The Snake River Page 7

  Tsaa-yogo-sic, he thought amiably—there’s a little humping going on here.

  Web lay next to Paintbrush, close enough to hear her breathe. He thought maybe he could feel her breath on his face. He lay stiller than still. He felt his woah fiercely erect. He squeezed the handle of his knife so hard he thought the bone might crack.

  He wondered which of his wives One Bull was on top of. One was old and fat, the other not so old and comely. The old fool was so lecherous, so nia-shup, he probably liked both of them, and any other woman he could get. Pictures arose in Web’s mind, the heavyset old man bouncing around on top of one, then the other, playing lewdly, throwing her legs around, laughing, mocking Web, who had never had a woman.

  A fantasy touched him. Paintbrush’s body lay the length of him, warm, soft, luscious. She was still, gentle, not yet beginning to move against him, her long hair on his cheek and chest. He felt the lips caress his neck. That caress was more real than any human touch he’d ever felt.

  He shook himself and broke the illusion.

  Fortunately, he bumped no one when he shook himself.

  Paintbrush was so close. She exhaled deeply, and he felt her warm spirit on his eyes.

  The two lovers were quiet, except for an occasional stirring, a sigh of satisfaction, a wordless murmur.

  Web would have to be quiet for a long time before he whispered to Paintbrush. The lovers would lie awake for a little while, and half awake for a long time. He needed them deep in their dreams.

  He could be patient. Thanks to Rockchuck. He could put his mind into a kind of stillness, a peaceableness, and wait for hours. He had plenty of time. He was where he wanted to be. He would think of Paintbrush as he often thought of the animal he was stalking, think of her and bring her those final inches, from enticingly close all the way into his arms. He pictured the parts of her, her slender limbs, her lissome body, her small girl’s breasts, her undulating hips…

  He never knew he was falling asleep.

  Paintbrush heard breathing, rhythmic, relaxed breathing, one of the sounds of the earth. She enjoyed it dreamily. It made her imagine running water, the lulling sound of water flowing lightly over rocks.

  Then two awarenesses began to seep into part of her mind. One was the predawn light. The other was breath on her face.

  The wind, it must be the wind. She lolled pleasantly in her mind, shushed by the sound of water, warmed by a soft breeze.

  But it was warm. It was moist. It was animal.

  Paintbrush, the adopted daughter of One Bull, born to the Tukku Tekkah, opened her eyes and saw the monster Joahwayho.

  She flinched. She froze.

  The monster opened its eyes, its mad, white eyelids wagging at her.

  Paintbrush screamed like a woman-child about to die, a shrill, ululating, horrific, mind-shattering cry.

  From behind, One Bull saw not a monster but a boy in his virgin daughter’s robes. The man was on his feet instantly, he leapt, he slammed one shoulder into the boy. Hard against the lodge skins they went. One Bull rolled on top of the enemy and pinned him with his heft. Then he grabbed the greasy hair, jerked the head back, and turned his face sideways.

  He looked hard. Then he snapped in disgust, “Numah-divo.”

  Paintbrush screamed and screamed.

  One Bull started slapping Web’s face hard, deliberately, over and over. He held the hair with one hand and made Web’s face jerk with the other.

  “Na-nik-kumpah,” he said with a growl. “I’ll kill you later.”

  Chapter Seven

  But One Bull did not kill Web. The two clans, One Bull’s and Horn’s, sat in a lodge and smoked and talked. There was a good deal of cackling over a boy who came to steal a girl and fell asleep. They had no debate because the punishment was a foregone conclusion: Web would be banished.

  The accused demanded that he be allowed to speak to the clans in his own defense. Rockchuck brought the message. Why? they asked. Anyone can see he tried to steal Horn’s woman. Yu-huup, found holding the horses, even confessed.

  Rockchuck didn’t know why. He simply repeated Web’s request.

  Web sat in the place of least honor in the lodge. He sat with his eyes on nothing, seeing nothing, but refusing to cast his eyes down, to act obsequious in front of the circle of men who mocked and condemned him.

