Sacajawea (137 page)

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?”