Sacajawea (31 page)

Inside the lodge, the women of Four Bears brought out leather boxes of healing salves. They helped Rosebud untie the weights, pull out the splints, and bathe Fast Arrow’s wounds.

Redpipe and Four Bears were showing their old torture scars, laughing and slapping each other across the knees. Rosebud sat limply beside her man’s couch. Fast Arrow slept deeply, with his mouth open. He snorted loudly. His tongue was swollen and his lips cracked from lack of water. Rosebud bent over him and moistened his lips with her tongue. He did not know they celebrated his victory over death.

Gently Rosebud began to stroke Fast Arrow’s forehead with a soft, damp leather cloth. She talked to him on and on, in a voice as soft as drifting feathers. Again and again she bent and moistened his lips with her tongue, letting a little of the saliva trickle down his parched throat.

Traded from one warrior to another, Sacajawea was finally put up on a blanket by her current owner and gambled away to Toussaint Charbonneau, a squawman from Montreal, who had a special weakness for very young Indian girls.

Excerpt from p. 155 in
Lewis and Clark: Partners in Discovery
by John Bakeless. Copyright 1947 by John Bakeless. By permission of William Morrow and Company.

S
un Woman and Sacajawea put fresh red paint down the middle of their hair parts and on the insides of their ears. They put fresh paint on the front of their moccasins and scrubbed the grease and dirt spots from their tunics. They were to go with Four Bears and Redpipe to the council area. Refreshed and rested after eating, and relieved that the Okeepa had been completed with honor this night, Four Bears and Redpipe would come to sit around the arena fire to tell, with pride in their voices, of the bravery of Fast Arrow. The telling of the stories of each candidate would be mingled with social dancing and the playing of gambling games.

It was dark now. Only the arena fire gave light. Other young people were slipping from their lodges, heading for the firelight. It was not far, but there in the chill dark, with the red light ahead, the black shadows, the soft
lum-lum-lalum
of the drummers, and the distant keening of the village mourners, it seemed very long.

Sun Woman, plump and smooth-faced, guided Sacajawea behind the men’s circle, and with their backs to the ring of men and their arms intertwined with other women, they danced to the drummers’ rhythm, moving toward and away from the men. Following the rules of this dance, the men pretended to ignore the women, whose dancing gradually became more and more animated, and who began to sing as they danced. Soon the harp musicians came to add their music to the drums. The women broke their circle and darted suddenly through the circle of seated men. The men began to sing, with an elaborate pretense that nothing was happening.

Sacajawea picked up the mood of the dance and let her pent-up emotions loose; she leaped, swaggered, and cavorted in incredible gyrations, following the movements of the Mandan women as they danced the history of their culture, from the warrior and fertility dances to the dance-dramas about love, nature, and the ancient pale-faced fathers of their people. Sacajawea became flushed and her eyes twinkled as she laughed and triedto keep up with the singing. She was in turn feverish, then seductive, then haunting. She did not even mind that Broken Tooth was in the circle.

The drums, drums, drums pulsated insistently. The women tapped men lightly on their shoulders, then returned to their original places and reformed their circle, leaving space this time for the chosen men to fill in.

It was now a test for the men, for each one had to know who it was who had tapped him. Each man rose and joined the circle, going to the woman whose finger had brushed his shoulders. If he failed to go to the right woman, it was considered a grievous insult. The men began dancing with high-leaping athletic prowess, looking carefully at each woman, some of whom were now bare-breasted.

Redpipe and Four Bears were finely dressed. Four Bears’s leggings were fringed with scalp locks, and Red-pipe’s were trimmed with porcupine quills painted yellow and blue. They wore no shirts; their chests and backs were painted with yellowish daubs to resemble the sun’s rays. Around Four Bears’s neck was a long string of elk’s teeth. Around Redpipe’s neck was a white leather collar adorned with small pearly shells. The women of the lodge had worked hard this night to make the men look so handsome.

Chief Black Cat, his face painted with dots and triangles, seated himself next to Four Bears. He seemed in a cheerful mood, perhaps relieved that the torture rites were over for one more year.

