Sign-Talker (36 page)

On the hoof-trampled ground he saw a long, black feather, the pointer-feather from an eagle’s wing. He knelt and picked it up, twirled it between finger and thumb, thinking. He had no right to keep it. He put it where he had found it. He and the eagle regarded each other for a while over the distance, and he remembered the day when he had watched an eagle rise through the clouds above Fort Massac and dreamed of seeing over all its horizons. Then he turned to walk on up the riverbank, hunting for elk, thinking of the Hidatsa people, six hundred miles back
down this river, who knew this wide land so well they could tell you where a bird would be and it would be there: the very one you had seen in your dream.

The portage unfolded as a labor of many days. It was all done with the captains’ characteristic processes of planning, measuring, and organizing. George Drouillard again thanked the Creator that he was just the hunter, not a soldier laboring in the midst of their scheme. His responsibility was demanding enough, but as usual he had freedom to do it his way, at a distance. He would kill enough game to feed everybody, preserve the flesh, and prepare the hides for use as moccasins, clothing, and a cover for the iron-frame boat. He must especially try to get elk, if any were about, because Captain Lewis thought elk hide would be more waterproof and durable on the boat than buffalo.

The soldiers’ ordeal as draft animals began every morning at the Portage Creek Camp below the lowest waterfall. From there they carried loads up a steep draw to the high plain and stowed them in the canoes-on-wheels. Then, six or seven to a canoe, they would put their shoulders into loop-harnesses, made of rope or hide, lean forward and strain until the clumsy wooden wheels began to turn. They would keep straining until all that tonnage was at Captain Lewis’s Upper Portage Camp eighteen miles to the southwest, above all the falls and rapids. If weather or broken-down wagons didn’t delay them too much, they might get there before dark. They would eat and fall into deep sleep, and the next morning pull the empty canoes back. Now and then favorable winds allowed them to raise sails on the wheeled canoes. The wind power made the pulling much easier.

That was how it was done on the good days. On bad days, when rain and hail turned the plains to slick, wheel-clogging mud, it was much more difficult. Bad days were frequent.

Drouillard’s hunting camp was on the bank of a tributary river that flowed in from the west, four miles below Captain Lewis’s camp, about halfway to the black eagle’s nest. The Hidatsas had called this pretty little river the Medicine, because a magic drum sound often came down its valley from the mountains. His camp was basically a slaughterhouse. To it every day he carried the buffalo, deer, and elk meat and hides he harvested in the surrounding plains and bottomlands, and there, sometimes with the aid of another hunter and butcher, he cut the flesh into strips to dry on stick racks high in the sun, or over fires of driftwood and dried buffalo dung, and he flensed hides while the meat cured. Because of all the meat, bears were always around.

Eighteen miles below, downstream beyond the five great waterfalls, lay the lower portage camp under the charge of Sergeant Ordway, to which the exhausted soldiers returned after pulling their emptied wagons back to be reloaded. At that lower camp the cook was Charbonneau, who stayed there with the Bird Woman and their baby. Captain Clark and York were at that camp when they were not trekking back and forth with the wagons. From that camp every day came the welcome news that the young mother was regaining her health and strength.

Drouillard, though he had spent much of his hunting life alone, was surprised to find himself thinking and worrying about all these people spread out miles through this powerful place with all its winds, waters, and angry bears.

There were many bears. And they did seem angry. They kept making it plain that these whitemen were not welcome.

After Drouillard and Frazier unloaded the meat from their canoe, Captain Lewis proudly took them over to show off the progress on his iron boat. The captain had named his boatbuilding camp White Bear Island, because those animals were always prowling around it. The vessel was being built on a scaffold so the crew could work under it and turn it over when they needed to.

“Thirty-six feet long, four and a half wide, and she’ll carry four tons of cargo,” Lewis exclaimed, “but light enough that eight men can carry her. Did you ever see such a clever vessel?”

Drouillard paid it the solicited compliment, although he found it much less ingenious and beautiful than an Indian bark canoe. Its basic frame was ninety-nine pounds of strap iron assembled with screws. Interwoven with the iron were flat-shaved slats of willow and box elder and strips of bark, which made the boat look like a big, long basket with pointed ends. Over it the
workers were fitting a covering of elk hides, the hair singed or shaved off, sewn together to be form-fitting.

“I’m worried about sealing the seams,” Captain Lewis said. “There’s no pine around here for pitch. I’m experimenting. Tallow mixed with pounded charcoal might seal well enough. Drouillard, you—Oop! There it is again. I swear it sounds just like a cannon!”

