Nakoa's Woman

by Gayle Rogers

  “I know I am doing the right thing.”

  “Everything is neither right nor wrong. The right or wrong is in the choosing, the keeping, the losing. All paths are light and shadow, and every path is a different thing to each man. The right and the wrong; the good and the evil lie not upon the silent pathway, but in the man that walks it.”

  “Natosin, I told you long ago a stranger had come to me, and you said that I should feel blessed. How could I be blessed when I have lost so much? I have lost my family, my friend Anatsa, my husband—your son. I have lost everything!”

  “And you are deeply blessed. A stranger met is not a stranger. The dead are gone but not lost. The stranger to yourself has come and has brought the turmoil, but you know the storm, and you feel the storm, and after every storm comes peace.”

  “Where? How?”

  “You will see. You will know. You will climb my daughter, and in great height and great silence, you will know!”

  Maria smiled now. “It will be the silence after the storm?”

  He looked at her intently. “You will have accepted. And then you will be free to marry.”

  “I do not know your words, but behind them I know love and kindness. You are a great and a good man, Natosin.”

  “I wish I could give you more than words. I know my son’s love for you. I was an old old man the night he said he would marry you, the night the head chiefs agreed that he walked alone as your husband. This morning you leave; my son has set you free, and again I am an old, old man. Good-bye, my daughter. Your Indian father wishes you well. May your path lead upward toward the sun. May you walk a long and a straight path, and at the end …”

  “Find myself. Thank you for speaking to me, as you did to your own people when the Sun Dance had ended.” Tears stood in her eyes. “Thank you, and may Napi travel with you always.”

  Apikunni had come and had saddled the bay. She mounted the horse swiftly, and as she and Apikunni rode away, she looked back at Natosin once more. Straight and tall he stood, his long gray locks moving slightly in the wind.

  Cooking fires had already been started. It was long after dawn, and many women moved about the tipis. Two other Mutsik joined them; Maria did not even look at their faces, but searched instead for Sikapischis and Apeecheken; Apeecheken had left the inner circle, and Maria saw her and rode over to tell her good-bye. Sikapischis was with a large group of women talking together, and she left them, and came to Maria and Apeecheken. “You are leaving us,” she said, reaching up and taking Maria’s hand.

  “Yes. Nakoa has set me free. I return now to my own people.”

  “I thought that Nakoa had done this. That is why my heart had no words for you yesterday.”

  “Maria,” Apeecheken asked. “Do you want this freedom?”

  “Yes. I have to be free. I could live no other way now.”

  “We will always remember you,” Sikapischis said. “We will always remember you, and this time that we shared together.”

  “I am proud in our friendship,” Maria whispered, stung by the sadness in their black eyes. She saw Nakoa’s eyes again, black, luminous with the light of a thousand candles that had gone out, one by one. “Amba wastayeh! Good-bye, good-bye!”

  She turned the bay toward the three men who quietly waited for her. Apart from the group of silent women watching her, stood Atsitsi. She looked up at Maria, her little black eyes squinting against the bright sky.

  Maria turned quickly away, but her eyes were drawn back. Atsitsi began to scratch, and their eyes met and locked.

  The bay walked back to her, and Maria took the fat woman’s unwashed hand and clasped it within her own. “Good-bye, Atsitsi,” she said softly.

  Atsitsi sucked and gummed her meat, and finally spat it out. “Leave fast before Nakoa have time to change mind. Who need you?” She scratched harder, watching Maria defiantly. Still scratching, she went into her lodge.

  They rode from the village. The bay moved ahead eagerly; he could hardly be restrained to a walk. Good-bye, Nakoa. She had said this before, when she had crossed the lake on her way to the burial grounds. Before they left sight of the camp, she turned back one time. She looked at the inner circle of the high chiefs, and the brilliant colors upon all of the lodges ran together like paint, colors that she used to play with as a child. Tears came again. Good-bye! She used the Blackfoot word, even in her mind. Amba wastayeh! Amba wastayeh!

