General Gaines said the treaty of 1803 that had set up the fort on Rock Island also had given the Great Father in Washington all the Sauk lands east of the Mississippi-fifty million acres. He told the stunned and puzzled Indians that they had received annuities, and now the Great Father in Washington wanted his children to leave Sauk-e-nuk and go to live on the other side of Masesibowi, the large river. Their Father in Washington would give them a gift of corn to see them through the winter.

Chief of the Sauks was Keokuk, who knew that the Americans were too many. When Davenport gave him the words of the white war chief, a great fist squeezed Keokuk's heart. Though the others looked at him to answer, he was silent. But a man rose to his feet, who had learned enough language while fighting for the British, so he spoke for himself. "We never sold our country. We never received any annuities from our American Father. We will hold our village."

General Gaines saw an Indian, almost old, without a chief's headdress. In stained buckskins. Hollow-cheeked, with a high, bony forehead. More gray than black in the roached scalp lock that split his shaven skull. An insulting beak of a big nose leaping out between wide-set eyes. A sullen mouth above a dimpled lover's chin that didn't belong in that ax of a face.

Gaines sighed, and looked questioningly at Davenport.

"Name of Black Hawk."

"What is he?" the general asked Davenport, but Black Hawk answered.

"I am a Sauk. My fathers were Sauks, great men. I wish to remain where their bones are and be buried with them. Why should I leave their fields?"

He and the general gazed at one another, stone on steel.

"I came here not to beg nor to hire you to leave your village. My business is to remove you," Gaines said mildly. "Peaceably, if I can. Forcibly, if I must. I now give you two days to remove. If you don't cross the Mississippi by that time, I will force you away."

The People talked together, staring at the ship's cannon pointed at them. The soldiers who rode by in small groups, yipping and hollering, were well-fed and well-armed, with plenty of ammunition. The Sauks had old rifles, few bullets, no reserve of food.

Keokuk sent a runner to summon Wabokieshiek, White Cloud, a medicine man who lived among the Winnebago. White Cloud was the son of a Winnebago father and a Sauk mother. He was tall and fat, with long gray hair and, a rarity among Indians, a scraggly black mustache. He was a great shaman, tending to the spiritual and medical needs of the Winnebago, the Sauks, and the Mesquakies. All three tribes knew him as the Prophet, but White Cloud had no comforting prophecy to offer Keokuk. He said the militia was a superior force and Gaines wouldn't listen to reason. Their friend Davenport the trader met with the chief and the shaman and urged them to do as they were ordered and abandon the land before the dispute became b.l.o.o.d.y trouble.

So on the second night of the two days the People had been granted, they left Sauk-e-nuk like animals that were driven away, and they went across Masesibowi into the land of their enemies, the Iowa.

That winter Two Skies lost her belief that the world was safe. The corn delivered by the Indian agent to the new village west of Masesibowi was of poor quality and not nearly enough to keep hunger away. The People couldn't hunt or trap enough meat, for many had bartered their guns and traps for Vandruff's whiskey. They mourned the loss of the crops left in their fields. The mealy corn. The rich, nourishing pumpkins, the huge sweet squashes. One night five women recrossed the river and went to their old fields and picked some frozen ears of the corn they had planted themselves the previous spring. They were discovered by white homesteaders and severely beaten.

A few nights later, Black Hawk led a few men on horseback back to Rock Island. They filled sacks with corn from the fields and broke into a storehouse, taking squashes and pumpkins. Through the terrible winter, a debate raged. Keokuk, the chief, argued that Black Hawk's action would bring the white armies. The new village wasn't Sauk-e-nuk, but it could be a good place to live, he argued, and the presence of mookamonik across the river meant a market for the furs of Sauk trappers.

Black Hawk said whiteskins would push the Sauks as far as possible and then destroy them. The only choice was to fight. The only hope for all red men was to forget tribal enmities and join together from Canada to Mexico, with the help of the English Father, against the greater enemy, the American.

The Sauks argued at length. By spring most of the People had decided to stay with Keokuk west of the wide river. Only 368 men and their families linked their fate with Black Hawk. Among them was Green Buffalo.

Canoes were laden. Black Hawk, the Prophet, and Neosho, a Sauk medicine man, set out in the lead canoe, then the others pushed off, paddling hard against the mighty current of Masesibowi. Black Hawk wanted no destruction or killing unless his force was attacked. As they moved downstream, when they approached a mookamon settlement he ordered his people to beat their drums and sing. With women, children, and the old, he had nearly thirteen hundred voices, and settlers fled the terrible sound. In a few settlements they collected food, but they had many mouths to feed and no time to hunt or fish.

Black Hawk had sent runners to Canada to ask the British for help, and to a dozen tribes. The messengers brought back bad news. It wasn't surprising that old enemies like the Sioux and Chippewa and Osage wouldn't join with the Sauks against the whiteskins, but neither would their brother nation the Mesquakies, or any other friendly nation. Worse, their British Father sent the Sauks only words of encouragement and wishes for good fortune in war.

