Sign-Talker (12 page)

As the keelboat pulled past the sandbar, Cruzatte’s high, nasal voice called a warning. Drouillard looked upstream and saw a big drift tree barreling roots first down the bend, right into the keelboat’s way. The rowers, alerted by his cry, paused, looking back over their shoulders.

Cruzatte crouched, jabbed the tip of his gaff-pole into the jagged root bole, and his sinewy body arched with strain. The pole began to bend as the great weights of the boat and tree pressed together through it, and Cruzatte was nearly lifted off his footing. Labiche jammed his spike too against the roots.

Slowly the root bole swung off the keelboat’s larboard quarter.

But Cruzatte was at once in action again, yelling,
“Pas encore!”
He yanked back his pole and jabbed again with it, this time at the trunk of the tree, which had begun to swing around
toward the prow. And the keelboat, now veering to starboard from the force of the fending effort, was quartered by the swift current, threatening to broach with the tree coming parallel. The powerful stream had the boat and tree in its grip, carrying them sideways toward the sandbar. Drouillard’s heart raced. In this moment on the muddy gray, rain-spattered water he could see the voyage coming to an early end. The weight of the tree would overset the boat or crush it like an eggshell against the tangle of driftwood. Cruzatte and Labiche were still straining to push the tree away. The oarsmen were jumping up from their places and stretching out their oars to help, all in a clamor of shouting, but apparently oblivious of the sandbar on the other side. Drouillard cupped his mouth to yell a warning, but suddenly a bellow overrode all the hubbub:

“All hands back on your oars! And
back off!
Now! Back! Back!”

It was Clark. He had seen the threat of the sandbar. The soldiers scrambled back to their places, dropped their oars into the rowlocks and pushed them instead of pulling them. Slowly, then faster, the keelboat backed out from the narrowing trap, then wheeled about stern-to in the swift channel, while the huge tree rolled onto the end of the sandbar. In a moment the rowers and helmsman had the keelboat back on course up through the river bend.

Drouillard stood shaking his head, breathing fast, as the ponderous vessel moved on up through the bend, flanked by the red and white pirogues, everybody laughing and howling to each other about yet another close escape. This would be all the talk again in camp this evening: another of those thrilling, terrible moments, and the desperate strainings and near-panics they went through almost every day to save the boats and themselves. This time they had avoided splinter-gashed hands or fearsome dunkings. Tonight they would brag, and the captains might come and brag on them all, and they wore praise like a warrior’s honors. Sometimes Drouillard listened and almost envied them their frights and miseries and hard-earned celebrations.

But they weren’t free, and he was. As the convoy moved on up
through the bend, their laughter faded. Cruzatte’s voice started up a rhythmic voyageur paddling song. Drouillard slipped out of the rock shelter into the rain to go to the place ahead where the venison hung. Those poor bastards needed meat, and they deserved it.

Alexander Hamilton Willard was a soldier whom Drouillard had noticed at the beginning of the journey for the contrast between his daunting physique and his quiet, obedient behavior. The rawboned giant was so shy that Drouillard might never have come to know him at all if the captains had not sent him out with him often, with instructions to teach the man some hunting skills. Willard had been a blacksmith. His hands were so huge and strong that Sergeant Floyd joked, “Drouillard, you just find him a bear, and let ’im wrang its neck like a chicken. Save powder and lead.”

Willard was good to hunt with in that he wasn’t a talker and didn’t have to be hushed all the time like some of them. Colter, and the two Field brothers, Joe and Reubin, were the best hunters among the troops. They were talkative, but not on the hunt. Willard seldom talked even in camp. But it didn’t look as if
he would ever become much of a hunter. He was too much a daydreamer and didn’t concentrate as one must to find sign or do tracking. He just could not concentrate, it seemed, and sometimes as they rode over the grasslands, Drouillard believed that the big man was asleep in the saddle with his eyes open.

