Shaman, Robert Shea [new ebook reader .txt] 📗

was hard for Redbird to follow her. She seemed to be saying that she expected to die before she ever knew those good feelings Redbird talked about with a man she loved. She had already lived for twenty summers, and now it seemed she might not live much longer. And never have a man.

It was true. There was big danger to Yellow Hair. If anything happened to White Bear, she would have no protector. Many Sauk hated pale eyes. One might get at her. Or her own people might even kill her by mistake.

Yellow Hair had missed so much. So tall and beautiful, but she had nothing to show for her life—no man, no children. Redbird felt sorry for her.

"You love White Bear?" she asked, hugging herself as she said the word "love" to show what she meant.

Now Yellow Hair turned pale—even paler than usual—and drew away from Redbird. She shook her head violently, her bright golden hair swinging all wild and loose, and said, "No, no, no!"

But she stared at Redbird too fixedly, and Redbird could see that she did not mean what she said.

White Bear wanted Yellow Hair, but said he did not want her. Yellow Hair loved White Bear, but said she did not love him.

White Bear and Yellow Hair were both being foolish. It came of Yellow Hair being pale eyes and White Bear being part pale eyes.

And so now Redbird took a deep breath and said, "When we sleep tonight, you go to bed of White Bear. He make you happy."

Yellow Hair's eyes grew huge and her face glowed with a joyous wonder. She stammered and gasped as she asked Redbird if she really meant it, if she would really let such a thing happen.

"I happy when you happy, White Bear happy," Redbird said.

Redbird had come to see Yellow Hair as a younger sister who needed her help and guidance. She liked Yellow Hair much more, in fact, than she liked either Wild Grape or Robin's Nest. Her sisters had always sneered at White Bear, and Yellow Hair saw what a fine man he was.[345]

Yellow Hair suddenly looked frightened. She stood up abruptly, picked up her fringed doeskin dress and struggled into it. When her head appeared through the neck of the dress and she shook her hair free, she was crying again.

No, she insisted, she couldn't do that. It would be wrong.

Redbird thought she understood. This hungry, dangerous time was a terrible time for a woman to be carrying a baby.

"You not want baby? Sun Woman makes tea keeps woman from getting baby."

Yellow Hair talked for a long time. Redbird tried hard to follow what she said, asking questions and making her repeat herself. It had to do with Jesus, the pale eyes spirit Père Isaac always talked about. Jesus would not like it if Yellow Hair went to bed with White Bear.

Redbird remembered White Bear telling her that Yellow Hair was the daughter of a pale eyes shaman. The Jesus spirit might be a special spirit for her, then.

But I am also the daughter of a shaman. I can teach her what we believe.

"Jesus not here," Redbird pointed out. "We children of Earthmaker."

But also, Yellow Hair explained, by pale eyes custom a woman who slept with another woman's husband was a bad woman.

"White Bear is your husband," Redbird said. "My father shaman. He marry you and White Bear." Surely that was more important than what a lot of pale eyes who were not even here to see might think. Among the Sauk, many would call Yellow Hair a bad woman for not sleeping with White Bear.

"We Sauk people. What you do with my Sauk man is good."

Yellow Hair sighed and wiped her tears with her fingers. Maybe she would go to White Bear in the night, and maybe not. She spread her hands helplessly. She did not know what to do.

Redbird saw that she could tell Yellow Hair no more. The pale eyes would have to make up her own mind.

Yellow Hair gave Redbird a sad smile and thanked her for her kindness. And after Redbird had put on her dress and her moccasins, Yellow Hair gave her a little kiss on the cheek.

With a wooden comb Redbird had given her, Yellow Hair combed out her long blond locks and began to braid them again.

They rejoined Eagle Feather and Woodrow and spent the rest of[346] the afternoon searching for food, returning to camp when the clouds overhead turned purple and the sun made a brief appearance, blazing like a prairie fire on the flat horizon of the marshland.

Redbird bit her lip anxiously as they walked back to the camp. If Yellow Hair decided not to go to bed with White Bear, she might think, according to her pale eyes custom, that Redbird was a bad woman for saying she should. But what if Yellow Hair went to bed with White Bear and he came to love Yellow Hair more than he did Redbird? She had thought that could not happen, but now that she had spoken out, she was not so sure.

That night Redbird curled up on her solitary pallet of blankets laid over a mat of reeds on one side of the wickiup. Yellow Hair lay in her sleeping place, and the boys were in the one they shared. White Bear was still visiting and treating ill people. Many people, especially the very old and the very young, were falling ill in the Trembling Lands. There had been many deaths since they crossed the Great River. Bit by bit the band was losing the wisdom of the old and the promise of the young.

White Bear came in long after the two women and the boys had settled down for the night. He went to his own pallet on the east side of the wickiup.

Now that Redbird was ready for sleep, the baby within her woke up, and its kicking, along with burning feelings that rose from her stomach to her throat, kept her awake.

The stillness was disturbed only by the chirping of countless frogs.

Where were those frogs today when we were looking for food? We must ask the Frog spirit to let us catch some of them.

