Sacajawea (26 page)

“We do not lie to each other,” said Four Bears.

“No.”

“Then I am glad I have the scar in my side where the Sioux arrow rested instead of going into your back. That was some battle, huh?”

“You have said that before. I have said before I am glad you saved my life,” said Redpipe. “You have something else on your mind, and it is hard to speak of, my friend.”

“You have a new daughter.”

“Ohhh.
Ai,
I have a new daughter. You think I would have been wiser to adopt a son?
Ai.
I suppose that is true. Women are not so valuable. They shed tears; they ask questions; they nag.”

“Your daughter is a former slave of the Hidatsas.”

“That is right. She is not Minnetaree, though; she is from the northern nation of Shoshonis.” Redpipe peered at his old friend, who only stared back, waiting for Redpipe to say more about his new child. “She has curiosity about things around her.”

“Ai!”
agreed Four Bears. “Much for a woman. She is not restrained.”

“She is a joy to have around the lodge. She sings and learns quickly. Grasshopper, my woman, bestows much love on her. The child seems to need the love. She was not well when she came to us. The Hidatsas must have been heartless with her.”

“You speak with a straight tongue.” There was a glint of firelight in the blue-green eyes of the subchief.

“Why would I do otherwise with you, my friend?” asked Redpipe, puzzled by the conversation of Four Bears. He did not understand why his friend was interested in Sacajawea. She was just one more woman, and that was all Four Bears had in his lodge. He ought to be nearly surfeited by women by this time.

“I have met your daughter. I have spoken to her. Sheis not shy. She speaks back. She looked into the sacred ark and asked me about the ancient stone resting there.”

“Ai, I can believe that. She wants to know about all things.”

“There is a strange story going around about a young slave girl from the Hidatsas.”

Redpipe started, then he relaxed, waiting to hear what Four Bears had to say.

“The girl loved a dog more than her captors. The dog also loved her. He was like a guardian and saved her life on several occasions. It is said she could talk the wild dog’s tongue, like an animal. When the dog was killed, she mourned it as she would a relative. The spirit of the animal stood over the lodge she lived in, and to appease that spirit a shrine was built to honor it, a shrine of cast-off bones and meat, an actual rubbish heap!” There seemed to be an amused upturn to the mouth of Four Bears.

Redpipe listened carefully, wondering what this story had to do with him or his new daughter.

“The girl was a curse to her captors. They feared her power with the wild dogs. They thought she walked with spirits. She was to have been killed, but one who had befriended her sold her instead to an Ahnahaway in exchange for a caged crow. The Ahnahaway did not know how fortunate he was when he lost the girl to a Metaharta in a game of arrows.”

Redpipe was unable to speak. He had not heard the story before. “You speak with a straight tongue? This story is not some made-up thing?”

“There is no fork in my tongue,” Four Bears said.

“The story is unbelievable. Yet as I think slowly on it, I see that the daughter I have could have made friends with a wild beast. She is gentle and does not push herself with small children or even adults. She is straightforward and firm also. She is not devious. Yes, she is devious! She has put herself around my heart as if I had raised her from a small cub!”

The green-blue ice of Four Bears’s eyes were full of yellow sparks, and his mouth was curved upward. A chuckle came from deep in his belly. “Two grown men we are, sitting here discussing the behavior of a daughter. This is either for women to discuss, or to dismiss.

But we have been doing the talking—about a woman who is as nothing, really, not much use, except to keep one of our young men happy.” Again, Four Bears seemed to be laughing deep inside his belly.

“There is more on my mind,” said Redpipe, handing the pipe to Four Bears to refill.

“Let us sit, then, and smoke your pipe awhile,” suggested Four Bears.

“I know as you know that it is wrong for grown men to worry about women. They are of no consequence.” Redpipe paused, glancing at the seven women of Four Bears sitting at the far side of the lodge.

“We are like women to talk or worry about even one of them,” agreed Four Bears. “But I have no man-child to think about in my lodge, so I do not find it unusual to worry or speak of a daughter.”

Redpipe felt easier and he went on. “I had the fainting sickness. I went on a journey of not waking, and there learned that this new daughter of mine would go to a white man.”

