Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Sacajawea thought of the braves who loitered around

  Chouteau’s big stone warehouse, where the “fur rows” smelled to high heaven. When the braves were bored, a band of them would mount their ponies and race madly down the main street, shooting blunt arrows at every dog and cat in sight. She said aloud, “My boys will not be like that. They will learn self-control.”

  Most of the Indians never did understand why the white men so sternly forbade these races. There was much they did not understand about the white men. For example, why did Mr. Boujou, the watchmaker, always wave his arms and scream ”Sacre!” when the braves sauntered into his shop to examine his collection of glass eyes? Sacajawea chuckled a little to herself at that thought. In his best blanket and wearing his tomahawk like a dress sword, an Indian went where he felt like going. He knocked at no doors. But black cooks screamed and sometimes hurled hot water. And their white mistresses screamed and sometimes fainted. There was no such silliness if a brave stayed with the men down near the levee. That was where there was rotgut, big talk, and sometimes a melee.

  Sacajawea heard more talk of the comet in the sky. Some said that it meant the coming again of the white man’s God. Others, more pessimistic, said the earth was going to explode and fall apart all over the sky.

  Tecumseh, the famous Shawnee chief, had moved into the southern part of Missouri to quiet the tribes and negotiate peaceful land settlements with the white settlers. It was generally recognized that open war with the Indians would necessarily be part of the June 1812 declaration of war against the British. Sacajawea wondered how much Tecumseh understood of the problems of both Indians and whites.

  In mid-December, the month before the snow covered the ground, Sacajawea was shaken from her sleeping couch. She heard a roaring and groaning in the earth. The cabin creaked and seemed to be moving. She staggered to the door and crashed drunkenly against the cabin wall. Winds rushed from many directions and mingled and cried in the upper air. Lightning leaped out of the dark, and fireballs danced in the distance. Then all seemed quiet. Sacajawea leaned farther outthe door and waited for the rain, but no rain fell. There was only the leaping lightning and the crying winds. A wolf howled, deep-toned, near, and there was no answer. She listened to the winds and heard voices shouting. “Come, come to us,” they called. She pulled her blanket closer and shivered. Again she heard the voices calling her. The voices of children calling to their mother in the black of night. Frightened children calling. The lightning leaped, and she saw the wolf, low-bellied to the ground, running past the cabin into the dark. The floor began to roll, and the meager furniture seemed to walk. Her head reeled, and her breath came in short gasps as her throat tightened with fear. In the brightness of the next lightning flash she saw great numbers of wolves pressed close together following the low-bellied one. Across the grassland the earth seemed to roll in waves like the Stinking Waters of the west. Now the shivers ran down her back.

  There had been stories all fall at Chouteau’s trading post from the rivermen who had been awakened by tremendous noises and violent agitations of their boats. They told of trees falling on the shore and the sea gulls screaming. Many a patron tried to sooth his men with “Restez-vous tranquil, c’est un tremblement de terre.” But men could not understand as the perpendicular banks above and below them began to fall into the river.

  Trappers who came up from Tecumseh’s territory near New Madrid in the Missouri delta told about great chasms four feet in width forming with the shocks. Some noticed that every earth shock was preceded by a roaring kind of groan, and that the shocks uniformly came from the same point and went off in an opposite direction. The river was reported to be covered with foam and driftwood, and had risen.

  Sacajawea gathered her butcher knife, firesticks, and a pouch of the fresh-made pemmican and followed the same trail as the wolves had taken, the trail to town. She walked. She was afraid to ride a horse on ground that rumbled. The way was hard in the dark. There was nothing now in her mind but fear. Only when the lightning leaped could she see the ground stretched before her, opening with sounds like tremendous claps of thunder followed by a diminishing cracking, like thegrumbling of a great sheet of ice. The lightning showed the trail, and it led her up along the creek toward town. She came against rocks that had tumbled into the creek bed. Frightening rumblings were discharged like the explosion of artillery. The ground heaved and rolled in a succession of earth tremors, six or eight minutes apart. She huddled against the stones, then climbed over them where the ground seemed smoother under their dried grasses and she could move easily. She could not make out the trail, but thought by some instinct she would reach the home of Chief Red Hair.

