Sacajawea had five children while with the Comancnes, but only two lived beyond infancy, the oldest, a son, Ticannaf, To Give Joy, and the youngest, a daughter, Yagawosier, Crying Basket.
CHARLES A. EASTMAN, Report to Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, March 2, 1925, pp. 1–69.
The tepee at the edge of camp was hidden by burr oak and wild grapevines. It was small, built for two, with highly colored paintings on the sides. The paintings were of the sun, depicting happiness, the moon, depicting restful nights, rain, meaning a good harvest of roots and berries, and at the sides of the door flap were fastened six silver bells. The hawk’s bells were cut from the fringe of Spring’s skirt. When the air stirred, the bells moved lightly with it.
The inside of the tepee was filled with branches of oak and sweet-smelling sassafras.
When Sacajawea woke in the morning, she glanced at Jerk Meat. He was still asleep under his robe. She smiled and brushed her hand along his long side hair. She sat up and threw off her robe and rushed from the tepee. The sun was high. She started a fire outside and listened to the distant barking of dogs, the creeping of the breeze through the oaks, and the soft speech of the villagers, barely audible. She ran on down through the trees to the creek’s edge. She knelt. Nose touching the water, she sipped a drink before bathing. She heard Jerk Meat call as she hummed softly to herself, letting her hair dry in the sun and by the heat of her small fire.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Bathing.”
“Why did you not waken me?”
Her dark eyes crinkled. “You were sleeping with a smile on your face; I could not waken you.” She took his head in her hands and pulled it down to her own.
“It was bad to wake and not find you at my side.” He stroked her streaming hair. “Why did you not wait for me?”
“Come, let us go swimming together, then.”
“Together?” he asked, startled. “Ai.”
“A man and woman do not swim together.”
“Why not?”
“No one does,” he said. “No one ever does.”
“And so—would you like to—with me?” she cupped his chin and kissed him. He moved his lips against hers.
“Do I do it right?” he asked. “I like to touch your lips.”
“Ai,” she said. She kissed him again. “You do it right.”
He cupped her chin gently and kissed her. His hand moved across her firm, round breasts and fingered the sky blue stone in the hollow of her throat.
She could see the wisps of smoke rising from the tepees of the village.
“We have everything here,” she said happily, pointing to the inside of their tepee. Inside were parfleches of mesquite bean cakes, roasted yucca fruit, ripe acorns. Even the necessities for preparing the food had been left by Hides Well. Spoons of buffalo bone, water gourds, fire drills, and woven grass containers.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“Happy?” she repeated. “Even more happy than I have ever been. More happy than when I was with my son, and the other one, called Tess. More happy than when I was with the white soldiers.”
“White soldiers!” He jumped backward, and his dark eyes blazed.
“Ai,” she said. “I will tell you how it was that I was chosen to show them the homeland of the People.”
“Chosen?” he asked, more perplexed.
“It is something I could not tell everyone. They would have thought my tongue the most forked in the whole Quohadas band.”
“Tell me,” he commanded.
When she finished, however, it was not soldiers he was indignant about. “What a stupid, cruel man—that one, Toussaint Charbonneau!”
Sacajawea slumped against Jerk Meat with an inner amusement mixed with a draining sense of relief. She thought, Who can ever tell how a man is going to react. In her moccasins most women, especially a woman of the Quohadas, would have held to a rigid adherence to the ideas of the tribe. She would have shaken her head and said it was a squaw’s duty to follow along with her man and take whatever he gave. Instead, Jerk Meat had immediately and emotionally identified himself with the captains. His whole reaction was masculine, personal, and uncritical. Charbonneau was the only one at fault.
“A squaw should not talk of these things—maybe. The Quohadas would say it is not modest. But I must tell you so that you can know me and know that I am not like all other squaws. But it must be between only you, my man, and me. No one else must know all these things. They would not believe. They would not understand how such things could be true.”
“Ai! Tell me what I already know. How are you not like other women?”
“Last night I was happiest of all. When we came here, the feeling was so good it seemed as though it could not go on. It seemed that surely I must die, and when I was with you as one man-woman that I could never live again and be happy alone without you. I have never felt that way. I found something new. And then, this morning I did not want that feeling at all. I woke and looked at you and touched you and felt your face and hair and listened to you breathe and there was nothing I wanted different. This is how it should be! I thought. And I have never before known of it. I am a grown woman, but I do not know very much. Then when I left you, I knew I could have remained at your side. Then the coming-back thought gave me the feeling of my heart coming through my skin.
“And at the creek there is a deep place and the water against my body makes it feel good because my body was clean with you, not used in whatever manner traders and mountain men deal in sordid acts with squaws. I kept thinking what you did to me, and I loved my own body because it had given you happiness.” She pulled away from him, blushing. “I think now it is not modest for me to reveal inner thoughts to you. You asked me if I was happy,” she said defensively.
“There is no modesty between us,” he said. “I had another woman once. I know something of what a woman thinks.”
“A woman should not talk too much, though. Pronghorn and Hides Well would be shocked.”
“No,” he said, “between us everything can be said. We are two people, yet one unit. Everything can be said. The good and the bad, the most beautiful and theugly. There must be nothing secret, no words that we cannot listen to from each other, nothing we cannot do with each other. We are bound together, yet separate.”
“You are more wonderful than I thought. You think deeply. You are gentle. You understand. You are a man. I give my love to you.” She put her hand on her heart and made the sign of love and held her hand out to him.
“Now listen to me.” He held her off, surveying her brown body, frowning at the white lines of the old scars on her back. “Each time something is held back, it builds part of a wall. Each little thing, no matter how small, builds on that wall. And then one day you will find you are on one side and I am on the other and it has become so high there is no climbing over. For a time we have each lived within ourselves, alone, and now we must start something new and share everything together. Everything. We must not grow alone in any way.”
“Ai,” she said, “like two wandering streams that come together. Can you feel the same happiness I do?”
“Ai, I can feel it. It is as though I have never felt happiness before. Let us not lose our good feelings. Each person thinks he or she alone has these feelings, as though the feeling were created each time. And each person is right. No one feels the same things. They go by the same names, but they are different, just as faces are different.”
She squatted by the glowing fire pit and dipped a flat bean cake in the meat stew she’d started earlier. “I must be a good woman and feed you.”
“I have forgotten about food.”
“You must eat,” she said seriously. “Many seasons ago my own mother used to say that a man judges his woman by the way she prepares his food. I do not want you to think I have no skill.” She hastened to the inside of the tepee for a cooking basket. She quickly brushed a tear aside and desperately wished she did not feel so much like weeping at this very moment of joyousness. “Go for a swim in the creek.”
“If you will come with me,” he said shyly.
“No. If we went together, we would not come back for a long time.”
“Ai, you little fox.”
“The water is maybe too cold for you?” She lifted aleather lid, reached in, and threw out a piece of brittle bread at him. “That is the direction of the water,” she said, and pointed with another piece of bread.
He made a little joke. “Do not eat all the stew before I return.”
She arranged the bread with pieces of dried meat on it. She combed out her soft warm hair and pinned it behind her ears with a piñon stick for the sweet smell it gave. She remembered the white tunic Hides Well had left in the tepee. She felt more like a woman than she had ever felt before.
The food was ready when he returned. He started to eat. “Why do you not eat?” he asked.
She shook her head and bit her lip. “I somehow cannot.”
“I cannot, either, then,” he said.
“Oh, please, you must.”
“Why do you cry, Little Fox?”
“Oh,” she said, “I am not certain. Maybe because I am so happy. It is the weeping of joy.”
He moved toward her, seeing how beautiful she looked in the white doeskin tunic, which was very plain, with fringes at the bottom and the armholes. The neck had a little blue quillwork, and a narrow, blue-dyed doeskin belt encircled her waist.
“Do not come to me now,” she said softly. “Let me look at you.”
He ate a few more bites, then put the bark plate down and went to her.
“You should have finished your meal. But I am glad you came over to me.” She shivered against him and buried her face in his neck. “I will try to outgrow this quickly.” Her voice quavered. “I know how a small baby feels when it first begins to walk. I know how a rabbit feels when it opens its small eyes for the first time. The beginning is beautiful, but it is so new and so big a feeling, it is frightening.” She lay beside him on the grass. “You will never grow tired of me?”
“Never. But will you grow tired of me and then go back to that wandering in search of your grown son?”
“Never will I leave you, my beloved,” she said, meaning every word. “There is nothing outside to which I belong. Nothing anymore. I belong only to you.”