Remembering the cannon on warships, Black Hawk took his people off the river, beaching their canoes on the eastern bank from which they had been exiled. Since each sc.r.a.p of food was precious, everyone became a bearer, even squaws who were big with child, like Union-of-Rivers. They skirted Rock Island and went up the Rocky River to meet with Potawatomi from whom they hoped to lease land on which to grow a corn crop. It was from the Potawatomi that Black Hawk heard that the Father in Washington had sold the Sauk territory to white investors. The townsite of Sauk-e-nuk and nearly all their fields had been bought by George Davenport, the trader who, pretending he was their friend, had urged them to abandon the land.

Black Hawk ordered a dog feast, for he knew the People needed the help of the manitous. The Prophet oversaw the strangling of the dogs, the cleansing and purification of the meat. While it was stewing, Black Hawk set his medicine bags before his men. "Braves and warriors," he said, "Sauk-e-nuk is no more. Our lands are stolen. White-skinned soldiers have burned our hedonoso-tes. They have torn down the fences of our fields. They have plowed up our Place of the Dead and planted corn among our sacred bones. These are the medicine bags of our father, Muk-ataquet, who was the beginning of the Sauk nation. They were handed down to the great war chief of our nation, Na-namakee, who was at war with all the nations of the lakes and all the nations of the plains, and was never disgraced. I expect you all to protect them."

The warriors ate the sacred flesh and were given courage and strength. It was necessary, for Black Hawk knew the Long Knives would be moving against them. Perhaps it was the manitous who allowed Union-of-Rivers to drop her baby at this encampment rather than along the trail. It was a man-child and did as much for the warriors' spirits as the dog feast, because Green Buffalo named his son Wato-kimita, He-Who-Owns-Land.

Spurred by public hysteria over rumors that Black Hawk and the Sauks were on the warpath, Governor Reynolds of Illinois called for one thousand mounted volunteers. More than twice that number of would-be Indian fighters came forward, and 1,935 untrained men were mustered into military service. They were a.s.sembled at Beardstown, merged with 342 regular militiamen, and quickly formed into four regiments and two battalions of scouts. Samuel Whiteside of St. Clair County was declared a brigadier general and placed in command.

Reports from settlers indicated where Black Hawk was, and Whiteside moved his brigade out. It had been an unusually wet spring and they had to swim even the smaller creeks, while ordinary sloughs became bayous through which they floundered. It took them five days of hard travel through trailless country to reach Oquawka, where supplies should have been waiting. But the army had blundered; there were no supplies, and the men long since had eaten what they had carried in their saddlebags. Undisciplined and cantankerous, they berated their officers like the civilians they actually were, demanding that they be fed. Whiteside sent a dispatch to General Henry Atkinson at Fort Armstrong, and at once Atkinson ordered the steamer Chieftain downstream with a cargo of food. Whiteside sent the two battalions of regular militia forward, while for almost a week the main body of volunteers filled their bellies and rested.

They never lost the awareness that they were in a strange and ominous environment. On a mild May morning the bulk of the force, some sixteen hundred mounted men, burned Prophetstown, White Cloud's deserted village. Having done so, they were inexplicably nervous and gradually became convinced that avenging Indians were behind every hill. Soon nervousness became fear, and terror produced a rout. Abandoning equipment, weapons, supplies, and ammunition, they fled for their lives before a nonexistent enemy, crashing through gra.s.slands, brush, and forest, not stopping until, singly and in small groups, they made their shamefaced way into the settlement of Dixon, ten miles from the place where they had started to run.

The first actual contact took place not long after. Black Hawk and about forty braves were on their way to meet with some Potawatomi from whom they were trying to rent a cornfield. They had made camp on the banks of the Rock River when a runner told them a large force of Long Knives was moving in their direction. At once Black Hawk fixed a white flag to a pole and sent three unarmed Sauks to carry it to the whites and request a meeting between Black Hawk and their commander. Behind them he sent five Sauks on horseback to function as observers.

The troops were inexperienced Indian fighters, terrified at the sight of Sauks. They quickly seized the three men with the truce flag and made them prisoners, and then set out after the five observers, two of whom were overtaken and killed. The other three made it back to their camp, pursued by the militia. When the white soldiers arrived, they were attacked by about thirty-five braves led by a coldly furious Black Hawk, who was willing to die a good death to avenge the whiteskins' treachery. The soldiers in the vanguard of the cavalry had no idea that the Indians didn't have a vast army of warriors behind them. They took one glance at the charging Sauks and turned their ponies and fled.

Nothing is so infectious as panic in battle, and within minutes all was chaos within the militia. In the confusion, two of the three Sauks who had been captured with the flag of truce escaped. The third was shot and killed. The 275 armed and mounted militiamen were gripped by terror and fled as hysterically as had the main body of volunteers, but this time their peril wasn't imaginary. Black Hawk's few dozen warriors stampeded them, harried the stragglers, and came away with eleven scalps. Some of the 264 retreating whites didn't stop their withdrawal until they reached their homes, but most of the soldiers finally straggled into the town of Dixon.

