Woman of the People

4. Incident at Medicine Mounds

4. INCIDENT AT MEDICINE MOUNDS SHE WAS disturbed because she had lost count of the years. After not thinking of it for a long time, she had suddenly felt that it was important, but upon trying to separate them out and count them, she could not. All those times when the weather was not cold were full of travel and visit and hunting, time waiting in raid camps, time gathering seeds and roots and wild fruit in a hundred places. Only with the winter did one have a chance to keep straight the passage of long periods of time. Winters had to be spent in a permanent camp near water and good grass, in a place sheltered from north wind. It was a separate and distinct time that had to be prepared for with preserved meat and plenty of robes. But she had lost count even of winters. There had been a winter on a river where pecan trees grew, during which they moved, so that there had been two permanent camps that year. But the camps in the canyon with high walls-had that been two permanent camps in one winter or one permanent camp and one travel camp or had it been two different winters? She didn't know. She had been ten that first autumn. Now, by her uncertain counting she knew she must be either fifteen or sixteen. She had been with them either five or six winters. 66 67 INCIDENT AT MEDICINE MOUNDS It was early spring. They had come, the entire Mutsani band, to Laguna Sabinas as soon as the danger of severe cold was past, planning to wait for the New Mexico traders here in the land of the Kwahadi Comanches. First flowers were blooming on the nearly level prairies out away from the salt lake, and new grass was starting. Scattered wild onions had thrust their fine blades suddenly through the soil and had burst out in delicate white flowers. This day Tehanita had come out with a group of women on the prairie to dig the onions, whose hiding places were thus betrayed. It was not hard work, though they were widely scattered. She dug them, rubbed most of the dirt from them with her hands, and dropped them into her deep, narrow basket. Her mind was turning over her problem of years as she worked. She believed that she was disturbed about losing count of the years because it might be part of a larger thing that was going on. She had learned to gather different wild plants for food and tea and medicine, to braid a rope from horsehair, to thin and tan hides, to cut out clothes and moccasins and tipi sections, to pack a horse. She had mastered the Comanche language and gained their trust. But she was forgetting things she wanted to keep. She could not see they were going away until she would one day realize they were gone. At times such as this, digging onions a distance away from the other women, she would whisper to herself in English, "Come Home Early is not my pia . .. I mean, my mama. She's not my mama. Nor Blessed either. And Old Woman is not my kabt ... I mean my ... " She didn't know the word. She knew there was a word, but she thought she had never had a kaku among the whites. She believed she had known the word at one time, but couldn't even be sure of that. It was other things besides words. There had been a woman her mama had called Melinda when they lived in the place near all the other people, and she remembered it coming to her in a flash one day: That was Mama's sister when she was a little girl. Yet she and George had not called the woman Mama, though she was their mama's A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE 68 own sister. They had used a special word with her name; it had seemed to make sense then, but she could not now remember the special word nor why they had not just called her Mama. The forgetting went to many things. How had they kept meat in the winter? She could remember no meat racks with meat drying. She tried to remember all of the inside of the lodge of logs they had lived in, and she could not...