The True Account (25 page)

Although I had no notion what to make of this gorgeous creature and her stories, I assured her that I would do all in my power to help her escape from Smoke. We talked on together most companionably until at last we were both overcome by weariness, and so lay down on opposite sides of the fire and slept for the remaining hours of the night.

L
ATE THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
, as Yellow Sage Flower and I rode south toward the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises and our rendezvous with my uncle, we had our first quarrel. She wished to camp in the prairie by a little stream winding down out of the mountains. I thought it wiser to ride to a higher place that would offer us more protection from marauding Crows or Smoke's party. Finally Sage said she would tell me how Blackfoot couples settled disputes if I would get off my horse and sit down by the brook and devote my full attention to her. Sitting cross-legged facing me and about three feet away, she began.

“Soon after my grandfather created the world, Ticonderoga, he decided to make himself a wife—Old Woman. Being inexperienced in such undertakings, he sculpted his first spouse from one of the many glaciers in our homeland. But she was far too frosty for any of the purposes Napi had in mind, so he set her in the sun; and soon this unobliging woman was a small pool of meltwater, at which my grandfather laughed very heartily. Then he fashioned a more suitable helpmeet from Missouri River clay, into which he breathed life, and they were very happy together for some years. But disputes between a man and a woman being inevitable, Napi and Old Woman Two could not agree on how many children to have. So my grandfather decreed that he should have first say in this matter and in all matters. To his surprise, Old Woman Two immediately agreed—with the provision that second say be reserved for her. ‘Fine,' Napi declared. ‘I have first say. I say we will have one child. A son for me.' Old Woman Two smiled. ‘And I, who have second say, say we will have two children. A son and a daughter for
us.
' At this, my grandfather was confounded. But he had to agree, and of course he never regretted it. Where do you want to camp tonight, Ti? Say your first say.”

“Higher up, on the ridge.”

“Are you sure?” She smiled, and I felt myself beginning to melt, like Napi's unfortunate first wife.

“Well,” I said.

“I will now exercise my option as a Blackfoot woman with second say,” Yellow Sage Flower told me. “And
I
say we camp here.”

Which, needless to say, we did.

The next morning, as we ascended a great plateau, we ran across the tracks of four ponies headed in the same direction as we were. Sage assured me that this was the female Crow raiding party. What concerned me much more, however, was that intermingled with their hoofprints were those of my uncle's mule. So far from decoying the Amazonians away from us and recovering Flame's riding cushion, he had managed, it appeared, to be recaptured—or worse yet, killed, and his mule appropriated by his murderers.

For the rest of the morning we followed the tracks up through a handsome country of wooded dells, steep hillsides dotted with evergreens, wildflower meadows, and cold rushing streams. As we continued to climb, the soil became thin and rocky. I lost the Crows' trail entirely, but Sage had no trouble following it, and in the early afternoon she announced that we would surely overtake them by evening. Then she said she would show me a thing that I had never seen before, which I should be prepared to sketch for a most original painting. In a brush pile just below a hilltop she opened a sort of saddlebag, which she called a parfleche, and removed a leather string, with which she fashioned a snare. Then she scraped out a pit on top of the knoll and covered it with pine boughs. Soon we heard a squeal and saw a snowshoe rabbit struggling upside down by one of its big hind feet from the snare. Sage spoke to the rabbit in Blackfoot, quieting it immediately, then tied it by one leg on top of the cut pine boughs and secreted herself beneath them in the pit, bidding me hide with our horses in the nearby pine woods with my pencil at the ready.

For a time nothing out of the ordinary occurred. The tethered rabbit hopped about on the boughs. Except for a sifting breeze in the hot-scented pines, all was silent. Then a shadow glided over the hilltop. The rabbit froze. I looked up to see, black against the blue afternoon sky, a golden eagle plummeting earthward with its talons outstretched. Just before the bird struck the rabbit, Sage jerked it out of harm's way. The eagle screamed as it crashed into the boughs. Sage's hands shot out and grasped the bird by its legs. For the next several seconds everything was all beating wings and driving yellow talons and striking beak and determined girl. Then the eagle was standing on the ground beside Sage, and although blood streamed down both her arms, she was talking to it just as she had spoken to the rabbit. Presently it lifted into the air again, flying straight south in the direction the tracks had been heading. Yellow Sage signaled me to remain where I was while she bound her arms with some strips of blue cloth from her parfleche. After some minutes the eagle reappeared, landing beside her again. Through some private communication, it seemed to be reporting to her on what it had seen. When their conversation had ended, it flew away toward the west, and Sage returned to me with a delighted smile, though she refused to tell what she had learned.

