Mantracker

By Mike W. Ray

Mike's grandfather raises him on the North Fork Indian Reservation in California, teaching him the Indian ways and history of the tribe, how to track animals, and how to cover up his tracks. But when he gets older, Mike wants to become a professional motorcycle racer--something that Mike doesn't have. He tries to get a mechanic's job in a motorcycle shop to increase his chances of obtaining sponsorship, but there are no openings. Instead, Mike's search lands him a civil service job that leads to romance and life-threatening experiences in Laos, where he earns his Indian name, Mantracker. It turns out to be the most turbulent
ride of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781495142062

Book preview

life.

Chapter 1

Raised with Grandpa

It was 5:00 on a cold, December morning. I stared out the living room window. Still snowing, I thought in disgust. It had been three straight days now, and there were a couple of feet built up on the ground.

There would be no work again today. How much longer can this last? I wondered, frustrated. Winters in Oregon are sometimes tough if you don’t have an inside job, and I didn’t. I had one of the most weather-sensitive jobs possible. For the past two years I’d worked for a local commercial roofing company in Beaverton. I knew there would be no work until the weather cleared. I didn’t want to sign up for unemployment. I’d tried that last year. By the time I went through all the hassles, the weather cleared, and I went to work.

I glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall. It said December 19, 1966. How long had it been, nine, ten years? My mind started wandering back, like it so often did when I was alone, to relive those early, carefree days growing up with Grandpa on the North Fork Indian Reservation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.

I poured my second cup of coffee and sat down on the couch to watch the snow falling in large soft flakes.

Yes, now I remembered how it all started. I was only three years old. There was a loud knock at the front door. I could see the look of fear on my mother’s face as if she sensed the troubles that opening that door would bring down on all of us. As soon as she opened it, two men and a woman pushed past her into the front room. They said something to her. I didn’t understand any of it. As my mother answered their questions, I could hear fear in her voice. I remember my mother starting to cry. Then my older sister, Maxine, and my younger sister, Mary, started to cry, then me. I didn’t understand what was happening.

The next memory I had was of a very long ride in a car at night. My sister Mary, who wasn’t yet two years old, and I were huddled together in the backseat. Finally the car stopped, and we were left alone in the dark. After a while, we were taken from the car and were left standing on an old wooden porch. In front of us stood a man holding a kerosene lantern. He looked very old, with deep lines in his face. His hair was long and white. It fell to his shoulders. He was so tall and slender that he looked like a giant to us.

The woman told us this man was our grandfather and that he was going to care for us for a few days until she found a home for us. All I could think was, Where is our mother?

I don’t remember much of the following weeks and months. The woman never did come back for us. What I do remember were the chores required of me.

I fed the chickens, gathered eggs, and fed Grandpa’s mules.

Grandpa didn’t talk much, but when he did, I learned to listen. I found out in later life that Grandpa was eighty-nine years old when we were sent to live with him. He was a Yosemite Indian.

My dad, George Wa-Heakley, was Grandpa’s son. He married my mom, who is white, in the 1920s. They decided to live on the North Fork Reservation because my dad had a steady job at the sugar pine mill located on the reservation. They had six children. Maxine, Marline and Johnny, who were twins, Bobby, Mary, and me. When the United States got involved in World War II, the government came to the reservation and drafted all the able-bodied men into the service. My dad was one of them.

My mom, even though she was white, was considered an Indian, because she had married one. She and the other younger women were sent to work in war plants. We wound up across the bay from San Francisco. My mom worked at the Mare Island shipyards as a riveter. I teased her in later life by calling her Rosie the Riveter, like the woman portrayed on the famous posters.

I never understood why my mom didn’t come back right away to get my sister and me. As I think back on it, I suppose she just was too destitute herself. Anyhow, I’ve never asked her.

After the war ended, my dad didn’t return home. We had lived with Mom in housing provided to war plant workers during the war. When the war ended, Mom lost her job and could no longer pay the rent.

