Shaman

by Noah Gordon

  All this he explained to Two Skies as he sat in the sacred place on the hill, stirring the favorable auguries in the carcass of the rabbit, which was beginning to stink. When he was finished, he asked if she would allow him to teach her to be a medicine woman.

  Two Skies was a child, but she knew enough to be frightened. There was much she couldn’t comprehend, but she understood what was important.

  “I will try,” she whispered to the Prophet.

  White Cloud sent Moon, Yellow Bird, and Smoke Woman to live with Keokuk’s Sauks, but Two Skies stayed in Prophetstown, living in Wabokieshiek’s lodge like a favored daughter. He showed her leaves and roots and bark and told her which of them could lift the spirit out of the body and allow it to converse with manitous, which could dye deerskins and which make war paints, which should be dried and which steeped, which should be steamed and which used as poultice, which should be scraped with upward strokes and which scraped with downward strokes, which could open the bowels and which close them, which could break fever and which dull pain, which could cure and which could kill.

  Two Skies listened to him. At the end of four seasons, when the Prophet tested her, he was pleased. He said he had guided her through the first Tent of Wisdom.

  Before she had been taken through the second Tent of Wisdom, her womanhood came upon her for the first time. One of White Cloud’s nieces showed her how to care for herself, and each month she went to stay in the women’s lodge while her vagina bled. The Prophet explained that she mustn’t conduct a ceremony or treat illness or injury before attending the sweat lodge to purify herself after her monthly flow.

  Over the next four years she learned how to summon the manitous with songs and drums, how to slaughter dogs in several ceremonial methods and cook them for a dog feast, how to teach the singers and hummers to take part in the sacred dances. She learned to read the future in the organs of a slain animal. She learned the power of illusion—to suck illness from the body and spit it out of her mouth as a small stone, so a victim could touch it and see that it had been banished. When the manitous couldn’t be persuaded to allow someone to live, she learned how to chant the spirit of the dying on to the next world.

  There were seven Tents of Wisdom. In the fifth, the Prophet taught her to control her own body so she could come to understand how to control the bodies of others. She learned to conquer thirst and to go long periods without food. Often he led her great distances on horseback and returned to Prophetstown alone with the two horses, leaving her to make her way back afoot. Gradually he taught her to master pain by sending her mind to a far-off small place so deep within herself that pain couldn’t reach her.

  Late that summer he took her back to the sacred clearing on the hilltop. They made a fire and courted the manitous with song, and again they set snares. This time they caught a skinny brown rabbit, and when they opened the belly and read the organs, Two Skies recognized that the signs were favorable.

  As dusk approached, White Cloud told her to remove her dress and shoes. When she was naked, with his British knife he slashed double slits on each of her shoulders, then carefully cut her to fashion straps of skin like the epaulets worn by white army officers. He passed a rope through these bloody slits and knotted a loop, and he threw the rope over a tree branch and hauled her up until she hung just off the ground, suspended by her own bleeding flesh.

  With thin oak sticks whose ends had been made white-hot in the fire, into the sides of both of her breasts he burned the signs of the People’s ghosts and the symbols of the manitous.

  Darkness came while she was still trying to free herself. For half the night Two Skies thrashed, until finally the skin strap on her left shoulder tore. Soon the flesh on her right shoulder parted and she dropped to the ground. With her mind in the small distant place to escape the pain, perhaps she slept.

  When the weak light of morning came, she was awake to hear the snuffling as a bear entered the far side of the clearing. It didn’t scent her, for it moved in the same direction as the morning breeze, and it shambled with such slowness she could note its snowy muzzle and the fact that it was a sow. A second bear followed, all black, a young male eager to mate despite the sow’s warning growl. Two Skies could see his great rigid coska, surrounded by stiff gray guard hairs, as he clambered to get behind the female and mount her. The sow snarled and whirled, snapping repeatedly, and the male fled. For a moment the female moved after him, then came upon the rabbit carcass and took it between her jaws and went away.

