by Noah Gordon
A light sleet began to fall as Rob J. rode behind the travois. They traveled along the edge of the forest that bordered the river. Finally the Indian turned his horse into a break between the trees and they rode into the camp of the Sauks.
Conical skin tipis—there would prove to be seventeen when Rob J. had a chance to count—had been set up among the trees, where they were protected from the wind. The Sauks were warmly dressed. Everywhere was evidence of the reservation, for they wore the castoff clothing of whites as well as animal skins and furs, and old army ammunition boxes could be seen in several of the tents. They had plenty of dead wood for fires, and gray wisps rose from the smoke holes of the tipis. But the eagerness with which hands reached for the three skinny snowshoe hares wasn’t lost on Rob. J., nor was the pinched look in all the faces he saw, for he had witnessed starving people before.
The injured man was carried into one of the tipis, and Rob followed along. “Does anyone speak English?”
“I have your language.” The age was hard to determine, for the speaker wore the same shapeless bundle of fur garments as anyone else, with the head covered by a hood of sewn gray squirrel pelts, but the voice was a woman’s.
“I know how to fix this fellow. I’m a doctor. Do you know what a doctor is?”
“I know.” Her brown eyes regarded him calmly beneath the fur folds. She spoke briefly in their own language, and the others in the tent waited, watching him.
Rob J. took a few sticks from their woodpile and built up the fire. When he freed the man from his clothing, he saw that the hip was internally rotated. He raised the Indian’s knees until they were fully flexed, and then, working through the woman, he made certain that strong hands firmly held the man pinned down. Crouching, he got his right shoulder just beneath the knee of the injured side. Then he drove up with all his might, and the snap was audible as the ball found its way back into the socket of the joint.
The Indian lay as though dead. Through it all, he had scarcely grunted, and Rob J. felt that a swallow of whiskey and laudanum was in order for him. But both medicinals were in his saddlebag, and before he could get them, the woman had poured water into a gourd and mixed it with powder from a small deerskin bag, and then had given it to the injured man, who drank it eagerly. She placed a hand on each of the man’s hips and looked into his eyes and half-sang something in their tongue. Watching her and listening, Rob J. felt the hair lift on the back of his neck. He realized she was their doctor. Or maybe some kind of priest.
In that moment the sleepless night and the snow-struggle of the past twenty-four hours caught up with him, and in a fog of fatigue he moved out of the dimly lit tipi into the crowd of snow-dusted Sauks waiting outside. A rheumy-eyed old man touched him wonderingly. “Cawso wabeskiou!” he said, and others took it up: “Cawso wabeskiou, Cawso wabeskiou.”
The doctor-priest left the tipi. As the hood swung away from her face, he saw she wasn’t old. “What are they saying?”
“They call you a white shaman,” she said.
The medicine woman told him that, for reasons that were at once obvious to him, the injured man’s name was Waucau-che, Eagle Nose. The large Indian’s name was Pyawanegawa, Comes Singing. As Rob J. traveled toward his own cabin, he met Comes Singing and two other Sauks, who must have ridden back to the horse carcass as soon as Eagle Nose was brought in, in order to reach the meat before the wolves. They had cut up the dead pony and were bringing the meat back on two packhorses. They passed him single file without seeming to glance at him once, as if they were riding past a tree.
After he arrived home, Rob J. wrote in his journal and attempted to draw a picture of the woman from memory, but try as he might, all that came was a kind of generic Indian face, sexless and tight with hunger. He needed sleep, but he wasn’t tempted by his straw mattress. He knew Gus Schroeder had extra dried ears to sell, and Alden had mentioned that Paul Grueber had a little extra grain put by for a cash crop. He rode Meg and led Monica, and that afternoon he went back to the Sauk camp and dropped off two sacks of corn and one of swedes and one of wheat.
The medicine woman didn’t thank him. She just looked at the sacks of food and rapped out some orders, and eager hands hustled them inside the tipis, out of the cold and the wet. The wind flapped open her hood. She really was a redskin: her face was a ruddy, mordant rouge-brown. Her nose had a prominent bump on the bridge, and almost negroid nostrils. Her brown eyes were swimmingly large and her gaze was direct. When he asked her name, she said it was Makwa-ikwa.
