Sacajawea (23 page)

Redpipe, as it happened, was rummaging disconsolately about the deserted clearing in front of the village gates, looking for spent arrows and old flint chips. He raised his head at the sound of a human cry that came floating to him from somewhere out at the edge of the woods. He peered with his myopic, hyperthyroid eyes and saw Sacajawea.

Sacajawea had reached the clearing in front of the gate in the very nick of time—the white man was at the clearing also, but an instinct for keeping to cover made him utilize every possible clump of undergrowth in his path.

Her breath coming in desperate sobs, Sacajawea spurted across to the gate with the last of her strength, the bearded one now only a couple of man-lengths behind. Mercifully, the gate was open. But then there came a fresh shaft of terror at the apparition of Red-pipe’s thin form as he made straight for her, walking with short, unsteady steps. She plunged in through the open gate just as the bearded one straightened, literallybeside himself with lust, and came lancing through the air to land upon the feet and legs of Redpipe.

In the middle of the afternoon, Fast Arrow, rounding the village after a desultory hunt, came upon the flat-footed, moccasined tracks of the white man, toes outward, in the damp earth on the bank of the little stream. He looked at the sunken beaver trap and knew the owner by the wad of beaver-castoreum-soaked cloth on a stick above the trap. As he had done before, out of curiosity about the bearded one’s ways, he turned to follow the moccasin tracks. They looked less than a hour old. Fast Arrow worked out the trail, which ran along the bank, noting that the man had squatted at intervals to watch and wait. What had the man been stalking, he wondered.

He puzzled over the tracks where they finally left the stream bank, and then he was startled to find mingled with them the footprints of a Minnetaree squaw. It could be that the bearded one had come after a runaway woman. Yet the squaw did not go back peaceably; she ran, digging in with her toes.

Fast Arrow hurried forward now, his quick eye reading signs as he went. He came upon deepened toe marks and saw that the squaw was in full flight. She was small; her tracks did not sink far into the earth. The bearded one followed with long strides—he was not heavy-laden, yet he brought his heel down first and then rocked forward to his toes. Fast Arrow’s heart began to pound; he was running, too, soundless in his moccasins.

Stumbling through thickets, he sped toward the clearing in front of the gates by the shortest possible route. He was in time to witness the unscrambling of his father-in-law, Redpipe, and the bearded one.

Ordinarily, Redpipe and this bearded one avoided one another in their comings and goings, through mutual and well-warranted disrespect. But in this instance all such inhibitions were swept aside. When old Redpipe suddenly appeared in the clearing, it seemed to the bearded one a direct attempt to rob him of the pleasure he had so patiently stalked—an unforgivable action. Instantly he sprang forward to annihilate this blun-dering redskin; the distrust between red and white men was not new by this year, 1802, in the history of the American plains.

Redpipe was flung forward on his nose as the two hundred pounds of bulk landed on him. Immediately the slow, deathly rage of his phlegmatic spirit was lashed to flames. In his nostrils was the beaver-castoreum scent of his attacker, the Squawman, Toussaint Charbonneau.

Redpipe’s mind exploded with this knowledge. Rearing upward with a bawl of rage, he flung all his frail strength into the struggle, mouth open in the savage caricature of a grin. Suddenly he fell backward, gasping for breath, his bulging eyes rolling up into his head, in an epileptoid fit.

Fast Arrow saw Sacajawea make the entrance to his lodge and knew that she was safe from her attacker.

It was a minute or so before Toussaint Charbonneau realized that Redpipe was having a seizure; Redpipe’s affliction was well known. Charbonneau’s fury abated; he fell back to examine his arm, which was deeply scratched from elbow to wrist. Then, seeing Fast Arrow standing near, he abruptly rose and ambled forward in sudden friendliness.

“Mon dieu
, that old Redpipe is still a warrior,” he said in halting Minnetaree mixed with French phrases. “He tripped me as I came for the gate.” Charbonneau’s breath came in fast, shallow gulps, and the upper part of his face, which was not whiskered, was as red as his neck.

“Squawman,” said Fast Arrow, his face dark, “you were running after my small sister?”