“And so—I believe she will be able to protect herself more than you think,” answered Four Bears after a moment of meditation.

Redpipe stood up and walked a little. “I have a feeling that this daughter will someday link us with the white men. She will be a go-between. Do we want this?”

“Now you speak strange thoughts.” Four Bears gazed at him in bewilderment. “The white man is arrogant and makes his own laws, even in our land. Do you think this daughter would go to live with that?”

“Not of her own will. But she has been shuffled from one village to another, enough to know that she has no say about her destiny. The Great Spirit guides us all. But I am frightened for her now. I do not deny it. If the Hidatsas knew the Girl Who Loved a Dog was here— It makes a man shake.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I am. But I am speaking as well for the members of my family who love this woman.”

“Times have changed,” Four Bears said. “For every Hidatsa who would harm her, there are many more who want nothing but to be left in peace and not be bothered about a shrine of stinking bones.”

“Aa-agh!”
Redpipe agreed. “But now we go in circles, like a tethered dog.”

“A dog”—Four Bears said it softly—“is not the only thing that might go in circles on a tether. Have you ever seen the body of a man who has done that, around a Hidatsa stake, with his own guts ripped out and tied to the post to tether him? Well, I have. At, you are right in being frightened.”

Four Bear’s cheeks sucked in against his teeth, and his lips went flat and whitened. “My skin crawls. We must pledge not to speak of this to anyone outside our families. Women gossip. The Hidatsas can have their sacred pile of bones and you can have your beloved daughter and we will both live in peace. We will not tell what lies secretly in our hearts.”

“But what if my daughter ever tells her story?” Red-pipe asked.

“She will not tell, and if others mention it, you will deny it and make your shoulders shrug as though it is something that has nothing to do with your family. You will clean your mind of the event now, wash it out.”

“Ai,
you have given me much to work over this night.”

“I do not hear the drums,” said Four Bears. “The young men have gone on the hunt. Your son has gone, too. Will you rest here for the remainder of the night?”

“I find it good here.”

“Then we will rest until the sun is in the sky. The night has walked its way across the sky already. And I have another thing for you to sleep on. Listen now. I would like you to come to our Okeepa Ceremony, in another moon. I would like you to bring your son, Fast Arrow, with you. Let him put himself in the Bull Dance as my son. With only women in this lodge, I need someone to smoke with once in a while. I would like someone to make arrows for. I am asking that you share your son with me.”

Redpipe sat up. “You honor me! The man of my daughter, Rosebud, my son, Fast Arrow, who came to us from Black Cat’s lodge, will be honored to become your foster son. There is nothing to sleep on. It is a matter settled. You shall have my son for your son. We are friends. We share.”

A smile crept up to soften Four Bears’s mouth.

“Would you like another daughter? I have one or two I can share.”

“Now you are making sport,” said Redpipe, puffing on the pipe, his eyes twinkling.

“I must be completely truthful. The name Black Cat has brought something else to the front of my mind. Many seasons past, Chief Black Cat was friendly with a white man called John Evans. They talked many nights through about the beginnings of our nation and the significance of the few things left to us from our old, old grandfathers. Evans knew how valuable these things are to us. He told other white men. We have been warned that a woman of one of the white traders will try to take our sacred relics so that this man can trade for them. When I saw her looking into the medicine ark, I thought your daughter was the woman who was friendly with the white traders and had been instructed by them to take our sacred relics.”

“You must judge more carefully,” scolded Redpipe. “Perhaps there is a woman in your own village who is friendly with the white traders and could do such a despicable thing. Sacajawea would take nothing she did not feel was rightly hers. Somewhere in her training she was taught by good people. You can be sure it was not the Hidatsas!” Redpipe spat the last word out as if it were spoiled, bitter gall.

The Buffalo Dance had been a success. By the middle of the next afternoon, the hunters were back, leading loaded horses. Their hands and arms were dirty with dried blood. Sacajawea and Rosebud helped unload and open the great furry bundles brought by Fast Arrow. Rosebud was proud of her man. She thought she had never seen so much meat in her whole life. Every horse that had been ridden away had come back loaded. There were great hams, broad rib slabs, juicy hump steaks, rolls of thin meat, kidneys, livers, tongues, and great white chunks of fat. The air was filled with a strong, sweet blood smell.

