Nakoa's Woman

by Gayle Rogers

  Anatsa reached the inner circle of tipis with her wood and since it was too early to start the cooking fire, she sat outside her brother -in-law’s lodge and began to dream quietly in the sun. She had no family except her older sister, Apeecheken, her brother-in-law, Onesta, and their child, Mikapi. Anatsa’s touch with reality was through them, but her own world lay deep in the shadow of the mountain where she had her own place. Here was a glen with a magical stream that was balm for the wounds of living. When the struggling and grieving of the prairie became too intense, she had the cooling waters that sprang from the earth’s breast. Early in the morning when Apeecheken, Onesta, and Mikapi all slept, and the firepits were still warm with the ashes of the night before, she would steal from the village. Sometimes the late moon would still be in the sky, a pale silver thread when the eastern horizon was streaked with color. All would be quiet and still. Not even a dog would bark as she walked quietly past the tipis.

  In the shadow of the mountain forest she would reach her glen, when the tips of the tall trees around it were orange and the air yet night-cold. Here she would quake and shiver as if she had just been newly born, uncrippled. She would linger in the glen until afternoon. Then the forest would be hot, slumbering, and lazy, and she would breathe deeply the scent of warming pine needles. Birds joyously called back and forth above the motionless ferns and the cool moss that seemed so indifferent to the vibrant sounds around them. In all of this beauty she would lie still and sleep a sleep as golden as honey, and in the touch of the wind and the shade of the trees she would feel deeply loved, deeply blessed. In return she loved all she could see and all that she could not see. She would awaken and walk in wonder back to the village, and she would look down upon the tipis and the cooking fires and want to bless them all with the ecstasy she had felt.

  She had waited many years to be a woman. She had waited patiently for her breasts to form, for her eyes to have something in them that would make a man love and want her. If her face could become beautiful then her deformed leg would not be seen; surely radiant beauty would put her leg in shadow. But she did not change. Her pale reflection in the river showed she remained too thin, a bud that would not open, a flower that had no sweetness with which to grow.

  Suddenly, this afternoon, Anatsa no longer wanted her glen. The stream and its shadowed ferns were not enough. She wanted to be in the village with Apikunni even if the prairie was scorching under the sun. Water flowing from the beginning of life itself was not the earth where the animals crawled to mate. The glen and its pond and stream did not bear the image of the man she loved, Apikunni, as close as blood brother to Nakoa. He was the man she wanted, and yet he was the one to whom she could not speak a sensible word. Dogs and horses and even the worm beneath the moss could feel and desire and unite—but not she! Not she! She loved Apikunni tenderly; she loved him passionately, she loved him purely and she loved him lustfully, but never once had he seen her! Anatsa put her head in her hands in despair. Her own suffering was enough for the whole world—why should the white woman be treated like a dog bitch?

  The moon was rising, silvering the prairie in poignant serenity. Anatsa thought back upon how many lovers yearned for each other in its magical light, and then she made herself turn away from its face. It was late and she should have started the cooking long ago. Her sister, Apeecheken, was pregnant and couldn’t stomach the preparing of food, so it fell upon Anatsa to do all of the cooking. Anatsa built her fire near Nakoa’s lodge and as she boiled meat, she watched his tipi thoughtfully.

  Nakoa’s Nitsokan was the voice of the west wind, the woman of the west wind who had appeared to him in a vision when he had fasted and sought his sign as a youth. What had she been like, this foreign woman who had traveled from distant seas and brought to the dry prairie the touch of water? She had been seen only by Nakoa, for most of the boys who sought their Nitsokan in lonely and dangerous fasts in the woods had seen signs of animals—the eagle, the bear, the white wolf; no brave had ever ridden into battle protected by a human sign before. Yet his was the most powerful of medicines, gaining him the most coups among the Blackfoot, and bringing him the chieftainship of the Mutsik society.

  Upon the skins of Nakoa’s lodge was a brilliant blue star and a yellow pine cone. Nakoa had not allowed the woman to be painted. Her touch stretched from the pines to the North Star, but like the winds themselves, she had to remain invisible. What would Nakoa’s woman of the west wind think of him now? How would she give him strength and protection when he would destroy one of her sex and beauty in blind lust?

