Sacajawea (150 page)

Slowly, in a peculiarly disjointed fashion, she walked to the dry creek bed. Gray Bone did not go in a straight line. She trembled as though shaking off the ghosts of the Ancient Ones who lived in the walls of the cliffs overhang. The apparition in front of her stood out like an overlord, a protector, in the twilight.

It lifted a hand and made a motion to come on. The sand dune was circled with piñon and deadfall. Gray Bone made her way cautiously. Her tunic was torn and hanging in ribbons. Her arms and legs were deeply scratched and bruised. Her face was hard, with dry skin over the skeleton to defy desiccation of the small inwardmoistness. One side was red and swollen where the flesh had been torn from the cheek to the chin. The gashes were scabbed over, but the wounds were inflamed. Through the shredded right leather sleeve, Gray Bone’s arm was exposed. It was badly scratched, and it, too, looked swollen and red.

“I have not much patience with curiosity-seekers,” rasped Gray Bone. Her voice was thick, as though retarded by some fleshy barrier. “There is no way to get me back to that camp, which stinks from human and dog excrement and rotting horseflesh. It is an eyesore upon Mother Earth with its ragged skin lodges and poor inhabitants.”

She had fallen into the loner’s habit of soliloquy. She tried to smile. It broke open the scab on her cheek, and the wound started to ooze. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and then wiped her hand in the sand at her side.

“The thought of water is good. I wish I could drink. Smells nice in the desert.” Jerkily she inhaled the hot, sweet breath of the canyon through nostrils that dilated and quivered.

“Ever know a camp that stunk more?” She moved down the dry creek a few steps. Not once did she take her eyes from the form at the creek’s bank. “Out here there are no old crones named She Cat and Weasel Woman pawing over you, pretending you used to be something. When you know you are not anything, only a creature confined to a narrow band of time.”

She leaned forward in a confidential manner. “At least Coyote is like me, conscious of certain things, whether she is conscious of time or not. She was my sister, and she turned crazy on me!” Her voice rose to a tight pitch. Her eyes half closed in the faded memory of that painful fight. She folded her feet under her and sat on the ground still talking, frequently pausing to gulp deep drafts of air. She babbled about how Kicking Horse had protected her. She rambled on about how she had fought with Kicking Horse many times, but in the end she had won because death had claimed him and his arguments. She wiped her mouth again.

Gray Bone constantly looked at Sacajawea, who was not dead, but sitting quietly on the sand and listening.

A flicker of awareness showed in Gray Bone’s sunken eyes, to be replaced by an expression of scorn.

“And your man is gone. And your white man has gone under.” Her laugh was like the screech of a crow announcing it had found carrion on the canyon floor. “He was named Charbonneau. I heard your talk with the Mexicans. So—I have asked around since leaving the Quohada stench. That Charbonneau was in the village named Saint Louis two summers past. He was with one called Joshua Pilcher, who gave him wampum, money, so he could buy a hunting knife. He then returned to his young Ute woman. This old weasel, Charbonneau, bragged about a Snake woman he had. This women, he said, went with him and white soldiers to the Stinking Western Waters with a son on her back.”

Sacajawea could say nothing. Her head pounded; her back ached and throbbed. She started forward a little, then stopped and watched Gray Bone, whose hands covered her throat as though it was a great effort to speak.

“That old weasel liked women young. That is why he let the Snake go. He wanted a fresh child to keep him warm. I could understand a man like that,” she croaked. “I like young girls with slim, firm bodies. They make my blood run and my head swim. My man beat me for looking at my own child when she was ripening.” She wiped her mouth again and gasped for air.

Sacajawea realized that Gray Bone never swallowed—that she could not.

Gray Bone pointed a clawlike finger at Sacajawea. “You were that Snake woman! I know it!” Then she swayed and it seemed she could not speak more, but after several moments she seemed to have a second wind.

“This Charbonneau died near a white man’s fort up north. It was a frightened young Sioux woman who buried him under layers of damp earth, where he will no longer see blue sky. You wonder where I learned this? It was from the mouth of a white man, Charles Larpenteur. He said that old man never carried a gun, only a hunting knife, and wore a red trading shirt, and offered his young women to any man in camp. It was some custom with him.”

