Sacajawea (16 page)

Old Grandfather grunted and turned the bull boat upright in the sunshine to dry. Catches Two twisted the rawhide from Antelope’s hand and flung it far out in the water. It floated momentarily, then disappeared. Old Grandfather sighed and seemed to shrink as his shoulders hunched downward.

Sacajawea felt the tension go out of the rope and she felt herself again being carried along by the strong current. To ease the pain in her hand, she tried to loosen the rope a bit, but her movements were clumsy and an unexpected eddy flushed the rope from her fingers. She grabbed. Too late, she saw the rope disappear.

Suddenly the mangy yellow dog, looking more than ever like a half-starved coyote, came from nowhere, jumped into the water, and began paddling. Its head ducked and came up with the rawhide in its mouth; its front paws moved frantically. It seemed to be trying toget to Sacajawea, but both girl and dog were being carried relentlessly downstream and were still far apart. Antelope ran along the gravelly bank shouting for Sacajawea to get to the dog—and the rope.

The shouting was fruitless. Sacajawea stretched her legs downward, trying to find a foothold—a rock, a log, anything. She bruised her knee on a slippery, algae-coated rock that was smooth from years of water charging against it, but she was chilled and the bruise did not hurt much.

The dog was closer now. Its head bobbed in time to the churning of its front paws. She saw the dark rawhide dangling from its mouth.

Antelope’s eyes followed the rope upstream and discovered the loose end floating near the willow overhang. She ran to the water’s edge, reached through the scratchy brush and branches, hung on to a thick limb, and grabbed for the line as it trailed through the water. All the time she yelled instructions to Sacajawea, but she couldn’t make herself heard above the churning of the fast water.

Sacajawea managed to propel herself closer to the dog. Finally she gave several extra-strong kicks, reached out, and with a cold, stiff hand grabbed the short wet fur and loose skin and hung on with white knuckles. The dog opened its mouth and the line slacked and fell out. Sacajawea caught it before it hit the water. The dog blinked. Its head bobbed as it turned and headed for shore. The current pulled faster than the dog could paddle and it rested, letting the current have its way.

The Hidatsas, clearly enjoying this sport, shouted for the dog to resume swimming. Old Grandfather cupped his hands around his mouth and called for Sacajawea to pull herself up the line, to fasten it around a log or rock. The others watched the dog compete against the force of the rushing water, and they made bets about the exact place the animal would come ashore—if it made it to shore at all. The men believed the girl could not hold out, and they made bets about how long she could keep her head above the rapids. The women clicked their tongues, hid their eyes, not wishing to see the moment when the girl slipped under the froth, never to be seen again.

Old Grandfather took the rawhide line from Antelope’s right arm where she had wrapped it. He wound it four times around his hand and felt the strength of the pull. Antelope rubbed her arm, which was ringed with deep indentations, to bring the circulation and feeling back and to relieve the tingling. She heard a group of women call out encouragement to the dog, and she watched Sacajawea work painfully and slowly toward shore, moving hand over hand along the rawhide line.

Old Grandfather yelled for someone to help him, and a broad-faced brave with clamshell earrings ran over and also grabbed the rope. Both men now began pulling, and Sacajawea found herself moving so fast through the water that she could not keep her head in the air. She choked and gasped. A shin banged the sharp end of a submerged log, but she was barely aware of any pain. The men’s pulling made her feel as though her arms were being pulled from their sockets. She tried to signal them not to pull so fast, but she couldn’t raise an arm from the water. Her hands and arms were numb with cold. She tried rolling over on her back, but the water washed over her face; she could not breathe. I am going to drown, she thought. It can’t matter if I let go the line. Clumsily she worked to twist the rawhide from her wrist, and finally it slipped off her hand.

Her knees sank and she lowered her feet with no thought anymore of finding footing. It was her knees that touched the gravel bottom. Her head came up and she could breathe. The breaths were shallow, and her lungs felt scorched when she inhaled. Her throat felt raw and sore. It was the
kiyi-
ing barks of the dog that caused her eyes to seek the shore. The dog was standing alone on a sandbank.