“You will tell me that often,” he whispered. “We must never forget that, no matter what happens.”
He carried her up a little hill into an oak grove. He carried her as if she were no more than a sack of breath feathers. The hill sloped into a small gully, which was packed with years of fallen leaves. “This is a couch made for us,” he said. “Remove the white tunic and sit in the sunlight. You are as beautiful as any young girl on her first day with a man.”
She still felt shy with him. She obeyed and liked the feel of the sun on her back. She watched him take off his vest and leggings and sit beside her. He sat for some minutes, waiting for her shyness to recede, then he began to stroke her body with the tips of his fingers. She kissed him on the forehead, eyes, and mouth. He kissed back hungrily.
“You are like no man I have known.”
“You do not like me?” he questioned gruffly, tugging at her short hair.
“I do like you! Ai, I love you. You give me a feeling I never knew anyone had.”
He lay with his head on her outstretched arm. “I have a new joy and a wonder because of you. I wonder at the sights, sounds, and feelings because they appear larger and more clear than before. It is like seeing things through a flattened drop of clean water. Always stay close to me. I want to touch you.”
He loved her and she felt an explosion in her belly. They clung to one another in ecstasy. The fierce, urgent emotion had been so great that it caused her to cry. The tears wet his shoulder and he stroked her forehead. They slept undisturbed.
The days passed one after another as beads strung one behind the other on a string. He swept out the tepee and arranged the cooking things. She folded sleeping robes and cleaned their clothing. He hung a buffalo paunch on four upright sticks and she filled it with water. Rocks were heated and forked sticks were used to place them in the water. He added strips of dried meat to that boiling water and she added wild carrots and onions dug from the edge of the creek. He showed her how to make a dressing from wild honey, buffalo tallow, and water to use over the cooked meat.
Jerk Meat practiced regularly with his bow and arrows and sometimes let her try. They ate and swam and walked through the trees. They lay in the sun and listened to the songs of the birds. At night they sat by their small fire and smelled the burning wood, and after the fire died they lay on their backs and looked at the sky and asked each other many questions.
She told him of her childhood and of her capture by the Minnetarees. She told him of the sea people who live in the Great Western Waters, the seals that bark and play so close to land that they amuse the people on the banks with their antics. She told him of the flood in the Rocky Mountains and how Chief Red Hair had saved her baby and herself and how Charbonneau had cried out like a pregnant squaw. She watched his eyes widen when she told him about the carcass of the huge whale on the sands of the Great Western Waters.
He told her of the time he was nearly captured by the Tonkas, the flesh-eating Comanches of the south. He had saved himself by quickly digging a hole in the sand and burying himself until the band had passed. He was alone that day seeking his medicine.
“Did you find your medicine? Did you dream a great dream?” she asked eagerly.
“I did not dream. The nights were not cold enough, and I did not starve long enough. But I found my medicine in the skull of the buffalo. I was trapped two nights in a place where many buffalo had died. The timber wolves were all around hunting for small animals. They would have had me, but I stayed in the middle of that dying ground with the skulls all about and the wolves did not come near. From that time on, the buffalo skull has been my special protector.”
“And when did you take a woman?” she asked.
“After I joined the young men’s Foolish Society. The Foolish Society is open to those who feel bold enough to disregard caution and ride up to an enemy and strike him using as his only weapons a quirt and a buffalo scrotum rattle. If he manages to escape death, he is then acclaimed a warrior for his valor. In spite of many casualties, there are always those who are reckless enough to take this chance.1
“My first woman thought I was brave and daringbecause I hit a Ute during a big horse raid. She was the foolish one, because truthfully I was frightened to death. She was the daughter of a Kiowa subchief, and a quiet, well-behaved woman. She caused me no sadness until she was crushed by her horse and our girl-child was born with no breath. She was called Tu-Pombi, Black Hair. I missed her.”
Sacajawea undid his braids and combed his hair gently. “You speak of your woman who has gone away and say her name. This is against our beliefs.”
“We already have done things not done by Comanches, but I do not regret them. They are good between us. Perhaps some of the white men you have named and spoken of are not living. You do not know. Perhaps the big black man we have laughed about is not living. Oh, I wish I had seen him just once. A man like that—black all over—oooay. Unbelievable!”
She braided his hair and tied the ends with thin leather strips and put the small piece of buffalo jawbone, worn shiny, back into the left braid just behind his ear. “You are handsome, my man.”
“You talk with sand in your mouth, my woman,” he said pleased, grabbing her by her short hair. “Come, we will swim together.”
Later she would remember how she stood in the deep part of the creek, the cold water reaching her waist. “I had one child—but maybe I cannot give you children.” The thought was new to her. She had not wanted another child with her white man.
“Then you will be my woman and my girl-child also,” was his answer.
She put her arms around him from behind and held him as though she would never let go.
“I will wash your back,” he said, and more softly, “you tell how the scars were put on you.” He worked the loam from the creek’s bank around her body as she told of her past. Next she scrubbed him, working the sandy soil into his hair, under his arms and across his chest and back. They rinsed clean by swimming into the deep hole under the overhang of willows. Then they lay on the sunny bank to dry. She noticed that the cottonwood leaves were beginning to turn yellow and there was the slightest chill to the evening air.
Jerk Meat boiled the water for the dried meat while Sacajawea found cress at the edge of the creek for salad. As he ate, Jerk Meat held his left jaw.
“Do you have a toothache?” she asked.
“It is not bad,” he said. “We will look for the mushroom to kill the pain when you finish.”
They walked along a game trail. Sacajawea found a tree fungus that she knew would ease pain when heated and held on the wound, but Jerk Meat was looking for a little brown mushroom that grew close to the ground near rotting wood. It was nearly dark when he found it. He dried it on a rock near the fire and stuffed it in the molar’s cavity. Sacajawea held the warm tree fungus on his jaw, then when she thought he ought to be feeling better she kissed him on the mouth.
“Woman,” he said, “a man can do nothing with you around. I believe the wise man who said that a man who has been with a woman lately is prone to wounds because arrows and bullets are drawn toward such a man. He must have known a woman like you.”
“Phfft,” she said, “there is no enemy band near here. See how quiet the village is.”
“There are always enemies in the land,” he said positively.
“You have strong medicine, and nothing will harm you. It won’t, will it?” she asked.
“No, but we must always be ready.” He took out his knife and cut down a slender branch of ash. He came back beside her and sat on a flat stone. He began to adze the branch down. “Here, you try some.” He handed her the branch and pointed to her knife at her waist.
“For a bow?” she asked, holding the clean white wood, and he nodded ai. He moved away and indicated that he was going to look for a buck deer they’d seen at the water hole early that morning. They needed the fresh meat. She watched until she could not see him, then cut the wood a certain length, measuring from her right hip across to her extended left fingertips, the way Big Badger had done. With the knife she beveled the bow with grooves cut down the back.
Over the evening fire Jerk Meat boiled the deer hooves and tendons until they were a sticky glue. He spread the glue over the back of the bow in several thinlayers and pasted on two sinews with the wide ends together in the middle. “Watch and do not forget,” he ordered. He spread on more glue and powdered it with white clay. He told her to repeat that treatment several times. Then she wrapped a piece of buckskin the width of a hand around the middle of the bow. Several days later she made the bowstring from the deer’s rear-leg tendon. Done, she set the bow aside to dry well.
He searched the bottom of the creek bed until he found a black stone that satisfied him. He gave it to Sacajawea to hold while he made a flintmaker, a tool with a long wooden handle tipped with a piece of deer antler. A burr oak handle fitted exactly under his right arm, from the tip of his middle finger to the point of his elbow. He set the butt of the handle against his chest to form a steady fulcrum, then, setting the antler point against the edge of the black stone held in his left hand, pressed firmly. Presently the stone fractured and a small flake flew to the ground. Flake after flake jumped off around the entire rim of the stone. He worked both sides.
While he was busy, Sacajawea chose a half-dozen chokecherry shoots, second growth, and cut them to her liking.
It became dark; they moved closer to the fire. Jerk Meat worked until he had six gleaming arrow points, perfectly tipped. Sacajawea had found feathers of the wild turkey and placed them tightly in the butt end of the chokecherry shoots. Seeing that the arrow points were properly grooved so that blood could flow from the wound they would make, Jerk Meat fastened them with glue and thin strings of buckskin onto the chokecherry shoots. He set the arrows several feet from the fire so they would dry gradually. To Sacajawea there was a magical sense of rightness in all they did together.