Before Charbonneau could think of an appropriate answer, Fast Arrow had bent to tend to Redpipe. Perspiration laced spidery channels through the crusting dust covering his body. He shook and slavered like a trapped wolf.

“La jolie femme?”
Charbonneau said. “She is your sister?”

“My sister since the Moon of the Trading Fair,” Fast Arrow indicated with hand signs.

“Was that her ceremony in the village yesterday?”

“Ai,
and you chased her as if she were a village slave.”

“Slave—
oui.
It is known you won her from an Ahnahaway. She is known in the big Hidatsa village as the Girl Who Loved a Dog.” Charbonneau began to laugh and hold his sides. “That is a nice picture for you. A girl making love to a dog! What a
diable
she must be!”

Fast Arrow straightened and looked directly at Charbonneau, who was now wiping the tears from his eyes as he laughed harder.

“That girl is known as Sacajawea, and she is the daughter of my mother, Grasshopper; she is no man’s woman. You lie about her and some mangy dog.”

“Woman! She cannot even keep hold of her skinning knife for protection, and she plays in the water like a small child.
Aagh,
that papoose, she did not even dance at her own puberty ceremony. I saw! The Hidatsas threw her away. Why did you pick her up? She is really still a child, a nothing, a female child of no importance, something to give away. I’ll take her. I’ll give you an ax for her. Then you will not have so many mouths to feed in your lodge. You will thank me and call me your friend.”

Fast Arrow’s eyes narrowed as Charbonneau continued to speak in his halting Minnetaree, begging for the young girl who appealed to him.

Finally Fast Arrow had heard enough. “If you are lucky, you will stop an arrow before the new moon.”

Charbonneau sneered back; then his shoulders sagged and he spat on the ground before heading toward the village gate. ”
Zut! Diable!”
he shouted back at Fast Arrow.

There are some who believe that a Welshman, named Madoc, discovered the new continent of America prior to Columbus’ famous voyage. They find old Welsh and English records to prove that Madoc and his men came to America in 1170 and anchored nine or ten ships in the Bay of Mobile. These Welshmen retreated from the coast to find security from attacking Indians and eventually reached the mountains of east Tennessee. No one knows how many months or years passed before they were forced to move from their fortified villages because of the greater number of attacking Cherokee Indians. The legend takes the white men back to the Mississippi River where they slowly migrated upriver toward the northwest to the Missouri River country. These people built fortifications around their sedentary, earthen hut villages. Their skin clothing was not made in the same fashion as that of the Upper Missouri tribes. Some of these people supposedly spoke and understood the Welsh language. They carried skin-wrapped parchments, which they could not read. The legendary Welshmen in early America made a primitive kind of harp for music on special occasions. Early explorers said these Welsh Indians recalled their ancestors coming a long way to reach the Upper Missouri, even traveling a long time on a great expanse of water. The explorer Verendrye first mentioned blue-eyed, light-haired people called Mandans, who had non-Indian fortifications and lived in the Missouri River valley
¹

Mandan mythology explicitly tells that the first ancestor of these people was a white man who, in the mists of antiquity, came to the country in a canoe. Long before the first missionaries reached the Mandan they are alleged to have known of a gentle, kindly god who was born of a virgin and died a death of expiation; they told of a miracle having close affinities with the feeding of the five thousand; they related the story of the first mother of mankind and her fall, of the ark and of the dove with a green twig in his beak; they believed in a personal devil who sought to win over and subjugate to himself the world of men. The clear traces of European blood which the Mandan exhibited in the middle 1700’s cannot have been the outcome of a relatively fleeting contact with white men; they must have sprung from some much more profound intermingling. What great adventure lies behind this strange and now vanished tribe? We do not know.
²

Many explorers after Verendrye wrote about the white Indians. This word white seemed to lead them into being a mythical kind of Indian. Their hair was light, sometimes red, eventually turning gray; their eyes were blue or hazel. Ethnologists offer a normal, genetic explanation. The white Indians were albinos. The nearby tribes of Hidatsa, Arikara, and Crow showed less frequent— but similar—albino traits. The Welsh historian Williams says that “as legends go, it is genial, human, and humane. It appeals to everyone ”
³

F
or several days the Minnetaree village of Metaharta had been making preparations. It was soon the time for braves from the neighboring Mandans to be coming. These Mandans were the buffalo scouters, and they traditionally invited the Metaharta to help in their annual spring and summer hunts.

