Sacajawea (148 page)

The wives of Kicking Horse, Together and Flower, distributed his belongings to members of the band that did not seem to have too much. They burned all his medicine things. Those that would not burn they placed in the creek under a large rock.

Ticannaf visited his mother often, giving her Choway, the Mexican girl, as a gift to ease her sorrow, but the sorrow was something he could not reach. She existed, but did not live. She moved about and prepared hides Ticannaf brought to her; she kept the kettle full of stew meat; she kept Crying Basket clean and well fed; but she did not speak to the child, or pat her, or hold her in the evenings. She ignored Choway. She didnot throw away the possessions of Jerk Meat, but left them where he had left them. Other women eyed her uncertainly, and some began to talk and discuss her past idiosyncrasies. Hides Well was appalled at Sacajawea’s behavior, and Spring looked at her, saying, “You never could behave in the proper Comanche manner.”

Some of the men talked about the need for a council. They talked and waited in uneasy silence. No one took the lead to do anything.

Sacajawea sat by the drinking spring one morning. It was gray and gloomy. Clouds hung heavy across the sky, and a little rain drizzled down. Her thoughts wandered back to the time long before she came to live with the Quohadas. She was near the Pacific Ocean with Chief Red Hair, and it was raining, raining, for days it rained. The men were not sad. They played games, joked, managed to keep things fairly dry. They even made little wooden toys for Pomp. Pomp was a beautiful child. He was happy. Was he a fine-looking man? she wondered. Was he now working with the whites? And Tess, where was he? He had the same terrible temper his father had. Had that temper pushed him into trouble? She swung her head from side to side.

Happy Heart came with a kettle for water. “Oh, my mother, please go to your tepee. It is not good to sit on the wet ground in the rain. The other women talk. They say you do not know if it rains or if the sun is glaring down hot and dry.”

Sacajawea laid her thin hand across the young woman’s and looked into her face. She was pretty. She was a good worker. She loved her man, Ticannaf.

“Who do you suppose they will choose as the new chief?” asked Sacajawea.

“They might choose Red Bull or Tabananikah, Hears the Sun Rise, or the man of Spring, Wounded Buck. Or they might choose Ticannaf, but he is young, without much experience. It takes a lot of qualifications, my mother. The man must have made a name for himself in war and mean something to the other bands.”

“When another chief is chosen, I am leaving this band.”

“Mother! Why? You can’t do that!”

“Yes, it is the thing for me to do. You have a goodman, and he will love and look after you. You do not need me here. No one really needs me here. The others talk behind my back. Even Hides Well and Spring look at me as an outsider. It is not their fault; it is the days we go through.”

“What about Crying Basket and the Mexican girl, Choway?”

“I will take Crying Basket. You may keep Choway. She is a good worker. Find her a good man.”

“Where will you go?”

“I will go north, maybe to your cousins, the Shoshonis. I may try to be a go-between with the whites for our band here. Maybe not. I have not yet decided.”

“See, you are not serious,
pia.
You would not go to see our enemies, the whites. You would not even be a go-between; that is something a man would do, a man who was as well-thought-of as a chief or shaman. For a little while I thought you might be serious. But you are only joking.”

When the first flecks of snow fell, slanted in flight by the wind, the band headed south to get away from the place where memories of the dead warriors were strong. Sacajawea carried Crying Basket on her back, and Choway led the two packhorses. They had walked only a few miles when Sacajawea saw something in the brush, a movement. She turned and stepped outside the procession to investigate. Behind a mesquite thicket was an old woman with a mangy dog and a small travois.

“It is cold,” said the old woman. “I am going south.” She looked thin and cold; her tunic was torn and dirty.

“Do you have food?” asked Sacajawea.

“A little,” said the woman, not wanting to admit she had none.

“Let me see,” said Sacajawea.

The woman opened a small parfleche. Inside were three or four kernels of parched corn, that was all.

“That was from a Mexican supply cart,” she explained. “They were camped by a water hole, and in the night I was hungry, so I filled my sack, but the food is hard and dry.”

“Come, travel with us a few days,” suggested Sacajawea.”You will be fed, and I have extra clothing to keep you warmer.”