He murmured his satisaction and moved to his sleeping robe and closed his eyes and folded his hands over his lean belly, composing himself for sleep. Sacajawea lay quietly beside him. She liked this calmness by the outside fire, and she felt humbled in his presence. He was a man of discipline, yet one of gentle humor and logical good sense. Her love for him was deep.
One night, late-fall heat lightning flashed across thesky. The wind rose and caused acorns to pepper down like hailstones. Jerk Meat turned and placed his hand across Sacajawea’s shoulders. “Are you awake, my woman?”
“Ai.”
“We must go back to the village in the morning. We have stayed long. Maybe too long.”
She questioned him.
The thunder rumbled far away.
“See, the thunder tells us it is time to go back to the village and live with the Quohadas. We must begin to store up our own food for the winter.”
“I like being lazy with you,” she said like a petulant child.
“You must fold the tepee skins, woman, and pack the cooking things. We belong now in the village.”
In the morning she obeyed, knowing there would be other good things, but it would never be quite the same again, anywhere.
Most of Sacajawea’s time now was spent keeping her tepee neat, making clothing, talking with other women, and preparing the foods her man liked best. When he brought home a deer she learned how to mix the raw brains and leg marrow in a way he liked. The curdled milk from the stomach of a fawn, still young enough to be nursing, he considered a delicacy. Liver cooked with marrow and the raw tallow from around the kidneys she fixed especially for him. She smashed persimmons to a pulp after removing the seeds and dried this paste by spreading it on rocks in the sun. It was stored in large rolls. Hackberries were pulped in the same way, then mixed with bear’s fat and made into balls to be roasted on a stick over a fire. If she worked alone, invariably the thought of Jean Baptiste came to her mind. She wondered what he was doing, if she would see him again, and if he thought of her. She did not tell these thoughts to Jerk Meat.
Once Jerk Meat and some of the braves—on a spring trip to trade robes to Mexicans for shawls and silver and a rusty harmonica—witnessed the strange procession of white men stripped to their waist marching through the street of the small village called Santa Cruzde la Canada. Jerk Meat gave the harmonica to Sacajawea and asked her to play for him. When she finished, they discussed the strange parade far into the night. He’d seen men pulling large carretas with immovable wheels, the harnesses, made of horsehair, galling and painful. The men all wore caps and black masks and whipped themselves until the blood ran down their backs and covered the yucca-fiber whips. One man walked alongside the whippers playing a pito, a homemade flute, and close by him another twirled a matraca, or noise-maker. They sang short songs continuously. He told her of the strange, cruel thing done to one of the white men who was pinned to two crossed poles and carried up a small hill. The man’s hands and shoulders were bleeding, and a headband made from the thornbush was pushed low on his forehead. The man was slapped and spat upon, until finally his head sagged on his shoulders and the life passed from him. Then there was a great moaning and wailing as the matraca made thunderous noises.
“Why?” he asked, puzzled.
“It is hard to say why men are cruel to one another,” she answered, and thought of the Mandan Okeepa, the Torture Dance. Some men lived and some died during that ceremony. “The Mandans were as cruel when leather thongs were threaded into the muscle sinew of a man’s chest and back. The man was made to walk around crossed poles in the center of the Medicine Lodge.” She told Jerk Meat how Fast Arrow was chosen by Four Bears to take part in the Okeepa Ceremony. “It was a long time before he recovered from that ordeal. It is strange that both the white men and the Mandans used the headband of thorns and the crossed poles.”
“Huh,” sighed Jerk Meat, “that is the strange thing. In many ways men are similar, no matter where they live or what tribe they belong to.”
“I believe, now, that it is far better to be gentle with each other,” said Sacajawea. “I am certain the Great Spirit does not wish us to harm ourselves for foolish reasons. It is like killing more antelope than we can eat and then throwing away what spoils.”
“You talk like a squaw,” chided Jerk Meat. “I think it is not good to have an able-bodied man laid low because of self-inflicted wounds. What if the enemy chose that time to make a big raid on his horses? That man is not good to anyone. What if this torture ceremony left him crippled, without the use of an arm or leg?”
“The Mandans believe it is the way to show bravery. I have often wondered why other nations did not use such ceremonies.”
“Woman, they do other things. If they had thought of this torture ceremony, they would try it. Men are that way.”
By spring, Sacajawea knew she was pregnant. The thoughts that had disturbed her through the winter did not rise to the surface for a long time. A child to raise, to hold close to her breast, to sing for, to teach, enjoy, laugh with, and watch grow—this engulfed all her thoughts—and in good conscience she put off thoughts of her hunt for her grown son.
One morning when Jerk Meat was out hunting, she walked toward the river with a digging stick and her grass basket. She looked for wild roots. She stopped suddenly and bent down. She had found a cache, empty now, but exactly like the ones made years ago by the white soldiers under the direction of Chief Red Hair. She looked more carefully, her thoughts carrying her back to the time she had carried Pomp on her back. She easily lowered herself inside. At the cool bottom she scraped the soft dirt floor and found a metal awl, rusty but usable. She scraped again and found another. The thoughts and memories of her firstborn engulfed her. She found small seashells and blue and red beads and silver ear plugs. Climbing out with no difficulty, because of moss growing along the sides which made the footing easy, she put her find in her upturned skirt. She carried her treasures secretly back to the camp.
The next morning, she said to Spring, “Come with your digging stick and basket. I will show you something new.” Spring took Wild Plum to Big Badger, who was teaching him to spin wooden tops.
The women found two more caches and scratched in them for half the afternoon. At times Sacajawea hardly listened to Spring, but lived in the past. “I wanted to come back alone,” admitted Sacajawea.
“Oh, you must not be out alone now,” said Spring. “Your time is near. Someone should be with you.” She bent for red beads and found a granite drinking cup. They left the pits and dug roots. All at once, Spring called, “Look, there is snow!”
“Foolish one, this is summer,” laughed Sacajawea.
“Lost Woman, I swear it,” said Spring, “come with me and see.” She ran through the buffalo grass pointing all the while to the field of brilliant, sparkling white. Sacajawea sucked in her breath and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “How can this be?”
They knelt on the light crust, and it cracked through. It was not cold, but hot as the sun beat upon it. Sacajawea said, “My sister, this is salt. Salt of the highest quality, not brown like the blown salt we have dug from sand. Beautiful, beautiful salt.”
The women filled their baskets with the clean salt. Their meat would taste good this winter. Other women were sent to gather salt. This find of a prized preservative was one more reason for the Quohadas to look upon Sacajawea as something uncommon, different. When the hunters brought in buffalo, she showed a few women how to salt-cure meat, using the same method the soldiers had used at Fort Clatsop. The anticipation of the salty, smoke-cured meat made her mouth water and occupied her thoughts so thoroughly that she scarcely felt the first twinges of her labor pains.
She did not have a difficult time delivering her son. Hides Well and several others who were proficient in midwifery came to assist. She clung to the birth posts as they bathed her loins with water containing herbs. They were about to give her yucca leaves mashed with salt to help the birth, but she pushed down deep within herself and gave a guttural moan as the child was delivered. Her face was glassy and wet, but she had not cried in pain. She lay down exhausted and fell into a soothing sleep, not knowing if the child were boy or girl, knowing only that Hides Well would take care of her small one. Later she became aware that someone was near. “Can I tell Jerk Meat he has a son?” It was Spring kneeling beside her, holding the healthy baby. Pronghorn had taken Jerk Meat for a long walk intothe sandstone bluffs, since fathers never stayed around while their women were giving birth.
“Quick, send Big Badger to tell Jerk Meat the papoose is here,” said Sacajawea. “Ai, tell Big Badger just to say, ‘The papoose is healthy and cries as loud as a cougar. The mother is well.’ Jerk Meat will guess whether it is a boy or girl all the way back.”
The monotonous songs of the women immediately changed to rejoicing and some exuberant laughs. Not to tell the new father the sex of the papoose was the sort of joke that the women thoroughly enjoyed.
The umbilical cord was cut and Hides Well wrapped it in a square of soft doe’s skin and then hung it in the elderberry bush behind the lying-in lodge.2
The papoose was bathed and oiled and wrapped in soft skins. Sacajawea was fed thin broth; she was not allowed to eat meat because it made blood and could cause a hemorrhage.
