Mary Katherine
Copyright© 2025 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: Life Among Them
The days blurred together like watercolors bleeding into wet paper—sunlight and shadow, the steady rhythm of work, and the gradual understanding that survival alone was no longer enough. Mary Katherine had been in the hidden canyon for three weeks now, and each morning brought the same sharp awakening: the scent of burning wood, the tang of drying hides, and the low murmur of voices weaving between tipis in a language that remained largely foreign to her tongue.
At first, every sound had made her flinch. The sudden laughter of children racing between lodges, the sharp calls of women directing their daily tasks, the deep voices of men discussing matters she couldn’t understand—all of it had seemed like accusations, threats whispered in words she couldn’t decipher. But gradually, as her hands found their rhythm in the endless cycle of work that sustained the village, Mary Katherine began to recognize the ordinary cadences of life continuing.
The Penateka band that had claimed her numbered nearly two hundred souls, their tipis and brush lodges scattered throughout the canyon in patterns that spoke of both family groupings and practical defense. She had learned to navigate the narrow paths between dwellings, to recognize the subtle hierarchies that governed who spoke first in gatherings, who received the choicest portions of meat, whose opinions carried weight in the endless discussions that seemed to occupy the men’s evenings.
Kee-tahku-wah—No Speaks—had become her lifeline in this strange new world. The old woman moved through the village with the confident authority of one whose place was secure, her gnarled hands never idle, her sharp eyes missing nothing. She had been born to another band, she told Mary Katherine in her careful English, captured herself as a young woman during a raid on a rival tribe forty years before. Her own integration had been earned through skill with healing herbs and an uncanny ability to predict weather patterns that had saved the band from more than one deadly storm.
“You watch too much,” No Speaks observed one morning as they worked together scraping a buffalo hide stretched between wooden stakes. “Watch the warrior, watch the other women, watch the children. But you do not see.”
Mary Katherine paused in her work, the bone scraper heavy in her hands. Her palms were blistered despite the calluses four years of ranch work had built, and her shoulders ached from the unfamiliar motions required to properly clean the hide. “I don’t understand.”
“Seeing is different from watching,” the old woman said, continuing her steady scraping without looking up. “You watch Gwah-pah-ho when he sits by the fire. But do you see why the other men give him space? You watch the women when they gather water, but do you see which ones speak first, which ones wait? You watch the children play, but do you see which games prepare them for war, which ones teach them to find food?”
The questions hung in the morning air like smoke from the cooking fires. Mary Katherine had been watching—constantly, desperately, trying to understand the rules of this new world so she wouldn’t violate them and bring punishment down on herself. But No Speaks was right. She had been watching surfaces, not meanings.
Over the following days, she began to see differently. The way Lone Wolf—Gwah-pah-ho, she had learned was his true name—carried himself spoke of more than simple confidence. When he entered the circle around the evening fires, conversations didn’t stop, but they shifted. Younger men listened more carefully when he spoke, older warriors included him in discussions of hunting and raiding with the deference given to proven ability. His reputation, she realized, had been earned through actions she could only guess at.
The scar that traced a thin line along his left ribs told one story. The way his horse responded to the slightest pressure of his knees told another. The fact that Buffalo Hump himself—the great war chief whose name was spoken with mixture of pride and awe throughout the village—had entrusted him with leading one of the raiding parties to the outlying ranches near Victoria spoke of trust earned through competence in war.
But it was the women’s reactions that taught her the most about her own precarious position. Some, particularly the younger ones, watched her with curiosity tinged by suspicion. Others, mostly the older wives and mothers, regarded her with something approaching sympathy—they understood, perhaps better than the men, what it meant to be torn from one world and forced to adapt to another. A few looked at her with undisguised hostility, and Mary Katherine gradually came to understand that these were women who had lost sons, husbands, or brothers in the endless cycle of warfare that defined life on the plains.
She had killed no one herself, but her father had. John Patrick Murphy’s work with the Texas Rangers had made him part of the machinery of war that ground lives to dust on both sides of the cultural divide. The smoke rising from Victoria had been vengeance for the Council House Fight, where Texan treachery had slaughtered peace-seeking Comanche leaders under a flag of truce. Her presence in the village was both prize and reminder—evidence of Comanche strength, but also a symbol of the losses that had made such strength necessary.
The work became her salvation and her education both. Under No Speaks’ patient guidance, she learned to scrape hides properly, removing every trace of flesh and fat without damaging the skin underneath. Her hands, already strong from four years of managing her father’s household, adapted quickly to the motions. She learned to cut the scraped hide into strips for rope, or to prepare it for the long process of brain-tanning that would make it soft enough for clothing.
Water-carrying was familiar work, but here it required navigating the narrow path down to the canyon stream, balancing the heavy containers while climbing back up the rocky slope. The Comanche women used tightly woven baskets waterproofed with pine pitch, lighter than the wooden buckets she had known but requiring a different technique to carry without spilling.
Gathering firewood taught her to distinguish between woods that burned hot and clean versus those that smoked badly or popped dangerously when used in the close quarters of a tipi. She learned which roots could be ground into flour, which berries were ripe enough to pick, which plants would ease a fever or stop bleeding from a wound.
But it was in the small garden plots tucked into protected corners of the canyon that Mary Katherine found her greatest success. The Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—grew here much as they had in her mother’s garden back in Texas, though the varieties were different and the growing methods had been adapted to the canyon’s unique conditions. Her understanding of when to plant, how to judge soil moisture, and when to harvest translated almost directly, earning her the first grudging nods of approval from women who had been watching her with skeptical eyes.
“You have good hands for growing things,” observed Mah-chee-tah-wo—Bear Woman—as they worked together harvesting the late summer corn. She was Buffalo Hump’s youngest wife, perhaps only five years older than Mary Katherine herself, and her opinion carried weight among the other women. “My grandmother said the earth speaks to some people more clearly than others. Maybe this is why Gwah-pah-ho chose to keep you.”
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