When I was about fourteen years old, I found out what happened on that terrible night so long ago. The two men and the woman were California social workers. To get rid of us, the state used the excuse that we were Indians. In the 1940s, it was still common practice to remove Indian children from their families and place them in orphanages for so-called reeducation. Maxine, who was fourteen, was placed in an orphanage in Raymond, California where she met and grew up with her future husband. Marline and Johnny were also placed in an orphanage and were adopted by a family in Walnut Grove, California. Bobby was adopted by my mother’s sister and her husband. He was raised as my cousin.

Grandpa lived in a three-room, sugar-pine shack. It had no electricity, running water, or inside toilet. Of course, for the first few years of our lives, my sister and I didn’t realize anyone else in the world had these things, either. Years later, as I was leaving my grandfather’s to visit my aunt Mary’s home in Madera, California, Grandpa warned me not to enter her house, because she had a toilet inside. Grandpa thought that was the nastiest thing he’d ever heard of. I thought the same when he told me.

Life was so simple then. Grandpa was born in 1856. He was very set in his Indian ways. As I got a little older, he started teaching me those ways. He taught me many things that I remember to this day.

As I sat on the couch drinking coffee, I remembered the story of the Mugrump tribe. It went like this:

There are two long roads in life. Those roads start when we’re born and end when we die. One road is red, and one road is black. A fence separates the two roads. There is a tribe of people who walk the black road, a road of evil. There is also a tribe of people who walk the red road. That is the good road, the road Tachasila, our Creator, wants us to walk. There is a third tribe whose members sit on the fence. Their mugs are on one side, and their rumps are on the other. They are the Mugrump tribe. Grandpa said to never trust these people, because you never know which side of life they are on.

As I sat on the couch, allowing my mind to wander over those wonderful times in my life, I also remembered the serious lessons Grandpa taught me.

He taught me how to track. I loved tracking. I’d follow a squirrel’s tracks as it went about the business of gathering acorns. I could tell what it was doing and thinking by its tracks—how it had stopped and stood on its hind legs to look for predators, especially red-tailed hawks and eagles. I could see how its heels had stayed planted in the dust but its toe and claw marks widened as it turned its head from side to side to search the sky.

Sometimes I’d follow deer for a couple of days and study their habits. Bear were especially fun to follow. Their antics were sometimes comical, especially when they found and raided wild honeybee hives.

When I wasn’t tracking I tried making bows and arrows. They were crude and weak at first. I cut up pieces of old rusty cans for arrowheads. Grandpa just watched me, not saying anything at first. Finally, after many tries, Grandpa realized I was determined. He showed me how to select the proper piece of wood out of the California oaks that grew all over the foothills. He showed me how to carve the bow, stake it out in the creek in a bow shape for several days, and hang it in the smokehouse for about three days until it was hard as iron. Grandpa had an ironwood bow hung over the door, but he never used it. He said he could no longer pull it back.

He also showed me how to make proper arrowheads. I took a few pieces of obsidian, placed a piece of leather in the palm of my hand, and put the obsidian pieces on top of the leather. I used an old nail to press on the edge of the obsidian to knap off a piece, and then turned it over to knap off the other side. As bits and pieces fell off, the arrowheads started taking shape. They were crude at first, but they got better and better until they looked like the ones I would occasionally find along the creeks.

We lived close to the town of North Fork, California. In those days it was just a wide spot in the middle of a dirty road. Once a month, my sister and I walked to town with Grandpa. He had an old wooden wheelbarrow that we’d carefully stack with all the extra eggs, butter, and milk we had accumulated in the spring house and take it to town with us. Grandpa traded our produce for coffee, salt, and once in a while, a little hard candy for my sister and me.

