Despite the two defeats at Fort Ridgely and two at New Ulm, despite the strange night wind and their morning stiffness, the air rippled with excitement. Barking dogs ran among the fallen teepees. Everywhere people moved in the tallgrass and prepared for their journey.
Blue Sky Woman sent Hazel down to the river to gather water. On the way back, the strap tight around her head, she was surrounded by boys with stones. A tall, lean boy flung one that struck her in the shoulder and dropped her to her knees. Others raised their arms. As a few pebbles skittered past her, Hazel threw off the headstrap and splashed the contents of the skin container on the boy who had hurled the rock. “Shame on you!” she shouted at the others in Dakota. “I am tioysape . I am the wife of Wanikiya. When he returns he will punish you. He will tear your braids out by the roots!”
It was an empty threat, but the children shrank from her. Hazel picked up the handful of pebbles they had thrown and hurled them back, all the time shouting and calling them dogs and mice. The children scattered before her anger. She was breathing hard, her face hot and red. Another shadow appeared on the hill above and she looked up into the sun, her arm cocked back and ready to throw.
“Wife?” said the voice in Dakota. Wanikiya’s voice. Hazel let the stone drop. He must not have heard yet. This was not the way she envisioned him finding out what Tamaha had said. With what dignity she could muster, she gathered the spilled container and headstrap and walked past him.
Wanikiya stepped aside to let her pass, watching her with curious eyes.
Many images troubled Hazel during the Dakota’s long flight into Yellow Medicine Country. The first was of a white-spotted dog that lay in the crushed grass near Pretty Singer’s fallen teepee. Long ago, when they had first come among the Dakota, Hazel had seen this old hound nuzzling Tatanyandowan’s hand. The dog’s ears were lowered; it showed no signs of joining the train. The rest of the encampment had been bundled up, ready for the journey. The canvas fluttered white and ghostly in the morning wind, the cedar teepee poles sheared off in some places by the night storm. It was as if the wind had carried him off. Not a trace of Pretty Singer anywhere. None remembered where he had last been seen. He was a headstrong warrior, known to ride off alone, obeying only his own impulses. But his accouterments of battle, his tree-dweller totem—a hag figure sewn with raccoon skin, hoary cottonwood bark and Ojibwe scalps—and other belongings had been left behind.
Blue Sky Woman whispered something to Wanikiya. The boy glanced at Hazel and then back at the remains of the teepee. She waited for the Indians to decide to search the river, to find the body. But it was time for them to go. Pretty Singer had left them once before without explanation and perhaps he had done so again. Only Blue Sky Woman, and now perhaps Wanikiya, guessed at the truth. Only that white-spotted dog, which remained behind while the rest of the camp rode on, seemed to care.
Hazel rode in the back of an ox-cart beside Tamaha, who was somber, fully dressed in his regalia topped off by the cap of buffalo horns that made him look fierce and devilish.
It was rumored that the Long Trader, Colonel Sibley, was coming for them with wagon guns, but the Indians did not hurry. Again the ponies were decked with festive ribbons, the spotted horses neighing with excitement, tails and manes tied with bells that jingled as they pranced among the dust-clouds raised by the bawling oxen. Even some captives couldn’t help smiling at the sight unfolding before them: warriors dressed in their captured booty, wearing women’s bonnets and silken pantaloons tied around their shoulders, streaming behind them like nobleman’s capes. One warrior wore a necklace of gold pocket watches strung around his throat. The cases of the watches had been emptied out, stripped of the innards that once gave them purpose. Boys blew on tin horns and clapped copper pans together and there was a constant ululation, the women trilling victory songs, the sounds rising and falling in waves along the mile-long line of ox-carts, livestock, and riders. Men wore American flags sewn into war shirts, fancied themselves in white-crepe shawls wound like turbans around their heads. They raised such a cloud of dust in the bright morning stillness Hazel was sure they would be seen from miles away. Around them clouds of blackbirds erupted from the burr oak forests and Hazel’s mind was cast back to their first sight of the valley, that snowy day they rode on the steamer to New Ulm, to see only the birds, alive and moving like so many dark leaves.
Throughout the journey elders from the Wahpetons and Sissetons rode up on their ponies and visited with Tamaha. One of the warriors greeted Hazel in English, a short black-skinned Indian in white man’s trousers, topped with a beaver hat like a gentleman. “I am called Paul,” he said. “You have not been hurt?”
Hazel shook her head. Indeed she had been lucky, protected. Paul turned back and continued to talk with Tamaha in Dakota. Little Crow and the Lower Sioux had not consulted before attacking the settlements. The majority of the Upper Sioux had no intention of taking part in the war. They were angry. When they made camp the Sisseton and Wahpetons separated themselves and went to the other side of the river. They declared themselves the “peace party.” With them the captives could find safe treatment. With each passing day Little Crow’s hold on his own people diminished.
