Sacajawea (110 page)

“Janey,” said Miss Judy, drawing closer to Sacajawea, “if it is the decline, the sun and air will do her good. Maybe she stayed in the cabin too much all day and did not get enough fresh air. She needed rest. Charbonneau won’t insist she get up early and get his meal, will he? He will let her sleep, won’t he?”

“You know he is as stubborn as an old donkey,” Sacajawea said at last in an explosive whisper. Her mouth was pulled together, as if she were trying to keep fromsaying too much. “If she does not do what he expects, he will say he cannot afford to keep her any longer and trade her for a red blanket to the first person who comes along.”

“That’s outrageous!” burst out Miss Judy, shocked.

“I did not mean to talk so much.” Sacajawea stopped and tried again. “The thing is, with herbs and broth, the Medicine Man will help her. You’ve no need to worry. Would not do Otter Woman any good, anyway.”

Miss Judy did not speak. She just stood up and stared for half a minute, then picked up her baby and the extra parfleche and doeskin-wrapped package of jerky.

“Here.” Sacajawea took the baby while Miss Judy tied the package to the back of the saddle, then pushed the bag of pemmican in between and lashed it on tightly. A meditative mood was strong upon her.

As soon as Miss Judy left, Sacajawea felt a wave of loneliness, a feeling of foreboding. She thought of Otter Woman’s good fortune at being able to go back to the Minnetaree village. Or was it good? She’d be going back to the old ways. Here near the river town, things changed and the ways were new and exciting.

Red Hair’s town was growing. Each year a few more stone houses were built and more good furniture and good cloth came up the river. Often a trapper or trader brought his Indian partner downstream with him for a winter in town. Then he introduced him hospitably to the civilization they had talked about in camp. Saint Louis was full of transients—Canadians from Montreal, like Charbonneau, who had arrived to become
engagés
for Chouteau or Lisa, and mountain men in to buy new guns and to spend their pelt money, as Charbonneau did. And always there were Indians, unabashed in their curiosity about the white man. They came to town with birchbark sacks of maple sugar, skins of wild honey, horsehair lariats, moccasins, herbs, buffalo tongues, and bear grease to trade for blankets, horse gear, coffee, tea, tobacco, knives, tin cups, and the like. The trappers, who customarily acted as their interpreters, did not try very hard, if at all, to keep them from buying rotgut whiskey, too.

Sacajawea thought of the braves who loitered around

Chouteau’s big stone warehouse, where the “fur rows” smelled to high heaven. When the braves were bored, a band of them would mount their ponies and race madly down the main street, shooting blunt arrows at every dog and cat in sight. She said aloud, “My boys will not be like that. They will learn self-control.”

Most of the Indians never did understand why the white men so sternly forbade these races. There was much they did not understand about the white men. For example, why did Mr. Boujou, the watchmaker, always wave his arms and scream ”
Sacre!”
when the braves sauntered into his shop to examine his collection of glass eyes? Sacajawea chuckled a little to herself at that thought. In his best blanket and wearing his tomahawk like a dress sword, an Indian went where he felt like going. He knocked at no doors. But black cooks screamed and sometimes hurled hot water. And their white mistresses screamed and sometimes fainted. There was no such silliness if a brave stayed with the men down near the levee. That was where there was rotgut, big talk, and sometimes a melee.

Sacajawea heard more talk of the comet in the sky. Some said that it meant the coming again of the white man’s God. Others, more pessimistic, said the earth was going to explode and fall apart all over the sky.

Tecumseh, the famous Shawnee chief, had moved into the southern part of Missouri to quiet the tribes and negotiate peaceful land settlements with the white settlers. It was generally recognized that open war with the Indians would necessarily be part of the June 1812 declaration of war against the British. Sacajawea wondered how much Tecumseh understood of the problems of both Indians and whites.