North Fork had a one-room government schoolhouse. I had heard about it that summer, but I had no idea what was in store for me. I’ll never forget that first day of school. Grandpa had ordered a pair of shoes, a shirt, and pair of jeans for me. The jeans were about four inches too long, so I had to roll them up. I put the boots on and tried to take a step. I guess I didn’t get them off the ground, because I fell face first. I told Grandpa I couldn’t wear them. He said I had to, and he made me practice for a while on the porch. The only way I could make them work was to lift my foot straight up about six inches, throw my foot forward, and then stomp down to keep from falling. Looking back on it, I bet on that first day I looked like a stork in Li’l Abner jeans stalking a frog.

My great-uncle Sam had given me an old horse named Barney that summer before school started. Barney was an ornery old cuss and didn’t like to be saddled up. He was probably smarter than most people. Grandpa never thought much of him. He said the only reason Great-Uncle Sam had left him at our place was because he couldn’t make it all the way to the glue factory.

I liked old Barney in spite of his ornery ways, so on the first day of school I went out to the corral to saddle him up. He eyed me suspiciously as I walked across the corral to his stall, carrying a coffee can with a few rolled oats in it. I poured a few rolled oats at a time into his feed box. Finally I had poured enough in to make it worth his while. He stepped into the stall and started eating, keeping an eye on me at the same time. I pulled the blanket off the stall wall and smoothed it out on Barney’s back. I turned to grab the saddle to throw over the blanket. Barney twisted his head around, grabbed the blanket with his teeth, slung it on the ground, and stepped on it with his left front hoof. I finally got the halter on him. I gave up on the saddle and rode him bareback to school. Barney didn’t like leaving his corral, so I had to keep kneeing him and jerking his reins around to keep him going. Once out of sight of the corral, he gave up the fight and plodded along to school.

Barney reminded me of another trick that he had that day when I finally arrived at school. The schoolyard was full of kids. Since I was new, everyone stopped playing and watched me ride up. I was proud of the fact that there were no other horses tied up in front of the school. I reined to a stop and slid down off of Barney. I took a step toward the hitching post with the reins in my hand to tie Barney up, only I forgot about my boots. I went straight down, face first. Barney saw his chance. He jerked his head up, pulled the reins out of my hands, and took off over the hill for home, running like a young quarter horse. As I rolled over on my back to get up, all the kids busted out laughing. I couldn’t get up. The boots felt like boards tied to my feet. I eventually had to take them off to get up. No one ever forgot that day. Years later, when I went back to the reservation, that was the first story everyone brought up.

I hated that school from the start. It was an old, wooden building that looked like a church. There was a bell tower on the top front of the steeply pitched roof. Old, wooden steps led up to double doors at the front of the school. Inside the doors was a foyer with a coat rack on each side, girls on the left and boys on the right. Past the foyer was one long room. The teacher’s desk was at the far end. Two blackboards hung on the wall behind the desk. Between the desk and the side wall stood an old iron potbellied stove. The boys were responsible for bringing in firewood and building a fire every morning. The desks were the old-fashioned kind with chairs attached to them. The lids lifted up for storage. We never had anything to store, though; we only had one book for all twelve grades, and we turned it back in to the teacher at the end of the day.

I hated that book. It was about three inches thick. On the front cover it had a picture of a wagon train coming across the prairie. Men and women walked alongside the wagons, all dressed in nice, clean clothes. In the foreground there were ragged-looking, half-starved Indians sitting next to mud-and-stick wickiups. As the settlers walked along, they were handing the Indians bread, tools, and sacks of flour. The message was clear as a bell to us.

The first forty pages of the book were spelling lessons. The second forty or so pages were arithmetic lessons. There were some pages for the boys about 4-H stuff and some pages for the girls about housekeeping. The rest of the book was a twisted version of history: how the white men migrated across the United States, saving the local savages from each other. Like I said, I hated the school and the book.

I had a rough time in school at first. I was teased because I was a half-breed. It only took a few weeks for me to discover I was related to nearly everyone in the school. I developed a tough attitude, and as the years went by, I fought most of my cousins over it. They finally accepted me.

