They gave her no respite. She was a slave, and if she sought a moment of rest they beat her with sticks or threatened her with knives. Only the old one, the grandmother, eyed her with any sympathy and offered the gift of an occasional fleet smile or a gentle touch of the hand. Once, when Victoria’s ragged doeskin dress fell apart, the old one brought an awl and patiently repaired it, lacing a seam at the side with new thong.
But the other women, all wives of Grandfather of Wolves, vied with each other to make her miserable. His sits-beside-him wife, Sisoyaki, or Cutting Woman, was hardest of all to cope with, and was determined to set an example of meanness for the other wives to follow. The youngest wife, Going Out to Meet the Victors, Pi-ot-skini, looked as if she wished to befriend Victoria, learn Crow words, and help lift her burden, but the older woman ruthlessly crushed the slightest tendency toward warmth. And so Victoria toiled alone.
At least she didn’t lack food. Even slaves needed food, and they didn’t begrudge the tongue or hump meat or backfat she ate, though in hard times, which afflicted all the Peoples now and then, she would be fed last and least. But there was food for the body and food for the spirit, and of the latter she was starved. She was never so aware of her hungers as when twilight came and handsome youths played the love flute sweetly outside the lodges of their beloveds. She knew those melodies; they were the same for all the tribes of the young and tender. These Blood people were much more fastidious than the Absarokas, and watched their daughters strictly. The girls were virgins when they were given away by their parents. She found herself wishing she had been raised in such fashion, with none of the bawdiness and wanton conduct of her own people. She had been too knowing too young, and maybe that was one of the things that had led her life to this fate, this brokenness.
So she dressed and tanned the skins and saw some of them replace worn hides in lodges or turn into good moccasins. When darkness stopped her hide dressing, they gave her other tasks. One was to stuff buffalo beard hair into cushions and pad saddles. Another was to pound meat and mix in fat to make a trail food rather like pemmican, though it was too early in the year for the other ingredient, berries. Not until the master retired, often late at night, was she permitted to collapse on an old robe in the place of least honor. In a few scant hours she would begin the same routine over again.
Each day the younger women harnessed travois to ponies and went out to the killing fields, there to butcher the buffalo the hunters had killed. The Bloods wallowed in buffalo, eventually cutting only the tongues from them, and sometimes hump meat. They loved cow, which was tender, and sometimes brought back an unborn calf, whose soft hide was prized. Even the camp dogs had their fill and slept lazily instead of gorging on the carrion. Plentiful meat, the true food of these people, made them happy, and they began to slacken their efforts. All except the slave, who toiled on because she faced the lash or a stick if she paused. The village had more meat and hide than it could possibly use. The buffalo were so plentiful that a foray into the midst of them hardly disturbed the giant herd, which slowly grazed its way south.
Then the chief—she had found out that his name was Crow Dog—decreed that the Hair Shirts would go to the Sun Dance, and soon she found herself packing the lodge’s wealth into parfleches, large rawhide containers, and loading them onto the ponies. The horses would be overburdened this trip, carrying all the jerky and pemmican that had been salvaged from the buffalo brothers and sisters, as well as fresh hides and tanned robes. It meant she would walk, but now that she was stronger she preferred to. Some of the bruises remained, yellow-and-purple reminders of her ordeal, which she wore like prisoner garb.
The walking gave her a chance to reflect on her life. As long as she didn’t stray from the other women, they left her alone. She could not converse, even though she was mastering all the words she could. It was one thing to recognize words and commands, quite another to string words together and talk to these Siksika. So she walked through golden June days when the world ached with pleasure, her thoughts on the new reality she faced. She had lost dominion over her life; every minute of it belonged to her master and mistresses. She had lost the hope of many things, including husband, reputation, friends, esteem, and her freedom to organize her days as she chose.