  Anatsa took the cooked meat to her sister and Onesta and Mikapi. She could eat none of it herself and went back to sit by the fire near Nakoa’s lodge, feeding it with new sticks. At last she heard the sound of his horse.

  Nakoa picketed the animal, and quickly walked over to her. He smiled and accepted the food she offered. “You will not eat?” he asked her.

  “I have no taste for food tonight,” she answered shyly, and then determination made her look boldly into his face. “I would like to talk with you,” she said.

  He looked surprised at the tone of her voice. “I am here,” he said.

  “My words come hard.”

  “Words have never been scarce between us before.”

  “I want to speak to you of the white woman!” she blurted.

  Immediately he looked wary. “Why should you speak of her?”

  “Because I should not, and if it is that I should not, then no one else will speak of her as I will.”

  “If you are afraid of your words then do not utter them.”

  “I must. I will say them and not keep them silent within myself where they will fester and grow in power.”

  “Then speak what you will.”

  “I feel sickness at what you are doing with this white woman.”

  “Why?”

  Anatsa felt her face burn but she went bravely on. “It is what you will do, then.”

  “What will I do?”

  “You have told the high chiefs. You will use her as a mistress and then trade her to Siksikai!” Anatsa was appalled at her bold words. “I am sorry—” she said timidly. “I know she is yours—I know—but I cannot see such a woman done this way!”

  “Such a woman? She is white!”

  “She is clean! She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen!”

  “You are pained for her just because she is beautiful?”

  “I am thinking of you!”

  “No. I want to lie with her. I want her for a mistress.”

  Anatsa began to tremble, suffering an anguish of embarrassment. “She does not want this.”

  “I do.”

  “When you are through she will be dirty like Atsitsi!”

  Nakoa looked at her earnest face, and putting down the food, took her thin hands and held them in his own. “Anatsa,” he said gently. “My heart is warm toward you. I have known you since you were born and have lived near you in this circle of high chiefs—but Anatsa—you are not of this village!”

  “Why?”

  “You cannot grow in the mud of a prairie river! You have always been so frail—”

  Anatsa thinking of her leg tried to draw her hands from his.

  “It is as if you were a flower that needs the sweet water of a more gentle stream—the shadow of protecting trees, Anatsa. This white woman is not like you! She—it does not matter what she is! I am a man,” he said somberly. “I am of the earth and of the mud where you gather the scrub brush for your cooking fires. I have desires and I live to meet them. I have fought for the coups I have; I have bled my blood for them, not the blood of my father, nor the blood of the high chiefs. I am not as you. I am of this village—this world. I do not have time for dreams. I do not live to scatter sunbeams!”

  She bowed her head sorrowfully.

  “Anatsa, I do not mock you. Be kind and gentle. Dream what you will in the mountain place you seek. Give others your touch of the sun. I am not a woman. I am a man.
I have hot desires and I satisfy them. If my father and all of the head chiefs had said that I could not have this woman, I would have her anyway!”

  “Why do you wait?” Anatsa whispered. “Why is she still at Atsitsi’s?”

  Nakoa stretched out his long legs and looked at the fire.

  “I am sorry,” Anatsa said quickly, “I deserve no answer.”

  “Why do I wait?” Nakoa asked, speaking more to himself than to her. “She will accept me. I wait for this.”

  “You wait for this?”

  “To make my pleasure deeper.”

  “Nakoa—”

  “She has her life! If I had not wanted her I would not have saved her from the Snakes! Why else would I care whether a white woman lived or died?” He was getting angry. “And yet this woman has touched me. I see her face—and her body—when I am not with her. Why would it make my pleasure greater to have her accept me? Why would I care when I can take her by force any time?”

  Anatsa shivered.

  “I do not know my actions! For the first time in my life, I do not know my actions!”

  “You feel pity?”

  “No! Why would I feel pity for a woman I saved from being killed? I want to see her naked again. I want to hold her with nothing between her flesh and mine.” He suddenly realized Anatsa’s embarrassment. “My words are ugly to you,” he said. “They are coarse because you are a virgin to life. I am sorry, my little Anatsa.”