Jerk Meat was at the birth shelter in minutes. It was as if he had put scrapings from deer hooves on his moccasins to give him swiftness.
Sacajawea opened her eyes as she heard someone saying loudly, “Today we have a new Quohada.”
She saw a glimpse of Jerk Meat and was sure that he jumped into the air so far the weasel tails dragging at the back of his moccasins just barely touched the ground. A woman brought the small bundle in soft doeskin quickly past him, then placed it across Sacajawea’s breast. “Old Grandmother, is he a boy or girl?” stammered Jerk Meat.
“This is a healthy child,” answered the woman with eyes twinkling. “See the good color, like a sun-dried strawberry.”
Propriety forced Jerk Meat to leave the birth shelter until his woman could come home under her own power. Still he did not know his child was the son he had dreamed about.
The Medicine Man, Kicking Horse, came to make certain the papoose was not deformed or diseased in any way that he could tell. If he found that the papoose was unfit, he would leave it out on the plains to die.3 He nodded when he found that Sacajawea’s papoose was well and healthy. He kept his eyes averted from Sacajawea. Before he left he painted a large black spot with charcoal on the outside of the lying-in tepee door to show that the new Quohada was a future warrior and his presence would strengthen the band.
For the first few days the papoose lay in soft hides and a rabbit-fur robe beside Sacajawea, where Hides Well could give him constant attention. When Sacajawea could get up, she bathed herself in the fast water of the creek. She felt weak, but noticed her belly was folded up, becoming flat again, and happiness filled her mind. The next day she took her time cleaning the papoose, greasing and powdering him with dry-rot dust from a cottonwood tree, packing him with soft, dry moss, wrapping him in one of the thin hides and placing him in the basket she had made of rawhide stitched to a flat, angular board.4 She was ready to go to her own tepee.
The wife of Twisted Horn was first to come to see the new papoose. She brought a gift of black crow feathers to tie on the basket to keep away evil spirits. It was customary for the new papoose’s father to give the first visitor a gift of some value in return. Jerk Meat gave the Twisted Horn family a black-and-white Mexican blanket. A week later Sacajawea was ready to go on an antelope hunt with Jerk Meat and help him butcher his kill and pack it on the extra horse. Before they left, Big Badger tied a stuffed bat to a corner of the basket so that the papoose would have even more protection from any unseen evil forces.
There was no set time for giving a papoose a formal name. Generally a person of distinction was invited to name the papoose.
“You will not ask Kicking Horse to name our papoose. I do not believe anything he would come up with can give him a longer or more useful life,” said Sacajawea as they rode along.
“Ai, he could give him a name that would cause some injury or sickness. So, then, wait until we think of something special.”
“I’ll call him Summer Snow. He almost came to us at the salt find. I think the salt drew him out.”
“Ai.” He grinned broadly. “You call him that for now. I’ll name him later. Listen to Big Badger.”
“He has never been on a hunt since I’ve been with the Quohadas.”
“That is true. Listen.”
Big Badger’s deep voice seemed to come from the bottom of his moccasins, pulsing strongly on the longheld notes, then trailing to the ground at the end.
Sacajawea rode up to him.
“What are you singing, Big Badger?”
“There are no words to this song. It is singing for my happiness and your happiness. The song belonged to my uncle. I paid him three pack dogs for it. That was before we had many horses.” He sang more, then said, “This is the first time in many summers I’ve felt like singing. I dreamed last night of my youth and of how it felt to do those high-spirited things. Then I saw Wild Plum and Summer Snow and I knew I would teach them to be men with high spirits and always be laughing with happy hearts.”
They set up the temporary camp late in the afternoon below some wild currants and pecan trees near a spring. The women went to find the trees to cut and trim into lodgepoles.
In the morning, the men ate early and set out looking for the herd of antelope the scouts found. The women put water on the new-cut poles and turned them in the sunshine so they would become seasoned without splitting.
Gray Bone walked past. Her hair was shaggy, and her stare arrogant. She patted Sacajawea’s baby on his cheek. Sacajawea felt her spine tingle as she readjusted the cradleboard on her back.
“He seems small and puny to me,” Gray Bone said. “Maybe his mother has thin milk.” She pointed a finger at Sacajawea. “Look at your insignificant breasts. You are hardly a squaw.”
At that moment the sound of the wing-bone whistle was heard, and the women in camp knew the men had found the herd. The taunting stopped and Gray Bone moved on.
“Think nothing of what she said,” advised a young woman. “That old Gray Bone is jealous of anyone who is more intelligent and more beautiful than she. Which is almost everyone in the band. She is the most quarrelsome squaw in the camp. Not many follow her. Most pay her no attention.”
Big Badger held Wild Plum as he climbed to the top of a small bluff where they watched the hunters. A scout dressed as an antelope crawled out of the brush on all fours.
Care was taken to come in toward the wind. The hunters moved slowly into position to kill as many antelope as possible before the rest of the herd realized that they were in danger. A curious old buck moved toward the scout, several younger animals followed. Suddenly they all stopped to stare and sniff. The scout pretended to chew grass. He knew curiosity was a strong trait in antelope.
The old buck moved and the younger ones followed still closer to the disguised scout who moved into tall grass near a slough. The scout pretended to drink. The old buck moved up and drank. Soon the other antelope had crowded in, their hooves making a sucking in the mud.
Wild Plum nudged Jerk Meat and each nocked an arrow and drew his bowstring taut. The other hunters also chose targets as the herd moved unsuspectingly into the waiting semicircle of motionless men on horseback hidden in the high marsh grass.
The scout, on hands and knees, moved away from the gathering herd, through the muck and grass, to the opposite side of the slough. The hunters let their arrows fly. The old buck sprang up and raced back across the meadow. The rest of the herd followed, moving into the hunters’ flying arrows.
Wild Plum kiyi-ed with glee when he saw Jerk Meat’s arrow plow into a young buck’s lungs. Big Badger smiled with anticipation of the taste of a roasted antelope ham.
The Comanche hunters were well spread out with their kill. Each man butchered swiftly, often glancing at his horse’s ears to see if they waved alternately. If so, it was a sign that coyotes or wolves were near. The men brought the meat into the temporary camp, and it was time for the women to work, slicing the meat into thin strips to hang on racks for sun-drying. The hides were laid out on the ground and fastened down, flesh side up, to be scraped for tanning later.
When her work was done, Sacajawea walked to a cluster of pecan trees and pulled her baby from her back. She undid his bindings, cuddling him and talking to him. “You will be a successful hunter, like your father,” she said to him. Summer Snow woke and felt hunger pangs. With his open mouth, he nudged around for food. Sacajawea sat with her back against a small pecan tree, closed her eyes as she nursed her baby. This is my happiness, she thought.
Back in the village there was an Antelope Dance with the smell of the juicy meat roasting above several small fires. The dance broke up in midafternoon, and Sacajawea took Jerk Meat’s packhorses to the grassy pasture and freed them. She walked back along the stream, then saw women ahead, waiting for her. There were three of them. Gray Bone was in the lead.
Sacajawea felt her hands shaking and her insides knotting. She knew their motive. They would try to taunt her into an impulsive act so that they could beat her. She looked about for the sight of a friend. They had chosen the time well; there was no one about, except some children playing in the sand by the stream. She was instantly thankful her baby was inside the tepee. She feared what lay ahead.
Then she remembered some advice Big Badger had once given her! “Do not turn around from trouble.” She walked boldly down the path toward them. When she tried to pass, Gray Bone stepped in front.
“You are not Comanche,” Gray Bone said. “You are a stranger who has come among us to live in a land that is not yours. You have visited our hunting ground and were lucky. That old blind antelope must have run into your man’s arrow. The Great Spirit intended for the Comanches to eat these antelope, not intruders. Leave the Quohadas at once and take your louse-infested son. Leave our village or I will take your life.”
She Cat stepped forward, her face hard. “You think because a Comanche family adopts you and then lets you marry their son you have the right to look and act like a Comanche?”
Weasel Woman pointed derisively at Sacajawea’s simple tunic and at the single flower design in the yoke. “You do not wear the dress or embroidery of a Comanche. You are a foreigner. What’s the matter? Aren’t our sewing customs good enough for you?”
Gray Bone’s suspicious eyes squinted, and her fingers curled into tight balls. “You are not like us in other ways. We do not like those who are different.”
Sacajawea thought. She needed some time to plan a way to leave these women. She needed time to think over a plan as a thing experienced. She moved backward, wanting to gain a moment or two. She knew a plan made and visualized was reality, not to be destroyed, but easily put into action. She looked about to measure distances quickly.