The men did not work, but lounged around smoking and talking in the arena of the village. Rosebud and Sacajawea took their horse out to pack the remainder of Fast Arrow’s kill. When they returned they werecovered with blood, their arms and legs caked. Sacajawea laughed at the sight of Rosebud. Rosebud scowled at her with dark eyes, but her mouth smiled. Then both looked up as Redpipe’s voice called to Fast Arrow, who was lounging in the shade.

“Ho there, my son, you did find the buffalo plentiful?” Redpipe stopped and examined the buffalo hides. Fast Arrow made a quick jab with his knife, as though stopping a buffalo in its tracks.

“We missed you,” said Rosebud, hurrying to the side of Redpipe. “Where did you go last night, father?”

“I had a long talk with my old friend, Four Bears.” He turned away from her to smile proudly at Fast Arrow. “Four Bears has invited you to take part in the Okeepa. You are to make yourself strong for the Bull Dance.”

Fast Arrow scowled at him. Redpipe scowled back— fiercely. Fast Arrow laughed. He bent, pawing the earth with his hands in the fashion of a charging bull buffalo, then pointed sternly and proudly to his bronze, blood-caked chest. He was ready. Redpipe saw and gave a grunt of grateful assent. They would return in a month for the ceremony. The two men went to join other men so that Fast Arrow could tell of his prowess at killing his buffalo.

Rosebud and Sacajawea went about the task of roasting some of the meat. The liver and heart were cut and wrapped in a long piece of gut around and around a willow branch and then tied in place. Rosebud held the branch in the outdoor fire until the meat browned and the juices sputtered. Sacajawea sliced off thin lengths of meat and hung them on drying racks of willow she had bound together with rawhide. Flies swarmed everywhere around the makeshift Metaharta camp. Sacajawea was careful to throw away the pieces of meat where small piles of white eggs had been laid. The flies made it hard to get the meat cut. They found the bare flesh of the women’s arms and faces and legs. Bright blood welled up from the shallow incisions left by the flies. Rosebud put some decaying leaves in the fire to make smoke and eliminate some of the flies; Sacajawea wrapped a huge green skin around her waist so that itcovered her legs. They worked hard, talking to one another, sometimes eating bits of raw meat.

Finally Rosebud could no longer tolerate the flies. “I am going to the riverbank for wet leaves. The smoke will be thick and roll around us.”

“Ai,
but we’ll have watery eyes!” Sacajawea said.

A young woman who had been working several tepees to the left came slowly toward Redpipe’s camp as Rosebud walked away. The gaunt, hot-eyed creature had two small children with dirty tunics and dried blood on their faces. Their hair seemed fine and showed glints of red in the shaft of sunlight.

“You are being careful,” she said. “You will not have maggots in the meat.” The young woman wiped her hands on the dirty skirt she wore. Her blouse was loose at the neck and the sleeves were fringed, but there were no other decorations. Her hair was long and black and piled on top of her head. It was held in place by sticks and thorns and daubs of mud. The insides of her ears were red, and she had a red line between her eyebrows, making her look as if the top of her head had been finely cut away from the bottom half. “My man would beat me if our meat spoiled.”

“Beat you?” said Sacajawea. “But if it was not your fault, why would he beat you?”

“Ai,” cried the woman, dropping the neck of her blouse over her shoulder so that unhealed burns between her shoulders were visible.

“He hit me with a smoldering chunk of wood only this morning when I had not built up the morning fire.” She swayed and grinned at Sacajawea. “My man is very important in the other village. He can speak the language of the Metaharta, and Mandan, and two tongues of the white men.” She held up two greasy fingers, her eyes snapping with pride.

“Did your man go on the hunt?” asked Sacajawea, wondering why the woman had not put melted buffalo fat on the burns.

“No, my man has gone north to trade with other white men. I am preparing the meat of some of his friends.”

“Your man is white?” asked Sacajawea, unbelieving.

“Ai,
Jussome, a Frenchman.” The woman grinned.

“My man is bearded—on his face, on his chest and back, and on his arms and legs.” She laughed.

“What is French?” asked Sacajawea.