  “You have always been so gentle with me,” Anatsa faltered. “You are not animal—mud of the river of earth …”

  “We are all of the earth,” Nakoa said softly. He looked at Anatsa with tenderness. “But you are not. Anatsa, you are a note of a bird song.” He looked musingly into the fire, his handsome face even more tender. “But the white woman is of the earth and she fights the call of her body. I wait for her to listen. With an Indian she will still have to be the woman and—accept.”

  “Your face is filled with love,” Anatsa said. “You speak tenderly of the white woman.”

  “I am touched by her beauty.”

  “It is more than that.”

  “She will bring me pleasure. Do not be blind to what I am. Near her I know the heat of my blood. That is all.”

  “That is everything,” Anatsa said gently and left him.

  At her sister’s they were all asleep and the last of the lodge fire flickered faintly upon the ceiling. Soundlessly, Anatsa stretched out upon her own couch. Her despondent mood was gone. She knew the white woman to be blessed with Nakoa’s desire. Mikapi giggled in his sleep, his boyish face pure and innocent in the firelight. When did innocence flee at last? When did baseness come and rule the flesh?

  Before sleeping, Anatsa thought lingeringly of Nakoa’s words. If she were but the call of a bird’s song, for her there would be no life, just a flashing of melody as brief as a spray of foam flung from a stream, quaking for a moment upon the earth before being dissolved by sun and wind.

  Chapter Seven

  “Nakoa important man,” Atsitsi said to Maria savagely.

  “That is all you have been telling me for two weeks,” Maria retorted. “I think that you are in love with him, Atsitsi. Are you going to take him away from Nitanna?”

  Atsitsi scowled. “You laugh at fatness. Atsitsi not always fat. And when was fat still white man like to screw with me.”

  “I imagine it was your quiet delicacy and gentle refinement. And also you were probably the only woman west of the Mississippi!”

  For two weeks, night and day, Atsitsi had been teaching Maria Pikuni. Pikuni was easy to learn; the language was beautiful in expression, moving in images.

  “Tell me the Ikunuhkahtsi,” Atsitsi growled, beginning to eat again.

  “The Ikunuhkahtsi is the tribal police,” Maria said wearily. “I know all of this!”

  “I hear all again. Nakoa say, no repeat my word, no food, no eat.”

  “All Blackfoot men enter the Ikunuhkahtsi, and advance from one society to another all of their lives.”

  “Tell societies.”

  “You just don’t want me to eat!”

  “Shut mouth about food.”

  “You old whore!”

  “You young one. You be whore longer I bet! Now tell societies.”

  “Boys enter the Little Birds, where they learn how to fight. When a boy has been to war three times he goes on to the Pigeons.”

  “Give Pikuni name.”

  “Kuk-kuiks. Then, when he is accepted as a tried warrior he goes on to the—Mosquitoes.”

  “Pikuni name!”

  “Tuiskistiks. Then if a man has led this society in coups and he is no longer mortal but is all God, he may join the greatest society of all because it is led by your old wished-for lover, Nakoa … This society is the Mutsik.”

  “This—our greatest warriors. Nakoa leader.”

  “Yes, yes, yes! And most young men do not make it, but go on instead to the—Knatsomita, the All Brave Dogs, the Mastahpatakeks, or Raven Bearers, the Issui, the Emitaks, and the Bulls. Now that I’ve named more men than even you’ve probably slept with, let me eat!”

  “No. Tell where tipis.”

  “Your tipis are arranged in two circles with the chiefs of the Ikunuhkahtsi camped in the inner circle. The outer tipis are arranged according to blood genes.”

  “Not enough on lodges of high chiefs. Arranged according to age advancement of chiefs society.”

  “All right. I agree. Now can’t I have some of that delicious food that you and the flies are fighting over?”

  Atsitsi belched. “Why?”

  Maria looked away and suddenly noticed two riders heading rapidly toward the inner circle of tipis. A crowd excitedly followed them.

  “Something wrong,” Atsitsi said. “Something happen.” She stopped scratching, and got clumsily to her feet. The crowd waited at the fringe of the inner circle, staring at Natosin’s lodge.

  “I go see,” Atsitsi said.

