by Gayle Rogers
During the new vigilance the women were told to use the lake and to walk to the river only in the light of full day. They were to travel in groups, and to follow only the paths guarded by mounted Mutsik. Anatsa and Maria went to the lake together, but when Anatsa’s sister Apeecheken became ill in her pregnancy, it fell completely upon Anatsa to bring wood back from the river. At first Mikapi accompanied her, but with the inconsistency of a child, he became bored, and let Anatsa go with the women while he rode with some of the men, or gamboled with the other young boys of the tribe. Even with the other women, Anatsa hated going to the river, because across from it were the Pikuni burial grounds, with their dead buried openly on platforms high in the trees. She had been to the grounds only once, and she would never go again. There the sky had a different color to her, the wind a different sound, and the sky and the wind were both hungry to imprison her there forever. She could not remember when she had started fearing the dead sleeping across the water. She must have been born afraid of their shadow.
On the second day after the hunters had gone to seek the buffalo, Anatsa walked to the river, lagging behind the other women. Maria was not with her, and walking in the hot sunlight, she began to feel terribly alone and lost from the village behind her and the women ahead of her. If the Mutsik were patrolling the path she did not meet them. Anxiously she struggled to catch up with the women.
The banks of the river were cool, and deeply shaded. Anatsa gathered the scrub wood from among the willow thickets and snowberry bushes, listening to the murmuring voices of the women working to her right. The river rushed loudly through the groves of aspen and cottonwood that bordered it, and its noise made her unaware that the other women had gone.
She straightened, and listened intently for their voices. There was no sound of them above the water. Hastily, without even enough wood, Anatsa turned to go back to the village. She passed a bush of serviceberries, now ripe and ready for picking. She could have gathered some; Apeecheken could eat berries if she couldn’t eat meat, but Anatsa was too afraid to stop. All of her body listened for a strange or an alien movement, and her heart began to beat frantically with the feeling that she was not in the thicket alone. Would the scalp of a crippled woman count as a coup? Why would it not? she thought. Her scalp would bear no mark of a crippled leg!
Through the shadows of the trees she walked quietly, trying to move without any sound at all. In the willows ahead of her she saw a slight motion, but it was so slight that it could have been just a movement of the wind or the quick touch of some light-footed animal. Anatsa stopped and hugged the wood that she had gathered to her breast. Someone stood behind the willows; she knew this. Her heart struck at her in terror. Minutes passed, and she still remained motionless. The wind moved suddenly through the aspens, making them glitter with the sunlight they hid from her, and then the cottonwoods moved too, more slowly and lazily. The river rushed monotonously on, washing the shore of the dead, its water keeping the restless spirits of the ghost hills from the Blackfoot camp. Oh, if she were dead, she would travel the great Wolf Trail and never come back to stir unrest among the living! She would never speak through the air and the wind that another would come soon to rest beside her.
Something ahead moved again, and Anatsa saw a tall man in buckskin. She screamed and dropping her wood, tried to run from the thicket. “Anatsa!” someone shouted, and she stopped running, panting wildly. Apikunni walked to her. “Why are you here alone?” he asked her angrily. “Why have you come for wood at all?”
Shaking violently, Anatsa looked down. “There is no one else,” she said finally. “Apeecheken is sick with her baby.”
“You could come with the other women,” he said sternly.
“I cannot keep up with them.”
“I could have been Crow,” he said, still angry. “This morning their prints were found across the river, in the burial grounds.”
With her head averted from him, Anatsa walked slowly back to her wood. He followed her, watching her limp, seeing her drag her almost useless leg. She knew that he watched her leg, and her face became hot with misery.
“The Crow do not enter a burial ground at night either,” he said. “They have been there when women were here, gathering wood.”
“I am sorry,” Anatsa whispered.
“You can’t even run!”
She looked up into his face for the first time. “Or walk,” she said quietly. Their eyes held for a moment.
“Tomorrow I will come with you, and I will see that you return safely to the village. Do not ever come here alone again!”