  He drew on the pipe defiantly, and offered the smoke as a prayer. Without knowing what he was going to say, he began.

  “I do not care what you say.” He spoke in a controlled voice, so they wouldn’t hear his anger, his fear, his outrage.

  “I do not care what you think of me.”

  He nearly shook. He had no idea what to say next.

  “You have treated me as a divo,” (white man). “From today I will be a divo.”

  He was shocked at himself.

  Yes, this was it.

  “I will go to my father’s people. I will get my father’s poha” (medicine): “I will never even think of the Shoshone people again. Good-bye.” When Shoshones said good-bye, instead of un-puih-ha-he, meaning “See you later,” they meant they hoped never to see you again.

  He stood, ready to leave. Then he thought. He walked between his host and the fire, a deliberate insult, and strode out of the tipi.

  The men in the circle muttered angrily. When they were calmed down, they decided to ignore the manners of a boy, and a Numah-divo at that. They talked a little more. Then they banished Web for life.

  The old woman found him beside the little creek. The blanket was pulled over his head, and it was shaking. The boy was sobbing.

  Black Shawl was sorry. She loved him. But he was different—he had always been different. Even his painting was different. It was painful, for both of them, but finding his own way would be best for Web.

  She sat down beside him, close, letting him feel her shoulder and her knee as she sat. She waited, and waited, and after a while he stopped crying and looked at her.

  “People told me what you said,” she murmured to him. “Sometimes even anger is wise. I think maybe your poha (medicine) is with the Hookin-divos.” It was their word for the French trappers, the ones who came from Vancouver.

  That was all she said. There was no need for more words. She would give him a pony, unfortunately a poor one, a blanket, some moccasins, and a little pemmican. He would take his weapons, his colored pencils, his few sheets of paper, and the one object his father had left behind, a compass. After sunset today, anyone of the people who spoke to him or gave him anything would be punished. Even his grandmother.

  After a long while, she added, “I’ll get your doings ready.” She looked at the boy’s wet cheeks. “They’ve sent Yu-huup out hunting with his father so you can’t say farewell.”

  The tall, skinny teenager and the short, skinny old woman walked side by side away from the pony herd, in the bottom land along the creek. They said nothing. The old woman held the boy’s elbow, perhaps for steadiness, perhaps from affection. She turned her face up to his. Her skin was creviced almost as deep as the bark of the Cottonwood. Her eyes were rheumy, and she no longer saw well. She couldn’t see her grandson’s face clearly unless she held it close.

  She had him a few years, and now she would lose him to his father. She had always felt the oddness in him anyway, surely from his father’s people. Maybe it was something good for him. Even Frenchmen, though they acted the fool, had some sort of power. Every living creature had its power. With Frenchmen it was the clever things they made—like traps and guns, and pencils and paper.

  Lucky. The boy had spoken in anger and bitterness, and wisdom had come out of his mouth. Luck was not chance—it came from Duma Apa.

  She held him back and eased herself onto a log. She could not walk far these days. This was all the distance she would go with him. He must make the journey alone.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “It’s all right, Grandmother,” he said.

  She held his face close and looked at it clearly for the last t
ime.

  “Tell me about the journey,” she instructed.

  “I go down the Snake River for about twenty sleeps. There the river goes east of north into a deep canyon, impossible to travel through. The Frenchmen call it the canyon of hell. I leave the river there and follow the old lodge trail north. After perhaps twelve more sleeps the trail will come back to the river, and it will turn west. Then the river will flow into a huge river coming from the north. There I will find the Frenchman fort Walla Walla. Maybe from there I can find someone to travel with to Fort Vancouver, which is almost to the sea.”

  “Tsaa-yu,” said the old woman. It is good. “We call the big river the Snake. What do the Frenchmen call it?”

  Web laughed sardonically. “Mad, Accursed River.”

  The old woman made a severe face. “It is mad. Keep your distance.”

  “And what will I find among the Frenchmen, Grandmother?” Web said bitterly.

  “Your poha,” the old woman said. Your medicine.

