To the Apache, I am the enemy, Miguel mused. To everyone else, they are the enemy. The Apache had always claimed that the Abranos’ horse ranch was on tribal land, even though the family had lived there for hundreds of years. It wasn’t just the Abrano land the Apache wanted. They believed all white settlers were in their territory, and they wouldn’t give up trying to remove them. Papá always said he would fight to his last breath if his land were threatened. Miguel realized now that the Apache felt the same.
Miguel thought again of the old diary. What happened to the land Aharon ben Avraham left behind in Spain? If the church seized it, does that make the church my enemy? Miguel rubbed his throbbing forehead.
What makes people enemies? he wondered. Rushing Cloud was afraid that I was his enemy when he first noticed me, and I felt the same about him. But we have learned to trust each other. We call each other friend.
Rushing Cloud scouted the area and picked up three dried-out cactus ribs. “Will you share Snake Skinner again?” he asked. Miguel pulled the knife from his pocket. Rushing Cloud used the blade to sharpen one end of each stick. With two of the sticks in hand, he walked to a prickly pear cactus. Holding the sticks like tongs, he gripped a spiny pad, sliced it off, and dropped it onto the sand. He repeated this a few more times.
“What are you doing?” Miguel asked.
“This is my dinner,” his friend replied. Miguel watched as Rushing Cloud rubbed the cactus pads roughly over the pebbly sand. Most of the spines fell away, and the rest he pried out with the knife blade. As he worked, Rushing Cloud asked, “Has your family sent out soldiers to search for you?”
“At first, I was sure the cavalry would come,” Miguel said. “Every day I listened for the sounds of hoof beats, hoping they had found my trail. I even wondered if their search was what made the Apache band decide to travel after dark the last night I was with them. Maybe they had seen soldiers and decided to move faster.” He shook his head. “But I don’t see how anyone could have tracked me. The band followed hidden trails into the mountains, and we even climbed up the face of a small cliff. No horse could follow us.”
“And Apachu always leave false trails,” Rushing Cloud said as he dropped the smooth cactus pads onto the hot stones in the fire pit. He sat down and pointed to Miguel’s feet. “They take your boots, no?”
“Yes,” Miguel answered. “One warrior put on my boots and walked off in a different direction than the rest of us. But when we arrived at a campsite that evening, he was already there—and my boots were gone.”
“Apachu think of everything to hide,” Rushing Cloud said with a hint of admiration for his enemy’s skill. “What about your horse?”
Miguel tried to close his mind to what had happened to Zuzi. He answered tersely. “Another warrior took it.”
“Yes,” Rushing Cloud said, nodding knowingly. “Horse leaves tracks in one direction and boots make tracks another way. Then Apachu wipe out all other footprints. When soldiers find cottonwoods where you stayed, they look all around. They think horse ran off and you walked the wrong way. They never guess true direction the warriors take you. By the time they maybe figure it out, you are far away in enemy camp.” Rushing Cloud’s face lit up with amusement, as if he suddenly remembered a joke. “Sometimes, Apachu copy the tracks of our friend, Snake-Killer. They walk with moccasins on backwards. Looks like the warrior ended up where he started and then disappeared!” He paused and admitted, “I do that myself sometimes—like when I ran away.”
Miguel was startled. “You ran away from home?”
Rushing Cloud looked puzzled. “No, I am running to my home. Why would I want to leave my family?” He jabbed the roasting cactus with a stick and turned it to char the other side.
Miguel swallowed hard. “What if—if your family wasn’t who you thought they were? What if suddenly nothing was the same?”
Rushing Cloud shook his head. “People do not change. Maybe the outside looks a little different, but we trust what is inside.”
Miguel’s entire body felt heavy, as if he carried a weight he could not bear. He had lost trust in his own family. Each of them had known the story of Aharon ben Avraham, yet they had deliberately hidden it from him. Once again, they thought of him as a child, not a young man. Perhaps he had proven that they were right. Now he didn’t know if he could even trust himself. He wasn’t sure whether what was inside him was still the same. Miguel couldn’t ask Rushing Cloud where he had run from, or he would have to admit what he had done.
“Dinner,” Rushing Cloud said. He speared a shriveled piece of snake meat and handed it to Miguel.
Miguel pulled off the burnt papery skin and tentatively nibbled at the meat. He wiped the juices from his mouth with the back of his hand. “What about you?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to eat some?”