  Chapter Thirty

  The trail was cool tree shadowed and soft with fallen leaves. The hoofs of the horses moved over pine needles, rustled the brown and gold leaves of the oaks to brief activity, and then in deeper shadow, moved noiselessly through leaf mold. Leaves were constantly drifting down under the oaks. Maria looked up at them and thought of her father’s orchard, and of how as a girl, she loved to run among the trees in the autumn, and catch their falling leaves. Each one, she had pretended, was a life, and by catching it and keeping it from the ground she allowed that life to continue. Happy, and worn out finally with her goodness, she would walk home, and through the quiet dusk see the lamp lights burning. She forgot what she had done finally with the rescued leaves. She must have dropped them upon the path from the orchard. So she had not saved them after all. She had tried so hard to be good. She had to try extra hard, for she had something that sweet Ana did not; she bore a wicked shadow that, from early days, made men turn and look at her.

  One day a man had come to the farm and had visited for a long time with her father. Helping her mother in the kitchen, she caught the man’s eyes upon her bodice several times; when she had finished with her work, she had gone to the cellar, and with cold hands touched her burning face, for the man’s looks had made her ashamed of her young breasts.

  She remembered the smell of apples cold in the cellar, and her heart lurched to go home. Gone for her now was the springtime, the time of youth; gone for her now was even the summertime, with bees buzzing lazily in summer flowers. Gone now was everything but the blue cold winter.

  Maria looked at Apikunni and the two men with him, Opiowan and Ahkiona. They were three of the original five Mutsik that had brought her from Snake land. Siksikai was dead, his carcass already eaten by the wolves, and Nakoa was in the winter forest.

  “I leave you a virgin but for two meetings,” he had said. She thought of the first meeting, their mating in the shadow of ferns, upon earth, meadow grass. They had met like animals, and yet there had been a trembling sweetness with the wild ecstasy, the shaking ecstasy, that made everything else move out of existence.

  She had to stop thinking of their lovemaking. She looked up at the sky. High thin clouds were coming to it. The day was growing cold. Apikunni came to her side.

  “The warm days are gone,” he said. “Look, the geese are flying high. It is sign of a hard winter.”

  “Coming back, won’t you be caught in the snows?”

  “We can camp. We can pitch our lodge in a sheltered place until the circle camp meets in the spring.”

  “Apikunni, why did he send me away on this—this verge of winter?”

  “Waiting is too bitter. Nakoa is my friend, and friend to Opiowan and Ahkiona too. The feel of a blizzard would be nothing to us to the feeling Nakoa would have if you lived with him until spring. You have departed one from the other and must separate at the time of departure.”

  “My heart is heavy at this leaving of your people.”

  “How will you remember the Indian, Maria?”

  “With respect.”

  “With liking?”

  “Yes. With very much liking.”

  Ahead of them, Opiowan stopped his horse and pointed up to the sky. Maria followed the direction of his hand and saw strange bright crosses of light shining near the sun. “What are they?” she asked Apikunni.

  “Sun dogs. They mean that a great storm is coming down to us from the north.”

  “Are we going to stop and make camp?”

  “No. The storm will not reach us before nightfall. We will ride u
ntil it is dark and then we will camp.”

  “When will we be able to go on?”

  “When the storm passes.”

  “Will we not be snowbound?”

  “No. The chinook will come, and will melt the snow.”

  “The chinook?”

  “The warm wind from the west. It fights the cold-maker, and melts heavy snow in less than one day.”

  They rode silently on. After they had stopped and eaten, the sky grew more and more threatening. Over the mountain, black masses of clouds piled up swiftly from the north, and bands of mist drifted ghostlike against its dark shoulder. The winds grew, roaring through the pines, deafening them all. At dusk they were suddenly stung with a furious blast of hail and sleet. Maria shrank into the warmth of her buffalo robe, blindly following the others as she bent low over the bay’s neck. The horses became covered with white frost, and icicles formed on their muzzles and matted their tails. Snow fell, and began to drift through Maria’s clothing, sifting coldly down her neck, and filling her eyes and her mouth with its thick white pall. Darkness would not come, and Maria thought that she would suffocate. There was no air, no sky, only thick white, drifting down from the treetops and burying them all.

