Sacajawea (83 page)

Sacajawea wondered if she could point her questions in the right direction without arousing suspicion or antagonism. She was the newcomer, the person who was different, and she was smart enough to know newcomers were never well accepted at first. “Have the women of your tribe always worn these easy-to-make, one-piece skirts?”

The woman with the conical, woven-grass hat bent forward. “You can see we sew well. Your eyes are sharp anyway.”

Sacajawea thought that the skirt only deserved praise for its simplicity. “I can see that on a quiet day those threads hang in place until you move or walk, but in a breeze you cannot be covered by much, and in a hard wind—
kiyi
—if it is the month of snow, the place where your legs come together will suffer frostbite. Could you weave the threads in a solid piece?” As soon as she had finished she was sorry. Her words were wrong. She looked from one woman to the next. Her neck and face felt warm. “I am only asking you to help me understand your customs,” she said weakly.

“We can tell you need plenty of help. For your information, in the month of the shoulder moon we have blankets to wear that are woven from dogs’ wool. It takes five or six good dogs. A matting of bark threads is for canoe sails.”

“Shoulder moon?”

“Shoulder-to-shoulder around the warm fire.”

“Uumm,” said Sacajawea, wondering how to go on using her limited Chinook jargon. “What do you eat—besides salmon?” She used hand signs as she spoke.

“Are you hungry?” asked the woman with the rotting teeth. “Would you like to gamble for something to eat? Dried salmon, boiled crab or clam? Some fresh fish oil? A box of smoked pigeon breast?” The woman got up and with her ducklike gait went inside the closest hut. It was built of split cedar planks set on end. The roof was gabled and supported by posts and covered by overlapping boards. She came out holding a red, squarecornered, cedar box. She pointed to the box, then pointed to the moccasins Sacajawea wore.

Sacajawea took the box. She had never seen anything like it. The thin cedar boards, when thoroughly wet from steaming, had been bent around partial cuts, and the box was tight enough to hold even liquids. The corners were sewn with fibers, and the lid was decorated with inlaid shells.
“Skookumchuck!
Something good!” Sacajawea decided to say only complimentary things.

Both women nodded. The one with the bad teeth said, “Inside is much fish oil. Oil can be used to flavor fruit, or to rub on your face, all over, and in your hair. Keeps you young. Now you give me moccasins. You gamble nothing else.”

“You want to trade—make a bargain?” asked Sacajawea.

“Gamble, bargain, trade—
ai.”

Sacajawea shifted her weight on the mat and saw that the woman with the bad teeth shone with oil from her greasy hair to her shiny feet, which were bare. The woman with the umbrellalike hat wore moccasins with thick, ugly leather soles and tightly woven grass tops.

“Good medicine too,” said the woman, reaching for Sacajawea’s moccasins, which were soft, buff elkskin.

“Medicine?” asked Sacajawea. “The same oil used by the ancients? The Multnomahs?” She looked under the lid and found a yellowed bag of transparent gut, tied with stiff sinew to keep the oil from exposure to air, so it would not become rancid right away. She pulled her moccasined feet up under her tunic, pretending shewanted more time to talk before deciding on the gamble. “What happened to them?”

The woman with the hat opened and shut one fist in the air several times, rapidly. “You ask more questions than can be answered. The words in your mind mill around like salmon before jumping up white water to spawn. Is that what you learn from all those pale eyes you are with?”

Sacajawea bit her lip and looked from one woman to the next. “I just want to learn about your ways.”

The woman with the hat picked up a stick and threw it at a scruffy dog who was sniffing around the drying rack. “Well—it is no secret that the Multnomahs gambled with men whose faces resembled the brown bear. Those people learned to depend on the gambling between themselves and these strangers. They were nothing until the big canoes came in sight and those men came ashore. They stopped attending the yearly salmon festivals or the horse fairs for their gambling. Then the strangers laughed at their important rituals and made them learn their tongue. They became nothing. But they thought the strangers made them more important than all of us—”

The woman with the bad teeth interrupted, “At least you and those men you are with try to speak our tongue. That is in your favor.” She spat in the fire and smiled at Sacajawea when it sizzled. “My people speak the language of the strangers, but it means nothing.”
¹⁰

The other woman continued. “Those white men came to their village on floating lodges and stayed. They made their homes there and tried to get the Multnomahs to behave like they did. This was all long ago. The white men tried to break all the societies and set up something new. The Multnomahs hid, then practiced their personal medicine and held their society rites, anyway. They showed those foreigners every hospitality. But in time they learned those men were nothing. They were
tilikum,
common people.” She spat in the fire.

