A PRESENT FROM STONE DOG
He knew nothing of being toted back to their camp like a sack of grain. When he opened his eyes it was dark of night. He smelled bruised grass. Roasted meat, perhaps fat squirrel. The smoke of the fire. The femaleness of Makwa-ikwa, who leaned over him and watched him with young-ancient eyes. He didn’t know the question she was asking, aware only of a terrible pain in his head. The smell of the meat nauseated. Apparently she anticipated it, for she was holding his head over a wooden bucket and enabling him to vomit.
When he was finished, and weak and gasping, she gave him a potion to drink, something cool and green and bitter. He thought he detected mint, but there was a stronger and less agreeable taste. He tried to turn his head in refusal, but she held him firmly and forced him to swallow as if he were a child. He was annoyed with her, angry. But soon after, he slept. From time to time he awakened and she force-fed him the bitter green liquid. And in this way, sleeping, semiconscious, or suckling at Mother Nature’s odd-tasting teat, he passed almost two days.
On the third morning the lump on his head was down and the headache was gone. She agreed he was getting better but dosed him just as heavily, and he slept again.
All around him, the festival of the Crane Dance continued. Sometimes there were the mutterings of her water drum and of voices singing in their strange and guttural language, and the near and far-off noises of games and races, the shouts of the Indian spectators. Late in the day he opened his eyes in the dimness of the longhouse and saw Makwa-ikwa changing her costume. He focused on her womanly breasts, puzzling to him because there was enough light to reveal what appeared to be welts and scars forming strange symbols, runelike markings that ran from her chest wall to the areolae of both nipples.
Although he didn’t move and made no sound, somehow she sensed his wakefulness. For a moment as she stood before him, their eyes met. Then she faced away from him, turned her back. Not, he felt, to hide the dark, tangled triangle so much as to protect from him the mysterious symbols on the priestly bosom. Sacred breasts, he told himself wonderingly. There was nothing sacred about her hips and buttocks. She was large-boned but he wondered why she was called Bear Woman, for in her face and suppleness she was more like a powerful cat. He couldn’t guess her age. He was afflicted by a sudden vision of taking her from behind while grasping in each hand a thick braid of greased black hair, like riding a sensual human horse. He contemplated with amazement the fact that he was planning to be the lover of a red-skinned female savage more wonderful than any James Fenimore Cooper had been able to imagine, and became aware of a vigorous physical response. Priapism could be an ominous sign, but he knew the manifestation was caused by this woman and not by an injury, and therefore presaged his recovery.
He lay quietly and watched as she put on a fringed garment of deerskin. From her right shoulder she hung a strap composed of four strands of colored thongs, ending in a leather pouch painted with symbolic figures and a circlet of large bright feathers from birds unfamiliar to Rob, the pouch and circlet falling on her left hip.
In a moment she had slipped outside. Soon, as he lay there, he heard her voice rising and falling, certainly in prayer.
Heugh! Heugh! Heugh! they answered her in unison, and she sang some more. He didn’t have the slightest idea what she was saying to their god, but her voice gave him chills and he listened hard, peering up through the smoke hole of her lodge at stars like chunks of ice that somehow she had set on fire.
That night he waited impatiently for sounds of the Crane Dance to end. He dozed, awoke to listen, fretted, waited some more, until the sounds were done, the voices dwindled and fallen silent, the festivities over. Finally he was alerted by the sound of someone entering the longhouse, of the rustling of clothing removed and dropped. A body settled beside him with a sigh, hands reached out and found him, his hands discovered flesh. All was accomplished in silence save for indrawn breaths, an amused grunt, a hiss. He needed to do little. If he wanted to prolong pleasure, he could not, for he had been too long celibate. She was experienced and deft, he was urgent and quick, and afterward, disappointed.
… Like biting into wonderful fruit to find it not what he had hoped.
Taking inventory in the dark, it now seemed to him that the breasts drooped more than he remembered, and under his fingers their walls were smooth and scarless. Crawling to the fire, Rob J. took a stick and waved the glowing end to cause it to burn.
When he crept back to the mat with the torch, he sighed.
The broad flat face that smiled up at him was in no way unpleasant, only he had never seen the woman before.
