Nakoa's Woman (23 page)

“It was ten suns ago. It was ten winters ago, and if I had not died too, the earth would still be hidden with snow!” Natosin bowed his head, and his face became older. Maria touched his arm.

“Do not go on,” she whispered.

“I went on that day. I went on that day, and so I shall go on now—when the only person I bring pain is myself, and from my pain I can give you sight.

“It was summer, the sky was hot and cloudless, and against it circled the vultures. I knew these were the birds of death, and that death had come to some of my friends. I wondered if the Dahcotah had raided the village, for the Dahcotah is not ally to the Mandan, and we had met on the trail Dahcotah warriors painted for battle. The birds circled above us too, and seeing them and hearing their hungry cries I felt terror for my wives and children, and I made them stay on the trail behind me.

“Slowly, and in plain sight, I rode into the Mandan village. There was no sound of people. I heard growling of camp dogs, but no voices of people. There were no fires. It was early morning, but there were no cooking fires. The lodges stood quiet and seemingly deserted, and in the one before me I heard frenzied growling of many dogs.

“My horse felt terror. I fought to hold him still. I picketed him, and entered the lodge before me. The day was bright, but the lodge was deep in shadow. Before I could see, I smelled the dead inside, and then as in a dream where I could not act but only see, I saw the dogs eating them. There was a mother, a child, a baby and an old man, and I do not know how much more of them I allowed the dogs to devour. When I had driven them off, I looked at the mangled corpses, and I could see that they had died in an awful agony, and their bodies were swollen to three times their size.

“I went into lodge after lodge, and everywhere it was the same. The Mandans in them had died and were being eaten by their dogs. Now I noticed a different thing. Upon every corpse were strange marks that had come to the skin, as if the white man who had lived among the Mandan had painted each one in an evil and an awful way.

“There was no one alive in the village. I went to the lodge of Mahtatohpa, but it was empty. There was no sign of him or his wife and four sons. Despair for all my friends was in my heart, and I stood still with my sorrow, and I stilled my horse.

“Now I will explain that the Mandan village is different from the Blackfoot in that the Mandan builds a lodge of willow boughs with a clay roof, and he does not move his village to hunt. The Mandan village had not been moved in the memory of any living man and had always been protected by its two walls, and the river. The river that guarded the other two sides flowed below towering bluffs, and it was from one of these bluffs that I heard soft and distant chanting. It was the death chant, and as I walked to the sound, I saw the figure of a lone Mandan against the sky. The sun faced me and hid the Mandan’s face, and not until I got very close to him, did I know him to be Mahtatohpa, my friend. When he recognized me, he became quiet.

“‘Mahtatohpa,’ I said. ‘Are you the only one left?’

“‘Yes,’ he replied, and his face seemed pitted and marked, though it was drained of all color.

“’Where are your wife—your children?’ I asked.

“He pointed to the base of the cliff upon which he stood, and when I followed his gesture with my eyes, I saw with horror that it lay heaped with corpses.

“‘They burned with fire,’ he said. ‘They became swollen and marked with thirst, and in madness they sought the river by jumping from here. Then those who knew they could not reach the river in this way went headfirst so they would know death sooner. It is those who did not have the strength to walk here who are left for the camp dogs.’

”‘How did this happen?’ I asked.

“‘This sickness came from the white man’s boat which traveled up the river to do trade with us. They took our furs, and they took our lives.’

“‘How? How?’ I asked my friend, thinking that my disbelief could prevent this terrible thing from ever happening when it did.

“‘The boat came, and as we had done before, all of the chiefs and warriors of prominence went onto it for trade talk. On the boat two white men lay sick, and when we left, we were sick. Our bodies became large, and strange marks came quickly to our skin, but many died of burning and mad thirst even before their skin became marked. The Dahcotah had come outside of our walls and waited in a large war party, and if those who were not sick had fled from us, they would have been killed as surely as we were dying. A person just had to look upon our faces to die. This will happen to you now, Natosin, if you stay and speak to me.’