Then she heard another movement. Someone was crawling across the reed-covered floor of the wickiup. She caught her breath. Yellow Hair's sleeping place was on the side opposite White Bear's, and the movement was unmistakably from her bed to his.

A little later she heard other sounds that were also easy to recognize—the crackling of a bed's reed matting, whispers, little gasps and groans, loud, fast breathing.

Yellow Hair's cry of pain sounded as if it had come through clenched teeth. She still did not want anyone to know. Redbird smiled to herself.

As she listened to White Bear's heavy panting, Redbird remembered[347] the sharp pain inside her when she first received him on the island near Saukenuk.

White Bear sighed loudly, and then everything was still for a time, and Redbird heard the frogs once more. They were probably mating too. How wise of Earthmaker to make his creatures into woman and man, so they could give each other such wonderful pleasure. Earthmaker knew everything, but it was hard to see how he could have invented man and woman without having seen something that gave him the idea.

Him? Redbird had always pictured Earthmaker as a man, a giant warrior, but now she wondered whether the spirit that gave life to the world and all things in it might be a she. Or, better yet, maybe there were two Earthmakers, a he and a she.

As she had so many times before, she wished now that the tribe's custom would permit her to become a shaman, so that she might see into these mysteries with her own eyes, as White Bear and Owl Carver had.

The sounds started up again from White Bear's bed, the movements, the whisperings. Redbird thought about how good it was to have her man filling her solidly, giving her delicious feelings as he moved in and out. And she felt herself warm with desire.

She smiled ruefully in the dark.

Now I want him and I cannot have him, because I sent Yellow Hair to his bed.

I hope this baby will be born soon, so I can lie with White Bear again. Of course, even then I will still let Yellow Hair have him, sometimes.

When Redbird awoke at sunrise and got up to begin the day's foraging, Yellow Hair was back sleeping in her own place. In the faint light that filtered through the wickiup's elm-bark skin, her pink mouth looked soft and childlike.

White Bear was seated cross-legged on his bed, loading the rifle he had brought with him when he came back to the tribe. With food so short, even the shaman had to go out and try to hunt to supply his family; the people he treated had no gifts to give him. She stood looking at him, waiting for him to speak to her, but he kept his eyes on his rifle with foolish shyness.

Did he think she was angry at him, or that she was going to tease him, the way Water Flows Fast might?[348]

Poor Water Flows Fast—she made few jokes since her husband, Three Horses, was killed at Old Man's Creek.

Redbird said, "I know what happened last night. I am glad that it happened. It was good for her and for you."

Now White Bear's dark eyes met hers, troubled. "Yes, it is good for me and Nancy—Yellow Hair—but only for now."

"What troubles you?" she asked him.

"One day, when Yellow Hair must leave us and go back to her own people, I think she will be very sad. That is why I did not lie with her when she wanted me to at Victor. I knew we would have to part."

"Now she has what she wants, at least for as long as she stays with us. Now she will have something to think about besides how afraid she is."

He smiled at her. "And you made it happen. I know that you sent her to me. You are a great troublemaker."

He stood up and stroked her cheek with his fingertips, and she felt a glow inside, certain now that speaking to Yellow Hair had been right.

The afternoon sun heated the interior of the birthing wickiup till it felt like a sweat lodge.

Redbird screamed. It was not a baby; it was a wild horse down there, kicking its way out. She felt about to faint.

The pain died away. Groaning, Redbird went limp between Wind Bends Grass and Yellow Hair, who held her arms. Sun Woman crouched before Redbird, observing the progress of the birth by the light of a single candle.

Her skin slick with sweat, Redbird was squatting naked over a pile of blankets in the center of the wickiup. Her back and legs ached unbearably.

"You don't have to scream so loud," Wind Bends Grass said abruptly. "It doesn't hurt that much."

Redbird wished her mother could feel this pain and know how much it hurt. She felt like telling Wind Bends Grass to leave the birthing wickiup.

Sun Woman said gently, "No one knows how much another person hurts."[349]

I don't remember this much pain when Eagle Feather was born. Maybe I am going to die.

Sun Woman stood up and wiped Redbird's forehead with a cool, wet kerchief, then cleaned her bottom for her, where a little blood was dripping.

"I can see the top of the baby's head," Sun Woman said. "It will be a good birth. You are almost done now."

Redbird looked up at the mare's tail, dyed red, that hung over the wickiup doorway, medicine to make the birth go easier.

Let it be over soon, she prayed. Her pains had started at dawn, and now it was past midday. Sun Woman had used up four candles, and in the whole band there were hardly any candles left. It had not taken this long with Eagle Feather.

Yellow Hair rubbed the arm she was holding, and Redbird managed to look at her and smile. Though Redbird had meant to honor Yellow Hair by asking her to help here, she was not sure now that she had done the right thing. The pale eyes woman's face was icy white, and she kept biting her lips as if trying to keep from being sick. She had probably never seen anything like this before.

Wind Bends Grass had insisted that it was bad luck to have Yellow Hair present, but Redbird had ignored her.

The next pain came, and Redbird, to show her mother how much it hurt, screamed even louder and longer than she had to. This time the pain gave her hardly any rest before it came again. And another came stepping on its heels. And another.

Her