For the rest of her life the girl who was then called Two Skies would remember the joy following the battle. A child felt the hope. News of the victory sped through the red-skinned world, and at once ninety-two Winnebago came to join them. Black Hawk strode about wearing a ruffled white shirt, a leather-bound law book under his arm-both found in a saddlebag abandoned by a fleeing officer. His oratory waxed. They had shown that the mookamonik could be defeated, he said, and now the other tribes would send warriors to form the alliance that was his dream.

But the days pa.s.sed, and no other warriors came. Food dwindled and hunting was bad. Finally Black Hawk sent the Winnebago in one direction and he led the People in another. Against his orders, the Winnebago struck unprotected white homesteads and took scalps, including that of St. Vrain, the Indian agent. Two days in a row the sky turned green-black and the manitou s.h.a.gwa shook air and earth. Wabokieshiek warned Black Hawk never to travel without sending scouts deep ahead, and Two Skies' father muttered heavily that it didn't take a prophet to know bad things were going to happen.

Governor Reynolds was furious. His shame over what had happened to his militia was shared by the populace of every border state. The depredations of the Winnebago were magnified and blamed on Black Hawk. Fresh volunteers poured in, drawn by a rumor that a bounty set by the Illinois legislature in 1814 was still in force-fifty dollars to be paid for every male Indian killed or every squaw or red-skinned child captured. Reynolds had no trouble swearing in three thousand more men. Two thousand nervous soldiers already were camped in forts along the Mississippi, under the command of General Henry Atkinson, Colonel Zachary Taylor second in command. Two companies of infantry were moved into Illinois from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and an army of one thousand regular soldiers was transferred from eastern posts under the command of General Winfield Scott. These troops were afflicted with cholera while steamboats carried them across the Great Lakes, but even without them, an enormous force, hungry for racial revenge and restored honor, had been set into motion.

For the girl Two Skies the world became small. Always it had seemed enormous during the leisurely journey between the Sauks' winter camp in Missouri and their summer village on the Rocky River. But now wherever her people turned there were white scouts and there was firing and screaming before they could break away. They took a few scalps and lost a few braves. They were fortunate not to encounter a main body of white-skinned troops. Black Hawk feinted and twisted in his tracks, laying false trails in an attempt to elude the soldiers, but most of his followers were women and children, and it was hard to conceal the movements of so many.

They quickly became fewer. Old people died, and some children. Two Skies' infant brother grew small-faced and large-eyed. Their mother's milk didn't dry up, but the flow slackened and turned thin, so there was never enough to satisfy the child. Two Skies carried her brother most of the time.

Very soon, Black Hawk stopped speaking about driving away the whiteskins. Now he talked of escaping into the far north from which the Sauks had come hundreds of years before. But as the moons pa.s.sed, many of his followers didn't have enough faith to stay with him. Lodge by lodge left the Sauk party, slipping off by themselves. Small groups probably wouldn't survive, but most had made up their minds that the manitous weren't with Black Hawk.

Green Buffalo remained faithful, despite the fact that four moons after they had left Keokuk's Sauks, Black Hawk's party had dwindled to a few hundred people trying to keep alive by eating roots and tree bark. They returned to Masesibowi, as always taking comfort from the great river. The steamboat Warrior came upon most of the Sauks in the shallows at the mouth of the Ouisconsin River, trying to catch fish. As the boat moved toward them, Black Hawk saw the six-pound gun on the bow and knew they could fight no longer. His men waved a white flag, but the boat drew near and a Winnebago mercenary on the deck shouted in their language, "Run and hide, the whites are going to shoot!"

They had started to splash sh.o.r.eward, screaming, when the cannon let go canister point-blank, followed by a heavy fire of musketry. Twenty-three Sauks were killed. The others made it into the woods, some of them dragging or carrying the wounded.

That night they talked among themselves. Black Hawk and the Prophet decided to go to the country of the Chippewa to see if they could live there. Three lodges of people said they would go with them, but the others, including Green Buffalo, had no faith that the Chippewa would give the Sauks cornfields when other tribes wouldn't, and they determined to rejoin Keokuk's Sauks. In the morning they said good-bye to the few who were going to the Chippewa, and they started south, toward home.

The steamboat Warrior tracked the Indians by following the flocks of carrion crows and vultures downstream. Wherever the Sauks went now, the dead were simply abandoned. Some were old people and children, some were those wounded in the previous attack. When the boat stopped to examine bodies, always the ears and the scalps were taken. It didn't matter if the patch of dark hair came from a child or the red ear was a woman's; they would be proudly carried back to small towns as evidence that their owners were Indian fighters.

