Sacajawea (139 page)

ROBERT H. LOWIE
,
Indians of the Plains.
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1954. Reprinted by The American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., 1954, pp. 216–17.

W
hen the cold snap broke, the Quohadas moved on and made camp in the bottom of the southern end of the great canyon, which was sliced through by millions of years of cutting water, sculpted into twisted shapes by storms and sand-edged winds. It was not steep-walled; the sides sloped into massive steps banded with many colors of rock, not too steep to be climbed. The stream that had cut the canyon was there, on the floor, washing over the red clay. There were groves of scrub cedar and a few age-old sycamores primitively growing only the inner layer of its bark every year.
¹
The Quohadas knew the sycamores were ancients, surviving fungus diseases, storms, and floods to lend their branches for strong arrows and digging sticks. The Quohadas showed each tree respect by choosing each branch carefully before hacking it off with knives or axes.

The men found small game rabbits and fox to shoot with the polished sycamore arrows. There were wild carrots and parsnips near the stream that could be dug easily with the hardwood digging sticks.

The men planned a buffalo hunt as soon as the weather warmed enough. The hair on the beasts was loose this time of year, but it did not matter as the hide was to be used for tepee covers, anyway.

Sacajawea did not plan to go with the hunters because she was a third of the way through her time. She was pleased to have another child, but not as ecstatically happy as she had been a year ago. She was almost afraid to feel great happiness, as though it would be an omen of bad times ahead. She stayed in the main camp and watched after Ticannaf, Wild Plum, and Big Badger.

The sun was back in unbelievable warmth, and the stream flooded its banks. The canyon was faintly tinged with fresh green shoots. Big Badger took the small boys swimming in a quiet spot under some willows in the stream. For being only five summers old, Wild Plum swam well, his arms and legs churning through the water much the way a dog swims. Sacajawea had agreat pot of boiled rabbit ribs ready for them when they returned.

One day the sweetish, slightly sickening smell of bloated buffalo carcasses filled the canyon. The familiar smell brought Sacajawea’s girlhood with the Minnetarees sharply back to her mind. She wished to see for herself and suggested a walk to look for carrots to go with the boiled rabbit. Big Badger nodded and motioned for the two little boys to follow along. They pushed through soft clay where the willows were gnawed down to stubs, broken, mouthed, and gummed off by starving animals. The floodwaters covered the low spots. Sacajawea held her nose, then let go and smelled the rich, rotten, stinking carcasses as the redolent smell rolled upwind the way water runs upstream in an eddy.

She wondered why she had combed her hair so carefully and put on her best tunic, tied the sky blue stone around her neck, and put the small pouch with her few valuables on the string at her waist, just to walk in this horrible stench. It is like going to meet old memories, she told herself.

Wild Plum tugged at her skirt saying, “Wheee-ou! What is that smell?”

“You will see soon enough,” promised Sacajawea, noticing Big Badger hold his nose.

The floodwaters forced them out of the bottoms and up onto a wide ledge. Below, Sacajawea saw the stream, astonishingly wide, pushing across willow bars and pressing deep into the cutbank bends. She heard the hushed roar like wind as the water rushed below. There were the buffalo balloonily afloat in the brush where they had died. They saw a cow float around the deep water of a turn with her legs in the air, and farther on a heifer, stranded momentarily among flooded rosebushes, rotate free and become stranded again. Then, abruptly, ahead of them dead eyeballs stared from between spraddled legs, horns and tail and legs tangled in a mass of bone and hide not yet, in that cool bottom, puffing with the gases of decay. They must have piled against one another while drifting before one of the winter’s blizzards.

She clung to Ticannaf’s hand and with the free handeach pinched his nose shut. A little later the stench was so overpowering that they all breathed it in deeply as if to sample the worst, and looked to the left where a huge bull buffalo, his belly blown up and ready to pop, hung by his neck and horns from a tight clump of alder and cottonwood where the snow had left him. They saw the breeze make cat’s paws in the heavy winter hair.

“Ai,
that is enough, when you find them in trees,” exclaimed Big Badger. “We will go back with no carrots for our meal. This is a bad year. You can see the bad. You can smell the bad.”