We rode on, and in the early evening we came out onto a red-rock crag above a very large lake entirely hemmed in by mountains. This was the first lake I had seen since leaving St. Louis. I was amazed that it could lie so high. But Yellow Sage, who had been here before, was pointing at some people on the bank of a river meandering out of the lake's northwestern corner. “Let's ride down and take them unawares,” she said.

As we galloped down the hillside, whom should I discern, standing by the lake, but my uncle. To my great relief, he was demonstrating the use of his fly-rod to Tall Mare, standing very close to him and watching with apparent admiration. He handed her the rod and, with his arm encircling her shoulder and his hand grasping her wrist, he helped her execute false casts, calling out instructions in his schoolmasterly way, as he had when he'd taught me to fly-fish on my mother's little stock pond. “Ten o'clock, twelve o'clock, two o'clock. Ten o'clock, twelve o'clock, two o'clock. Excellent, my young Hippolyta. You have a natural talent, my dear.”

The fact that Tall Mare spoke not a single word of English did not seem to trouble either of them. To me he said, patting the bulge in his buckskin pantaloons, “Fear not, Ti. Not only have I made peace all around with our Crow friends, I have also recovered that which I earlier had lost.” My uncle had indeed recovered Flame Danielle's pink cushion, though he appeared, by the same token, to have lost his heart.

But where was Frankln, whose tracks True had been following when the Crows apprehended him? Sage assured me that her resourceful brother would turn up when least expected.

Earlier that day, Yellow Sage Flower had told me that no people dwelt year-round in the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises, which the nations of Louisiana considered a sacred place. But each year in late summer, the Crows convened for a trade rendezvous at the place where the river flowed out of the lake. To this celebration they invited all of the other Indians of the western plains and Rocky Mountains except, pointedly, their inveterate enemies from the far north, the Blackfeet.

That night we camped by the lake, a little apart from my uncle and the Crow women. Early the next morning I woke to discover Sage watching me. “Why don't you try to catch me, Ti?” she said. “I'm in the mood for a race.” Before I could reply she leaped up and sped off down the slope toward the lake as fast as her feet could carry her, with me in close pursuit.

Sage was a fleet runner. But like my long-legged uncle in his day, I was able to outrun nearly anyone. She was quick, I quicker. I overtook her at the edge of the water, she tripped me, I sprang to my feet, and away we went again. With her long black hair flying, she shot me a mocking look over her shoulder, then stopped abruptly near a secluded bay—beside my uncle and Tall Mare, asleep in each other's arms and surrounded by a party of Crow warriors.

One of the men identified himself as Horse Stealer, the chief of the tribe and father of Tall Mare. Horse Stealer seemed very much amused by his daughter's attachment to my uncle, who, upon waking, turned as red as the sun coming up over the mountains to be discovered in such a situation. But he soon recovered himself and informed the chief, with Sage as translator, that he need not worry for his daughter's virtue, since he and Hippolyta were “just friends.”

“Tib-Rep-Mic, you and your yellow-haired nephew, and even the Blackfoot girl, are welcome here in our sacred park,” Horse Stealer replied. When Yellow Sage asked the meaning of my uncle's Crow name, the chief said, “Stranger Who Chose Not to Kill a Human Being”—meaning his daughter, when she had been at my uncle's mercy, pinned to the ground by her hair near the Three Forks.

Horse Stealer inquired where my uncle and I had come from. Sage explained that we were Americans, who lived far to the east. To this the chief responded that Americans would always be welcome in the Crow Nation, and he decreed on the spot that no Crow must ever kill or harm one, though he could not guarantee the security of American
hones.
For to ask a Crow not to steal horses would be asking the impossible. Smiling cordially, Horse Stealer invited my uncle to shake hands with him. He grasped my uncle's right hand in his, then with his left fist struck him a prodigious blow on the side of the head, knocking him clean off his feet, to repay him for striking his daughter.