The causes for all that lay in the past, in her folly, in her girlish worship of warriors and war, but those things could not be undone, so they were best forgotten. She still faced a future, however limited, and she would have to find some sort of bearable life among these enemies of the People, or else roll over and die. Skye was long gone. Why would he try to find her and save her from her own foolishness? Why would he come, after she had betrayed him? No, he was on his way to the east and the many-houses villages he had told her about.
She probably would have to make a life with the Kainah and then die. She had learned that Kainah meant “Many Chiefs” and that Bloods was a name bestowed upon these people by their enemies the Cree. On her war trip with Beckwourth she had departed a girl; now she was a woman. She had changed forever, a passage as real as her passage from freedom to slavery. As she walked, she came to understand herself as a woman who would not surrender. She would look for a chance to escape. Someday the Absaroka would show up in force and free her. Or someday when things were just right—an impending snowstorm, or chaos, or a desperate fight—she would walk away. Someday, sometime. And meanwhile, she could make life bearable by learning the tongue, avoiding abuse as much as she could, pleasing those who really didn’t wish to be pleased, and perhaps even winning friends among those who wanted mainly to despise her.
She had never again heard from her benefactor, the woman who had saved her life the night of the coup counting, but she knew that somewhere among these people was a woman whose name was Magpie, and someday she would find and befriend that woman. Her other source of strength and courage was her spirit-helper. She found time for the traditional crying, and grew certain that her counselor was leading her through this ordeal for a purpose—maybe to make a beautiful woman of her. Magpie was wise; magpie did not flee south like other birds, but endured, even as she, Many Quill Woman, must endure this winter of the soul.
She learned to work without being asked or bullied. By the time the village was settling down for the night, she had found firewood, unloaded parfleches, and spread the robes. The elder wife didn’t really like this; she wanted to yell, and itched to beat the slave. So she found fault no matter what Victoria did, but the torrent of abuse slid by Victoria like leaves floating on a stream.
They traveled farther north than she had ever been, and now the Backbone of the World shown whitely to the west again. The Bloods possessed a good and bountiful land, though not half as sweet as the land of the Absarokas.
They came to a great grassy flat lying at the foot of mysterious and strange buttes, and there the Kainah were gathering. Several bands had preceded the Hair Shirts. Victoria beheld a great encampment, rather like the white men’s rendezvous. The days had grown hot, even scorching, and the sun was driving the last of the green from the grasses. This had been a dry summer, for which she was grateful. She had almost no clothing; a tattered dress that was rotting away from her lithe body, and no more. With the coming of cold, they would either clothe her or let her freeze to death. She could not know her fate.
Her master, Grandfather of Wolves, had not come to her for many suns, preferring his own women, and that pleased her. Perhaps that was because she had been too still and submissive, giving him nothing. Whatever the reason, he left her alone, and she was able to sleep entire nights, rest her weary body, and awaken refreshed, even if desolation stole through her as she faced another hollow, brutal day.
They kept her far away from the sacred lodge they were erecting to worship Sun. This, the most arduous and sacred of ceremonies, was only for the People. She didn’t wish to see any of it. They had stolen it from the Absarokas, who had honored Sun long before the Bloods. And before that, it had come from the Arapaho. She didn’t kno
w where it had come from before that. These Bloods were not a numerous people, the smallest nation in the Blackfoot Federation. And yet she admitted, reluctantly, that perhaps they were the handsomest and proudest, and perhaps raised its greatest chiefs, which their very name suggested.
The great blessing of the Sun Dance for her was simply that the Siksika ignored her. Sacred ritual absorbed these people. A woman of impeccable virtue was chosen to lead the Bloods in worship of Sun; there were prescribed dances, often lasting all night. They had built a sun lodge, a circular arbor with the traditional sacred pole in its center, to which the dancers would be tethered in the final act of ritual sacrifice.