Gray Bone whipped out a butcher knife. “I see your ears are whole, yet you are living in evil with a brother. Now, leave this land forever as furtively as you came in. And so—before you go, I am notching your ears so that the next time we meet I will know who you are.”
Sacajawea stood very still, focusing her wits. Gray Bone’s knife did not frighten her. She knew a couple of ways to take it from her. It was best to let this wicked, mean woman talk. When she had talked out most of her hate, perhaps she would cool off.
“Look how straight and proud she stands,” Gray Bone sneered. “What has she to be proud of? She is married to her own kin, yet she does not have a drop of Comanche blood in her.”
Sacajawea could feel her face flush. Why was this woman continually taunting her? Why was she considered an outsider? Wasn’t she a Shoshoni, cousin to the Comanche? Hadn’t she kept Wolf’s wrist from healing in a deformed manner? Wasn’t Wolf Gray Bone’s son? Was it that she yet wanted Jerk Meat for her marriageable daughter? Or was it that things strange and unknown were always hated with a malice that melted toward fear?
Triumph gleamed in Gray Bone’s watery eyes. She thought she had found the way to goad this one called Lost Woman.
“Listen, Woman Who Sleeps with Her Brother, I forbid you to consider yourself married, or to live with this band, or raise your child as a Comanche. If you do any of these things, I will spill out all your black blood and let it drain on the ground.”
Sacajawea’s pulse began to race. A loud kind of music began to pound in her head, and her heart beat out a heavy rhythm. She crouched down. This dirty old woman deserves more than just being deprived of her butcher knife, she thought. She deserves to have her heart cut out. A song throbbed in her head — if she had been able to speak of it, she would have called it the Song of Action. Her teeth bared, and fury flared in her eyes. Sacajawea moved fast as lightning.
Whap!
Gray Bone reeled from the stinging slap. Recoiling, she charged and struck out at Sacajawea with her butcher knife. With swiftness, Sacajawea withdrew her body, turning it to the left as the knife went past her breasts. She caught Gray Bone’s wrist with both hands, pulled her in the direction she was going, unbalanced her, and in a flash twisted the butcher knife out of her hand. It fell, and was kicked aside as the women dodged one another.
Gray Bone’s eyes were entranced, and she felt the wary, the unknown waiting for her. It was shadowy and dreadful; it threatened her and challenged her. Her eyes were wide; she charged, then struck out at Sacajawea, who raised her hand to stop her. Then, instinctively, Sacajawea’s right hand went for her own bone knife, polished thin on one side, held by her waistband. Gray Bone’s mouth opened in terror. Sacajawea thrust the thin-honed blade of bone upward. She could feel the knife bite in, feel the weight upon it. Gray Bone crumpled, struggled to rise, her face distorted in stunned disbelief, her hands wrapped about the deep gash in her neck. She felt the unknown all about, hidden in the wash of the stream, in the willows, and behind the boulders, hovering in the air.
Sacajawea bent to pick up Gray Bone’s butcher knife, and her eyes flicked to a rustle beside her. It was the other two, moving forward almost soundlessly. She froze a moment, and then her lips drew back from her teeth like cat’s lips. She whirled on the two women, a knife in each hand. Motionless, they stared for a terrified moment at Gray Bone’s butcher knife, then at Sacajawea’s tipped bone knife, then last at Gray Bone kneeling in the buffalo grass. Surprise spread over their faces. Turning, they ran into the brush.
Sacajawea was surprised at how easy it had been. Big Badger’s advice had been sound. Sacajawea’s timidity had probably saved Gray Bone’s life. In her rage she had missed the artery, inflicting only a cut through the skin layers. The blood came through the cut bright red on Gray Bone’s fingers and formed tiny scarlet puddles in the dirt at her feet.
Sacajawea was relieved and then exhilarated, as if a very sore boil had been opened and the poison drained out.
Then a feeling of guilt came over her. Gray Bone had received what she deserved. Still, a small voice deep inside Sacajawea kept saying, “It is wrong to kill another human.” She had tried to kill a human being, failing only because she had not the boldness to push harder on her bone knife. She did not ever want to be cruel or violent as she knew that some were—Comanches, Shoshonis, and whites. Every step of the way back to her tepee she thought about what she had become in such a short time.
Outside the tepee she stopped and looked down at her hands. The rage had left her, and a sick disgust took its place. She leaned over and vomited. She went inside, buried her head in her hands, and cried with great, heaving sobs. Only the crying of her small son could rouse her from the feeling of depression and guilt. She freshened him with clean cattail down, then held him close and nursed him. What was this thing that had made her half-insane? she thought. In her woman’s soul she knew that there was a savage in everyone. And yet it was the control of this savage that made the difference between humans and beasts. Reason, good sense, love—these made humans.
The tepee flap lifted. Jerk Meat, ducking because of his height, rushed inside. His dark face was stamped with concern. An angry hum of voices came from outside.
“Gray Bone’s relatives and friends have come for you,” he said. “They are angry because they say you cut her up and left her alone to die. It is a bad thing when members of one band fight. There is always trouble over it.” He was daubing on his black war paint. The noise outside grew louder, and dogs began to bark.
“So—she cut my nose once!” Sacajawea yelled to her man. “It must be a bad thing when a Comanche woman cuts another without good reason.”
“Ai,” he said quietly, “I saw you with a dangling red nose. Quite a sight. But it healed with hardly a show of a healing line. Good medicine runs in our lodge.”
Sacajawea heard voices very near. Someone said, “Let’s go inside and bring her out.”
Jerk Meat picked up his long lance. Facing the door, he began singing his war song.
Shaken, Sacajawea stood by him, bow and arrows ready. She steadied herself. Sacajawea loved this man. She could not now imagine life without him. There was no question; she would follow him. She wished with all her heart that this were not happening. It seemed so senseless to die for knifing a witch like Gray Bone.
Then another voice was heard outside the tepee flap. A deep, strong voice. It was the voice of Kicking Horse. “I have stanched the flow of blood from my old woman’s neck. The wound is not deep. It will heal. Now, whoever fights will have to fight me also.”
There is nothing to do but to save ourselves, thought Sacajawea, throwing away the past.
Everything became quiet. Kicking Horse, standing stiffly outside Jerk Meat’s lodge, knew the capabilities of his woman and what her insane jealousy could do. He called her cohorts and said gruffly that any more ambushing would have to be punished, even if it meant his own woman being thrown out of her tepee.
“It was my woman who started this trouble.” As he spoke, She Cat nodded her head up and down. “Gray Bone was first to draw her butcher knife. Children playing nearby came to tell me. Members of the Quohadas band, what is a woman to do—a woman alone—when three large bodies cut her off from the path and threaten her? What is she to do when one draws her butcher knife and tells her she is going to notch her ears? Should she run? Should she climb a tree and hide?
“Our women are taught from the time they are small to use their butcher knife in case of any danger.” Kicking Horse kept on talking, slowly, calmly, and clearly, and so great a talker and Shaman was he that Gray Bone’s friends, She Cat and Weasel Woman, gradually forgot their quarrel and went home. The other people slowly tired of his haranguing and went back to their tepees. The excitement of a real fight was talked out.
Kicking Horse scratched at the tepee flap. Jerk Meat quickly admitted him. His black eyes were somber. On his back were arrows in a leather quiver, and he carried his bow.
“Our friend—” began Jerk Meat.
“Hush,” said Kicking Horse. “It may not be good to call me that. I wish to say that this is what makes a man—or woman. To be able to fight and not to be afraid.” He came to Sacajawea, put his hands on her trembling shoulders, and patted her affectionately. His face seemed wet with tears. “I envy your man. I will be his friend forever.” He bent beside her sleeping couch and picked up his woman’s butcher knife, but first he eyed the bone knife lying beside it. Then, as suddenly as he had entered, he left.
“Now you will tell me what happened out there today to make them so angry,” growled Jerk Meat, leaning his lance against a tepee pole and indicating that Sacajawea should wash off his paint. “The last time I saw you, you were full of roasted antelope and had started to take the horses to feed.”
She told him.
Jerk Meat sat on the dirt floor with a grunt. “Little Fox, you’ve done all right. You have fought twice with Gray Bone, and won once. Who can tell, perhaps at the next feast I’ll have you relate stories of your bravery.” A smile turned his mouth up. He moved so he could put his arms around his woman. Something swelled in her breast, something proud and grateful and heartwarming. A great humility swept over her, and an overpowering weariness.
