Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Before Grasshopper could get a good look at her, the woman, who was not old, but young and agile, ducked and dodged past. Something was rolled inside the front of her tunic. Her hands pushed it securely to her breast as she ran across to the next lodge and then out of sight. Grasshopper called after her and ran to the edge of the next lodge, but the young woman had gone. Grasshopper’s mind ran in circles. She gazed at the clouds in the sky and tried to think, to remember the features of the young woman. Was she familiar? Grasshopper wiped her hands on her tunic; they were wet with perspiration.

  “That woman took the weasel-tail collar,” said both Sacajawea and Rosebud together. They had followed Grasshopper from the lodge, and now they put their hands to their mouths. It was a sign of thinking another’s thoughts to speak the same thing at the same time. “Why would she take that?” they asked together. Then, afraid to speak again, they looked to Grasshopper.

  “She could be a woman of Kakoakis,” Grasshopper said slowly. “But I don’t think so. His women are well-dressed and good-looking. I did not see her face, but she was not clean.” Grasshopper’s decision was made. “Do not think on this. It is something we can do nothing about. Probably we will not hear of it again. The weasel collar is gone, and I say good riddance!” She clucked and pulled the wisps of hair from her face and returned to the lodge.

  “I hope Grasshopper is right and there will be nothing more heard of the collar,” said Rosebud.

  “Ai,” answered Sacajawea. “I do not want Chief Kakoakis coming around. He could give the small children bad dreams.”

  That night, Sacajawea slept little. She was a woman now, but vacillated between the impossible thought of running away and the other thought of quietly marrying one of the Metaharta braves. “Why not?” she asked herself. “My own people did not come to look for me.”

  Then there was that round, hard thing that came and stayed in her throat—the thing was the forgetting of the old Agaidüka habits. Several times she told herself, “I am an Agaidüka. I must throw off my Minnetaree ways and keep those of my own people. They cannot make me be a Minnetaree!” She thought of following the Big Muddy River back across the prairie, into the mountains—but if she were caught, she would be made sport of by Kakoakis, then she would be killed or sold to some other tribe. Grasshopper was kind, and life was not hard here as it had been in the big Hidatsa village. Maybe she should, after all, wash her mind of the past.

  She lay quite still until the dawn light showed through the smoke hole and she could see the dark forms of her new family lying around the sides of the circular room. She rose quietly and went outside, pulling a woven grass sash tightly around her waist to hold in the sides of her tunic. No sound came from anywhere in the village. All was cool and still. She walked quietly down to the edge of the bathing place in the river and along the shore. She watched the killdeers swooping out over the river, catching insects on the wing, emitting thin cries as they rose from the river and flew out across the grassy plain. She watched until they were only a group of mingling, weaving specks, then nothing. She washed the paint from yesterday’s ceremony from her body. She felt refreshed, and her mind was clear.

  Sacajawea went back across the grassy rise and along the dusty path toward the village. On an impulse she wandered close to the sapling-picketed walls of the village along the bank of a little stream. She thought of the wild dog and wondered if there were others in thesagebrush out there, waiting to be friendly. She began roaming the woods. She had known little of childhood, but Mother Earth was her friend. The growing things that changed every day, the rocks that never changed at all—these were things she could count on. She thought, I always know what to expect of the things of Mother Earth. Sometimes they are cruel, but it is hard, clean cruelty. They don’t torture you with their own weakness. She wondered then about Old Mother, Old Grandfather, and Catches Two, Antelope, and Talking Goose. Then her mind turned to her new family—the tormented Redpipe, and Sweet Clover, and the hideous chief of this village. Kakoakis could change people’s lives without so much as thinking about what he was doing. You cannot count on people, she thought, and the corner of her mouth flickered with a grim little smile.

  Alone this morning, she let herself go back to the fantasies her childhood had never completed. She entered into the magic realm that her new family would not have credited even if she could have told them of it. Grown-ups managed to forget all such things with maturity and could not visualize one who had been a slave for several years behaving with such abandonment and pure childish joy. She smiled secretly for delight, a child, forgetful of all yesterdays.

  For several hours she wandered, playing in her own way, back into her nearly forgotten childhood, vying with the chipmunks in search of nuts, with the chickadees in the seeking out of secret places, and with the big green frogs in plumbing the depths of the woodland pools. She had smelled scents, seen colors, heard sounds, and felt joys so seldom in the summer air. Her fingers, no longer callused, were sensitive to the dryness of the rocks and the pleasurable contrast between the soft moss and the rough sand, all at one and the same time, in the instinctive way of young birds and animals.

  About midafternoon, she came to the banks of a wide stream. She made boats of rolled bark, peeling it thin with her knife and sending boatloads of frightened people down the rushing stream to the far-off water. Her people were pinecones, and she sang to them with each launching in the old, monotonous, five-note songs of the

  Agaidükas. Her songs were not remembered, but instantly invented to fit the freedom of her situation.

  Presently a disturbing sensation that she was not alone began to steal over her—a sense that unfriendly eyes were close by. She hardly heeded it at first, but it persisted. Finally she stood up and strove to penetrate the blue-black shadows.

  Then her heart gave a violent surge and she wished she had taken heed of those semiconscious warnings earlier. Something subtle as a shifting cloud had caused her to glance backward, and there, framed in a tangle of windfall, she saw a bushy black head with a furry face and dark eyes, and although there were no braids like the braves wore, and the face was not smooth and brown, she knew this was a man—a bearded white stranger. This was one of the white trappers from the village!

  He’d been there a long time, fixing his beaver traps and watching Sacajawea at play. This was not the first time he had followed this same girl lecherously. He had seen her in the big Hidatsa village, and discovered her here more than a moon before. He had taken to watching her in the gardens, knowing well that he could not touch her without being obliterated with a fast stroke of her skinning knife. Each time he had shadowed this child, who was clear-featured and slim, exquisitely made, beautiful by the standards of whites and Indians alike, the one part of frenzied daring had come a bit closer to prevailing over the nine parts of sheer cowardice that composed his French nature. But an instinctive awe of very young females continued to hold him from success.

  Today, in this lonely spot, he had aroused himself to the point of action. And like the blood lust of the prairie wolf, the bodily appetite of this half-white, half-Indian man, fully aroused, was not to be turned aside. Imagination had worked upon him until lurid flames burned in his raisinlike eyes and he could fairly smell the pleasure of the tender flesh of his prey.

  Abruptly the shaggy black head withdrew for an instant, only to reappear at another spot several feet closer. As Sacajawea glimpsed his short, broad body, the strength of his shoulders, she felt a shaft of coldfear at the purpose she sensed in his sinister movements.

  Breaking the spell of his evil watching eyes, Sacajawea turned and fled along the bank of the stream. Glancing backward, she saw the man crashing through the thickets, closing the distance between them. Her knife lay on a shell of birchbark, glinting in the sun.

  Emboldened by the sight of the girl running away, the bearded man covered the ground in short bounds, keeping to the undergrowth. Now Sacajawea ran with frank abandon and with all the streng
th she had. She had never before known fear of a man’s two eyes, but she was terrified at what she saw in their depths, fearing at each moment to be struck down. But her woods sense did not leave her; she knew just where she was— the stream led back to the gates of the village, and toward those she turned in her flight, knowing there would be refuge there.

  The man was fascinated by the ancient game of chasing a desperate quarry. He came on, always keeping to cover, never getting closer, yet never falling behind. This was all that delayed the girl’s capture in those first vital minutes.

  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.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The Mandans

  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 valley1

  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

  For 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.