A group of men, Catches Two in the center, were below the dog making good their bets. The dog had come ashore at the big red rock. Antelope ran back and forth along the shore motioning for Sacajawea to stand up and walk. Sacajawea raised her aching right arm in answer. She got to her feet, but she was dizzy and her legs were like wilted cornstalks. She put her hands down in the cold water and crawled. At the shore she lay on her back, staring at the clear sky, her chestheaving with hard breathing. Antelope sat down beside her.

“What can I do?” asked Antelope.

“Bring me two, three fish,” whispered Sacajawea.

“You want food?”

Sacajawea pointed toward the scrawny, silent dog.

Antelope hissed, “For that?”

“Ai,”
Sacajawea said, closing her eyes.

Antelope came back with two good-sized fish from Old Grandfather.

Sacajawea pushed herself up stiffly and walked on aching legs to the sandbank. She tossed both fish to the dog. It began to tear and chew chunks of fish hungrily.

Some of the Hidatsa shook fingers at Sacajawea, showing disapproval for wasting good food on the mongrel.

Later, Old Grandfather carried Antelope’s bull boat over his head until they moved far enough upstream to be out of the white water. Then he put the boat in the water and let Sacajawea curl up in the bottom. He poled upstream along with the others, homeward to the big Hidatsa village. Not once did he complain about his aching arms. Nor did he scold because he could hardly move his feet in the little boat. When he saw that Sacajawea could not control her shivering, he told her to remove the wet tunic, and he took off his dry shirt and wrapped her snugly in it. He never once mentioned the bows and arrows she had lost in the water, nor the fish net, nor the boat she smashed to pieces.

Soon the weasels became whiter and a growth of frost flowers decorated the marsh edge. A small band of Sioux came to trade, their travois loaded with meat and hides. They stayed three days and promised to come back later during the time of the big spring trading fair. The women in Catches Two’s lodge worked as they saw fit, going often to visit and gossip with the women in the Sioux camp. Sacajawea went out with the women, but when the dog followed, she felt many eyes on her. When she was sent to return a horse to the herd or to catch another to keep hobbled near the lodge, the dog stayed close by her. From the field, as she harvested the ripening squash, Sacajawea watched the games and horse racingbetween the Hidatsa and Sioux boys. They rode their horses flattened out like lizards. The older Sioux boys could ride a horse and fire arrows at the “enemy” at breakneck speed, miraculously clearing a series of small rocky gullies without mishap.

The Hidatsas had traded with the Sioux for much meat. Trees, bushes, and meat racks were covered with flat strings of it, drying, turning dark. The lodge of Catches Two had four skins from the Sioux; the hair on them was long, dark brown, shiny. The wind whistled out of the north, and the Sioux left for their winter camp before the first snow fell.

The dog often moved closer beside Sacajawea now. Although he was not allowed in the lodge, he seemed to live most of the time right outside the door, waiting for Sacajawea to come out. She continued to feed him, without Talking Goose’s discovering. She had learned to take the food she wanted without asking.

At night when Catches Two came to her sleeping couch, she feigned sleep, and often he moved away to the bed of Talking Goose or Antelope. But one night when he came to her he said that she created a flame in his belly that burned like a prairie fire. His hands ran slowly over her thighs as he said, “I may catch you by the river or the water hole, and you will lay for me each time I ask. You will think about it and feel the same fire.”

Sacajawea felt a sickening at the pit of her stomach.

“You are not fat like Talking Goose, or growing with child like Antelope, or old like Old Mother. You should look into the clear water. There you would see what I like—a young girl, barely a woman.”

Sacajawea lay very still, afraid to push and kick him, for he would beat her until she lay limp.

“You have an obligation to me, for I captured you and saved you from the white water in the river,” he breathed in her ear.

She shrugged and turned away so that he could not see her face in the firelight.

“It was the dog,” she whispered.

She felt his hard-surfaced flesh. Every movement he made had the easy gracefulness of an animal, seemingly unhurried, yet lithe and quick. But she could thinkonly of the dirt-clogged pores covering his nose, and the rank odor about him. His hands moved over her body— her shoulders, her back, her hips, her breasts. It was difficult for her to breathe as he lost himself in her; then nothing remained but the blaze and flash of sensation, and a thousand images, half-formed and swift, confused and fantastic, thronging like scurrying clouds heavy-laden with rain.

