The inside of the tepee was filled with branches of oak and sweet-smelling sassafras.
When Sacajawea woke in the morning, she glanced at Jerk Meat. He was still asleep under his robe. She smiled and brushed her hand along his long side hair. She sat up and threw off her robe and rushed from the tepee. The sun was high. She started a fire outside and listened to the distant barking of dogs, the creeping of the breeze through the oaks, and the soft speech of the villagers, barely audible. She ran on down through the trees to the creek’s edge. She knelt. Nose touching the water, she sipped a drink before bathing. She heard Jerk Meat call as she hummed softly to herself, letting her hair dry in the sun and by the heat of her small fire.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Bathing.”
“Why did you not waken me?”
Her dark eyes crinkled. “You were sleeping with a smile on your face; I could not waken you.” She took his head in her hands and pulled it down to her own.
“It was bad to wake and not find you at my side.” He stroked her streaming hair. “Why did you not wait for me?”
“Come, let us go swimming together, then.”
“Together?” he asked, startled. “Ai.”
“A man and woman do not swim together.”
“Why not?”
“No one does,” he said. “No one ever does.”
“And so—would you like to—with me?” she cupped his chin and kissed him. He moved his lips against hers.
“Do I do it right?” he asked. “I like to touch your lips.”
“Ai,” she said. She kissed him again. “You do it right.”
He cupped her chin gently and kissed her. His hand moved across her firm, round breasts and fingered the sky blue stone in the hollow of her throat.
She could see the wisps of smoke rising from the tepees of the village.
“We have everything here,” she said happily, pointing to the inside of their tepee. Inside were parfleches of mesquite bean cakes, roasted yucca fruit, ripe acorns. Even the necessities for preparing the food had been left by Hides Well. Spoons of buffalo bone, water gourds, fire drills, and woven grass containers.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“Happy?” she repeated. “Even more happy than I have ever been. More happy than when I was with my son, and the other one, called Tess. More happy than when I was with the white soldiers.”
“White soldiers!” He jumped backward, and his dark eyes blazed.
“Ai,” she said. “I will tell you how it was that I was chosen to show them the homeland of the People.”
“Chosen?” he asked, more perplexed.
“It is something I could not tell everyone. They would have thought my tongue the most forked in the whole Quohadas band.”
“Tell me,” he commanded.
When she finished, however, it was not soldiers he was indignant about. “What a stupid, cruel man—that one, Toussaint Charbonneau!”
Sacajawea slumped against Jerk Meat with an inner amusement mixed with a draining sense of relief. She thought, Who can ever tell how a man is going to react. In her moccasins most women, especially a woman of the Quohadas, would have held to a rigid adherence to the ideas of the tribe. She would have shaken her head and said it was a squaw’s duty to follow along with her man and take whatever he gave. Instead, Jerk Meat had immediately and emotionally identified himself with the captains. His whole reaction was masculine, personal, and uncritical. Charbonneau was the only one at fault.
“A squaw should not talk of these things—maybe. The Quohadas would say it is not modest. But I must tell you so that you can know me and know that I am not like all other squaws. But it must be between only you, my man, and me. No one else must know all these things. They would not believe. They would not understand how such things could be true.”
“Ai! Tell me what I already know. How are you not like other women?”
“Last night I was happiest of all. When we came here, the feeling was so good it seemed as though it could not go on. It seemed that surely I must die, and when I was with you as one man-woman that I could never live again and be happy alone without you. I have never felt that way. I found something new. And then, this morning I did not want that feeling at all. I woke and looked at you and touched you and felt your face and hair and listened to you breathe and there was nothing I wanted different. This is how it should be! I thought. And I have never before known of it. I am a grown woman, but I do not know very much. Then when I left you, I knew I could have remained at your side. Then the coming-back thought gave me the feeling of my heart coming through my skin.
“And at the creek there is a deep place and the water against my body makes it feel good because my body was clean with you, not used in whatever manner traders and mountain men deal in sordid acts with squaws. I kept thinking what you did to me, and I loved my own body because it had given you happiness.” She pulled away from him, blushing. “I think now it is not modest for me to reveal inner thoughts to you. You asked me if I was happy,” she said defensively.
“There is no modesty between us,” he said. “I had another woman once. I know something of what a woman thinks.”
“A woman should not talk too much, though. Pronghorn and Hides Well would be shocked.”
“No,” he said, “between us everything can be said. We are two people, yet one unit. Everything can be said. The good and the bad, the most beautiful and theugly. There must be nothing secret, no words that we cannot listen to from each other, nothing we cannot do with each other. We are bound together, yet separate.”
“You are more wonderful than I thought. You think deeply. You are gentle. You understand. You are a man. I give my love to you.” She put her hand on her heart and made the sign of love and held her hand out to him.
“Now listen to me.” He held her off, surveying her brown body, frowning at the white lines of the old scars on her back. “Each time something is held back, it builds part of a wall. Each little thing, no matter how small, builds on that wall. And then one day you will find you are on one side and I am on the other and it has become so high there is no climbing over. For a time we have each lived within ourselves, alone, and now we must start something new and share everything together. Everything. We must not grow alone in any way.”