“I looked at my friend’s scarred face. ‘You are alive,’ I said quietly.

“‘I was marked, and I burned and thirsted,’ he said, ‘but I did not die. This is my punishment, because in my sickness, I did not have the strength to prevent my wife and sons from jumping toward the river below. I watched, but I could not tell them that they would reach not the water, but death. Now I am glad in my heart that they lie there, beneath the waters, and that I did not awaken finally to the sound of their being eaten by my own dogs!’

“I took my friend’s hand” Natosin continued. “I told him that he needed no punishment because sickness of the body is not a wrong that sickness comes unsought and is an invader and not a welcomed guest. I sought to talk him from jumping from the cliff and dying like his family. It was no use. Before he jumped, he walked with me through the village, weeping, and stood long before his deserted lodge.

“’They wait for me,’ he said brokenly. ‘They cannot travel upon the Wolf Trail alone. My wife is an easily frightened woman, and she fears strangeness. My sons are little boys, and are not yet men. They wait for me and call piteously.’

“‘No. No,’ I entreated, ‘there are many things yet for you to do.’

“‘There is nothing left for me to do,’ he answered. ‘I am a ghost, and so I will leave this world of living men, and walk quietly to my family and my people.’

“‘You stand before me, as I stand!’ I replied. ‘You speak as I speak!’

“ ‘No, my friend,’ he said. ‘From me life is gone. I have not eaten or drunk for nine days. I am starved already, and nowhere, now, is there water for my lips!’

“With these words,” Natosin continued, “he walked away from me, wearing his robe in ceremony, and standing tall and straight, as if he entered the council lodge for the bestowal upon himself of the highest honor. I felt tears upon my face, for I wept for my brother. I saw him walk toward the precipice, and once more, I heard his death chant, and then there was nothing but the still frenzied growling of the dogs in the lodges.”

“Natosin, Natosin, why didn’t you stop him?”

“I could not stop what he had already done in his heart.”

“It is horrible! Horrible!” Maria exclaimed.

“Yes, my daughter. The horrors are for the living. It is the brave man who suffers life, and the coward who seeks death in glory.”

“Did you think your friend a coward for killing himself?”

“Mahtatohpa’s path had ended. He had walked as far as he could. He knew this and accepted it. I speak of the coward who seeks death in frenzy because he so dreads it. It is easier to rush toward death blindly than to accept it in light. There are cowards who die great warriors but remain cowards, because they would rather be destroyed and be nothing without life than wait quietly in the sun and receive what they are!”

“Natosin, life is so hard!”

“And you are so young for these words. A loving mother does not give to her child all of the time. Punishment and denial bring strength. My daughter, perhaps your mother, the earth, is being generous to you in your youth.”

“No,” Maria said, shaking her head.

“I will go on with my story. I did not keep the dogs from the rest of the dead. Why suffer the dogs, I thought, and feed the lower worm? The dogs were of the master, and let them feed thereupon.“

Maria strangled, seeing the white wolves after Ana, her father, and even Anson. She hid her face in her hands.

“I went back to my family, and we ate and slept together, and there was laughter and good feeling between us. Early in the morning, long before even the seven brothers in the sky touched the prairie, I awakened. I had heard ghost voices. Two thousand Mandans had died, and it was the end of a proud tribe, a proud way of life. I felt great sadness for this, not for the bodies becoming part of the dogs, but for the passing of the last Mandan village.

“Then I heard a sound, a difficulty in breathing, a crying for drink, and then, in that moment, in my detachment of bodies returning to worms and dogs, every one of those two thousand Mandans rose, and led even by my friend Mahtatohpa, struck me in the heart. Two thousand times I was struck and suffered the deathblow with each one, and I reeled and gasped and clawed blindly at death, but could not die. My wives and my children except Nakoa died before me instead. They died because I had brought them the disease, because I had marked them and tortured them, and drained the juices from their body. My innocent little daughters who had loved me hours ago before the cooking fires, were mutilated, swollen, and gasping in thirst that could not be filled. My sons tried to die in silence—because their father was such a—great warrior!”