Rushing Cloud skewered a cactus pad and waved it in the air to cool off. Carefully, he took a bite. “My people do not eat rattlesnake,” he said. “The . . .”
“. . . elders tell it,” Miguel chimed in, finishing the sentence.
Rushing Cloud smiled. “You are learning,” he said.
Miguel’s stomach rumbled its hunger. He tried to forget what he was eating, and now took a large bite. Instead of sinking into thick meat, Miguel’s teeth crunched against bones. The snake was a mass of sturdy ribs, as if the meat were hidden in a ring of toothpicks.
Now his companion couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You are so hungry you eat bones?”
“I didn’t even know snakes had bones,” Miguel muttered sheepishly.
Rushing Cloud shook his head in disbelief. “I never eat this creature, but still I know it has bones.”
Miguel took another bite, gnawing carefully at the stringy meat and pulling it away from the ribs where it held fast. The snake meat was tough, with a slightly bitter aftertaste. But the more Miguel ate, the more he grew accustomed to it. He stopped thinking of it as cooked rattlesnake and simply appreciated it as food. Before long, Miguel was cracking bones with his teeth to pull out every last shred of meat. When he finished the last piece, he wiped his hands on his pants.
Rushing Cloud collected the discarded pieces—bones, skin, head, and innards—and tossed them onto the still smoldering stones. He covered the pit with sand and wiped away traces of their meal with his feet.
“We need more water,” Miguel said. “Let’s go back to the hole you dug.”
“Not safe,” Rushing Cloud said. “We must stay out of sight.” He sliced two more prickly pear pads from a different plant, pried out the spines, and made a cut across the top of each. He handed over one pad, and Miguel saw liquid dripping out. He licked at the moisture, then sucked the cut edge.
“It is not like water from the olla,” Rushing Cloud noted, “but it will keep us.”
“How do you know about getting water from a cactus?” Miguel asked.
Rushing Cloud responded with his own question. “How do you live in the desert and not know these things? Do you not see the rabbits and javelinas that chew cactus to get moisture? Do you not see anything around you?”
Miguel felt his face flush with embarrassment. It seemed that until now he hadn’t looked at anything in his life with open eyes. He understood that it was time to think with his mind open, as well as his eyes.
The rattlesnake meat and the cactus juice satisfied his hunger and his thirst. Just a week ago, Miguel would never have been content with just one small meal each day or been able to survive in the desert with so little water. Perhaps he had become more like the scorpion. Maybe gaining power from another only meant that you learned new ways.
Rushing Cloud settled down in the shelter, folding his shirt for a pillow. Miguel stretched out beside him. “You never told me why you’re traveling alone,” said Miguel, hoping he wouldn’t have to confess his own reason for becoming lost. Rushing Cloud lay on his back, staring up at the brush he had piled overhead.
For a long moment he was silent. Miguel wondered if his companion was hiding something, just as Miguel was. Then, in a challenging voice, Rushing Cloud said, “I ran away from the mission school.” When Miguel offered no protest, Rushing Cloud began to share more.
“Many sleeps past,” he said, “when the planting season was upon us, a white man with hair upon his face came to our rancheria driving a wagon. I see my cousins and other children from our village are already in the wagon. My father was away tending our fields, and my mother and sisters were under the ramada. If only I had gone to help my father that day, I might be there still.” He paused, as if regretting what might have been. “This man tells my mother that all Indian children must go to a place where they will learn the new ways of white men. He said nothing about being forced to pray to their god.”
Miguel swallowed the words that nearly leapt from his mouth. That is my God, he thought. The only God. Should he try to lead Rushing Cloud to the faith now? Clearly the missionaries had already tried to do that. And now Miguel was uncertain of what he had once believed was his calling.
“My mother tried to shield me from the hairy face man. With gestures, she tries to explain I am her only son—I am needed to work in the fields so we will have enough to eat. But the white man holds a paper my mother cannot read and tells her it is written that if she does not send me to this school, the white chiefs will lock my father in their iron cage. With tears flowing from her eyes, my mother scoops beans into a covered basket for the journey and fills an olla of water. As the man takes me to the wagon, my grandmother pulls me to her and whispers one last piece of wisdom for me to carry away. I did not forget her words.”