Then the Wolf Chief appeared with the huge, ugly Chief Kakoakis and two men with long, black, bristly beards. Sun Woman pointed them out to Sacajawea. “The Wolf Chief has visitors for this festive night,” she said, clicking her teeth. “Look, they take off their shirts and come to join the dance.”

A chill swept over Sacajawea. She pulled Sun Woman into the shadows, out of the firelight around the dancers.

“Are you tired of dancing?” asked Sun Woman.

“No. I was enjoying myself,” confessed Sacajawea, “but I do not want to dance with the white men. The bearded one next to Kakoakis is the white trader called Charbonneau.”

“The other bearded one is the man of Brooken Tooth,” said Sun Woman. “See, the one with the squinted eyes and the black cloth tied around his neck? That is the man they call René Jussome. The white men do not look like men, much, but like animals, with such thick hair on their bodies and faces. I would call that one Big Bear!” She giggled.

They watched the three men approach the men’s circle for dancing. Kakoakis, who wore a beaver tail to the front and back of his breechclout and an elaborate neckpiece of bear claws, knotted thongs, and painted eagle feathers, made a beeline for Broken Tooth, who was wearing a tunic with an elaborately decorated yoke of brightly painted shells and quills. He laughed loudly as he moved into the open space at her right and took her hand.

Charbonneau wore soft leather boots, baggy pants, and a red kerchief at his throat. He weighed about two hundred pounds and was not tall. His eyes were nearly black, and his face bore the large nose and high cheekbones of the French-Canadian métis, or half-breed. He looked around the circle of giggling girls, then with an awkward imitation of the Mandan leap, he entered the men’s circle. The dance began again.

Jussome, who had placed a cloth cap with an eagle feather jauntily fastened to the side on his head, stood on the far side of the circle watching his woman, Broken Tooth, dance with the tall, repulsive, one-eyed Kakoakis. The dance went on until the dancemaster, who was the Medicine Man of the Bull Dance, signaled the drummers to stop and said, “Let no one walk out into the brush,” as a warning to the young couples who had made love pacts.

There were braves stationed at strategic places on the outer rim of the arena to see that no one wandered out to the brush, but not all the lovers were kept within bounds. Kakoakis, chief of the Metaharta village, moved furtively out into the darkness with the giggling, loose-hipped Broken Tooth.

Charbonneau moved toward Jussome, who was now talking in loud guffaws with Four Bears. “How about a little game of hands? I bring five quarts of rum from

Fort Pine last time I visit.” He repeated his offer in Mandan to Four Bears.

Jussome made signs indicating to Four Bears that it was good crazy-water and would warm his innards.

“Have you ever watched men at this game called hands?” asked Sun Woman. She had read the signs the men exchanged.

Sacajawea nodded no. She had never seen men play the game, but she had played it with Rosebud’s children many times.

“They will play the game a long time before they go to the lodges. Let us go watch awhile. Sometimes they play for knives, or arrows, or beads, or shells. Four Bears might win something for me.”

Jussome, in a row with the Wolf Chief, Black Cat, Four Bears, and Redpipe, faced a row of men including Charbonneau. Seven men were facing only six, and Charbonneau was passing firewater and complaining because his row was short a man, delaying the start of the game. The Mandan Charbonneau spoke was heavily accented with French and English, and it was hard for Sacajawea to understand him.

Finally, Chief Kakoakis was sighted coming across the flat ground behind the Medicine Lodge. Broken Tooth came a few paces behind, the top of her tunic pushed around her waist as it had been during the dancing. Her breasts bounced as she walked along the hard ground. Charbonneau, who was seated cross-legged, watched her dangling breasts and broke into a lecherous grin. He took a pull from the rum jug.

“Jésus,
what a woman,” breathed Charbonneau, his roundish face pushed out low from the hunched thrust of his shoulders. His voice came from deep down in his throat.

Jussome glared at Charbonneau. “You have forgotten one thing,” he said in his French-Canadian patois. ‘That is my woman, and if you want her you pay me in worthwhile goods, the same as Kakoakis does.”