  Finally, in great pain, Two Skies rose to her feet. The Prophet had taken her clothes. She saw no bear tracks in the hard-packed dirt of the clearing, but in the fine ash of the dead fire was a single clear track of a fox. A fox could have come in the night and taken the rabbit; perhaps she had dreamed the bears, or they had been manitous.

  All that day she traveled. Once she heard horses and hid in the brush until two Sioux youths rode by. It was still light when she entered Prophetstown accompanied by ghosts, her naked body covered with blood and dirt. Three men halted their talking as she approached, and a woman stopped grinding corn. For the first time, she saw fear on faces that looked at her.

  The Prophet himself washed her. Tending her ruined shoulders and the burns, he asked if she had dreamed. When she told him of the bears, his eyes gleamed. “The strongest sign!” he murmured. He told her it meant that as long as she didn’t lie with a man, the manitous would stay close to her.

  While she pondered that, he told her she would never be Two Skies again, any more than she would ever be Sarah Two. That night in Prophetstown she became Makwaikwa, the Bear Woman.

  Again the Great Father in Washington had lied to the Sauks. The army had promised Keokuk’s Sauks that they could live forever in the land of the Iowa beyond Masesibowi’s west bank, but white settlers had quickly begun to spill into that land. A white town was established across the river from Rock Island. It was named Davenport, honoring the trader who had advised the Sauks to abandon the bones of their ancestors and leave Sauk-e-nuk, and then had bought their land from the government for his own enrichment.

  Now the army told Keokuk’s Sauks they owed a large debt of American money and must sell their new lands in Iowa territory and move to a reservation the United States had set up for them a long ride to the southwest, in the territory of the Kansas.

  The Prophet told the Bear Woman that so long as she lived, she must never accept as true the word of a white.

  That year Yellow Bird was bitten by a snake and half her body swelled and filled with water before she died. Moon had found a husband, a Sauk named Comes Singing, and already she had borne children. Smoke Woman didn’t marry. She slept with so many men, and so happily, that people smiled when they said her name. Sometimes Makwa-ikwa was stirred by sexual longing, but she learned to control desire like any other pain. The lack of children was a regret. She remembered how she had hidden with He-Who-Owns-Land during the massacre at Bad Ax, how her baby brother’s tugging lips had felt at her nipple. But she was reconciled; already she had lived too closely with the manitous to question their decision that she would never be a mother. She was content to become a medicine woman.

  The final two Tents of Wisdom dealt with blighting magic, how to make a healthy person sick by casting spells, how to summon and direct ill fortune. Makwa-ikwa became familiar with small imps of wickedness called wata-winonas, with ghosts and witches, and with Panguk, the Spirit of Death. These spirits weren’t accosted until the final Tents because a medicine woman had to attain self-mastery before summoning them, lest she join the wata-winonas in their evil. Dark magic was the heaviest responsibility. The watawinonas robbed Makwa-ikwa of her ability to smile. She became wan. Her flesh melted until her bones seemed large, and sometimes her monthly bleeding didn’t come. She saw that the watawinonas also were drinking the life from Wabokieshiek’s body, for he became frailer and smaller, but he promised her he would not yet die.

  At the end of two more years the Prophet broug
ht her through the final Tent. If it had been in former days, that would have called for the summoning of far-flung Sauk bands, races and games, the smoking of calumets, and a secret meeting of the Mide’wiwin, the medicine society of the Algonquian tribes. But former days were gone. Everywhere, red people were scattered and harassed. The best the Prophet could do was provide three other old men as judges, Lost Knife of the Mesquakies, Barren Horse of the Ojibwa, and Little Big Snake of the Menomini. The women of Prophetstown made Makwa-ikwa a dress and shoes of white doeskin, and she wore her Izze cloths, and anklets and bracelets that rattled when she moved. She used the throttle-stick to kill two dogs and supervised the cleaning and cooking of the meat. After the feast, she and the old men sat all night by the fire.

  When they questioned her, she answered with respect but forthrightly, as an equal. She brought forth the sounds of supplication from the water drum while she chanted, summoning the manitous and pacifying ghosts. The old men revealed to her the special secrets of the Mide’wiwin while retaining their own secrets, as she would retain her own from now on. By morning she had become a shaman.

