Sacajawea

  “And from now on, this tribe will punish anyone who kills our relatives or rips hides from our cousins, the buffalo! That is good, good, good,” Gray Bone sang in a high, reedy falsetto. “We must give our enemies a lesson if they do not behave.”

  Some of the spectators’ mouths tightened at the effrontery of the boasting, but a few of the women applauded with approval after each recitation, stamping their feet, clapping their hands, and vigorously shaking their gourd rattles.

  “We must punish them.”

  Again there was agreement with hand-clapping, gourd-rattling, and shouts of ”Hey-yah!”

  A dancer in a long-fringed tunic with vermilion-and-black stripes painted on her face and arms, her beaded ear pendants and copper wire wristband glinting in the firelight, burst into a frenzied gait. It was She Cat. With a long, slow sweep of her hands through her hair, down her sides, and over her hips, she indicated that her enemy was the Mexican girl. She Cat crouched and looked wildly about, as though her victim had escaped. She bounded after her and, with a grunt of rage, went through the action of grabbing her by the hair and swinging a club downward.

  Sacajawea’s legs began to shake uncontrollably. The pantomimist pulled a knife from her bosom, stooped, and pretended to tear off the scalp. Then Gray Bone decided there had been enough pretending and snatched up one of the scalp poles. The black hair on the small willow hoop stirred in the air. Flourishing it triumphantly, she whirled around, arms spread, facing the four directions, one after the other, and tapped the Mexican girl on the head with the wand. A roar of approbation echoed off the canyon walls.

  A wave of anguish overcame Sacajawea.

  The Mexican girl and her brother were lashed to the two posts, back to back, the right hand high on one postand the left high on the other. Their bound legs were loosed so that their ankles could be secured to the bottoms of the posts. The two-year-old cried in pain, turning his head from left to right and keeping his eyes shut. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, and her tied-up arms twitched again and again as she wanted to wipe the tears off.

  Sacajawea looked from right to left at the women clustered about. She was remembering that when an enemy kills a Comanche, the Comanche’s tribe kills or tortures its enemy captives in return. And at this remembrance a seed of fear germinated in the pit of her stomach.

  Everything grew ominously quiet. The drum was hushed. All around, the audience stood gravely still, as if waiting for a new and more significant scene to start.

  Big Badger moved with deliberation to the center, his arms flapping to the crowd. “Something is growing here that is bad,” he said, trying to shout above the women, who now began to chatter. “Stop and all go home. Take the children home. Our chief is not here to advise us. Nothing must be done this night that we cannot undo or that would cause the men who are gone to look upon us with shame.”

  Gray Bone was not listening, She Cat was not listening, and the drummer, who was Weasel Woman, had begun again even before Big Badger finished. His head hung on his chest, and he was swallowed up by the crowd. Feet stamped in a rhythmic beat on the dirt to the beat of the drum. There they were, led by She Cat, the dancer, a long line of painted squaws with their hair plastered upward with cactus spines and river clay. Each carried a skinning knife in one hand and a gourd rattle in the other.

  Sacajawea stared at them, entranced by the deliberateness and confidence these women showed. They seemed in no hurry, advancing slowly, with a half shuffle. They glided forward; then back, left and right. The onlookers remained still.

  Sacajawea gaped at Gray Bone. Her stomach twitched, her buttocks jiggled, and the strands of hair poking up from the cactus spines waved in the wind. Bowlegged and pigeon-toed, she looked old and wizened,

  her slit-eyes boring hypnotically into the eyes of the crowd. The rattling gourds grew louder, and Sacajawea braced herself. If Big Badger could not stop them, how could she? Ticannaf was clinging lightly to her skirt, yet his eyes were fixed on the spectacle in front of him.

  The Mexican girl screamed shrilly. With a swift, dextrous stroke of Gray Bone’s knife, a tiny patch of thick black hair was scalped off. Next, the women dancers drew their knife points across the midsection of the girl and small boy, ripping their clothing and cutting deep red gashes.

