The Cache (3 page)

The ceremony that followed was short and simple; so much so that Benoni could not help feeling disappointed. He had not known what to expect, but he had thought that there would be much beating of drums, long speeches exhorting them to go into the Navaho country, take as many scalps as possible, and return to their honor and that of Fiiniks. He had also expected that their heads would be shaved, leaving only a roach of hair and that their bodies would be daubed with warpaint. Or even that there would be a bloodletting ceremony during which his blood would be mixed with that of the adults of his frat.

Chief Wako, in a few words, dissolved those preconceptions.

“You boys will go as you are, naked as when you came into this world. You will go East or North or South until you come to enemy territory. There you will take at least one man’s scalp. How you get food, water, shelter, and weapons is your problem. After you return—if you return—you will be initiated as men into the frat. Until then, you are only fledglings.

“If this seems hard to you, to let you loose with bare hands and feet, remember that this custom was established many many years ago. The first warpath weeds out the unfit. We want no weaklings, cowards, or stupid ones to breed their kind among us.

“Later, in the fall, the eighteen-year-old women will go through a similar test in the desert, the main difference between their tests and yours being that they do not have to go into enemy land.

“Now, when the drum begins beating, your ciders in the clan will drive you into the desert with whips. You will run a mile, will be dispersed in all directions so you will not band together. Not that we can forbid you to band together afterwards, for you may do anything outside the area of Fiiniks. Even kill one another, if you wish.”

Benoni heard a youth near him snort and mutter, “Good!” and he did not need to look to know that Joel Vahndert had spoken.

He did not have time to think about the implications of the remark, for Chief Wako raised his hand, held it a moment, then lowered it.

The drums broke out into a frenzy. The men in the masks, whooping and screaming, raced behind the youths. Then, whips cracked, and Benoni leaped into the air at the burn of a whiplash on his buttocks. He began running, and he felt no more cuts, for there was not a man in Fiiniks who could run as fast. But, behind him, the whips cracked and the yelling continued, and he ran for at least a mile until his pursuers had dropped far behind. Then he continued dog-trotting for several more miles, heading northeastward.

Benoni planned to trot for about five more miles, then hunt a while for a kangaroo rat or a jackrabbit to furnish him with blood and meat. Afterwards, he would find a place to sleep during the day. Travel by night was the only sane way. The sun would burn up the water in his naked body and make him more easily seen by any Navahos who might be in the area. Besides, hunting was better in the night when most of the beasts were out.

He paused on top of a high hillock of malapi to get his bearings, and then he heard, or thought he heard, somebody in the rocks below. At once he slipped behind a huge black malapi boulder and gripped a stone as a weapon. The man, or whoever it was, seemed to be in a hurry, which puzzled Benoni. He did not think it likely that a Navaho would be this close to Fiiniks, though it was possible. And if the follower were a Navaho, he would not be making this much noise. Chances were that it was one of the initiates. Either one who had happened to be taking the same path as himself, or one who was purposefully tracking him.

Joel Vahndert?

If it were Joel, he would not be one bit better armed than himself. It would be better to face him now, get it over with, rather than wait until he had fallen asleep and Joel could take him by surprise.

Benoni crouched behind the boulder. And he, whose ears could detect the lizard running over the sand and whose nose could smell a rabbit a quarter mile away upwind, knew at once that this was a sweating man. There was tobacco in the odor, which relieved him. It could not be Joel; youths were not allowed to moke until they took their first scalp.

However, if this were the case, then the man could be a Navaho. And he might be careless because he thought that he, Benoni, was much further ahead.

The man came by the boulder, Benoni leaped around it, ready to catch him in the side of the head with a thrown stone.

He stopped, restrained his arm, and said, “Father!”

Hozey Rider jumped away, whirled, his long knife in hand. Then he relaxed, put the knife back in its sheath, and smiled.

“Good work, son!” he said, “I knew you must be some place close. I’m glad I didn’t catch you unawares. I’d have felt very bad about your chances among the Navahos.”