Hunting was different here on the plains. Drouillard had spent most of his life under the gloomy green canopies of hardwood forests. Here, except in the ravines and river valleys, scarcely a tree was to be seen anywhere. Grasses waved and rippled in the wind, miles in every direction. Game on the plains had to be approached by staying in defilade, in gullies and draws, and taking very long shots. No buffalo had been seen yet. Hunting for deer, Drouillard therefore stayed much in the bottomlands, where the deer behaved pretty much as deer did anywhere.

“No damn fair, is it, Reubin?” Joseph Field whined to his brother, looking up from the deer hide he was flensing with his hunting knife in the firelight. He tilted his head toward Drouillard. “This feller’s makin’ us miss out on the fun, cleanin’ all these damn deer hides!” Over by the big bonfire most of the soldiers were stomping, hooting, and capering to the fast, jiggling French tune Cruzatte played on his fiddle. Soldiers were keeping time with clapping, and a couple of voyageurs were making their tambourines sound like rattlesnakes. Captain Lewis’s big dog, excited as always by the men’s dancing, was bounding around in the sand as if he were one of them, and his proud and doting master was roaring with laughter at the sight. Beyond the fire were the straight edges and sloping surfaces of the long, half-faced tents of oiled linen, hung with mosquito-barring gauze, in which the soldiers off guard would sleep in rows when their party was over.

Drouillard looked up from his own work and saw that the brothers were smiling and glancing at him, joking, not really complaining. They were pretty good hunters themselves, and he had made a big impression on them. Sometimes when they didn’t know he was around, he would hear them talking to the other soldiers about him, building him into a proper legend. Some of the troops had taken to calling him Nimrod. It was a name he vaguely remembered from the whiteman’s religion. Captain Clark eventually had told him that in the Bible, Nimrod was the mightiest hunter of the ancient times.

“We’ll be glad we got all them hides,” said a man named Shields, sitting nearby. “My army clothes an’ boots ’bout wore out and tore up from all this river rat work. We’ll all of us be wearin’ leather, come winter.”

“Come winter, give me bear skin, fur side inside,” said Reubin. “You notice how long we been goin’ north and more north since we camped at the Kanzas?”

Shields, being a skilled gunsmith and tinkerer, spent much time near the captains, repairing things. He eavesdropped, and then talked about what he’d heard of their discussions. He said, “We got another three, four hunnerd miles more north to go. Start runnin’ into Sioux ’bout two hunnerd miles, that’s what ol’ Dorion said.”

Since he had joined the party, the old trader had talked mostly about Sioux, since that was what he knew most about. His camp boy was part Sioux. Drouillard had tried in vain to talk with the boy, who was strange and dense. Drouillard suspected that one or two of the voyageurs were playing with the boy at night. Maybe that was why Dorion kept him too, but the main thing on the old man’s mind and tongue was the Sioux. His band, the Yanktons, were reasonable and probably would agree to go east. But the ones farther up, the Teton or Burnt Thigh Sioux, were belligerent, and jealous of their control over the trade in British goods from Canada. They were not likely to cooperate, even talk, with the Americans. They might even try to attack and rob them. Over and over Dorion warned them not to count on convincing
those
Sioux of anything.

“O’ course,” Shields went on, “ye say somethin’ like that to Cap’n Lewis, he take it as a dare, an’ he means to try, I reckon.”

Drouillard, still working on hands and knees over the fresh deer hide that he had staked flat on the ground, listened and nodded. Unlike Shields, he kept to himself what he heard from the captains, and he heard much more, because as their interpreter he tented with them. It was true that Lewis had that cocksure idea that all the Sioux would just have to listen to him, and how could they quibble with what the Great Father Jefferson intended for them?

So here they were anticipating how they would deal with the Sioux already, while so far in all these hundreds of miles up through the plains they had not encountered Kanzas, Ponca, Oto, Missouria, Pawnee, Omaha, any of the tribes they should have met before getting into Sioux country. Since the Kickapoos in May, they had not met one solitary living Indian. It was eerie. Drouillard had seen a few old village sites, and today Captain Clark had caught a stray Indian pony. But from the very old burrs in its mane and tail, it appeared to have been astray a long time. Dorion had said there were hardly any Indians along the Missouri for a long stretch ahead, as most were up the tributaries or out on the plains hunting.