  Rage and revulsion shook Sacajawea. The chanting women formed a serpentine line. Sacajawea called out, “Stop! Stop! Do not harm them! They have done nothing to you!” The line slithered around the children, slashing at them. Sacajawea lifted her gaze to the stars. She sucked in a long gulp of the night air and began to pray to the Great Spirit. “Stop them, stop them, stop them!”

  She heard the barbaric uproar, the advancing and retreating. Her legs were locked in terror and in an effort to keep them from shaking. In another moment a dull rushing of air sounded in her ears, the sky turned black, and the singing retreated to someplace far away. She felt ill. Hides Well again pulled her up. Her legs were so deadened that she found it difficult to walk.

  “Do not do anything more!” Sacajawea croaked. “Go home! These are only children. They are frightened and hurt. Take them home!”

  Gray Bone made more slashes across the shoulders of the girl. Her knife stabbed at the baby. His howling stopped. Blood flowed down from his chest to the dirt.

  Sacajawea began to push forward.

  “No, not now,” Hides Well said. “You cannot stop this. Even together we cannot stop this.”

  Sacajawea had seen the dull fish-eyes of Gray Bone and the great sadness that lay like a lake behind her pupils. She also saw that the Mexican girl no longer breathed. The girl’s face was mutilated with knife slashes. Her entrails lay bloody upon the ground.

  Gray Bone yelled, “They killed my son, but they will kill no more! Dirty Mexicans!”

  Sacajawea realized Ticannaf was standing at her side.

  She put her hand on his shoulder and wished he had not witnessed this evil thing. She thought there must have been something of the same kind of brutality, the same indifference to suffering and rights of others in those twenty-two white men who raced through the empty Quohada village, setting fire and burning tepees in a furious desperation to destroy the thing that would not fight back.

  She could not sleep. She heard the restless turning and moving about that Ticannaf made in his bed. Her logic finally made her admit calmly and quietly in the middle of the night that it was she, Sacajawea, who had stirred up that great, black, ugly thing in Gray Bone and the other Quohada women this night. She had not meant that to happen, but not meaning such a thing did no good. It was that impulsive thing in her—the thing that caused her to speak before the women and children and old men as if she were a chief in council—that had been bad. She was the bad influence. She bit her tongue. Jerk Meat would have a perfect right to beat me, she thought. I am truly a bad squaw. Her tears of self-pity spilled into the darkness.

  The next morning, Sacajawea rose in the gray dawn and with quick steps hurried to the center arena. There the two cold bodies hung lifeless, mangled, and crusted dull red. Sacajawea unbound them, stuffed the cold entrails into the gaping cavity of the girl’s belly, and dragged them to her own tepee, one at a time.

  “Mother!” cried Ticannaf. “What do you do?”

  “I am washing my conscience,” she told her son. She washed the bodies with warm water and wrapped them in clean white doeskins. She then wrapped them in heavy buffalo hide and bound them up together. The load was much too heavy for her now. She went to the lodge of Hides Well.

  “Mother, I must have help. I must have help in making the burial hut for the bodies of the Mexican children so they will be safe from wolves and coyotes.”

  “You, Lost Woman, have prepared their bodies for burial?”

  “Ai, my mother. It is I who killed them.”

  “I have thought of that. I have also thought it was bound to happen because I think something evil possessed Gray Bone. Maybe you started her last night, but if you had not been so angry wit
h the white hunters, and had kept your tongue silent, something else would have unleashed the dark spirit in Gray Bone. It is tangled with the heavy grief she carries for the death of her son.”

  CHAPTER

  48

  Shooting Stars

  On November 12, 1833 a dazzling shower of meteors blazed across the night sky. All America saw them. In Independence frightened Missourians were convinced that heaven was protesting against recent mobbings and whippings of the Mormons. In Santa Fe horrified Mexicans were sure that the state had brought a flaming curse on itself by denying certain privileges to the Church. While the skies dripped fire, while William Bent and the other traders watched from Bent’s Fort’s unfinished walls, the visiting Cheyennes decked themselves in full battle regalia of feather and paint, lance and shield. They could not fight this fearful tumbling down of the stars, but at least they would die like men. Women cried and children shrieked. The dogs howled back at the chorusing wolves. Chanting their death dirges above the din, the warriors rode in single file around the tepees, under the shadow of the mud bastions.

