Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Sacajawea’s heart sank. “My mother, there is a bond of friendship between us. Let us not break that. I will show you how to make the washing liquid this afternoon.”

  “Is it true that you are some kind of woman Shaman?”

  “No, my mother,” said Sacajawea, aghast, “that is not true.”

  “And so—now how do I know?” Hides Well walked away to her own tepee, not waiting to be shown the wonders of crude soapmaking.

  Late that summer, Ticannaf and Happy Heart had another son, this one very much alive. They named him Waigon, Thunderbird, because his cry was as loud as any thunder that woke them in the night.

  Gray Bone came to the tepee of Sacajawea several times. She did not stay long, but the women of the village were aware of those visits. One day late in the afternoon, she came in bringing a dead turkey with her.

  “I wish to give you this,” she said and moved around as though restless.

  “Thank you,” said Sacajawea, reaching for the bird swinging by its neck in Gray Bone’s hand.

  “You do not know what it is like to catch a bird with one’s hands.”

  “Is that how you got the gash on your arm?” asked Sacajawea, bending nearer to see the wound better.

  “Not exactly,” said Gray Bone. “It happened on a hunt. I ran into a coyote. She turned on me. Afterward, she drank much water and did not turn on me again. The wound is not new, but takes its own time healing.”

  “Let me look.” Sacajawea took the woman close to the tepee fire.

  “Many have said that the sister-in-law of the new chief has special medicine powers. I recall something like that—but at times my mind wanders. Can you heal it?”

  “New chief?” asked Sacajawea.

  “Ai, your sister’s man, Wounded Buck, has been named the civil chief of our band. So—it is true they do not tell you everything now. You are becoming the outcast!”

  Gray Bone then did a peculiar thing. She put her hands to her mouth and rolled her eyes heavenward. She shrieked and screamed and tore at her hair. Sacajawea tried to calm her with herb tea, but Gray Bone pulled an old, broken rifle from under her robe and tried to swing it at Sacajawea. She missed, and it hit the other side of the tepee wall. Gray Bone seemed unable to swallow. She had great difficulty breathing. Finally Sacajawea calmed her, but the spittle continued to roll down the sides of her mouth as though she could not swallow.

  “You have eaten something bad?” asked Sacajawea.

  Gray Bone shriveled, her eyes opened wide, and the muscles of her mouth and larynx moved with spasms. She moved around and around the tepee. She could not speak.

  “Rest here,” offered Sacajawea. “I will take care of you until this sickness passes.” When Choway came in, she handed her the dead turkey. “Get rid of this. Destroy it. It is not fit food. Those who eat turkey becomecowards and run from their enemies in the same fashion turkeys run away. Keep Crying Basket with Happy Heart for the rest of the day.”

  Then Sacajawea sat back on her heels looking at Gray Bone. She had never seen anyone act this way. What have I done? she thought. Now I am obligated to care for this woman, and I do not really like her. I hate her. I am frightened of her. Once she cut my nose. Would she again? Perhaps in the middle of the night?

  By the next morning, the whole village knew that Wounded Buck was chief. He was young and could fight. He understood the old way and could see the coming of a new way.

  For the next two days, time dragged for Sacajawea. Gray Bone seemed to get better; then she would become feverish, restless, and want to walk outside. Sacajawea and Choway tried to keep her tied down to a sleeping mat with thick rope. Choway bathed her face, but her maniacal behavior discouraged much washing or cooling with water.

  On the third day, a whippoorwill swooped low over the camp, trailing behind him his mournful yet urgent cry. The Quohadas heard this and during the morning looked at one another asking themselves, “Who?” They believed the cry of a lone whippoorwill flying low over a camp meant violent death to some particular member of the band.

  Sacajawea pulled her tired limbs from between her robes and crouched over the fire, which had gone out. Crying Basket began to whimper with hunger pangs. Sacajawea looked toward the child. Then she saw the empty sleeping couch, clothing torn off hooks, a parfleche of pemmican partly emptied on the floor, the tepee flap partially open. Gray Bone was gone! She woke Choway. “I’ve got to find that old sack of bones,” said Sacajawea. “Who knows what she can do? She’s rotten as an egg lying too long in the sun.” She left the fire unlit and asked Choway to straighten the lodge, light the fire, and look after the child.