The woman with the bad teeth said, “They were not real chiefs, like the ones you travel with.” She squinted into the fire that had blazed up. “Yet you can never be too sure. Best to take every precaution and be on the lookout for anything not just right. The Multnomahsmade that mistake. If they were here, they could tell you plenty of advice along that line; they learned it all the hard way. If the slightest hint of any sickness, especially
ahn-cutty,
comes your way, duck into the nearest sweat lodge, then dive into the cold water. That washes out your system. The Multnomahs just lay around their lodges until it took them away.”

“Where? Where did they all go?”

Both women grunted at the same time.

“You are dumber than I thought,” said the woman with the bad teeth. “They died of
ahn-cutty.”
She pecked her face and arms with one finger. “The white men brought it to them. That was the fine gift they brought and gave to the Multnomahs in return for friendship.” She spat into the fire.

“They were all sick?”

“Everyone—young, old, men, women, fat and thin. Everyone, except the white men who were
tilikum,
and left when they realized there were no people to take their orders or follow their commands. I will say one thing, though, the white men put all the bodies in canoes, stacked one on top of another, and let them float in the bog away from the village. I believe that was the only desire of the Multnomahs those men carried out. I’m too young to remember. But their history is passed on along the river. They were a kind, good-hearted people, long ago.”

Suddenly it occurred to Sacajawea that she had been gone a long time and she probably had all the useful information she needed. She rose and said, “I enjoyed talking. I have to go now.”

“If you ever want to join the first woman’s society, I will sell you a membership in the Red Salmon. You could stay right here with us. There is usually plenty of work to keep you busy,” said the woman with the hat.

Sacajawea slipped out of her moccasins and handed them to her and pulled the sewing awl from her blanket and handed it to the woman with the bad teeth. “Thank you,” she said and walked out into the rain. She hoped she had learned enough to satisfy the curiosity of Chief Red Hair.

That evening, Clark stared at the sodden sky. Hehad hunted most of the day and was so tired he did not want to move. He ruminated vaguely on the difference between his weariness and Sacajawea’s liveliness. I drop in my tracks, he thought, and she sighs and continues to hunt for edible roots. Then in vexed admiration he saw her coming toward him, her feet hardly distinguishable because of the mud on them and on her legs. She sat with her legs folded in front. She did not say anything for some moments, then, ”
Ahn-cutty.
The whole Multnomah village died, long ago.”

Clark sat up.

“Smallpox. I talked with two old women while you hunted today. One showed me deep pits on her own face and said,
‘Ahn-cutty.’”

While she told her story, Clark noticed that she had a feather ornament knotted in her hair. He felt a warm glow he had not experienced until she came into his life. He dragged a piece of driftwood to some dry sand by the cook fire and settled against it.

Sacajawea moved with him. She hugged her muddy knees and waited with growing confidence for some expression of his satisfaction, feeling that the moment would last forever in her memory. She picked her teeth with a splinter and spat in the fire; yet she did not offend him. She met Clark’s gaze and stared back with the remote peacefulness of an animal.

The next day she and some others traded their seats in the canoes to those with weary feet. She carried Pomp on her back in a thin blanket. They walked on a trail beaten leafless, which wound about, considering only the shortest way between boulders and broken cliffs. They kept to the bank of the river, which seemed to cascade from pool to pool or splashed over rock-strewn rapids. The woods receded around a succession of small fields. As the hours wore on, Sacajawea noticed that Clark always waved to the natives they passed. He talked with his men, and laughter surrounded him. It was a desire for friendly contact with him. She watched him gesticulating, wiping sweat from his face with the sleeve of his leather shirt, hitching his belt, emptying his moccasins, stretching out on his back with arms spread in the grass. He enjoyed everything.

