Sacajawea (138 page)

“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.

The once roaming bands of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico are Comanches, a branch of the great and widely distributed Shoshone family. Their language and traditions show that they are a comparatively recent offshoot from the Shoshone of Wyoming; both tribes speaking practically the same dialect. Once the tribes lived adjacent to each other in southern Wyoming, then the Shoshone were beaten back into the mountains by the Sioux and Blackfeet, while the Comanche were driven steadily southward by the same kind of pressure. How soon the Shoshoneans turned into Comanche Plains Indians remains uncertain. They passively took on Plains features, absorbing essentially material rather than social and religious traits. The earliest unquestionable reference to these people goes back to 1701 and places them near the headwaters of the A rkansas (Colorado); in 1705 they were found in New Mexico. Since Comanche and Shoshone differ only dialectically, their separation cannot date back many centuries.