by Alan Smale
With some difficulty, not having the appropriate hand-talk vocabulary, Marcellinus signed, Buffalo talking who?
Akecheta chuckled, and now it was his turn to earn a stern look from the young woman of the Hidatsa.
“She, here,” Mahkah said. “This fine woman of medicine, this is Sooleawa, and she is the buffalo caller of the Hidatsa and much honored by the Blackfoot.”
Marcellinus studied her more closely. Sooleawa’s face was young, but she had deep creases by her eyes, perhaps because of the rigors of her life and the harshness of the elements. A rather shapeless elk-skin dress hung from her shoulders, and pendants of weasel skin from her ears. Across her brow was a headband of buffalo hide, and her hair was otherwise loose; Hidatsa women did not braid their hair as other Hesperians did. She wore no other adornments and looked much the same as any other woman in the winter camp.
Then again, her vaunted skills at buffalo calling—whatever that was—were probably just superstition anyway.
“Quickly, Gaius, Aelfric: smile and agree now or the chance will be lost.”
“Not me,” Aelfric said. “March into nowhere with winter coming in, and me not even able to complain?”
Although she could not understand his words, Sooleawa hissed in exasperation at Aelfric for speaking at all.
“After we went to all that effort?” Isleifur said. “Well, then, off you go, back to the ship immediately, and don’t leave it until we’re gone.”
“Happy to. Have fun. See you when you get back.”
As Aelfric walked away, Sooleawa and Mahkah looked at Marcellinus. “You?”
Marcellinus nodded and hand-talked. Of course. I be silent. Hunt buffalo. To the young woman of the Hidatsa he bowed and gestured, I thank you.
Sooleawa half bowed awkwardly in return and walked away past the headman’s lodge to a smaller tipi beyond it.
“We will go with the Hidatsa,” Akecheta said. “The fewer, the better, so just us. They will give us furs, but we must carry our own food and our bows, spears, and knives. And no Roman weapons, nothing of steel, only the weapons of our forefathers. Everything else stays behind. The rest of the crew stays here with the longship.”
Marcellinus signed, Black feet agree? and Akecheta nodded, remembering Marcellinus’s earlier question. “Yes, of course. The Blackfoot and Hidatsa are not enemies. The Hidatsa here are just small villages and do not threaten Blackfoot territory. The Blackfoot trade with the Hidatsa for corn, beans, askutasquash. On the other side—”Akecheta waved westward, indicating a far distance. “—to the west, the Blackfoot do battle with the Shoshoni to keep them away.”
“Here they’re allied, particularly when it comes to buffalo,” said Isleifur. “It doesn’t hurt that the Hidatsa have a first-rate buffalo caller.”
“But when we all meet up, try to stay away from them,” Akecheta said. “The Blackfoot, I mean.”
With their reputation, Marcellinus would be glad to.
He and Isleifur, Sintikala and Kimimela, Akecheta and Mahkah. Six of them, trekking off into the frozen grassland with the Hidatsa. Already he was cold, and this camp was in broken ground, relatively sheltered from the wind off the plains.
If he had been able to speak, he would have said, Tahtay had better be worth all this.
Sintikala read his expression. “Now you change your mind?”
Marcellinus shook his head, but another thought had occurred to him. The tipis must be heavy with their long lodge poles and their dressed buffalo-skin coverings, but without them, how could they ever survive the nights? He signed, We take? and pointed at the lodges. How?
“Do not worry,” said Sintikala. “The Hidatsa will give them to the dogs.”
—
“It is a great honor they give you,” Mahkah said as they walked back to the longship to divest themselves of their steel and prepare for the journey.
Isleifur grunted. “Even I was surprised they went for it.”
Marcellinus signed, What price?
“Kimimela’s virginity,” said Isleifur, and Kimimela laughed. “What? I’m joking, man. Good grief.”
Marcellinus dropped his fists to his side and bit his tongue hard. Being forbidden to speak was already having its significant downsides.
He gritted his teeth and again signed, What price?
“The headman wants to see Cahokia before he dies.”
“Really?” Kimimela said. “Cahokia?”
“Of course. The Great City, jewel of the Mizipi? The city of giant mounds and many thousands of lodges that he has heard tell of all his life but has never seen for himself?”
