Sacajawea (14 page)

Sacajawea forced herself consciously to breath. She moved her eyes to the side of the trail, looking for a stick or stone to throw at the troublesome wild dog. “Go, Dog!” she whispered.

She breathed deeper and caught the rancid, rank odor of bear. The dog again growled—a low, vibrating rumble. The woods crackled with snapping twigs. With the gracefulness of a huge boulder rolling down a mountainside, a young bear with massive, humped shoulders bolted down the trail in front of them, crashed into the other side of the woods, and sniffed. The sniffing was as noisy as a glacial waterfall whooshing down a long rock embankment. There was a scraping on bark and both Sacajawea’s and the dog’s eyes widened as the bear stood on its hind legs and raked long, straight, yellow claws two or three times down a fir tree that was black in the waning moonlight. The bear dropped on all fours and loudly sucked something from the chunks of bark. With ease, two golden, half-grown cubs charged through the brush to join their mother in eating the insect delicacy in the peeled bark. In another moment the femaleand cubs moved away with a light gallop, cracking and popping dead twigs and branches underfoot.

The wild dog began to bark furiously, like a warrior
kiyi-
ing to unnerve an enemy. Then it stopped, sniffed the ground and the fallen water paunch, lifted its leg, and trotted quietly off in the opposite direction from the grizzlies. It never looked back.

Coming to her senses, Sacajawea realized the wild dog had saved her from a deadly mauling. She had been between the female and her cubs, and if that grizzly had moved downwind she would have smelled more than insects in a rotting tree. The wild dog kept Sacajawea from moving. She was grateful. She had a secret helper, a friend. The thought pleased her.

She returned to the creek, filled the paunch, and sloshed cold water over her naked loins to numb the ache. The coldness made her shiver. She noticed blood on the inside of her legs and washed it off.

Refilling the paunch, she took it to the lodge and poured the cold water into the stew pot. She had no appetite for the leftover squash. She blew on the fire and started it crackling, then eased herself back into her robes, exhausted, but waiting for the morning light to come. During these last several weeks she had become an intense and stoic adult, at the precocious age of only ten or eleven summers.

That summer, Sacajawea was given a rake made from reeds curved at the end, separated from each other by interlaced rods, and with the handle bound with leather thongs. Antelope taught her to use a hoe made of the deer’s shoulder blade. She learned what “garden” meant. Catches Two had an acre plot of corn, beans, and squash that his women cultivated. Also on the plot the kinnikinnick was allowed to grow wild. This was the sacred tobacco used in the pipes of men, and women were not allowed to touch it.

The plot of each lodge was separated from the others by brush and rocks and pole fences. At times Sacajawea was able to talk with Moon Woman, Pine Woman, and Fish Woman, who worked for those who needed them. They were still public slaves. Seldom did they see Water Woman, except at the women’s bathing place. Water

Woman seemed happy enough, and her boys were plump and laughing. Moon Woman never said a lot, but Fish Woman and Pine Woman complained about the large lodge they had to keep clean and the hard work they had to do each day.

Other women who had been captured also worked as slaves for their families in the fields. Besides the Shoshonis, there were Blackfeet, Crows, and Utes. Each Hidatsa family had from half to one and a half acres to cultivate.

Sacajawea watched the corn grow from the first two slender blades. The stalks seldom exceeded two or three feet in height, and two ears formed near the surface of the ground. The grain was small and hard, and Antelope told her it was covered with a thicker shell than the corn raised in warmer climates. They would harvest about twenty bushels from the acre. When it was still green, a portion would be pulled, slightly boiled, then dried, shelled, and laid by in the cellar beneath the lodge floor. The Hidatsas called this sweet corn. It could be preserved indefinitely, and if boiled with a little water, it did not taste much different from that taken from the stalk.

The squashes grew on large, strong vines. The Hidatsas either boiled these, ate them when green, or sliced and dried them for winter use. The unbroken squash could be kept in the cold for several months before molding. If dried, they were strung and became very hard—these required an age to cook and were not Sacajawea’s favorite dish.