The woman looked at Sacajawea, and it seemed tears came to her eyes. It could have been the way the light shone.

The two traveled a little way side by side.

“Kicking Horse? How is he?” the old woman asked.

Surprised, Sacajawea looked at the stranger for several moments before answering. “You cannot speak his name.” Then she looked still closer and this time recognized the old woman as Gray Bone. She did not know what more to say to her. She looked around at the others, but none had recognized Gray Bone. They were buried in their own thoughts or trying to keep warm in the wind and biting snow. “There was a raid in Mexico. Many of the men did not return,” she said finally. The moment she said it, Sacajawea was sorry. Gray Bone did not need to know that the Quohadas were so vulnerable and unprotected. Gray Bone was pathetic, but she was trouble.

Gray Bone grinned broadly, so that her broken, rotting teeth showed as a jagged yellow slash across her face. She trotted up ahead and pushed herself into the procession along with her scraggly yellow dog pulling the small travois.

At the midday rest, Gray Bone had found her friends and was chatting freely with some of the older women. She had come back to the band. She had been invited back by Sacajawea. There was no one in command to keep her away. The council had not yet been able to agree on a new chief. Spring shook a finger in Sacajawea’s direction but did not come to talk with her.

Sacajawea kept her promise and took a fresh tunic and some clean but worn leggings and moccasins to Gray Bone, who grabbed for the clothing.

“I see that you are not so generous with your old friend. These leggings have holes in them. You were about to throw them away.” Gray Bone gave the leggings a toss over her shoulder. She Cat let out a stifled tee-hee. Gray Bone stared at Sacajawea. “You cannot throw me away like cast-off leggings. I am still a Quohada Comanche. And I have some knowledge that would interest you, Lost Woman. I have been as far north asthe white men’s fort. For the use of one of your horses, I will tell what I know.”

Sacajawea shook her head, but said no word. She could not tell if Gray Bone were truthful or not. She went back to her packhorses and pulled out dried meat for Choway and Crying Basket.

Hides Well shuffled by and shouted a warning, “Gray Bone is there!”

“I have seen her,” said Sacajawea.

“Who invited her to travel with our band?”

“I did, my mother,” said Sacajawea.

Instant anger showed in Hides Well’s words. “Woman, there is talk that you act strangely. Now I can believe it. This is a black day.”

“She was cold and hungry.”

“She is trouble. Her mind is evil.”

“Perhaps she will live quietly with her friends.”

“Hah!” said Hides Well. “She watches us from the corner of her eye right now. You have become soft and stupid. Maybe you should have been kicked out of the band also.”

Sacajawea wiped a piece of stringy meat from the chin of Crying Basket, but made no reply.

They traveled through rough terrain and much snow, finally coming to a small valley with red-clay slopes. In the valley were other Comanche villages:
Penatuhkas,
Honey Eaters;
Kotsotekas,
Buffalo Eaters; and
Tanimas,
Liver Eaters. The Quohadas chose a winter campsite upstream from the other villages. The Tanimas told of a white man named Bill Williams, who had spent two winters with them. They said he knew all the white men in that part of the country and those up north.

Sacajawea hoped Bill Williams would come back this winter. His woman and child were with the band, so he might be back.

The change of camp and talks with other bands were good. The Quohadas gained a clearer perspective and began to believe that their lives would go on as they always had. After their great grief they needed this change, and now they were able to laugh, to send children to play games, and to visit back and forth with the other bands.

Some scouts brought back messages of white soldiers in all directions—north, west, south, and east. They talked of a man named José Castro in the southwest, who wished to attack white traders, especially one named Frémont.

Sacajawea was bewildered by the fact that white men were fighting or attacking other white men.

The Buffalo Eaters told of the Kiowas, who had bought blankets in the spring from white traders. They were good woolen trading blankets, but children wrapped in them to keep the spring winds out at night fell ill with high fevers and red blotches on their bodies. If they were rushed to the cooling stream to halt the high fever, they were dead by morning. If they were not and the fever burned within their bodies, some died, some became blind, and others survived but were dull-witted. Very few of that Kiowa band survived the disease that was in the blankets of the white men. The Buffalo Eaters warned all the bands not to buy the white men’s trading blankets. They told the bands not to trust any white man.