Akecheta nodded. “He wishes to come as an honored guest, to stand on the Great Mound and look out over the city. And he wants us to take him in the big canoe and bring him back safely afterward.”
“Headman’s holiday,” Isleifur said. “Not now. Next summer or the one after, while his people are fat and lazy.”
“And he wants to be blessed by Cahokia’s greatest shaman,” Mahkah said, and shook his head in some amusement.
Marcellinus was hand-talking, but nobody was looking and Kimimela beat him to the punch anyway. “Then you have not told them that we are banished? That the shamans…That we—”
“It seemed best to steer clear of politics,” Isleifur said.
“Merda,” said Kimimela. “You have balls, both of you.”
Marcellinus winced. Isleifur and Akecheta grinned.
“Not me, though?” Mahkah asked, aggrieved.
“Yes, you have them, too.”
“Seriously, though, you can’t blame the old coot,” Isleifur said. “I’m quite looking forward to seeing Cahokia myself one of these years.”
Akecheta sighed, and Mahkah shook his head. “So are we,” Kimimela said, suddenly mournful.
Everyone fell silent. The mention of Cahokia had knocked the wind out of their sails. Sintikala looked around them all and up at the sun. “We should rest. Tonight will be long, and we will rise and walk before the dawn.”
Marcellinus signed Tonight, long? but everyone else was lost in his or her thoughts, and his question went unanswered.
He shook his head and followed them.
The trek to the hunt was brutal: six days of hell.
On the first morning the Hidatsa came to rouse them after what seemed like only two hours of sleep, and Marcellinus had great difficulty not groaning aloud. The night before had indeed been long: old men chanting and beating drums of buffalo rawhide with rattles, the younger men dressed in buffalo robes prancing and lowing and pretending to gore other braves dressed as hunters. Around them all, women drummed wooden poles on the ground to imitate the sound of buffalo hooves. And seated above them all on a wooden platform, Sooleawa smoking one of the long pipes of the Hidatsa people, the chill wind blowing the smoke away onto the plains in a straight line. They had shivered through prayers and incantations and incomprehensible jokes and mimes that made the Hidatsa and Cahokians roar, leaving Marcellinus smiling uncertainly.
Then had come the garbing of Sooleawa, in which she put aside her village skins to be clothed in a luxuriant buffalo-hide robe, its long winter hair inward. Richly decorated on the outer skin side with painted and dyed porcupine quills, the robe was the most splendid thing Marcellinus had yet seen in this back-country village. With bracelets and anklets of buffalo horn; a necklace made of buffalo teeth, herbs, and sweet-smelling roots; and a crowning headband of calfskin and plaited buffalo hair, Sooleawa became regal in the flickering firelight, standing tall and calm above them all.
She had descended from her platform and walked among them, distributing morsels of dried buffalo tongue to the hunters from a parfleche. She had sung an interminable song, apparently a buffalo-charming anthem designed to appease the prey and persuade the wind to blow fair for the hunt. Marcellinus hoped she was also asking it to blow warmer.
Just as he had decided this must be over and they could all go to their beds, the dancing had begun again, with no sign of anyone wil
ting. Marcellinus had no idea how anyone would be able to walk the next day, let alone hunt.
Escape had been impossible. In Cahokia and Shappa Ta’atan, Marcellinus could beat a hasty retreat from the unfathomable Hesperian ceremonies. But as one of the hunt participants he needed to be as carefully blessed as the rest while being robbed even of the luxury of complaining aloud. He had been formally clothed in a buffalo robe of his own. Much less splendid than Sooleawa’s and with no decoration, it was darkly odorous and must have weighed ten pounds but at least had the virtue of being warm.
Aelfric, of course, must have been even warmer under his blankets in the cozy tent of the longship’s sail, rocked to sleep by the gentle Wemissori. No forced march across the prairies for the Briton. At that moment, Marcellinus hated him.
Then came morning, with the aroma of burning sweetgrass on the air as the Hidatsa again blessed their hunt. As early as it was, they obviously had been awoken at the last minute, because as soon as the six of them arrived blinking and yawning in the open area between the lodges, the dogs barked and they set off.