  Once that would have made her a person of great power. But now Wabokieshiek helped her assemble the herbs she wouldn’t be able to find where she was going. Along with her drums and medicine bundle the herbs were packed on a brindle mule that she led. She said good-bye to the Prophet for the last time and then rode his other gift, a gray pony, to the territory of the Kansas, where the Sauk now lived.

  The reservation was on flatter land even than the Illinois plains.

  Dry.

  There was just enough water to drink, but it had to be toted a distance. This time the whites had given the Sauks land that was fertile enough to grow anything. The seeds they planted sprouted strongly in the spring, but before summer was more than a few days old, everything withered and died. The wind blew dust through which the sun burned as a round red eye.

  So they ate the white man’s food the soldiers brought them. Spoiled beef, stinking pig fat, old vegetables. Crumbs from the paleskins’ feast.

  There were no hedonoso-tes. The People lived in shacks made from green lumber that cupped and shrank, leaving cracks wide enough for winter snow to drift through. Twice a year a nervous little Indian agent came with soldiers and left a row of goods on the prairie: cheap mirrors, glass beads, cracked and broken harness with bells on it, old clothing, maggoty meat. At first all the Sauks gleaned the pile, until somebody asked the agent why he brought these things and he said they were a payment for the Sauk land confiscated by the government. After that, only the weakest and most scorned ever took anything. The pile grew in size every six months, to rot in weather.

  They had heard of Makwa-ikwa. When she arrived, they received her with respect, but they were no longer sufficiently a tribe to need a shaman. The most spirited of them had gone with Black Hawk and had been killed by whites or died of starvation or drowned in Masesibowi or been murdered by the Sioux, but there were those on the reservation who had the strong hearts of Sauks of old. Their courage was constantly tested in fights with the tribes who were native to the region, because the supply of game was dwindling and the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Cheyenne, and the Osage resented the hunting competition of the eastern tribes moved there by the Americans. The whites made it hard for the Sauks to defend themselves, for they saw to it that there was plenty of bad whiskey, and in return took most of the furs that were trapped. In increasing numbers the Sauks spent their days sick with alcohol.

  Makwa-ikwa lived on the reservation a little more than a year. That spring, a small herd of buffalo wandered across the prairie. Moon’s husband, Comes Singing, rode out with other hunters and killed meat. Makwa-ikwa declared a Buffalo Dance and instructed the hummers and singers. People danced in the old way, and in some of their eyes she saw a light she hadn’t seen in a long time, a light that filled her with joy.

  Others felt it. After the Buffalo Dance, Comes Singing sought her out and said some of the People wanted to leave the reservation and live as their fathers had lived. They asked if their shaman would go with them.

  She asked Comes Singing where they would go.

  “Home,” he said.

  So the youngest and strongest departed the reservation, and she with them. By autumn they were in country that gladdened their spirits and made their hearts sore at the same time. It was hard to avoid the white man as they traveled; they made wide circuits around settlements. Hunting was poor. Winter caught them ill-prepared. Wabokieshiek had died that summer, and Prophetstown was deserted. She couldn’t go to white people for help, remembering what the Prophet had taught her about never placing her faith in a whiteskin.

  But when she had prayed, the manitous had sent survival in the form of help from the white doctor called Cole, and despite the Prophet’s ghost, she had come to feel he could be trusted.

  So when he rode into the Sauk camp and told her that now he needed her help to perform his medicine, without hesitation she was able to agree to go with him.

  18

  STONES

  Rob J. tried to explain to Makwa-ikwa what a bladder calculus was, but he couldn’t tell if she believed that Sarah Bledsoe’s illness really was caused by stones in her bladder. Makwa-ikwa asked him if he would suck out the stones, and as they talked it became apparent that she expected to witness a sleight-of-hand humbug, a kind of juggling trick to make his patient believe he had removed the source of her trouble. He explained several times that the stones were real, that they existed painfully in the woman’s bladder, and that he would go inside Sarah’s body with an instrument and remove them.