Miguel sensed his friend’s sadness and tried not to interrupt for fear that Rushing Cloud would stop speaking. “We traveled a long trail, through other villages where more children are taken and other wagons come to carry them. At each rancheria, the women give us dried cornmeal and fresh water. Soon everything I know is left behind. I never see my family again.” Miguel guessed that the cornmeal was to make the same pasty pinole he had eaten along the trail. It was a poor meal—just enough to keep you alive.
“After four sleeps, we come to a white man’s village, with wide trails leading to mud buildings. Women wearing strange clothes take all the girls away, and the boys are brought to a ramada. Some of the boys try to go after their sisters, but they are held back. Under the shade of the ramada, a man with an iron tool cuts off all our hair. If any boy fights against him, he is held down like a sheep losing its coat. Finally, we wash at wooden bowls and our clothes are taken away. The white men make us squeeze our feet into pinching boots. They show us how to make a button crawl into a hole in a cloth shirt. Everything is so tight against my skin that I feel that I cannot breathe.”
Rushing Cloud sighed. “Never before did any Tohono O’odham boy cut his hair. We are ashamed to look upon each other.” Then his voice rose in anger. “What had we done to make these people cut off our hair?” The question echoed off the rocks.
Rushing Cloud’s short hair was the first thing Miguel had noticed, and it had reassured him that Rushing Cloud wasn’t an Apache warrior. Miguel’s own hair was long, and now it was dirty and matted. He even wore a headband like his captors, but that didn’t make him an Apache.
Rushing Cloud hadn’t chosen to cut his hair. He would have been the same even if his hair had reached his shoulders. Still, Miguel knew he would have been more afraid. Rushing Cloud kept talking as if a dam had opened, unleashing a stream of thoughts.
“Soon we are taken to a room where we must sit on long benches with our hands folded upon a board of wood. This they call a table, but we have never seen such a thing before. At the rancheria, we eat sitting on blankets spread on the soft sand and sleep on straw mats. At the school, bad-smelling food is put in front of us and the women make motions with their hands, telling us to eat. We try, but we cannot swallow such strange things. Day after day this is the only food they give us. Finally, we must eat or starve. The mission women become red in their faces if we do not eat everything placed before us. They whip us with sticks. But this food makes us sick, and we must run often to the wooden shed.”
Miguel could never forget the rank smell of cooked horsemeat and the way his stomach had churned when he tried to eat it. Yet the Apache ate the meat with relish and laughed at his revulsion. He didn’t think he would have grown to like horsemeat if he had lived with the Apache forever. Miguel could never erase the memory of seeing Doc Meyer’s dead horse beyond the campfire.
Rushing Cloud spoke fiercely, his voice rising. “Some Pima boys are at the mission school too. Tohono O’odham are no friends of Pima. They laugh and call us Papago—Bean Eaters! Of course, we must fight for our honor.” He pounded his fist against his chest. “We are Tohono O’odham, we tell them, People of the Desert!”
Miguel had always heard the Indians in Tucson called Papago. The women who came into town selling ollas and baskets, and the men who sometimes worked at the ranch, were all called Papago. It was the only term Miguel had ever known. Had he and his family been insulting these people without realizing it?
Miguel coughed. “Why didn’t you and your cousins run away?” he asked.
“We are forbidden to speak our own tongue at the mission school, so we cannot make a plan together,” said Rushing Cloud. His voice began to sound drowsy, but he kept talking. Miguel’s eyelids drooped.
“At first, we do not understand English words, so how can we know that our own talk is not allowed?” he asked bitterly. “Whenever we spoke in our words, we were beaten and sometimes locked into a hot wooden box. There we sit and try to think of what we have done that is so terrible. Slowly, slowly, we learn the strange new talk. When we first come to the mission school it is the time of planting, when the earth is black with rain. By the time the corn stands tall our mouths only make the white man’s sounds. Our own words begin to disappear like water hiding under the sand.”
“You must trust the inside,” Miguel said, using Rushing Cloud’s own advice. “Your language is always in you.”
Rushing Cloud turned his head toward Miguel, his eyes downcast. “We can accept the gods of the mission church, but we must not lose our own. Our sacred stories must be told every year, in the same words, always. It keeps our life in order. It makes the rain come and the fields to sprout. What will happen to my people if they forget their own tongue?”
Miguel thought of his ancestor’s code. Maybe hearing Aharon Ben Avraham tell his story would keep his family’s life in order too. Miguel realized that he had to at least listen.