Sacajawea (97 page)

Before daylight Sacajawea was wakened by the sound of beating hooves, then thrashing and the cracking of trees. But she knew there were few trees in the village, only the upright poles of the security fence which enclosed the village. She threw off the covering robe, pulled on her tunic and rushed outside.

An entire band of wapiti was on the move. They were charging through a big break in the fence, thundering into the ditch behind the fence and up through the center of the village, kicking up dust and panic. At first the leaders of the herd were stymied by the wide, three-to-four-foot-deep ditch, which held a few feet of water whenever there was a hard rain. Several wanted to follow the ditch around and one or two wanted to climbthe steep bank and charge through the village. When the followers bunched up behind these leaders, they took off pell-mell in both directions.

By this time other Minnetarees were awake and coming out of lodges with bows and arrows, long, pointed, chert-tipped spears, steel knives, and their preferred flintlock rifles. Sacajawea ran back into the lodge calling for Charbonneau to get outside. “Here is your chance. The wapiti—the big deer, the elk—have come!” She shook him until his eyes were open. “Break the hoodoo. Wapiti are close. You go right up and boom it falls to the ground. They are so close you could hit one on the head with a large grinding stone!”

Charbonneau was slow getting out of bed, puiling on wool pants and a red shirt to cover his bearded chest, tying a scarf around his throat and a red bandana to hold his neck length hair in place.

“No time for boots!” shouted Sacajawea. ‘Grab the gun!”

“It is hardly light out there,” complained Charbonneau. “Every man, woman, and child in this here village is out. I can hear them. What is this excitement?”

“Ai!”
shouted Sacajawea. “There is enough wapiti to last two winters. They are here! For you to take!”

By this time Otter Woman and the boys were up and dressed and outside, curious to see what was going on. Sacajawea pulled the gun from under Charbonneau’s bed and followed them. “Come on!” she called.

“She is black as
le diable
out there,” mumbled Charbonneau.

Once outside his eyes adjusted to the first gray light of early dawn. Twenty yards away on the grassy, flat area two bucks were battling. Harems of three or four cows for each buck were standing off in a disinterested fashion munching grass. Unusual and exciting as that was, the sight of several dozen wapiti coursing around the inside ditch was spectacular—something the Minnetarees had never seen before. Charbonneau moved up to stand with a group of men with guns who were laughing and shouting and aiming at the animals. Several wapiti were already dead on the bottom of the ditch or lying on the edge. Charbonneau was close enough so that he could see the arrows in the dead animals’ necksor briskets. He could see the prominent facial glands below the eyes. The rest of the animals were nearly hysterical—stampeding, hardly looking for a way out of the ditch or out of the village.

The villagers were in danger of attack by the elk, of being impaled by antlers or slashed with hooves if they moved out into the wide ditch where the animals were moving back and forth, round and round.

Charbonneau heard the crack of a gun and looked to see where it came from just as the whir of a spear sang over his head and the
chuk
of it hitting the shoulder of a cow thudded into his ear. Charbonneau ran back to the side of his lodge for safety. It was obvious that if he stood out in the open he could be in the middle of crossfire. He was truly frightened, and crouched close to the lodge wall with his arms around his knees to keep from shaking.

Sacajawea and Otter Woman with the two boys stood with a group of women watching the fighting bucks, who had now locked antlers. The women knew that given time, someone would throw a butcher knife or two at the bucks or stone them to death and thus save the animals from dying of starvation.

Sacajawea remembered that she carried the long flintlock, powder horn, and bag of lead shot. She backed up to find a spot where she could take aim on a wapiti running in the ditch and not worry about being in the path of an arrow or lead shot. The gun was heavy and longer than she was tall. She rested the stock across an old heap of garbage and pulled back the cover of the tube next to the bore.

