Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo Page A

leg twitched with unnatural rapidity. He had cut the scalp lock above one ear, and there was a single bloody braid dangling from his waiststring when Grass Child reached him.
    With a cry she slashed the murderer’s face with her fingernails, scarifying it with three deep, red furrows. She saw a face with a big nose that was long and hooked like the beak of a buzzard. Evil, it looked grisly in the deepening shadows of late afternoon. Her scalp tingled. Another stranger rode his horse between Grass Child and Willow Bud, separating them. Grass Child found herself standing alone, staring at the strange rider. She turned and raced as hard as she could toward the riverbank where she had last seen Willow Bud. Her feet flew, and she did not feel the stones under them. Her lungs felt scorched. At the river’s edge she did not see Willow Bud; her feet slid in the mud. She slipped quietly into the cold water. She was a good swimmer, but never had she swum so frightened before. She could not breathe; water flooded her lungs; she choked. Finally, she let the current carry her downstream, where she bumped a sawyer just under the muddy water. She was sure she saw something move in the thicket of willows, so she clung to the sawyer and kept her head under as long as possible. She heard the splashing of water over the wild thumping of her heart, and before she could get the mud cleared from her eyes, she felt a blow onthe back of her head and for a brief moment felt herself sinking into the cold, watery darkness.
    Grass Child opened her eyes. Her head hurt miserably. The sky was fading to a gray tinged with a few streaks of pink. She was bound facedown with thick thongs to the back of a scrawny pony, and, slowly moving her head and opening her eyes to a squint, she saw beside her one of the bays from her father’s stock. Her mind reeled, and plainly she heard her father speaking to Never Walks, his eldest: “A horse is a tool. Do not let him go dull. Some men break their beast until he has no will, only a sweating horror at their approach. These men know how to make a horse kill himself, how to make him do an added mile at top speed after he is ready to quit.”
    Slowly she came up from the darkness that had surrounded her to the reality that she had imagined her father’s voice, and she smelled acrid smoke from the burning of hides and green willow. Her eyes watered as she looked at long plumes curling from the direction of the People’s hunting camp. Four yellow-and-black striped figures emerged at the top of a small bluff, each carrying a child. Grass Child dropped her head to the horse’s rump; her eyes closed, pushing out the sting with hot tears. She had recognized the children. Drummer, just learning to walk, and Blue Feather, a summer older. Both sons of Water Woman and Yellow Rope. Water Woman was somehow related to Grass Child’s mother. She remembered the women called each other sister. Small Man was kicking at his captor. He was the son of Red Eagle, who had been so full of thanksgiving at the boy’s birth that he had celebrated for more than a week, giving away all his belongings to members of the village. Last, there was Something Good, little son of the old Medicine Man and his youngest wife, Gall.
    The sickening knowledge exploded inside Grass Child that the People were raided for ponies and children. These strangers had also been looking for the buffalo, but had found something better.
    Taking horses from an enemy was not considered stealing, but an accepted practice of daring and wits.
    All tribes initiated their young boys in the endless craft of stealing horses; how to study a herd to ascertain the leader, how to hold the rest together through him. But the taking of children and women to be used as slaves left a terrible debt unpaid.
    Grass Child’s head ached cruelly, and she could feel blood oozing down the inside of her tunic from the wound. She had lost her moccasins. A strange, fierce-looking man reached for