The Spirit of Thunder

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “A good day,” he said to her as they traveled. “Could have done better if I had a rifle, though.” He looked at the fox hanging from the side of his backrest. That skin, plus the other pelts of fox, beaver, marten, and such that he’d trapped over the winter, together should be enough to trade for a rifle, but he wasn’t sure.

  Then he remembered the nugget of gold. That would be enough. Enough and more.

  At home, when he presented Picking Bones Woman and Mouse Road with the elk’s teeth and hide, he broached the subject.

  “I thought I might make a journey to the vé’ho’e-trading-place.”

  The women’s faces brightened. They grinned at him. “Truly?” Mouse Road asked. “Will you truly go?”

  Befuddled, George gave a little chuckle. “Yes,” he said. “Truly. Why?”

  Picking Bones Woman shrugged. “The men, they never want to go up to the trading-place. ‘What do they have that we need?’ they always ask. But if you go, I can think of one or two women who would like their husbands to make the trip with you.”

  “I would need someone’s help,” George said. “To show me the way, at least.”

  “Leave it to me,” Picking Bones Woman said.

  Within three days she had organized a trading party. Through the efficient use of suggestions and casual remarks to neighboring women, Picking Bones Woman had subtly undermined any objections the men had to such a frivolous trip. By the morning of the party’s departure, a total of twenty-four men had “volunteered” to guide George to the nearest trading outpost.

  George stood outside his lodge, loading up his drake. The mountain air was still crisp in the mornings but would heat up as the spring day progressed. George guessed it to be mid-April—he had given up on his exact count during the winter—though it might have been May. To the People, it was still the Ball Game Moon, a time of happy relaxation, the last moon in their mountain camp. The next moon would be Hatchling Moon, and the band—along with every other band of the People—would make its way down to the plains where the hatchlings could graze on the tender new grass and where the People would slowly gather and prepare for the return of the buffalo herds. George was lucky. His two hens were sitting on clutches of eggs. That left him, however, with only his drake to ride on the trading expedition, for he would not take his hungry walker on a trek with no other company than whistlers.

  “One Who Flies!”

  It was Mouse Road, coming up the hill with two whistlers in tow. She led them up to the drake, who displayed bars of pale gray and deep red up and down his head and neck in seasonal aggression. Mouse Road’s hens fluted and changed their colors to dark, mottled green in submission, quieting the male.

  “My mother has sent you these spare mounts.” Mouse Road smiled and pointed to a bundle of pelts on the back of one of the whistlers. “And something extra to trade.”

  George was touched by the generosity of Picking Bones Woman. “Please take my thanks to your mother,” he said.

  “She would like for you to get,” Mouse Road continued, enumerating items on her fingers, “some red Trader’s cloth, at least two arm’s lengths; some salt, a bag about this big; a new knife, and a good one, not one of the small ones Storm Arriving always got her; some corn, at least three large sacks; and a metal cooking-plate, like the one Little Worker has.”

  “All that?” George laughed. “She expects me to get all that for a few pelts?”

  “Yes,” Mouse Road said with a sharp look. “You will have to be very clever with the traders. But my mother says that she will have finished dressing the elk hide by the time you return.”

  “Yes. The elk hide,” George said, chagrined at being reminded of the favor Picking Bones Woman was doing for him. “I will do my best.”

  “Cloth, salt, knife, corn, cooking-plate,” Mouse Road said with a satisfied smile.

  He repeated the list as he took his own pelts and supplies and tied them onto the pack animal Mouse Road brought. “And thank her for the loan of the whistlers, will you?”

  “I will.” She turned to go, but hesitated.

  “What is it, Mouse Road?”

  She turned back, her hand on the pouch that hung at her belt. “Will you trade something for me?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But what could you possibly need?”

  “Something shiny,” she said and touched the end of her braid. “Something silver or copper for my hair.”

  He signed his agreement. “And what do you have to trade?”

  She reached inside the pouch and pulled out something small, held gingerly between two fingers. She held it out, and dropped it in George’s open palm.

  It was another nugget of gold. Smaller, to be sure, than the one Speaks While Leaving had found, this one was only the size of a pea. George took out his knife and pressed the edge against the nugget. It left a mark in the soft metal. Definitely gold.

  “Where did you find this?” he asked, trying not to let his excitement show.

  “Near where Speaks While Leaving found hers. I went out to the tamarack tree she told of, a few days after. Is it worth anything? Can you trade it for me?”

  George swallowed. These women, he thought to himself, are picking up pure gold off the open ground. How much must be under the surface?

  “Um, yes,” he said. “I think I can trade it for something for your hair.”

  She smiled and it was a happy smile of innocent pleasure. “My thanks,” she said, and bounded off down the slope. George stared after her, then shook his head, and looked again at the small nugget. His ideas of what to get at the outpost were already changing.

  He rode down to the meeting place near the lower pond, absently repeating the list of items. “Red cloth, bag of salt, big knife, three sacks of corn, cooking-plate, something for Mouse Road’s hair. Red cloth...”