Gray Bone’s hand twitched. She leered into the darkening air with contempt.

Sacajawea bent forward, rubbed her back, and felt a large stone bruise. She knew the disease of the coyote had nearly taken possession of Gray Bone’s body, but her mind was working. She had heard many times that lucky ones bitten by crazed animals took only a few days to die—but the unfortunate ones took weeks. Gray Bone was fortunate.

“There was a chola—part Shoshoni, part white—who came to a fort, far north—Bill Bent’s—with furs on a donkey charrette. He could scratch on paper. Once I hid in the fort at the side of a building, a lodge of logs, and watched.” Gray Bone’s head nodded, and her hands went to her throat. Sacajawea feared the words would become incoherent. She wanted to ask questions, but was afraid Gray Bone would say no more. “I put things together. The one with the furs was called Charbonneau. Sometimes Bap. So—he is the son you asked the Mexican trader about?”

Sacajawea could not answer. She could not speak. And now Gray Bone seemed unable to stop. She exulted when Sacajawea sat motionless. She looked about herself until she had established the continuity of her existence and identified Sacajawea’s form sitting passively across the dune from her.

“Now I was not so bashful. I found an opportunity when this Bap was walking alone and went up to him. I asked in good Comanche if he had a
pia,
Wadzewipe, or Lost Woman. He looked and asked for a repeat of my words; then he said no, his
pia
ran away and was never found. She is dead—maybe eaten by a coyote.” Gray Bone laughed raucously. “I said his mother lived with the Quohada Comanches. He said no, she liked to live like the white people.” Gray Bone tried to lick her parched lips. Her voice was hoarse. She choked, then quieted, and her voice was no more than a loud whisper. “I told him I know his
pia.
He laughed and gave me chewing tobacco. Nice man.”

Sacajawea shivered as a breeze stirred the dead gray dawn air. Gray Bone’s mood varied. “The wind,” she groaned. “It will skin me alive.” She ran her left hand lightly across her bosom and down her thigh. The touchseemed painful. As the breeze grew, she groaned, “Can’t you stop it? See what it is doing to me?” She wiped her mouth and seemed to forget Sacajawea was there. She began to explore her body with her fingertips, muttering something about heavy clothing.

“Where is this place—Bent’s? The chola—where is he?”

“What?” Gray Bone rasped, straightening up abruptly, an expression of wonderment and awe overspreading her face as she peered at Sacajawea. Her mouth twitched. “The white men are north.”

“How far?”

“Six, eight suns by horse, maybe farther; it is hard to say.” Her face moved as if in a spasm, and she hesitated a few moments. She again pushed a hand against her throat, then wiped her mouth.

“Can I get you water?” offered Sacajawea.

“I cannot drink it. Do not bring it near.” Her voice was hardly audible.

“I will go for help.”

“No, I cannot use help. Do not leave.” She pierced the stillness with a shrill laugh. She moved closer to Sacajawea, then with one swift motion struck out with arms and legs.

Sacajawea’s legs felt a jerking grip that overthrew her. Swiftly as the grip had flashed about her legs, just as swiftly Gray Bone brought a stone down, grazing Sacajawea’s left hip. And like the crack of a beaver’s tail on water, Sacajawea hit Gray Bone with the flat of her hand on the good side of her face, and with a quick thrust of her other hand, struck Gray Bone’s hand. The stone was thrown out and thudded into the sand. The next instant Gray Bone felt Sacajawea’s hand grip her wrist. The struggle was for the butcher knife Gray Bone had grabbed from Sacajawea’s waistband, each woman striving to hold it. Gray Bone could see only dimly; then she was blinded by a handful of sand deliberately flung into her eyes. In that moment she slashed the knife across Sacajawea’s shoulder and her grip slackened. In the next moment Gray Bone felt a smashing darkness descend upon her skull, and in her brain the darkness filled with nothing.