  “And maybe my father,” said Web. “Goddamn Hairy, my mad, accursed father.”

  She stood and embraced him.

  “I will come back, Grandmother. With many horses and many presents.”

  She hugged him. She didn’t think he’d come back.

  “Tsaa-paitt-sig,” she said. “Oosie-oie-yound.” Go well. This is all I ask of you.

  He mounted, looked back once, tried to smile, and set the overloaded pony to walking.

  He had a hard way to go, and dangerous, through the country of a lot of bloodmirsty people. He’d have to travel at night. The pony probably wouldn’t last—it was old and broken-down—but he could always eat it. It was more than fifty sleeps to Vancouver, by the western sea. No man of her people, in the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men, had traveled that far. She hoped he made it to the Frenchmen. The ways of the powers were unpredictable.

  It was hard to see a grandchild leave, almost unheard of among the people, a loss grievous as death. She had raised him as her own. But he had to go where he belonged.

  And it was time for her not to be responsible for a child. Since her bleeding stopped, she had worked to learn medicine. She knew how to use snowberry tea to help a woman after childbirth, and self-heal to improve eyesight. Her friend had promised to teach her how to prepare the wild geranium to heal ulcers in the stomach, skullcap to ease heart pain, and other remedies. It was time for her to become a healer.

  She was sad. It was hard to imagine him living among strangers, in some foreign place. Those people ate a lot of fish, or so she heard—barbarous. And some flattened their heads. The Frenchmen stank like fetid feet, left their women at home, and took everybody else’s.

  There were no people like the Newe-i, the people.

  She couldn’t see him clearly now, not with these eyes. Surely that dark shape against the horizon was him. She waved. If you come back, grandson, she murmured, I may no longer be walking the earth.

  The worst part of getting old was losing the people you loved.

  Chapter Eight

  The exile wandered. He drifted. He walked and rode like he was drunk, or opiumed, or like the air of the whole world had turned foul and fogged and soured his spirit.

  Web rode slowly through the heat of the moon when the berries are ripe, which the white man called August. He went along a nameless creek toward the Snake River, and then over the lava plain to the white-man trail. One sleep away for a strong, lone man with no women, no children, no travois. It took him two days to get there.

  The exile was half-hoping Yu-huup would track him and catch up. Maybe his cousin would bring him some gifts, some extra pemmican, extra moccasins, another blanket—maybe even another horse. It would be some company. Yu-huup could at least wish him a good journey, though never say good-bye.

  So he drifted along toward the big river, where he would turn west toward Fort Walla Walla, toward Fort Vancouver. Toward his father’s people, and his father.

  It would be a hard trip. The Snake River here ran through lava flows, sagebrush plains, and desert flats. The river made its own canyon and ran crazily over big falls, through terrible rapids, a mad, accursed river for sure. But he would follow the trail the white men used. They came every summer to Fort Hall, to collect the beaver pelts and pack them downriver—to Fort Walla Walla, Fort Vancouver. A moon ago he might have been able to ride downstream with some of them. But they had gone back to Fort Vancouver by now. The names of the forts made a kind of thumping music in his mind, like drums, lulling and irritating at once. He almost fell out of his saddle, drowsy in the heat, his spirit murky.

  Web knew he would have to be lucky to make it all that way. Anybody might take his scalp. He snickered to himself. Maybe one of the Frenchmen who were now his only people would lift his hair and give it to his father, lordly there in Fort Vancouver. And his father, knowing it for what it was, would roar and roar with laughter, and hold up the red scalp of Web, his red son, for all to see.

  Yu-huup didn’t come.

  Web spent the third day lying by a seep, a half mile below the trail. He told himself he was resting his pony, but the creature didn’t need rest yet. Web lay in the shade of a rock all day, occasionally drinking, eating too much of his pemmican. Far too much. He was torporous. He had eaten the first night greedily, like a man consuming his last meal. He needed to remember to make it last more than a moon, until he got to Fort Walla Walla. Now he would have to hunt. Which would take more days, make him later getting to Walla Walla, make him need more food.

