Sacajawea (18 page)

In the sudden silence, a low whimpering sound drew everyone’s attention from the dead dog. Their eyes caught something unfamiliar. Antelope began to sob loudly once again and point with her finger. A dead female coyote lay in a puddle of blood just beyond the place where the cradleboard had stood against the Cottonwood. Near the tree lay a bull boat, bottom up. The whimpering came from under the old, discarded boat.

Still sniffling, Antelope ran to investigate. The papoose was out of the cradleboard, on his hands and knees under the lightweight boat. He was dirty and bedraggled and crying now because he was hungry— but he was unharmed.

“The dog saved him,” breathed Sacajawea, pointing to the broken straps on the cradleboard. The straps and lacing looked like something had chewed on them.

Antelope picked up her papoose, cooing and soothing and cuddling him; but this sweet moment of relief was short. Without warning, Sacajawea leaped at Catches Two and began beating him about the face and chest.

Old Mother felt a slow fear dawn in her heart, and her eyes became dark and glassy. Her lips were stiff as she took a deep breath. “What will happen?” she asked Antelope.

“It is up to Catches Two,” said Antelope, looking at Sacajawea, who had stopped hitting Catches Two, although her fists were still balled in rage. She could say no more, but gave a sickish laugh when Sacajawea rushed to the dog and threw herself on its back, embracing its scrawny head with the lifeless, amber eyes. Something great was gone.

Catches Two was bewildered by Sacajawea’s behavior. “It is unforgivable,” he said to Old Mother, “for a slave to beat her master and defile his lodge with a wild dog.” And then Sacajawea pulled her good sleeping robe out of the lodge and pushed the hulk of the dog onto it. Catches Two sat on the earth and began to laugh softly, unregenerate laughter. He was unstrung after his encounter with the dog and the pounding he had taken from Sacajawea.

Sacajawea promptly restrung him with a sharp, dark look. “I’ll lodgepole you,” she warned, “if you or anyone makes another sound.”

His laughter broke off and he glared at her. “No woman talks to a Hidatsa brave that way,” he said, but then fell silent.

Carefully she tied the robe together with thongs found in the lodge. Then she dragged the huge parcel across the cultivated field, toward the willow brake. She tugged and heaved until it was firmly caught in the lower branches of an old sycamore. She tore at her hair until it fell loose. She tore her face with her fingernails until it streamed blood. She tore her tunic. She scooped up dirt and spread it on her head and face. The riverbank was filled with her high animal howl.

“We must get rid of her,” said Catches Two. “She cannot stay here.”

“Where can she go?” asked Antelope.

“I think the old chief Black Moccasin would take her,” said Old Grandfather, pointing his pipe to the four corners of the earth and offering a prayer in behalf of the spirit of the dead dog.

“He has many slaves,” said Old Mother.

“Give her to Bull Face. He is shriveling up for want of a slave girl,” snickered Talking Goose.

“It is the Moon of the Trading Fair,” Catches Two said. He sounded worried. “There is much to do, and it will not be good if the girl continues to mourn. It will not look good to the village. If she does not come to her senses, we must end her comings and goings.”

“It is up to you,” said Old Mother, looking closely at Catches Two. “You are the one who brought her to us.” Her mouth bunched up and she scratched in the earth with the heel of her moccasin. Sacajawea’s howls were still to be heard as Old Mother began pushing dust over the pools of dried blood left by the dog.

Antelope clutched her baby son. “Will the wild beast’s spirit kill us because we did not believe in him?” she said.

It was a new thought.
“Ai,”
said Talking Goose. “What do you think about that, Old Mother?”

“I do not know,” she answered. “But perhaps the forces that made the dog react the way he did will be angry because the dog has been killed. We will offer an especially rich gift to the dog’s spirit to show that the members of our lodge feel some remorse and will never again harm a wild dog.”

Everyone supported her except Old Grandfather. He said, “I am not so sure this is necessary.”

Old Mother ignored him. She said, “If we place many animal bones together under the tree in the willow brake where the girl took the body of the dog, the sun and the moon, and the trees and living animals, will see, and they will know that we wish the spirit of the dog well.”

