Nakoa's Woman

by Gayle Rogers

  “Because I didn’t know it myself until tonight!” he said. “Maria,” he added, studying her face, “do you want Siksikai?”

  “No. Dear God, no! I will not be raped by any man!”

  “You will accept me,” he said fiercely.

  They looked at each other angrily. Suddenly tears came into Maria’s eyes. “Can’t you show me kindness—some tenderness?” Close to him, Maria felt the strength and buckskin smell of him again. “Are you going to take me without one kiss?” she asked him.

  His black eyes searched hers. “I kissed you outside the village, and you met my feeling of tenderness with hatred. No, I will not kiss you. And I will not use you as a harlot. I cannot make you my first wife, Maria, but I will make you my second wife. I cannot give you up.”

  “If you will not kiss me, then I will kiss you,” she breathed, kissing his lips. Immediately she was held in his embrace and the wildness and the wonder came to them with the same potency that it had the first time, outside the village. When he finally restrained her, they were both shaken.

  “Maria,” he said, “what you did tonight was a blind and dangerous thing. Stay away from Siksikai.”

  “I could tell him the dance had no meaning to me.”

  “Tell him nothing! I will have it announced that you are to be my second wife. That is all he needs to be told!” He was becoming angry again.

  “Nakoa, would you have traded me?”

  “Yes.” He made no attempt to avoid her eyes.

  “From the very first, did you want me just for a mistress? Is that all?”

  He smiled. “Wasn’t that enough?”

  “Because you saved my life? No. If you had done what you intended, it would have been better for me to have been killed.”

  “Not for me!” His eyes went to her lips and breasts and back to her own gaze. “You are a beautiful woman. I knew you would bring me pleasure, and I was there to capture you.”

  “Did you not think at all of what I would feel?”

  He took her in his arms again. “I will say what we both know. At the river—when I held you naked—when never was I so mad to enter a woman—”

  “There have been several?”

  He ignored her question. “I did not. I did not do what I wanted to do, so I knew your feelings. I have known them ever since.”

  “Then after that morning you didn’t ever intend to trade me?”

  “I will not give you up, and so I will not make you my mistress now. I do not want to give you up when I marry Nitanna.” At the mention of Nitanna, Maria kissed Nakoa again, but he resisted her embrace. “I will take you back to Atsitsi’s” he said gently. “I should not have kept you here so long.”

  At the outer tipis the fires had died and the village was in total darkness. At Atsitsi’s lodge, Maria turned to Nakoa and huddled against him. “I do not want to leave you,” she whispered. “Can’t we stay here and talk?”

  He touched the thinness of her dress over her shoulders. “You are cold. Maria, you will have to start wearing the dress of an Indian woman.”

  “All right.” She sat apart from Atsitsi’s lodge, and he sat near her, putting his arm around her shoulders and shielding her with his warmth. “That is why a man is born,” he said, smiling.

  “Why?” Maria asked.

  “To keep coldness from a woman.”

  “A woman?”

  “His woman,” he said tenderly. “Maria,” he continued, “you have come to a new life. Hear my words, Culentet, with your heart.”

  “Culentet? What does that mean?”

  “My little white bird. It is an expression of…” He stopped.

  “Of love?” Maria asked.

  He kissed her hands and then studied her face gravely.

  “Maria, hear my words. When the flame burns, it does not always give warmth. Darkness comes at the end of every day, or we would not know the beauty of the sunrise or of the sunset.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying that you are in Indian land and your path will be strange and hard. This is the beginning, and pain seldom starts in the beginning. You will have to accept.”

  “I can accept you! I want you!”

  “Maria, you will have to accept much more! Culentet, that is why we live! To accept the joys and burdens of the body. In our flesh we live to accept the will of the Great Spirit. We accept, and we move with the will of the Great Spirit, for we cannot move against it. Whether you walk in the Indian’s way or the white man’s way, you will have to accept. Strange paths are harder to follow and there is an undying loneliness in the soul of every man and every woman. That is why we are seeking—seeking—but in our endless seeking we still must accept!”

  “Nakoa…” She tried to touch him tenderly again, but he held her hands stilled.