  “Me too,” Maria answered.

  “You to stay by my lodge!”

  “I’m to stay with you, so you’ll just have to take me along!” They both walked to the crowd where Atsitsi listened a minute to the talking. “Strangers have come to village,” she said to Maria.

  “Who?”

  “Enemies from the south. Blackfoot have no friends to south.”

  “Is this a war party they are talking about?”

  “Yes. I hear now. They are Snake. Snake party come to challenge some of the Mutsik in battle.”

  “The Mutsik?”

  “The Mutsik always meet war parties. Now shut mouth, so I listen.”

  The crowd was growing; Maria and Atsitsi were jostled about, and the old woman furiously shoved anyone who tried to take her place. Soon Maria thought that the entire camp was in the inner circle, but then she saw five riders approaching them, followed by a group of excited boys. The riders were painted. “Are those the Snakes?” she asked Atsitsi.

  “Yes.”

  “Can your enemies just ride into your village—like that?”

  “If come in open challenge, yes! Now shut mouth, I listen.”

  The murmuring of the crowd around them grew. Maria heard one name repeated in awe and fear. One of the Snakes had been recognized and was obviously a great warrior. The Snakes rode near them, forcing some of those around Maria to move out of their way. The Snakes were so close to Maria that she could smell the sweat on their horses, and see their features under the paint on their faces.

  “Damn, damn!” Atsitsi whispered. “Nakoa get it now!”

  “What do you mean?” Maria asked instantly.

  “Listen! Maybe you read the Indian talk with hands.”

  The Snakes had stopped before Natosin’s lodge, their horses forming a straight and unwavering line. Maria watched them spellbound. They were armed with bow and quiver, and the sunlight flashed from the long lances that they held before them. Each man held a shield close to his breast, and each wore a headdress of eagle
feathers that the wind ruffled out. Scalp locks danced on their lances. They stood in stillness and silence.

  “What are they waiting for?” Maria whispered.

  “This,” Atsitsi said, and Maria saw Natosin, Nakoa, and a brave ride to them from the outer tipis. They were not painted for battle, but both Nakoa and his father wore a headdress of buffalo horns that Maria had never seen upon an Indian before. The three Blackfoot stopped, facing the Snakes. After a moment of stillness, one of the Snakes prodded his horse out from the four Snakes behind him and raised his arm high in sign language.

  Instantly the brave with Nakoa and Natosin prodded his horse forward and signed back. A hush settled on the group around them. “What are they saying?” Maria asked Atsitsi anxiously. “Tell me what they are saying!”

  “The Snake who gestures is Shonka, the greatest of Snake warriors. He has come for the scalp of Nakoa. He is the brother of Eeahsapa, who lies dead by Nakoa’s arrow. Nakoa’s arrow is known in Snake land because it has been found in friends and relatives of Shonka and the men who have ridden far to Blackfoot land with him. Shonka will kill Nakoa, and the four men with him will kill the four Mutsik who went into Snake land with Nakoa. The taking of Snake hair and Snake horses will end with the death of Nakoa and these four Mutsik.” Atsitsi was translating directly now.

  The Blackfoot signed rapidly back, and Atsitsi had difficulty in keeping up with him. “The great Shonka does not tell that it is already seven times that Nakoa has ridden into Snake land and taken Snake hair and Snake horses! What will Shonka, who is both a woman and a coward, do about it?”

  “Shonka will kill Nakoa tomorrow morning when the sun first comes to the sky, and the Snake warriors with him will kill the Mutsik they have challenged!”

  “Nakoa and the four Mutsik will accept the challenge, and will be glad in their hearts to take yet more Snake scalps.”

  “Good! So it will be!” Shonka signed, and then looking past the Blackfoot who had signed to him, looked directly at Natosin. He gestured again. “I talk to the man who wears the headdress of the Blackfoot high chief. I talk for my brother and for all of the Snakes who move restlessly in the ghost hills without the peace of the dead. Tomorrow your son, the man who has done this, will lie dead by my knife, and I shall wear my war shirt decorated with his hair. Tomorrow this ground will ring with his death cry, this cry of your only son, and his life blood will run at my feet.”