Sacajawea (22 page)

“Ho, Le Borgne knows where to pick the pretty flowers!” shouted one of the bearded men in broken Minnetaree.

“Hey, Chief, you think they’ll come entertain us?” called another, stamping his feet and swinging his arms.

“Quiet,” the huge man said, and his anger seemed to rise and boil within him. “You, then, take this to the one called Sweet Clover.” Rosebud gasped as he handed her the weasel collar from around his neck. ‘Tell the one called Sweet Clover that Chief Kakoakis sends this gift”

Grasshopper drew in her breath.

Chief Kakoakis turned toward Grasshopper and blinked his one good eye at her. “I was not aware of this youngest daughter of yours. I see she is now ripeenough to be a woman. Send her to my lodge, and you will have a grand present. You do like presents, Old Mother?”

“There are enough gifts this day to satisfy the heart,” spat out Grasshopper, moving to block Kakoakis from both Sacajawea and Rosebud.

“Some of my friends wish to dance,” Kakoakis said, pointing to the bearded men. “I will tell them that you make them welcome.” He turned to leave and was swallowed by the crowd that seemed to surge in behind him.

Grasshopper’s face was ashen. “Kakoakis!” she spat, her voice shaking. Her mouth bunched up, and she rubbed her hands down her hips. “Give me the weasel tips.” She grabbed them from Rosebud and stepped silently toward the refuse heap. She never took her eyes from Sacajawea as she wadded the fur necklace and threw it on the pile of bones and scraps. No one seemed to look at her, nor did they say anything for fear of bringing on the wrath of their chief.

When the sun began to set and the men who were to serve as masked dancers had donned their ritual shirts and moccasins, the Shaman rolled a leaf of mild tobacco, puffed smoke to the four directions, and asked the dancers to begin.

With the drums throbbing, they moved out to the center of the village to the council fire, moving forward and back, then circling. The people talked and joked, and soon the young people joined in, the girls keeping a watchful eye for a hand, perhaps a certain hand, to beckon them into the dancing and song, then to fall back to another, as was proper.

Sacajawea knew that she was expected to join the dancers, but the sight of Kakoakis and the white men sitting near Redpipe on the far side of the fire filled her with fear, and she watched the activities sitting safely on a blanket.
³¹
At last the festivities were over.

The return to the lodges from the dance was casual. The young people walked together in small groups, the old women a few steps behind, complaining among themselves about the late hour and the chill of the night.

When Sacajawea came through the lodge entrance, Grasshopper asked, “Did you enjoy your festivities?”

“Ai,
thank you. It was nice.” She showed Grasshopper her presents: paints, a belt with beaded shells, a scraping knife, a metal awl, several yellowed elk’s teeth.

“I am relieved Chief Kakoakis did not bother us at the dancing,” sighed Rosebud, “but you did not dance with anyone! You just sat there staring at the fire and the other dancers! You did not dance!”

“Shhh! My daughter did not wish to dance. She had a moment of bad experience,” said Grasshopper, waddling over to sit beside Sacajawea.

“Is she my daughter or still a slave girl?” asked Red-pipe, moving his skinny legs into bed. “It was embarrassing for me to have her sit. Chief Kakoakis asked me about her. When we could not find her dancing, he made a joke, Oh, oh, she is out in the brush with a man already. So—she is aware of the effect she has on men!’ And he slapped me on the back so that I almost coughed up my buffalo steak.”

“And then you pointed to where she was sitting?” snapped Grasshopper.

“I did not! One of the bearded white men did that. They had been watching her. These white men are slaves to urges that seem about to consume them. But they did not go near our new daughter. After a time they went home with the women loaned to them by Kakoakis. I think they imagined you beside our daughter and feared your long tongue.”

Grasshopper whispered, “Great Spirit, help us!” Then in a louder voice she said, “I have noticed that about the whites. They are eaten by the thoughts of one thing—wanting our women. Nobody has taught them to be continent or restrained like our men, by fasting and controlling the body for what it must endure in war or in hunting and trapping.”