As he trudged into the chill of the dawn, a blanket masking most of his face from the icy wind, Marcellinus found himself in a ragged procession of around forty Hidatsa hunters and twenty accompanying women, walking across the frost-crackled grass of the plains with their spears and bows slung across their backs. Several hundred yards ahead Sooleawa led the way into the wilderness; she strode alone in her splendid buffalo robe, her lilting croon audible even from that distance. Occasionally she would stop and take a few dance steps and bleat into the wind like a buffalo calf, and the small band of hunters would wait patiently and with respect. Then onward they would go, ever onward.
Beside them the dogs hauled the tipis, the crossed lodge poles tied together and resting across their shoulders, the pole ends dragging on the ground behind them. The buffalo skins that had made up the tipi walls had been folded and wrapped and tied to the cross-frames of the travois. Other dogs hauled firewood on similar frames. As each dog was dragging fifty pounds or more across the land, they limited the pace of the group. In addition, they were infinitely distractible: sometimes they would pick up a scent and try to skew away from their humans, sometimes they would bark frantically at nothing in particular, and sometimes they would just sit down hard and need to be coaxed back into movement. The marching line meandered and broke up, and sometimes even Sooleawa had to wait, arms folded and face expressionless.
It began to snow very lightly.
The first night they camped in a shallow depression, which was of some help in keeping the wind off them. They threw up the tipis and set a fire and ate their dried deer meat, then went to sleep in the dusk in some comfort, with Marcellinus, Akecheta, Mahkah, and Isleifur in one tipi and Kimimela, Sintikala, and two tough-looking Hidatsa women in the tipi next door. But the second afternoon there was no natural shelter to be had, and they wrestled the lodges up around them as a gale howled. They pitched only half the tipis before exhaustion and frostbite halted the effort. The chilly winds were so strong that they could not even light their fires and had to huddle in the cold and the dark, chewing buffalo pemmican and ashcakes. That night all six of the Concordia crew slept piled uncomfortably in a single tipi along with the two women none of them knew and two of the dogs, which even with their thick fur could not be left out in such bitter cold. Marcellinus lay wrapped around Sintikala and Kimimela as best he could, all of them fully clothed, with Mahkah’s knee in his back, and slept barely a wink.
After that the days blurred, and even the men and women who were permitted to speak rarely conversed. Old Father Winter had come to the plains early indeed, and they were kicking their way onward through several inches of snow.
“It’s not cold,” Isleifur said unconvincingly. “The North Sea in winter, now that’s cold. Vinlandia during the Long Night Moon, that’s cold. This? Nothing.” But at the end of the day, he was into their tipi just as quickly as anyone else.
As for Marcellinus, he was numbed mentally as well as physically. Conversation had grown sparse anyway, but as he could not participate, he almost stopped listening whenever anyone else said anything. The fur gloves made hand-talk essentially impossible. In principle he could cheat by whispering to the others in their lodge at night at times when none of the Hidatsa were around. In practice the Cahokians and Isleifur took the vow of silence as seriously as the Hidatsa did, their superstitious side out in full force. Even Kimimela would not allow him to speak to her, and besides, she collapsed exhausted at the end of every day’s walk, buried in buffalo blankets and enfolded in Sintikala’s arms for warmth.
The skies over the plains still hung heavy with cloud. If the clouds helped warm the land at all, it was hardly noticeable. Even the Hidatsa were looking upward nervously. If the snow got heavier, they could all die out there.
—
“Go left.”
Marcellinus did not respond immediately, and Akecheta shoved gently on his right arm. “Wanageeska? We must go around them.”
He looked up. Just a quarter mile in front of him, a herd of buffalo covered the plains as far as the eye could see. The sheer number of animals it must have contained beggared belief. Marcellinus’s eyes widened and he began to pull off his gloves to sign, but Akecheta was ahead of him. “No, these are not the buffalo we will hunt. We must leave these in peace.”
Marcellinus’s feet were blistered from marching in the cold and the wet, and he and Akecheta were close to the rear of the Hidatsa column. In front of them the women steered the dogs far to the east in a much larger detour than the hunters were taking to avoid spooking the herd.
