While in L. A., Yana had gone through "lots of changes."

IT RAINED heavily but briefly during our last ride. We rode with a young kid and two chicks who occasionally went to the commune and said they knew some of the people there. Yana asked them if they knew where her husband and his lover were. They didn't know. They let us out where the pavement stopped on the road that led off the highway to the commune.

It had all but stopped raining, but the dirt road leading through the mountain meadows to thicker woods and the commune was a river of red mud. The sun was setting as we walked the five miles to the commune. Yana slogged along about ankle deep in mud. I held her sleeping bag for her once while she squatted in the road to piss and a few other times at places where the road had sharp gravel. We had to pass up one shortcut because the rocks would be too hard on Yana's feet. By the time we got to the vicinity of the commune, it was quite dark in the valley, though sunlight still shone on the meuntain top.

Yana had "brought another sister into the world." She had had her first child, a daughter by her husband, nine months earlier, and, as I noticed that night, she would be having another child too. The daughter, Tana, as well as a few other infants, had been with Yana's L. A. group. Tana and a little boy slightly older than she had been the favorites of the group. The little boy, Yana said, was like a little king, who, in way, ruled the group. Tana was like his queen.

I asked her where her daughter was. She said that lately she and Tana had been going through changes, and that she didn't want to put ideas into her daughter's head the way her parents had done to her. So she had "given it back to itself."

We went straight to the hot springs on the north side of a little ravine which cut through the commune. As we were crossing the ravine, Yana asked me if I wanted some of the gum she was chewing. I said yes and she parted her lips and put the gum between her front teeth. Thinking she meant for me to bite off the piece that showed in front of her teeth, I went over to do so.

Just as I went to bite it loose, she puckered her lips and I bit her. Her lip bled rather badly. She looked up into my eyes as if I had done it on purpose and said pleadingly, "Don't bite!" If she hadn't said that and looked at me the baleful way she did, I never would have thought I might have done it on purpose. To the best of my knowledge, it was an accident. But I admitted to myself that friction had arisen between us as it had arisen between Yana and the two kids from New Jersey. I apologized to her and said I hadn't meant to bite her.

"Don't bite," she said. "I would never bite you... but I'd love to suck you."

I hoped that was an indication of forgiveness.

Yana told me about "cutting capers" with her friends out in L. A. What they would do was break into some expensive suburban house at night, either alone or in groups, and while making no attempt at secrecy or quiet, take or break anything they wanted to, Yana had gone into homes alone, unarmed, and turned on the stereo or television while she ransacked the house. She said no one ever tried to stop her. They were so "afraid of themselves," she said that they'd just lie frozen in bed thinking, "Oh my God! There's a BURGLAR in the house!"

The sacred Indian hot springs had been "improved" by white man who had built a resort there. The hot water ponred out of the mountain and ran through a succession of four or five partly natural, partly concrete pools, becoming cooler at each step. Through two waterfalls, it emptied into a huge man-made swimming pool which was now lined with moss.

Because it was getting cold. Yana and I went to the very top, stripped, and got into the hot sulfur water. The water was very warm, about 18 inches deep. We glided through the pool with only our hands supporting us and looked out over the rim. We could see the string of little pools; the waterfall and the swimming pool, the ruins of the resort on the right, the ravine beyond, and way off in the night, another row of mountains. Then our shoulders got cold and we slid back into the water. . . .

"IVE DECIDED not to kill you." she said abruptly as we were getting out of the pool.

"How do you mean?"

"I'm not going to destroy your mind. I could, but I don't want to."