A blue norther came and leaned its wind on the tepees in strange erratic patches, as if animals were jumping on the skins. The Quohadas went outside to try tokeep their tepees from blowing away. The men hauled large boulders to anchor the tepees, and the women tied long, stout leather ropes to the lodgepoles and hooked them to the wooden pegs nearly buried in the frozen ground. The old men pointed to the sundogs and said they meant something. The early winter weather could not last, but they feared what might replace it.
One night the darkness was full of snow pebbles, hard and stinging, that beat their faces, shutting their eyes and melting in their hair, but freezing again. The camp slept most of that time, two or three days. Then, when the wind eased, they dug their way out, and the tepees were surrounded by dunes of snow. There was no sign of the horses.
Buffalo Bones, Coming Home, and Jerk Meat hunted until they found the horses downwind. They came back before dark and reported dead coyotes that the wolves had left when the storm drifted in. The next day, they brought in half a dozen half-eaten coyotes frozen stiff on the backs of the lost horses.
That evening around the cooking kettle, Jerk Meat spoke of rich pemmican with dried fruit and nuts mixed in as he sucked on a coyote bone with little meat on it. Sacajawea spoke of roast duck and boiled pumpkin. Before dawn, that night, the wind reached down out of the north and rushed in a new blizzard. They fought and groped through the wind and snow to fasten down their tepees even tighter with more boulders and rawhide ropes. They heard the beating of hooves as antelope came down to their depression for shelter. The Quohadas cursed them as they stumbled over guy ropes and tore one of the tepees down, snorting and bolting into one another. The men tried to take a few for food, but found their hands so stiff with cold they could not hold their bows straight and taut.
In the morning, the sky remained gray. Whenever anyone had to go outside he looked at the horses, which were picketed so they could move around or bunch up to keep warm. The women went out and fed them fleshy, pulpy cactus leaves or cottonwood sticks.
Fuel ran low, and they could find none in the snow, so after meals they let the fires die and crawled under their robes to sleep or tell stories. Talk flared up andwent out again. Once or twice Sacajawea went out and carefully scraped the worst of the snow off the top of their tepee while Jerk Meat watched inside with concern because a careless poke of the stick would easily cut through the skintight hide, leaving them exposed to the storm.
Jerk Meat talked with Ticannaf in the cold afternoons. “I played nanipka when I was your size. I went over a hill and waited until the other boys hid themselves under buffalo robes; then I came back and tried to guess who was hidden under each robe.” He told of his first antelope surround and the coyote stories he’d heard himself as a boy from Big Badger. Sacajawea kept the baby, No Name, under the robes with her and put Ticannaf under the robes with Jerk Meat. The wind slammed against the skin tepee in furious gusts.
Sometime before one gray afternoon howled itself out, Sacajawea bundled her baby and went outside. The rest of the camp lay in their robes. She went to the lodge of Pronghorn and Hides Well. A jet of white breath followed her. The tepee of Pronghorn shook and gave way, then shuddered stiff and tight again. Sacajawea was inside, and Hides Well was tying the flap tightly shut. “This one’s the worst yet,” said Pronghorn.
“I came for antelope chips,” she said. “We are out of fuel, and no one can find any under that snow.”
Hides Well held up two steaming chips from near her fire. “Take these. We have only a few also.”
“Thank you,” said Sacajawea as a numbness like freezing death stole through her.
“Is the child all right?”
“Ai, he dozes and listens to his father tell stories.”
“Is the baby all right?” Pronghorn laid his pipe aside and stared at the bundled baby.
“Ai, only hungry and getting thin.”
“Aren’t we all?” asked Hides Well.
Back inside her own tepee, Sacajawea slipped inside her robe without starting the fire up again, only laying the two soggy chips near the cold fire. She fell asleep nursing No Name.
She awoke, hearing the awakening sound of Jerk Meat and his soft calling, “I must be fed, woman, get up.”
She sat up. ‘The wind’s died.”
“Ai, it will be me next if I don’t get something in my belly.”
“Shall I kill one of the horses?”
“No, not yet. I’ll talk to Pronghorn. Maybe he’ll call a council.”