“What does that mean in English?”
“The Bear Woman,” she said.
13
THROUGH THE COLD TIME
The stubs of Gus Schroeder’s amputated fingers healed without infection. Rob J. visited the farmer perhaps too often, for he was intrigued by the woman in the cabin on the Schroeder place. Alma Schroeder at first was closemouthed, but as soon as she was convinced that Rob J. wanted to help, she became maternally voluble about the younger woman. Twenty-two years old, Sarah was a widow, having come to Illinois from Virginia five years before with her young husband, Alexander Bledsoe. For two springs Bledsoe had broken the stubborn deep-rooted sod, struggling with a plow and a yoke of oxen to make his fields as large as possible before the summer prairie grass sent spears higher than the top of his head. In May of his second year in the west he came down with the Illinois mange, followed by the fever that killed him.
“That next spring she tries to plow and plant, all by herself,” Alma said. “She gets in a kleine crop, breaks a little more sod, but she just can’t do it. Just can’t farm. That summer we come from Ohio, Gus and me. We make, what you call it? A rangement? She turns her fields over to Gustav, we keep her in cornmeal, garden sass. Wood for the fire.”
“How old is the child?”
“Two year,” Alma Schroeder said levelly. “She never said, but we think Will Mosby was the father. Will and Frank Mosby, brothers, used to live downriver. When we moved here, Will Mosby was spending lots of time with her. We were glad. Out here, a woman needs a man.” Alma sighed with contempt. “Them brothers. No good, no good. Frank Mosby is hiding from the law. Will was killed in a saloon fight, just before the baby come. Couple months later, Sarah gets sick.”
“She doesn’t have much luck.”
“No luck. She’s bad sick, says she’s dying of cancer. Gets pains in her stomach, hurts so bad she can’t … you know … hold the water.”
“Has she lost control of her bowels too?”
Alma Schroeder colored. Talk of a baby born out of wedlock was merely observation of life’s vagaries, but she wasn’t accustomed to discussing bodily functions with any man but Gus, not even a doctor.
“No. Just the water…. She wants me to take the boy when she goes. We’re already feeding five …” She looked at him fiercely. “You got medicine to give her for the hurting?”
Someone with cancer had a choice of whiskey or opium. There was nothing she could take and still look after her child. But when he left the Schroeders’, he stopped by her cabin, closed up and lifeless-looking. “Mrs. Bledsoe,” he called. He rapped on the door.
Nothing.
“Mrs. Bledsoe. I’m Rob J. Cole. I’m a doctor.” He knocked again.
“Go way!”
“I said I’m a doctor. Maybe I can do something.”
“Go way. Go way. Go away.”
By the end of winter his own cabin took on a feeling of home. Wherever he went he acquired homely things—an iron pot, two tin drinking cups, a colored bottle, an earthen bowl, wooden spoons. Some he bought. Some he accepted in payment, like the pair of old but serviceable patchwork quilts; he hung one on the north wall to cut down the drafts and used the other to comfort the bed Alden Kimball made for him. Alden also made him a three-legged stool and a low bench for in front of the hearth, and just before the snows came Kimball had rolled into the cabin a three-foot section of sycamore tree and set it on its end. He nailed a few lengths of board to it and Rob spread an ol
d wool blanket over the planks. At this table he sat kinglike on the best piece of furniture in the house, a chair with a seat of plaited hickory bark, taking his meals or reading his books and journals before bedtime by the uncertain light of a rag burning in a dish of melted lard. The fireplace made of river stones and clay kept the small cabin warm. Over it, his rifles rested on pegs, and from the rafters he had hung bunches of herbs, braids of onions and garlic, threads of dried apple slices, and a hard sausage and a smoke-blackened ham. In a corner he accumulated tools—a hoe, an ax, a grubber, a wooden fork, all made with differing degrees of workmanship.