One day four Penatuhka men rode into the Quohada camp. Wounded Buck invited Wild Plum and Ticannaf to sit with them in front of his lodge. The Penatuhka were polite and ate and smoked before talking.

“We traded beaver pelts to some white men on Prairie Dog Town River,” said the man wearing a red flannel shirt. “There white men said one day all of us will live together in one big camp. What do you make of this?”

“I’ve heard that whites tell plenty lies,” said Wild Plum, picking at his teeth with a straw.

“Well, and so, one of the whites said they had men ready to show us how to put eyes in the ground to grow something called potatoes.”

“How can anyone have confidence in white man’s words?” said Ticannaf.

Sacajawea was inside the tepee listening. She pushed aside the door flap and blurted, “White men, did you say? Was any of them called Chief Red Hair?”

The four Honey Eaters looked at her dumbfounded, then whispered together in low tones. The man with a silver belt buckle in his hair said, “Do you Quohadasalways let your women interrupt men talk? We Penatuhkas consider such a woman highly unmannerly.”

“This is Lost Woman,” said Ticannaf, trying to cover his embarrassment. She used to live with some whites and is anxious to hear news of them.”

“Ai,
one old man had red hair and a red and white beard. He knew how to speak with several tribes. He said he lived at the edge of the Father of Rivers, the Mississippi.”

Sacajawea felt like a bubble about to burst. “What was this red-haired man’s name?”

“This man you could not know. He was a truly great chief among his people. He traveled far across the land to the Shining Mountains and the Great Stinking Waters of the West. I do not remember his name.”

“It is him!” shouted Sacajawea. “So—he is still here!” She let out a great sigh and her eyes lit up as she continued questioning. “Did he talk about houses that float on the river, and the iron moccasins for horses, and the thin, snow white robes used on sleeping couches? Did he? Were his eyes sky blue?”

The four men again stared at the woman asking all the questions, and whispered among themselves. The Quohadas were staring at Sacajawea. Then their whispering began. “How does she know of these new things? She never told us about them before. Do you suppose she could be a spy? Her ways are strange.”

“Say, Quohadas, do women usually speak up in your councils?” asked a Honey Eater with a blue blanket.

Now all eyes were on Sacajawea. She trembled and mumbled, red flames of excitement in each cheek, her piercing black eyes seemingly on the ground, but she saw the Honey Eaters. “I am sorry. I listen to white traders and hear things. It seems many of these things the white men offer are not bad. There is some good.” Her legs shook. She sat on the ground.

“Ha!” exclaimed Broken Horn. “The voice of Lost Woman is like that of the Honey Eaters. She hears things that are new and she thinks they are good.”

After thanking Wounded Buck for his hospitality, the four visitors did not stay much longer.

Once or twice, some of the bolder women asked Sacajawea how it was she knew so much about the waythe whites lived. She was evasive in her answers, usually saying she listened to traders talk. The women suspected more, but did not say so in front of Sacajawea. The gossip came back through Hides Well.

“The women are uncertain about you and ask if you ever lived in a white village,” said Hides Well.

“Tell them I lived many places,” she answered. ‘Tell them here I have been the happiest.”

“Sometimes I find myself looking at you in an uneasy light. I’m not saying I actually distrust you. But you did ask the crazy one, Gray Bone, back into the band. You gave her food and clothing. And from what I know, you have every right to stay completely away from her. Then there is this. You save meat fat. You make something like the yucca washing juice, only much better. It is true you do not hide your knowledge because I know several women who now save ashes in a parfleche and pour water over them, then collect that dripping water to mix with their leftover meat fat. Their tunics and leggings have never been cleaner. Now, I am wondering where all your knowledge came from.”

Sacajawea’s heart sank. “My mother, there is a bond of friendship between us. Let us not break that. I will show you how to make the washing liquid this afternoon.”

“Is it true that you are some kind of woman Shaman?”

“No, my mother,” said Sacajawea, aghast, “that is not true.”