  The winds died some, and the lightning ceased. She passed circular holes, resembling the vents of small volcanoes, from which only minutes before gases, steam, and water had shot high in the air. Some glistening black protrusions of rock and substrata were exposed along the trail, but she could not remember them from before and wondered more and more if she were going in the right direction. The darkness was thick, the air acrid and sulfurous; far ahead she thought she saw a glimmering in the weeds. The glimmering faded, then came again. She stumbled, watching it become larger. Then she saw faces shining in the light of a campfire. All were stupefied by the great Mother Earth rumblings and openings that spewed the sulfurous fumes, blasts of carbonized dust, or great geysers of water and steam. These fugitives had sought refuge on a hilltop while they tried to see the continuing devastation below. They were now composing themselves for death by frantic hymn-singing and prayers. The noise of these white farmers and their families was as frightening as the roar from inside the earth.2

  Instinctively Sacajawea moved in a wide circle around the campfire. Her right foot reached out in one instant to meet only air, and she pitched forward, downward. Her body twisted, and her hands caught at the sod edge. Her fingers gripped and held. She dangled into deeper darkness, and her mind whirled in circles and her legs thrashed as she sought to swing them up and crawl back over the edge. Slowly her fingers slipped, and she fell downward, her left ankle striking a dead-white protrusion of rock. She lost consciousness as her body layfolded upon itself on the mud at the bottom of a yawning crack in the earth.

  She lay surrounded by the earth; only the dark sky, now veiled by a yellow haze as dawn approached, looked down at her. She seemed close to the inner heart of the rumblings, and yet she could hear the outer winds whispering among the grasses. The ancient magic of her beginnings was there.

  The winds whispered through grasses and were the voices of spirits that lived in Mother Earth. Her mind knew such spirits existed. She had learned of them when she was a child. The sighing winds, streaks of lightning, images of a low-bellied wolf in fright, heaving earth, frightened palefaces chanting around a flickering fire, and small animals running scared were all signs to her as she merged into the natural forces that surrounded her. These were the things that brought her to the bottom of the crack in Mother Earth.

  She was somewhere between her lodge and the lodge of Chief Red Hair. She was a bit of human life in a mud-walled well, alone.

  The wind sighed, and the rain fell. The drops gathered a chill from the high openness of the sky. The cool wetness brought consciousness back to the dreaming Sacajawea. She stirred; waves of pain swept through her body, and she was unconscious again. The rain stopped. Mother Earth rumbled deep inside herself and far away.

  A sickly yellow dawn spread over the land and filtered through the oaks and hickories. Awareness came to Sacajawea. She lay in a heap. Her tunic was mud-caked, and clotted blood clung to her left leg. It was twisted grotesquely beneath her, but not broken. Pain swelled and receded and swelled again in her throat with each in-drawn breath. She stared upward at the yellow-gray clouds overhead for a long time.

  The sun was almost straight above her when she moved. Agony streaked inside her as she moved her left leg, pushed down a little, and pulled it around in front. She could not rememb
er what had happened. She could not recall the terrified look on the white faces in the firelight. She did not know that she was the woman called Sacajawea. She did not recall that she was running away from some unknown terror. She imagined the cry of an infant who longed for the comfort of its mother’s arms, then recognized her own whimperings. She was a primitive, elemental creature looking about herself now for the primary substances of survival. Her eyes found the pouch of pemmican where it had fallen in mud when she pitched over the edge of the earth crack. She inched her way toward it, wondering what was inside the leather pouch. Her back ached, but did not seem more than bruised. Her mouth felt dry.