  If his spirit weren’t so heavy, the exile might see something. Might get poha (medicine) from Spirit. Might be brought help by a lizard, or a spider. But he knew his spirit was fouled.

  Yu-huup didn’t come.

  The next day Web lay around again. He daydreamed. He fantasized.

  His imaginings were ugly. He began to think he would lie here forever, until he died. When he thought of the people finding his bones here next summer, he smiled with wry satisfaction. Or maybe the pony would go back to camp, and the people would know. He chuckled bitterly. He liked to imagine how they would be sorry and know they’d been wrong, and how Paintbrush, especially, would weep over the body of the exile.

  Sometimes white people gave their horses names. Now that he was a white man he would name his pony. Maybe Mom-pittseh. Owl. Among his people the owl was the messenger of death.

  Yu-huup didn’t come. Rockchuck didn’t come.

  On the evening of the fourth day he decided to change. Simple as that: He decided. His decision went like this: True, he had abandoned his first people, or been abandoned by them. But he would never abandon Spirit. He would now ask Spirit to enlist its poha on his side. He would pray. He would renew his promise to avoid the behaviors Spirit forbade. He would ask for the strength to make a sacrifice as his bond for that promise.

  It was a simple thing to decide, and necessary. At first it made no difference. He lay there, torpid, his strength lulled, his will limp, his spirit listless. When he made the decision to go through these gestures, he felt no better, no stronger, no more hopeful. His pledge was simply to make the gestures, to do his part, to see if he could act better.

  He gathered sticks and built a small fire. Then he gathered the needles of the cedar and burned them. He rubbed the smoke on his body, purifying himself.

  He took two valued possessions out of his old, ragged parfleche bag, sweetgrass, and the compass his father had left with his mother. Web had always felt odd about this compass. According to Black Shawl, his father left it with some words and a promise. He explained that the stick always called toward the north, where the white buffalo lives. While Pinyon had the compass, all Hairy’s travels would lead him to Pinyon. The words said the compass had power. Yet his father had not come back.

  Nevertheless, the compass still showed the direction from where the white buffalo sends the cleansing winds. Web would honor its power, however small. With a bow drill he made a small fire and lit the braided sw
eetgrass. He passed the compass four times through the thick, curling smoke.

  Then he stood. Without even a toih, pipe, he faced each of the four winds, the west of the Thunderbird, the north, home of Magpie, the east, where Meadowlark comes from, and the south, where Owl lives. Without even tobacco to offer, he lifted his arms to Father Sky, made obeisance to Mother Earth.

  Then he prayed. “Ne Nahgai Ook,” he said—Hear me, Spirit. “Ne shone deah”—Have mercy on me. “Ne tsaanani-sunte-ha”—I pray well.

  He promised to bring an offering of tobacco in the future. To behave as Spirit had taught Shoshones to behave. To make a sacrifice of flesh to Spirit.

  He asked for strength to start on his great task, finding his father. Strength of spirit to do what he must do. Strength of body to set out firmly on the long journey. Strength of will to persevere for many sleeps. Strength of mind to make wise decisions.

  He finished his prayer with thanks to Duma Apa for the earth, for living things, and for his own life.

  When he was finished, he felt scarcely different from the way he felt when he decided to change. He was a little more hopeful. At least he could do what he had decided to do, whether it was futile or not.

  Now was the time for his sacrifice. He took his knife from the belt of his breechcloth. He kept it very sharp. As he looked at the blade, his hand jumped.

  Taking control, he sat cross-legged by the fire, once more threw cedar needles on the coals of the fire, once more purified himself. He took the knife in his right hand. With his left he lifted the skin a finger joint’s length above his left nipple.

  He forbade his imagination to go ahead of him. He had seen this done but never tried it. The pain of imagination, he knew, would be greater than the pain of the flesh.

  Deftly, he made a downward cut with the knife point. Blood popped like beads of red sweat from the thin line.

  Quickly, not quite frantically, he made three more cuts, outlining a square of flesh the size of his thumbnail.