The True Account (24 page)

By now two warriors had seized Yellow Sage, bound her wrists together, and carried her upstream to a little sand beach, where a third Indian was waiting with my uncle. Shoved along by my captors horse, I stumbled on the slippery rocks. The horsewoman gave me a cutting lick across the back with her quirt. Infuriated, I seized her by the wrist with the object of yanking her off her mount. But while I was wrestling with her, one of the others came galloping down on me, and the last thing I saw was her stone war club descending toward my head.

 

Crows. Cawing black crows lined up on a limb. Four of them, with the Green Mountains of Vermont rising in the background. Then someone said, “Crows.”

My head ached violently, but by degrees my vision returned and the four birds in the tree resolved into the four warrior women, looking down at me and laughing. My uncle, still on his mule, looked more sorrowful than ever. I tried to move, but my hands and feet were bound.

“These women are Crows, Ti,” Yellow Sage said. “They belong to a society of female warriors, and they're on a self-proving mission, scouting for Blackfoot horses to steal. They know I'm a Blackfoot, but they can't figure out who or what you and your uncle are, and they don't know yet that your horse is across the river. Whatever you do, don't tell them.”

“How, sir, do you find yourself in this fix?” I asked my uncle. Who, for a rare moment in his career, seemed at a complete loss for a reply.

Then he said, “If you want the truth, Ti, I was taken whilst performing a private function in the bushes. What's more, these Louisiana Amazonians laughed quite uproariously at my predicament. I might have reached for my arquebus, which was near at hand, but modesty dictated that I first reach for my codpiece—I mean Flame's cushion—and hitch up my breeches. By then it was too late. This same Queen Hippolyta who rendered you senseless had me on the ground and trussed up like a Christmas goose; and damme, Ti, she was laughing the whole time. I shall never live this down.”

My greater concern was that we might not live much longer at all. The women were now all talking at once, debating something, I thought. “Can you understand their lingo?” I asked Yellow Sage Flower.

“Scarcely anyone can, even them. It's a mishmash of clucks and clicks and gobbles. But we've had enough Crow captives around that I've gotten the drift of it.”

“Just then I recognized the root word for ‘fish,'” my uncle suddenly said. “It's quite universal among the Indians of America, suggesting a possible linkage dating back several thousand years to China. I wish my hands were free so I could get at my lexicon.”

“Not to mention your weapons,” I ventured to say, a bit vexed that he would be thinking of lexicography at such a moment.

“I gather,” he continued, “that Hippolyta is rather sweet on me. We might purchase our freedom in exchange for my attentions.”

In a high, utterly ridiculous voice, he called out, “O Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Your admiring swain awaits you with all eagerness.” He made big moon eyes at the giantess, accompanied by such contortions of his long face and lantern jaw, and such an attempt to bow in a courtly fashion while bound to his mule, that the four Crow women had to support each other to keep from falling on the ground with laughter.

“What do they propose to do with us?” I asked Yellow Sage Flower.

“That's what they've been arguing about,” she said. “Tall Mare, whom your uncle calls Hippolyta, wants to tie us to cottonwood trees and use us for target practice. One of the others suggested that they skin us and stuff us with meadow grass like scarecrows. Another wants to roast us over a low fire.”

“Dear Jehovah!” exclaimed my uncle. “We can't allow any of that. I have an idea they'll like better. It's called the Race for Life, and was often employed by the Persians with their Greek captives. An archer would shoot an arrow as far as his bow would throw it. That's how much of a head start they'd give the Greek. When he reached the arrow, the whole Persian army would tear out after him, and the Devil take the hindmost.”

“How often did the captive get away?” Yellow Sage inquired.

“Why, so far as I know, never,” my uncle said. “But there's always a first time. I'll wager that with these ladies after us, we could run like the wind. Go ahead and propose it, my dear. Not to put too fine a point on our predicament, I fear it's our only chance.”