In mid-December, the month before the snow covered the ground, Sacajawea was shaken from her sleeping couch. She heard a roaring and groaning in the earth. The cabin creaked and seemed to be moving. She staggered to the door and crashed drunkenly against the cabin wall. Winds rushed from many directions and mingled and cried in the upper air. Lightning leaped out of the dark, and fireballs danced in the distance. Then all seemed quiet. Sacajawea leaned farther outthe door and waited for the rain, but no rain fell. There was only the leaping lightning and the crying winds. A wolf howled, deep-toned, near, and there was no answer. She listened to the winds and heard voices shouting. “Come, come to us,” they called. She pulled her blanket closer and shivered. Again she heard the voices calling her. The voices of children calling to their mother in the black of night. Frightened children calling. The lightning leaped, and she saw the wolf, low-bellied to the ground, running past the cabin into the dark. The floor began to roll, and the meager furniture seemed to walk. Her head reeled, and her breath came in short gasps as her throat tightened with fear. In the brightness of the next lightning flash she saw great numbers of wolves pressed close together following the low-bellied one. Across the grassland the earth seemed to roll in waves like the Stinking Waters of the west. Now the shivers ran down her back.

There had been stories all fall at Chouteau’s trading post from the rivermen who had been awakened by tremendous noises and violent agitations of their boats. They told of trees falling on the shore and the sea gulls screaming. Many a
patron
tried to sooth his men with
“Restez-vous tranquil, c’est un tremblement de terre.”
But men could not understand as the perpendicular banks above and below them began to fall into the river.

Trappers who came up from Tecumseh’s territory near New Madrid in the Missouri delta told about great chasms four feet in width forming with the shocks. Some noticed that every earth shock was preceded by a roaring kind of groan, and that the shocks uniformly came from the same point and went off in an opposite direction. The river was reported to be covered with foam and driftwood, and had risen.

Sacajawea gathered her butcher knife, firesticks, and a pouch of the fresh-made pemmican and followed the same trail as the wolves had taken, the trail to town. She walked. She was afraid to ride a horse on ground that rumbled. The way was hard in the dark. There was nothing now in her mind but fear. Only when the lightning leaped could she see the ground stretched before her, opening with sounds like tremendous claps of thunder followed by a diminishing cracking, like thegrumbling of a great sheet of ice. The lightning showed the trail, and it led her up along the creek toward town. She came against rocks that had tumbled into the creek bed. Frightening rumblings were discharged like the explosion of artillery. The ground heaved and rolled in a succession of earth tremors, six or eight minutes apart. She huddled against the stones, then climbed over them where the ground seemed smoother under their dried grasses and she could move easily. She could not make out the trail, but thought by some instinct she would reach the home of Chief Red Hair.

The winds died some, and the lightning ceased. She passed circular holes, resembling the vents of small volcanoes, from which only minutes before gases, steam, and water had shot high in the air. Some glistening black protrusions of rock and substrata were exposed along the trail, but she could not remember them from before and wondered more and more if she were going in the right direction. The darkness was thick, the air acrid and sulfurous; far ahead she thought she saw a glimmering in the weeds. The glimmering faded, then came again. She stumbled, watching it become larger. Then she saw faces shining in the light of a campfire. All were stupefied by the great Mother Earth rumblings and openings that spewed the sulfurous fumes, blasts of carbonized dust, or great geysers of water and steam. These fugitives had sought refuge on a hilltop while they tried to see the continuing devastation below. They were now composing themselves for death by frantic hymn-singing and prayers. The noise of these white farmers and their families was as frightening as the roar from inside the earth.
²

Instinctively Sacajawea moved in a wide circle around the campfire. Her right foot reached out in one instant to meet only air, and she pitched forward, downward. Her body twisted, and her hands caught at the sod edge. Her fingers gripped and held. She dangled into deeper darkness, and her mind whirled in circles and her legs thrashed as she sought to swing them up and crawl back over the edge. Slowly her fingers slipped, and she fell downward, her left ankle striking a dead-white protrusion of rock. She lost consciousness as her body layfolded upon itself on the mud at the bottom of a yawning crack in the earth.

She lay surrounded by the earth; only the dark sky, now veiled by a yellow haze as dawn approached, looked down at her. She seemed close to the inner heart of the rumblings, and yet she could hear the outer winds whispering among the grasses. The ancient magic of her beginnings was there.