  The next morning the sun shone again. The young men laughed at their alarm and stories of the night the stars fell passed into folk tale.

  DAVID LAVENDER, Bent’s Fort. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1954, pp. 143–44.

  The warriors returned from Mexico in a state of gaiety. No Quohada had lost his life, and they had traded hides for awls, axes, knives, kettles, a few old guns, and silver bracelets and earrings for the women. There was to be a celebration.

  Sacajawea hurried out to meet Jerk Meat. She found him in front of the tepee of Kicking Horse. The men were talking, their faces dark and grave. They saw her and came forward.

  “Is it true that you provoked Gray Bone into this murderous thing?”

  “I do not think she—” began Jerk Meat.

  “Let her tell her story,” said Kicking Horse.

  Sacajawea told first how she had come in angry, and without thinking had told all the people about the wasted buffalo.

  “You acted like some chief woman?” asked Jerk Meat.1

  Her head hung low. She was much ashamed. Kicking Horse had his pipe out and was making little sucking noises, as though impatient to get on with the rest of it.

  “We saw white men load hides on carts drawn by mules and go toward the white villages. Many hides and no meat,” added Jerk Meat.

  “Let her speak,” said Kicking Horse, pointing to Sacajawea with his pipe.

  She told the whole thing as best she could remember, even telling how she had dragged the bodies to her tepee and prepared them for a proper Comanche burial. She told how Hides Well had helped. She pointed in the direction of the newly made burial hut.

  “Woman,” said Jerk Meat, without seeming to move a muscle, “do not speak with a forked tongue. Hides Well had no part in this hideous thing.”

  “Ai, the load was heavy for me. I asked her to help. We talked. We talked about the spirit that sometimes possesses Gray Bone.”

  Kicking Horse was very quiet. He stopped sucking his pipe. “It is difficult to face truth about someone youonce thought you loved,” he said, then walked away with his head hanging low.

  Later in the day, shrill cries and the sound of blows came from the direction of Gray Bone’s lodge. She bolted out screaming with pain. Behind her moving nimbly, ran Kicking Horse. He held a cedar club in his right hand. Overtaking Gray Bone, he struck her from behind and knocked her flat on the rough ground.

  “Do not go sniffling and hiding your face like a child when I am talking to you. When I tell you to pack, do it. Take your things and get out. From this day on, I will say I do not know you. I have never seen you. Vamos!”

  Gray Bone sobbed harder, trying to rise, red welts showing on her arms and neck.

  “Stop that howling and move. You are no longer fit to be a Quohada Comanche. I will endure no more from you.” Kicking Horse swung the club again with all his strength. Gray Bone tried to stifle a pain-crazed cry. Scrambling up, she got to her feet and stumbled back into the tepee, moaning. Kicking Horse dropped the club and seated himself under a tree. He began to smoke with sucking noises. In the tepee behind him, Kicking Horse knew, Gray Bone was composing a prayer, her face set rigid and her muscles hard, to force the Great Spirit to give Kicking Horse compassion. She would tear the compassion out of the Great Spirit’s hands, for she needed it desperately this time, and because the need was great and the desire was great, her little secret prayer was louder than she would have wished.

  Kicking Horse’s eyes were dark, but in decency he pulled himself up straight and stood in front of the tepee until Gray Bone had packed her things and moved away, alone, from the village.

  The news traveled fast. Kicking Horse was without one of his women. All manner of people grew interested in Kicking Horse—people with no thought about his powers as Medicine Man. The news stirred up something curious in these people. Every father with a full-grown daughter not yet married wanted her to parade inconspicuously in front of Kicking Horse’s tepee. Every mother with an eligible daughter urged her to groom and clean herself and keep a pleasing smile on her face.

  Later, Jerk Meat came to Sacajawea with a dark look. “You must prepare to move.”

