Nakoa's Woman (12 page)

He smiled in deep pleasure. “We are alive!” she whispered over and over.

When they mounted their horses, and started home, Apikunni studied the trail frowning in perplexity.

“There was sign of only one Crow,” he said. “I could not follow him and leave you alone, for he must be part of a larger war party. If he is lost, why would he stay alone here, in our land?”

“He was watching us twice,” Anatsa replied. “He was watching us on the trail, too.”

Apikunni said no more and rode ahead, constantly alert to an attack. The afternoon light was going fast. The sun only shone on the peak of the mountain, and the tall tips of the pines. Where they rode was already deep in shadow.

Near the village they rode abreast. Smoke from the evening cooking fires clung wraithlike over the tipis, and in the last strong light of the day their eyes met. To them both, the day ended golden and shimmering, and Apikunni felt as if he had parted some bunch grass, long familiar to him, and had discovered the most precious flower in the world.

The memory of their day together haunted Apikunni as he rode with the Mutsik the next morning. He saw Anatsa’s image in the rippling pool; he saw her as beautiful and as fragile as a spray of foam that trembled upon the earth, yet was as indestructible as the sun.

They could find no fresh sign of the Crow. His prints of the day before disappeared into hard shale, but the thought of how close he had come to Anatsa made Apikunni feel terror. The thought of the light ending in her eyes made him quake in his soul. He wanted this girl whom he had lived near all of his life, but had just discovered. He wanted her to prepare his food, to lie with him on his couch; he wanted her to bear his sons.

That evening he walked across the Pikuni camp toward the inner circle of high chiefs, to where Anatsa lived with her sister and her brother-in law. A light wind blew from the mountains, moving the little bells on the ears of the tipis. The night was magic; mystical medicines from the wise men long dead came from the stars and fell gently to his shoulders.

His new recently dressed buckskin gleamed in the night, and from a distance Anatsa saw him coming, and saw the sober look of his face. She was working quill bands into Onesta’s shirt; inside the lodge Apeecheken was still sick, still vomiting, for the otsqueeina had not helped her yet.

When Apikunni stood tall and silent over her, Anatsa could only look down at her own hands.

“Anatsa,” he said. “You watched me as I was walking toward you. Why do you take your eyes from me now?”

“I do not know,” she whispered, looking at the shirt she held as if it would be the last thing she would ever see upon the earth.

He sat beside her, gently taking the shirt from her hands. “You have a good name for your sewing,” he said, “but do not sew now. Look at me, Anatsa. I have come to ask you something.”

She forced herself to meet his gaze.

“I have come to court you,” he said. “Would you ride around the camp circle with me tonight?”

She looked at him in disbelief. “What?”

“Would you ride with me tonight in sign of courtship?”

Anatsa’s eyes became pained. “You have not changed—from yesterday?”

“No.”

“You do not come to me and ask this in jest?”

“Anatsa! Why would I do this as a joke? Why, Anatsa, why?”

“Because no man has ever come for me before!”

“What does any other man in this village have to do with me? Do I think with the minds of other men? Do I seek coups, the buffalo, with the minds of other men? Why would I follow them in the seeking of a wife?”

Anatsa felt a violent beating of her heart. “Do not mock me!” she almost sobbed.

“Why do you act like this? Didn’t you tell me at the glen that you loved me?”

“I do love you!”

“Then why would you weep at becoming my wife?”

“I am afraid that it is pity that has touched your heart.”

She tried to hide her face in her hands, but he grasped her hands and held them firmly within his own. “I am a proud man,” he said. “I would take no woman because of pity.”

“All my life,” she said to him, “all my life I have dreamed of being your woman and living in your lodge. Yet never did I believe it would happen! I thought that we would live and die in this village together, and you would never know me.”

“I want you to ride with me tonight, and every night, until you become my wife,” he said tenderly.

“All right,” she said, her voice unsteady. “But know your words. I am crippled, and our sons might be in my image, and not in yours. Think of this now, Apikunni, in long silence.”

“I will not think of this,” he answered, and taking her in his arms, kissed her long and lovingly. From inside the lodge, Apeecheken began to retch again. Love came sweetly and softly, and love came darkly and violently. Sometimes the seed of love grew and sometimes it died.

“Anatsa,” he said. “It is beauty that is crippled; the rest of the world is different!”

“I will not speak to you of my leg again,” she promised. “I will ride with you tonight, I will be your wife!”