Sacajawea looked at Big Badger, weathered and scarred as the country had left him. His eyes were black and steady, though, marksman’s eyes. His long fingers plucked a strand of new rice grass. He bit it between his teeth. His head went slowly up and down.

“Lost Woman, you have been here before?”

“No, Big Badger, not here, but far up north, where the same thing happens to the buffalo—and the people”—her breath caught—“eat the soft, putrid flesh.”

“Pobrecita,”
he said, “we would all be so ill with belly cramps we would die.”

“I could not eat.” Her eyes came down and found Ticannaf watching her steadily. “There are more beautiful things. We must find them for the boys.”

They hurried back toward the village, holding their noses. Wild Plum hung back and pointed. By his toe was a half-crushed crocus, palely lavender, a thing tender and unbelievable in the mud and stones.

“Beauty,” said Big Badger, “is here, where you find it.”

Sacajawea bent to pick it up. Smelling the mild freshness she handed it to Wild Plum, who said, “It will not take the place of wild carrots.”

“So—who can eat after this stink,” grumbled Big Badger, putting the five-year-old on his shoulders and trotting homeward. Sacajawea and Ticannaf trotted behind.

Big Badger suddenly made the “stop” sign with one hand, slashing it in the air behind him. There was movement in the Quohada village. The camp should be quiet at this time of day. Only the grandmother of Wounded Buck was left behind, and she was asleep inher tepee. He held his hand behind him, slowly moving it back and forth, meaning, “Be still.” A dark figure moved without sound, as in a dream. It carried a rifle. It mounted a saddled horse. Another figure did the same. Sacajawea could see they had on blue jackets or coats. Her breath caught. They were white men. She felt a curious splitting sensation, as though she had suddenly divided into two people. She wanted to run to those men and ask them questions, to look into their eyes to see what they knew of her grown son, or of Chief Red Hair. Then her other half wanted to run, hide, get away from them; they were the enemy and she their prey. She was afraid of them.

The four of them waited, crouched down behind red sandstone and some sparse cedar. The village looked like a camp of the dead. There was no sound in it now and no motion. Suddenly the echo of gunfire came along the canyon walls. Acrid blue-gray powder smoke mixed with the rotten-carcass odor. Then some other men on horses came down into the canyon. They sat calmly and formed two lines, then waited. Then there was a piercing noise, familiar to Sacajawea. “The sounding horn,” she whispered. The charge had been sounded.

Twenty-two men let out a holler and rode madly into the canyon. There was no resistance. When they charged, they charged. The mud was churned up. They pumped bullets into the tepees. A man fell from his horse, then another, hit by their own lead ricocheting off the rock walls.

Big Badger was furious. He swore constantly in the Mexican-Comanche tongue.

The camp had been swept through by a scythe. The crumpled tepees were empty and covered with mud. Smashed drying racks lay broken in the sunshine. Cooking pots were overturned and left behind. Buffalo robes and discarded clothing were strewn all over the ground. Lodgepoles were scattered.

The white men seemed weary and disgusted that they had found no Comanches. They kicked at the pots and spat, then mounted their horses. Enough was enough. They put the two dead men across their saddles and led the horses up the canyon walls.

“Lie still,” warned Big Badger when Wild Plumsquirmed in the damp grass. “These men are out for revenge. It may be that they were attacked by Apaches and many were killed. The white man considers all Indians the same.”

“But, Big Badger,” said Sacajawea, “we did nothing to them.”

“Ai, nothing. But we are Indians. Indians killed their comrades.”

“That is not fair,” said Wild Plum. “Quohadas are peaceful, not ferocious like the Tonkas.”

“Ai, we know that even among the Comanches there are good and bad, but they do not. They have no understanding. It is bad,” sighed Big Badger.

The white men were not quite finished. Two men rounded up the Quohadas’ ponies and mules, and two others stayed behind to set fire to the tepees, then fled up the rocky wall. The lodgepoles burned, and then a stink of scorched hides filled the air. In less than thirty minutes the great village of the Quohadas was an inferno. The crackling tepees burned like torches, and then the ancient sycamores began to burn.

Deep inside her belly Sacajawea felt the knotted sickness of hatred for these white men.

The afternoon breeze fanned the flames, and tepees collapsed in showers of orange sparks. The old wood of the lodgepoles cracked with loud reports as the licking flames found their hearts.