Sacajawea thought it strange that these people had to plant seeds in the spring, tend them through the hot summer, and at last harvest the crops. She thought of the many plants that grew wild whose roots had been food for her people. Her people did not plant and tend, they simply harvested. They harvested what nature planted and tended for them. They dug roots and picked berries. But they did not think of planting seeds or caring for the growing plants. Why should they go to all that trouble when so much grew wild, thought Sacajawea. Yet these people had food for the winter and her people never had enough.

Sacajawea hated the back-breaking slavery of gardening. The eternal, brain-numbing monotony made her draw farther into herself for some time. She crawled out of bed at dawn to water the horses, hoe the interminable rows of corn and beans, grub up alders and roots for a fresh field, transport rocks from the fields to the long gray walls around them, pull the sunflowers from the squash patches, rub bear’s grease on the tethers of the horses so they would be soft, strong, and pliable, and perform all the chores women were expected to do, or be punished by the elder wife of her owner, Catches Two.

She hated to sit down to her meals, drenched with sweat, too tired to say anything except “More soup.” She hated the waves of weariness that swept over her each night. As soon as she had served the men their stew and the women had eaten, she was glad to stumble into her sleeping couch. She hated the nights that Old Grandfather grunted and groaned on top of her, or Catches Two spread her legs and lay between them, playing with her small breast buds, pushing his large erect penis deep within her belly. She endured this and accepted it as something that could be sustained, such as the hot enclosure of the lodge in summer and the leaden slumber that brought surcease from her labors, but no rest.

Some days she had no time to look at and feel the things around her, although they kindled sparks of curiosity within her all day long—the broad, quiet water of the river, running slowly toward the fast white rapids at the river bend, then moving on—where? She wondered about the round bull boats that the men and boys took fishing; the round, clay-covered lodges with rooftops so strong that people could sit on them in the coolness of the evening; the flat prairie with few trees but much fragrant blue sage, whose pungent odor was a constant reminder of her own mother; the clear blue skies and the shadows of morning, noon, and evening. Soon her child’s brown hands were so callused and her fingers so stiffened that she doubted they would ever again hold a needle for stitching.

Only one thing made the hatred of this drudgery bearable—the wild dog.

As Sacajawea hoed the beans at the edge of the fieldone hot afternoon, she became aware that the mangy yellow dog was watching her about fifty man-lengths away. It simply stood there, staring at her. Across the fence, Moon Woman looked up and threw a well-aimed dirt clod, which struck the dog’s side and drove it howling into the willow brake.

Moon Woman waddled to the fence. “Did it frighten you?” she asked. But Sacajawea presented her with a long, direct look, coldly erasing all feelings from her eyes and face.

“It is an outcast and more lonely than I,” murmured Sacajawea, looking steadily ahead.

Moon Woman dropped her eyes and walked away. Then, from across the field, she yelled in Shoshoni, “Do you think it will be a friend to you like the dogs in the camp of the People?” She jerked her head at the willows. “Don’t get chewed by that scavenger,” she warned. “It’s more coyote than dog.”

Sacajawea secretly saved scraps of meat and the large pieces of flesh from hide-scraping to leave at the wood’s edge for the dog. After she had fed it several weeks, she moved cautiously close to pet it, but it moved away.

Some days she could not get meat to feed the dog, but it stayed at the edge of the field and watched her work, anyway. One day as she wearily left the field for her lodge, the dog seemed disappointed and followed her, keeping a good distance behind, until she reached the lodge.

Then, day after day, the dog could be seen following her at a distance as she went to work and when she returned from the field. She sometimes spoke softly to it. “Come, Dog. Come. I have brought you meat.” The dog’s tail moved vigorously as it acknowledged her friendship. Moon Woman kept a heavy stick tucked inside the bosom of her dress in case the beast reverted to its savage nature. She never quite trusted the dog.

No one else really noticed Sacajawea in the field, except to see that she worked. Antelope and Talking Goose and Old Mother kept the lodge neat and made the meals and sewed. The two young women looked after Little Rabbit. Old Grandfather sat by the fire or in the sunshine, smoking his pipe most of the day, never saying very much.