Sacajawea was sitting on her sleeping couch with the skin curtains pulled aside, lazily combing her hair, when she heard a great commotion outside.

Exclaiming, “Rooptahee Mandans!” Grasshopper ran out the door.

Sacajawea dressed as fast as she could. She was eager to see the men from the Mandans who had hair white as snow and eyes the color of summer sky. Rosebud had told her so.

The council area was full of people, waving and shouting to the riders, and dodging the horses. Some of the horses were loaded with buffalo-hide packs, and others were being unloaded. Men herded the unloaded horses into open spaces on the slopes above the village.

Some of the men were Minnetarees; and some must have been Mandan, for their hair was streaked with silver or gray and some was the color of dried grass. Their bodies were copper-colored in the sunlight. Their faces were streaked with paint, eyes outlined in white, with horizontal white bars across their cheeks. Sacajawea could not tell if the men were grinning at each other or baring their teeth. They looked terrible. They wore torn, dirty shirts and trousers that flapped as they rode. Their knee-high moccasins were fuzzy with gray prairie dust, and they carried murderous-looking lances. Sacajawea noticed that two or three of the men had straw-colored beards on their faces. They were shouting—at the horses, at each other, at the people in the council area—and they were flexing their great muscles and leaning from their horses to grab the hands of pretty girls. Some of these men had blue or gray eyes. Some were singing, and though they were so dirty and so terrible-looking, they were radiant with triumph, and whatever they were shouting or singing, it allsounded like one great splendid hurrah: ”
Ni-effi coe-dig!”
“We are hunters!” “The buffalo are near and plentiful!”
“Buch! Buch! Buch!”

Pressing against the wall of a lodge to keep out of their way, Sacajawea felt the little tingles that rippled through her whenever something really thrilling took place. These men, riding horses loaded with meat and hides, gave her a feeling deep down inside that she could not have expressed. It was a feeling that these men were strong and right and splendid, the sort who rode proudly over the earth and made villages strong. Today she felt proud to be a Minnetaree.

She caught sight of Rosebud, not far away in the crowd. Rosebud was holding a robe over her hair to keep the dust out. Sacajawea edged her way along the wall and spoke to her.

“What a morning!” said Rosebud. “Isn’t this like a fair?”

They heard a string of angry Mandan,
“Nehi! Ake-e-vee!”
as one of the riders shouted to a Minnetaree on foot who was in the path of his horse. Sacajawea smiled. “They are frightening, aren’t they?”

“Frightening? I never saw such a bunch of horrors in my life. Maybe they’ll look human when they’ve washed and dressed for the Buffalo Dance.” Rosebud looked pleased. “That is much fun to watch. We’ll go on horseback with Fast Arrow and Redpipe. They know some of the important men in the Rooptahee village.”

Suddenly Sacajawea grabbed Rosebud’s arm. “Do you think the black-bearded one will be there?”

“No, he’s probably gone looking after his beaver traps. The white traders don’t often come to the Buffalo Dance.” Then Rosebud scraped her moccasins in the dirt. Looking down, she said, “It is best that you know our chief will be there. He will be the guest of the Mandan chiefs. But we can stay out of his sight, and besides, Fast Arrow will be with us.”

The next morning, Sweet Clover brought four horses from the pasture. Fast Arrow and Redpipe would each ride one. Sacajawea and Rosebud would ride together, leading the spare, which would be used for carrying meat and hides.

“Redpipe—he should not become tired because it might lead to another long illness,” Grasshopper whispered. “Encourage him to stay and visit his old friend Four Bears instead of going on the hunt with the younger men.”

“I can suggest it,” answered Rosebud, “but he is stiff in opinions.”

“Stubborn,” said Grasshopper. “Only Redpipe knows what is right. He will tell you so himself,” she said sarcastically.

“I will try to see that he rests frequently, my mother,” said Sacajawea. “If Rosebud and I become thirsty and must stop for a drink at a stream, he will have to wait for us, or get a drink for himself. We will drink often.”