California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (10 page)

Elizabeth could scarcely feel her relief
and gratitude as another wave of numbness caught her up and drained away her
emotions again. Watching herself from a point somewhere outside her own body,
she saw the tears flowing involuntarily down her cheeks. "I will...
somehow, some day I will repay you."

"Don't trouble your mind about that.
If you become that most valuable of all things, a friend, that will be
repayment enough." He dabbed a lace handkerchief at her eyes. "All
you need consider now—Esther—is what you want to do. Rest. Tomorrow we will put
our heads together and I will then make whatever arrangements are
necessary."

When Sutter first learned on January 17
that two male and five female Donner snowshoers had staggered down out of the
mountains near Johnson's ranch, north of the fort, he quickly arranged for the
woman who now called herself Esther Cable to be temporarily housed at Miwokan's
village.

"Until the cabin is built," he
said, fingering her wedding ring as he sat next to her bed.

"I want you to keep that, as payment
for having the Indians build the cabin."

He smiled. "I will hold the ring for
you, if you like, but I would rather make other arrangements about the
cabin—and the land."

"I have money."

"That won't be necessary now. The
land is two miles from Miwokan's village. If you need anything, the Indians
will be ready to help you. This quarter-mile-square piece of land straddles the
South Fork of the American River. It is wild country. You will essentially be
alone. Are you sure that is what you want?"

"Yes."

He sighed. "Then I suggest the
following financial arrangement: A total price of one hundred dollars for the
land and the cabin. That is fair. Four annual payments of twenty-five dollars,
commencing twelve months hence. If you decide to stay. If you do not, you
simply sign title to the property back to me. Agreed?"

"It is more than a bargain."

"I will have Custot, my secretary,
write it all down with his quill pen in triplicate. One copy for you, one for
me, and one to be filed with Consul Larkin in Monterey, so it is
official."

"My God, my husband
works
for
Larkin!"

"How would he, or anyone else, know
who 'E. Cable' is?"

"That will be the only name on the
deed?"

"That—and mine, of course."

"But suppose someone asks
who—?"

"I will simply tell them 'E. Cable'
is a settler. Come north from the Pueblo
de
Los Angeles after arriving there a year
ago by way of the Santa Fe Trail."

"I will need furniture."

"The Indians are already making
it."

"I want to pay for it."

"Ten dollars—for the furniture and
enough seeds, coffee, flour, sugar, salt, bacon, and dried beans to last a
year. Is that agreeable?"

"It is too little. I should pay you
more than that."

"All right. For another ten dollars
you may have the use of a milk cow, a horse, and a saddle."

"You are being more than fair.
Unreasonably so. I  will find a way to repay you."

Sutter clucked, waving it off, then took
her downstairs to show her the handsome armoire his cabinet-maker, Wetler, had
recently built.

"It is a housewarming gift—for you,
Esther."

Although
she had chosen the name herself, the sound of it was somehow uncomfortable. It
would  take time to get used to, as would everything else in this new life she
was beginning. Tears filled her eyes. "You have been like a—father to me.
I... I  will never forget this. Ever."

She was apprehensive about being alone even  
briefly in an Indian village, but Sutter explained that the cabin was a few
days from completion, reminded her of the need for secrecy, and told her a
number of things about Miwokan and his relatively small, familial subtribe that
reassured her. Still, Sutter accompanied her when Miwokan, his wife,
Solana,
and several other Miwoks left with
"Esther" for the village before dawn on January 19. Since he would be
traveling back from the village that night, Sutter took two armed Kanakas with
him.

"She needs rest and quiet,"
Sutter told Miwokan, after Elizabeth was settled in comfortably. Lying covered
with furs on the same bearskin that had terrified her the last time she was in
Miwokan's sunken, beamed, earth- and barkslab-covered hut, she listened groggily
as Sutter went on. "There is simply too much activity too much bustle and
racket at the fort. The cabin will be ready soon, so she will not be here
long."

"She may stay as long as it is
needed," Miwokan answered, glancing at her. "My people are happy for
her to be here. She... is not only a white woman to them. But more."

Sutter did not pursue the meaning of what
Miwokan had said. "You have an empty hut?"

"She will stay in mine—
Solana
and I will move to another until she is
well."

Sutter's eyebrows rose. "In the
chief's hut?"

"It is only right. She came over the
mountains when there was deep snow. By herself. It tells us that she is a great
woman, a daughter of the sun."

Sutter let Miwokan think whatever he
wanted to. As far as he was concerned, if their beliefs protected Esther Cable,
it didn't matter to him whether those beliefs were childish or not. Riding back
to the fort with his two Kanakas, he felt an enormous sense of relief. Fitfully
asleep now, with
Solana
watching
over her, Esther was out of the fort not a day too soon, he was sure. For
already the place was alive with a mixture of half-fact, half-rumor about the
seven Donner survivors and those they had left behind in the snow.

William Eddy was starving, emaciated, too
exhausted to speak, when Miwoks from another tribelet brought him to the
emigrants who lived in and around Johnson's ranch. William C. Foster—in the
same condition after the thirty-three-day trek through the snowbound wilderness
between Donner Lake and the Johnson place—was so crazed he could not speak
coherently.

Amazingly, all the women who had begun
the trip—except Elizabeth Todd—had survived. Mrs. McCutchen, Mrs. Foster, Mrs.
Pike, Mrs. Fosdick, and Mary Graves, all in their early twenties, were severely
debilitated, but they were not nearly so badly off as the men. They, at least,
could sit up, eat, and talk. This much Sutter knew for certain from the rider
who brought the news to the fort. The rest: indications that all seven had had
to cannibalize the dead to survive; that someone had threatened the lives of
Sutter's two Indians, Luis and Salvador; that the Indians had subsequently fled
without snowshoes; that Foster had come upon the two pale brown men lying
exhausted and near death in the snow and had then killed them and eaten parts
of the bodies; these things Sutter could not be certain of until he spoke to
Eddy and the women himself.