She went inside the lodge and told her sister, and came outside with the little meadow rue berries at her throat again. She mounted his horse, and sitting before him rode through the village, and every one who saw them knew that they had announced their marriage. The children of other loves watched them solemnly. Wives long married looked after them too, and before their fires of boiling meat and vegetables from the prairie, remembered other times; through long years either bitter or sweet, they were virgin-young once more, when the first kiss was followed by the second, and the moment of union trembled ahead in its own wonder.

In custom as old as their tribe, Apikunni and Anatsa rode around the outer circle of the Blackfoot camp, and around the horse herds that grazed quietly out upon the prairie. They met other betrothed couples, whom they passed without sound.

Anatsa looked up at the great form of the mountain that obscured half of the night sky. “Apikunni, when the glacier fields above us melt next spring, when the ice breaks and feeds all of this land with the winter snows, I will have your son! Apikunni—I will have borne your son! Think of the wonder it will be! My heart and your heart will be his!”

He kissed the side of her face, remembering an old Blackfoot song. “From whence did I come?” he whispered. “Does our son know—is our son blessed even before the meeting of our bodies?”

Her face became serene. “How I love this night!” she said. “How I love this world—my life—my body that has given me this transport!”

Back at the village the campfires died out. So deeply in love, Apikunni and Anatsa could not bear to part for sleep. They watched the slow moving of the stars, and only when the seven brothers of the north sky had dipped toward the prairie did they ride to the inner tipis. At Anatsa’s sister’s lodge they clung desperately to each other. When Apikunni rode away at last, all of the fire pits were cold and deep with white ashes.

Chapter Eleven

Pikuni men go crazy!” Atsitsi screamed at Maria. “Apikunni marry ugly Anatsa and Nakoa keep you!”

Maria, quilting some moccasins for herself, ignored the old woman.

“Why man ever want ugly thin woman like Anatsa?”

“Anatsa like boy. Without crippled leg already a mess. No man want Anatsa.”

“Apikunni does,” retorted Maria.

Atsitsi got up abruptly. “I go see why.”

“Oh, no!” moaned Maria. “You can’t ask Apikunni that!”

“How else I know, fool?” Atsitsi grunted and waddled away.

Maria looked after her, so fat, so old and bent, and sweating in the hot sun. Pity for Atsitsi smote Maria’s heart. Here too was a creature who suffered. Sitting, suddenly desolate before an Indian tipi, she heard voices speak to her, voices from within herself. Love Atsitsi they said, love all things of the earth, for all things feed the earth, and it is the earth that feeds you.

Maria got up and walked, and some dogs barked at her heels. She shook her head, weak and dizzy. Was Indian superstition affecting her reason? Love Atsitsi? Fat, loathsome, filthy Atsitsi?

Nakoa, Nakoa, her mind called. She had thought of him every day and every night since they had been alone after the Kissing Dance. She could not erase his image, the memory of his overpowering strength.

She had not seen him again since the night of the Kissing Dance, but before he went with the others to the buffalo hunt he had had it announced that she was to become his second wife.

“My daughter,” a voice said quietly, “where do you walk?”

It was Natosin, and in his face she clearly saw again the face of his son.

“I do not know where I walk,” Maria said sorrowfully.

“All of life is a strange path,” he answered.

“Natosin! Natosin!” she exclaimed, not knowing if she should have called him by name. She hung her head. “I feel more pain than I can bear.”

“It is sad that the young have to bear youth,” he said. “They have not had the time for it!”

Maria looked up into his eyes. They were kind and filled with compassion; so much of Nakoa stood before her that she wanted to bury herself in his arms. “No,” she whispered, “I did not have the time to be young.”

“You wear the dress of an Indian, and speak Pikuni. Is this what is destroying you?”

“I am captive of your son,” she said. If only he knew how captive she was! “Since I have been here, a part of me that I have never known is growing—haunting me.”

“When you are aware of a stranger, do not weep, my daughter, but feel blessed!”

She studied his face again. Once more this king of savages struck her with his great dignity, and now she was fascinated by his words. “Why should I feel blessed with feeling a stranger to myself?” she asked.

“We are all part stranger to ourselves.”

“But this part of me that I feel now—never existed before!”

“You know it exists now, so it is not strange. Someone has come forward who always was you, but was in shadows. Keep her in the light; accept her and use her strength!”