  “Here,” she heard Apikunni shout, and in this known camping site, the men assembled the tipi and put a large supply of wood in side. They dug the fire pit, adjusted the doorflaps of the lodge to suit the wind, and built a large fire. To hold the lodge anchored against the growing storm outside, they weighted its pegs down with stones, tied a lariat around the apex of its poles and anchored it to stakes driven in the ground. Near the skins of the lodge, the horses huddled, heads down, as if they could feel warmth too from the fire within.

  Around the dancing fire they ate, and finally they slept. All night icy pellets lashed against the lodge, but inside of its double skins and by its fire it was warm and comfortable. There were other shelters besides white man’s wood.

  For three days and three nights snow continued to fall, and the wind howled crazily. The lodge poles creaked and groaned under its mighty onslaught, and great gusts swept down the smokehole and sent them all into spasms of coughing.

  The men left the lodge when it was necessary, and in time Maria had to do this too. Even after her long period of living among the Blackfoot, this still caused her embarrassment. Oh, the body, the hated troublesome body! The body that had to be fed and had to be clothed, and went on and on with its disgusting animal functions.

  Nakoa, you loved my body naked. Why could I not love my body naked? Atsitsi, forgive me! Forgive Maria—big with herself! Forgive the two Marias that had not the courage to accept each other!

  Gentle Anatsa, my frail crippled friend! To you I turned, but did not hear, and now your tongue is silent and will not speak again! Anatsa—Ana—I lost you twice, and when I thought I was saving the leaves, I was only keeping them from nourishing their mother.

  Upon the fourth morning the storm ended, as Apikunni said it would; then the warm chinook came, melting much of the snow. The fifth day they broke camp and traveled the thin trail once more that wound down the mountain to the prairie below.

  The sky was bright and clear, and the wind cold enough to crust the snow again so that it crunched beneath the horses’ hoofs. They rode to a valley, deep with powdery drifts that had been rippled by the chinook and frozen into lapping little waves by the north wind. It seemed a frozen sea, and through it the horses pranced spiritedly, arching their necks and blowing in the brisk air so their breath clung wraithlike to them.

  They crossed the valley and came to a small glen when Apikunni, who was leading the party, signaled for them to stop. He stayed away from them and sat his horse without moving or speaking. While the rest of them waited, they ate and looked after him curiously. High in the snow-covered trees, the wind moved out strongly and sorrowfully.

  He had almost not seen Anatsa’s glen. He had almost ridden by it, covered with its first snows. His heart gave a violent wrench, as if with his unseeing eyes he had hurt her. He listened intently to the forest sounds around him, but in winter there were no sounds of spring. His horse moved, pawing at the ground and nuzzling the cold earth.

  If the stream were moving again, between its banks of moss and swamp laurel she would be alive. If the stream were flowing down into the river again, from its waters she would drink.

  He bowed his head. In the cold air he felt tears cold upon his cheeks. Napi-mi notchokeaman! Where is my strength? A shadow darkens all of the land and hides the sun! Spring will come again and the water frozen into silence at my feet will flow again—but the winter of my heart will remain. Anatsa, my love, my bride, I cannot bear the pain of a knife in your heart!

  The wind moved more sadly through the pines and Apikunni remembered their day at the glen so vividly that he shook in agony. He would wail her name to the end of his days but it would do no good.

  Gently, chidingly she came to him. Swiftly, suddenly, lovingly, and shy no longer, she entered his soul. In their love they were joined, closer than man and wife; death had not torn them asunder. She was too close for words; he felt her love, and the solace of her own deep serenity. Her joy was a flame in the blackness of his desolation. In the radiance of her being he saw the endless limits of his own. He would never accept her death again except as illusion. He did not know how long she stayed with him, for time no longer bound them. She had freed him from the agony of thinking her lost.