The nights began to cool. The cotton wood leaves yellowed and dropped. The days were chilly. The dog still followed Sacajawea as she made her way to work in the field. It stood patiently watching her most of the day. Sometimes it would sneak off into the willows, then reappear when it was time for her to go back to the lodge. One day it lay at the edge of the cornfield and watched her. Its ears were straight up and its eyes were wide open. She was harvesting the small ears, putting them into a deep willow basket.

Suddenly she looked up. Scar Face stood in front of her, a sneer on his lips. “You are finished in the field of Catches Two, and you are to come to my field and pull squashes.”

“I do not understand,” said Sacajawea. “You are not my master.”

“No, but I captured a girl to work in my field and you helped her escape!” he cried, irritated with explanations.

“Then she is not dead?” asked Sacajawea. “Willow Bud is not dead?”

“How do I know?” he asked, moving closer.

“She will bring the People here to find us,” she said, looking him in the eye.

“No, too far to come. The Shoshonis never come here. You work now in my field.”

She was uncertain what to do. Catches Two had not told her she was to work for the lodge of Scar Face. Surely Antelope would have said something about this.

“I can’t go,” she said.

Scar Face’s broad, fiat hand flew through the air. Sacajawea found herself on the ground with the side of her head throbbing. Several of the women, including Moon Woman, who was working nearby, saw what happened next: the dog, looking like nothing more than a flash of yellow, bounded from its resting place and leaped at Scar Face, sinking its teeth deep into the man’s leg with an angry snarl. Scar Face fell to the ground, beating at the dog with his fists, but the animal would not release its grip. The women rushed forward and went after the dog with their bone hoes and willow rakes. Moon Woman, using her heavy stick, finally forced the dog to let go. They took Scar Face to the Medicine Man’slodge, where, amidst loud chants and the clanging of gourd rattles, the bleeding was stopped with the fur of a beaver tail, and the wound held together with a sticky wad of spider’s web.

Several days afterward in the council Black Moccasin announced that the dog should live. He declared that the dog was the protector of the rights of Catches Two; even though this was an unusual situation, the dog should be left alone.

Scar Face, whose Hidatsa name was Bull Face, left the council with his head down and his face scowling. He was the loser.

One morning when it was too rainy to work in the field, Old Grandfather began to question Sacajawea. She ignored his questions and continued to tend a pot of boiling stew, but she realized how little she really knew about Old Grandfather besides his stale body smell when he was close to her, and his foul, panting breath. Perhaps he was thinking the same thing because he laid his pipe carefully beside his leg and asked, “Did your people have such fine iron cooking pots?” She made no reply, did not even look up. She just went on stirring.

Old Grandfather looked at her squatted down near the cooking fire. He shrugged and let it go. It didn’t matter to him. But he wondered at the girl’s displeasure. Why was she so angry? What did it matter? Was she angry because he found she brought some excitement to his blood? Sexual activity did not hurt a slave at any age. There were other slaves to be had. There was hardly a big man who did not have two or three, even a dozen in his lifetime. If a man took a female child as a slave, surely it was to be expected. Nobody gave it a second thought. It was nothing. Look at Ka-koakis, grand chief of all the Minnetarees; he had many female slaves. And he did many things with his slaves— yelped, laughed, joked, pinched them, whipped them, tied them, gashed them, bit them, licked them—and these women readily worked in his fields without fuss. It was a strange strain in this female to be displeased about what he did in the sleeping couch with her for his pleasure.

“I suppose,” Old Grandfather said, “you will want tolearn to make some clay cooking pots and to work the glass ovens.”

Sacajawea finished with the stew and threw the wooden ladle carelessly on the ground. It went skidding through the dirt, collecting a mess on its wet sides. Sacajawea pushed up and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Why?”

“Well,” Old Grandfather began uncertainly. It was obvious. She was worn out from working in the fields. She needed to rest. He said, “You can learn. I’ll show you.”

“My people made watertight pots from willows and reeds and the long pine needles covered with pitch. They filled these with water and added red-hot stones to boil the water for cooking meat or roots or making herb tea,” she said, spilling out the pride of her tribe. Then she thought she had said too much because Old Grandfather did not reply.