Before summer was over the women cut thick buffalo hides into squares that the men could use to protect their heads and backs from the relentless sun that beat down on the hot, treeless plains as they hunted. For the first time in their lives the men complained that the buffalo herds seemed scarce and thin.
Sacajawea made a new shield for Jerk Meat during the summer with the shoulder hide of a tough old buffalo bull. The hide was heated over steaming hot water, rubbed on a large, rough rock to get most of the flesh off, then scraped to finish the fleshing. Her heating and steaming thickened the hide by contraction. Then she used a smooth stone to pound and rub the hide to take out all wrinkles and make it pliable. A circular piece was cut and stretched flesh side out over a circular wooden hoop two feet in diameter. Another piece was cut and stretched on the opposite side. These were sewed together by pulling rawhide string through holes punched around the edges of the hide. The space between the layers was about an inch thick and she packed it tight with goose feathers.5
The surface of the shield was stretched into a saucer shape that would readily deflect an arrow and in most cases deflect a rifle bullet unless it struck straight-on.
At the end of summer the band was ready to move northwest even though they had not had a good buffalo hunt. They were moving across the tableland called the Staked Plains. The rivers, lying far apart and cutting across the Staked Plains southeastward, were serpentine, low banked, silty, and bitter tasting—not fit for drinking.
To Sacajawea it seemed as though they were on the roof of the world. It was a strange, wild, hard land that rolled on forever beneath an endless sky. When the rains came, water would rush out the sides of a draw and Mother Earth would drink it dry, and sometimes lakes would be made in shallow basins, then birds would fill the sky and frogs would croak in the mud. Jerk Meat told about the land in early spring when it rippled with the delicate wild flowers in waves of gold. In summer it was scorched and blasted by sun, and the mesquite and scrub oaks were little more than bushes. The grass became brown, brittle, and sparse. The blue northers howled through the gray winter days.
The Quohadas were secure in this land where the Mexicans never came. They made winter camp by a cold little pond. Pronghorn had chosen this place well. The water had gathered in a small depression that was lower than the level of the surrounding plains. Thecamp was in a kind of bowl. They could not be seen unless a man rode up to the very rim of the bowl and looked down. The camp was safe.
Above the camp were colored logs of petrified wood and not far away were giant bones from great lizards that once had lived on the plains. These caused Sacajawea to recall the great whale skeleton she had seen on the western coast. And she thought about her firstborn son. And again the longing for him rose to the surface.
Along a meandering creek valley they found canyons for protection, grass for their horses, but no expected buffalo and antelope for winter meat. Hungry Kiowas came to visit and share their meager food supply. The Kiowas brought a little parched corn that they traded for some horses with Mexican comancheros. In this depression they were protected from the full force of the wintry blasts from the north. The hungry friends visited several days until both corn and meat were all gone.
The women burned off the sharp spines from leaves of the prickly pear cactus and fed them to the horses, keeping the sweet-tasting fruit for their family. The ice over the pond was broken and melted in tightly woven grass baskets. The women put mesquite brush tight against the sides of their tepees to keep out the cold wind that whistled across the plains.
The men killed several older horses for food. Jerk Meat and several others went out after small game. They found none and came in before nightfall with eyes swollen almost shut, bloodshot, burning, and smarting, tired and stiff with the cold.
That winter seemed to be a procession of trials—days with bitter winds that lashed and stung the face with dry sand snow, icy nights, white freezing fog in the mornings, so that the horses had to be held together in the spooky white by ear, afternoons when white-coated Mother Earth flashed up such a glare that a horse rider closed his eyes to slits, or went nearly blind, in spite of painting his cheekbones with charcoal. Skin and lips cracked as crisp as the skin of fried fish, and grew black with sun. Eyes smarted as tears seeped through swollen lids. Babies cried because of hungerpains. Sacajawea became thin, but she continued to drink plenty of snow water and nurse her child. The boy was not content with watered-down milk, and he cried out in the night. During these times Sacajawea played softly on the rusty harmonica Jerk Meat had given her and she sang:
“Rouli roulant, ma boule roulant, Rouli roulant ma boule.”
For a while they would forget their hunger and the cold, frozen bed robes.
They heard the wolves’ hunting noises far off, back up the plain on some creek bottom. They seemed to cry from great distances as life immune to cold and hunger and pain, hunting only for the wolfish joy of running.
Jerk Meat told Sacajawea the weather could not last, as they began to feel there was nothing between them and the north wind and the wolves but the skin tepee, so thin that every wind moved it, its sides so peppered with spark holes that lying on their robes at night they caught squinting glimpses of the stars.
The weather warmed early, and the summer was hot and dry. The Quohada band did not move from the little basin, but stayed near the fresh water of the pond and the shade of the few cottonwoods and willows. Once or twice they made temporary hunting camps as they went out to find the great herds of buffalo. The herds were small that year, and often the hunters came back with reports of white men making great killings and leaving most of the meat for the buzzards and wolves, taking only the hides.
Sacajawea gave birth to a second child late in the summer, another boy. Jerk Meat renamed Summer Snow, Ticannaf, because of the happiness he brought to their tepee. The baby was called No Name until the time when an appropriate name could be found.
That winter, the horses that lay down in the ice and froze to death were thawed and eaten.
A blue norther came and leaned its wind on the tepees in strange erratic patches, as if animals were jumping on the skins. The Quohadas went outside to try tokeep their tepees from blowing away. The men hauled large boulders to anchor the tepees, and the women tied long, stout leather ropes to the lodgepoles and hooked them to the wooden pegs nearly buried in the frozen ground. The old men pointed to the sundogs and said they meant something. The early winter weather could not last, but they feared what might replace it.
One night the darkness was full of snow pebbles, hard and stinging, that beat their faces, shutting their eyes and melting in their hair, but freezing again. The camp slept most of that time, two or three days. Then, when the wind eased, they dug their way out, and the tepees were surrounded by dunes of snow. There was no sign of the horses.
Buffalo Bones, Coming Home, and Jerk Meat hunted until they found the horses downwind. They came back before dark and reported dead coyotes that the wolves had left when the storm drifted in. The next day, they brought in half a dozen half-eaten coyotes frozen stiff on the backs of the lost horses.
That evening around the cooking kettle, Jerk Meat spoke of rich pemmican with dried fruit and nuts mixed in as he sucked on a coyote bone with little meat on it. Sacajawea spoke of roast duck and boiled pumpkin. Before dawn, that night, the wind reached down out of the north and rushed in a new blizzard. They fought and groped through the wind and snow to fasten down their tepees even tighter with more boulders and rawhide ropes. They heard the beating of hooves as antelope came down to their depression for shelter. The Quohadas cursed them as they stumbled over guy ropes and tore one of the tepees down, snorting and bolting into one another. The men tried to take a few for food, but found their hands so stiff with cold they could not hold their bows straight and taut.
In the morning, the sky remained gray. Whenever anyone had to go outside he looked at the horses, which were picketed so they could move around or bunch up to keep warm. The women went out and fed them fleshy, pulpy cactus leaves or cottonwood sticks.
Fuel ran low, and they could find none in the snow, so after meals they let the fires die and crawled under their robes to sleep or tell stories. Talk flared up andwent out again. Once or twice Sacajawea went out and carefully scraped the worst of the snow off the top of their tepee while Jerk Meat watched inside with concern because a careless poke of the stick would easily cut through the skintight hide, leaving them exposed to the storm.
Jerk Meat talked with Ticannaf in the cold afternoons. “I played nanipka when I was your size. I went over a hill and waited until the other boys hid themselves under buffalo robes; then I came back and tried to guess who was hidden under each robe.” He told of his first antelope surround and the coyote stories he’d heard himself as a boy from Big Badger. Sacajawea kept the baby, No Name, under the robes with her and put Ticannaf under the robes with Jerk Meat. The wind slammed against the skin tepee in furious gusts.
Sometime before one gray afternoon howled itself out, Sacajawea bundled her baby and went outside. The rest of the camp lay in their robes. She went to the lodge of Pronghorn and Hides Well. A jet of white breath followed her. The tepee of Pronghorn shook and gave way, then shuddered stiff and tight again. Sacajawea was inside, and Hides Well was tying the flap tightly shut. “This one’s the worst yet,” said Pronghorn.
“I came for antelope chips,” she said. “We are out of fuel, and no one can find any under that snow.”
