best help him,” Joseph said. “That boy can’t find his own arse with both hands.”

Andrew grinned. Frank wasn’t the sharpest lad, particularly after a night of drinking. Besides, Andrew thought it would be wise to avoid Joseph’s company until he downed a few cups of the poisonous brew he called coffee. “Sure enough,” Andrew agreed.

While Frank and Andrew were saddling their horses, the mule announced its whereabouts. From up the creek came a great braying noise, the sort of ruckus that only a mule in trouble can make. As Frank and Andrew rode toward the noise, the ground grew swampy; their horses splashed through muddy water, and the air stank of rotting vegetation.

Andrew caught a glimpse of the mule up ahead. An old Indian man was holding the animal’s bridle, urging the animal forward. The old man was muddy; Andrew reckoned he’d been in the mud with the mule. An Indian girl was swatting the mule’s rump with a switch. Andrew could hear the Indians talking to the mule, jabbering in that incomprehensible language of theirs. As An drew watched, the mule lunged forward, pulling itself from the mud. The old man shouted something; it sounded triumphant to Andrew.

Then a rifle cracked and the old man fell, collapsing into the mud. Blood spread across the rabbit-skin cloak that covered his chest.

Andrew glanced at Frank, who was lowering his rifle. “That Injun was stealing our mule,” Frank said.

Andrew nodded. He thought it was more likely that the Indians were just freeing the mule from the mud, rather than actively stealing it, but Frank wasn’t in a good mood and it made no sense to argue. At least he’d waited until the Indians got the mule out of the mud. Andrew didn’t like to get dirty.

The Indian girl was cradling the old man’s head, jabbering away. Her eyes were wide; her face was wet with tears.

Andrew watched as Frank rode up beside her. For an Injun, she was pretty, he thought. She wore a rabbit-skin cloak that hid her breasts. That was too bad. The Injun gals down in the valley didn’t bother to cover their breasts at all, and that was nice. But her skirt was barely down to her knees, showing off muscular legs. Nice. It didn’t leave too much to the imagination, and Andrew had a good imagination.