“Ai,” she said, “like two wandering streams that come together. Can you feel the same happiness I do?”
“Ai, I can feel it. It is as though I have never felt happiness before. Let us not lose our good feelings. Each person thinks he or she alone has these feelings, as though the feeling were created each time. And each person is right. No one feels the same things. They go by the same names, but they are different, just as faces are different.”
She squatted by the glowing fire pit and dipped a flat bean cake in the meat stew she’d started earlier. “I must be a good woman and feed you.”
“I have forgotten about food.”
“You must eat,” she said seriously. “Many seasons ago my own mother used to say that a man judges his woman by the way she prepares his food. I do not want you to think I have no skill.” She hastened to the inside of the tepee for a cooking basket. She quickly brushed a tear aside and desperately wished she did not feel so much like weeping at this very moment of joyousness. “Go for a swim in the creek.”
“If you will come with me,” he said shyly.
“No. If we went together, we would not come back for a long time.”
“Ai, you little fox.”
“The water is maybe too cold for you?” She lifted aleather lid, reached in, and threw out a piece of brittle bread at him. “That is the direction of the water,” she said, and pointed with another piece of bread.
He made a little joke. “Do not eat all the stew before I return.”
She arranged the bread with pieces of dried meat on it. She combed out her soft warm hair and pinned it behind her ears with a piñon stick for the sweet smell it gave. She remembered t
he white tunic Hides Well had left in the tepee. She felt more like a woman than she had ever felt before.
The food was ready when he returned. He started to eat. “Why do you not eat?” he asked.
She shook her head and bit her lip. “I somehow cannot.”
“I cannot, either, then,” he said.
“Oh, please, you must.”
“Why do you cry, Little Fox?”
“Oh,” she said, “I am not certain. Maybe because I am so happy. It is the weeping of joy.”
He moved toward her, seeing how beautiful she looked in the white doeskin tunic, which was very plain, with fringes at the bottom and the armholes. The neck had a little blue quillwork, and a narrow, blue-dyed doeskin belt encircled her waist.
“Do not come to me now,” she said softly. “Let me look at you.”
He ate a few more bites, then put the bark plate down and went to her.
“You should have finished your meal. But I am glad you came over to me.” She shivered against him and buried her face in his neck. “I will try to outgrow this quickly.” Her voice quavered. “I know how a small baby feels when it first begins to walk. I know how a rabbit feels when it opens its small eyes for the first time. The beginning is beautiful, but it is so new and so big a feeling, it is frightening.” She lay beside him on the grass. “You will never grow tired of me?”
“Never. But will you grow tired of me and then go back to that wandering in search of your grown son?”
“Never will I leave you, my beloved,” she said, meaning every word. “There is nothing outside to which I belong. Nothing anymore. I belong only to you.”
“You will tell me that often,” he whispered. “We must never forget that, no matter what happens.”
He carried her up a little hill into an oak grove. He carried her as if she were no more than a sack of breath feathers. The hill sloped into a small gully, which was packed with years of fallen leaves. “This is a couch made for us,” he said. “Remove the white tunic and sit in the sunlight. You are as beautiful as any young girl on her first day with a man.”
She still felt shy with him. She obeyed and liked the feel of the sun on her back. She watched him take off his vest and leggings and sit beside her. He sat for some minutes, waiting for her shyness to recede, then he began to stroke her body with the tips of his fingers. She kissed him on the forehead, eyes, and mouth. He kissed back hungrily.
“You are like no man I have known.”
“You do not like me?” he questioned gruffly, tugging at her short hair.
“I do like you! Ai, I love you. You give me a feeling I never knew anyone had.”
He lay with his head on her outstretched arm. “I have a new joy and a wonder because of you. I wonder at the sights, sounds, and feelings because they appear larger and more clear than before. It is like seeing things through a flattened drop of clean water. Always stay close to me. I want to touch you.”
He loved her and she felt an explosion in her belly. They clung to one another in ecstasy. The fierce, urgent emotion had been so great that it caused her to cry. The tears wet his shoulder and he stroked her forehead. They slept undisturbed.
The days passed one after another as beads strung one behind the other on a string. He swept out the tepee and arranged the cooking things. She folded sleeping robes and cleaned their clothing. He hung a buffalo paunch on four upright sticks and she filled it with water. Rocks were heated and forked sticks were used to place them in the water. He added strips of dried meat to that boiling water and she added wild carrots and onions dug from the edge of the creek. He showed her how to make a dressing from wild honey, buffalo tallow, and water to use over the cooked meat.
Jerk Meat practiced regularly with his bow and arrows and sometimes let her try. They ate and swam and walked through the trees. They lay in the sun and listened to the songs of the birds. At night they sat by their small fire and smelled the burning wood, and after the fire died they lay on their backs and looked at the sky and asked each other many questions.
She told him of her childhood and of her capture by the Minnetarees. She told him of the sea people who live in the Great Western Waters, the seals that bark and play so close to land that they amuse the people on the banks with their antics. She told him of the flood in the Rocky Mountains and how Chief Red Hair had saved her baby and herself and how Charbonneau had cried out like a pregnant squaw. She watched his eyes widen when she told him about the carcass of the huge whale on the sands of the Great Western Waters.