I never paid attention to what was going on in class. Instead, I stared out the window, watching the blue jays scolding each other and hopping from limb to limb in the big oak tree in the schoolyard.

As soon as the teacher rang the bell signaling the end of another school day, all the boys raced for the door. I would tear off my shirt, run across the yard, and run into the woods. I’d grab my bow and arrows from where I’d hidden them during school and run toward home, my favorite squirrel hunting grounds. Sometimes I’d get lucky and bag one. Sometimes I’d get a cottontail rabbit and take it home to Grandpa. He would make dumplings, add salt and wild onions, put them in a pot with a lid on it, and slow-cook them for hours. Those were great times.

Yes, it’s been nine years now since I’ve left Grandpa; five since I’ve left California and Mom. Mom, my stepfather, Archie, my two younger brothers, Buster and Dutch, and my youngest sister Gloretta, who are Mom and Archie’s children, left California this past year also and moved to Oregon to give it a try. Archie landed a job working at a dairy farm just outside of Forest Grove, Oregon. Mom was happier than I had ever seen her, I think it was because we were near each other again. Archie, however, didn’t like the damp weather. He was originally from Oklahoma and wanted to move back there. After one summer in Oregon, they moved to Oklahoma. He couldn’t find steady work there, so after a few months they wound up in Texas, where they live now.

When I was thirteen I found out my mom and Archie were married. Mom decided to try to retrieve Mary and me from Grandpa around that time. Mom and Archie arrived suddenly one day. They were complete strangers to me. Mary and I have been living with Grandpa for the past ten years. They told Grandpa they wanted Mary and me to go live with them in Madera, California. This terrified me. I ran away up into the foothills above the house, where I could look down and watch the house until they left. I saw Grandpa glance up a couple of times into the hills, where I was crouched behind some big granite boulders. From the way he seemed to look straight at me, I could tell he knew where I was hiding.

After Mom and Archie left that day, I was sitting in a hollow behind an old oak tree, thinking of what to do next, when I felt someone looking at me. I looked behind me, and there was Grandpa. I could never hide from him.

He walked up and squatted down next to me.

I didn’t say anything to him. We sat in silence, staring down at the little sugar-pine shack I had been raised in. We just sat, watched, and listened. Squirrels chased each other from tree to tree, and a single dove gave its lonesome call for a mate in the distance.

Finally, Grandpa spoke. Grandson, I’m getting old. I’ve taught you many things about the ways of our people, the animals, and our world. He paused for a moment. But there’s a different world out there than the one you know. It’s a world that I can no longer hide you from. It’s a world far more dangerous than you can imagine, where men live without honor and where women paint their faces, smoke long cigarettes, and stare at men without respect. In this world, men hardly ever walk. They use machines to travel and fly.

I knew what Grandpa was telling me was true. I’d seen cars, of course, and marveled at the airplanes flying overhead from time to time. Grandpa also occasionally brought home a National Geographic magazine, and I’d read it until I wore out the pages. Yes, I knew Grandpa was right. I knew of this world, and I feared it. I wanted to see it, but not live in it. I sat there holding my breath, fearing what he would say next.

Your mother and I talked about what to do. She wants you to go with her to your aunt Mary’s house in Madera for a couple of days. She promises to bring you back.

Promises? I blurted out. Grandpa, she’s my mother, but she’s a washisu (white), and they all lie. I’ll never come back. You’ve told me many times how the washisu lied to our people to get them to leave Yosemite. They said the land would be set aside as sacred land, not to be defaced by white or Indian. It was all a lie. Now look at us. We’ve lost all the creator has given us. No. It’s a lie, and I won’t trust her.