Those Sauks still alive left Masesibowi and moved inland, only to meet the army's Winnebago hirelings. Behind the Winnebago, lines of soldiers fixed the bayonets that led the Indians to call them Long Knives. As the whites charged, a hoa.r.s.e animal cry rose from them, deeper than a war whoop but just as savage. They were so many, so intent on killing in order to regain something they believed they had lost. The Sauks could do nothing but fall back, firing. When they reached Masesibowi again they tried to fight but were quickly driven into the river. Two Skies was standing next to her mother in waist-deep water when a lead ball tore through Union-of-Rivers' lower jaw. She dropped into the water facedown. Two Skies had to turn her mother onto her back while holding the infant He-Who-Owns-Land. She managed to do so only with the greatest difficulty; then she understood that Union-of-Rivers was dead. She couldn't see her father or her sister. The world was gunfire and screams, and when the Sauks waded through the water to a little willow island, she went with them.

They tried to make a stand on the island, huddling behind rocks and fallen logs. But on the river, moving out of the mist like a great ghost, the steamboat soon had the small island under crossfire from its cannon. Some of the women ran into the river and tried to swim its expanse. Two Skies didn't know that the army had hired Sioux to wait on the far bank and kill any who managed to cross, and finally she slipped into the water, clamping her teeth into the soft loose skin at the back of the baby's neck, leaving her hands free to swim. Her teeth bit into the infant's flesh and she could taste her brother's blood, and the muscles in her own neck and shoulders became agonized by the strain of keeping the little head above the water. She tired quickly and knew if she continued, she and the infant would drown. The current of the river swept them downstream, away from the fire, and she turned back toward land, swimming like a fox or a squirrel moving young. When she had achieved the sh.o.r.e, she lay next to the screaming baby, trying not to see his ruined neck.

Soon she picked up He-Who-Owns-Land and carried him away from the sound of firing. A woman sat on the riverbank, and as they approached, Two Skies saw it was her sister. Tall Woman was covered with blood but she told Two Skies it wasn't hers, a soldier had been raping her when a bullet hit him in the side. She had managed to get out from under his b.l.o.o.d.y body; he had lifted a hand and asked for help in his language, and she had taken a rock and killed him.

She managed to tell her story but didn't comprehend when Two Skies told her of their mother's death. The sound of screams and firing seemed closer. Two Skies carried her brother and led her sister deep into riverside brush, and the three of them huddled. Tall Woman didn't speak, but He-Who-Owns-Land never stopped his high-pitched bawling, and Two Skies was afraid soldiers would hear him and come. She opened her dress and lifted his mouth to her undeveloped breast. The little nipple grew under the dry tugging of his lips and she held the baby close.

As hours pa.s.sed, the firing grew less frequent and the tumult died. Afternoon shadows were long when she heard the approaching steps of a patrol, and the baby started to cry again. She thought of strangling He-Who-Owns-Land so she and Tall Woman might live. Instead, she did nothing but wait, and in a few minutes a skinny white boy poked his musket into the brush and then dragged them out.

On the way to the steamboat, wherever they looked they saw familiar dead without ears or scalps. On the deck, the Long Knives a.s.sembled thirty-nine women and children. Everyone else had been killed. The baby was still crying, and a Winnebago looked at the emaciated infant with the torn neck. "Little rat," he said scornfully, but a redheaded soldier with two yellow stripes on his blue sleeve mixed sugar and water in a whiskey bottle and stuck a rag into it. He pulled the baby from Two Skies' arms and gave him the sugar teat to suck, and he walked away with a pleased face, carrying her brother. Two Skies tried to follow, but the Winnebago came and struck her across the head with his hand until her ears rang. The boat moved away from the mouth of the Bad Ax, through the floating Sauk bodies. It carried them forty miles downriver to Prairie du Chien. At Prairie du Chien she and Tall Woman and three other Sauk girls, Smoke Woman, Moon, and Yellow Bird, were taken off the steamboat and placed in a wagon. Moon was younger than Two Skies. The other two were older, but not as old as Tall Woman. She didn't know what became of the rest of the Sauk prisoners, and she never saw He-Who-Owns-Land again.

The wagon came to an army post they later learned to call Fort Crawford but didn't turn in, taking the young Sauk females three miles beyond the fort to a white farmhouse surrounded by outbuildings and fences. Two Skies could see plowed and planted fields, and several kinds of grazing animals, and fowl. Inside the house she could scarcely draw a breath because the air was foreign with harsh soap and polishing wax, a smell of mookamonik sanct.i.ty she loathed for the rest of her life. At the Evangelical School for Indian Girls, she had to endure it for four years.

The school was run by Reverend Edvard Bronsun and Miss Eva, a middle-aged brother and sister. Nine years before, under the sponsorship of the Missionary Society of New York City, they had set forth to enter the wilderness and bring the heathen Indian to Jesus. They had started their school with two Winnebago girls, one of them feebleminded. Perversely, Indian females had resisted their repeated invitations to come and work the Bronsuns' fields, tend their stock, whitewash and paint their buildings, and do their housework. It was only through the cooperation of law authorities and the military that their enrollment grew until, with the arrival of the Sauks, they had twenty-one sullen but obedient pupils tending one of the best-kept farms in their area.