“Just how will they know this?” asked Old Grandfather.

“They will know,” said Old Mother.

And so the women of Catches Two’s lodge built a pile of bones as high as the branches that held the last earthly remains of the dog, and left a fresh hunk of bear meat on the top of the bone monument so that the spirit of the dog would not go hungry.

In the morning, Sacajawea was found sitting between the rows of new-planted corn, making believe the dog sat watching on his side of the brake. The meatthat Antelope had left was gone, and there were wild dog or wolf tracks around the huge stack of bones.

“Those are the tracks of the dog’s spirit,” said Old Mother positively.

The story of the bone monument was long recounted in the big Hidatsa village, and each spring new bones were added to the heap by the descendants of Catches Two.

If the Indians are right they went east to the great fur fair of Montreal in the late 1630’s and returned with white-man goods. Gradually, visiting tribes brought meat and furs to the upper villages of the Missouri River, trading them for corn, beans, and squash. In spite of the competition and the growing wars among the crowded tribes, the Hidatsas managed to keep a hand on the good share of the trade through their favored upper-river position. For years now, the goods had been brought right through their gates by the British, enlarging the importance of the villages as a marketing place, rivaling the early fur-trading posts of Lake Superior, Rainy Lake, Lake of the Woods, etc. Thus it became a sort of Grand Portage at rendezvous time, but operated by Indians.

From
The Beaver Men.
Copyright 1964 by Marie Sandoz, Hasting House, Publishers, Inc., pp. 15-21.

B
efore sunup the next morning, the
tum-tum
of hide drums was heard coming from the center of the village. The Moon of the Trading Fair, June, had begun. During the night the Hidatsa scouts discovered the Yankton Sioux setting up a camp close by. As soon as their presence was announced, others hurried out to welcome them back and to offer hospitality during their stay. Within the next few days a large group of Oglala Sioux came. The Hidatsa women began preparing meats and fresh cactus with the spines cut off and young, succulent thistle leaves for the thousands of visitors who were on their way to the enormous trade fair gathering in the area of the five villages of the Upper Missouri. The Hidatsa men prepared flat prairie area for various games of skill and chance and a wide, long track for horse racing.

For years, tribes from as far away as northern Canada and the southern plains had come to these sedentary villages to trade. The French-Canadians from around Hudson’s Bay came on horseback, trailing ponies loaded with wool blankets, capotes, and long colored sashes. Ojibwas came with axes and awls of bone and arrowheads of copper and baskets of wild rice. The Kiowas brought bone knives and mallets, along with baskets of yucca pods. The Utes brought beautifully cured skins of mountain goats and goat horns filled with white quartz for beadmaking. The Crees’ horses were loaded with rice, snowshoes, and packs of marten and mountain lion fur. The Teton Sioux brought skins of mountain sheep. The Apaches came with leather sacks of obsidian for spear points. Others brought seashells and walrus ivory from trade centers west of the Rocky Mountains. Some came with red pipestone, reindeer horn, and caribou skins. Many had leather boxes and woven containers filled with herbs: sassafras, peyote, cascara, foxglove, bergamot, sage, thorn apple, poke-root, mullein, wild cherry bark, anise seeds, and cone-flower root.

After bartering, these tribes took home dried corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, gourds, tobacco, dried currants, rosehips, skunkberries, glass beads, and deerskins and buffalo robes embroidered with dyed porcupine quills.
¹

The visiting young boys were full of pranks, often stealing meat from the women’s drying racks, then dashing off for a good laugh and a feast together.

All loved the games of chance. A Ute gambled away all of his property, even his wife. However, she told her husband she would not go anywhere, and sat on the ground refusing to budge; he was disgraced because she would not honor the gamble. In the end she hit him in the stomach with a heavy leather bag and he sprawled in the dirt, discredited. The winner, an Apache, took a good look at the couple and decided he would be better off leaving them together. He gave the humiliated Ute a kick in the back and stalked away, saying, “This bet is off!”

