Chapter 16: What Reaches Him

The signs came irregularly, which was how he knew they were real.

A pattern would have been a comfort and therefore a projection — his own need imposing itself on the available evidence. What he got instead was the random and the unexpected, which was harder to live with and more trustworthy for that reason. You could not predict them. You could not watch for them because the watching produced nothing and the not watching was when they came. They arrived the way significant things arrived — on their own schedule, indifferent to his readiness.

The woven piece at the north fence had been the first. In the following months there were others.

A bundle of dried plants left on the top rail of the east fence, the same plants Tsela had pressed into the soil of the kitchen garden on her first week at the ranch, the ones whose seeds she had carried in the small hide pouch. He did not know their Yahi name. He knew them by sight. He took them inside and hung them from the rafter in the kitchen the way Tsela had hung them and they dried there through the winter and filled the kitchen with the faint smell of something he could not name that he associated entirely with her.

A child’s drawing on a piece of bark, left at the gate post in the spring of the second year. He was not certain of the hand — could not be certain — but the marks had a quality of deliberate communication rather than play, a picture of something that might have been a ranch or might have been a house with a fence around it, and beside it something that was clearly a person, tall, with lines radiating from the head that he decided to take as hair though they might have been something else. He took it inside and put it with the moccasin and the woven piece in the box he had started keeping on the kitchen shelf, the objects accumulating into something he did not have a word for. An archive. A correspondence conducted without language.

A sound in the tree line on an October evening in the third year, when he was working the fence at the north pasture at dusk. A sound that was not wind and not animal, that had the specific quality of a human voice carefully modulated to not carry, the sound of someone singing very quietly to themselves or to a child, stopping when he stopped moving, resuming when he moved again.

He did not call out. He did not approach the tree line. He worked the fence in the gathering dark and listened to the sound and let it be what it was — presence, not contact, the specific communication of people who needed to remain invisible but also needed, on this particular evening, to be known to be there.

When it stopped he stood at the fence in the full dark for a moment.

“I hear you,” he said quietly. In Yana.

The tree line said nothing. But the silence after was different from the silence before.

He went back to the house.

He thought about Ishi constantly.

The boy would be walking by the second year, running by the third. Would be learning the things children learn in the years between one and five, which was everything — language and movement and the specific negotiation between self and world that occupied the whole of early childhood. He would be learning it in the hills, which meant he would be learning it the Yahi way, the patient immersive way of a people for whom the land was not background but teacher.