Mr. Edvard, tall and spare, with a freckled balding scalp, instructed the girls in agriculture and religion, while Miss Eva, corpulent and icy-eyed, taught how whiteskins expected floors to be scrubbed and furniture and woodwork to be polished. The pupils' studies consisted of housework and unceasing heavy farm labor, learning to speak English, unlearning their native languages and culture, and praying to unfamiliar G.o.ds. Miss Eva, always smiling coldly, punished for infractions such as sloth or insolence or the use of an Indian word, utilizing supple switches cut from the farm's greengage plum tree.

The other pupils were Winnebago, Chippewa, Illinois, Kickapoo, Iroquois, and Potawatomi. All regarded the newcomers with hostility, but the Sauks didn't fear them; arriving together, they were a tribal majority, although the system of the place sought to nullify this advantage. The first thing each new girl lost was her Indian name. The Bronsuns considered only six biblical names worthy of inspiring piety in a convert: Rachel, Ruth, Mary, Martha, Sarah, and Anna. Since this limited choice meant that several girls shared the same name, to avoid confusion they also gave each pupil a numeral that became available only when its owner left the school. Thus, Moon became Ruth Three; Tall Woman, Mary Four; Yellow Bird, Rachel Two; and Smoke Woman, Martha Three. Two Skies was Sarah Two.

It wasn't hard to adjust. The first English words they learned were "please" and "thank you." At meals, all foods and drinks were identified once, in English. From then on, those who didn't ask for them in English went hungry. The Sauk girls learned English quickly. The two daily meals were hominy and cornbread and hashed root vegetables. Meat, served rarely, was fatback or small game. Children who had experienced starvation always ate hungrily. Despite the hard work, they put flesh on their bones. The dullness disappeared from Tall Woman's eyes, but of the five Sauks she was most likely to forget herself and speak in the language of the People, and so she was beaten most often. In their second month at the school, Miss Eva heard Tall Woman whispering in the Sauk tongue and whipped her severely while Mr. Edvard watched. That night Mr. Edvard came into the dark attic dormitory and whispered that he had salve to spread on Mary Four's back to remove the pain. He led Tall Woman out of the dormitory.

Next day, Mr. Edvard gave Tall Woman a bag of cornbread that she shared with the other Sauks. After that, he often came to the dormitory at night for Tall Woman, and the Sauk girls grew accustomed to the extra food.

Within four months Tall Woman began to be sick in the mornings, and she and Two Skies knew even before it showed in her belly that she was with child.

A few weeks later Mr. Edvard hitched the horse to the buggy and Miss Eva took Tall Woman in the buggy with her and drove away. When she came back alone, she told Two Skies her sister was blessed. Miss Eva said from now on Mary Four would work on a fine Christian farm on the other side of Fort Crawford. Two Skies never saw Tall Woman again.

Whenever Two Skies was sure they were alone, she spoke to the other Sauks in their own tongue. Picking potato bugs, she told them stories Union-of-Rivers had told her. Weeding beets, she sang the songs of the Sauks. Chopping wood, she spoke to them of Sauk-e-nuk and of the winter camp, reminding them of the dances and festivals, and of kinsmen dead and alive. If they didn't answer in their own language, she threatened to beat them worse than Miss Eva did. Although two of the girls were older and larger than she, none challenged her, and they kept their old language.

When they had been there more than three and a half years, a Sioux girl came as a new pupil. Wing Flapper was older than Tall Woman. She was of the band of Wabashaw, and at night she taunted the Sauks with stories of how her father and her brothers had waited on the far bank of Masesibowi and had killed and scalped every one of their Sauk enemies who had made it across the river during the ma.s.sacre at the mouth of the Bad Ax. Wing Flapper was given Tall Woman's name, Mary Five. From the start, Mr. Edvard fancied her. Two Skies dreamed of killing her, but Wing Flapper's presence proved fortunate, for within a few months she too was pregnant; perhaps Mary was a begetting name.

Two Skies watched Wing Flapper's belly grow, and planned and prepared. Miss Eva drove Wing Flapper away in the buggy on a hot, still summer's day. Mr. Edvard was one person, so he couldn't watch everyone. As soon as the woman was gone, Two Skies dropped the hoe she'd been wielding in the beet field and crept out of sight behind the barn. She piled fat pine kindling against the dry timbers and ignited them with the sulfur matches she'd stolen and set aside for this moment. By the time the fire was noticed, the barn was well ablaze. Mr. Edvard ran in from the potato field like a crazy man, shouting and pop-eyed, and directed the girls to set up a bucket brigade.