  Two dozen men and over seventy whistlers were converging on the field. George was glad when he saw Red Whistler riding down the hill from his lodge. It would be good to have another person at the trading post who could speak French. The young man looked worried, though; his brow was furrowed and his eyes stared at the ground in front of him. He was muttering to himself, and as he drew closer George could hear his words.

  “...one sack of sugar, three sacks of corn, three sacks of white beans...”

  George laughed out loud and Red Whistler looked up in anger.

  “Quiet, One Who Flies. If I forget something, my wife will be most angry with me.”

  “Wait here,” George said. He slid off his whistler and went over to a cold fire-pit near the edge of the pond. With a charred twig and a parfleche, he wrote his own list on the inside flap—in French, for he had no idea how to accurately spell the Cheyenne words.

  “What are you doing?” Red Whistler asked.

  “I am”—the Cheyenne had no word for “to write”—”I am drawing the words, to help me remember. There.” He showed him the written words. “That is my list. Now tell me yours.”

  “Those marks...they are words?”

  “Yes. Tell me your list and I will draw your words, too.”

  Red Whistler recited his list and George wrote it down. When he was done, he read it back. “One sack of sugar, three sacks of corn, three sacks of white beans, some blue cloth, two wool blankets—”

  “You can see all of that? In those marks?”

  George nodded, caught himself, and signed in the affirmative. “—two handsful of peppercorns, one large piece of hardback shell, and a long coil of brass wire.”

  Long Jaw rode up, having overheard their conversation. The older, quiet Indian looked at Red Whistler’s baffled expression, then at the words that George had written down.

  “Four sacks of corn,” he began.

  “No, no, no,” George protested, but saw that Long Jaw was prepared to take offense if George refused. He also saw that the other men were all riding over to see what was of so much interest to Long Jaw. “I do not have enough room for everyone’s list here. I should mark y
our list on something of yours, so it won’t get confused with someone else’s list.”

  Long Jaw handed over a beaver pelt and recited to George his list. The elder man stared at the pelt as George handed it back to him.

  “Take care not to smear the markings,” George said. “Next!”

  The lists were generally the same: corn, beans, sugar, salt, something new for the household, something nice for the wife. The Indians handled the enscribed pelts and hides like holy relics, holding them flat and level as if the words might somehow slide off. George did not discourage their caution, and made a mental note to mix up some ink and cut some quills.

  The trading party rode for five long days, down from the Sheep Mountains, and out across the vast plains. To George, however, the empty land around them was no longer the wasted resource he once considered it to be. The land was in use, by a people who simply did not leave their mark upon it.

  The greening of the land was well underway. The grass that blanketed the earth was bright and vivid. The trees that stood in groves along streams and riverbeds were in full leaf, and when the party stopped along a stretch of running water, the ferns were thick and the berries bushes were full of flowers.

  Everywhere George looked there was the activity of springtime: birds sang and gathered grasses for their nests, and bees floating lazily from flower to flower to flower. The whole prairie was sown with the colors of wildflowers and dogwoods, birds and butterflies.

  The trading place, as George discovered, was near the towns of the tribes the People called the Earth-Lodge Builders. At the confluence of the Big Greasy and the Antelope Pit rivers lived the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and the Arikara. When he had first seen their towns, he had been amazed. Now, a year later, they still impressed him.

  George and the others rode through field after field of mixed crops. The Indians planted their crops together so that in one glance George could see the tiny white flowers of bean bushes standing tall over the blowsy blooms of squash and pumpkin. But still, between each crop plant, the prairie intruded. The low grasses and delicate blossoms of spring held on to the soil and kept the weeds at bay.

  “Where are the farmers?” he asked Red Whistler. “I see no one out here working the land?”

  Red Whistler shrugged. “What is there to do? You sow the seeds, the plants grow.”

  Long Jaw spoke from a few paces pack. “Long ago, before anyone had even heard of the vé’hó’e, the People used to live along these rivers. We would plant in the spring, and follow the buffalo all summer. When we came back in the autumn, we harvested our crops. The plants know what to do. They do not need our help.”

  “But couldn’t you...” George did not complete his sentence. With arable land that stretched to the horizon and beyond, discussions of bushels per acre were meaningless. More was not better if you did not need it.

  They rode wide of the quiet town, though even from a distance George could make out the large settlement of cylindrical buildings with thatched, domed roofs. After some miles they came to a place where the river swung this way and that in a long, lazy ess. George could see buildings on the far shore—ten or twelve of them—built like regular houses. Their walls were straight, their corners square, and their roofs were peaked. Smoke rose from a few chimney pipes. George felt his stomach flip over.

  White men.

  He thought of his Indian clothes, his long hair, his scraggly beard. He hadn’t bathed since they had set off and he felt the grime of a week’s travel on the back of his neck. For the first time in nearly a year he was going to meet some white men and he looked like—

  He stopped and considered his line of thought.

  Am I ashamed? Embarrassed of my appearance? Afraid of what these lonely traders might think of me?

  No, he decided. I’m just nervous. I haven’t been among whites for moons...for months, that is. Everyone wants to make a good first impression.

