The Wild Girl (2 page)
“That’s fascinating,” said the designer. “And what became of the girl?”
“She tried to bite anyone who touched her,” Giles said, “and she refused food and water. She curled up in a fetal position”—he gestured to the photograph—“just like that. It took five days for her to starve herself to death. They buried her in an unmarked grave on the edge of the town cemetery, just outside the fence. Because, of course, she was not a Christian.” Giles tried to take another swallow from his empty cup, looked again at the photograph, nodded, and spoke in a lower voice. “And that really is it. End of story. Now, if you’ll excuse me, please,” he said, turning away.
The fashion designer wrote the gallery owner a check for $30,000 for this sixty-seven-year-old original print of the wild girl, and they put a red sticker in the corner of the glass to indicate that it had been sold. It was the last print of this particular photograph in Ned Giles’s possession; he no longer did any printing, no longer even had a studio, and all his negatives had been destroyed in a chemical fire in his old studio in Albuquerque some years before. Giles was ashamed of himself for selling it, had considered not even hanging it in the show. Now he could hardly bear the thought of this image, so private and so personal, hanging on the wall of this man’s house, to be viewed by a bunch of chichi assholes over cocktails. But he needed the money so that he might at least die in peace, rather than having to face the final indignity of being a ward of the state. And he was ashamed of himself for that, too.
Of course, that hadn’t really been the end of the story of
la niña bronca.
For a mere $30,000 the wealthy designer of men’s and women’s fashions who owned a mansion in the Hamptons, a winter home in Palm Beach, and a ranch in Montana didn’t get to know the whole story. That was the only thing Ned Giles had to hold on to now. It was his story, the girl’s story. It was all he had left in his heart to protect.
In the beginning there was Ishtun-e-glesh, White-Painted-Woman. She had no mother or father. She was created by the power of Yusen. He sent her down to the world to live. Her home was a cave.
There was a time when White-Painted-Woman lived all alone. Longing for children, she slept with the Sun and not long after gave birth to Slayer of Monsters. Four days later, White-Painted-Woman became pregnant by water and gave birth to Child of the Water. As Slayer of Monsters and Child of the Water grew up, White-Painted-Woman instructed them on how to live. They left home and, following her advice, rid the earth of most of its evil. White-Painted-Woman never became old. When she reached an advanced age, she walked toward the east. After a while she saw herself coming toward herself. When she came together, there was only one, the young one. Then she was like a young girl all over again.
FROM THE APACHE CREATION MYTH
James L. Haley,
Apaches: A History and Cultural Portrait
H. Henrietta Stockel,
Women of the Apache Nation
THE GIRL HEARD THE DOGS BARKING LONG BEFORE SHE COULD SEE
them, a kind of frantic, high-pitched yipping. She could not know that it was the sound hunting hounds make when they are on a fresh trail. Nor did she have any way of knowing that the trail they were on was her own, that she smelled enough like a wild animal, like the mountain lion they were supposed to be hunting, to temporarily divert them to her path. Yet in the instinctive way that all creatures sense danger in such a sound, and because the barking, though distant at first, seemed to be coming closer, the girl began to run down the arroyo.
The arroyo was dry this time of year and only ran water during the summer monsoons. On the hillsides above grew twisted mesquite trees and gnarled oaks, and above those the tall, straight pines of the high country. Down below, the broad plains were studded with prickly pear and cholla cactus, and impenetrable thickets of catclaw bushes. The arroyo ran to the river bottom, which itself was incongruously lush, a band of pale spring green with grass and ferns, giant cottonwood trees, and white-barked sycamores just beginning to leaf out. To this oasis all things aspired; the wildlife came down to water, and seek shade and cover there. The land itself—the rocky canyons and draws, the folds of land like the knuckles, fingers, and veins on the back of a man’s hand—all spilled into it. Beyond and above, the high jagged peaks of the Sierra Madre rose up, hazy with dust that swirled skyward in the warm spring winds from the plains below.
The girl carried a thin cotton sack containing a few roots she had dug, the only food she had eaten in the several days she had spent wandering the hills and mountains, searching for the People. She wore a two-piece deerskin dress and high-topped moccasins with the distinctive upturned toes of Apache manufacture. The moccasins strapped above her knees, but were now almost worn through at the soles, and a thin rivulet of dried menstrual blood ran down the inside of her thighs, staining the hide of the moccasins dark all the way down to her insteps.
Only a few days before, her costume had been very beautiful, made painstakingly over a period of weeks by her mother for her puberty ceremony, the traditional Apache celebration of a girl’s menarche. The dress was tanned soft and sewn flesh side out, dyed yellow to signify the fertility of pollen and painted with spectacular symbols of White-Painted-Woman, the mother of all Apaches—a rainbow, the morning star, a crescent moon, sunbeams. It was exquisitely beaded and elaborately finished with fringes and silver studs and tin cone-tinklers that once made a light musical tone when she moved. But now the beads and ornamentation were mostly torn off, the dress itself so tattered that the painted symbols hung in shredded ribbons that fluttered as she ran, those few cone-tinklers still attached rattling desolately. And as she ran, the tatters of the dress caught on the grasping thorns of the catclaw bushes, ripping the deerskin away from her slight frame so that she was slowly being stripped naked, her brown flesh where it was exposed to the thorns scored by small cuts and scratches.