However exaggerated, he thought some of
it was probably true. And even some of it was enough to chill a man's blood.
Sutter shivered now, thinking about it as the hooting of an owl added a
primeval note to the moonlit shapes and stillness of the foothill pine forest.
He was glad the two Kanakas had accompanied him—for reasons beyond the
protection they afforded from living things. Just their company was soothing.
Not enough, but a balm nonetheless. Sutter was not a man to entertain even the
vaguest thought of supernatural interference in the lives of men under normal
circumstances. But this night, filled with speculation about primitive, perhaps
even subhuman acts in the mountains, his sensibilities chilled and shaken,
surrounded by a cold, pale light that seemed suffused with the eeriness of the
unknown, even Sutter found himself as disquieted as a young child awakened by a
strange sound in the dark.

He was glad Esther had heard none of the
news, the rumors. She was in no condition to deal with or discuss them. The
sexual stirrings, aroused in him by his first sight of her extraordinarily
formed naked body were gone now. He felt again a strong surge of paternal
protectiveness. He did not know how much of the horror she had seen, had
engaged in herself, and he hoped it was as little as possible. But her words
echoed in his mind:

"I am responsible, for many
things... You do not know all of it."

As
Sutter and the two Kanakas finally rode across the open fields toward the
hushed fort just before dawn, he resisted conjecturing about what Esther had
been forced to do up there in the snow.
Sooner or later, he thought wearily,
it is almost certain that I will find out.

Miwokan was standing in the doorway of
the conical hut, watching Esther, when she woke up. Alert now, she immediately
experienced the first of many surprises that would fill the next several days.

"Good morning," he said with
perfect pronunciation. "Was your sleep a good one?"

"Yes," she said, aware that she
felt more rested than at any time since Fort Bridger.

"The forest is a good place for
healing." Miwokan moved aside, and
Solana
entered with a bowl of steaming black
acorn and oat mush laced with wild honey and seeds. She was not wearing the fur
cape she had on the day before, and Esther saw that she was at least five
months pregnant. "When you have finished eating," Miwokan went on,
"you should walk. Each day walk a little more and strength will return.
Until you are strong enough, use one of my spears to lean on when it is
necessary, but do not lean on it until you believe you will fall."

He left then. As she ate the crude
cereal, she could see him through the entranceway with a gathering of young
Indian boys carrying intricately handwrought snares and traps. She realized now
that he had seemed familiar in the fort enclosure because he had hovered
closest to her when she lay thrashing and screaming deliriously in this same
hut after they had found her on the river. She had a vague recollection that he
had also lain next to her in the furs to keep her warm.

"He goes to teach the younger ones
how to trap the rabbit, deer, and
fox,"
Solana
said, startling her.

"You do not use bows and
arrows?"

"Yes. But it is at the same time
less work and more, more..." She could not find the words and tapped her
head. "More challenging,"
Solana
said slowly, examining the word.
"More hard putting of pictures together in the head this way," she
added, pointing at the small group leaving the village.

"Where did you learn to speak
English? Who taught you?"

Solana
smiled
proudly. "The mission fathers and Miwokan. A small Spanish, also."

Their unexpected facility with language
absorbed Esther. During the next several days as she moved about the village,
trailed at a distance by curious young children and peered at from huts by
adults, her attention was further diverted from her own condition as huge
chunks of misconception concerning all Indians fell away like portions of a
cliff collapsing into the sea.

Everywhere there were indications of
cleverness and industry that belied white men's evaluation of Indians in
general, and these western "diggers" in particular. They were called
diggers, a derisive term, because the women customarily dug for tubers, roots,
seeds, maggots, larvae, and snails to provide parts of the diet. Myopically,
the white men thought that was the only work they did and the only food they
ate regularly. Esther saw at once how stupid this supposition was. These people
were different from what she knew of the Indians east of the Sierras. They
hunted no particular source of food, and their weapons were less developed. But
that was only a practical reflection of a wide variety of food sources and a
basically unwarlike nature. They were inactive, indolent for long periods, but
not all year long as white m
en
believed.
They simply worked at various activities when the state of nature and their
environment indicated the most propitious time. Rather than enormous tribes,
there were dozens of subtribes and extended family units that lived in harmony
with the conditions of the small area where they had resided, as
Solana
put it, "forever." They took
from nature only as much as they needed, and what they took they had long since
developed simple but efficient ways to process, store, and use.

Esther saw rows of woven broadgrass
baskets filled with nuts, berries, seeds, acorns, acorn meal, and flour.
Solana
showed her the watertight baskets in
which the yellow acorn meal, ground down with stone mortars, was leached of its
toxic acids in water brought to a boil with heated stones. There were different
types of baskets for hulling, pounding, leaching, and storage.

After eating a piece of dried deer meat
and a piece of bread made from finely ground acorn flour, Esther was shown a
hut full of hides and furs, soon to be transported to Sutter's Fort and
bartered.
Solana
pointed
out another hut packed with enough cured meat to last through two winters. A
third was lined with a variety of subtly woven weirs and nets for trapping
fish. Walking toward yet another hut from which steam issued in an aromatic
cloud, she noted that everyone was amply clothed. Save for a slight
cautiousness with this new, unexplained, and disfigured woman who had strangely
come down out of the deep snow, they were all friendly, happy, apparently at
peace with themselves and the world. Now that she was used to seeing the
mugwort leaves some of them wore in pierced ears and noses, she liked these
people and what they represented.

Beyond a large assembly house made of
bark, duck feathers festooned the hut where the steam rose.