The morning of January 11, 1868, was cold, damp and mist-heavy, like a cloud had settled on the skin of the earth. One of those Oregon mornings.
Ada Two Trees, nine years old and the only child of Otto Bordst and Louise Two Trees, was running for her life. She ran through the woods with branches whipping across her cheeks and the air in her lungs ripping in and out beneath her shirt like hot stitches. Greenery like a blur as she ran. She ran for miles, she ran for hours. She ran through the woods and the morning gave way to afternoon and then to dusk and finally into the night. She ran and rested and ran and rested. She ran toward the scent of the sea and away from the man with the rifle, away from their little home with its two real leaded windows and the tiny shoots of a cucumber plant she had been growing in a little tin on the windowsill. She ran through scrub brush and among the lashing tree limbs that left welts on her arms and rills of chilled water running down her collar. She leapt over streams, past clots of poison oak and tangles of sticker bushes, over falls of dead jack pines stacked like bleached bones, across carpets of jagged stones and beds of browned pine needles gone soft as clouds. She ran until her feet were punctured and bleeding. She ran until finally the pain in her side became too great and exhaustion trembled the edges of her vision and then she hid in the spongy earth between two fallen trees, the ground fragrant with rot, buoyant with give, the gray flesh of the trees covered in moss and clusters of tiny white and orange mushrooms. She pulled clutches of ferns over herself and lay there listening to the sound of the forest around her.
The man had been astride his piebald horse, his form warped through the cabin window, when she watched him shoot her father in the face. He’d laughed as Otto Bordst had tumbled to the ground, inert, a suddenly broken doll. Her mother had grabbed her, shoved her through the other window in their little house, her voice hushed and bright with panic.
Ada wiped tears away beneath her bed of ferns, heard the chorus of dripping rain above her as the world slowly darkened to night. Nine years old, Ada Two Trees, and close enough to the ocean to smell its brine and tang in the air.
• • •
The man who had killed her parents in the dooryard of their home was a woefully hungover Indian hunter named Timothy Long. Initially a prospector, Long had only recently discovered that a lifestyle of unhindered travel, government bounties, and sudden black flurries of violence greatly agreed with him. He had heard it on good authority (a fellow drunkard in a Riptide tavern the previous night) that a woman named Louise Two Trees was actually a full-blood squaw who had, years earlier, escaped the reservation and was now apparently living in the woods without proper papers. Sitting next to him in the bar, the flickering oil lamps thankfully obscuring the majority of grime covering the man’s countenance, he claimed that Louise Two Trees had spent the past fifteen years gallivanting around with her kraut husband and kicking out any number of half-breed babies, the whole lot of them living in filth out in some squalid cabin in the woods, the children so depraved and brain-scarred they ate their own waste and the bark off trees. “If it was me and I had the go ahead from the governor,” the man leered through a cloud of body odor so severe it actually made Timothy’s eyes water, “I’d be putting a plug in that bitch promptly and dropping her skullcap off at the Sheriff’s office. If it was me and I was a man interested in a paycheck.”
This information was, like most things, mired in half-truths. For one, Ada Two Trees was an only child. More importantly, Louise Two Trees had her papers. They had been issued to her by the state of Oregon and signed by David E. Muyner, acting Indian Agent of the Tumquala Reservation. Otto had been a frequent visitor to the Tumquala trading post and Muyner, impressed with the man’s humility and work ethic, had willingly passed Louise on beyond the walls of the reservation. If only more could be like those two, the Agent had mused more than once. Willing to eschew the dark animism of the Indians’ ancient ways, in exchange for hard work and belief in family and home. So, yes, she most certainly had her papers. And as far as it concerned Ada Two Trees, most of the men in Riptide knew of her only vaguely, and not by name but rather simply as one of those young sitkum siwash (a not-so-nice term in the Chinook jargon that meant half-breed) gals who populated a small number of homesteads in the dark nooks and crannies along the coast. All things considered, Long should have grown suspicious after his barmate had archly suggested, “Them kids ain’t worth nothing, but that Louise, you’d get you some guv’ment money for her scalp sure as shit. I’d say that information’s worth a drink, don’t you? At least one, maybe two.” But Long had also been morbidly intoxicated, and had simply nodded his agreement and raised his hand for the bartender’s attentions. Sometimes, we only hear what we want to hear.
