I started to scrub at the top, merciless to my face and thinking about impressing some Indians who I was certain didn’t want me in their camp. A warm cloth down my breasts was bliss in a salmon sort of way. I rinsed off my arms and legs with the now-brown water and promised to do a better job when I could.

Comb in hand, I attacked my hair. I lost. A handful of my hair eventually ended up tangled in the teeth, but at least I didn’t look like a freak in a sideshow. I finished it off with the rawhide strip in a bow.

Hawk barged into the shelter then. I still suffered from the effects of the camp cook’s meals, but at least the buttons on my camisole weren’t straining now and my bosom was more under control. C’est la vie. To his credit, Hawk backed right out of the shelter as his mother gave him The Look and handed me my riding habit.

Word traveled fast in the encampment, but I already suspected I was going to be a nine-day wonder for as long as the Nimiipuu suffered my presence. A little knot of people watched me as I left the shelter. Hawk led the way, and I followed him, my eyes on the ground, too shy to look at anyone. I felt dreadfully out of place and so unequal to the situation. Miss Sumner had hammered into our skulls that good manners allowed anyone to fit in anyplace. I’d like to have seen her in the Nimiipuu camp.

We walked to a campfire at the edge of a v-line of tepees, followed by Blue Mountain Woman and what looked to me like all the Indians in the western Hemisphere. Journalists have said since then that there were some 250 warriors and 500 women and children in the five clans of Nimiipuu who fled from their homeland in eastern Oregon. I don’t know. I would have thought more, but I was scared and they weren’t there.

They were an orderly crowd, as opposed to, say, the French rabble lining the streets on Marie Antoinette’s tumbril ride to Place de la Revolution. No one talked or jostled for position. I felt the excitement in the air.

There were at least fifteen men seated around the fire. If I name their names, you will know them…. White Bird, Looking Glass, Joseph, Ollokot, Toohoolhoolzote. There were others you wouldn’t know…. Many Wounds, Poker Joe, Tom Hill, Husishusis Kute. I didn’t know them at the time, naturally, but they were obviously men of authority. Anyone could have discerned that by the way they sat and the gravity of their expressions.

As Hawk and I entered the circle, one of the men motioned us to sit. I did so as gracefully as possible, trying not to wince or grimace on the way down. Methuselah had a bony back.

I sat directly opposite a truly splendid-looking man. He was tall, even sitting down, with a broad face and high cheekbones. His eyes quite captured me. I saw serenity, which was a comfort. I learned later that this was Joseph, a distant cousin of Hawk’s and a chief of the Wallamwatkin family of the Nimiipuu.