Then he slid from her bed and stood with his arms hanging at his sides. In the pale light from the lodge fire she could see his brown-yellow eyes, hard and uncompromising, watching her steadily. There was no doubt he meant every word he said.

“You will always be my slave.”

She was careful not to go down to the river alone, or to the woods by herself. At night she would relax her tired body, then stiffen at the thought that Catches Two might come again. She felt uncomfortable when he was in the lodge. His eyes were like burning coals. She did not want her friend Antelope to know of his desire. Soon Antelope was going to have her first papoose.

Sacajawea began letting the dog in the lodge at night. She kept him in the entrance, and early in the morning she would let him out before the others awoke.

Ice thickened in the upland streams. In a brief thaw a trickle of water slid into the marsh. It resealed caverns; desperate fish gulped and choked and suffocated; and wise crows waited for the bodies to emerge through the ice.

There was much food in the storage cellars, and at no time did anyone know true hunger cramps in their belly. But about midwinter there was a great hunger in the soul for the green shoots of grass and the warmth of a spring sun. Snow smothered the grasses, and the horses were fed corn by the Hidatsa women. Sacajawea learned the merit in crop planting and storing for the long winter. Dimly she recalled the wild grass seeds her mother had wanted to store for the winter. That would have been good for trading with a friendly tribe for their oversupply of meat and warm hides.

In the warmth of the lodge, Catches Two made a new war shield and several long spears to be used for elkhunting. Old Grandfather left for several days at a time and returned with field mice and thin squirrels to add to the vegetable soup. The women made clothing and mended moccasins.

Almost daily, Sacajawea made a trip to the cache of vegetables in the field. She learned that she must keep busy to avoid the eyes of Catches Two. Sometimes she not only filled the leather pouch from the lodge with corn or hard, dry beans, but she stuffed some of the beans inside her tunic and shared jerky she found, hanging on bundles along the cellar walls, with the dog. She chewed the filched beans as she sewed and cooked.

That spring the Chinook struck the western country, and water flowed down the Big Muddy and Knife rivers in submarine arteries, then across the top of the rotting ice. Water streamed from shrinking snow and roared down gullies from the drifted prairie. The river ice cracked with reports sharper than an Indian trade flintlock, and broke into vast white blocks that began to move, crushing, grinding, piling up, and pushing in dirty banks and windows out over the flooded bottoms. Suddenly entire families, tired of the dank, smoke-filled lodges, went hunting. The Hidatsas often hunted with the other Minnetaree village, Metaharta, or their cousins, the Wetersoon, at the mouth of the Knife River.

When the first winter storms had come sweeping over the plains, buffalos and other large animals had begun their great migration toward the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, seeking protection in the bluffs, the brush, and the timber. Often buffalo were drawn out upon weak ice, pushed on by the moving mass behind. Thousands might break through and be swept away, drowned, and then frozen. In the spring, the huge bodies were washed out and scattered along the riverbanks for hundreds of miles, the flesh greenish under the hide and ready to come alive on the first day of warm sun with fiies and a horrible stench that only the buzzards, the Minnetarees, and their friends, the Mandans, could endure. When the sun woke the flies from their winter’s nap, the meat was so tender it almost fell apart. It was ripe for those with a taste for that sort ofthing, as the Minnetarees had. Perhaps that taste had been cultivated in the days before the horse, when large supplies of meat were welcomed under almost any circumstance.
¹

The Minnetarees took to the river, the young men leaping from one ice cake to the next, falling between, to bob up elsewhere, towing buffalo carcasses to the bank. The women slipped out of their doeskin dresses and plunged naked into the icy water, too, collecting driftwood for fuel, which was always scarce on the prairie. There was no shyness about the naked body among the two Minnetaree tribes. The floating wood was important, and the ripened meat, like the hung game of the British, the hung beef of some Americans, was a great delicacy.

Everyone, except the very old and very young, was armed with a horn spoon and butcher knife. Some carried leather bags to bring meat home; some carried huge hunks of bark to use as sleds across the soft snow. Overnight the hills began weeping freshets, and there was the soft sucking
chug
of collapsing snowbanks. The children laughed and the women sang. The air felt good in the sunlight, where the eyes did not have to shut against the sting of the warm smoke of the lodge.