  He accepted his own argument but remained unconvinced by it.

  At the near shore and also on the far side several large canoes had been pulled up out of the water. The Big Greasy was too wide to ford here, so they hobbled their whistlers, unpacked their trading goods, and three and four to a boat, began to ferry themselves across.

  Even before they had reached the middle of the river’s creamy, brown flow, four men stood on the far shore.

  White men. Traders.

  As the boats came close the men waded in to help pull them ashore, already hawking their wares in an amalgam of French, signs, and—even to George’s untrained ear—heavily accented Cheyenne.

  “‘Allo, Chief. Come with me! I’ll get you what you need!”

  “What you need? I have everything you need!”

  “Cloth! Blankets! Come! Look!”

  The youngest of the four reached for Long Jaw’s parcel of pelts and hides. There was a blur of motion and the trader was on his back in the riverside mud, a long, thin knife at his throat. The other traders fell silent and still. The man on the ground was wide-eyed with fear, petrified.

  Then Long Jaw, usually so stern and taciturn, actually smiled. He put his knife back in its sheath.

  “I thought he was going to take my list,” he said, and everyone laughed. Everyone, including the traders who, though not comprehending, were glad nonetheless to see peace restored.

  None of the traders, however, helped anyone with their bundles.

  “Sacrée mère,” said one of the traders and George saw that the man was staring at him. “What have we here?”

  The other traders stared, too, first with incredulity, then with derision.

  “Looks like someone’s gone native,” said one.

  “Or around the bend,” said the youngest, having recovered from his encounter with Long Jaw.

  “Just who in Hell do you think you are?” asked a third trader. He took a step closer and George could smell the stink of the man: sweat, dung, whiskey, tobacco, and six or seven other odors all joined in on the assault. George realized that his own fears about having not bathed were absurd.

  “Oh,” the trader said, noticing George’s reaction. “So you think you’re better than me, non?”

  George felt the presence of several of his friends behind him. Though none but Red Whistler understood the French trader’s words, the belligerent tone was unmistakable.

  “Say nothing,” he heard Long Jaw say. “They are just crazy vé’hó’e. They do not know how to act.”

  The old phrase, so long applied to him, and now turned around against others of his own race, struck George as oddly humorous.

  That these men were the Indian’s primary contact with his own race, with their foulness and their avarice and their aggression, it was no wonder that the People had such a low opinion of the whites.

  “Crazy vé’hó’e,” George said in Cheyenne, and began to laugh.

  “He’s a lunatic,” said the first trader, and with a sudden smile of blatant huckstership, he turned and beckoned the others to follow him. “Come with me, Chief. I’ve got what you need.”

  “Crazy vé’hó’e,” Long Jaw said, giving George a pat on the back. Then they all picked up their bundles and headed up the river bank toward the buildings.

  To George, several of the cabins—though even that word was too glorious to describe some of the outpost’s dilapidated hovels—looked empty, as if uninhabited for some time. The others, those in use by the four traders, were not in much better shape. Doors hung loosely on leather-strap hinges and unglazed windows gaped from behind broken or missing shutters. Shattered glass and potsherds littered the area around each shack, as did the offal of hunting kills and—George’s nose told him—ordure from the trader’s own eliminations.

  Red Whistler pointed to each of the traders. “That one has metal, and that one has cloth. The oldest one has tools and knives, and the youngest one has sugar and salt and pretty things for decorations.”

  “What about the corn and beans and such?”

  “We will get t
hose when we visit with the Ree, back on the other side of the river.”

  For the traders, obsequiousness and flattery were the order of the day, but the Indians appeared immune to it. The party stayed together and walked toward the first of the trader’s shacks, ignoring each man’s attempt to separate individuals with promises of good trades.

  As they approached the shack of the trader of cloth goods, the spiels from the other three increased in urgency. When the Indians all bent to their bundles and took out a pelt or hide, the traders’ entreaties grew feverish. George found their unabashed avarice disturbing. Their gazes shifted from man to man, they craned their necks forward and looked up into the faces of their hoped-for patrons. Their hands pled and their voices whined in supplication, but their lips curled in near snarls. Only the older trader maintained any fragment of dignity and decorum. He stood farthest back, a knife in one hand and an awl in the other.

  “Best price to first customer,” he said. “Not too many left.”

  But when the Indians each brought their hides to George and he read off of what their cloth needs were, the traders fell silent and stared.

  “Merde,” the metal dealer said. Then he and the other dealers stood back and let the dickering begin in earnest.

  Even though the cloth dealer’s supplies of blankets and fabric were dirty, dusty, and in some cases frayed and torn, the desire for them was strong. The trader bargained hard. George and Red Whistler helped with the translation when necessary, but sign language and a few words of Cheyenne proved to be adequate for all but the most complex requests.

  George quickly learned that the most precious pelts were marten, fisher, fox, and mink. Though George had far fewer pelts than some of the others, he had a good number of marten and fox. He purchased a length of red wool in exchange for a beaver pelt.