“Filled,” she whispered to herself. She dumped in a little powder and rammed in a ball. Then she noticed a long forgotten, dilapidated bull boat, and moved the barrel to rest on that. She felt the trigger; she heard the flint crack on the steel. Any other noise was covered by the shouts of the villagers. The kick of the gun knocked Sacajawea from a squatting position to flat on her back, and to her disappointment the ball hit one of the upright posts and lodged there. “Damn, son of a bitch,” she said, remembering what she’d heard white men say in similar situations. She reloaded, letting the gun rest on the rotting bull boat. She put her head downto the gun and sighted for some brownish hide, then for the white on the chest. This time the ball hit right on target and was swallowed into the chest cavity, and the wapiti fell over on its side with legs twitching.

Sacajawea sat up and rubbed her aching shoulder. There was smoke hanging low over the entire village and the strong smell of gunpowder. She felt an elation and smiled. Charbonneau had been right at first—this was a fine gun. Ram home a bullet, pull the rod free, and spark from the flint does the rest. There was no worry about getting the priming pan wet with sweat when holding it too close to the lock. She could still hear Chief Red Hair telling Shannon never to hold a flintlock close to the lock when carrying, because “your sweat will run down and damp the pan.”

She looked around for Otter Woman and the boys. They were huddled down at the side of the lodge with Charbonneau. Otter Woman was wailing, tears running down her face. Sacajawea put the flintlock over her shoulder and said, “What is the matter? I have shot a wapiti for our lodge.”

“Look for yourself,” said Charbonneau, his eyes wide. He pointed his stubby forefinger to the place where the bucks had been locked together in battle. They lay spraddled on the ground, still locked by their antlers, but with a score of arrows and knives growing out of their chests and sides. Several cows were down, the rest had disappeared, and in their place were four Minnetaree women with bloody backs and shoulders, their arms and legs flung out from their bodies.

“What happened?” asked Sacajawea.

“Ai,”
whispered Otter Woman, beginning to wail louder. The boys clung to each other.

“Everyone threw their weapons at once, like crazies. They wanted to kill the wapiti, and they killed themselves. Stupid! Stupid!” said Charbonneau, shaking his head as if coming out of a bad dream. Suddenly his head snapped up and he looked at Sacajawea.
“Nom du bon dieu,
what are you doing with my brand-new gun?”

“I shot a wapiti,” she repeated.

“How do you know how to shoot? Are you trying to show me up?”

“Chief Red Hair let me shoot at targets pinned to a tree—only once or twice. I was never good.”

“This was beginner’s luck then,” said Charbonneau, and his face brightened. “So—the gun, she works. The hoo-doo is broken. Give it to me and I’ll show you some real shooting.” He grabbed the gun and walked to the ditch, hoping that the frantic animals were still racing around it. He checked the gun, rammed in a ball, and felt the trigger. Holding it to his shoulder and remembering its kick, he wondered how Sacajawea took that jolt. Her shoulder is black and blue, he thought. He lowered the weapon when he saw that several women were already bent over dead animals, butchering them. Men were loading up packhorses. The remaining elk had stampeded through another break in the rotting pole fence, and Charbonneau walked over to join several men who were examining the exit. The men moaned that they could have gotten at least another six or seven animals if they had only been quicker.

“I got me a wapiti,” Charbonneau told them, and then walked on.

He passed a group of keening women. A young boy lay on the bloody ground. He had been caught in crossfire and hit in the back by an arrow but he was alive. The Shaman was calied to suck out the arrow head.
⁴

In an unusual burst of philosophizing, Charbonneau cursed at the waste of humankind in such a frenzy to save each other from hunger. Out loud he said, “I’ve seen death while people go for food, and death while people go without food. Where is the Great Spirit in this?”

Several men came up to Charbonneau, and they talked about the power of the Shaman, a power that could bring wapiti right into their village when the front gate was locked. One man said, “The Shaman and Chief Kakoakis conjured something big last night. I heard plenty singing and dancing in the chief’s lodge.”

The Minnetarees had killed two dozen wapiti, with an average weight of at least seven hundred pounds apiece. That would supply each lodge about a hundred twenty-five pounds of meat.
⁵
This called for a feast and celebration that would last a couple of days.

Charbonneau went back to make sure his womenhad started butchering “his” wapiti. If they got it all cut up and pulled into the lodge, out of sight, he reasoned, maybe he would not have to divide it with another family. After all, he thought, there is no meat in my lodge at this moment and I have two squaws with big mouths and two growing boys to feed.