  The swamp laurel bloomed a delicate pink; the green moss shadowed the moving stream and the deep pool that had caught her image. Tears were gone from his face; the wind no longer mourned at the coming winter. The world was a toy for them both; their meeting was not confined to its limits.

  His horse was moving restlessly. Apikunni saw that the others had finished eating and were waiting for him. He led them forward on the trail again. Maria rode to him and looked anxiously into his face. “Do you not want to eat?” she asked him.

  He turned to her, his eyes burning with a radiance. “I have eaten,” he said. “I am sustained.”

  “And now I will speak to you,” Apikunni said to Maria as he rode beside her. “I was going to say nothing and lead you to the white man’s trail without words of love, but now I will speak.”

  “I listen to your words.”

  “At this glen, where we halted, I stopped in agony and grieved for Anatsa. It was here that I saw her for the first time. It was last spring when we rode to the mountains for the otsqueeina.”

  “I remember the morning you left for the mountains. The day before Atsitsi and I met you coming back from the river together.”

  “It might have been that my seeing her started that day. I do not know. But all my life, Anatsa was before my eyes. I think of her now, see her now, running as a little girl, running in such a strange manner, trying so hard with her crippled leg. I laughed at her trying to run, and wondered why she did not just walk.”

  “She heard the laughter and ran no more.”

  “I do not know. She might have stopped running in the village, but I feel that here, in these mountains, she could run like a young colt, tasting the wind of her running, the passing sky, and loving it.”

  “How can you speak so lightly of her crippled leg that brought her so much suffering?”

  “She is crippled no more. Beauty has died, and is whole and complete, because I have seen what I cannot see, and in my blindness have accepted. That day at the glen the banks bloomed with swamp laurel, and the flowing stream became an island against the heat of the day. On the way up the mountain trail, she rode with me in such shyness. Talk between us was painful even when we halted for the otsqueeina, but there, at the glen, she drank from the pool and she changed, or I changed, and I saw her—really saw her. And today—how can I speak of today? My tongue struggles to say what I would, but my heart has reached so far beyond it!” His voice shook. “Today Anatsa came to me; she became a part of me. Her feelings were my feelings. We did not need talk. Our hearts
were one. The winter of my grief is gone; she brought spring to my soul.” Again Maria saw the radiance of his eyes, of his whole face.

  “I am glad for this, Apikunni. I am so glad in my heart.”

  “I cannot keep this shining love to myself. You must feel it too; I will tell you of the love between Anatsa and me.”

  “I hear, Apikunni.”

  “Maria, there is sight without seeing. I saw Anatsa today when she was a part of me. All of my life I had seen her, but in blindness. Anatsa to me was her crippled leg—her run that brought laughter to us all. I remember now, at the Kissing Dance, when I saw Anatsa enter with you, I was afraid that she might choose me for a lover.”

  “Oh, Apikunni! Apikunni!” Maria said sorrowfully, and tears flowed unchecked from her eyes.

  “Eyes, awake and open, yet seeing without sight! I curse their blindness that kept me away from her for one day, one hour before our marriage! If I could have had her for my bride one full moon. If the moon could have come to the sky and grown into fullness just one time with Anatsa—my wife!”

  “Do not grieve, Apikunni.”

  “I do not grieve for her now. I grieve for blindness that kept me from seeing her until that afternoon at the glen. I remember she bent over a pool there and when she arose she was like a water spirit. She was free and she told me that she used to dream of me as a lover there. She held some swamp laurel to her face and her eyes glowed with love for me. I thought she had risen like a magical spirit of both earth and water, for she was suddenly the beauty of both, and I wanted her and felt pain at my long self-denial. She was trembling when I touched her hand; and when I held her and kissed her, it seemed to me that she was shaking white foam, of neither land nor stream. I would shield her with my hands, but she would soon be gone. I knew this, Maria, I knew this!”

  “Six notes of a gambel sparrow, a song of neither earth nor air.”

  “Why do you say this?”

  “This is how she saw her life. She knew that she would die soon. She said she would rest in the burial grounds before her time.”