Embers of Hope
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
Three Women at the Gate
Coulter was splitting wood behind the barn when he heard the gate.
He set the maul down and straightened and listened. The gate had a particular sound — the iron latch lifting and the mild complaint of the left hinge that he had been meaning to oil since October and had not gotten to — and he had learned over the years to read something of what was coming from the sound of it. The way a man lifted a latch was different from the way a child lifted it. A neighbor with news came through differently than a man looking to sell something. He had developed this attentiveness without deciding to develop it the way you develop most useful instincts, through repetition and the gradual understanding that information arrived in advance of events if you knew how to receive it.
What he heard now was the gate opening carefully. Deliberately. With the particular quality of people who were not certain of their welcome and were conducting themselves accordingly.
He came around the side of the barn and stopped.
Three Indian women stood just inside his front gate. They were young — younger than he had expected, though he could not have said what he had expected, or whether he had expected anything at all, or why the word expected came to him at all since he had not known anyone was coming. They stood straight and close together and watched him cross the yard with the focused stillness of people accustomed to reading a man’s intentions from a distance before he arrived close enough for intentions to become actions.
He had seen Indian women in Redding, occasionally, in the margins of the town’s life — moving along the far side of the street, waiting outside a store while someone else went in, conducting the small necessary transactions of existence with the careful invisibility of people who had learned that visibility carried a cost. He had observed them the way he observed most things, without staring, noting what was there and moving on. He had not had three of them stand in his yard and watch him cross it.
He stopped a few feet from them and nodded. “Morning.”
The tallest one spoke first. She was perhaps twenty-one, with a straight back and steady dark eyes and the particular composure of someone who has prepared carefully for a difficult thing and intends to get through it with their dignity intact. She said something first in her own language — three or four words, low and deliberate — and then tried English, feeling her way into it with care.
“You are the one who left the animals at the tree line.”
“I am,” Coulter said.
She looked at him for a moment. “We have watched you for a long time. We know what kind of man you are.”
Coulter said nothing. He waited. He had learned early in his life that silence was often the most useful response available, that many conversations found their own way to what they were actually about if you gave them room to get there.
The one to the tall woman’s left stepped forward slightly. She was younger, perhaps nineteen, with a quality of focused attention that reminded him, oddly, of a good hunting dog — not the aggression of it but the concentration, the sense of a mind fully engaged with the task in front of it. She had been the one watching the yard as he crossed it, reading him the way he had been reading the gate.
She spoke directly and without preamble.
“There are twenty-two Yahi people left on this earth,” she said. Her English was more practiced than the taller woman’s, worn smooth by use. “Twenty-two. We are living in the hills above your land. We have been living there for three years. The old ones among us will die in the next few winters. The children will grow up with no people around them, no one to teach them what they need to know, no one to carry the Yahi forward.”
She paused. Her eyes stayed on his.
“We are the only three women among our people who can still bear children. Our two warriors have tried to father children. Every child they sired was either lost before it was born or died within days of coming into the world. We do not know why. We know that it has happened every time and that it will keep happening.”
The morning was quiet around them. A meadowlark somewhere in the south pasture. The small sound of the creek below the fence line.
“We are asking you to take us into your home as wives and mate with us,” she said. “Each of us. Until each of us has carried children. Without this the Yahi are gone. Not in our grandchildren’s time. Now. In the next few years. This is what we came here to ask.”
The tall woman said, “We ask nothing else from you. Only this.”
The third woman, the youngest, had not spoken. She was perhaps eighteen, slight, with dark eyes that held something he couldn’t quite read — not fear, not anger, something more complicated than either. She stood with her hands still at her sides and her chin level and she held his gaze without any of the performance of holding it, simply looking at him the way someone looks at a thing they have already decided about and are waiting for the thing itself to catch up.
Coulter looked at the three of them for a long moment. He looked at the ground. He took his hat off and turned it in his hands, which was something he did when he was thinking and which he was aware of doing and which he did not stop doing because he was not going to pretend to be less affected by this than he was.
Twenty-two people. He had heard a number approximately like that spoken in Redding over the winter by a man who said it the way you say a number that has no particular weight to it. Hearing it now, standing in his own yard in the morning sun with three young women looking at him, the number had a different quality. It was not an abstraction. It was the children sleeping in a cave in the hills above his pasture. It was the old ones Kweina was describing, who would die in the next few winters. It was these three, who had walked down out of those hills and through his gate and were standing here asking him something that no one had ever asked him and that he did not have a ready answer for.
He put his hat back on.
“Come inside,” he said. “I’ll put coffee on.”
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