“All right,” Anatsa said softly. She started through the thicket, and on the prairie, she saw Apikunni’s horse. He followed her and mounted his horse, riding slowly beside her. For a while they didn’t speak, Anatsa becoming more and more aware of her dragging walk. “I do not want you to wait for me!” she said suddenly.
“I will ride with you every day like this,” he said shortly.
The wood began to scratch Anatsa’s arms. When she had learned that Apikunni had not gone to the hunt with Nakoa and most of the Mutsik she had felt joy, but now that he was so close beside her, and spoke to her, she fervently wished that the earth would open up and swallow her. The wood was miserable. If she stopped and shifted it so that she would be more comfortable, she would be with him longer, and she couldn’t bear it. Her growing misery was broken by the sight of Maria walking toward them, followed at a distance by the sweating Atsitsi.
“You get by-damn wood!” Atsitsi was shouting.
“If I get the wood, I’ll have my own fire!” Maria shouted back.
“Full of big Maria now because Nakoa take you after Nitanna! He never marry you, no matter what he say! He never marry you—big fool Maria!”
“Oh, shut up!” Maria shouted. She saw Anatsa and Apikunni and smiled. “Tonight Atsitsi and I are going to have two fires,” she said.
“Hers and mine! Now that I am going to be wife to Nakoa, she can get her own wood!”
Atsitsi had caught up with her. “White woman full of Maria now,” she said.
Apikunni and Anatsa looked puzzled, for they could not follow Atsitsi when she broke into English.
Atsitsi scowled at Apikunni and scratched herself. “Why do you ride with Anatsa?” she asked him.
“Crow have been at the burial grounds. Do not go to the river by yourselves. After I take Anatsa to the village, I will come back and ride to the river with you.”
Maria laughed. “No Crow, no matter how ragged and starved for coups, would get near me with angel Atsitsi protecting me. That is all she has to do just smell for them!”
“I protect you for hell!” Atsitsi raged, and sat down. “We wait,” she said in Pikuni, and Maria sat down too, but a good distance away.
Apikunni smiled at Anatsa as they left Maria and Atsitsi alone. “They have their own language,” he said. “Nakoa’s woman is very beautiful,” he added.
Anatsa felt like nothing beside the incomparable beauty of Maria. The wood had scratched her arm, and shifting its position, she scratched herself again. Her arm was bleeding.
“You have hurt yourself,” Apikunni said. He reached down suddenly and took the wood. She was so thin; he had never before known that she was so delicate. He had heard that she prepared skins for lodges and clothing faster than any woman in the village, yet how could she even flesh a hide and soften it when she was so frail? She looked terribly unhappy. “What is the matter, Anatsa?” he asked her gently.
“You should not carry my wood.”
“That is not why you look at the ground and act afraid to meet my eyes.”
She said nothing, and he saw the hot flushing of her cheeks.
“You are friends with the white woman,” he said, trying to put her at ease with him.
“Yes,” she said briefly, still averting her face.
“She is beautiful, but she will bring no happiness to Nakoa.”
“Why do you say this?” Anatsa asked.
“She is white.”
“What reason is that?”
“She will always want her own people. She will not accept the people of Nakoa, and if she cannot accept them, she cannot accept him.”
“Why couldn’t a white woman accept us?”
“We do not walk in the white man’s way or wear his dress, and because we do not he thinks of us as animals, no better than the buffalo that he destroys without reason on our prairie.”
“How do you know this?”
“Natosin has talked to me of the white men. He used to travel to the Mandan villages and visit with his friend Mantatohpa before the sickness brought to them from the white man killed them all. The white man came to the Mandans in trade, and because the Mandans accepted them, sickness from the white man’s boats killed every man, woman, and child in their village. Natosin was there when they died. That is when all of his wives and children except Nakoa died with the sickness too.”
“Did Natosin see the white man too?”
