Sacajawea (53 page)

Captain Clark waved wildly to the approaching lone horseman and was saluted with a non-Shoshoni, “Hul-loo, strangers!”

“Drouillard!” cried Clark, his face dark. “You’re dressed like a Shoshoni? If so, that’s a poor joke to play on us!”

“No joke, Captain,” said Drouillard, adjusting the white ermine-skin cape of the Shoshonis and pointing to the vermilion on his face and down his hair part. About his neck was a necklace of bear’s claws. “We have found ‘em!”

“You camp with the People?” asked Sacajawea.

“Oh, you bet, and they dance for us and sing, and invite us to dinner.”

Questions poured from Sacajawea and then from Captain Clark, so that Drouillard could not answer coherently.

Charbonneau contemptuously fingered the blue belt at her waist. “Like a white woman,” he said scornfully. “I’ve never heard a woman speak up so much as you. Even the white woman keeps her mouth shut once in a while.”

Sacajawea trembled. “I am coming to my land,” she said.

“Captain Lewis is coming with more than sixty Shoshoni men,” said Drouillard, his horse’s hooves clicking on the rocks. “They will help us.”

“Ride back and give the others the news,” Captain Clark ordered Drouillard. “Tell them Labiche, Charbonneau, Janey and I are on our way to meet Lewis. We’re walking.”

With a wild Shoshoni whoop, the half-Shawnee, half-French Drouillard galloped toward the canoes.

This cannot be a dream, thought Sacajawea. I am with these white men, and they are not in the spirit world. What if these people are not the Agaidüka Shoshoni, but some other tribe? The Agaiüdkas may be farther back in the mountains. I cannot get my hope too high. My heart beats as though it would fly out.

It was then that memory rose up before her to merge with the familiar landscape: far below, near the river, a great circular enclosure at the foot of a bluff, and above, a fan of gray stones spreading back from the bluff’s edge like wings over the green, undulating hills. The picture spread vividly before her, overlaying the short pines ahead, and she became a girl on a painted horse, looking down from a high hill. White clouds bloomed and grew towering against the sky edge of the world, casting shadows below, islands in the green sea. A band of sheep, a moving cloud shadow, circled, flashing as white as foam on each turn, a promise to the People of warmth and contentment.

From the white circle of lodges in a green valley, a thread of people on horses moved toward the enclosure, buckskin bright with quillwork, and paint bright on the horses. They stayed silent at the base of the bluff, then went on, upward, separating into lines that moved out along the wings. Beyond the last stones a herd of bighorn sheep grazed, gray-white on the green grass; among them birds rose and circled and dropped. She saw the caller of the sheep in his brown skin robe dancing near the animals to catch their attention; the herd moved toward her, gathering to a white stream, flowing between the converging wings toward the bluff. The leader plunged wildly over, and the stream was solid, flesh of the earth sliding, a fall of meat and robes—life for the People. Dust rose in the stone enclosure, and the vision was gone, fading to the silver forks in the river ahead, the grass changing to dust made by galloping horsemen coming toward them. The dust rose shadowy against the sky. The riders had bright-painted faces; their horses were strong and beautiful, spotted and decorated with handprints of red, yellow, and white. Bird feathers were tied to their manes and tails.

The riders were singing as they approached. The song rang in Sacajawea’s ears, feral as the cry of a hunted animal. She caught her breath and recognized the Greeting Song of the Shoshonis.

Sacajawea scanned each face eagerly, her heart thumping with excitement. One after another passed, but there was not one whom she recognized. She stood still a moment, her head bowed, uncertain, her baby heavy on her back, her heart as heavy as stone. These Shoshonis were all strangers, not her tribe, not the Agaidüka.

The horsemen wheeled and pranced around her, Captain Clark, Labiche, and Charbonneau. Labiche smiled and
kiyi-ed
with them. Charbonneau sputtered,
“Jésus,
them Snakes think we have lots of meat to give them.”

Sacajawea had a shadowy, unclear feeling of a dream begun, not ended; she was at the edge of awakening. She began to wish she had not put the red circles on her cheeks nor the vermilion down her center hair part.

The horsemen were leading them to a larger group of Shoshonis. There was a sudden movement among the mass of people, and Sacajawea recognized Captain Lewis through the crowd, with red paint smeared on his face and on the straw-colored wisps of hair that poked wildly from his queue.