  Her puzzlement continued when they got to his cabin and he used strong brown soap and water to wash down the table Alden had made for him, on which he would operate. They called for Sarah Bledsoe together, in the buck-board. The little boy, Alex, had been left with Alma Schroeder, and his mother was waiting for the doctor, her eyes large in her pinched white face. On the return trip Makwa-ikwa was silent and Sarah Bledsoe nearly dumb with terror. He tried to ease the situation with small talk but had little success.

  When they reached his cabin, Makwa-ikwa leapt lightly from the buck-board. She helped the white girl down from the high seat with a gentleness that surprised him, and she spoke for the first time. “Once I was called Sarah Two,” she told Sarah Bledsoe, only Rob J. thought she said “Sarah too.”

  Sarah wasn’t an accomplished drinker. She coughed when she tried to swallow the three fingers of sourmash whiskey he gave her, and she gagged on the additional inch or so he added to her mug for good measure. He wanted her subdued and dulled to pain but able to cooperate. While they waited for the whiskey to work, he set up candles around the table and lighted them despite the heat of the summer, for the daylight in the cabin was dim. When they undressed Sarah, he saw that her body was red from scrubbing. Her wasted buttocks were small as a child’s, and her blue-skinned thighs looked almost concave in their thinness. She grimaced as he inserted a catheter and filled her bladder with water. He showed Makwa-ikwa how he wanted her knees held, then he greased the lithotrite with clean lard, taking care not to get any on the little jaws that would have to grasp the stones. The woman gasped as he slid the instrument into her urethra.

  “I know it hurts, Sarah. It’s painful as it goes in, but … There. Now it will be better.”

  She was accustomed to far worse pain, and the groaning dwindled, but he was apprehensive. It had been several years since he had probed for stones, and then under the careful eyes of a man who undoubtedly was one of the best surgeons in the world. The day before, he had spent hours practicing with the lithotrite, picking up raisins and pebbles, picking up nuts and cracking their shells, practicing with the objects in a small tub of water, with his eyes closed. But it was quite another thing to poke around within the fragile bladder of a living being, aware that to thrust carelessly or to close the jaws on a wrinkle of tissue rather than on a stone might result in a tear that would bring terrible infection
and painful death.

  Since his eyes could do him no good, he closed them now, and moved the lithotrite slowly and delicately, his whole being fused into one nerve that functioned at the end of the instrument. It touched something. He opened his eyes and studied the woman’s groin and lower abdomen, wishing he could see through flesh.

  Makwa-ikwa was watching his hands, studying his face, missing nothing. He brushed at a buzzing fly and then ignored everything but the patient and the task and the lithotrite in his hand. The stone … Lord, he could tell at once that it was large! Perhaps the size of his thumb, he estimated as he maneuvered and manipulated the lithotrite ever so slowly and carefully.

  To determine if the stone would move, he tightened the jaws of the lithotrite onto it, but when he put the slightest backward pressure on the instrument the woman on the table opened her mouth and screamed.

  “I have the biggest stone, Sarah,” he said calmly. “It’s too large to come out in one piece, so I’ll try to break it.” Even as he spoke, his fingers were moving to the handle of the screw at the end of the lithotrite. It was as though each turn of the screw tightened the tension within him as well, because if the stone wouldn’t break, the woman’s prospects were dismal. But blessedly as he continued to turn the handle there was a dull crunching, the sound of someone grinding a shard of pottery beneath his heel.

  He broke it into three segments. Although he worked with great care, when he removed the first piece he hurt her. Makwa-ikwa wet a cloth and wiped Sarah’s sweaty face. Rob reached down and unclenched her left hand, peeling the fingers back like petals, and dropped the piece of the stone into her white palm. It was an ugly calculus, brown and black. The middle piece was smooth and egg-shaped, but the other two were irregular, with little needle points and sharp edges. When she held all three in her hand, he inserted a catheter and rinsed the bladder, and she voided a lot of the crystals that had broken from the stone when he had crushed it.