Now the drumming never ceased, and along with it the eagle bone whistles and flutes. This mesmerizing throb filled the whole plateau with heartbeat, life’s pulse. Had this been the ritual of her own people, her spirit would have overflowed with pride and joy. But these were not her Absarokas, and the ceremony had a reverse impact on her. With every beat of the drum, with each prayer and song lifted on eagle feathers to the Above Ones and Four-Foots, she was flooded with an ineffable sadness.
thirty—nine
Skye rode north, a solitary horseman passing through the land of the Blackfeet. The mountains, the Backbone of the World, rose ever present on his left, severing these featureless plains from whatever lay beyond. This was a brooding land, with perspectives so distant that it set the mind to thinking about eternity. Nothing but a few scattered buttes supplied features to a featureless land. From any slight hill he could see his fate in the day to come. This country made him feel small, as the sea had sometimes made him feel helpless.
He saw no Blackfeet, nor did he even discover signs of passage. Yet he was now in the heart of their country—and not far from British possessions. He had no way of knowing when he might cross that line, the 49th parallel, but it didn’t matter. The Crown had no power here, and his escape from the Royal Navy frigate would be long forgotten. Trouble, such as it was in such country, would more likely be the crossing of a treacherous river or a sudden storm. He had crossed two northeast-flowing streams, and suspected they were the south and middle branches of the Milk, a river that rose in the western mountains, hurried north into the British possessions, and then curved south again to empty into the Missouri.
The long country evinced long thoughts, and the one that preyed on his serenity had to do with Victoria’s heart. In that brief encounter at Berger’s post, she had cried to him for help. And in his own fantasies, he had expanded that heart-cry into something it wasn’t: a wish to return to him. She wanted help, escape, freedom. Not a word or gesture in that fiery moment had suggested love or caring. As he rode, he came to grips with that painful truth.
At first he believed it would have to be an act of faith; he would rescue her, drawing courage from his certitude that she loved him and would return to his arms, his hearth fires, forever. But then he knew even that was delusion. He simply did not know. She might be very grateful, quite distant, and once returned to her people, quietly shut the door to him again. So he wondered anew whether he was on a fool’s mission. He could turn back, unscathed, probably find one of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigades and sign on—with his scalp on his skull.
The thought tempted him. Around his campfires, each skillfully hidden in a brushy coulee, he let the temptation run, wanting to see it whole. He owed her nothing. He loved her—nothing would ever change that—but faced rejection once again. Why had he set out on this fool’s errand?
In the stillness of that sweeping land, when even the breeze seemed hushed and scarcely a bird sang, there came to him another reason: no mortal should live in captivity. Victoria’s life was not her own. Why had she been set upon the earth? To be a slave? She was experiencing much the same ordeal as his own. He had not been in possession of himself. All he had, during his long burial in the crowded fo’c’sle of the H.M.S. Jaguar, was his dreams and his prayers. Nothing else. He owned not even the clothing on his body, and received a meal only when his masters felt like giving him one. What had sustained him then was hope. He had never stopped dreaming of the time when he would be a free man.
So it was with her. She probably was as much a slave as he had been. Perhaps her life would be better than his. At least she had land under her feet, and with it the chance of escape. And probably she did just about the same things she had done in her own village. She might even be given in marriage. And yet in some respects her lot would be worse than his. She didn’t know their tongue; he and his shipmates and masters shared the English tongue, which had assuaged his loneliness.
Skye realized, then, that his purposes were larger and more generous than simply the recovery of a woman he loved and had once possessed. He would free her if he could—and then offer her freedom from him. He would free her because of every bitter memory of being at the mercy of others, of the lash and whip that had befallen him whenever he resisted or failed to do what was required of him. He would free her because no mortal on earth should be forced into servitude. No one deserved that fate.
He studied the country as he passed through, uncertain whether he would know the Belly River even if he stood on its bank. The scant direction he had received from the Piegans scarcely prepared him to find his way in a land without landmarks. He forded another modest stream flowing northeast, and believed it to be the north fork of the Milk River. He topped a low divide and found himself in a different drainage, this one with scattered lakes lying ahead. Somewhere beyond the lakes would be the medicine line, the beginning of Grandfather’s Land, as the Piegans had described it. From there it would not be far to the Belly River … and the Bloods.