“Wait!” she said in Pikuni. Maria met his searching black eyes. “Natosin, you have called me daughter, but you do not want me to marry your son.”

He looked at her steadily and lost none of the compassion for her that remained upon his face. “No, my daughter, I do not want this marriage. I think such a marriage will bring my son sorrow. I would prevent his taking you for a wife if I could!”

“Can’t you?”

“My son will walk his own path. Life was not given him to follow mine.”

“Then why do you call me daughter? I am captive—white—you are the chief of the Pikuni.”

“It is a truth that all of the land in the world is surrounded by sea. If water surrounds all of the land, then it is the same water that nourishes us all.”

He walked away from her and as Maria watched his proud carriage, a small voice wailed over and over within her, “I love your son! I love your son!” She walked on. What did Natosin mean when he said the seas fed the earth? It was the other way around. And how could he say that the young did not have the strength to bear youth? Youth was the spring song of life and only the vigor of youth could deal with its treasures! What wisdom could Natosin have when his words were opposites?

She did wear the dress of an Indian woman, but she still refused to braid her hair like the other young girls of the village. Was wearing her hair loose her last symbol of being a white woman?

Around her was talk of the hunters. When would fresh meat from the hunt be brought to camp? Had they not found the herds yet? Dried meat and stews had lost their taste; the feasts of the running days when fresh steaks could be broiled over coals, or meat could be roasted, were one of the main delights of the village.

Like the Indian women, Maria went to the river for wood and got coals for their cooking fire; she gathered the prairie turnip, cow parsnip, wild potato, onion, smart weed, and bitter root; she slept upon an Indian couch and spoke the Pikuni tongue.

Maria used the Indian rooting stick and wore the little buckskin bags of balsam fir or meadow rue berries for their fragrance. Anatsa had taught her how to sew skins, for these were necessary for clothing and shelter, for the men’s pipe bags, paint bags, tobacco paunches, knife cases, and the parfleche bags used for the storing and carrying of food. Thread was sinew or dried tendons pushed through holes made in the skin with a bodkin, and Maria had her own sewing kit of bodkins, shredded sinew, and a sewing knife all in the traditional bag of buffalo skin.

Maria was also taught the Blackfoot art of fashioning bowls and dishes of sheep or buffalo horn by boiling, splitting, fitting, and sewing them together with sinew. She had learned to make spoons and ladles by scorching a horn over a fire, shaping, then boiling and shaping again.

With Anatsa, she gathered the herbs used by the Blackfoot for healing. She could identify bear grass used to stop inflammation, purple loco weed chewed for a sore throat, the wind flower burned upon coals for headaches, black root for coughs, sixocasin and grape root to stop bleeding of the stomach, and big larb used by the men in their ceremonial smoking.

The land around them was raw and wild and the Blackfoot lived upon it and cherished its wildness, but it was hard for Maria to accept. There was no cultivated field, no orchard planted in stiff design, no road filled with the dust of moving wagons and carriages. There were only the narrow paths through the tall meadow grass, the vast and quiet prairie, the towering shadow of the west mountains. There were no church bells to peal on Sunday, the sound sending birds scurrying from the belfry, no humming of barter and trade, never the whistle of a boat or a lonely train. Instead, in Indian land, the geese, ducks, and swans returned silently from warmer regions and heralded the time of the great Sun Dance.

There was sweetness for the body: wild rhubarb to be roasted over hot coals, the pulp of the cottonwood tree, not unlike maple syrup in flavor, the sweet camas gathered and baked in the earth in the fall. But there was no milk and no salt and no sugar.

As Maria walked on through the village a woman called her name. It was Sikapischis, the widow who lived with her blind father and her little son. Maria went over to where they sat in front of their lodge.

“You look like an Indian woman now,” Sikapischis said to her kindly.

Maria smiled and sat upon the ground with them. She noticed that Sikapischis’s father held a deerskin flute in his lap. “We have other music besides the drum,” Sikapischis explained. “My father teaches my son the skills that he has known. He teaches Siyeh how to hunt and to fish and to approach an enemy unaware, with no sound at all. (Maria smiled, for the boy could not have been over eight.) And when they have finished with these things that a man must know, they come back to my lodge in the evenings, and my father teaches Siyeh how to sing with the flute. Siyeh can play the flute, too, and now when one plays, the other sings the flute’s song.”