  “What is her disease, pia?” asked Choway. “She looks very sick. I do not like the smell of her.”

  “I think it is from the coyote that cannot swallowwater. It is bad. I should have fed her mayapple roots when I first knew.”

  “There are no such roots here, pia,” said Choway, shaking her head.

  “Well, so—there are other death powders.” Sacajawea packed jerky in a parfleche hurriedly.

  “Pia, my mother, please, no—” called Choway, but Sacajawea had turned toward the entrance of a gully, riding her horse swiftly along the slow-winding curves of the dry course.

  Gray Bone was not there. Sacajawea soon realized the search might take all day. She listened and heard only the twitter of a small bird, the thumping of a rabbit, and the gnawing of a porcupine at a cottonwood stump. It is quiet, she said to herself, surely. Then she corrected herself: Nothing is sure.

  Some of the gullies had rocky steps beyond which a horse could not go, and in those, brought up short by the rock barriers, she turned back. In others the sandy bottom ran clean and free all the way to a far rim, and in those she saw nothing, not even a snake or lizard. The catbirds and jays went about their normal business, making it certain that there was nothing new around. The sun pushed beyond a grove of stunted oaks filtering a sickly green light to the ground.

  About noon, she saw plants growing in lush profusion below two strong jets of clear water. The stream fell straight down the rock wall for a small distance, then was broken by the banding of rock into a sequence of short falls, as water might run down garden steps during a heavy rain. This was an oasis of greenery that contrasted agreeably with the otherwise arid aspect of the land shimmering under dry waves, heralding a heat that would crack the ground, already sucked dry by a thirsty sun. A cascade of scarlet monkey flowers tumbled down the slope, the whorled stems of horsetails grew thickly among the rocks, and everywhere the shiny leaves of poison ivy glistened in the sun. How ivy had found this place puzzled Sacajawea. She had not seen any in all her years with the Quohadas. Mother Earth provides a small secret place and somehow sees to it that the plants find the place. I must find the secretplace of Gray Bone, thought Sacajawea. She may be near the spring, resting.

  She led the horse to the cold and delicious water. She ate a small piece of jerky. The horse grazed on the grassy bottom for a while, then came back to her. She led it to the bottom again. The animal tossed its head and pulled back. Then Sacajawea knew that what she had sniffed a few moments back on the gentle breeze was not her imagination. Twenty yards away, beside another pool formed from the waterfalls, lay a dead coyote, her head near the water, as though trying to take one last drink. Sacajawea left the horse and examined the animal. There had been a considerable scuffle. She could see moccasin tracks. The coyote’s skull had been crushed. Near it lay an old, rusted muzzle-loader. The rifle had once been the pride of Kicking Horse. The stock was broken in half at the breech. The butt was smeared with the blood and brains of the coyote.

  The coyote was not large. It was female. Her muzzle and lower jaw had a mottled look from dried froth that extended clear back to her eyes, which were open and peculiarly yellow. The moccasin tracks led away across the other side of the water.

  Sacajawea jogged her horse slowly, keeping the pigeon-toed tracks before her. Far ahead, she could see that this clear land was beco
ming broken again. During the warm afternoon, she went up a slight incline to a plateau, beyond which a rise of catclaw-dotted hills foretold more abrupt walls of limestone. The wind was hot even in the coming evening. The sky was clear. There was small chance of rain washing out Gray Bone’s tracks. The great dome over Sacajawea filled with twilight as the sun went under.

  Sacajawea hunched herself down on the horse for an evening’s ride. She looked behind every small bush. Once she held her horse still, straining all her senses, and she became aware of the little sounds, the hollow call of an owl, now there was no wind, but she heard the rattle of a dusty mesquite, and knew some creature was stirring about a night’s business. She heard the singing whir of some insect at work or travel.