“You made a lot of noise,” said Benoni.

“I had to catch you,” said Hozey.

“Why?”

Benoni looked at the knife and wondered, for a second, if his father planned to give him the blade so he would have a better chance. He dismissed the thought as dishonorable.

“What I’m doing isn’t according to ritual,” said his father. “And it’s actually a last-minute thought on the part of the chiefs. I’ll be brief, because it’s not good to hold a young unblood back from the warpath.

“You know, son, that your older brother went out with a scouting party about two years ago, and we never heard of him again. Possibly, he may be dead. Then, again, he might just not have come back from wherever he went to. You see, the mission he went on was secret, because we didn’t want to stir up our own folk. Or let word to the Navahos what we might be doing in the future.”

“I never did know what the party Rafe went out on was looking for,” said Benoni.

“It was looking for a good place for us to move to,” said his father. “A place where there is no valley fever, no earthquakes, no volcanoes, and plenty of water, grass, and trees.”

“You . . . mean out of the valley?”

Hozey Rider nodded, and he said, “You must not tell anybody. The Council sent the scouting party out two years ago but told nobody why they went. We thought that there might be emotional upsets. After all, Fiiniks is our home. We have lived within the shadow or the sacred Kemlbek Mountain for hundreds of years. Some people might not want to leave, even if Fiiniks was knocked flat by a quake twenty years ago and ten volcanoes not over thirty miles away formed in the last twenty years. They might make a lot of trouble. But we decided that it would be for the good of the people if we did find another home. For one thing, besides the fever, which has been getting worse since I was a child, and the threat of quakes and of volcanoes, there is another thing. That is, that this valley can only feed so many people because there is only so much water available. Despite our heavy mortality, the population has been expanding. Food is getting increasingly scarce. Oh, you haven’t suffered, because you’re the son of a rich farmer and slaveholder. But there are plenty of poor people who go to bed hungry every night. And if they keep getting hungrier and more numerous, well . . . I saw the Great Slave Revolt of thirty years ago.”

“But those were slaves, father!”

Hozey Rider smiled twistedly and he said, “That’s what you’ve been told, son. That lie has been spread about so successfully that even those who know better believe it now. But the truth is that the lower classes tried to storm the granaries. And only after much blood-shed on both sides was the revolt settled. The granaries were opened, the courts and laws were reformed somewhat, and the lower classes were given more privileges.”

“Lower classes?” said Benoni.

“You don’t like to hear that word? Well, it’s part of our way of life to deny that there are such things as classes. But any man who wants to blink two or three times can clear the mist away from his eyes. Would you think about marrying the daughter of a cotton-chopper? No, you wouldn’t. And there are other things. Some people don’t like the idea of slaves.”

“Any slave who serves fifteen years gets his freedom and becomes a citizen,” said Benoni.

“That’s very fair. The Navahos never give their slaves freedom.”

“And so the ex-slave joins the ranks of the poor, is not fed, and loses all his security. No. Anyway, I didn’t puff and pant after you just to discuss our social system.

“Shortly before you and the others were initiated, we Councilmen talked about asking some of you to extend your first warpath.”

“Extend?”

“Yes. Remember, this is not an order. It’s a suggestion. But we would like some of you young bucks, after you’ve taken a scalp or two, not to return at once. Put off your moment of glory. Instead, go east. Look for a place where there is water, perhaps the Great River so many talk about but have never seen.

“Then, when you report, we can start thinking about moving our people, starting anew there.”

“Everybody?”

“Everybody!”

“But father, if I do this, I may not get back for a long, long time. And . . . and . . . well, what about Debra Awvrez?”

His father smiled and said, “You think Joel Vahndert may have married her by the time you get back? Well, what about it? She isn’t the only good looking girl in the valley.”

Benoni gasped in astonishment. He said, “Weren’t you ever in love?”