Two Skies stayed cool amid the general excitement. She gathered up Moon, Yellow Bird, and Smoke Woman. As an afterthought she took one of Miss Eva's plum switches and used it to move the farm's great porker out of the deep black mud of the sty. She drove the pig into Miss Eva's scrubbed and polished pious-smelling house and closed the door. Then she led the others into the woods and away from that mookamon place.

They avoided roads, staying in the woods until they reached the river. An oak log was snagged on the bank, and the four girls pushed it free. The warm waters contained the bones and ghosts of their loved ones and embraced the girls as they held on to the log and let Masesibowi carry them southward.

They left the river when it began to grow dark. That night they slept hungry in the woods. In the morning, picking berries in a riverside patch, they found a hidden Sioux canoe and stole it at once, hoping it belonged to a kinsman of Wing Flapper. It was midafternoon when they rounded a bend and came upon Prophetstown. On the bank, a red man was cleaning fish. When they saw he was a Mesquakie they laughed in relief and sent the canoe arrowing toward him.

As soon as he was able after the war, White Cloud had returned to Prophetstown. The white-skinned soldiers had burned his longhouse along with the others, but he built another hedonoso-te. When word was spread that the shaman had returned, families came as before from several tribes and raised lodges nearby so they could live their lives close to him. Other disciples arrived from time to time, but now he looked with special interest at the four small girls who had escaped the whites and blundered their way to him. For days he scrutinized them while they rested and fed in his lodge, noting the way three of them looked to the fourth for guidance in all things. He questioned them separately and at length, and each of them told him of Two Skies.

Always, Two Skies. He began to watch her with growing hope.

Finally he caught two ponies from his string and told Two Skies to come with him. She rode behind his horse for most of a day, until the ground began to rise. All mountains are sacred, but in flat country even a hill is a holy place; on the wooded hilltop he led her into a clearing musky with the smell of bears, where the bones of animals were scattered, and ashes of dead fires.

When they dismounted, Wabokieshiek took the blanket from his shoulders and told her to disrobe and lie on it. Two Skies dared not refuse, though she was certain the old shaman meant to use her s.e.xually. But when Wabokieshiek touched her, it wasn't as a lover. He examined her until he was satisfied she was intact.

As the sun lowered, they went into the nearby woods and he set three snares. Then he built a fire in the clearing and sat by it, chanting while she lay on the ground and slept.

When she woke, he had collected a rabbit from one of the snares and was slitting the belly. Two Skies was hungry but he made no move to cook the rabbit; instead, he fingered the viscera and studied them at greater length than he had examined the body of the girl. When he had finished, he grunted in satisfaction and looked at her warily and with wonder.

After he and Black Hawk had heard about the ma.s.sacre of their people at the Bad Ax River, their spirits had sickened. They had wanted no more Sauks to die under their leadership, so they had given themselves up to the Indian agent at Prairie du Chien. At Fort Crawford they had been turned over to a young army lieutenant named Jefferson Davis, who had taken his prisoners down Masesibowi to St. Louis. All winter they were confined in Jefferson Barracks, suffering the humiliation of the ball and chain. In the spring, to show the whiteskins how completely their army had vanquished the People, the Great Father in Washington ordered the two prisoners brought to American cities. They saw railroads for the first time and traveled on them to Washington, New York, Albany, and Detroit. Everywhere, crowds like buffalo herds came to gape at the curiosities, the defeated "Indian chiefs."

White Cloud had seen enormous settlements, magnificent buildings, terrifying machines. Endless Americans. When he had been allowed to return to Prophetstown, he contemplated bitter truth: the mookamonik could never be driven from Sauk lands. Red people would be pushed and pushed, always away from the best farming and hunting. Those who were his children, the Sauks and the Mesquakies and the Winnebago, needed to become accustomed to a cruel world dominated by white men. The problem no longer was to drive the whites away. Now the shaman pondered how his people could change in order to survive, and yet retain their manitous, keep their medicine. He was old and soon would die, and he began to look for someone to whom he could pa.s.s on what he was, a vessel into which he could pour the soul of the Algonquian tribes, but he had found no one. Until this female.

All this he explained to Two Skies as he sat in the sacred place on the hill, stirring the favorable auguries in the carca.s.s of the rabbit, which was beginning to stink. When he was finished, he asked if she would allow him to teach her to be a medicine woman.

Two Skies was a child, but she knew enough to be frightened. There was much she couldn't comprehend, but she understood what was important.

"I will try," she whispered to the Prophet.

White Cloud sent Moon, Yellow Bird, and Smoke Woman to live with Keokuk's Sauks, but Two Skies stayed in Prophetstown, living in Wabokieshiek's lodge like a favored daughter. He showed her leaves and roots and bark and told her which of them could lift the spirit out of the body and allow it to converse with manitous, which could dye deerskins and which make war paints, which should be dried and which steeped, which should be steamed and which used as poultice, which should be sc.r.a.ped with upward strokes and which sc.r.a.ped with downward strokes, which could open the bowels and which close them, which could break fever and which dull pain, which could cure and which could kill.