Occasionally he played the viola da gamba. Most of the time he was too tired to make music all by himself. On March 2 a letter from Jay Geiger and a supply of sulfur came to the stage office in Rock Island. Geiger wrote that Rob J.’s description of the land in Holden’s Crossing was more than he and his wife had hoped for. He had sent Nick Holden a draft of money to cover the deposit on the property and he would take over future payments to the government land office. Unfortunately, the Geigers didn’t plan to come to Illinois for some time; Lillian was pregnant again, “an unexpected occurrence which, though it fills us with joy, will delay our departure from this place.” They would wait until their second child was born and was old enough to survive the jolting ride over the prairie.
Rob J. read the letter with mixed feelings. He was delighted that Jay trusted his recommendation about the land and someday would be his neighbor. Yet he despaired because that day wasn’t in sight. He would have given a lot to be able to sit with Jason and Lillian and make music that comforted him and transported his soul. The prairie was a huge, silent prison, and most of the time he was alone in it.
He told himself he should look for a likely dog.
By midwinter the Sauks were lean and hungry again. Gus Schroeder wondered aloud why Rob J. wanted to buy two more sacks of corn, but didn’t press the matter when Rob offered no explanation. The Indians accepted the additional gift of corn from him silently and without visible emotion, as before. He brought Makwa-ikwa a pound of coffee and took to spending time by her fire. She eked out the coffee with so much parched wild root that it was different from any coffee he’d ever had. They drank it black; it wasn’t good but it was hot and somehow Indian-tasting. Gradually they learned about one another. She had four years of schooling in a mission for Indian children near Fort Crawford. She could read a little and had heard of Scotland, but when he assumed she was a Christian, she set him right. Her people worshiped Se-wanna—their top god—and other manitous, and she told them how to do it, in the old ways. He saw she was as much a priestess as anything, which helped her be an effective healer. She knew all about the botanical medicines of that place, and bunches of dried herbs hung from her tent poles. Several times he watched her treat Sauks, beginning by squatting at the sick Indian’s side and softly playing a drum made from a pottery jar filled two-thirds with water and with a thin cured skin stretched over its mouth. She rubbed the drumhead with a curved stick. The result was a low-pitched thunder that eventually had a soporific effect. After a while, she put both her hands on the body part that needed healing and talked to the sick person in their tongue. He saw her ease a young man’s sprung back that way, and an old woman’s tortured bones.
“How do your hands make the pain go away?”
But she shook her head. “I can’t splain.”
Rob J. took the old woman’s hands in his. Despite the fact that her pain had been driven away he felt the ebbing of her forces. He told Makwa-ikwa the old woman had only a few days to live. When he returned to the Sauk camp five days later, she was dead.
“How did you know?” Makwa-ikwa asked.
“Death that’s coming … some people in my family can feel it. A kind of gift. I can’t explain.”
So each took the other on faith. He found her tremendously interesting, completely different from anyone he had known. Even then, physical awareness was a presence between them. Mostly they sat by her small fire in the tipi and drank coffee or talked. One day he tried to tell her what Scotland was like and was unable to determine how much she comprehended, but she listened and now and then asked a question about wild animals or crops. She explained to him the tribal structure of the Sauks, and now it was her turn to be patient, for he found it complicated. The Sauk Nation was divided into twelve groups similar to Scottish clans, only instead of McDonald and Bruce and Stewart they had these names: Namawuck, Sturgeon; Muc-kissou, Bald Eagle; Pucca-hummowuck, Ringed Perch; Macco Pennyack, Bear Potato; Kiche Cumme, Great Lake; Payshake-issewuck, Deer; Pesshe-peshewuck, Panther; Waymeco-uck, Thunder; Muck-wuck, Bear; Me-seco, Black Bass; Aha-wuck, Swan; and Muhwha-wuck, Wolf. The clans lived together with no competition, but every Sauk male belonged to one of two highly competitive Halves, the Keeso-qui, Long Hairs, or the Osh-cush, Brave Men. Each first man-child was declared a member of his father’s Half at birth; each second boy became a member of the other Half, and so forth, alternating so that the two Halves were represented more or less equally within each family and within each clan. They competed in games, in hunting, in making children, in counting coup and other deeds of bravery—in every aspect of their lives. The savage competition kept the Sauks strong and courageous, but there were no blood feuds between Halves. It struck Rob J. that it was a more sensible system than the one with which he was familiar, more civilized, for thousands of Scots had died at the hands of rival clansmen during many centuries of savage internecine strife.