A squaw stared, watching Sacajawea curiously. Her hair was in strings at the sides of her face, and her tunic was unwashed. A tear at the bottom had been mended with thick buckskin. Her straight hair hung as if to hide her sunken cheeks. This unkempt woman began making the sucking motion with her fingers and crying words that came from long ago, a scrap of a familiar song.

Sacajawea caught the smell of these people, the living earth smell—leather, woodsmoke, mulch odor. The squaw was pressing her way through the crowd, coming toward her. Sacajawea instinctively stepped back, but the squaw was at her side, moving her hands firmly and lightly over her arms, then over the face of Pomp, then over Sacajawea’s face. The woman gave a quick little cry, and then her arms were about Sacajawea; tears were warm on Sacajawea’s cheeks, then cool.

“Boinaiv, Grass Child, you have come home to the People.”

Sacajawea’s arms closed convulsively about the woman, and she could not keep her tears back. “Willow Bud, it is you!” Between tears she laughed and no longer noticed the others around her. “So—these are the People, my people?”

“Ai.
The scouts have been watching the white men. None said you were with them. It is hard to believe. And a baby, too. Where is his father?”

Sacajawea pointed to Charbonneau, who had a wide grin on his face as he watched the Shoshonis dance for these newcomers.

“A white man!
Hai-hai-ee!
And your papoose, he is beautiful.”

Questions tumbled out, but there was no pause for them to be answered. Sacajawea put her finger on her lips for the sign of silence, and both women laughed and clung to each other again; then Willow Bud took Pomp and walked to a spot that was shaded by tall pines and sat cross-legged, holding the baby close to her heart. Pomp tried to free himself as she smelled him and ran her hands over his face and plump body. She rocked him gently back and forth as a tear slipped down her chin.

“The papoose that was mine did not live through the Month of Howling Wind. She was so tiny. Her mouth opened like a baby bird’s, and I had no milk for her. There was no other nursing woman who could spare extra milk. Food was scarce. Stomach cramps were everywhere. She lived eight moons. We laid her tiny body behind the white rocks by the gurgling stream. My man sat there with no food, only the icy water, for one moon. He said the morning sun makes the white rocks glisten like water going over a high falls, so we shall always know where our papoose sleeps—in the glistening stones. He put many stones over her body before he came back to the tepee. It will always be hidden from wolves or buzzards.”

Inpulsively Sacajawea slipped her blue-beaded moccasins from her feet and pressed them toward Willow Bud, thinking of them not as a possession, or gift, but as a word, a phrase of sympathy spoken by the gesture. The meaning was clear and understood. For the moment there were only the two of them with the child between, an awareness of each other, a communication felt as palpably as a touch of the hand.

Sacajawea slipped her feet into the worn moccasins cast aside by Willow Bud. She looked back over the years and saw Willow Bud, a beautiful, self-reliant child with fat, brown cheeks and a straight, sturdy body. Now she was hollow-eyed, slightly bent, thin and haggard, her toes turned in even more than most squaws’. She was probably about fifteen or sixteen summers old, but her thin face looked much older. Winters of near-starvation had done that.

Willow Bud hunched herself to her feet. “Come along. We will go to my tepee and do nothing but talk. Yellow Neck, the one who is my man, is with his brother. They have gone to see the white men you have brought to our village.”

Inside the summer lodge a smell of leather and sage enveloped them. Sacajawea’s sight cleared to the darkness, and she stepped closer to the small center fire. It was hot inside, and the air was thick with the smell of musty roots simmering in a tightly woven grass container. The walls were hung with bows, arrows, quilled bags, painted rawhide parfleches, herbs, dried roots. The floor was hard-packed, clean-swept clay.

For a moment Sacajawea could not speak. Her mind took her back to a day when dawn came in a mirroring of light, a springing wash of color. The cottonwoods, aspens, and willows flared from the mist and darkness along the creek, leaves bright green against pale trunks. The whole camp was astir as children swirled among the tepees, shouting, waving their arms, dogs barked, women worked by the fires or brought wood and water to their tepees. Near the camp she imagined she saw the horse herd, red, yellow, black, white—pinto, piebald, spotted—bright flares against the green short grass. The camp was preparing to move to a summer home in the cool shade of the mountains. She could see her grandmother and her mother packing the household goods. Her father sat before the lodge, dignified, smoking in the sun. The day brightened and she was brought from her reverie when the tent flap was pushed aside by women.