Sacajawea hustled to the flap and looked out. The sky was palest blue, absolutely clear, and deep drifts lay all around the tepees. Other women were trotting their horses up and down a long, narrow space, getting them warm. The breasts, rumps, and legs of the horses were ice-coated. There was not one among them whose ribs did not show plainly under the rough winter hair.
Jerk Meat swore, “More snow blindness!” He stepped past Sacajawea and blew his nose with his fingers—first one nostril, then the other—and again studied the land. There was no color in the landscape, only the packed white sheet running off into the east, where the sun was just rising.
Pronghorn was out calling a council. It was decided to move to a more sheltered spot. “We’ll try to move the horses,” he said. “They maybe can make it, but unless we get a chinook, it is starving time for them.”
The women pulled down the tepees and packed their belongings, and the band rode out straight into the sun. They kept the horses going hard.
“Hurry!” warned Kicking Horse. “I do not trust the weather any more than I do my older woman.”
Near noon, far to the south of the basin they had lived in, they came to a wide stream, angling down from a canyon wall. The vegetation was sparse, but it held some elk. They quickly moved in and got all they wanted for food and new hides. As the day wore on, it changed from a pale blue to lavender, then to a faint pink, and then the sun was gone as if it had slid off the ice-slick horizon. Pronghorn pushed them on. Their breath froze all over them.
Sacajawea, her face stiff, her shoulders aching clear down across her collarbones into her chest from the papoose on her back, glanced briefly at the frosty stars in the night sky. She found the Dipper and the North Star, her total astronomy learned from Chief Red Hair in another place, during another time. Then she wondered if Pronghorn knew where a sheltered place was. The band could not possibly take much more of this. They had been on the horses since sunrise and had eaten nothing but a little raw elk meat. What if the horses should give out?
Pronghorn stopped a little farther on. No one had said, “Can we stop now?” Pronghorn seemed to like what he saw. The low, flat place behind a cutbank in the turn of the stream was a good camp. The dry grass was partially exposed at the edge of some drifts. There was much running water. He stuck a willow stick into the ground. Instantly the tired squaws tumbled out the lodgepoles and unfolded the leather tepee coverings. The men all sat huddled together talking, stupid with cold and fatigue. Children screamed and cried as their mothers tried to hush them.
Finally camp was set up. Everyone seemed too exhausted to eat the elk meat that roasted on the large center fire made from some downed cottonwood logs. The men let the heat beat on their faces and gleam in their bloodshot eyes. Some went to their tepees; others stayed and slept around the huge fire. A few came out from their tepees and stood in a row and made water, lifting their faces into the night air that was mistier and warmer than any night since the first snowfall.
“I don’t know,” Kicking Horse said, sniffing for wind. “I do not quite like the looks of the sky.”
“But it is warm,” the other men said, almost with reverence in their voices, thankful for a night without wind and snow.
The mild air might mean more snow, but it also might mean a thaw coming in, and that was the best luck they could hope for. They kicked the snow around, smelling the night air soft in their faces; it smelled like a thaw, though the snow underfoot was still as dry
and granular as salt.
“This must be the break,” added Jerk Meat, leading Ticannaf inside the tepee for a good night’s rest.
Sacajawea hardly heard him. Her eyes were knotted, the lids heavy with sleep. But not even her dead-tiredness could lift from her the habits of the last couple of weeks. In her dreams she struggled against winds, she felt the bite of cold, she heard the clamor of people andanimals and knew that she had a duty to perform—she had somehow to locate the baby for his feeding. She called, but she was far down under something, struggling in the dark to come up and break her voice free. Her own nightmarish sound told her she was dreaming and moaning in her sleep, and still she could not break free into wakefulness and shove the dream aside. Things were falling on her from above; she sheltered her head with her arms, rolled, and with a wrench broke loose from tormented sleep and sat up.
Jerk Meat was kicking out of his robes. There was a wild sound of howling wind. Sacajawea leaned over the fire, stupidly groping for cottonwood bark, as a screeching blast hit the tepee so hard that Jerk Meat, standing by the flap, grabbed the pole and held it until the shuddering strain gave way and the screech died to a howl.