Two Skies listened to him. At the end of four seasons, when the Prophet tested her, he was pleased. He said he had guided her through the first Tent of Wisdom.

Before she had been taken through the second Tent of Wisdom, her womanhood came upon her for the first time. One of White Cloud's nieces showed her how to care for herself, and each month she went to stay in the women's lodge while her v.a.g.i.n.a bled. The Prophet explained that she mustn't conduct a ceremony or treat illness or injury before attending the sweat lodge to purify herself after her monthly flow.

Over the next four years she learned how to summon the manitous with songs and drums, how to slaughter dogs in several ceremonial methods and cook them for a dog feast, how to teach the singers and hummers to take part in the sacred dances. She learned to read the future in the organs of a slain animal. She learned the power of illusion-to suck illness from the body and spit it out of her mouth as a small stone, so a victim could touch it and see that it had been banished. When the manitous couldn't be persuaded to allow someone to live, she learned how to chant the spirit of the dying on to the next world.

There were seven Tents of Wisdom. In the fifth, the Prophet taught her to control her own body so she could come to understand how to control the bodies of others. She learned to conquer thirst and to go long periods without food. Often he led her great distances on horseback and returned to Prophetstown alone with the two horses, leaving her to make her way back afoot. Gradually he taught her to master pain by sending her mind to a far-off small place so deep within herself that pain couldn't reach her.

Late that summer he took her back to the sacred clearing on the hilltop. They made a fire and courted the manitous with song, and again they set snares. This time they caught a skinny brown rabbit, and when they opened the belly and read the organs, Two Skies recognized that the signs were favorable.

As dusk approached, White Cloud told her to remove her dress and shoes. When she was naked, with his British knife he slashed double slits on each of her shoulders, then carefully cut her to fashion straps of skin like the epaulets worn by white army officers. He pa.s.sed a rope through these b.l.o.o.d.y slits and knotted a loop, and he threw the rope over a tree branch and hauled her up until she hung just off the ground, suspended by her own bleeding flesh.

With thin oak sticks whose ends had been made white-hot in the fire, into the sides of both of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s he burned the signs of the People's ghosts and the symbols of the manitous.

Darkness came while she was still trying to free herself. For half the night Two Skies thrashed, until finally the skin strap on her left shoulder tore. Soon the flesh on her right shoulder parted and she dropped to the ground. With her mind in the small distant place to escape the pain, perhaps she slept.

When the weak light of morning came, she was awake to hear the snuffling as a bear entered the far side of the clearing. It didn't scent her, for it moved in the same direction as the morning breeze, and it shambled with such slowness she could note its snowy muzzle and the fact that it was a sow. A second bear followed, all black, a young male eager to mate despite the sow's warning growl. Two Skies could see his great rigid coska, surrounded by stiff gray guard hairs, as he clambered to get behind the female and mount her. The sow snarled and whirled, snapping repeatedly, and the male fled. For a moment the female moved after him, then came upon the rabbit carca.s.s and took it between her jaws and went away.

Finally, in great pain, Two Skies rose to her feet. The Prophet had taken her clothes. She saw no bear tracks in the hard-packed dirt of the clearing, but in the fine ash of the dead fire was a single clear track of a fox. A fox could have come in the night and taken the rabbit; perhaps she had dreamed the bears, or they had been manitous.

All that day she traveled. Once she heard horses and hid in the brush until two Sioux youths rode by. It was still light when she entered Prophetstown accompanied by ghosts, her naked body covered with blood and dirt. Three men halted their talking as she approached, and a woman stopped grinding corn. For the first time, she saw fear on faces that looked at her.

The Prophet himself washed her. Tending her ruined shoulders and the burns, he asked if she had dreamed. When she told him of the bears, his eyes gleamed. "The strongest sign!" he murmured. He told her it meant that as long as she didn't lie with a man, the manitous would stay close to her.

While she pondered that, he told her she would never be Two Skies again, any more than she would ever be Sarah Two. That night in Prophetstown she became Makwaikwa, the Bear Woman.

Again the Great Father in Washington had lied to the Sauks. The army had promised Keokuk's Sauks that they could live forever in the land of the Iowa beyond Masesibowi's west bank, but white settlers had quickly begun to spill into that land. A white town was established across the river from Rock Island. It was named Davenport, honoring the trader who had advised the Sauks to abandon the bones of their ancestors and leave Sauk-e-nuk, and then had bought their land from the government for his own enrichment.

Now the army told Keokuk's Sauks they owed a large debt of American money and must sell their new lands in Iowa territory and move to a reservation the United States had set up for them a long ride to the southwest, in the territory of the Kansas.

The Prophet told the Bear Woman that so long as she lived, she must never accept as true the word of a white.