  She sat up and looked around again. The crack was long and turned sharply to the left about a hundred yards in front of her. A butcher knife lay half-buried in the mud at her feet. She tucked it inside the leather belt at the waist of her tunic. She pulled herself upright, pulling at the dirt along the side of the crack. Her left ankle throbbed, and she could not put her full weight on it. She gripped the pouch and pulled at the dirt, trying to raise herself out of the crack. The dirt and mud crumbled under her hands. But she knew she had to find a way out. She limped to the turn and found the sides were all equally steep. She put her hand into the leather pouch and found the fine-pounded meat laced with blackberries. She put a pinch in her mouth. It was dry and hard to swallow. Her head ached. She crammed two more pinches into her mouth and let the juices form slowly, slowly from the dryness. The dried meat was pounded finely and needed little chewing. A convulsive constriction of her throat forced it down. She reached for more, and in the reaching stepped down on her left foot. A blackness surrounded her, and unconsciousness took her again.

  Daylight disappeared and darkness grew. A half moon rose over the land, and its silver light moved slowly across the grass to the crack in Mother Earth. The pale light touched the limp figure. She stirred and opened her eyes. Her unconsciousness had passed into sleeping, and the sleeping finally into awakening. Her eyes looked at the drifting moon. She knew who she was. She was Sacajawea, mother of Baptiste, friend of Chief Red Hair. She did not know where she was. But the moon in the dark sky was the same moon that she had watched from her cabin door so many nights. It had not changed. Thesky had changed. No longer was the comet visible, and the sickly clouds were gone.

  Her muscles were very stiff and sore. To move was to call back the pain. Her left ankle was discolored and swollen. But she was Sacajawea. She could grit her teeth and fight the hurt. She ate a little more of the pemmican. She limped along the floor of the crack to a large stone that she had not seen before and pulled herself up to it. She looked around. She could see grass hanging down from the mouth of the crack. She reached through the moonlight to touch it. It fell, and some stayed in her hand. It was wet. She remembered the rain. The moonlight moved across the bottom of the crack, close to the wall of mud above the large stone. It beckoned her upward. Almost involuntarily she reached for the knife in her belt and began to cut footholds in the side of the wall. The pain in her muscles had subsided into an aching that could be endured. The pain in her left ankle was a mounting torture. She fought it and dug. She fought it and was defeated. She rolled from the stone to the damp earth and shuddered. Then she was still.

  The sun warmed her. She scraped the mud from her leather tunic, kneeling on the ground, with her weight on her right knee. Her left leg touched the ground little, doing only the job of helping her keep balance. She finished cleaning her tunic, then sat with her back against the stone. She shivered. It was cold. She limped back to where her blanket had fallen, then sat again with her back to the stone. She tucked the blanket around her legs. She listened and heard nothing. No one came. The pain in her ankle had numbed. There was no one to come. No one knew she had gone into the night. No one knew that she had been afraid and had started toward Chief Red Hair’s lodge. No one knew that she was concerned over the well-being of her boys, Baptiste and Tess. Not even she admitted that, but she knew that was why she had fled into the night. She knew it as well as she knew she was the one called Sacajawea. But she would not say it aloud as she would not say her own name aloud. No hunting party would come here. No trapping party would come out here far from the stream.

  She held the knife firmly and all afternoon dug niches in the mud wall. The wind did not touch her; she dropped the blanket, and the working kept her warm. She felt small tremors in the earth, but there was no rumbling and she kept digging. Finally, before the night fell, she dug deep into the pouch for pemmican and ate the last mouthful of pounded meat. She dug her feet deep into the niches, and her hands gripped the edge of the niche above as she pulled herself upward. She remembered the firesticks, but did not go back down to look for them.

  Out on the grass she rested, then looked for the path that led to the town. The winds sighed softly in the upper air. She drew the blanket tightly around her body. Her breath came in short gasps. There was a tingling in her hands and arms. Her ankle had swollen more. She lay beside the long wide crack and thought that the Great Spirit searched for her. He came in the form of rabbits and ground squirrels. He leaped and laughed and mocked her, and his laughter was terrible. “Look at this squaw,” he said. “She climbs up out of Mother Earth and is afraid of the dark night.” A rabbit sniffed at her and turned its tail toward her saying, “She follows the crying of papooses, but is afraid to go to them. Afraid she will find herself in another crack.”