In the Yellow Medicine country they camped in a valley. The teepees were set up near a set of undulating hills of grass where it was said the ancients had buried their dead in elaborate mounds. The Dakota claimed the ancients lived in the time of giants, Unkteri , and hunted great beasts, twice the size of buffalo. In time the ancients acquired such powerful magic they learned how to cross over into the other world and they left this one behind, not knowing if they would ever be able to get back. Sometimes they managed to cross back over and visit their dead, lonely for the valleys they once knew. It was said the men and women wore headdresses made of antlers and were fleet as deer. If they encountered Dakota warriors or maidens they would lure them away with the secrets of this other world and those people would never be seen again.
In this haunted place, they set up camp. On the hill above them, clearly visible in the twilight, Hazel saw the tall, whitewashed buildings of the Upper Agency. A brick warehouse was flanked by a schoolhouse with a pretty steeple. Hazel felt herself standing between two worlds. On one side there were the mounds of a people long since passed away; on the other, all that remained of her own people, the empty buildings they had left behind.
WEDDING
NIGHT
BLUE SKY WOMAN was waiting for her when she came back to the teepee, a blood-red woolen blanket folded in her lap. Hazel went to arrange her grass sleeping mat and saw that this was rolled up and tied with a sinew along with Winona’s awl. She looked back at Blue Sky Woman who held out the blanket silently. “Tonight,” she said as she rose and folded the red blanket around Hazel’s shoulders, “will be your wowinape .”
It was late and the only sounds in the camp were distant gunshots, some of the braves drunk now with liquor taken from agency stores. Here and there the half-wolf curs took up their wolf song.
Blue Sky Woman drew a hot needle through Hazel’s earlobes, her voice soft as breath, saying, “Yes, it will be like that, pain and joy together.” Then Winona’s tin earrings, bells and crosses, were hanging from Hazel’s ears. She felt the weight of them, felt the dull pain that remained even after Blue Sky Woman dabbed the blood spots with balm. She felt somehow that her disguise was completed. She was transformed.
The violent winds of the night before had died down. Her wedding night was nothing like other Dakota weddings. There was no pony for her to ride to her suitor’s teepee. There were no crowds of people waiting on either side to watch and cheer the bride. Most of the village was sleeping. There was no nearest relative waiting to greet Hazel at the entrance of the teepee, to fire off a gun over her head and signal that the ceremony was complete. Only Blue Sky Woman was there and Otter as she walked through a damp summer night, the blood-red bridal blanket around her shoulders. Hazel turned to look back at the woman who had been her protect
or for these last few weeks, and then ducked under the teopa to meet her husband.
Wanikiya sat across from her, his braids undone, his hair coppered by the near firelight. He looked composed and otherworldly, as though he shared none of her fears. His eyes didn’t meet hers at first. The air was so damp out that she could see her breath in the room. Was it really completed now? Is this all it took for her to become a bride? Despite all she had seen and done, she was still only a sixteen-year-old girl. But her mother had been a child bride; Hazel remembered the daguerreotype portrait and the sense of her mother’s fierceness. What would her pa do when he heard she had married an Indian?
Swaying on her feet, the wool blanket itching her shoulders, she waited for her groom to speak. At last, he said, “Sit,” so quietly that he had to repeat himself.
Hazel let her eyes fall. He was looking at her intently. “I remember the first time I heard you speaking English the night when you stopped my wound. You whispered in my ears and I could hear the unwinding of your life story, a thread somehow I could follow. Your story has been threading into mine ever since, as tightly as those that make your blanket. Even when I was away from you I went on hearing your voice. All these winters that I have been with Tatanyandowan, learning how to be brave, I haven’t stopped thinking of you. You said you do not know me anymore. It is true. I also do not know you. But your cord is bound with mine and so now you are here.”
Hazel’s vision blurred with sudden tears. Until this moment she had never heard him speak at length. Their relationship was based on glance and gesture, touch and quiet. He was no longer the boy she knew. She was overcome with the sense that she had made a mistake; maybe this ceremony could be undone. She did not belong here with him. She would go back to Blue Sky Woman.
“Where are you going?” he said as she ducked under the door and went out into the dark.
In the distance she heard the continued chucka-chucka sound of the drunks firing their shotguns at shadows in the trees. A lone dog howled at the outskirts of the camp. The ponies, in a corral of loose brush, stirred restlessly. The planet her father called the Shepherd’s Star, Venus, was low on the horizon. She heard Wanikiya’s voice behind her. “You can’t go back,” he said. “Blue Sky Woman can’t keep you safe any longer. You’re with me now.” He was close to her now, his breathing audible. He touched her arm and she allowed herself to be led back into the teepee.
He unfolded one of the buffalo blankets and stifled a yawn. Was she expected to sleep with him this night? Hazel hesitated. How did a man and woman fit together? Would it be violent like with Tatanyandowan at the river? If Emma had lived would she have told her such things so she would not have to be afraid?
“Come,” he told her. “I am tired.”
She knelt on the blankets and then felt his hands touching her sore ears as he took off the tin earrings and lay them gently to the side. Wanikiya undid her tightly wound braids, the ribbons that Blue Sky Woman had woven through her hair. He laid her back against the softness of the blankets. His fire had dimmed to ashes. He folded a blanket over her and then moved away. In this way only did he touch her the first night.