  The night became black. She hobbled her horse andslept in a shelter formed by an overhanging stone ledge. She woke at daybreak, ate some jerky, and resumed her ride. She came to a place where there was a milky, warm stream. The stream was only one or two feet wide, but from the size of the canyon it had cut, it was obvious that it could be quite formidable in a flash flood. The sandy banks cut from the rocks were thickly grown with mesquite and catclaw. The gravelly benches were a desert garden. Sacajawea stopped to look for telltale moccasin tracks in the sand by clumps of orange mallow and yellow flowers. She tied her horse to a mesquite and bent to search the sand where it was crisscrossed with lizard, mouse, and insect tracks. There were no moccasin tracks. An occasional butterfly drifted in and out through the patches of yellow and shade. The voice of the creek was soft. The motion drifted into the heart of the little canyon where the sun filtered through the leaves in a sickish warm green. The swell of the white sand dunes, the soft bubblings of the milky water, the yellow of the rock across the stream, and the arc of blue sky seemed a clean, bold contrast to the nauseating incubus of green that flowed through the small chasm, like a scrim in the hot breeze. Farther down the canyon the stream was gone, dried to dust in the ovenlike heat.

  Something caught Sacajawea’s eye. She climbed from her horse. Nestled among the pebbles and sand was a small potsherd, about two inches square. Its gray-white surface was decorated with black Vs. The inner V was further embellished with little black dots. She picked the fragment of clay pottery up, then looked around her feet and saw the ground strewn with dozens of other ancient shards. Some, like the one in her hand, had white-and-black lines; others had designs on a white background, or black on red. Still others, probably from vessels of a more utilitarian nature, were unpainted but adorned with a corrugated design, as if the wet coils of clay had been pinched by the maker and marked with his fingernails. She crouched back. The Ancient Ones had lived here. Still squatting on her heels, she continued examining the fragments. Suddenly there came to her a premonition of danger. It seemed a shadow had fallen upon her. But there was no shadow. Her heart had given a jump up into her throat and waschoking her. Then her blood slowly chilled, and she felt the sweat in her tunic cold against her flesh.

  She did not stand up or move; her eyes darted around the ground. She was considering the nature of the premonition she had received, trying to locate the source of the mysterious force that had warned her. She felt the imperative presence of some unseen thing. There was an aura too refined for the senses to know. She felt this aura, but could not tell how she felt it. It seemed that between her and life had passed something smothering and sickening—ghosts, as it were, that waited to swallow up life.

  Every force of her being impelled her to turn and confront the unseen demon, but her soul dominated and she remained squatting, in her hands a black shard. She did not dare look around, but she knew by now that there was something behind her and above her. She looked at the shard, examined it critically, rubbing the sand from it and noticing tiny dull red dots that formed a circle at the edge. All the time she knew something above her was looking and watching her.

  She pretended interest in the clay fragment in her hand, listening, but she heard nothing. She realized her predicament; she was caught in the camp of the Ancient Ones.

  She shifted her weight ever so slightly, but stayed squatting on her heels. She was cool and collected. Her mind considered every factor. She would have to rise sooner or later, move from this spot, and face the incubus that stared at her back. As the moments passed, she knew she was nearer the time she must stand. She wanted to run, to rush to her horse and on to safety. But her intellect favored a slow, careful meeting with this thing that she could not yet see. And while she debated, a loud crashing noise burst on her ear, like a stone falling down a wall. At the same instant she felt a stunning blow on the left side of her back. She sprang up, noticing a wide niche in the yellow wall far up a steep, rocky slope, but her feet crumpled and her body fell like a leaf dried by the rays of the all-conquering sun. The air was expelled from her lungs with a sigh, and her body lay upon the hot earth, defeated, but it only appeared so. The human body, a vast and inventiveorganization of living cells, survives even when it seems lost.

  Above, on the yellow ledge, another great stone in her hand, Gray Bone looked for a long time at the motionless body beneath her. After a while she replaced the stone and went away from the ledge toward the wall. She was breathing hard when she reached the niche. Set back under an overhang were five or six little rooms, each about six feet long, four feet high, and three feet deep. Each had its own door to the ledge where she stood. The sticks that served as lintels of the doorways were perfectly preserved in the dry air.