“What is your father called?” Maria asked looking toward the blind old man. “I am sorry,” she said, remembering that this information was never asked of one Indian by another, but was always volunteered. Sikapischis smiled.

“My father is called Mequesapa, and I am glad to tell his name to you. He was a Mutsik and a very great warrior known deep in Crow land for the number of his coups. It was in fighting a Crow that he lost one eye, and then a growth came to the other and left him blind.”

“I know my grandfather’s coups!” Siyeh interrupted. “I know them all! Would you like to hear them?”

“No, Siyeh,” his grandfather said quietly.

The round little face and shining black eyes lost none of their eagerness. “I am proud to walk with my grandfather,” Siyeh said.

“Of course you are,” Maria answered, looking at the little boy affectionately. A beautiful light came to Sikapischis’s eyes as she looked at her son. “I am deeply blessed,” she said. This was the second time Maria had heard the word today. “I was blessed with his father, and I am blessed with our son.”

Siyeh began to fidget. “Grandfather, would you play the flute?” he asked. The old man hesitated. “Please,” Maria asked, and for the first time Mequesapa’s sightless eyes turned toward her.

“The white woman’s voice is a gentle one,” he said to his daughter.

“She is a gentle woman,” Sikapischis answered.

“But it is still that Nakoa is foolish,” he said sadly, and Maria looked away from them all. In the long silence, the old man finally picked up his flute and began a haunting tune. “It is filled with sorrow,” Maria said. But she was held spellbound by the music, and Siyeh’s young face shone in rapt worship. Others in nearby lodges came to gather around Sikapischis’s tipi. As the last note slipped away, it seemed to end more than just a melody. “It is like a prayer!” Maria breathed. “Are there words for it?”

“Yes,” Sikapischis answered. Her father began to play the tune again and Sikapischis sang its words.

I accept.

The love and the pain; the sunlight and the rain,

I accept.

The day and the night; the blindness and the sight,

I accept.

The love and the glory; the end of the story,

I accept.

From winter’s deep snow, spring waters must flow,

The body and the heart, is the beginning and the start,

I accept!

I accept!

Sikapischis finished. “It is an old song,” she said. “It has been sung in Blackfoot camps as long as their tipis have been pitched upon the prairie.”

“It is beautiful,” Maria said. “I thank you, deep from my heart,” she said to the old man. “Your notes have given me peace, and so did the words they carried.”

“Can you be given peace?” he asked her softly.

“I have found peace this morning,” she answered.

“Are you a beautiful woman?” he asked her.

“I don’t know!” Maria stammered.

“She is beautiful,” Sikapischis said.

“She is very beautiful, except her eyes are a different color!” Siyeh added and then flushed in embarrassment.

“I have asked the white woman!” Mequesapa said sternly. “She is the only one who can answer this!” His sightless eyes were seeking her, one eye a hollow pit and the other covered with a white growth.

Maria met the dead eyes. “I would like to be beautiful!” she said.

The old man’s face softened. “When a woman asks for beauty and does not think she has it, she wants it for a gift, and the woman who gives is the rich woman and blesses the earth!”

Maria said nothing. Why did they all talk in such a strange way?

“Would you like your beauty for a man?” Mequesapa asked. “Would you trade its heart away?”

“Yes,” said Maria. “I have! I have!”

Mequesapa closed his eyes. “There has been no light for me so that I could have sight for Siyeh. But I have had as much for him. Without the light of the sun its warmth is as great. Beauty is a small gift, but if given in trade, becomes a great one.”

Maria looked warmly at the three of them, at all of the Indians who, when the song was finished, had begun to go back to their own lodges. “I do not know all of your words,” she said, “but this morning has been a rich one for me. Good-bye,” she said, rising, and thinking that she would go to the inner lodges and seek Anatsa. The two of them could walk to the lake and swim and sun the rest of the afternoon.

“Talk with us again,” Sikapischis said. “You are always welcome, even to share our food.”

“Thank you,” Maria replied. Sikapischis was her friend; Anatsa and she were becoming as close as sisters. Natosin may not have wanted his son to marry a white woman but he liked her; Mequesapa liked her too. Her only enemy in the Blackfoot camp was Atsitsi, and on Atsitsi Maria did not waste one thought.

Another Maria she did not know had come to her out of the shadows, and she was strong and could bear anything. She loved Nakoa and would be his wife, and from the Indian prairie would come milk and honey. Near the inner tipis, Maria began to hum happily:

The love and the pain,