He told her of the time he was nearly captured by the Tonkas, the flesh-eating Comanches of the south. He had saved himself by quickly digging a hole in the sand and burying himself until the band had passed. He was alone that day seeking his medicine.
“Did you find your medicine? Did you dream a great dream?” she asked eagerly.
“I did not dream. The nights were not cold enough, and I did not starve long enough. But I found my medicine in the skull of the buffalo. I was trapped two nights in a place where many buffalo had died. The timber wolves were all around hunting for small animals. They would have had me, but I stayed in the middle of that dying ground with the skulls all about and the wolves did not come near. From that time on, the buffalo skull has been my special protector.”
“And when did you take a woman?” she asked.
“After I joined the young men’s Foolish Society. The Foolish Society is open to those who feel bold enough to disregard caution and ride up to an enemy and strike him using as his only weapons a quirt and a buffalo scrotum rattle. If he manages to escape death, he is then acclaimed a warrior for his valor. In spite of many casualties, there are always those who are reckless enough to take this chance.1
“My first woman thought I was brave and daringbecause I hit a Ute during a big horse raid. She was the foolish one, because truthfully I was frightened to death. She was the daughter of a Kiowa subchief, and a quiet, well-behaved woman. She caused me no sadness until she was crushed by her horse and our girl-child was born with no breath. She was called Tu-Pombi, Black Hair. I missed her.”
Sacajawea undid his braids and combed his hair gently. “You speak of your woman who has gone away and say her name. This is against our beliefs.”
“We already have done things not done by Comanches, but I do not regret them. They are good between us. Perhaps some of the white men you have named and spoken of are not living. You do not know. Perhaps the big black man we have laughed about is not living. Oh, I wish I had seen him just once. A man like that—black all over—oooay. Unbelievable!”
She braided his hair and tied the ends with thin leather strips and put the small piece of buffalo jawbone, worn shiny, back into the left braid just behind his ear. “You are handsome, my man.”
“You talk with sand in your mouth, my woman,” he said pleased, grabbing her by her short hair. “Come, we will swim together.”
Later she would remember how she stood in the deep part of the creek, the cold water reaching her waist. “I had one child—but maybe I cannot give you children.” The thought was new to her. She had not wanted another child with her white man.
“Then you will be my woman and my girl-child also,” was his answer.
She put her arms around him from behind and held him as though she would never let go.
“I will wash your back,” he said, and more softly, “you tell how the scars were put on you.” He worked the loam from the creek’s bank around her body as she told of her past. Next she scrubbed him, working the sandy soil into his hair, under his arms and across his chest and back. They rinsed clean by swimming into the deep hole under the overhang of willows. Then they lay on the sunny bank to dry. She noticed that the cottonwood leaves were beginning to turn yellow and there was the slightest chill to the evening air.
Jerk Meat boiled the water for the dried meat while Sacajawea found cress at the edge of the creek for salad. As he ate, Jerk Meat held his left jaw.
“Do you have a
toothache?” she asked.
“It is not bad,” he said. “We will look for the mushroom to kill the pain when you finish.”
They walked along a game trail. Sacajawea found a tree fungus that she knew would ease pain when heated and held on the wound, but Jerk Meat was looking for a little brown mushroom that grew close to the ground near rotting wood. It was nearly dark when he found it. He dried it on a rock near the fire and stuffed it in the molar’s cavity. Sacajawea held the warm tree fungus on his jaw, then when she thought he ought to be feeling better she kissed him on the mouth.
“Woman,” he said, “a man can do nothing with you around. I believe the wise man who said that a man who has been with a woman lately is prone to wounds because arrows and bullets are drawn toward such a man. He must have known a woman like you.”
“Phfft,” she said, “there is no enemy band near here. See how quiet the village is.”
“There are always enemies in the land,” he said positively.
“You have strong medicine, and nothing will harm you. It won’t, will it?” she asked.
“No, but we must always be ready.” He took out his knife and cut down a slender branch of ash. He came back beside her and sat on a flat stone. He began to adze the branch down. “Here, you try some.” He handed her the branch and pointed to her knife at her waist.
“For a bow?” she asked, holding the clean white wood, and he nodded ai. He moved away and indicated that he was going to look for a buck deer they’d seen at the water hole early that morning. They needed the fresh meat. She watched until she could not see him, then cut the wood a certain length, measuring from her right hip across to her extended left fingertips, the way Big Badger had done. With the knife she beveled the bow with grooves cut down the back.
Over the evening fire Jerk Meat boiled the deer hooves and tendons until they were a sticky glue. He spread the glue over the back of the bow in several thinlayers and pasted on two sinews with the wide ends together in the middle. “Watch and do not forget,” he ordered. He spread on more glue and powdered it with white clay. He told her to repeat that treatment several times. Then she wrapped a piece of buckskin the width of a hand around the middle of the bow. Several days later she made the bowstring from the deer’s rear-leg tendon. Done, she set the bow aside to dry well.
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