Sacajawea had grabbed the stone. She hit again andagain, until she was sure Gray Bone was not breathing, except for the dying of the pulsing heart. Sacajawea tossed the stone over the white dune; she was breathing heavily. She sat beside the body of Gray Bone. Sacajawea sobbed and panted for breath. “That old woman wanted me on the trail to the Unknown with her!” Sacajawea was half crying from anger and exhaustion. “Why would I want to go with her?” She peered at Gray Bone’s bloody face, with the eyes staring at the sky, the head twisted to one side and sprinkled with fine particles of sand. It was difficult to distinguish the features.

Sacajawea scrubbed her hands and arms with abrasive sand, instinctively knowing she had touched the unclean body of someone diseased. With her hands she covered Gray Bone’s body with clean white sand from the dune. She carried half a dozen large boulders to place on top. “That is the best I can do,” she said aloud, cleaning her butcher knife with sand.

She thought she heard the wild, half-human scream of a
chimbica.
She moved toward her horse in the mesquite thicket. She had never heard a cougar cat scream in the afternoon before.

She mounted and left the body of Gray Bone as she would leave a scrub oak leaf fallen in the winter’s wind. Leaving the past, she rode down the dry canyon, across the bits of potsherd poking out of the sand. The cry of the cougar cat became a whisper as she passed under the niche in the wall where once life had lived in balance with nature, simply and happily, until something had abused and abased those Ancients and they no longer walked on the sand or watched the flight of birds, but passed on to the trail of the Unknown.

While he was in charge of Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, August 30, 1842, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was described by a traveller there as one “who proved to be a gentleman of superior information. He had acquired a classic education and could converse quite fluently in German, Spanish, French, and English, as well as several Indian languages. His mind, also, was well stored with choice reading, and enriched by extensive travel and observation. Having visited most of the important places, both in England, France, and Germany, he knew how to turn his experience to good advantage.

“There was a quaint humor and shrewdness in his conversation, so garbed with intelligence and perspicuity, that he at once insinuated himself into the good graces of listeners, and commanded their admiration and respect.”

RUFUS B. SAGE
,
Scenes in the Rocky Mountains by a New Englander.
Vol V. Philadelphia: 1846.

LEROY R. HAFEN
and
ANN W. HAFEN
, eds.,
Scenes in the Rocky Mountains, 1820–1875,
“Rufus B. Sage, His Letters and Papers,” Vol. II. Glendale: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1956, pp. 52–4.

There is a Mexican girl who was captured by her son, Ticannaf. This girl lived with her until the old lady disappeared and her son’s family would not live with her, so they gave her to a man for his wife, although she was only 14 or 15 years old. This girl knew a great deal about her but even she never knew her past history.

CHARLES A. EASTMAN
,
Report to Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, March 2, 1925, pp. 45–6. “Statement given to Dr. Charles A. Eastman, Feb. 15, 1925, in Lawton, Okla., by Wesuepoie, mother-in-law of Tahcutine, youngest daughter of Ticannaf, concerning the traditions of Porivo, or supposed to be Sacajawea, or ‘Bird Woman.’”

I
n the next dawning, Sacajawea saw the thin streams of smoke rising into the quiet air. She was on high ground, riding toward the Quohadas’ camp.

In the village a feast was going on in honor of the new chief, Wounded Buck.

Sacajawea looked at these people who called themselves Quohadas. Their faces were happy once again and full of confidence. They had ridden through the time of having no chief and were now whole and alive.

Hides Well pushed through some women and came to meet Sacajawea. Hides Well’s lips were drawn tight. “Get off that horse and show some respect for the new chief. What about old Gray Bone? Did you find her? Where is she?”

“Shh—do not say the name. She cannot return to this camp.”

“She has gone away?” Hides Well’s mouth began to turn up into a smile.

“Ai,
she has gone with
los muertos.”

“Dead? You saw her die?”

“Ai,
I helped her, my mother. She was crazed by the mad coyote’s bite. We fought.”

“You are bringing her remains in for proper burial?”

“No,
pia,
she is under sand and stone in the little canyon. The body was not fit to carry.”

Hides Well looked out of the corner of her eye at Sacajawea. “Lost Woman, she was a Quohada and deserved that much. The people will turn from you, remembering who invited her to be a member of this band again.”

“Even while living she was putrefying.”

Hides Well did not argue with Sacajawea; yet she did not agree, either. She walked off to her lodge.