Hides Well held up two steaming chips from near her fire. “Take these. We have only a few also.”
“Thank you,” said Sacajawea as a numbness like freezing death stole through her.
“Is the child all right?”
“Ai, he dozes and listens to his father tell stories.”
“Is the baby all right?” Pronghorn laid his pipe aside and stared at the bundled baby.
“Ai, only hungry and getting thin.”
“Aren’t we all?” asked Hides Well.
Back inside her own tepee, Sacajawea slipped inside her robe without starting the fire up again, only laying the two soggy chips near the cold fire. She fell asleep nursing No Name.
She awoke, hearing the awakening sound of Jerk Meat and his soft calling, “I must be fed, woman, get up.”
She sat up. ‘The wind’s died.”
“Ai, it will be me next if I don’t get something in my belly.”
“Shall I kill one of the horses?”
“No, not yet. I’ll talk to Pronghorn. Maybe he’ll call a council.”
Sacajawea hustled to the flap and looked out. The sky was palest blue, absolutely clear, and deep drifts lay all around the tepees. Other women were trotting their horses up and down a long, narrow space, getting them warm. The breasts, rumps, and legs of the horses were ice-coated. There was not one among them whose ribs did not show plainly under the rough winter hair.
Jerk Meat swore, “More snow blindness!” He stepped past Sacajawea and blew his nose with his fingers—first one nostril, then the other—and again studied the land. There was no color in the landscape, only the packed white sheet running off into the east, where the sun was just rising.
Pronghorn was out calling a council. It was decided to move to a more sheltered spot. “We’ll try to move the horses,” he said. “They maybe can make it, but unless we get a chinook, it is starving time for them.”
The women pulled down the tepees and packed their belongings, and the band rode out straight into the sun. They kept the horses going hard.
“Hurry!” warned Kicking Horse. “I do not trust the weather any more than I do my older woman.”
Near noon, far to the south of the basin they had lived in, they came to a wide stream, angling down from a canyon wall. The vegetation was sparse, but it held some elk. They quickly moved in and got all they wanted for food and new hides. As the day wore on, it changed from a pale blue to lavender, then to a faint pink, and then the sun was gone as if it had slid off the ice-slick horizon. Pronghorn pushed them on. Their breath froze all over them.
Sacajawea, her face stiff, her shoulders aching clear down across her collarbones into her chest from the papoose on her back, glanced briefly at the frosty stars in the night sky. She found the Dipper and the North Star, her total astronomy learned from Chief Red Hair in another place, during another time. Then she wondered if Pronghorn knew where a sheltered place was. The band could not possibly take much more of this. They had been on the horses since sunrise and had eaten nothing but a little raw elk meat. What if the horses should give out?
Pronghorn stopped a little farther on. No one had said, “Can we stop now?” Pronghorn seemed to like what he saw. The low, flat place behind a cutbank in the turn of the stream was a good camp. The dry grass was partially exposed at the edge of some drifts. There was much running water. He stuck a willow stick into the ground. Instantly the tired squaws tumbled out the lodgepoles and unfolded the leather tepee coverings. The men all sat huddled together talking, stupid with cold and fatigue. Children screamed and cried as their mothers tried to hush them.
Finally camp was set up. Everyone seemed too exhausted to eat the elk meat that roasted on the large center fire made from some downed cottonwood logs. The men let the heat beat on their faces and gleam in their bloodshot eyes. Some went to their tepees; others stayed and slept around the huge fire. A few came out from their tepees and stood in a row and made water, lifting their faces into the night air that was mistier and warmer than any night since the first snowfall.
“I don’t know,” Kicking Horse said, sniffing for wind. “I do not quite like the looks of the sky.”
“But it is warm,” the other men said, almost with reverence in their voices, thankful for a night without wind and snow.
The mild air might mean more snow, but it also might mean a thaw coming in, and that was the best luck they could hope for. They kicked the snow around, smelling the night air soft in their faces; it smelled like a thaw, though the snow underfoot was still as dry and granular as salt.
“This must be the break,” added Jerk Meat, leading Ticannaf inside the tepee for a good night’s rest.
Sacajawea hardly heard him. Her eyes were knotted, the lids heavy with sleep. But not even her dead-tiredness could lift from her the habits of the last couple of weeks. In her dreams she struggled against winds, she felt the bite of cold, she heard the clamor of people andanimals and knew that she had a duty to perform—she had somehow to locate the baby for his feeding. She called, but she was far down under something, struggling in the dark to come up and break her voice free. Her own nightmarish sound told her she was dreaming and moaning in her sleep, and still she could not break free into wakefulness and shove the dream aside. Things were falling on her from above; she sheltered her head with her arms, rolled, and with a wrench broke loose from tormented sleep and sat up.
Jerk Meat was kicking out of his robes. There was a wild sound of howling wind. Sacajawea leaned over the fire, stupidly groping for cottonwood bark, as a screeching blast hit the tepee so hard that Jerk Meat, standing by the flap, grabbed the pole and held it until the shuddering strain gave way and the screech died to a howl.
“What is it?” Sacajawea asked idiotically. “Is it a chinook?”
“Chinook!” Jerk Meat said furiously.
He janked his stiff leggings on and groped, teeth chattering, for his fur-lined moccasins. He dressed as fast as his dazed mind and numbed fingers would let him. Sacajawea broke more bark in her hands and shoved it into the fire. At that moment the wind swooped on them and the tepee came down.
Half-dressed, Jerk Meat struggled under the skins. Sacajawea was still crouched over the fire, trying desperately to put it out. She saw Jerk Meat bracing a front lodgepole, and she jumped to the rear one; it was like holding a fishing rod with a thousand-pound fish fighting the hook; the whole saillike mass of skins slapped and caved and wanted to fly. One or two rawhide ropes on the windward side had broken loose and the wall plastered itself against Sacajawea’s legs, the wind and snow pouring like ice water across her bare feet. “Somebody out there—tie us down,” Jerk Meat’s grating voice yelled. Buffalo Bones crawled toward the front flap on hands and knees. Braced against a pole, Big Badger was laughing. The top of the tepee was badly scorched and there was a large hole burned around the edges, but the fury of the wind had put the fire out.
The skins could be repaired. Pronghorn came out to help.
Ropes outside jerked; the wall came away from Sacajawea’s legs; the tepee rose nearly to its proper position; the strain on the poles eased. Eventually it reached a wobbly equilibrium so that she could let go and send Ticannaf outside with his father and she could locate the baby, No Name, in the mess of her own sleeping couch. The outsiders came in gasping, beating their numbed hands. In the gray light of storm and morning, they all looked like old men; the blizzard had sown white age in their hair.
“Ohhh!” Sacajawea cried. “Our baby does not breathe! His head is crushed flat. No, no! This cannot be true!”
“The front lodgepole,” whispered Big Badger, wiping away an icicle from under his nose. “It fell. Ai, it fell where he lay asleep.”
“He is solid, frozen,” said Jerk Meat aghast. “How long has he been this way?”
Sacajawea could not answer; her grief was too much. Her heart lay broken on the ground.
Big Badger held the small, undernourished body. “He was not sent to the Great Spirit by the lodgepole, but much earlier in the night by the cold finger of frost. The winter was too much for such a small boy. The Great Spirit made certain the boy made a safe trip to the Land of Warmth and Everfeasting by cutting off his earth life twice,” he said as great tears rolled down to his chin.
Pronghorn walked from the tepee trying to control his emotion. He sent Hides Well and Spring to console Sacajawea.
For the remainder of the night, the men pulled and strained and fastened the rawhide ropes on the tepee. Spring brought in a half-cured elk hide to cover the burned top skin and sewed it neatly while the men held the poles down. Once the whole middle of the windward side bellied inward; the wind got under the side, and for an instant they were in a balloon. Ticannaf thought for certain they would go up in the air. He shut his eyes and hung on, and when he looked again, the men had grappled the uplifting skirt of skins and pinned it down.
The women started the death howl, shrieking. Sacajawea lay prone on her robe. She could not think. She did not want to move or speak. She felt as though an avalanche of ice and snow had hit her in the back and a herd of mustangs had stampeded over her midsection. She felt torn apart so that her heart lay on the ground. Her stomach felt full of knots. Her grief was deep.
Jerk Meat was stunned. He knew that he had lost something he could never have again. A son, yes, but more than a son. He had lost a piece of his life with Lost Woman; the web that reached from the present to the past was broken. There would be no other boys like little No Name. The new ones would be different. The baby had died without becoming old and useless. So—that might be good, thought Jerk Meat.
