by Gayle Rogers
When he saw that she had filled her bag, he led the horses to where she stood and silently helped her mount. With Indian caution he chose a different route down the mountain, and soon they followed the course of another stream. Branches slapped ruthlessly at them; the horses slipped and stumbled on rocks and pebbles, brushing them sharply against the banks, and they rode on and on in the ribboned sunlight with not a word between them. They were nearing the foothills, for Anatsa recognized the vicinity of her glen. She began to feel some of its power, and wondering at herself, Anatsa signaled Apikunni to leave the stream and follow her. He looked amused, and motioned her ahead, for now they were close to the prairie and the Blackfoot camp. Smiling, she set the trail, and for a while they traveled in the hot sunlight, and the horses began to sweat. Ahead of them two mountain slopes came together and here was her glen. Here was a smaller stream, gently moving; for a while the water was caught in a pool, a shadow of refuge in the summer heat. By it, Anatsa halted her horse, dismounting and looking up at Apikunni with shining eyes. “This is my place,” she said softly.
He slid from his horse. “It is beautiful,” he said, captured by her eyes. He sat with her at the edge of the pool. The stream had been caught in a beaver dam and as it moved away, ripples pushed out at its mossy banks.
Her luminous eyes held him enchanted. They held deeper serenity than the water. Outside their refuge the forest hummed with life and heat. He felt a hunger he had never known. He studied her face soberly, and when she shyly turned away, he reached for her thin shoulders and brought her lips to his. At the feel of her frailty he burned to take more of her and was torn between the desire to seize her entirely and the need to shield her innocence. The confusion of his emotions made him dizzy. When he looked at her again, she was stretched out upon her stomach, lying upon the soft moss.
“Why is this—your place?” he asked her, his heart still pounding enough to keep him aware of its agitation.
“This glen nourishes me,” she said, smiling up at him. A bed of wild strawberries lay near them, and she plucked a berry, putting it into her mouth, making a wry face.
“I hope it feeds you better than that,” he answered with a boyish grin.
“Oh, it does,” she answered quickly. “Here, I could even accept your kiss.”
“Was that so hard for you to do?”
“Yes.”
He looked deeply hurt. “You do have a lover! I could not believe it; I could not believe that you have accepted a man!”
“I have!” she flashed angrily, thinking he mocked her leg. “I have met him here, I have met him here many times!”
Now he looked away from her, deeply depressed. “Do not speak to me of it.”
“I will. I lie here with him, and upon this moss we sleep through many afternoons together. He kisses me and I kiss him.”
“Stop your words. They are not for me.”
“And here I also have the forest people that I have created, that live in those great ferns, and when I come here, they sing happily, and talk lovingly and tell me that I am—I am.” She stopped, tears rushing down her cheeks. “Apikunni, it is all created by me. The people, the songs—and you as my lover! That is why it was so hard for me to accept your embrace.”
“Why?”
“Because it is wrong for me to love you! I am crippled, and I cannot even crawl like a baby! This is my secret place just for dreams. I have no right to bring you into them.”
Trembling within himself, he covered her shaking hands with his own.
“Do not pity me,” she whispered.
He gently wiped away the tears that were still falling from her closed lashes. He took her in his arms and kissed her again, warming her whole body with his. He kept embracing her until she relaxed. He kissed her until she forgot about herself and knew only his rising passion. He kissed her until she met him with a passion equal to his own. Finally, in exquisite tenderness they separated, and looked into each other’s eyes. He then picked some swamp laurel that bloomed near them, and handed her the pink flowers. She smelled them, and with her large eyes luminous with feeling, held them to her lips. She was the most beautiful of women.
Outside of the glen, the touch of the sun was warm and untroubled. A wisp of cloud moved against the blue sky. High above them she could see a curlew circling, and then its shadow skimmed the earth near them and it landed in the next valley glade, calling back to them sweetly.
He touched her face with his hands, loving the look of the pink flowers against her vivid coloring. “Anatsa!” he said wondrously. “Anatsa!”
Suddenly the curlew flew from its shelter in alarm, circling in great sweeping strokes and refusing to land. Anatsa looked up at it and saw the color of the sky change to the waxen look of flesh after life has left it. She felt the coldness of the Wolf Trail that stretches across the night sky.
“What is it?” Apikunni whispered, dropping her hands. He looked around them.
The forest had become deadly still. More birds had flown away. Apikunni crouched and drew his knife. A gentle wind came for a while to the pines and then fell to silence. Their horses turned toward the opposite bank, their ears cocked.
“Sahpos!” Apikunni hissed, and using the bank as shelter, rapidly crossed the pond and disappeared in the direction in which the horses were looking.
There wasn’t a sound. Anatsa clutched at the moss in agony. Napi, let your power be within him!
The little pool lapped at her legs. With her heart in her throat she watched its widening ripples, like an eye that widened to vanish, so swiftly, so silently. What did it see? What, besides the face of the deer, the elk, the mountain goat, or the white wolf? Did it see those who came for its sustenance? Did it know her ugliness—her weakness? So swiftly the little images came and disappeared, what mattered was that the eye was unchanging. You could agitate the waters, but not the final image. Reality ultimately reflected itself in its own mirror of perfection, so she would never feel imperfect again. Her glen had sustained her, and this magical eye of the mountain had made her see beyond her frail flesh. When Apikunni returned, he returned to her, and she caressed his face with a wild abandon that even their caressing before had not aroused.
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 Ana
tsa 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 sav
ages 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?