If there were gods in this world after all, they had played a terrible trick on the Hesperians; in place of sheep, goats, or honest cattle they had been cursed with the most ugly and ungainly creature on the earth. To Marcellinus, each of the buffalo looked like a hairy testudo with a bad temper, not only huge and stupid but also clumsy and dangerous. Any creature as tall as a man that surely weighed well over a thousand pounds, armed with horns more than six feet across, was definitely worth steering clear of.
Sooleawa, though, had walked into the herd and was slipping between the giant beasts, probably singing to them in her rather tuneless croon, even reaching out to touch them as she passed. The buffalo tolerated it, appearing to nod their great heads at her as steam billowed from their noses. Marcellinus wondered what it would mean for the hunt if one of the buffalo were to casually gore her or even knock her over by accident and step on her. It seemed entirely possible.
“Does your mouth water?” Mahkah had arrived on Marcellinus’s other side but was talking past him to Akecheta.
“I hope their meat tastes better fresh than dried.” Akecheta shook his head. “It is amazing that an arrow or spear can kill such a beast at all.”
“It often takes many.” Mahkah grinned. “If I cannot kill Iroqua, maybe killing a buffalo will make me feel like a man again.”
Marcellinus tugged off his gloves. You always a man, and good man.
“Perhaps I would prefer to not be a good man.”
Then again, perhaps the Hesperians’ gods had been wise to put so much value into a single animal. The People of the Grass lived off the meat of the buffalo, of course, and used its skin to clothe their bodies and tipis, but Marcellinus already knew that they wasted almost no part of the ungainly creature. They used its rawhide for bags and clothes, shields, moccasins, and ropes, even for the hulls of their canoes. The muscles and sinew of the beast were used for bowstrings and bindings, the horns for cups and ladles, the hair for pillows and rope, clothing and ornaments. At the winter camp he had seen women using buffalo paunches to carry water, and the Hidatsa arrowheads and awls were all of buffalo bone. Aside from their use in rattles, buffalo hooves could be boiled to make a sticky resinous substance that could be used for glue. Buffalo skulls had been prominent at the prehunt ritual, and the brains that once had lived inside those skulls were used for tanning th
e hides. Even by Hesperian standards of practicality, the way the People of the Grass plundered every part of the buffalo was extraordinary.
Although it took more than two hours to skirt the perimeter of this herd, Marcellinus knew it to still be a relatively small grouping. In the summer, such herds might number millions of buffalo, even allowing for Hesperian exaggeration. Now the herds were fragmenting with the coming of winter as grass got scarcer.
As the women guiding the dog travois rejoined the line of hunters and they continued on their way, Sooleawa slipped out from the herd. Even as she jogged athletically past the Hidatsa and Cahokians to take her place at the head of the group, she smiled beatifically like a woman in a trance.
“I will kill ten buffalo!” Mahkah said. “I will show the Blackfoot what Cahokia can do!”
Akecheta grunted. “The Blackfoot or Sooleawa?”
“Everyone,” Mahkah said with a smile.
Akecheta looked at the sky. “It seems warmer. Is it warmer? Or is it just Mahkah’s rosy glow from Sooleawa?”
It did not feel warmer to Marcellinus, but in fact it was. At noon it began to rain, of all things, helping to melt the snow and turning the ground underfoot to mush. As the rain increased, lashing down in sheets, Sooleawa halted the caravan to erect the lodges in a circle and prepare the evening meal before dark. The mood among the Hidatsa had turned bleak. Even though no runners had come from the Blackfoot and Marcellinus had no idea how they might know, it appeared that after all they might arrive at the hunt too late.
—
“Nearly there,” said Isleifur, arriving at Marcellinus’s side as they struggled on into the wind. Beside him Akecheta trudged along, almost as miserable as he was. Only Mahkah was cheerful; hours earlier he had hurried forward to be in the vanguard of the group.
Hands wrapped in gloves, Marcellinus could only gesture vaguely.
“That’s what the Hidatsa say, anyway. And Sooleawa has left us, run on ahead.”
Marcellinus squinted into the distance. Sure enough, he saw no sign of the buffalo caller. His legs felt like they weighed a hundred pounds yet could snap at any moment. He shook his head in disbelief that anyone could run.