“Natosin met only one white man, a medicine man who came among the Mandans to draw the Indian. He lived among the Mandans and the Dahcotah and persuaded some Indians to go back with him to the white man’s land, and there the white man looked upon the Indian with mockery and set him apart from men. The white medicine man had accepted the Indian with open heart, but the whites don’t listen to the voice of their medicine men.”
“Maria does not look upon us as something apart from men.”
“Maria is held as Nakoa’s captive. She cannot be free in her thinking.”
“Maria does not think with the mind of others! This is done by people with fear in their hearts, and Maria knows no fear!” For the first time Anatsa completely forgot herself and was fully communicating with Apikunni. Her beautiful eyes were flashing in anger and Apikunni looked at her strangely. He had never seen her before.
“Why do you become angry?” he asked softly.
“The white woman knows no fear,” Anatsa repeated stubbornly.
“Or wisdom. What did she think Nakoa’s feelings would be when she scratched his face and went to the Kissing Dance and chose Siksikai as her lover?”
“Who has thought of her feelings? She is white, but she has the feelings of an Indian! He should not even force her to marry him!” Apikunni looked at Anatsa in astonishment. “She is his!” he said. “She is his!” Anatsa mimicked furiously. “She is his!”
“He saved her life. He wants her and she is a white woman!”
“Oh, oh! So she should be destroyed—like the white man kills the buffalo?” Anatsa was shaking in rage. Apikunni watched her wordlessly. Her face was flushed and she met his eyes fearlessly. Why had he thought her pale, a shadow of a woman? He began to smile down at her thin outraged face. “What should Nakoa do with this woman?” he asked.
“He should set her free!”
“How? Where would he take her?”
“To the Nez Perces! They trade with the white man.”
“But they are our enemies!”
“It makes no difference.”
She walked indignantly ahead of him, her head held high. Grinning to himself, he followed her all of the way through the village, from the outer tipis to the inner circle of the high chiefs, and everywhere they walked, women stopped working and stared in astonishment at a brave carrying a woman’s wood. They came finally to Apeecheken who stood wordlessly at the door of her lodge. Never had she seen her little sister so haughty. When Apikunni handed Anatsa the wood, she refused to touch it, dropping it disdainfully at his feet. She then went inside, and Apikunni looked after her, still smiling. “The little flower has thorns,” he said, and rode his horse away.
Apeecheken angrily flung open the doorflap. “Now what is this? Is this what the Mutsik is to do for us now—carry a woman’s wood? What would he have done if he had met Crow, defended you with a serviceberry twig?”
The next morning Apeecheken became violently ill. She began to vomit and did not stop. She grew so weak that she could not leave the tipi. Isokinuhkin was sent for and said that she would lose her baby. Onesta would not leave his lodge, but sat outside of it, his face drawn and suffering. “I am afraid she will die,” he told Anatsa. “If she can not eat, the baby will die, and when a woman’s baby dies within her she dies too.”
Anatsa stirred food she was cooking for Onesta and Mikapi.
“She has to have food,” Onesta said despairingly.
“I have boiled her beard tongue, and gray leaves and apoksikim. The only thing left that could make her eat is otsqueeina. The berries are ripe now, but they are in the mountains.”
“Does not Isokinuhkin have the berries?”
“No. I have asked him. No woman in the village has any either.”
“Do you know where they are in the mountains?”
“Yes. I have gathered them with the women.”
“Then you will ride to the mountains today. One of the Mutsik can go with you. I will go to tell Natosin.” Onesta left, and Anatsa and Mikapi ate hurriedly and in silence. From the inside of the lodge came the sound of Apeecheken’s vomiting.
“Anatsa.” Apeecheken called weakly, and Anatsa went to her.
“I would like water,” Apeecheken said, wiping her face. Anatsa held her head and helped her drink. She heard Onesta’s voice, and the sound of the Mutsik who was already waiting for her.
“I am going to the mountains to get you otsqueeina,” she said to her sister. “You will eat by tomorrow.”