A group of laughing women played the game of hands with a pair of small sticks. One stick was marked with a string around the middle and the guesser had to point to the opponent’s hand that held the unmarked stick. Some Yankton women were playing shinny against some Teton women with a buckskin ball, throwing it against a goal indicated by blankets on the ground. The Crow introduced their favorite hoop-and-pole game. Two players rolled a hoop on a level course and threw darts at it, and the way the darts struck the hoop determined the count. The French-Canadian traders held foot races while the Ojibwas and Kiowas held archery and horse racing contests. Often there were heated discussions and fistfights over who won these games. It was a time to collect and store memories of fresh stories to be told and savored during the coming snowy months.

Before sunrise on the morning of the fifth day after the death of the dog, Old Grandfather wakened Sacajawea. She was still wearing mourning ashes on her face, and although she had resumed her chores, she would not speak to Catches Two, and had been seen at night near the willow brake—looking for the spirit of the dog, some neighbors said.

“Fix your hair in two braids. Put the red stripe down your center part and put red inside your ears. Washyour face, paint yellow rings under your eyes, and join me at the front of the council lodge,” Old Grandfather told her. “If you have any valuables or trinkets you treasure, put them in a bag and hide them in your tunic. You are going to the fair with me.” He nodded his head toward her sleeping couch as if knowing where she kept her most treasured possession, the sky-blue stone of her ancestors.

While Sacajawea readied herself, Old Grandfather lay himself down with his head in Antelope’s lap. With great rapidity she picked off the vermin that resided in his hair. She smashed the enormous crawlers with her teeth, keeping them in her mouth until there were enough to spit out in the shape of a ball as large as a walnut. Then she stuck his hair together in tufts with pine gum and plastered the whole arrangement with white clay and grease and streaks of red paint.

Sacajawea was glad Old Grandfather had selected her to carry the trade goods back to the lodge. Perhaps the fair would help lighten her heavy heart. But she wondered why he was taking such pains to look handsome and why he had ordered her to look her best and to bring her treasures.

She cautiously took the small pouch from under her sleeping couch. Inside was the blue stone on the thin thong. The rusty red round stone, and a dark feather from a Canada goose she had found by the river last fall. It shone green in the sunlight. She had imagined that the goose had been south of the sunset where her People lived. Perhaps he had even seen the village of the People.

Sacajawea followed Old Grandfather across the camp, heading for the trading ground set up on the prairie. Not too far from the lodge, a quail whistled in the grass, so close to Old Grandfather that it startled them both; a cool whiff of wind rustled through the dew-laden buffalo grass beside them, and then died down. A scattering of gray clouds scudded in from the north. Slowly the lower sky faded into pearl gray; still lower, a faint area of clear, lake-deep green; and below that, a little line of mustard yellow right at the horizon. As she watched the sunrise, Sacajawea was overcome by the tranquillity of the dawn.

All the fevers of the last few days—death, murder, fear—seemed unreal. She felt suspended in a world without trouble or conflict. The breeze cooled her face; a scent of sage in the air refreshed her; the subdued sounds of the prairie soothed her with their familiarity and at the same time had a new and unaccustomed timbre as the traders began assembling for the day. Chippewas trundled sacks of rice; in every direction Indians carried bundles. And now she could hear shouts of instruction or warning: “Make way!” “Watch the ground!” “Throw out your grain!”—shouts of the counters, shouts of recognition, banter between nations. There were swarms of big-eyed, barefooted children standing about—torrents of laughter—excited eyes gleaming—white teeth in brown faces—lithe brown bodies naked to the waist—wind-tousled hair—movement, energy, hubbub, gaiety.

Sacajawea walked behind Old Grandfather, following him at the correct distance, until he stopped near a circle of braves who were already set up for trading. Sacajawea moved closer then so she could see inside the circle and watch what interesting things were being exchanged. Old Grandfather inspected the braves, then moved to the side of an Ahnahaway who had a rough face and unkempt hair that was smeared with red clay and tallows. The British called these Ahnahaways, cousins to the Minnetarees, Wetersoons, and the French called them Soulier Noir Indians. Old Grandfather tugged at the Ahnahaway’s shirt and, when he had his attention, pointed to Sacajawea, making suggestive motions with his hands. Sacajawea went numb. The Ahnahaway’s face brightened. He appraised Sacajawea for a moment, then said, “Come, I have something you will like.”