In roughly eighteen months Timothy Long had gathered the scalps of eleven unchristian and paperless Indians. The states of Oregon and California had paid him between ten and fifty dollars for each of these, and Oregon, at that time, was offering fifteen dollars for the scalp of a proved-rogue Indian. That morning, it had gone like this: Timothy had gotten directions to the cabin, and at first light, a hangover’s terrible fangs still stuck in his head, he had stood in the dooryard and called Otto out of his home. Timothy managed to sound jovial as hell, in spite of his headache, greeting the man like an old friend. Dawn had shown blue through the fragmented sky between tree limbs as he shot Otto through the forehead with his revolver from fifteen paces away, astride his horse. Otto still had the straps of his coveralls around his hips when he died. Louise began screaming inside the cabin, a hot and bright sound that reverberated in the tiny rooms, and Long dismounted smartly and fired another round into Otto’s head as he stomped his way happily into the doorway of the cabin, where little Ada’s legs could be seen wriggling out the far window. Louise came at Long like a dervish, howling and mad, a cooking knife gleaming in one fist. Another shot rang out in the tiny room, a curl of flame licking from the barrel, and Timothy Long walked over to the corpse with a spring in his step. Fifteen dollars was a fine payout for a minute’s worth of work.
It was only after scalping Louise and ransacking the little house that he found her papers in a wooden chest beneath the bed. A flurry of cursing ensued. He rode back to town, fury at a slow boil—never even coming close to following little Ada. All this happening while she ran and ran, certain that he was after her.
That evening she rose from her bed of ferns and ran again toward the sea. It had been long dark by the time she made it through the scrim of pine and fir trees to the cliff side, the beach glimmering below her. The moon hung low and bright and lit the ocean swells like sculpted white fire. The sand glowed. She made her way carefully down the cliff, holding onto exposed roots and stones for purchase, and it was only when she had made it down to the beach, where the sand was hard-packed and cool, where she could see around her in all directions, that she sat down and wept—loud, wracking sobs—for all that she had lost.
• • •
Perhaps it could be argued that the tah-kee-na-teh is no more to blame than a bullet fired from a gun is to blame. That we should question, perhaps, the rifleman instead. That it is fulfilling a simple purpose, less than an animal, even, and no more capable of awareness or rationality than a lung or a blinking eye or a trigger. That it was simply doing what it had been created to do.
And yet how much did intent matter to Ada Two Trees right then, with moonlight gleaming off the ocean surf like sparks from a fire and her heart feeling like it had been rent in pieces? Did blame really matter when she looked up and saw what suddenly shared the beach with her, that sinuous form slinking toward her, skulking and low to the ground? Did it?
• • •
Timothy Long traveled back to Riptide and, that evening, found the man who had told him about Louise the night before. The man was sitting in the same bayfront tavern, on the same stool, drinking, perhaps, from the same glass. He certainly smelled the same.
Timothy threw Louise’s scalp down on the bar in front of the man, and next to it the signed papers illustrating her freedom.
“Get that shit out of here,” the bartender said. “Good lord.”
Timothy said to the man at the bar, “You owe me fifteen dollars, I’d say.”
The man took a drink. He looked at the papers as he wiped a ghost of foam from his mustache. “I never learnt to read, myself.”
“Well,” Timothy said, “you can pretty fucking well imagine what it says.”
The man nodded. “I guess I can. I guess I’d say that’s about right. I was just telling you what I’d heard. Making conversation, you know.”
“Means not a good goddamned whit to me,” Timothy said. “You owe me fifteen dollars and the price of a drink or we’ll have an issue momentarily.”
“Okay, then,” the man sighed, reaching into the bag on his hip.
At the same moment, on a stretch of beach very near what would later become known as Wolf Point, Ada Two Trees looked up from the cave of her hands and saw a thing in front of her that, put simply, made the eye unsure of itself. This animal coming toward her, that slunk with its four legs low to the ground, this thing that slalomed among the low rises of dunes, the fur on its back scalloped in whorls of matted gore.
And as it fell upon Ada Two Trees, it made a joyous and gleeful sound, so akin to a human voice as to be practically indistinguishable from one.
A man named Robert Meachum, the owner of a feed and grain store on Riptide’s growing main street, was out for his morning walk when he found Ada. (What was left of her.) Meachum went running for the sheriff with bile hot in his throat as Timothy Long woke up hungover in a rooming house near South Beach around the same time. How the world hands us ruination by the handful, and in a million small ways. Long would never read the article published in the Riptide Observer a few days later, having moved on further down the coast. Sheriff Watts and his deputies would wind up burying the little girl in the woods above the cliffs; the Tumquala Massacre would take place less than a week later, and alongside the state militia, they would have their hands full quelling a goddamned Indian uprising; there was no inquiry into the girl’s identity.
For the rest of his life, Robert Meachum, who had discovered Ada’s body, would, on infrequent but oft-sleepless nights, with the darkness beyond the window glass spun out seemingly forever, consider this: how, at its best, the world seemed indifferent to sorrow and pain and, at its worst, seemed an engine that ran on it like fuel.