  “Accept not through me, Maria. Your old life is gone, and I cannot replace it. I can warm you now, but you will be naked in the wind until you accept a new life.”

  “I eat your food, I have learned your tongue. I will wear the dress of an Indian woman. I will be your wife.”

  “Culentet! There is more than just accepting me or my people, for when you do this your old life will be gone and there will be nothing left but yourself. You will be alone! What is it that you bring to me? Are you bringing the innocence that wept in terror at rape, or the harlot who went to Siksikai and asked to be his mistress so I would make her mine this evening?”

  Maria hung her head sorrowfully and made no reply.

  “Do you think that I do not know the touch of a woman’s lips? Do you think that I don’t know when a woman wants me? Maria, you wanted this before we even reached this village!”

  “I know it. I know it,” she said sadly.

  He tenderly touched her face. “And now the sadness is back at feeling this—for an Indian. Yet when your dead are truly accepted in your heart, and your past is really buried upon the white man’s trail, then you will come to me as neither virgin nor harlot, and you will accept me as a man.”

  “It has been so hard for me,” Maria said. She saw Edward Frame dying and shuddered convulsively.

  “It is too cold for you here,” Nakoa said. “It is time for you to go to your couch and dream long dreams.” He kissed her once more. “Perhaps in our dreams we will meet,” he said, and left her at Atsitsi’s door.

  Atsitsi still slept by the cold firepit, and Maria left her there. She stretched out upon her couch looking up at the stars through the smoke hole of the tipi. His lips were still warm upon hers. He had said he loved her.

  From a nearby lodge came the sudden wailing of a medicine man. “Listen Sun to what I say! Hear the wailing of this mother! Take pity upon the sickness of this child!”

  Speak the voice and cry the heart. This is still the most tender of nights and beyond all of the suns is someone who does care.

  “Maria,” Anatsa said, “I do not like Siksikai. He is shadow and darkness to me, the coldness of the deep earth where the white men are said to bury their dead.”

  Maria and Anatsa had gone to the lake to bathe, for there they had privacy. They had walked the extra distance because Atsitsi did not follow them there. They had bathed, and after dressing, were lying in the morning sun.

  “If you had chosen any man—any man—but Siksikai!” Anatsa went on.

  “I am sorry for what I did. I was someone else, someone that comes into me and does these terrible things, as when I scratched Nakoa’s face. It is as if some part of me is not hurt enough and wants to suffer more!”

  Anatsa sat up, and shivered. “I am cold, yet the sun is still warm upon us. Maria, there are voices in the wind, and in the sound of the little bells moving on the ears of all the tipis at night. I hear this, and I know.”

  “Anatsa, Anatsa!”

  “Those that have moved here before us, for all of the years passed and long lost on the Indian time stick, still talk of the circle of their lives. The roundness of living is repeated and repeated.” The fra
il girl shivered, and her beautiful eyes were luminous with the strange expression that Maria had seen in them the first day they had met. “My body is weak,” she whispered, “and so there is a different strength within me that you—and many others—do not have. I know things, in waking dreams, in pictures and in sounds that you cannot know.”

  “Anatsa, do not be so upset at my foolishness!”

  “The coldness that has touched me does not come from across the lake,” Anatsa said, still lost within herself. She grasped Maria’s hands, and looked searchingly into Maria’s eyes. “Siksikai is your death, Maria,” she said quietly.

  “Anatsa, he will not bother me. He is afraid of Nakoa.”

  “You have committed your body to him. You have asked for his possession.”

  “I did not mean it! You know this!”

  “Your actions have started the circle and every circle has to meet its beginning.”

  “You talk strangely too, like Nakoa.”

  “Nakoa is a wise man, like his father. Natosin is far wiser even than Isokinuhkin, our medicine man, because Isokinuhkin thinks only of the body and the beating of the heart. My body is nothing, but I know that I go far beyond its frailty.”

  Maria squeezed Anatsa’s hand. “Love your body, Anatsa, for no matter what you believe about death and life, now you are your body.”

  “No! No! All of me is not—crippled!” The girl shook in anger.