“What is it?” Sacajawea asked idiotically. “Is it a chinook?”
“Chinook!” Jerk Meat said furiously.
He janked his stiff leggings on and groped, teeth chattering, for his fur-lined moccasins. He dressed as fast as his dazed mind and numbed fingers would let him. Sacajawea broke more bark in her hands and shoved it into the fire. At that moment the wind swooped on them and the tepee came down.
Half-dressed, Jerk Meat struggled under the skins. Sacajawea was still crouched over the fire, trying desperately to put it out. She saw Jerk Meat bracing a front lodgepole, and she jumped to the rear one; it was like holding a fishing rod with a thousand-pound fish fighting the hook; the whole saillike mass of skins slapped and caved and wanted to fly. One or two rawhide ropes on the windward side had broken loose and the wall plastered itself against Sacajawea’s legs, the wind and snow pouring like ice water across her bare feet. “Somebody out there—tie us down,” Jerk Meat’s grating voice yelled. Buffalo Bones crawled toward the front flap on hands and knees. Braced against a pole, Big Badger was laughing. The top of the tepee was badly scorched and there was a large hole burned around the edges, but the fury of the wind had put the fire out.
The skins could be repaired. Pronghorn came out to help.
Ropes outside jerked; the wall came away from Sacajawea’s legs; the tepee rose nearly to its proper position; the strain on the poles eased. Eventually it reached a wobbly equilibrium so that she could let go and send Ticannaf outside with his father and she could locate the baby, No Name, in the mess of her own sleeping couch. The outsiders came in gasping, beating their numbed hands. In the gray light of storm and morning, they all looked like old men; the blizzard had sown white age in their hair.
“Ohhh!” Sacajawea cried. “Our baby does not breathe! His head is crushed flat. No, no! This cannot be true!”
“The front lodgepole,” whispered Big Badger, wiping away an icicle from under his nose. “It fell. Ai, it fell where he lay asleep.”
“He is solid, frozen,” said Jerk Meat aghast. “How long has he been this way?”
Sacajawea could not answer; her grief was too much. Her heart lay broken on the ground.
Big Badger held the small, undernourished body. “He was not sent to the Great Spirit by the lodgepole, but much earlier in the night by the cold finger of frost. The winter was too much for such a small boy. The Great Spirit made certain the boy made a safe trip to the Land of Warmth and Everfeasting by cutting off his earth life twice,” he said as great tears rolled down to his chin.
Pronghorn walked from the tepee trying to control his emotion. He sent Hides Well and Spring to console Sacajawea.
For the remainder of the night, the men pulled and strained and fastened the rawhide ropes on the tepee. Spring brought in a half-cured elk hide to cover the burned top skin and sewed it neatly while the men held the poles down. Once the whole middle of the windward side bellied inward; the wind got under the side, and for an instant they were in a balloon. Ticannaf thought for certain they would go up in the air. He shut his eyes and hung on, and when he looked again, the men had grappled the uplifting skirt of skins and pinned it down.
The women started the death howl, shrieking. Sacajawea lay prone on her robe. She could not think. She did not want to move or speak. She felt as though an avalanche of ice and snow had hit her in the back and a herd of mustangs had stampeded over her midsection. She felt torn apart so that her heart lay on the ground. Her stomach felt full of knots. Her grief was deep.
Jerk Meat was stunned. He knew that he had lost something he could never have again. A son, yes, but more than a son. He had lost a piece of his life with Lost Woman; the web that reached from the present to the past was broken. There would be no other boys like little No Name. The new ones would be different. The baby had died without becoming old and useless. So—that might be good, thought Jerk Meat.
As in a nightmare where everything is full of shock and terror and nothing is ever explained, Sacajawea looked around at the numb huddle of friends and saw only a glare of living eyes, and she believed she saw a question on Jerk Meat’s face. The question was directed to her: “Didn’t you know the boy was freezing?”
Hides Well slashed herself on her arms. Spring began to cut off the first joint on her small left finger. Jerk Meat pulled out his knife and began tearing at the flesh of his little finger.