I jumped up and ran higher into the foothills. I knew I could easily outrun Grandpa. He’d sit for a while and let me think about what he’d said. But this time I wouldn’t come back, at least not for several days, until my mother had returned and left without me. I knew Grandpa would track me down, but this time I would not be found. I used every trick I knew. I backtracked for a while, stepping backward in my tracks until I came to a large oak with long limbs that reached out over some granite boulders. I carefully pulled myself up the tree trunk and crawled out on a large limb. I made sure I left no scuff marks on the tree, and I was careful not to disturb any of the moss on the north side of the branches.

When I got to the boulders, I let myself down, watching to make sure I didn’t disturb the lichen that grew there. Jumping from boulder to boulder, I went as far as I could without touching the dirt. I figured I went about two hundred yards. Once I was on the ground, I tried to keep from stepping on any leaves or soft dirt. I knew it would only take one disturbed area for Grandpa to pick up my trail, and this was only one of many tricks I would use to lose him so I could have time to think. I hiked all the rest of the day using fallen logs, creeks, and oak trees to hide my trail.

As the sun started to set, I found a stream. I chased some small trout up into the shallows and kept them at bay. I sharpened a stick, cut a back barb about an inch from the point, and managed to spear a couple of the trout. I dared not build a fire, so I ate them raw.

I found a large cedar with a hollowed-out, rotted area at the base, and I crawled into it. The sun had warmed the tree and the soft dirt at the base of it. I cut some boughs from a pine tree and pulled them up around me. There I was, warm and safe. This was the world I knew, the world no one could take from me. The coyotes called in the distance, and the forest lay still around me. I was content Grandpa wouldn’t find me, so I drifted off to sleep. I would come back under my own terms.

In my dreams, I wandered through the foothills I knew and loved. I climbed up Table Top Mountain, sat on the boulders at the top, and looked down at the slopes where the U.S. Army had laid siege to our people. I knew every inch of that mountain.

There were two mass graves that held most of the gone-before, our people who were killed in the siege of Table Top. Every large boulder told a story of fighting and dying with courage and determination.

In my dreams, I smelled smoke and heard the crackling of burning pine. I woke up, opened my eyes, and there sat Grandpa with a small fire in front of him, his old blue coffee pot half buried in the coals.

I sat bolt upright. How did you find me? I blurted out. I’d been so careful to hide my tracks.

Grandpa just looked at me with his wise, hundred-year-old eyes. Son, you were trying to hide your tracks? It looked to me like you were deliberately showing your way.

I should have known. Mother Earth hid nothing from Grandpa. He could track a rattlesnake over a rock pile.

He poured some boiling coffee into my tin cup. I realized then that after I’d run away, he’d walked back home and picked up some supplies before tracking me. He must have followed me in the dark the last part of the way. There was no way I could ever deceive him in the woods. He poured his coffee and sat sipping for a long time. I could see he was deep in thought. I wanted to talk, but knew I would have to wait until he was ready.

The sky was starting to lighten in the east. This was my favorite time of the day. The rugged Sierra Nevada Mountains would seem to change from light gray to blue and then to light orange, casting shadows on the foothills as the sun broke over the high, snow-capped peaks.

Finally, Grandpa spoke. Son, all white men do not lie. As I watched you sleep, your spirit caused you to groan and talk. You spoke of the siege of Table Top.

All I could do was to stare at Grandpa. Could I hide nothing from him, even in my sleep?

He went on, saying, Have you forgotten who saved the last 261 people of our nation?

How could I forget? Grandpa had taught me our history ever since I could remember. He taught me that the Yosemite people were a nation of tribes that had retreated up into Yosemite—a word that means fortress. Then the white men advanced on their land and a bounty was placed on their scalps: young or old, men or women; it didn’t matter. He told me how our people had been hunted down and killed by bounty hunters and farmers in the 1800s, and how the remaining so-called wild savages from different tribes were driven farther up the Merced River. They made a stand in Yosemite.

I remember him saying that before the turn of the century, a man came to us in peace, telling us he wanted to help us to