Chapter 14

The inexplicable fear that had been growing inside me as I headed home turned out to be unfounded.

Our little farm was the perfect bliss it always had been, and with Alawa to tend the fields in my absence Mataoka was recovering fine and nursing our two healthy offspring happily.

Alawa grunted to acknowledge my return and, without speaking, took both the children off to see the turkeys so that my wife and I could reacquaint ourselves after our week apart. Mataoka giggled as she confided in me how it was now safe to cuddle again and how Alawa had taught her which herbs to forage for to stop herself becoming pregnant too soon. And so we urgently hurried to the warm spring pool to bathe and clean ourselves and each other carefully all over before our gentle, deep, longed-for bliss.

I took to hunting as there was nothing for me to do in the field. I wounded another moose, and knew it wasn’t a quick killing shot, so tracked and hounded it until it gave up life. It was a large bull, with velvet on its massive antlers, and I knew that Mataoka would be especially keen to harvest that for remedies and such. Every part of the moose had a use, and Alawa was teaching Mataoka all of them. The moose was so big and heavy that I had to butcher it on the ground where it lay and hang the big cuts and then smoke them there by the kill before bringing the parts home.

The wild grapes on the hill behind the house were ripening, the early rice was ready to harvest and the first of the corn was, too. Alawa helped me while Mataoka sat watching us from the house platform while she sewed clothes from all the skins we’d gathered trapping over the winter.

Each evening we sat around a fire and Alawa and Mataoka taught me the finer points of their language and improved my pronunciation markedly. All attempts at teaching Alawa any English failed miserably, though, but Mataoka had a good humored laugh at the garbled words that she struggled with and we persisted without success.

It was late in the summer and I had moved down to the summer camp to work more ore when the first Indian came. Slowly, a straggle of women and children came into my summer camp and busied themselves looking around. Only a handful of old men and Walla accompanied them. All the other young men had stayed to defend the village, they said. Walla, who still suffered from his wound, had tried to stay, too, but they had insisted he act as guide to find my camp, although I was sure that a blind man could follow the three-day trail that was now so well established.

I didn’t want all the Indians to see our cabin, so Walla, who had more stamina than the rest, set off to fetch down the ladies. He had never seen the cabin either, but Walla was the best tracker of any Indian and he had no trouble seeing the path I took even though I had taken care to tread lightly and disguise it. He was soon back with Alawa, Mataoka and the children in just a couple of hours.

There was much rejoicing and fussing when Mataoka and our babies came among the Indian host. Mataoka had put on her English clothes for the occasion, and many reached out to pat and stroke her long, dark hair that flowed down the back of her tight, white blouse and touched the top of her tight, long, black skirt.

Walla stood aside, watching the trail back, warily, as the other women described the looming battle. They had been tipped off that a large group of the underemployed men in town were preparing to claim their lands and were spoiling for an altercation so that they could justify it. The truce and peace on our short stretch of the frontier was breaking down. They were sure it was just a matter of time before they were attacked or goaded into defending themselves, and so the young and old were away on a summer hunting expedition, leaving the braves to face the threat. They had already harvested most of their crop early.

Indian villages did move every so often when the soil got too poor and the village had stood longer than most already. When I was young, its proximity to the town had been a bonus, but now that closeness to the white man had soured. The fields slowly yielded less, anyhow; they consoled themselves to help justify their flight. They were contemplating moving the whole village.

By the next morning my little summer camp felt like a little village, with new wigwams being constructed all over the place. Most of the Indians were not attentive churchgoers and, away from the old village now, they were reverting to their heathen ways and discarding their modesty about the camp in the summer heat.

Some of the young squaws were mighty pretty, but I figured my Mataoka was the prettiest of them all, anyhow. I thought Mataoka prettier every time I saw her. I know I should have been scandalized by the nudity but I was feeling less English than ever. Mataoka cocked a playful eye at me and eventually stripped off, too, all to preserve her set of English clothes and the easier to nurse little Martha. She had stopped telling me when it was Sunday back in the spring, and I had been forgetting myself. Were we going native again?

For all the distractions of the other squaws, it was Mataoka who drew my eye whenever she was in sight. It was almost more alluring to see my wife in just a loin cloth front and back than to know what she looked like under it. I caught her bending over on the slightest pretext and glancing back over her shoulder at me, checking I was noticing on several occasions; at times we had to rush off, giving no explanation, and find privacy up towards the higher cabin and our secret hot spring.

The Indians had settled in my summer camp without asking, but in their eyes we were them and it was just like when I visit ma and pa, with a sense of entitlement. The Indians had little concept of property anyhow, so I just had to shrug and learn their ways. I worried they would over-fish our lake and denude the forest of game, but there was little I could do and nor could I hurry them up to leave. And where would they go? If the village was to move, perhaps they could find a valley of their own further west? But all the young braves were defending their current village, and before they heard word of how that was going they were unlikely to move further away.

My newest burn of charcoal was ready now and, with little else to do, I set about getting the old men to help me smelt some iron. They had no initiative, though, and only did what I told them and saw not what needed to be done. Still, it was a big help to have someone hold an ingot steady with the long tongs while I beat it with my metal hammer. I could feel my bulging muscles moving like snakes as I swung and Mataoka teased me mercilessly that she was going to have to take the young maidens away to forage so they would not be tempted.

I began to wonder if I could build my own little water mill where the small river came past my summer camp. The flow, even in summer, seemed stronger than the beck back on the farm, so ought to be enough.

Although they settled into the summer camp with the assumed permission that distant relatives can entitle themselves to, I found out they were scouting for somewhere to move the village permanently.