It had been a dry spring and scenting conditions were poor for the dogs, which would have been to the girl’s advantage, except that her menstruation gave up the faintest scent trail of blood, permeating the desert air like a vague perfume, further inflaming the hounds. She ran lightly, soundless as a spirit, her feet barely grazing the rocks, silent footsteps raising small puffs of dust from the sandy arroyo, her thick dark hair unbraided and wild, tangled and streaming behind her. She did not breathe heavily, for even though she was exhausted and weakened by hunger she was
In’deh,
Apache, and could run this pace all day.
The girl did not know what calamitous mistake had been made in her puberty ceremony to bring this terrible disaster down upon the People. She had not gone around with boys before her menarche, which would have disqualified her from assuming the role of White-Painted-Woman. Her aunt Tze-gu-juni, who served as her attendant, had bathed her before dawn on the first morning, washing her hair with yucca root, marking her with yellow pollen down the part of her hair and across the bridge of her nose. Then her aunt dressed her in her puberty costume, starting with the moccasins, then the beautiful dress, during the sewing of which the old woman Dahteste had come to sing the proper songs so that all had been done exactly according to ritual.
But the girl had little time to consider this now, did not think about her mother and her sister as she ran, and of the others dead in the attack upon their camp that morning, did not think about watching from her hiding place in the rocks as three Mexican vaqueros raped the women each in turn while the others watched, smoking indolently and laughing. And when they were finished, while her mother tried to comfort her sister in their disgrace, the worst fate that can befall an Apache woman, so that even death was preferable, two of the men had come up behind them with machetes and struck them each a sharp chopping blow to the back of the neck. They fell wailing together to the ground, her mother blindly trying to gather her sister in her arms to protect her from the blows. But the men continued to hack at them for a very long time with the machetes, until they lay still.
Then the men began the task of decapitating the dead with hunting knives, working with the same brutal efficiency with which they might remove heads from the carcasses of game animals. And when they had completed their grim surgery, they mounted the severed heads on sharpened mesquite sticks and rode away to claim their bounties, these
In’deh
now destined to live for eternity in the Happy Place without their heads.
But the girl did not have time to think about this now. Nor was it a good thing to dwell upon the dead, even worse to speak their names lest you call up their ghosts to bedevil the living. Still, she understood with the innate biological certainty of a species hurtling toward extinction, that Yusen, the life-giver, had abandoned the People, and that somehow she herself had brought this terrible disaster down upon them, that her power as White-Painted-Woman had failed to protect them against their ancient, hated enemies. And so weak and starving though she was, on she ran, steadily, lightly, moving like a spirit being over the rocks, the shreds of her dress fluttering like ribbons, her hair streaming wildly behind her, her soundless footsteps raising small clouds of dust in the dry arroyo.
By the time she reached the river bottom, the sound of the dogs had intensified, their yipping taking on a new resolve. Now the girl spotted the lead dog making his way down the arroyo behind her. He did not look up although he would certainly have seen her, but rather kept his nose to the ground, working a steady, if circuitous route, businesslike, inexorable. The river was low and clear, and the girl ran across on the slick rocks. But she knew that she could not outrun the dog, and partway up the slope on the opposite side, she scrambled up an oak tree and squatted there in the crotch of a branch.
The dog was only mildly confused by her crossing, working up and down the riverbank until he winded her scent and then made his way across on the same rocks. He trailed the girl to the base of the tree, looked up at her finally, in some state of canine puzzlement, growled low in his throat, not quite certain what prey this was. Then he settled himself on his haunches like compressing a spring and pushed off with surprising upward thrust, soaring skyward, as if just to have a better look, his front paws clawing for purchase at the trunk of the tree. But he fell back to the ground, sprawling and ungainly, scrabbling to his feet again, to take up a new tone, a deeper wailing song that told his fellow dogs and the hunter himself that he had brought their quarry to bay.
The hunter, Billy Flowers, had been cutting country for several hours, looking for lion sign when he heard his dogs begin to utter the short choppy bark that told him they had moved a fresh track and were trailing. Flowers knew that his dogs would never trail trash—as deer, or rabbits, or other nonpredatory animals are called by houndsmen. But he could detect a subtle difference in the pack’s barking, a confused edge that suggested they might be tracking something other than a panther. Perhaps, he thought, they had moved a jaguar, although this was a bit north of that cat’s traditional range. Still, it was possible that one had strayed up from the southern Sierra Madre, and he dearly hoped so, for the jaguar was one of the few species that he had not yet killed in his long and distinguished career as a hunter of predators.