Otter Woman cried off and on most of the day as she and Sacajawea made strips for jerky inside their lodge. At the edge of the village where the bodies had been lifted to burial platforms, the families of the dead mourned with a high, ululated keening. Charbonneau spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning his gun, rubbing it with oil, watching the women work with the meat. He guffawed when the two boys complained that they couldn’t find the wapiti’s gall bladder. “You saps,” he said, “you have now learned what every man and woman already knows—that the wapiti does not have a gall bladder.”

Charbonneau felt let down. The excitement had worn off and he had not used his gun. He glanced at Sacajawea and wondered if she was really good with his newfangled flintlock. He was a little afraid of her. If her temper came to a boil she might grab the gun again. What could he do about it? Maybe he would be better off getting out of this damned place—go out trapping for a while.

Later in the afternoon Chief Kakoakis came to the lodge door. He and Charbonneau talked about how one of the larger wapiti was shot.

“I sure got me a big one for this lodge,” bragged Charbonneau. “There are plenty of hungry mouths here. My gun shoots straight—never misses.”

“You divided with a needy family?” asked the chief. “All people share. Your women will show you where extra meat is needed. I heard how the ball from your flintlock lodged directly in the wapiti’s heart. A perfect shot… and by a woman.”

Charbonneau felt the blood rush to his neck and face. He looked at Sacajawea, who was speaking to the boys and seemed to be paying no attention to him. “Well, I was standing back from my woman, protecting her in case the wapiti came out of the ditch; I had this newfangled flintlock, see. I took careful aim and bam! That’sall I had to do. Aim and shoot. Her shot went into the fence. Mine went to the heart. It is a natural ability.”

Kakoakis laughed and put his arm around Charbonneau’s shoulder. “You bring some of the white man’s rum to my lodge and we’ll celebrate your ability.”

“I’m out of rum,” said Charbonneau, with some regret in his voice.

“Get some,” said Kakoakis, leaving.

Sacajawea looked at Charbonneau. The look made him shiver and feel guilty. He was afraid she might take some of his meat to that old woman, Grasshopper. Or worse, the old woman and her half-witted girl, along with the one who had all the papooses, might come for a visit in his lodge. If they did that, he did not want to be around. “I ought to go up to one of the Canadian posts,” he said. “I could get some things for the chief and do some trapping on the way.”

No one said anything to his suggestion. He rubbed bear’s grease into the stock of his new gun and thought of picking up a piece of firewood and beating both women. Then they would talk to him, and pay him the attention he deserved as the man in the lodge. I could cut their noses off and send them out, he thought. Then I could find a couple nice young girls that appreciate me. But he knew no young thing would come willingly to his lodge if he did that bloody deed. And he would not do that because he preferred his squaws good-looking.

Charbonneau found a better way to hide his disgrace than disfiguring his women or getting drunk with Chief Kakoakis. The Britisher who had sold him the flintlock returned late in the afternoon, and the two men left that night. They trapped the rivers of the Côte Noire. He was gone nearly a month.

Most of the women were in the fields harvesting the fall crops. A Canadian trader on his way to Fort Assiniboin, then east, stopped by a belt-high stone fence and called out, ”
Bonjour, mes amies!”

Sacajawea looked up and squinted her eyes into the sun. She could see him talking to one of the women, his hands jerking. The woman wiped a hand across her perspiring face and motioned toward Sacajawea. “He calls in the same tongue as your man. I think he looksfor the one called Toussaint Charbonneau, sometimes called Chief of the Little Village.”

“Ami!
she called, and walked to the narrow passageway in the rock fence. Out of the field, she noticed the man was short and his black hair trailed down his neck through a bone ring. There was no bridle on his horse, only a single rein tied to its lower jaw.

“Alerte!”
The face of the French-Canadian turned redder than the inner bark of the red pine. He licked his lips and spoke in French. “I want to speak to the man Charbonneau. You know where I can find him?”

“Oui,”
said Sacajawea, nodding her head. She also spoke in French so that this stranger would know that she spoke with a straight tongue. “He has just returned, this same day, from the Côte Noire.”