“Mother,” interrupted Rosebud, “the white traders in our village are not so bad. They have lived here for as many as five summers.” She held up the fingers of one hand. “Their women do not complain about them. The women have many presents and do not have to work in the fields. Their men are able to trade for the vegetables from us. It is our chief, Kakoakis, I think, who spreads evil in our village.”

Redpipe rolled over in his bed. “Women! Hush! Nevermust you speak out loud of your dissatisfaction with our chief. He can bring disaster upon this household anytime he wishes.”

Instantly Grasshopper remembered the discarded weasel collar and looked about the room thinking who might have seen her put it in the refuse pile and wondering if any would dare tell on her. On an impulse, she left Sacajawea’s side and walked to the back of the lodge where the refuse had been thrown. She stopped, aghast. A squaw was hunting through the pile. It was possible her family did not supply her with enough to keep her sides from rubbing, and Grasshopper called to her, “Come, I will fix you some broth!”

Before Grasshopper could get a good look at her, the woman, who was not old, but young and agile, ducked and dodged past. Something was rolled inside the front of her tunic. Her hands pushed it securely to her breast as she ran across to the next lodge and then out of sight. Grasshopper called after her and ran to the edge of the next lodge, but the young woman had gone. Grasshopper’s mind ran in circles. She gazed at the clouds in the sky and tried to think, to remember the features of the young woman. Was she familiar? Grasshopper wiped her hands on her tunic; they were wet with perspiration.

“That woman took the weasel-tail collar,” said both Sacajawea and Rosebud together. They had followed Grasshopper from the lodge, and now they put their hands to their mouths. It was a sign of thinking another’s thoughts to speak the same thing at the same time. “Why would she take that?” they asked together. Then, afraid to speak again, they looked to Grasshopper.

“She could be a woman of Kakoakis,” Grasshopper said slowly. “But I don’t think so. His women are well-dressed and good-looking. I did not see her face, but she was not clean.” Grasshopper’s decision was made. “Do not think on this. It is something we can do nothing about. Probably we will not hear of it again. The weasel collar is gone, and I say good riddance!” She clucked and pulled the wisps of hair from her face and returned to the lodge.

“I hope Grasshopper is right and there will be nothing more heard of the collar,” said Rosebud.

“Ai,”
answered Sacajawea. “I do not want Chief Kakoakis coming around. He could give the small children bad dreams.”

That night, Sacajawea slept little. She was a woman now, but vacillated between the impossible thought of running away and the other thought of quietly marrying one of the Metaharta braves. “Why not?” she asked herself. “My own people did not come to look for me.”

Then there was that round, hard thing that came and stayed in her throat—the thing was the forgetting of the old Agaidüka habits. Several times she told herself, “I am an Agaidüka. I must throw off my Minnetaree ways and keep those of my own people. They cannot make me be a Minnetaree!” She thought of following the Big Muddy River back across the prairie, into the mountains—but if she were caught, she would be made sport of by Kakoakis, then she would be killed or sold to some other tribe. Grasshopper was kind, and life was not hard here as it had been in the big Hidatsa village. Maybe she should, after all, wash her mind of the past.

She lay quite still until the dawn light showed through the smoke hole and she could see the dark forms of her new family lying around the sides of the circular room. She rose quietly and went outside, pulling a woven grass sash tightly around her waist to hold in the sides of her tunic. No sound came from anywhere in the village. All was cool and still. She walked quietly down to the edge of the bathing place in the river and along the shore. She watched the killdeers swooping out over the river, catching insects on the wing, emitting thin cries as they rose from the river and flew out across the grassy plain. She watched until they were only a group of mingling, weaving specks, then nothing. She washed the paint from yesterday’s ceremony from her body. She felt refreshed, and her mind was clear.

Sacajawea went back across the grassy rise and along the dusty path toward the village. On an impulse she wandered close to the sapling-picketed walls of the village along the bank of a little stream. She thought of the wild dog and wondered if there were others in thesagebrush out there, waiting to be friendly. She began roaming the woods. She had known little of childhood, but Mother Earth was her friend. The growing things that changed every day, the rocks that never changed at all—these were things she could count on. She thought, I always know what to expect of the things of Mother Earth. Sometimes they are cruel, but it is hard, clean cruelty. They don’t torture you with their own weakness. She wondered then about Old Mother, Old Grandfather, and Catches Two, Antelope, and Talking Goose. Then her mind turned to her new family—the tormented Redpipe, and Sweet Clover, and the hideous chief of this village. Kakoakis could change people’s lives without so much as thinking about what he was doing. You cannot count on people, she thought, and the corner of her mouth flickered with a grim little smile.