  “I am sorry,” Maria whispered. “Everything I do and everything I say in this village is wrong.”

  “Nakoa has told me,” Anatsa went on, slowly, “that I am the song of a bird. Do you know what such words from Nakoa mean?”

  “You are the song of a bird? Why he thinks you are sweet and…”

  “How lasting is the song of a bird? The bird comes from the earth and goes back to the earth, but its song trembles sweetly in the air and becomes nothing, and is no longer even part of the bird.”

  “Anatsa, you cannot think like this!”

  From the trees above them came the call of the gambel sparrow, echoing in three notes twice repeated, and six plaintive little sounds came down from the tall pines and then were gone. Anatsa looked up. “Six notes,” she said softly. “Six notes falling slowly with sweet sound. Now they are gone, Maria, and did we really hear them at all?”

  “Anatsa, I will not listen to you talk such nonsense. How can that bird singing have anything to do with you? Maybe you hear the wind at night moving the bells of the tipis, and the sound of them makes you dream something. But what is a dream?”

  Anatsa looked at Maria strangely. “They are my dreams,” she said. “The Indian has always listened to the speaking of his dreams. Every brave seeks his medicine in a dream. If the bravest warrior dreams a bad dream before battle, he will not fight. The voice within him is a sacred voice, and is the voice of the Sun.”

  Maria looked away. “I will not argue with you if this is part of your religion—your talk with the Great Spirit.”

  “We all walk our own path,” Anatsa said, “and every path leads to the sun.”

  Maria sighed. “I do not follow your words.”

  “About Nakoa,” Anatsa said, “I cannot ask, if it is not in your heart to tell me.”

  “He did not hurt me last night,” Maria said. “He slapped my face in great rage, but his touch was not strong, and when we had finished talking, our talk with each other was not angry.” Hotness came to Maria’s face, and she clasped her hands tightly. “He is not taking me—the way he was. He is going to make me his second wife.”

  “Maria! Maria!” Anatsa exclaimed softly. “You can have a good life with us now! Maria, you will not be unclean, and as Nakoa’s wife…”

  “Second wife,” Maria said, her voice bitter.

  Anatsa heard the bitterness, and some of the gladness left her face. “You will be under the protection of Nakoa,” she said. “You will be kept clean. You can have a voice to speak to the Great Spirit! Nakoa will always be rich, Maria. Any girl in this village would give deep thanks to be Nakoa’s second wife!”

  “I do not want to be farmed out.”

  “I do not know your last words.”

  “I do not want to be used by every man in your village, but I do not want marriage with Nakoa either. I do not want to be—”

  “To be what?”

  Two other women had come to the lake, and Anatsa whispered so that they wouldn’t hear.

  “I do not want to be a second wife,” Maria said.

  “You will have to accept this,” Anatsa said. “Accept this and be thankful in your heart that you are being taken in marriage. When it is announced that Nakoa will marry you after he marries Nitanna, Siksikai will not harm you. He is afraid of Nakoa, for he knows Nakoa would enjoy ending his life.”

  Maria looked affectionately at Anatsa. “Why do you think of death and killing and shadowed dreams when your thoughts should be on marriage and children?”

  “I will not marry,” said Anatsa.

  “There were six notes even to that bird’s song. If you are the song of a bird, you have to take six steps, too!”

  Anatsa smiled.

  “You were born …”

  “And I was crippled.”

  “And you were crippled, and you fell in love.”

  Color came to Anatsa’s thin face.

  “There are three steps already!”

  “And I have grown in friendship with a white woman.”

  “Then you must take the fifth step, little bird! You must marry!” “Maria, Apikunni does not know me.”

  “He looked you full in the face at the Kissing Dance. Is this usually done?”

  “No.”

  “Then you will take the fifth step and marry Apikunni.”

  Anatsa laughed, the first time that Maria had ever seen her laugh. Her eyes shone. “Tell me how! You worked your magic on Nakoa. Give me some of the magic that you brought from the land of the rising sun!”

  “I will! I will tell that you have a lover in the Mutsik, and you must tell no one that this is not true. I will tell the whole village this.”

  Anatsa laughed again. “And how can you tell the whole village this?”

