Sacajawea (134 page)

“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.