Natosin shuddered. His strong muscular arms became frail, his broad shoulders bent, his face marked beyond any age. Maria could not fight her tears, and wept with the old man as he lived this time again.

“My wives died last,” he went on. “They died last, and saw their children dead before them. Then it was my time. I burned. I was on hot dry sand with no life and no water, and nothing but the blazing sun. The sun was in the sky, and I thought, ‘Can the Great Spirit burn with such heat to destroy one of his children?’ The sun burned closer and closer, and my flesh cooked, my eyes were seared with blindness, and in my first blindness I felt wild panic for I could see nothing, not even the burning sun which had left the sky to destroy me. Then, in my blindness to the earth and the sky, came sight within myself. I thought if the Great Spirit would bring the sun to earth to burn me, he cared; he had moved and he had toiled for me, and I would accept his torturing sun. I would turn to ashes and accept what was left.

“In my searching within I felt coolness, shadow; I had reached a sanctuary, green and safe from fire. A part of me thus burned, and a part of me thus rested, soothed and comforted in deep darkness, and in the deep shadow rose a spring, for I could hear its waters bubbling upward to the earth’s surface. The water went to the earth and then to the sun, and new rains came to replenish the spring, to feed the earth, to find the sun, and I saw the circle, and was charmed by the simplicity of it, the sweetness of burning heat, the shadow, the spring; and I loved them all, accepted them all, tasted them all, and felt a richness that cannot be described in my poor words.

“The sun in destroying me had brought torture and blindness. The blindness had brought sight and had made me find the shadow that allowed me to live in the heat. In shadow and in light, in coolness and blazing death I lay still, and my long quiet began. I went deeper and deeper within myself, and there were distances, greater than those that separate the fires of the Wolf Trail; there were worlds that shrink ours and make it a leaf upon a sea. Food and drink lay abundant but unneeded; love and companionship surrounded but was unsought. The sky could be touched; the heavens could be spanned; the newness was of the present and the past, and the future no longer blind.

“And so I lay in death. Nakoa buried my wives. He buried his mother, and he buried his brothers and sisters, and above him the silent Mandan village looked down, and the black birds of death darkened the skies.”

“How horrible it must have been for him!” Maria whispered.

“I lay in death, and I knew Nakoa’s suffering, but so contented was I in my exploring, in my glimpsing of the worlds that led one into another, and so silent were they, that Nakoa’s anguish was softened and became a muted thing that would soon pass, for these worlds lay ahead of him too.”

“Didn’t you seek your children and wives?”

“They did not have to be sought. The richness was theirs too.”

“You were with them?”

“Time is the divider. Our bodies are timepieces ticking with our heartbeat, and when we are free of the time watcher—when we are free of the clock, we are no longer separated by time.”

“How do you know about clocks?”

“Mandans had white man’s timepieces which they regarded as having great magic. They are nothing. The beating of our heart is the timepiece.”

“Natosin, I am cold! I am chilled!”

“The coolness within me let me live, my daughter. Nakoa had placed me in water when I was on fire, but it is the coolness within that saved his work from failure.

“I felt his efforts, and gradually I realized that the sun that burned so hotly was not within the sky, but within myself, and from its heat and life I could feel the shadow and the spring that fed the earth. The sweet circle of spring, earth, and sun was within me too. Deep within myself, I had felt the second kiss.”

“I am so glad that you lived! I am so glad, Natosin!”

“Then your hands are not empty. This morning, I have given you something.”

“Yes. But I will not know your strength, Natosin.”

“You know nothing, daughter. Outside of the worlds of the self the wind is strong and blows the grasses and changes the sands into shifting patterns. The wind changes even the seas that march forever onto the land. You do not know even what you see, for you can only feel the wind.