As in a nightmare where everything is full of shock and terror and nothing is ever explained, Sacajawea looked around at the numb huddle of friends and saw only a glare of living eyes, and she believed she saw a question on Jerk Meat’s face. The question was directed to her: “Didn’t you know the boy was freezing?”
Hides Well slashed herself on her arms. Spring began to cut off the first joint on her small left finger. Jerk Meat pulled out his knife and began tearing at the flesh of his little finger.
Sacajawea raised her head. Suddenly she was up, grabbing at their knives. “No, no!” she cried. “It is not necessary to do that!”
They looked at her, puzzled. Bewildered, Jerk Meat sat beside his woman. “Then I will throw away my beautiful orangewood arrows.”
“Ai, if you feel that is proper,” she said softly. “Please, do not let anyone else mutilate his body for the death of someone he loves.” Her words were not her own, but those of Chief Red Hair years ago when she had tried to cut a finger joint in mourning for their friend Captain Lewis. Now she herself sat around in the cold, unwilling to build a fire and feel the comfort of its warmth. That morning brought news of others, small children and old ones, who had died during the cold snap.
Sacajawea went from tepee to tepee, preventing the slashing of arms or cutting of fingers, and preventing those who had cut themselves from jerking the scabs from those self-inflicted wounds, causing them to bleedagain. She tried to explain that it was somehow wrong to search for relief from sorrow in pain. The women sobbed and broke down. She said, “Crying is no good. We must work to keep the living alive.”
The usual burial place was a deep crevice in the rocks or a cave, but the weather was too cold to search for a suitable spot. The face of each corpse was sprinkled with powdered local rock containing enough mercuric sulfide to be scarlet and the eyes were sealed shut with moist, red clay. If possible, before the body was cold the knees were bent to the chest and the head pushed to the knees, then it was wrapped in a robe and held together with lashings of rawhide rope. The women cut many poles that day from the thin cottonwoods and built a pen around the bodies. Some wanted to build individual pens, but because of the scarcity of poles they had to place their beloved ones all together. The poles were pounded into the frozen ground. Into this enclosure they placed the personal effects with the deceased—saddle and bridle, tomahawk, scalping knife, bow and arrows and lance, or in the case of a squaw, her favorite tunic, cooking kettle, tools for dressing skins.
Pronghorn had forbidden them to kill any horses for burial because the Quohadas still living needed horses for food and travel. There was some discussion about this because the band believed in a kind of resurrection in which the dead would rise and march eastward to take possession of their land. The personal items were left with the dead because the Comanches supposed their souls would have need of them in the other world.
The penlike enclosure was roofed with bark and willow branches and covered with mud. The work was exhausting. The women sat on the ground awhile and did not look at the burial hut, ugly brown against the sky and unmelted snow patches. Sacajawea sat with the women, her robe over her head, wiping her leaking nose against the edge of the fur and feeling slick ice there as the temperature began to drop. Suddenly she threw off her robe and moved toward the burial place that held the small bundle of No Name.
“He did not even have a name. He could be driven off into the barren wasteland crying for years amongthorns and rocks, thirsty, hungry, and in pain because he was not named when he lived. Oh, my baby!”
“Our old grandmother was fond of small ones,” sobbed a young woman crouching before Sacajawea. “She will hear your baby’s cries and carry him into a warm valley. She will give him cool water, pounded corn, and elk meat. She will set him upon a horse that is fleeter than the wind just to hear his laughter.”
It was wonderful the way the Quohada tribe kept track of itself and all its various family units. If every single man, woman, and child acted and conducted himself or herself in a known pattern and broke no walls and differed with no one and experimented in no new way—then that unit was left safe and strong, alone. But let one man or woman or child step out of the regular thought or the known pattern, and the people knew, their suspicion ran, and their thoughts traveled over the camp.
Sacajawea was now watched more than ever. She did not conduct herself in familar patterns. The people began to watch her as they realized now it was she who had held them back from the tradition of cutting their own bodies while they were in the deep hole of grief. They had not yet made up their minds whether to be grateful or angry toward her. She had broken another wall in their life.
Darkness came. The night was dominated by the wind. Sacajawea searched the center campfire for her man. She called his name. She did not realize others watched her. When she found Jerk Meat, he took her to their patched tepee. They huddled together under their robes, comforting their remaining child, Ticannaf. He said it was the first time he had been warm since they moved camp. It was not until the next morning that Sacajawea noticed what the whole camp already knew: Jerk Meat had cut off his long, flowing hair.
That morning the cold had settled in, freezing the muddy ground. Pronghorn called another council, and they decided to move camp farther up the canyon toward the south. He sent a party out first with some skins for a lodge and to start a fire going for the others who would come to the new camp cold and tired, dragging their thin horses.
Some of the women of the second party had to take turns walking because the first party had taken horses for their supplies and many had been slaughtered and eaten by the Quohadas during the past weeks. Step by step they moved through the canyon, panting, winded, crying encouragement, forcing themselves to keep up.
Sacajawea sagged and started to sit down, and Hides Well climbed from her horse and barely managed to hold her up. Sacajawea could not see more than a bleared half-light. She could see no objects. Her tears were ice, her lashes stitched together. Savagely she wiped her face across the snow-slick fur of Hides Well’s blanketed shoulder. With what little vision she could gain, she looked straight into the wind and snow, hunting for the huge white conical wall that would be the lodge. Spring and Wild Plum rode a horse, and Jerk Meat rode with Ticannaf sitting in front of him. Sacajawea tried to control her tears, knowing they might mean blindness and death in the wind that drove itself down her throat. To talk was like trying to look and shout up a waterfall. The wilderness howled at her, and she stopped, sightless, breathless, deafened, and with no strength to move and barely enough to stand, not enough—desperately not enough, she slid down and away. This was the end. It was not hard. It was easy.
Then pain stabbed through her eyeballs as if she had rubbed across them with sand; something broke the threads of ice that stitched them shut. She looked into the gray, howling wind and saw a loom of shadow in the dark murk; she thought in wonder, Have we been here going around and around the lodge? The darkness moved and the wind’s voice fell from whine and howl to a doglike barking, and Hides Well was there shouting in her face.
She heard the unmistakable crackle of a fire going inside the lodge. She felt an arm around her, the urging of someone else’s undiminished strength helping her along through a deep drift that gave way abruptly to clear ground. Her head heard one last scream of wind, and the noises from outside fell, the light brightened through her sticky eyelids, and her nostrils filled with the smells of roast elk, tallow, and the delicious odor of spicy cedar bark. Someone steered her around andpushed on her shoulders. She heard Jerk Meat whisper, “Little Fox, you cannot be finished so easily. You belong to me.” She felt safety like this was pure bliss as she eased herself down on the old buffalo hide that was spread for her. Later she sat with aching feet in a basket of water, and when the pain in her hands swelled until it seemed the fingers would split, she felt this safety was only misery. She could not numb the ache into bearability. Her eyes were inflamed and sore; in each cheek a spot throbbed with such violence that she thought the pulse must be visible in the skin like a twitching nerve. Her ears were swollen, and her nose was so stuffed and swollen that she gurgled for air. She knew how she looked when she saw Kicking Horse, who had let his women ride their two good horses as he walked.
Kicking Horse said to her, “Feeling anything?”
“Ooo, ai,” answered Sacajawea.
“Better let those feet stay in the water awhile,” Kicking Horse said when she pulled up her feet. “The slower they come back, the better.”
“I think my face is frozen, too,” she said.
“Well, we’ll be sitting around for a couple of weeks now,” said Pronghorn, looking at his own painfully swollen hands.
Weatherbeaten and battered, the Quohadas crowded into the one big lodge. They huddled back against walls and away from the center fire, and each retired within his skinful of pain and weariness. Sacajawea, with pain enough to fill her to the chin, locked her jaw for fear of whimpering. She made a note that none of the Quohadas whimpered, not even Gray Bone, not even the children — least of all her own son, Ticannaf, who sat sound asleep on Jerk Meat’s lap. The worst she heard was a querulous growl when anyone moved too fast. Big Badger, the old one, unfrozen except for a touch on the fingers and ears, moved between them in moccasined feet and flipped the cooking pot with the edges of his palm, saving his tender fingertips, and looked in. The mystic smells of brotherhood were strong in that lodge.