  She drew in her breath, and her mouth made a small O. Jerk Meat explained that Pronghorn was furious about the wasted buffalo meat. He was still ranting, and because he thought the camp was in danger of being discovered with white men coming so close, he had called the council and decided that the entire camp must pack up and move out.

  “My man,” said Sacajawea, wanting to know why Jerk Meat had this black mood over his soul that he did not rub out, “do you feel you must banish me from your lodge as Kicking Horse has done with his woman?”

  Jerk Meat shuddered; he ground his teeth together.

  She touched him. At her touch he shivered. She thought she could understand his mood a little. She knew she had been outspoken, but it was not the first time a squaw had warned of impending danger. She had not been too far out of line to tell about the destruction of the buffalo and the nearness of the white men. And how could she have known Gray Bone would act like that? But that was it. If anyone should have known that Gray Bone would use such an occasion to draw the attention to herself, it was she, Sacajawea. “Speak to your woman. I would know what your trouble is. We are as one.”

  He shuddered some more. He spoke. His voice cracked. “Oh, my woman, Gray Bone, who once lived in the same lodge with our friend Kicking Horse, has said she will banish you from the Quohada band whenever her opportunity arrives. She declares you are the chief troublemaker for the band.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No, but I believe that things happen because people cause them to.”

  “That woman can do nothing to me. Do not believe what she says to you.”

  “I had a dream. In the dream you were forced to leave the Quohadas. Again you wandered in the plains with no one to care for you.”

  “That was a dream, my man. I will stay with you. I will not go away.”

  A massive breath made his chest shudder. He swallowed again and again. “Oh, Lost Woman, my Pajarita, I could not live without you. It would be like losing my right arm and leg to have you gone. It is a feeling so deep that I think it very rare and valuable. I think not many men feel so about their women. I could not do as Kicking Horse. I do not want another woman. You never complain about working alone. Many men’s women would.”

  Sacajawea fell silent. What could she say to comfort her man? “I am yours and you are mine. I love you as I have never loved any person. I shall never love a man after you. You are all.”

  Suddenly a voice from behind the tepee shouted to them. “Look! Come see!”

  It was Ticannaf, and there were six small brown trout in his willow net.

  Jerk Meat said, “My son, did Big Badger teach you this art of catching fish?”

  “No, it was my mother,” said Ticannaf, smiling. “
She puts the water worms, peeled from their stony homes, inside the net and tells me to lay it in the foamy water.” The boy’s hair had the shine of a burnished crow.

  “Mother of Ticannaf, come here,” ordered Jerk Meat. “In my leather pouch I have something for you that I found in Mexico. It is a light-maker.”

  She turned the wax candle around in her hand and admired it. A smile made her lips upturned, and her eyes sparkled. “It is beautiful. I like its color of red. And I will tell you something. I will tell you how this stick was made.” She began telling the astonished man and boy how she had watched Judy Clark make candles from lye of ashes and tallow. In the evening she showed them how the light could be moved from dark corner to dark corner to make it light. Jerk Meat and Ticannaf were fascinated by the tiny yellow flame and did not want her to blow it out until daylight. Then it was melted down to a nub of soft wax. Jerk Meat thought his woman knew more than five other Comanche women put together.

  In the morning, the women struck the tepees, and the band moved out to search for a fresh campsite. They met three members of the Nokoni, Wanderers, band who had been to San Carlos. They were loaded withcolored shawls and trinkets. They rode beside Pronghorn and Jerk Meat and discussed the nature of the whites and their coming into the Comanche lands. They were also disturbed about the skinned buffalo being left for the buzzards.

  “Of course,” said a young man with great silver disks in his hair plaits, “the Great Spirit knows the whites’ disposition. He gave them books and taught them to read so they know what is right and wrong. We Comanches know that without a book.”

  Sacajawea was about ready to say something, but Jerk Meat caught her look in time and made a face that meant, “Hold that tongue, woman.”

  “There is talk of a big raid on one of the white forts past the Moving Mountains. You Quohadas could come and help,” said another Nokoni.

  Jerk Meat rather liked the idea of traveling a great distance and raiding the white men’s fort. That would be something to discuss on long winter nights.