  Gray Bone panted for breath and fought the ominous feeling that she was on the private property of others and they were squeezing the very life-force from her lungs to remove her from that property. She bent to examine a tiny corncob, much smaller than the corn she had seen. Her head ached, and her throat contracted with spasms as she tried to gulp the hot, life-giving air. Her skin prickled as the breeze went through her tangled hair.

  She looked down the slope to the bottom of the canyon where she’d last seen Sacajawea. Her eyes squinted in the fading sunlight, but she could not locate the body of Sacajawea she thought she had left for dead a few moments before. She wiped her hand across her eyes, but she could not see clearly. Her hand slid down across the side of her face where a rush of flame went through her flesh. She moved to the edge of the cliff and began descending, resting on each stone cut. She wanted to see the dead body of Sacajawea just once more.

  Slowly, in a peculiarly disjointed fashion, she walked to the dry creek bed. Gray Bone did not go in a straight line. She trembled as though shaking off the ghosts of the Ancient Ones who lived in the walls of the cliffs overhang. The apparition in front of her stood out like an overlord, a protector, in the twilight.

  It lifted a hand and made a motion to come on. The sand dune was circled with piñon and deadfall. Gray Bone made her way cautiously. Her tunic was torn and hanging in ribbons. Her arms and legs were deeply scratched and bruised. Her face was hard, with dry skin over the skeleton to defy desiccation of the small inwardmoistness. One side was red and swollen where the flesh had been torn from the cheek to the chin. The gashes were scabbed over, but the wounds were inflamed. Through the shredded right leather sleeve, Gray Bone’s arm was exposed. It was badly scratched, and it, too, looked swollen and red.

  “I have not much patience with curiosity-seekers,” rasped Gray Bone. Her voice was thick, as though retarded by some fleshy barrier. “There is no way to get me back to that camp, which stinks from human and dog excrement and rotting horseflesh. It is an eyesore upon Mother Earth with its ragged skin lodges and poor inhabitants.”

  She had fallen into the loner’s habit of soliloquy. She tried to smile. It broke open the scab on her cheek, and the wound started to ooze. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and then wiped her hand in the sand at her side.

  “The thought of water is good. I wish I could drink. Smells nice in the desert.” Jerkily she inhaled the hot, sweet breath of the canyon through nostrils that dilated and quivered.

  “Ever know a camp th
at stunk more?” She moved down the dry creek a few steps. Not once did she take her eyes from the form at the creek’s bank. “Out here there are no old crones named She Cat and Weasel Woman pawing over you, pretending you used to be something. When you know you are not anything, only a creature confined to a narrow band of time.”

  She leaned forward in a confidential manner. “At least Coyote is like me, conscious of certain things, whether she is conscious of time or not. She was my sister, and she turned crazy on me!” Her voice rose to a tight pitch. Her eyes half closed in the faded memory of that painful fight. She folded her feet under her and sat on the ground still talking, frequently pausing to gulp deep drafts of air. She babbled about how Kicking Horse had protected her. She rambled on about how she had fought with Kicking Horse many times, but in the end she had won because death had claimed him and his arguments. She wiped her mouth again.

  Gray Bone constantly looked at Sacajawea, who was not dead, but sitting quietly on the sand and listening.

  A flicker of awareness showed in Gray Bone’s sunken eyes, to be replaced by an expression of scorn.

  “And your man is gone. And your white man has gone under.” Her laugh was like the screech of a crow announcing it had found carrion on the canyon floor. “He was named Charbonneau. I heard your talk with the Mexicans. So—I have asked around since leaving the Quohada stench. That Charbonneau was in the village named Saint Louis two summers past. He was with one called Joshua Pilcher, who gave him wampum, money, so he could buy a hunting knife. He then returned to his young Ute woman. This old weasel, Charbonneau, bragged about a Snake woman he had. This women, he said, went with him and white soldiers to the Stinking Western Waters with a son on her back.”

  Sacajawea could say nothing. Her head pounded; her back ached and throbbed. She started forward a little, then stopped and watched Gray Bone, whose hands covered her throat as though it was a great effort to speak.