  “By telling Atsitsi of course!”

  Anatsa smiled, then shook her head. “I do not want it thought that I would go to a man’s couch without marriage!”

  “Of course you do not. I am sorry for what I said.”

  “I walk in the shadow of those who are whole, but I am not only my body. If I could, I would not give the body that I have to a man—to a man that… No, I speak with straight tongue—not even to Apikunni!”

  Maria understood her faltering words. “I know that you wouldn’t,” she said. She looked at Anatsa and heard a soft Spanish lullaby, and then saw her mother’s face cold and waxen in her coffin and the white naked breasts of Meg Summers. She shuddered.

  “Why do you tremble, Maria?” Anatsa asked.

  Maria looked out at the lake. “It is those women in the water. They must be cold.” The two women were swimming. The Blackfoot were strong swimmers, and the women used a stroke that Maria had never seen before. They did not use the breaststroke of the white man, but drew one arm at a time entirely out of the water and reached forward and pushed back with it. They seemed to move faster with much less fatigue.

  “That is not why you shuddered,” said Anatsa.

  “Your words made me think of my mother. You are a lady, Anatsa. A true lady. I have only known two of them. My mother, and Ana, my baby sister.” And they are both dead. They are both dead, but the breasts of Meg Summers are alive and warm.

  They walked slowly back to the village. Anatsa left her, and went toward the inner lodges, and Maria saw her nephew Mikapi run to meet her. Anatsa ruffled his hair affectionately, and then placed her hand upon his shoulders, as the two of them talked excitedly. Maria watched them until they were out of her sight, and then turned toward Atsitsi’s.

  Apikunni and Anatsa

  Chapter Ten />
  The spring of 1846 had been unusually warm and mild. Summer came early to the prairie; it touched the columbine, gaillardia, and the mountain golden rod, and they all bloomed before their time. Because the warmth of summer had come early, the running time of the buffalo, usually in the moon when the leaves turn, came in the moon of the flowers. Less than thirty miles from the village their shaggy forms blackened the prairie for miles around, and so it had to be the time for their hunting.

  All the societies of the Ikunuhkahtsi, except the Knatsomita and some of the Mutsik, left with their women for the buffalo grounds. The warriors that remained behind were to guard the village. For in this year, known on the Indian time stick as the sun of early spring, there had been seen sure sign of an enemy.

  The Blackfoot nation with its three tribes of Pikuni, Kainah, and Siksikauwa, and their two allies, the Sarcee and Atskina, protected their lands with studied vigilance—but their land was vast. Their holdings stretched from the northern branch of the Saskatchewan River in Canada, south to the mouth of the Yellowstone, and from the western summits of the Rockies east into the land of the Crow and the Dahcotah. Beyond this land was the Blackfoot enemy, the Crees to the north, the Assinoboines to the east, the Snakes, Kabspels, and Kutenais to the southwest and west. But most dreaded and hated of all was the Crow from the Badlands. For the Crow alone came boldly into Blackfoot land in the eternal Indian search for coups. To the Crow, a woman’s scalp, taken within sight of her village, counted as a coup equal to an Indian male’s, or the stealing of a great warrior’s horse.

  In that moon of the flowers, in July 1846, at the time of the great buffalo hunt, came the first sign of the Crow. There was a stray dog found near the village with a pack of Crow moccasins tied to his back, bruised grass made by a camp was seen in a mountain meadow, strange moccasin markings were discovered in the mud of a mountain stream bed, and so it was clearly known that a Crow war party was waiting in the mountains for the taking of scalps. The Mutsik who remained in the village rode out on patrol of the camp’s surrounding territory, and when they rode back, they were met by the Knatsomita, who did not return to the village until daybreak. Separate war parties rode to the mountains. Braves, mounted on warhorses, wearing war shirts of two thicknesses and carrying skinning knives for the lifting of scalps, became a common sight to Maria. She saw at close range the ash war bow and the war quivers filled with barbed arrows, glued so lightly to the shaft that the point of the arrow would remain in the wounded man even after the shaft was removed. Each warrior’s quiver contained one hundred arrows; he could fire from fifteen to twenty in one minute.