Rising and rubbing his jaw, my uncle said that though no man had ever felled him before, nay, not in fisticuffs or cudgel play or any other wise, fair was fair and he took no umbrage. Then he and Tall Mare went offhand in hand to fish the River of Yellow Stones, which the private assured me was teeming with Kinnesonian cutthroats, offering the best sport he had ever known—though Yellow Sage and I were not entirely persuaded that fishing was the principal sport he had in mind.

O
VER THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS
my uncle spent every waking—and sleeping—minute with his darling Hippolyta. In the meantime, while the Crows prepared for their annual fair, I began another tableau, with the lake as its centerpiece. Compacting my images, I combined images of several spectacular wonders I had seen nearby, including the outlet river and its falls, which cut through a deep canyon with gleaming yellow walls; a mountain of glassy black obsidian; a field of oozing muds colored blue, copper, green, and orange; and a mammoth hot spring of azure water. In the foreground I placed a geyser, which several times a day at regular intervals erupted into a gushing hundred-foot-high column of steam. The Crow Indians called this marvel the Weeping Maiden, and believed it to have once been a Shoshone girl from the mountains to the west who was jilted by her lover and still wept each day for him.

As I painted, Yellow Sage told me stories. Many involved the antics of her grandfather Napi, who, it seemed, had nearly as many little ways and stays as my uncle. Once, trying to pick the ripe purple berries off the
reflection
of a bullberry bush, Napi leaned over too far and tumbled head over heels into the river. To punish the bush he gave it thorns so that the only way people could pick its fruit was by whacking the branches with sticks. On another occasion, Napi accidentally set himself on fire while stealing a handsome pair of elk-skin leggings from the sun. Again he had to take to the river, this time to douse himself.

One night Sage told us a tale in which a young Piegan boy and girl fall into the clutches of a wicked witch. When she decides to cook the children alive, a mountain buffalo helps them escape, then drowns the evil witch in a river. “See how Tall Mare trembles,” cried my shuddering uncle. “Do not worry, my dear Dulcinea. I will let no witches carry
you
away.”

Though Sage had been educated at Sault Ste. Marie as carefully as her brother and spoke perfect English, as well as Blackfoot, Cree, Assiniboine, Crow, and Shoshone, she practiced all the ways of her Piegan mother. Her favorite dish was buffalo blood soup, which she whipped up from the fat and blood of a bison, sweetened with ripe huckleberries. Yet when my uncle fried up a mess of trout, she gagged at the sight of their orange flesh and said that even if they were starving, the Piegans never ate fish, which they reviled as unclean. Serpents and lizards, on the other hand, she held to be wise, healthy, and long-lived; from Horse Stealer, who was the tribal snake charmer as well as its chief and had brought to the rendezvous a box full of writhing vipers, she borrowed a lively bull snake five feet long, which she draped round her neck, then invited me to embrace her.

 

I was eager to do a painting of the Indians' trade rendezvous, but I was running low on colors and blank canvases and wished to husband what I had left for our journey to the Pacific. “Is that all the trouble?” Sage said after I explained my dilemma to her. “Go shoot us a buffalo.”

I did as she bade me, and in the animal's gall bladder she collected about a gallon of rainwater from a pothole on a red mesa. This she boiled down to a thick, pasty substance, which she compounded with a little buffalo tallow to form a brilliant madder-red. From sage twigs boiled with the leaves attached she concocted a glowing yellow. She extracted a royal purple from the huckleberries that grew abundantly in the high natural parks of the nearby mountains, and a lovely azure blue from the dried dung of some teal who were raising a second brood beside the Lake Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises. White she procured from a snowy clay resembling our kaolin.

After scraping the hair from the hide of a mountain sheep, Sage tanned the underside with a mixture of buffalo brains and fat, smoked it over a fire-hole for a day, then set me to pounding it with a rock to make it soft and white. When I was finished, she stretched the hide over a frame of four willow sticks about the thickness of her little finger—thus making me a painting surface as smooth as canvas. To hold fast the colors, she showed me how to extract a more than passable sizing oil from wild sunflower seeds mixed with the glue from a boiled beaver tail and the hoofs of a buffalo. From the edge of a buffalo's scapula she cut a light, porous applicator that received paint well and applied it in an even flow; and for finer work she fashioned a true brush from a deer fibula tipped with the hairs of a bull elk's underbelly. Henceforward, while in the West, I would never be without the means to paint.