“Six or seven times,” said Hozey Rider. “And I loved both my wives. But if I hadn’t married them, I would have met some other women and married them and loved them just as much. You think I’m cynical, son. But that’s only because you’re so young. Anyway, if you have your fiery young man’s heart set on this particular blonde, think of the honor that will be yours if you discover a new country. How can a Navaho scalp compare with this? She will be yours for the asking; any girl in the valley would be yours.”

“But Joel may have returned and have her! You forget that!”

“If Joel’s father can catch his son, and he shouldn’t have any trouble following the tracks of that lumbering bear, he will tell him the same thing I’m telling you. If I know Joel, the idea of so much glory will be irresistible. He’ll go on to the East, too.”

“Perhaps. Why didn’t the Council think of this before?”

“Then we wouldn’t have to be tracking you down? As I said, it was decided suddenly. It
was
ridiculous doing it so impulsively and so late. But a suddenly made-up mind moves quickly, and Wako told us to track our sons down if we could and ask them.”

Benoni envisioned the older ones frantically chasing down the young men to give them a last-minute message. He did not know whether to feel sick or to laugh. All the dignity and importance of the ceremony was gone; he doubted the wisdom of the Council, which he had looked up to all his life. His father, as if he had read his thoughts, said, “Yes, I know. It’s ridiculous, but when you take your place on the Council, son, you will find yourself doing just such stupid and hasty things.”

“I don’t know about this exploration trip, father,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it later. Now, I’m going to be too busy keeping alive.”

Suddenly, tears appeared in his father’s eyes; the moonlight glinted off them. And his father put his arm around him and said, “God go with you, son. And bring you back home as soon as possible.”

Benoni was embarrassed. It was bad enough for his mother to weep. She could be excused because she was a woman. But his father . . .

Nevertheless, after gently saying good-bye to his father and watching him disappear into the boulder strewn hills, Benoni felt better. He had not known that his father cared so much for him. Men took so many pains to conceal emotions, to deny they even had any. Besides, no one had seen them, it was not as if his father had broken down in public.

Benoni headed toward the northeast, keeping the towering bulk of the Superstitions, twenty miles away, to his right. His goal was the beginning of the Pechi Trail, the path of the uplands and Navaho country. To get there, he had two choices. Take the easy but much longer road which curved southeast and then back north just at the foot of the Superstitions. Or cut straight across the country or rock strewn, wash-gashed, hilly country. The easier path meant that he would have to pass by farms and the fortress-town of Meysuh. Even though his going would be at night, he would be in danger of being shot by his own countrymen or having dogs set upon him. The naked youth on his first warpath was taboo. A man’s hand was lifted only to strike a blow at him, to send him more swiftly on his way. There had been cases where boys had taken the easier road, were detected, and killed or crippled. Nobody felt sorry. A youth who was captured was obviously unfit to be a warrior of Fiiniks.

Benoni cut across the desert. He climbed the steep walls of several cut washes. One of which, so said legend, was an irrigation canal dug centuries before white men had ever come to this land. Hohokam, the ancient Indians were called. Their descendants were the Papago and Pima, long since absorbed into the white majority in the Valley of the Sun.

He skirted several small mountains where he could, climbed where he could not go around. Near dawn, he had covered about ten miles.

Then, thirsty and hungry, he thought of hunting. First, he needed a knife. That meant finding a piece of chert or some satisfactory substitute. He would be lucky if he found even chert. There was no better grade of flint in this area. And, after an hour of straining his eyes in the moonlight and picking up many rocks and rejecting them, he found a chert. This, he chipped away at, though he hated to make any noise. And he fashioned a crude cutting tool, one that would be refined when he had more time.

After choosing two small stones for throwing, he looked for jackrabbits, cottontails, kangaroo rats, pocket mice, or anything else that he might see before it saw him.

After an hour of slow and silent search, he came across a pack of kangaroo rats. These long-legged, strong-tailed little creatures were playing in the moonlight in a coliseum formed by a ring of malapi boulders. They bounded high into the air, chased each other, rolled and tumbled in the dirt that was the floor of the coliseum. Benoni waited until one was chased close to the boulder behind which he crouched.

Then, his left hand fired the stone at the unsuspecting creature.