“Anyway, I want a bear fur coat,” Reubin Field said. He leaned over to sit on one haunch with his elbow supporting him, and said, “Do I hear a bear growlin’?” and blew an imitation bear growl out of his rear end. Then he laughed at his own humor, slapping his knee.

“Nope, but don’t I hear a hoot-owl?” Shields raised a thigh, squinted one eye, made a noise like a boot being pulled out of mud. He opened both eyes wide and puckered his mouth and said, “Oop! ’Scuse me …” He got up gingerly, bent forward and hurried out of the firelight down to the river. The Field brothers watched him go, then burst out laughing, hitting each other on the shoulders. Reubin, gasping between guffaws, finally managed to say, “Guess ol’ Shields jes’ remembered to do his laundry!”

Drouillard shook his head and grinned.
What a people!
To his surprise, he sometimes had a good time among these whitemen.

Drouillard, sleeping out, was awakened by intense, angry voices. A quick look at the low place of the moon and the burned-down campfire embers told him it was far past midnight. The voices were coming closer, from down by the river. He started to rise, and others were stirring around him. Over by the tents Captain Lewis’s dog barked. Someone nearby whispered, “What is it? Indians?” Under a glory of stars, Drouillard was up on one knee on his blanket with his rifle in hand and his thumb ready to cock the flintlock. He heard footsteps coming heavily through the sand, two people walking hard, cutting straight through camp from the boat mooring toward the captains’ tent. Several people were stuttering and mumbling about Indians.

Then one of the walkers, Sergeant Ordway, said loudly, “Hush, boys. No, it’s not Indians. Damn good thing it ain’t, by God, this son of a bitch asleep on guard!”

“I wasn’t sleepin’!” the other voice said, almost whining.

“Devil ye weren’t!” Ordway’s voice growled as they went on toward the tents. “Think I don’t know snorin’? Y’re a dead man, Willard.…”

“Ooooh damn,” someone said in the dark nearby. “Poor Willard!”

And Collins’s voice, familiar by now to everyone, said, “Thank God, somebody but me catchin’ hell for a change!”

Willard’s trial was scheduled for eleven o’clock. Sleeping on sentinel duty was punishable by death, so the captains had to try him, instead of his enlisted peers.

Because of the trial, the fatigue of the boat crews, and the need to take some sky measurement, the captains decided to keep the camp here another day. The camp was on an island opposite the mouth of a little river that Dorion called the Nemahaw. Captain Clark took Drouillard and four other men to explore a few miles up that stream, and Drouillard soon became aware that this was another mound-hill place of the ancestors. He could
hear their songs in the blowing grass, and in a sandstone cliff there were carved animals and what appeared to be a boat. Drouillard got away from the others for a brief time, lit his pipe with a magnifying glass and smoked to the Old Ones, standing atop the highest mound. He felt the spirits tingling through his feet. He was thankful that being among so many whitemen had not entirely dulled him to the subtle messages of the ancestors.

Private Willard stood trial looking like a pole-axed ox, stunned that this was happening to him. He knew he was a good soldier. He pleaded that maybe he had lain down, but he had not gone to sleep. But the captains believed Sergeant Ordway, who had caught him. They found Willard guilty, a serious offense here so deep in Indian country. They lectured him that he was to be spared the death sentence only because the party was so small and every man was needed. He was sentenced to a hundred lashes, to be meted out over the next four evenings. That meant welts upon fresh welts, enough pain, the captains hoped, to discourage any other sentry from lying down or shutting his eyes.

So that evening Drouillard again flayed deerskins to the sound of the troops flaying a fellow soldier, and he didn’t watch. He smoked a final pipe that night facing up the Nemahaw River toward the mounds, thanking the Master of Life for guiding him not to enlist as a soldier. Drouillard knew he was their best sentry even though he was not required to stand guard. He knew how to sleep without turning off his senses. But damned if he would volunteer for it, because if he did, they would think they had the right to whip him for shutting his eyes. Sometimes the keenest guarding was done with eyes shut, and the ears and the nose doing the work.