She lay awake for a long time, looking at his back in the shadows, thinking: This is what it means to be married?
She didn’t meet his eyes when he returned. She had their fire going, and had placed cedar flatboards near the heat on which she was baking mashed cornbread, the sweet smell filling the enclosure. His hair was dark and wet and he smelled of the river. He wore a doeskin bag around his throat, his medicine bag she knew, something she wasn’t allowed to touch because a woman’s menstrual blood could strip away a warrior’s power. The doeskin bag was beaded with the shape of an owl’s watching yellow eye. She knew that it contained owl’s down and a few pebbles darkened with pictograms. She knew as well that the pebbles had belonged to his father, Seeing Stone, who spoke the language of stones. Hazel wondered if he had come to understand his father’s magic in the time they had been apart or if the stones were still silent when he held them in the palm of his hand. She remembered the second time she had seen him, crouched above the tiny body of an owl he had killed, grief raw in his voice. While she watched him, Wanikiya went to his corner and cast aside the rumpled blankets.
What he uncovered horrified her. It was a totem figure carved of knobby cottonwood bark. The feet were made of severed raccoon paws, webbed for swimming. The face looked like the skull of some creature, a baby possum with bared teeth, but the carved torso was that of a man, its phallus elongated and distended. Glued to the skull was black hair—human, she realized—perhaps cut from an Ojibwe scalp. The figure was both crude and disturbing.
“Do you know this?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“I took it from Tatanyandowan’s teepee. It’s the Canotina. The tree-dweller. Sometimes he danced with this totem strung around his throat.” The cornbread had begun to smoke and blacken at the edges. She took it from the fire and passed one of the boards across to him. The bread had burned along the bottom but it tasted sweet and warmed her throat on the way down.
“My first memory is of my mother and sister drowning. I should not remember it; maybe it is only that I have heard the story so many times, how I was left tied to a tree in my cradleboard and saw them break through the ice. You see, the Canotina gives power to warriors like Pretty Singer, but in turn it asks the names of those you love and it takes their lives. The Canotina is one of the most terrible spirits.”
“I know,” she said. “You told me once. Would you really want such power?”
He pinched away a thumbnail of crumbling cornbread and swallowed it. She watched him to see if he was pleased. He said nothing and washed the bread down with a swig of water. Was it too dry, had she left it to cook too long? “Last night the Canotina came to me in a dream,” he said. “It spoke about my brother’s death.”
“Wanikiya. . . .”
“I know what you did,” he said. “I am not sorry.” He set down the cedar board that held the bread. “After Winona died, Hanyokeyah left with Tatanyandowan to search for Inkpaduta. He never returned. I knew when Tatanyandowan came back alone that the old man was dead. I waited for my brother to kill me too. But that is not what he wanted. What he wanted was for me to become like him.”
“You’re not him,” she said, thinking of the emptiness in Tatanyan-dowan’s eyes.
“In the moon when the wind shakes the leaves from the tree, Tatanyandowan took me north. We were not hunting deer to provide for our camp. We hunted Ojibwe. We found what we searched for when one old man and a boy left their camp. The old man went down trying to shield the boy. Though the boy had only a knife, he did not run. He stayed near his dying grandfather until Tatanyandowan gunned him down. My brother cut the old man’s scalp from his head while he was still alive and then we fled. I counted coup with my brother. I touched the dying man and dead child, wishing that one day I would be as brave as that boy.”
“You are,” she said, “though you don’t know it yet.”
From the gathered belongings he also took his headband with its two feathers that he’d earned from counting coup. “The canotina,” he continued, “promised me even greater power than my brother, power to destroy. In my dream he looked just like this figure that Tatanyandowan made. I’ve been wanting a dream of power for so long. Twice in the past summers I have gone alone in the woods for four days as the Zuya Wakan instructed and dug a hole and listened in the clouds and winds. Twice, no vision has come to me. And now I saw the canotina and it told me I will be a great warrior. But one of the names it asked for was yours.”
Hazel felt the corn bread go dry in her throat.
“I told it no and it attacked me and drove me from the woods, laughing the whole time. And it said that you would cause my death. It said that you would kill me just as you had killed my brother.”
Hazel sat back on the blankets and buried her face in her knees. She remembered Pretty Singer at the river and t
he dream she had had later.
When she looked at him again she saw him through a blur of tears. “Then you should stay away from me.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I tried in the beginning, after I brought you here, just as I’ve tried in each battle to be faithful to my people without hurting any more of the whites. I’ve seen enough killing. It doesn’t change things. Tatanyandowan said that when we drove the whites from the valley, my father’s stones wouldn’t be silent anymore. The old magic would be alive again. He said the buffalo would return to the prairie. He said there would be no more sickness. But he lied.”
“Will you still go with them to fight?” Hazel couldn’t stand to think of making more bullets for him that might be used against her own people.
“I don’t know,” he said.
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