Alone this morning, she let herself go back to the fantasies her childhood had never completed. She entered into the magic realm that her new family would not have credited even if she could have told them of it. Grown-ups managed to forget all such things with maturity and could not visualize one who had been a slave for several years behaving with such abandonment and pure childish joy. She smiled secretly for delight, a child, forgetful of all yesterdays.

For several hours she wandered, playing in her own way, back into her nearly forgotten childhood, vying with the chipmunks in search of nuts, with the chickadees in the seeking out of secret places, and with the big green frogs in plumbing the depths of the woodland pools. She had smelled scents, seen colors, heard sounds, and felt joys so seldom in the summer air. Her fingers, no longer callused, were sensitive to the dryness of the rocks and the pleasurable contrast between the soft moss and the rough sand, all at one and the same time, in the instinctive way of young birds and animals.

About midafternoon, she came to the banks of a wide stream. She made boats of rolled bark, peeling it thin with her knife and sending boatloads of frightened people down the rushing stream to the far-off water. Her people were pinecones, and she sang to them with each launching in the old, monotonous, five-note songs of the

Agaidükas. Her songs were not remembered, but instantly invented to fit the freedom of her situation.

Presently a disturbing sensation that she was not alone began to steal over her—a sense that unfriendly eyes were close by. She hardly heeded it at first, but it persisted. Finally she stood up and strove to penetrate the blue-black shadows.

Then her heart gave a violent surge and she wished she had taken heed of those semiconscious warnings earlier. Something subtle as a shifting cloud had caused her to glance backward, and there, framed in a tangle of windfall, she saw a bushy black head with a furry face and dark eyes, and although there were no braids like the braves wore, and the face was not smooth and brown, she knew this was a man—a bearded white stranger. This was one of the white trappers from the village!

He’d been there a long time, fixing his beaver traps and watching Sacajawea at play. This was not the first time he had followed this same girl lecherously. He had seen her in the big Hidatsa village, and discovered her here more than a moon before. He had taken to watching her in the gardens, knowing well that he could not touch her without being obliterated with a fast stroke of her skinning knife. Each time he had shadowed this child, who was clear-featured and slim, exquisitely made, beautiful by the standards of whites and Indians alike, the one part of frenzied daring had come a bit closer to prevailing over the nine parts of sheer cowardice that composed his French nature. But an instinctive awe of very young females continued to hold him from success.

Today, in this lonely spot, he had aroused himself to the point of action. And like the blood lust of the prairie wolf, the bodily appetite of this half-white, half-Indian man, fully aroused, was not to be turned aside. Imagination had worked upon him until lurid flames burned in his raisinlike eyes and he could fairly smell the pleasure of the tender flesh of his prey.

Abruptly the shaggy black head withdrew for an instant, only to reappear at another spot several feet closer. As Sacajawea glimpsed his short, broad body, the strength of his shoulders, she felt a shaft of coldfear at the purpose she sensed in his sinister movements.

Breaking the spell of his evil watching eyes, Sacajawea turned and fled along the bank of the stream. Glancing backward, she saw the man crashing through the thickets, closing the distance between them. Her knife lay on a shell of birchbark, glinting in the sun.

Emboldened by the sight of the girl running away, the bearded man covered the ground in short bounds, keeping to the undergrowth. Now Sacajawea ran with frank abandon and with all the strength she had. She had never before known fear of a man’s two eyes, but she was terrified at what she saw in their depths, fearing at each moment to be struck down. But her woods sense did not leave her; she knew just where she was— the stream led back to the gates of the village, and toward those she turned in her flight, knowing there would be refuge there.

The man was fascinated by the ancient game of chasing a desperate quarry. He came on, always keeping to cover, never getting closer, yet never falling behind. This was all that delayed the girl’s capture in those first vital minutes.