That year Yellow Bird was bitten by a snake and half her body swelled and filled with water before she died. Moon had found a husband, a Sauk named Comes Singing, and already she had borne children. Smoke Woman didn't marry. She slept with so many men, and so happily, that people smiled when they said her name. Sometimes Makwa-ikwa was stirred by s.e.xual longing, but she learned to control desire like any other pain. The lack of children was a regret. She remembered how she had hidden with He-Who-Owns-Land during the ma.s.sacre at Bad Ax, how her baby brother's tugging lips had felt at her nipple. But she was reconciled; already she had lived too closely with the manitous to question their decision that she would never be a mother. She was content to become a medicine woman.

The final two Tents of Wisdom dealt with blighting magic, how to make a healthy person sick by casting spells, how to summon and direct ill fortune. Makwa-ikwa became familiar with small imps of wickedness called wata-winonas, with ghosts and witches, and with Panguk, the Spirit of Death. These spirits weren't accosted until the final Tents because a medicine woman had to attain self-mastery before summoning them, lest she join the wata-winonas in their evil. Dark magic was the heaviest responsibility. The watawinonas robbed Makwa-ikwa of her ability to smile. She became wan. Her flesh melted until her bones seemed large, and sometimes her monthly bleeding didn't come. She saw that the watawinonas also were drinking the life from Wabokieshiek's body, for he became frailer and smaller, but he promised her he would not yet die.

At the end of two more years the Prophet brought her through the final Tent. If it had been in former days, that would have called for the summoning of far-flung Sauk bands, races and games, the smoking of calumets, and a secret meeting of the Mide'wiwin, the medicine society of the Algonquian tribes. But former days were gone. Everywhere, red people were scattered and hara.s.sed. The best the Prophet could do was provide three other old men as judges, Lost Knife of the Mesquakies, Barren Horse of the Ojibwa, and Little Big Snake of the Menomini. The women of Prophetstown made Makwa-ikwa a dress and shoes of white doeskin, and she wore her Izze cloths, and anklets and bracelets that rattled when she moved. She used the throttle-stick to kill two dogs and supervised the cleaning and cooking of the meat. After the feast, she and the old men sat all night by the fire.

When they questioned her, she answered with respect but forthrightly, as an equal. She brought forth the sounds of supplication from the water drum while she chanted, summoning the manitous and pacifying ghosts. The old men revealed to her the special secrets of the Mide'wiwin while retaining their own secrets, as she would retain her own from now on. By morning she had become a shaman.

Once that would have made her a person of great power. But now Wabokieshiek helped her a.s.semble the herbs she wouldn't be able to find where she was going. Along with her drums and medicine bundle the herbs were packed on a brindle mule that she led. She said good-bye to the Prophet for the last time and then rode his other gift, a gray pony, to the territory of the Kansas, where the Sauk now lived.

The reservation was on flatter land even than the Illinois plains.

Dry.

There was just enough water to drink, but it had to be toted a distance. This time the whites had given the Sauks land that was fertile enough to grow anything. The seeds they planted sprouted strongly in the spring, but before summer was more than a few days old, everything withered and died. The wind blew dust through which the sun burned as a round red eye.

So they ate the white man's food the soldiers brought them. Spoiled beef, stinking pig fat, old vegetables. Crumbs from the paleskins' feast.

There were no hedonoso-tes. The People lived in shacks made from green lumber that cupped and shrank, leaving cracks wide enough for winter snow to drift through. Twice a year a nervous little Indian agent came with soldiers and left a row of goods on the prairie: cheap mirrors, gla.s.s beads, cracked and broken harness with bells on it, old clothing, maggoty meat. At first all the Sauks gleaned the pile, until somebody asked the agent why he brought these things and he said they were a payment for the Sauk land confiscated by the government. After that, only the weakest and most scorned ever took anything. The pile grew in size every six months, to rot in weather.

They had heard of Makwa-ikwa. When she arrived, they received her with respect, but they were no longer sufficiently a tribe to need a shaman. The most spirited of them had gone with Black Hawk and had been killed by whites or died of starvation or drowned in Masesibowi or been murdered by the Sioux, but there were those on the reservation who had the strong hearts of Sauks of old. Their courage was constantly tested in fights with the tribes who were native to the region, because the supply of game was dwindling and the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Cheyenne, and the Osage resented the hunting compet.i.tion of the eastern tribes moved there by the Americans. The whites made it hard for the Sauks to defend themselves, for they saw to it that there was plenty of bad whiskey, and in return took most of the furs that were trapped. In increasing numbers the Sauks spent their days sick with alcohol.

Makwa-ikwa lived on the reservation a little more than a year. That spring, a small herd of buffalo wandered across the prairie. Moon's husband, Comes Singing, rode out with other hunters and killed meat. Makwa-ikwa declared a Buffalo Dance and instructed the hummers and singers. People danced in the old way, and in some of their eyes she saw a light she hadn't seen in a long time, a light that filled her with joy.

Others felt it. After the Buffalo Dance, Comes Singing sought her out and said some of the People wanted to leave the reservation and live as their fathers had lived. They asked if their shaman would go with them.

She asked Comes Singing where they would go.

"Home," he said.