T
HE
C
ROWS LISTENED
to Yellow Sage's proposal, then nodded. It appeared that the Race for Life was on, though as Sage explained to us, she would not be required to participate in this contest, since our captors planned to make a present of her to Tall Mare's father, one Horse Stealer, who had recently lost his wife of many years. I scarcely knew whether to thank my uncle for his inspiration or curse him. But with the captains and their party still fifty or sixty miles away, battling their way foot by foot up the swift current of the Missouri, and Franklin off on the easternmost of the three tributaries, we had little hope of rescue. I had to agree that running for our lives would be better than being posted up for a target or skinned alive.

Tall Mare jerked me to my feet, cut the thongs binding my hands and feet, then freed my uncle. As she fetched her bow from her horse and nocked an arrow, an idea occurred to me.

“Quick,” I said to Yellow Sage Flower, “try to talk her into shooting the arrow across the river. Dare her to do it. Say I challenge her to shoot across the river.”

Yellow Sage Flower spoke fast, more clucks and gobbles. But Tall Mare laughed and shook her head. “Ha ha, Ti,” chuckled my uncle. “Letting us cross the river is evidently more of an advantage than they care to give us. We'll have to come up with a different ruse.”

“We'd better do so quickly,” I said.

Sage Flower looked around, and her gaze alighted on the lizard-shaped boulder where she had been captured. She spoke in Crow again, and Tall Mare relayed her words to her three companions.

To us, in English, Yellow Sage Flower said, “I think I've persuaded her to shoot the arrow down near that big stone. I told them they should kill you where they found me, that it would make a grand story to tell. Now here's a story for you. I'll make it short. Long ago the Blackfeet trapped Sleek Otter out on the open prairie where he couldn't get away. Never having seen an otter before, they didn't know anything about his ways. So when he asked them to let him go down by the riverbank to say a last prayer to Creator Napi, they fell for it. Sleek Otter waddled down to the water, turned around, and instead of a prayer, shouted out a curse on the Blackfeet. Then he plunged into his natural element and disappeared forever.”

As Tall Mare fired her arrow high into the blue sky, I said to Sage, “But we aren't otters.”

“Think like one,” she said. “It will help.”

Tall Mare barked something at me as her arrow came to rest near the lizard rock.

“What did she say?”

“She said strip off your clothes, both of you, and hightail it,” Sage said.

Now the Crow women were painting diagonal vermilion stripes on their faces. At the same time, I became aware of a large black cloud climbing up in the sky from the south.

“Ask her, with the greatest respect, if I may, for modesty's sake, leave on my tights and codpiece,” said my uncle.

“Leave them on, by all means,” Sage said, to my considerable relief, since I was no more eager than he to stand stark naked before her and the Amazonians. “Just go. And remember Sleek Otter.”

“For Sleek Otter and for Scholia Aristotle!” cried my uncle, and broke into a lumbering sprint, which I thought to accelerate somewhat by taking his hand in mine and half-dragging him along beside me. I refused to look back, even when an arrow whizzed just over our heads and another appeared quivering in the ground by my bare foot.

“Run, run, as fast as you can,” Private True called back over his shoulder to the Crows. “You can't catch me, I'm the—”

“Uncle, for God's sake, save your breath.”

“Pick up the first arrow when you get to the lizard rock,” Yellow Sage Flower called out. “Use it for a weapon.”

We continued to tear through the bankside willows. An arrow flew by so close that the feathers ticked my left ear. A moment later we reached the rock. My uncle stooped and picked up Tall Mare's arrow, then we leaped into the rapids below the rock.

Over the rushing water I heard yells. We quartered hard across the current that was sweeping us downstream toward a sharp bend. In midstream we seized a drift-log and got on the far side of it from the Crows, who were riding through the thick willows along the bank and loosing more arrows at us. Several passed inches above our heads, others thunked into the log. Then we were around the bend. As we passed near the opposite bank, my uncle began counting aloud in Greek so that our pursuers, if they were within earshot, would not know what he was saying. On three we made a surging dive, swam hard, and gained the bank.