Sacajawea raised her head. Suddenly she was up, grabbing at their knives. “No, no!” she cried. “It is not necessary to do that!”
They looked at her, puzzled. Bewildered, Jerk Meat sat beside his woman. “Then I will throw away my beautiful orangewood arrows.”
“Ai, if you feel that is proper,” she said softly. “Please, do not let anyone else mutilate his body for the death of someone he loves.” Her words were not her own, but those of Chief Red Hair years ago when she had tried to cut a finger joint in mourning for their friend Captain Lewis. Now she herself sat around in the cold, unwilling to build a fire and feel the comfort of its warmth. That morning brought news of others, small children and old ones, who had died during the cold snap.
Sacajawea went from tepee to tepee, preventing the slashing of arms or cutting of fingers, and preventing those who had cut themselves from jerking the scabs from those self-inflicted wounds, causing them to bleedagain. She tried to explain that it was somehow wrong to search for relief from sorrow in pain. The women sobbed and broke down. She said, “Crying is no good. We must work to keep the living alive.”
The usual burial place was a deep crevice in the rocks or a cave, but the weather was too cold to search for a suitable spot. The face of each corpse was sprinkled with powdered local rock containing enough mercuric sulfide to be scarlet and the eyes were sealed shut with moist, red clay. If possible, before the body was cold the knees were bent to the chest and the head pushed to the knees, then it was wrapped in a robe and held together with lashings of rawhide rope. The women cut many poles that day from the thin cottonwoods and built a pen around the bodies. Some wanted to build individual pens, but because of the scarcity of poles they had to place their beloved ones all together. The poles were pounded into the frozen ground. Into this enclosure they placed the personal effects with the deceased—saddle and bridle, tomahawk, scalping knife, bow and arrows and lance, or in the case of a squaw, her favorite tunic, cooking kettle, tools for dressing skins.
Pronghorn had forbidden them to kill any horses for burial because the Quohadas still living needed horses for food and travel. There was some discussion about this because the band believed in a kind of resurrection in which the dead would rise and march eastward to take possession of their land. The personal items were left with the dead because the Comanches supposed their souls would have need of them in the other world.
The penlike enclosure was roo
fed with bark and willow branches and covered with mud. The work was exhausting. The women sat on the ground awhile and did not look at the burial hut, ugly brown against the sky and unmelted snow patches. Sacajawea sat with the women, her robe over her head, wiping her leaking nose against the edge of the fur and feeling slick ice there as the temperature began to drop. Suddenly she threw off her robe and moved toward the burial place that held the small bundle of No Name.
“He did not even have a name. He could be driven off into the barren wasteland crying for years amongthorns and rocks, thirsty, hungry, and in pain because he was not named when he lived. Oh, my baby!”
“Our old grandmother was fond of small ones,” sobbed a young woman crouching before Sacajawea. “She will hear your baby’s cries and carry him into a warm valley. She will give him cool water, pounded corn, and elk meat. She will set him upon a horse that is fleeter than the wind just to hear his laughter.”
It was wonderful the way the Quohada tribe kept track of itself and all its various family units. If every single man, woman, and child acted and conducted himself or herself in a known pattern and broke no walls and differed with no one and experimented in no new way—then that unit was left safe and strong, alone. But let one man or woman or child step out of the regular thought or the known pattern, and the people knew, their suspicion ran, and their thoughts traveled over the camp.
Sacajawea was now watched more than ever. She did not conduct herself in familar patterns. The people began to watch her as they realized now it was she who had held them back from the tradition of cutting their own bodies while they were in the deep hole of grief. They had not yet made up their minds whether to be grateful or angry toward her. She had broken another wall in their life.
Darkness came. The night was dominated by the wind. Sacajawea searched the center campfire for her man. She called his name. She did not realize others watched her. When she found Jerk Meat, he took her to their patched tepee. They huddled together under their robes, comforting their remaining child, Ticannaf. He said it was the first time he had been warm since they moved camp. It was not until the next morning that Sacajawea noticed what the whole camp already knew: Jerk Meat had cut off his long, flowing hair.
Sacajawea Page 106
