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We fooled them; we fought. It seemed unreal then that we'd do that. It seemed unreal to the army, too; that's why we did as well as we did. Some of us didn't even take time to lace our boots, just wrapped the laces around our ankles. The others strapped on snowshoes and went down the draw toward the cienega. I didn't have snowshoes; I just waded along the best I could in other people's tracks.
The troops were in no hurry. They were still in the cienega. They'd unloaded from the two light landers, I guess a platoon of them, and were forming up to move on us.
None of us had a night scope, of course, but the soldiers weren't wearing camouflage whites, and there was moonlight. With the snow cover, it was easy to see them. But it was too dark to use the sights on our rifles. We just aimed down the tops of our barrels and started to shoot from behind trees. We had time to shoot two or three rounds each before they started shooting back, but when they did, it was the most frightening thing in my life, before or since. It sounded like four hundred rifles instead of forty. I could hear bullets hitting tree trunks and rocks, and branches falling off the trees above and behind us. They fired for about half a minute, I guess.
Then they stopped, and started moving forward. Someone said later that they'd gotten orders through headphones in their helmets. They were to take us prisoner if they could, and they thought they'd intimidated us; thought we were ready to quit, and I was. One or two of our people started shooting again though, so the soldiers did too, and then the rest of us did. I shot two or three times more before Lemmi yelled to cease fire and surrender. After a few seconds, the soldiers stopped shooting again, too. They came up and arrested all or us. A few started to beat us with their rifle butts, but their sergeants swore at them and made them quit. We'd shot a few of them-I heard we killed three-and the rest were pretty mad. Five of us had been shot, and two were dead.
Another lander came down in the cienega, and they loaded us and took off. They didn't stop at Lukachukai. They flew us straight to Window Rock, where they'd set up a fenced compound with army field shelters, just for guerrillas, and mostly still empty. The other Window Rock internees were kept in the community college and high school auditoriums, and the livestock-judging pavilion.
The field shelters we were in didn't have any power cells in the heaters, so they seemed pretty cold, especially for sleeping. Especially when we lay on our cots in summer-weight sleeping bags, shivering and looking out through the transparent roots, seeing stars through holes in the clouds.
Actually, most of us didn't know what it was to sleep cold. Not then.
The army let us know about our families-Marilyn was at the high school-but they kept us segregated. We were guerrillas. I never thought of myself that way, but we were. They kept bringing more people to the guerrilla compound, some of them women. This went on for several days. The Navajo Reservation is bigger than some states-about the size of West Virginia-with a thousand canyons, a thousand ridges and mesas, and a lot of its people live out among them on isolated ranches.
The army didn't know who or where the guerrillas were. So they waited for attacks, and killed or rounded up the attackers, and checked out little ranches for groups of men with weapons.
Quite a few White Mountain Apaches had driven up from the Fort Apache Reservation-seventy or eighty at least-and maybe forty or fifty from the San Carlos, co
Those numbers are not exact. I've estimated from hearsay, and from how many ended up in the guerrilla compound. The nine Mescaleros are the only ones whose starting number I learned exactly. Four of the nine were killed or hospitalized, or maybe escaped to hide out somewhere; the other five were interned with us.
The compound got more and more crowded until, after eight days, more troops arrived. Not the U.S. Army this time, but CoDominium Marines. Russian-speaking. Someone said the army wasn't happy about having to do that job, and that the whole thing had gotten out. Soldiers had told their families on the phone, also the newsfax and television, and the government couldn't pretend anymore that nothing was going on.
Then shuttles landed at the Window Rock airfield and they started loading us. I was lucky: I got a seat by one of the windows. After a few minutes we lifted, moving upward and outward till the rim of the Earth curved blue and white against black, and still outward till the curvature was strong. If I'd had a better view, I could have seen the Earth as a great beautiful ball. Finally, out beyond the outer Van Allen Belt, we docked with a converted freighter waiting to take us to Haven. I was feeling pretty bad; I thought I'd never see my wife again. But before they finished shuttling people up, they'd brought all the internees, Marilyn included, and we were together again.
The Alexei Makarov was not a Bureau of Relocation ship. It was a tramp ore carrier on contract to Ke
At the start there were 2,436 men and boys, and 1,179 women and girls, thirteen years old or older. There had been more than three hundred younger children with the internees, but someone in the government got them taken away before we shuttled up. The woman in charge of taking them said they'd be settled with people on Earth; mat conditions on Haven were too extreme for young children. That didn't help the children born aboard the Makarov. And it wouldn't help those who'd be born after we arrived on Haven. Or their mothers.
One of the first things Marilyn told me, when we got together, was that she'd started getting morning sickness while she was interned; we were going to be parents. She didn't know what that meant. I did-I'd read about childbirth on Haven-but I didn't tell her.
Meanwhile there were more than 3,600 of the Di
George organized the Navajos according to clan, and the rest of us by tribe. Although I was only adopted Mescalero, the Mescaleros made me their spokesman because I could speak Navajo pretty well. From the start, most of the Apaches could pretty much carry on a conversation with each other, including the Navajos, each speaking his own dialect. But Mescalero is less like the others, and at first the Mescaleros had trouble understanding and being understood. And no one felt like speaking English; we felt betrayed by the English-language government.