The winds whispered through grasses and were the voices of spirits that lived in Mother Earth. Her mind knew such spirits existed. She had learned of them when she was a child. The sighing winds, streaks of lightning, images of a low-bellied wolf in fright, heaving earth, frightened palefaces chanting around a flickering fire, and small animals running scared were all signs to her as she merged into the natural forces that surrounded her. These were the things that brought her to the bottom of the crack in Mother Earth.

She was somewhere between her lodge and the lodge of Chief Red Hair. She was a bit of human life in a mud-walled well, alone.

The wind sighed, and the rain fell. The drops gathered a chill from the high openness of the sky. The cool wetness brought consciousness back to the dreaming Sacajawea. She stirred; waves of pain swept through her body, and she was unconscious again. The rain stopped. Mother Earth rumbled deep inside herself and far away.

A sickly yellow dawn spread over the land and filtered through the oaks and hickories. Awareness came to Sacajawea. She lay in a heap. Her tunic was mud-caked, and clotted blood clung to her left leg. It was twisted grotesquely beneath her, but not broken. Pain swelled and receded and swelled again in her throat with each in-drawn breath. She stared upward at the yellow-gray clouds overhead for a long time.

The sun was almost straight above her when she moved. Agony streaked inside her as she moved her left leg, pushed down a little, and pulled it around in front. She could not remember what had happened. She could not recall the terrified look on the white faces in the firelight. She did not know that she was the woman called Sacajawea. She did not recall that she was running away from some unknown terror. She imagined the cry of an infant who longed for the comfort of its mother’s arms, then recognized her own whimperings. She was a primitive, elemental creature looking about herself now for the primary substances of survival. Her eyes found the pouch of pemmican where it had fallen in mud when she pitched over the edge of the earth crack. She inched her way toward it, wondering what was inside the leather pouch. Her back ached, but did not seem more than bruised. Her mouth felt dry.

She sat up and looked around again. The crack was long and turned sharply to the left about a hundred yards in front of her. A butcher knife lay half-buried in the mud at her feet. She tucked it inside the leather belt at the waist of her tunic. She pulled herself upright, pulling at the dirt along the side of the crack. Her left ankle throbbed, and she could not put her full weight on it. She gripped the pouch and pulled at the dirt, trying to raise herself out of the crack. The dirt and mud crumbled under her hands. But she knew she had to find a way out. She limped to the turn and found the sides were all equally steep. She put her hand into the leather pouch and found the fine-pounded meat laced with blackberries. She put a pinch in her mouth. It was dry and hard to swallow. Her head ached. She crammed two more pinches into her mouth and let the juices form slowly, slowly from the dryness. The dried meat was pounded finely and needed little chewing. A convulsive constriction of her throat forced it down. She reached for more, and in the reaching stepped down on her left foot. A blackness surrounded her, and unconsciousness took her again.

Daylight disappeared and darkness grew. A half moon rose over the land, and its silver light moved slowly across the grass to the crack in Mother Earth. The pale light touched the limp figure. She stirred and opened her eyes. Her unconsciousness had passed into sleeping, and the sleeping finally into awakening. Her eyes looked at the drifting moon. She knew who she was. She was Sacajawea, mother of Baptiste, friend of Chief Red Hair. She did not know where she was. But the moon in the dark sky was the same moon that she had watched from her cabin door so many nights. It had not changed. Thesky had changed. No longer was the comet visible, and the sickly clouds were gone.

Her muscles were very stiff and sore. To move was to call back the pain. Her left ankle was discolored and swollen. But she was Sacajawea. She could grit her teeth and fight the hurt. She ate a little more of the pemmican. She limped along the floor of the crack to a large stone that she had not seen before and pulled herself up to it. She looked around. She could see grass hanging down from the mouth of the crack. She reached through the moonlight to touch it. It fell, and some stayed in her hand. It was wet. She remembered the rain. The moonlight moved across the bottom of the crack, close to the wall of mud above the large stone. It beckoned her upward. Almost involuntarily she reached for the knife in her belt and began to cut footholds in the side of the wall. The pain in her muscles had subsided into an aching that could be endured. The pain in her left ankle was a mounting torture. She fought it and dug. She fought it and was defeated. She rolled from the stone to the damp earth and shuddered. Then she was still.