Sacajawea searched their faces as they crowded inside the hot tepee. They had come out of curiosity and respect to see and make welcome this member of their tribe who, by some magic, had led many friendly white men to the Agaidüka camp. One old squaw remarked it was like seeing a person come back from the dead to see this grown woman who had left them as a child. They were curious about the baby, made by a white man. They passed Pomp back and forth, examining him more thoroughly than a white man’s doctor. Pomp did not cry out; he seemed to enjoy the attention and squealed with laughter when they looked at his fat feet and counted his toes. Sacajawea smiled at them as they fingered his clothes and nodded approval at the way she had made them soft and white from thin doeskin.

The old squaw fingered the mosquito netting that was folded in his blanket. Sacajawea explained that the white men used this to keep the biting insects off.

“Is it better than bear’s oil?”

“Ai,
better,” she answered, and they crowded closer, eager to hear stories of the white men. Some left and returned with food so that they could stay longer and listen to Sacajawea tell about the round mud lodges food that was planted in spring and harvested in fall metal horns, men who did women’s work, a scratch that would keep away the smallpox.

“Unlikely. Her tongue is crooked,” laughed an old woman feeling the blue-headed belt at Sacajawea’s waist. Then she looked at Willow Bud’s new moccasins with the beads on top. These women had never before seen glass beads. Their bone needles could never pierce the tiny holes; nor could their cordage—even the finest made from the fibers of the false nettle—go through the tiny beads.

Sacajawea showed them the pewter mirror that Chief Red Hair had given her.

“Like carrying a part of a water pool in your pocket,” said an old squaw who made delightful faces in the mirror and smiled a wide, toothless grin and grabbed Sacajawea by the arm.

“My daughter,” she said. “I clearly remember your family. You are the true shadow of your mother. We are pleased to have her image back among us.” Again she smiled, and then she was gone. In a moment she returned with a small quilled fawnskin robe, which she held out silently. Sacajawea accepted it and waited until the old woman was ready to explain.

“The mother of this woman,” she whispered almost inaudibly, choked with emotion, “made the robe for my firstborn son. I thought it too beautiful to use. Later I thought it was a mistake not to have used it, but now I know why it had to be kept. For the son of the woman we call Boinaiv.”

There were many wet eyes in the tepee. Sacajawea moved back, making room where she could spread out the blanket for all to see. The designs around the edge were beautifully intricate, intimate circles, suns, and triangular birds. Again she felt it hard to catch a breath as the past enveloped her. This thing of beauty had been made by the hands of her own mother. Suddenly she thought of her sister and brothers. She opened her mouth to ask about them just as Charbonneau poked his shaggy head inside the tepee and yelled, “Little Bird, you must come.
Les capitaines
say you be in their council.”

“What did he say?” asked the old squaw with the mirror close to her face.

Sacajawea made the sign for a meeting. “There is a powwow between the white men and the chiefs. They asked me to come.”

“Awww,” the old squaw said. “You are asked to the council where there are only men?”

A tittering rose among the women. Shoshonis would never permit a woman in their councils. Willow Bud’s eyes were wide with curiosity.

“Are you something special to these white men that they cannot powwow without a woman sitting among them?” asked Willow Bud. Again the squaws tittered.

Sacajawea folded the precious robe over her arm and tried to explain. “It is not because I am a squaw and they are braves. It is because I can speak the Shoshoni tongue and the white men cannot. I can speak for you to them.”

The women slowly nodded.
“Ai, ai,
we understand that.” And with a clucking noise made with their teeth and tongue they showed that they approved of this and she should go at once.

Willow Bud followed at a little distance, then, getting up courage, asked, “May I care for him?” She held her arms out for Pomp.

Sacajawea handed the sleeping baby to her girlhood friend, kissing him first.

“What is that?” asked Willow Bud, making a smacking noise with her lips.

“It is a sign for love.” Sacajawea crossed her arms over her breast in the manner of a woman greeting her man when he returns from a hunt or war. “See?” And then Sacajawea kissed the startled Willow Bud on her cheek.