Kakoakis took his place in Charbonneau’s line, opposite Redpipe, and now seven men faced another row of seven. They were spaced about three feet apart. A ring was drawn in the earth between the rows. The Wolf Chief began a low chant that was picked up by

Redpipe and then Kakoakis. The rum jug passed between the players and the game began, accompanied by yells of encouragement or hisses at opponents by the onlookers.
¹

The hands game was played with small bones that could be concealed in a man’s hand. One of the bones was carved with lines and dots around the center; the other was polished, but left plain. The object was to fool an opponent into picking the hand that contained the unmarked bone. Markers, in the form of sticks, twelve on each side of the ring, kept the score.

Kakoakis kept time to the low, monotonous singing, moving his hands about in front, to the side and behind his back, under his leg, over his head and under his arm. He moved his hands slowly and flashed the bones so that Redpipe, whose face was flushed with rum, could plainly see them. Then he moved them quickly high in the air keeping the backs of his hands toward Redpipe as his hands came together and apart, seeming not to open, keeping time to the beat. Suddenly, swaying to and fro, Kakoakis brought his hands toward Redpipe. Redpipe pointed to the right clenched hand.

Kakoakis opened his hand to show the marked bone.

Redpipe had won the point.

Kakoakis placed one of the twelve sticks lying on his side of the ring beside the twelve sticks on the side of the ring closest to Redpipe.

“You cover those sticks like they were a woman— with experience,” guffawed a man near Kakoakis.

“I cover a woman different, old warrior!” Kakoakis chuckled.

Sacajawea caught a glimpse of Broken Tooth skulking back from a trip to relieve herself in the woods. She moved around the two rows of men, then slid down petulantly next to Kakoakis. She looked up into his face and made a little pouting mouth.

Sacajawea looked at Jussome and thought, That man does not even care if his woman is moon-eyed in front of all these others! She looked from him to Charbonneau. The more closely she examined the faces of the white men, the more difficult it was to tell them apart. White men all look alike, she thought.

Redpipe now held the deal and moved the sticks hereand there. Under one leg, then the other, and back and forth in front of his opponent. Finally he held them out. Jussome spoke up fast.

“I bet the favors of my woman for a look at your left hand.”

There was much laughter, for this bet of Jussome’s would liven up the game. Redpipe was sitting very erectly, not wishing to offend the white trader, but at the same time not wishing to collect any favors from Jussome’s woman, Broken Tooth. He shrugged and opened his left hand.

There was much shouting, for Jussome had guessed wrong. He motioned to Broken Tooth, who went over and sat next to Redpipe, giggling and heaving her breasts to and fro.

Kakoakis took another swig of rum and bent to Red-pipe. “Put up as a prize this woman of Jussome,” he said.

Redpipe blinked. His face remained blank. Inside he felt a great relief. The idea came to him to lose quickly and get rid of the brazen young Broken Tooth, who meant nothing but trouble.

Redpipe, however, won his round, and Kakoakis passed his turn to Charbonneau.

The rum bottle was brought out, and again the chanting began. At the same time, several men got up and voided, seeing who could wet earth the farthest.

Sacajawea felt herself wilting. The day had been strenuous and long. It had been filled with experiences she had never had before, emotions and excitement that would live in her memory for a long time. Her eyes closed with sleep.

“Come along,” said Sun Woman, “we have stayed too long.” She helped Sacajawea to her feet. “Our men will be along toward morning. Let us sleep.”

Charbonneau turned at that moment and saw the women rise. He pointed a finger at them.

“He looks to us,” gasped Sacajawea.

“It is nothing,” said Sun Woman, unconcerned. “It was a gesture meaning nothing to us.” But Sun Woman was wrong.

“Bring that
femme
to me!” Charbonneau called.

“Redpipe, I wish you to place that daughter of yours as a bet instead of Broken Tooth.”

“Leave the child out of it,” Four Bears said to him before Redpipe could answer. He rose and walked to the women. “Go to our lodge,” he told them.

Charbonneau was complaining violently. He threatened to quit the game and take the firewater with him when he saw Sacajawea and Sun Woman begin to walk away.

“Stop!” bellowed Chief Kakoakis. “Come forward! I will have a look at these two.”

Even Four Bears dared not disobey this grotesque man.

“Chief Kakoakis,” Four Bears said. “This daughter of Redpipe is a guest in my lodge. I have told her to take my woman there.” He pointed to Sun Woman’s full breasts. “Her papoose needs feeding.”