Greasy smoke hung like strange clouds. It was hot in the canyon.

“A large village can make a lot of smoke when it burns,” said Wild Plum, lying with Ticannaf in tearless wonderment.

All night they watched the fires burn and smelled the stink that boiled up out of the earth. It was the first time Sacajawea had been fully aware of the enmity of the white man. She had no idea why they had come or where they had come from. She began to wonder if they were all like the Mexicans—friends one time and enemies another. She was hurt and confused. Now the only certainty in her life was the love she felt for her man, Jerk Meat.

“It is gone,” said Big Badger. There were tears inhis eyes. Wild Plum lay close to him and asked, “Is my mother all right?”

“That is the one thing we can thank the Great Spirit for. The early hunt took everyone out of the village.”

“And we can thank Lost Woman for wanting carrots for her stew,” added Wild Plum.

“Ai,”
agreed Big Badger. “We wait here one more night to make sure the palefaces do not come back. Then we go down and look.”

“I’m hungry,” whispered Ticannaf.

“This is all the jerky I have. Chew it slowly,” said Sacajawea, pulling a piece of hard, stringy meat from a small leather pouch attached to her waistband.

They dared not build a fire, and they could feel the damp, cold earth through their clothing. When it became dark, they huddled together for warmth. Sacajawea slept fitfully with her legs curled around the small body of Ticannaf. The night dragged. Daylight brought no comfort. The place did not seem like home. When the sun rose, it helped. Big Badger went over the cap rock to scout around for the white soldiers. He was gone a long time.

Sacajawea and the boys played games with small stones as they lay in last year’s damp weeds. “Can we have a fire?” Ticannaf asked.

“No, it is better not to make any more smoke,” she replied.

Big Badger came puffing up the side of the yellow rock. He spoke fiercely. “Do not think about what you see. Go down and wrap the body of Wounded Buck’s grandmother. She was shot five times. Those white men are brave to shoot an old, helpless grandmother and then burn down a deserted village. Yaaagh!”

As Sacajawea went down the slope toward where the village had been, she was shocked by its appearance. A few of the lodgepoles had not burned. The whole area was trampled by horses’ hooves. Wild Plum hung back among the scrub cedars. “What is it?” she asked.

“My mother’s sewing basket is over there. See, all the things are spilled in the red mud.”

“You pick them up and wipe them off, then bring the basket and whatever else you find to the far end ofthe village. Big Badger is there cleaning off some lances and war clubs.”

Sacajawea gathered up the body of the old woman and gently laid it on a scorched buffalo robe. She rolled the body in the robe and tied it securely. She built a small fence for the burial hut from odds and ends of sticks. She put an iron kettle inside with the body and several of the better robes, along with a bone spoon and a skinning knife with no handle. She did the best she could to make a roof over the burial hut from sticks and mud and stones.

Then she began to pull out bedding and extra clothes that were not burned beyond use and put them in a pile. Big Badger was looking through the mess for tools and cooking gear. They put what was usable at the far end of the camp and covered it with extra robes. There were not many lodgepoles left. Pronghorn would have to move the camp to a place with lots of trees.

Wild Plum found the old blue coat that Sacajawea cherished, but there was nothing else to be found except some small blue beads and a couple of hawk’s bells around the burned hole that had been her tepee.

By late afternoon, clouds had come rushing over the sky. Big Badger made a small fire with twigs and dry grass. They ate some pemmican they had found in a leather sack half-buried in mud beside the stream. They slept. When they woke, the fire was out and a fine mist was falling.

The hunting party came back through a driving rain. The night was black and wild around them, and that was good. There was no chance of being seen.

Their scouts had seen the
taibo,
white men, and they had been able to travel around them without being seen. They were tired. They had ridden hard and long and with heavy loads. Their hunt had been successful. But they were shocked at the desolation and destruction in their camp. They were disheartened at the news that all the extra horses and mules were gone. The women began to make temporary shelters from the scorched hides and robes that Sacajawea had piled up. No one complained that someone else was using her robe. They were too shocked and worn out. They worked together to make a dry place for the children to sleep, then builtthemselves temporary lean-tos. The smell of smoke and wet, burned leather was strong in their noses that night.