They weren’t pretty lakes, nor were they set in green forests. But they harbored thousands of ducks, geese, cranes, and white swans. One somber evening Skye made a meal of a Canada goose he shot as it lifted from the shimmering water. Skye didn’t much like this silent country. It lacked the graces of beauty and surprise. Neither did he much like dining on goose. It took too long to gut it, pluck the pinfeathers, clean it, roast it, and saw it into edible portions.
He arrived at the northernmost of these lakes the next evening and beheld a campfire across the water. So, at last, he would make contact again, for better or worse. He waited for the darkness to settle, which was a long time coming in that latitude in summer. But at last he walked his horses around the grassy shore, edging closer. He wanted a good look before he made any decisions. He tied his horses to a juniper and negotiated the last quarter mile on foot. If trouble came, he would be shielded by darkness.
He saw that there were five or six standing around the fire, which burned brightly and too large for concealment. He spotted several horses picketed close by and what appeared to be packs on the ground. On closer examination, he discovered still more men sitting on logs near the fire.
“You out there, do you come in peaceably or do we hunt you down?” came the voice, startling and harsh in the velvet silence.
Skye sprang backward, fearing the firelight had revealed him.
“I know you’re there. Every one of our beasts faces toward ye, ears pointed. You’re not a catamount or a wolf. The beasts don’t act like that except around mortals. Now, are you friend or foe?”
Skye watched the others casually lift weapons and settle behind the packs, which made fine barricades. He thought he detected some familiar ring to the voice, and what he heard did not remind him of Yanks.
“All right,” he said. “I’m alone.”
“Ah, I knew you jolly well weren’t a red man,” said the voice. “Ye speak the tongue known to us. Come then, and warm yourself at our fire, if that’s your purpose. I will tell you straight off, we are Hudson’s Bay men.”
Skye paused. HBC once offered money for his capture. But that was four years ago, and the episode had long been forgotten, even by the HBC men he had encountered at the rendezvous since then.
“I’ll come in,” he said. “It’ll be a few minutes.”
&n
bsp; He retreated to his horses, wondering all the while whether to leave them as a means of escape, and finally decided to bring them in. He wanted to talk to these men.
He collected the horses and led them toward the distant glow, and finally walked into camp. There he encountered others dressed rather like himself, in a mixture of flannels and buckskins, a wedding of native and European manufacture. Sitting on a log were several Creoles, dressed identically in red flannel shirts and blue trousers. They appeared to be voyageurs, and Skye spotted two large canoes nearby. They and the gents in buckskins all wore beards; some wore their hair shoulder length, like the Yank trappers. All but one. That fellow, amazingly, had outfitted himself in a heavy black swallowtail suit. That one looked for all the world like a duke. He had a ducal presence as well, examining the world about him as if he owned it. Now that penetrating gaze focused on Skye with obvious curiosity. Skye gaped at the apparition, this powerfully built gentleman in business attire in the middle of a wilderness.
“I’m George Simpson, governor of HBC. And who are you, sir?”
The name shot fear through Skye. Simpson was the most powerful Briton in the New World. Hudson’s Bay had a charter that permitted it sovereign rule over a large portion of North America, and the governor of that fiefdom, who ruled not merely a business but operated a private government as well, stood before him. Here was the man appointed in London by the board of directors, a quasi-official of the Crown, the superior of Dr. John McLoughlin out in Fort Vancouver. Here was the man who oversaw an empire from his lair at York Factory on Hudson’s Bay, as well as from Fort Vancouver itself.
And a man who might remember Skye’s name, even after four years. But Skye doubted the man would remember the name of an ordinary sailor.
Dark Passage Page 23