Apeecheken lay back on her couch exhausted. The Mutsik was talking to Onesta now, his voice clear to Anatsa’s ears. It was Apikunni! She stood still, and then with shaking hands hastily changed into another dress.
Apeecheken began to watch her with interest. Anatsa had selected a dress she had never worn before, and around her neck, hidden in the dress, she wore two little bags of meadow rue berries. She combed and braided her hair carefully, and then brushed it with the oil of sweet pine.
Apeecheken sighed. “You tremble, and your face glows, and you wear meadow rue berries and scent your hair with pine—all so you can be like this!”
Anatsa was silent, and Apeecheken looked at her tenderly. “Do not look so stricken, Anatsa. You are no different from the rest of us.”
Anatsa clutched at the meadow rue berries, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, if only I truly was not different,” she said softly, and went outside.
Apikunni smiled at her, his face warm. He held a horse for her, a light-footed mare, already blanketed and bridled. Anatsa smiled shyly back at him, and mounted the mare. Apikunni gestured to Onesta and then led Anatsa from the inner circle of high chiefs.
They rode without words through all of the outer tipis. Anatsa hung her head, and clutched her hands. Why hadn’t she spoken to him? Would all of the long day find her tongue dumb?
The smoke from the cooking fires rose in a haze over all of the tipis. The smell of burning wood and cooking meat was all around them, and curious eyes followed them from sight. Why would Apikunni be with her? the eyes would say, and then the voices would speak and the tongues move and say, “Anatsa is a cripple! Anatsa is a cripple!” Maria said that I am not my leg, Anatsa thought fiercely to herself.
They rode out of the village, and on the prairie the horses pranced spiritedly through the tall bunch grass. They passed the lake, calm and unruffled with no bathers or swimmers. In the shadow of the mountains they rode into carpets of pink loco weed, blue and white phacelia, and meadows colored with bluebells and Indian paintbrush. Their trail suddenly became steep and unmarked. Anatsa had given Apikunni the general direction they were to follow, but he picked their trail himself, avoiding both hilltops and ravines. He looked back at her when they entered the forest and smiled. “Your eyes do not flash fire this morning,” he said briefly, and said no more, because talk on the trail could be dangerous.
Anatsa watched him as he rode ahead. She knew that he studied every clump of trees, every group of tall ferns for any move
ment, any flashing of color. The mountains near the village were searched constantly by the Mutsik; she knew this and told herself that patrols were near the trail that Apikunni chose, but still she watched his exposed back and began to feel anxiety. She shivered. The sky seemed to her to have suddenly changed color, to be blue no longer. Yellow light gleamed evilly through the forest; she sensed that death followed them with pale eyes, like a killer cat. If only she were riding behind him on his horse and could protect his back with her body! Her hands grew numb, and when from the trees about them came the two toned cry of the curlew and then the soft notes of the myrtle warbler, she became convulsed in terror.
Apikunni turned and saw her face. He stopped his horse, and in silence they both sat among the thick trees, listening. Slowly Apikunni’s glance traveled all around them. Gradually the yellow light lifted; evil slipped into the shadow, and the sun came and made the sky above them blue again. He saw the change in Anatsa’s face, the fear and the terror were receding. Looking at her curiously, he prodded his horse onward once more.
They came to the higher reaches of the mountains, the region of pine and spruce. Their path hit shale, white and barren, burning now in the hot sun. They reached a shadowed stream, the horses walking up against its current, fetlock deep in its rushing waters. It was this stream that led to the meadow they sought.
“Here is your meadow,” Apikunni said, and Anatsa dismounted and started to gather the otsqueeina. Anatsa looked back at Apikunni. He had set the horse grazing on the summer thistle of which they were so fond, and was studying the grasses all around them. A black-tailed deer moved suddenly across the meadow; except for it, there was no sign of animal or man. Hastily, Anatsa filled her parfleche bag with cool, moist berries. It was a beautiful day. She looked at the shining green of the meadow, at the deep sky and softly moving clouds. She would never forget this day—the day she spent alone with Apikunni.