  Her breath came more easily, and her ankle throbbed into her inner-most being, awakening in that being an anger that filled her. A shout rose in her mind and traveled to her lips. “A mother will face anything to comfort her child! Move forward!”

  She sat up and, cutting off a wide strip from the bottom of her tunic, bound her ankle tightly, pulling the soft leather until it was smooth and shiny. For a few moments she crawled along the ground, feeling for cracks. She saw the hills swell up boldly in front of her. They were gentle hills, and the swales between them broad. She knew if she could not find the trail she could stick to the high ground. One oak ridge would lead her to another; if she took the bottoms, they would lead to other bottoms. They were not like the mountains. The mountains were far away, in a dream. She’d have good going; no mountains to get in the way. She’d had enough ups and downs. It seemed as though there was no such thing as level going; it was all up and down and in andout. There was no sense to the troubles she faced trying to reach town. “Good Lord,” she said aloud, using one of Lewis’s favorite terms, “I could use a little level going.”

  She limped along the slope of a hogback and heard the rushing of the small creek. The ground was smooth. It felt good to her feet. It felt familiar, somehow. The woods smelled familiar. It was like coming home. In a way it was. It was like getting back to something that she’d been away from. She thrust her hand into the water and brought it out, cupped, and drank deeply. Again and again she drank. She felt a rise of nausea but fought it down. Soon she was on her feet, slowly feeling her way along the trail. The moon rose and lighted her way. She skirted two more cracks in Mother Earth. As the backbone of the ridge behind shut out the terrifying days, the notion took her that it was not only the feel of the ground, nor the woods’ smell, nor the rolling hills that gave her that queer feeling. It was the same feeling as in the aftermath of the flood when she and Chief Red Hair had stood alone, except for her papoose. She was alive. She was at the edge of the town. She knew that the glow from the place closest in her line of vision came from the live candles in Chief Red Hair’s lodge.

  Things had not changed much. Six years ago she’d been obliged to Chief Red Hair, and she still was. He was sending her boys to school. And they’d taken to spelling books and cropped hair like a bear took to sugar. She wondered if she’d ever be of much use to the boys again. She had set so much store by reading and writing like the whites. But now the boys had changed. They were not so pleased to have her hands on them anymore. Her lips quivered. She set her jaws together, hard, and pulled her cheeks in tig
htly against her teeth. The muscles at the corners of her mouth made knots and pulled her lips out straight.

  But then, she was not bad off. Charbonneau was not home to badger her. Chief Red Hair kept her supplied with meat and skins. Nothing was so bad. She had moved ahead on her trail of life, that was all.

  She eased her feet along the ground. The moon rose and lighted her way. She went around to the back of General Clark’s home. The door opened. Old Rose’s eyeswere wide. “Oh, child, what’s the matter with your leg? Come in here to the kitchen.”

  Sacajawea limped in. Rose, her hands running over the swollen ankle, her fat cheeks fluffing in and out, reassured herself that the bone was not broken. She wrapped the ankle in cool, damp cloths.

  A kind of pleasant stupor was stealing over Sacajawea as she sat by the kitchen hearth. She was placed on a pallet beside the hearth. She slept and dreamed that Miss Judy held one new papoose after another in her arms. No celebration was held for one papoose, however, as it was a girl, a thing to be cherished, but not as important as a boy.

  For the next several days, Sacajawea’s thoughts moved about, but she did not. She seemed drawn to the pallet and lay on it, motionless as a stone. She took no note of the lapse of time. She knew when anyone besides Rose entered the kitchen. She could understand most of what was said, but she could not answer. To open her mouth and move her limbs was nearly impossible. Miss Judy and Chief Red Hair appeared in the kitchen once or twice a day. They whispered above her.