Because of the short rations and a queasiness toward trusting the Indians’ food preparation, at first he avoided sharing Makwa-ikwa’s meals. Then, on several occasions when the hunters were successful, he ate her cooking and found it palatable. He saw that they ate more stews than roasts and, given a choice, would take red meat or fowl over fish. She told him about dog feasts, religious meals because the manitous esteemed canine flesh. She explained that the more the dog was valued as a pet, the better the sacrifice at a dog feast and the stronger the medicine. He couldn’t hide his revulsion. “You don’t find it strange to eat a pet dog?”
“Not so strange as to eat blood and body of Christ.”
He was a normal young man, and sometimes, even though they were bundled against the cold by many layers of clothing and furs, he became painfully horny. If their fingers touched as she handed him coffee, he felt a glandular shock. Once he took her cold square hands in his and was shaken by the vitality he felt surging in her. He examined her short fingers, the roughened red-brown skin, the pink calluses in her palms. He asked if she would come sometime to his cabin, to visit. She looked at him silently and reclaimed her hands. She didn’t say she wouldn’t visit his cabin, but she never came.
During mud season Rob J. rode out to the Indian village, avoiding the sloughs that had sprung up everywhere as the spongelike prairie was unable to absorb all the bounty of the melted snows. He found the Sauks breaking their winter camp and followed them six miles to an open site where the Indians were replacing their snug winter tipis by building hedonoso-tes, longhouses of interwoven branches through which the mild breezes of summer would blow. There was a good reason for moving camps; the Sauks knew nothing about sanitation, and the winter camp stank of their shit. Surviving the harsh winter and moving to the summer camp obviously had lifted the Indians’ spirits, and everywhere Rob J. looked he saw young men wrestling, racing, or playing at ball-and-stick, a game he had never witnessed before. It utilized stout wooden staffs with leather webbed bags at one end, and a buckskin-covered wooden ball. While running at full speed, a player hurled the ball out of his netted stick and another player caught it deftly in his net. By passing it to one another they moved the ball considerable distances. The play was fast and very rough. When a player carried the ball, the other players felt free to try to dislodge it from his net by lashing out with their sticks, often landing wicked blows on their opponents’ bodies or limbs, with contenders tripping and crashing. Noting the fascination with which Rob was fo
llowing the action, one of the four Indian players beckoned and handed over his stick.
The others grinned and quickly made him part of the game, which seemed to him to be more mayhem than sport. He was larger than most of the other players, more muscular. At first opportunity, the man with the ball flicked his wrist and sent the hard sphere hurtling toward Rob. He stabbed at it ineffectually and had to run to claim it, only to find himself in the midst of a wildcat fight, a clashing of long sticks that mostly seemed to land on his flesh. The long passing baffled him. Full of rueful appreciation of skills he didn’t possess, he soon handed the stick back to its owner.
While he ate stewed rabbit in Makwa-ikwa’s longhouse, the medicine woman told him quietly that the Sauks wished him to do them a service. All through the hard winter they had taken pelts in their traps. Now they had two bales of prime mink, fox, beaver, and muskrat. They wanted to trade the furs for seed to plant their first summer’s crop.
It surprised Rob J., because he hadn’t thought of Indians as farmers.
“If we brought the furs to a white trader ourselves, we would be cheated,” Makwa-ikwa told him. She said it without rancor, the way she would tell him any other fact.
So one morning he and Alden Kimball led two packhorses laden with fur pelts, and another horse without a pack, all the way to Rock Island. Rob J. traded hard with the storekeeper there and in exchange for the furs came away with five sacks of seed corn—a sack of small early corn, two sacks of a larger, flinty, hard-kerneled corn for hominy, and two sacks of a large-eared soft-kerneled meal corn—and three sacks each of bean, pumpkin, and squash seeds. In addition, he received three United States twenty-dollar gold pieces to give the Sauks a small emergency fund for other things they might need to buy from the whites. Alden was full of admiration for his employer’s shrewdness, believing Rob J. had arranged the complicated trading deal for his own profit.