In the morning, when Makwa-ikwa returned to her longhouse, she wore again her customary shapeless costume of faded homespun. Clearly the Crane Dance festival finally was over. While she prepared the hominy to break their fast, he was sullen. He told her she must never send a woman to him again, and she nodded in a bland, noncommittal way she doubtless had learned as a girl when the Christian teachers had talked to her severely.
The female she had sent him was named Smoke Woman, she said. As she cooked, she told him without emotion that she herself couldn’t lie with a man, for to do so would be to lose her medicine.
Bloody aborigine nonsense, he thought in despair. Yet obviously she believed it.
But he considered it as they ate, her harsh Sauk coffee tasting more bitter than ever to him. In fairness, he acknowledged how quickly he would shun her if slipping his penis into her would mean an end to his doctoring.
He was forced to admire the way she had handled the situation, making certain the fires of his ardor had been banked before telling him simply and honestly where things stood. She was a most unusual woman, he told himself, not for the first time.
That afternoon, Sauks crowded into her hedonoso-te. Comes Singing spoke briefly, addressing the other Indians instead of Rob, but Makwa-ikwa translated.
“I’neni’wa. He is a man,” the big Indian said. He said that Cawso wabeskiou, the White Shaman, ever more would be a Sauk and a Long Hair. For all their days all Sauks would be the brothers and sisters of Cawso wabeskiou.
The Brave Man who had hit Rob on the head after the ball-and-stick game had been won was pushed forward, grinning and shuffling. He was a man named Stone Dog. Sauks didn’t know about apologies, but they knew about reparations. Stone Dog gave him a leather pouch similar to the one Makwa-ikwa sometimes wore, only decorated with wood-pig quills instead of feathers.
Makwa-ikwa said it was to hold his medicine bundle, the collection of sacred personal articles called a Mee-shome, never to be shown to anyone, from which every Sauk draws strength and power. To allow him to wear the pouch, she gave him a gift of four dyed sinews—a brown, an orange, a blue, and a black—fastening them to the pouch like a strap so he could wear it from his shoulder. The cords were called Izze cloths, she said. “Wherever you wear them, bullets can’t hurt you, and your presence will help the crops and cure the sick.”
He was moved, yet embarrassed. “I am happy to be a brother to the Sauks.”
He had always had a hard time expressing appreciation. When his uncle Ranald had spent fifty pounds to buy him the post of dresser at University Hospital so he could gain surgical experience while a medical student, he had scarcely been able to utter thanks. Now he didn’t do better. Fortunately, the Sauk were not given to displays of gratitude either, or to farewells, and nobody made anything of it when he went out and saddled his horse and rode away.
Back at his own cabin, at first he made a game of selecting objects for his sacred medicine bundle. Several weeks before, he had found a tiny animal skull, white and clean and mysterious, on the floor of the woods. He thought it was a skunk’s, it seemed the right size. All right, but what else? The finger of a birth-strangled child? Eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog? Suddenly he wanted to assemble his medicine bundle with great seriousness. What were the objects of his essence, the clues to his soul, the Mee-shome wherein Robert Judson Cole derived his power?
He placed in the pouch the prize heirloom of the Cole family, the blue steel surgeon’s knife that the Coles called Rob J.’s scalpel and that always went to the oldest son who became a physician.
What else could be drawn from his early life? It wasn’t possible to put the cold air of the Highlands in a bag. Or the warm security of family. He wished he owned a likeness of his father, whose features he had long forgotten. His mother had given him a Bible when they had said good-bye, and for that reason he treasured it, but it wouldn’t go into his Mee-shome. He knew he wouldn’t see his mother again; perhaps she was already dead. It occurred to him to try to put her likeness to paper while it was still familiar. When he tried, a sketch came easily except for her nose, then it took anguished hours of failure until finally he had her right, and he rolled up the paper and tied it and placed it in the pouch.
He added the score that Jay Geiger had transcribed so he would be able to play Chopin on the viola da gamba.
A bar of strong brown soap went in, symbol of what Oliver Wendell Holmes had taught him about cleanliness and surgery. That started him thinking along new lines, and after some reflection he removed everything from the pouch but the scalpel and the soap. Then he added rags and dressings, an assortment of drugs and medicinals, and the surgical instruments he needed when he made house calls.
When he was done, the pouch was a medicine bag that carried the supplies and tools of his art and craft. Therefore it was the medicine bundle that gave him his powers, and he was extremely happy with the gift the blow to his hard head had won from the White Paint named Stone Dog.