Wild Instinct

45

Later, Gale and Geronima walk the beach at Crystal Cove up in Newport. The afternoon is cool and gray, and the offshore wind blows crowns of spray off the waves.

Geronima ignores the NO DOGS ON STATE BEACH sign. Hulk streaks, shrieking, his leash splashing the sand behind him as the gulls reluctantly lift off and relocate.

Gale looks south to the great cliff on which the Tarlow mansions tower over the ocean below. Pictures happy Tarlow and beautiful Norris Kennedy in Vegas for that fight. Pictures them in exotic parts of the world, chasing their spectacular birds. Pictures Tarlow trying to get a good flash shot of the great gray owl and her young in the nest that night, as behind him new bird buddy Vernon Jeffs brings a gun to his head.

They walk the mile north to a restaurant and by the time they start back after dinner the sun is low in the west.

Orange sunlight hits mansion windows. And hits the sand on which they walk, as their ancients walked.

Geronima beside him, wind in her shiny black hair, tired Hulk at heel beside her.

This is what you get, Gale thinks.

This is what you need.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Mark Owen Gottlieb, Trident Media Group senior vice president and agent, for his insightful early read of this novel.

And Kristin Sevick, Minotaur Books editor, for her perspicacious editing, enthusiasm, and general good humor.

Also, my thanks to Evan T. Pritchard, founder of the Center for Algonquin Culture, for his detailed and very helpful notes on the Indigenous Acjacheme people of California, who inspired, inhabit, and haunt this novel.

Last, but always first, thanks to Rita Parker, who always sees what I am trying to see, and finds a way to explain it to me.

Author’s Note

The spirit and history of the Acjacheme people of Southern California helped inspire this book.

Often called “Juaneños” because of their eighteenth-century relationship with Mission San Juan Capistrano in Orange County, California, the Acjacheme rarely refer to themselves in that way. They have for centuries ignored the Juaneño label.

Most of my research for this novel is from the books and articles about the Mission Indians, of which the Acjacheme are one tribe. They are not recognized by the federal government, and the State of California has no official “recognition” laws or policies for native Californians.

The best book I found is Stephen O’Neil’s The Acjachemen (Juaneño) Indians of Coastal Southern California. Wonderful stuff.

I used the writings of Pablo Tac, who was a Luiseño native (associated with Mission San Luis Rey; just as the Acjacheme are associated with nearby Mission San Juan Capistrano). These two tribes played each other in lacrosse-like games, and made war upon each other, and intermarried. The friars of San Luis Rey took the fiercely intelligent Pablo Tac to Italy as a fourteen-year-old, where he studied at the College of the Propogation of the Faith in Rome, writing in both Luiseño and Spanish about his life in and around the mission in the early nineteenth century. His writings, later translated into English, are illuminating. Pablo died in Italy at the age of nineteen.

Also, I used Chinigchinich, a booklet written in the early 1800s by Friar Geronimo Boscana, focusing on both Acjacheme and Luiseño peoples. It’s an odd and contradictory book, vivid and passionate but condescending, and very clear on the idea that Spaniards like himself created the missions of California to convert the natives to Christianity and recruit them into enlightened lives as citizens and subjects of Spain.

In order to give a voice to the Acjacheme — whose existence in California can be traced back some five thousand years — I created a character in Wild Instinct who tells his story about helping to build Mission San Juan Capistrano. His name is Luis Verdad, and he relates a harrowing hunt for a mountain lion that has carried off his little sister.

I’ve wandered around these missions for hours. Restored, they are old and beautiful places, alive with history and art and the Catholic Church. They are also the stately reminders guarding the sometimes dark and shameful collision between the California natives and their European, American, and Mexican “masters.”