From across the river I heard yelling as the Crows fought their way out around a thick copse of cottonwoods. Supposing us to be still in the rapids, they rode to cut us off below the bend. We dodged into the brush and started upstream. But we had contrived to get into a thicket of wild-rose briars, whose thorns tore cruelly at our bare feet and legs and arms. I gave the jay-whistle I'd taught Bucephalus to come to. Ahead we heard something crashing through the thicket. I whistled again and we raced out of the briars—and narrowly escaped being trampled by Tall Mare riding toward us at full gallop. My uncle feinted one way, jumped the other, seized her by her trailing hair, and yanked her off her pony onto the ground. The force of the fall knocked out her wind. Leaping astride the Crow maiden, he raised the arrow he had picked up earlier high above his head with both hands. In Tall Mare's eyes there was only defiance. She neither asked for nor expected quarter.

“Uncle!” I cried.

But he had no intention of killing the Amazonian. With all his might he drove the arrow not into Tall Mare's windpipe but through her thick hair, pinning her head to the ground and rendering her temporarily helpless.

At just that moment Bucephalus galloped into the clearing. “Ha ha, Ti. The coy maid feigns indifference”—on the contrary, Tall Mare was struggling like a wildcat to free herself—“but I sense her ardent spirits rising. Ah, madam. If we had world enough and time . . . but for the nonce, forgive me.”

With this, True struck the giantess full on the jaw with his fist, knocking her quite senseless. Then he leaped up behind me onto Bucephalus, and we posted hard for the ford upriver. We stopped only for my easel, with the painting of Yellow Sage Flower still attached, then galloped across the shallows, where I hurried into my clothes, slit the thongs binding Yellow Sage, cut the hobble-strings on the Crows' horses, and fired my rifle to drive them off. Sage jumped onto her black and white pony. I pointed south, toward the approaching rainstorm, to indicate that we should head in that direction. My uncle, however, still struggling into his chain mail, shook his head. “You and Sage strike out that way, Ti. I intend to ride overland, across the middle tributary I explored this morning, leaving just enough sign to lead Hippolyta on a merry chase while you escape. I'll find Franklin tomorrow or the next day, and we'll overtake you in the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises. Don't try to dissuade me. For in our wrestling, the fair maiden stole from me that without which I cannot, in decency, proceed another mile in mixed company.”

“And what, pray, can that be?”

“Flame's riding pillow,” he replied. And, clapping his heels to his mule, the old knight-errant was off on what was, perhaps, the strangest mission in the history of chivalry.

L
IGHTNING AND MORE LIGHTNING.
Crackling rivers of electricity swept down the sky, and the rain came in such torrents that our tracks were wiped out almost before we laid them down. On and on we rode, half blinded by the deluge, which continued for several hours. At sunset it cleared, and over the mountains to the south the evening sky was the same deep green it had been on the evening before I met Yellow Sage Flower. Ahead, she told me, lay the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises, a magical place where we would wait for my uncle and Franklin. For now, she suggested that we spend the night under a nearby ledge overhanging a little cul-de-sac, where we could light a fire and dry off without much fear of detection.

Here Sage offered to tell me her story. “As you know, Ticonderoga,” she began, “not so very long ago or far away, a girl named Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories was orphaned by the deaths of both her dear mother and father, leaving her alone in the world except for her brother. However, her grandfather on her mother's side of the family happened to be none other than Old Napi—the Creator of the Blackfeet.”

I could not help smiling. But Yellow Sage sprang up from the fire and said that if, in my great ignorance, I intended to make fun of her, there would be no more storytelling that night or any night. And she now wished she had let the Crows burn me at the stake to spare herself this mortification.

I offered up a thousand apologies, protesting that I would never dream of laughing at her; but, having been raised in an altogether different place and manner, I needed a little time to adjust my thinking to the ways of the Blackfeet.

“You must say ‘the ways of the Blackfeet,
Lords of the Plains,
'” she corrected me. “For that is who and what we are. Indeed, ‘Blackfeet' is only our name in English. In fact, we are the Piegans, or Torn Robe People.”

“The Blackfeet, Lords of the Plains, then. I am beginning to understand them much better already.”

“Of course you are,” she said, sitting down again. “Now then. I happen to be the apple of Napi's eye as well as his granddaughter. But I shouldn't want you to suppose that my grandfather and I always agree. Not by any means. For he arranged for me to marry Smoke when I turn eighteen. Which is why I decided to run away.”