Charbonneau’s feet were hot in a short time, his shirt stuck to his skin, and his hair was tousled.

After three miles of dense green timber, of pines and spruces, the trees began to stand apart in groves or small irregular groups. They found sugar pines and tasted the sugary pitch that exudes from the heartwood when wounds are made by ax or fire. The pitch comes out in kernels, crowded together like white pearl beads. Charbonneau ate considerable and was the first to learn of its laxative properties. By late afternoon they were back down to the grassy banks of the river. Charbonneau’s legs were weary and achy, and his shoulders drooped with fatigue.

The canoes were already pulled up on shore. The mosquitoes were an intolerable agony. Lewis groaned aloud when he could no longer refrain from baring his naked hindquarters close to the ground, where the mosquitoes were a black layer of piercing needles.

Charbonneau was tired enough to fall and simply lie on the ground. The mosquitoes invaded his reasoning so that the most thoughtless, necessary action was torture. He slid down the embankment as if he had orders to do so, and placed one foot into a canoe. He knew that it was only on the water that he could find rest from the insects, somehow, while working.

“Is this my canoe?” he called to Cruzatte, who was already kneeling in the middle.

“Sure. We’ll go only a short distance before finding a campsite for this night.”

Charbonneau was cautious about shifting his weight, and he had barely knelt in the canoe when it lurched unsteadily, moving off the shore. The next canoe, led by Lewis, was already being paddled upstream.

A sigh escaped Charbonneau; he did not know whether it was for his misery or contentment.

With the first strokes of the paddle, the agony of the land suddenly became a wilderness through which he sped in the canoe at will. It was even strange that nothing hindered his escape. He simply knelt in the bottom and departed.

With dizzy elation he began to sing a voyageur’s chant as he paddled against the current. Muddy water swirled through bushes on the low banks. The groundwas black, the pines and hemlocks stood out among naked trunks, but the top of the forest was a filmy cloud of opening buds. Patches of snow glinted in the light.

The hardships of winter showed in Charbonneau. He was lean and his muscles tougher. He gazed at the budding hazelnut trees, and at the violets and fern-tufts on the rocks lower down. He paddled in time, remembering the blisters, aching tendons and cramping joints.

At first paddling upstream relieved his tired feet. Then he glanced up and saw the rain clouds gathering. The wind was channeling along the river blowing the rain that came fast into a spray. The canoes moved to the shelter of dell copses and large trees where everyone caught their breath. Charbonneau’s shoulders and neck were loose with the work. The river, already bank full from snow melt, slowly spread out over its banks, covering sand flats and meadows. The alders and willows were bent against the current. Within minutes the storm was in full bloom. The men stayed close to the bank, shoved their paddles inside the canoe, and stood to pole against the sand, which often gave way in a mad swirl of eddying water. Charbonneau said he could see only new misery every hour, and was there not anyone who remembered that they were only going a short way?

Several times he opened his mouth to shout at Cruzatte, but the bent figure, poling evenly, gave such an appearance of obliviousness to the surroundings that he choked the words down in a rage. They went on over the smooth water where the rain danced.

Toward evening, they pulled up under a looming cliff. There was just room to pull up the dugouts on a strip of beach, and Charbonneau stood in the water while the others unloaded; then he crawled under one of the overturned dugouts. Lewis distributed dried meat. Charbonneau chewed unhappily.

They sat quietly, waiting for those coming on foot to catch up. Ordway spread some fir branches on the ground and after a time started a smoky fire. Charbonneau sat shivering now in his drenched clothes.

“Hey, Frenchy,” called Collins. “It ain’t so cold if you come do a little work.” He was chopping down a small tree for dry firewood.

“Hey, down there!” called Clark. “We are all herebut Charbonneau. I have two men out looking for him along the driftwood a mile or so back.”

“Bring your men here where it is dry!” called Lewis. “Your man Charbonneau is with us. Rode in the dugout all afternoon. Thought you sent him.”