It was the drumbeat sound from the mountains that the Hidatsas had spoken of. Drouillard had heard it several times a day in his hunting camp.

Lewis said: “Cap’n Clark and I have been speculating on what it is. Air pressure changing maybe. There has to be a rational explanation.”

Of course, Drouillard thought.

“Do the bear bother you as much down in your camp as they do us?” the captain asked. “They prowl here so much that Seaman barks all night. We’re too busy to deal with them the way I’d like to. When the time comes, I’d like to get enough troops to make war on ’em and drive them out of here.”

Drouillard kept himself from saying something that he knew would be meaningless to the captain. He replied simply, “The meat draws ’em. I have to hang it high between trees at night.”

“I won’t let a man go alone anywhere in the bush, always in pairs. It bothers me that you’re alone down there so much.”

“I appreciate your concern, Cap’n, but I’m all right.”

He spent that night, a night thick with droning mosquitoes, at Captain Lewis’s camp. The next morning the captain woke him early for breakfast. Lewis was serving as the camp cook so his men could keep working every waking hour on the iron boat and the portage. He was making a great quantity of suet dumplings as a treat for the wagon crews when they should come up. The captain was in high spirits. “Fine meat you brought, George. We’ll feed those hardworking fellows well. Ha ha! What do you think, a captain serving as cook for his men?”

“Guess they should feel real honored,” he replied, telling the captain what he apparently hoped to hear.

“I want you and Joe Field to take that canoe upriver today and see if you can get more elk. I sent him up yesterday and a bear almost got him. Shields has fixed his gun, and he’s ready for bear again.”

“But what you really want is elk, sir. Not bear, eh?”

Lewis laughed. “Correct. Elk.” He rubbed his hands and looked at his cookfire. “Another day or two they can bring up the rear camp. Be good to get Charbonneau up here. That fellow can cook! Captain Clark says the squaw’s about well enough to make the walk.”

“Good.” She had been very much in his prayers,

The captain sighed and clenched his jaw, looking toward the mountains. “We’ve been here far too long. Near two weeks where I expected we’d be one day. I really want us out of this place.”

Drouillard thought: The bears would be glad to know that.

“Chief, I swear t’ God they’s a bear a-stalkin’ to bushwhack us,” Joe Field said in a low and tight voice from the stern of their canoe. They had started back down the Missouri to Captain Lewis’s camp. Ominous dark weather was gathering in the southwest.

Drouillard knew. He had been seeing glimpses of a pale bear slipping through dense willow brush on the near riverbank, staying a good way ahead, and it looked as big as a buffalo.

The little narrow dugout was so loaded with elk meat and hides that it had scarcely three inches of gunwale above water. Their hunt for elk had been very rewarding: nine of them. Also the fat and hides of two small bears. Drouillard nodded toward shore. “Put over close.” He wanted a look at the tracks. He didn’t really want another bear just now. With weather rising and the canoe so burdened, they could be swamped easily, especially if they took on another bearskin. But he was interested in this bear’s intentions.

From a few feet offshore he could see that the prints of the grizzly’s hind feet in the mud were the biggest yet—about a foot long, not counting the talons. Joe Field said, “That big sneaky son of a bitch! I hate them bullyin’ bastards!”

No wonder, Drouillard thought, Joe Field had reason to feel they were picking on him personally. What was beginning to worry Drouillard was that if this big warrior bear kept stalking ahead like this, he would head right into Captain Lewis’s camp. And this one appeared to be more bear than the one last month that had needed eight bullets to die.

He thought of trying to get ahead of the bear to warn the camp. But probably this bear wouldn’t allow anyone to pass him, not until he’d had his chance to ambush them on shore.

So it seemed there was nothing to do but go ashore. “Joe, put us in above that big leaning tree. And keep quiet.” Field was probably good and scared now, but he was brave and he had a true bear grudge, and without a word he steered to the bank. The dugout was too heavy-laden to pull onshore, so Drouillard stepped off the bow and tied it to a willow clump, meanwhile looking, listening and smelling for the big bear. Wouldn’t he like to come back and tear into this load of elk, he thought. But I think he’d want to tear us up first, and then maybe eat some elk. And then maybe go down and tear up the camp. Drouillard had a strong notion that this was a chief bear.

He motioned for Field to follow him into the brush, and led him to the base of the leaning cottonwood. Then he signaled for him to go up. They slung their rifles on their backs and started up. The thick, slanting trunk was easy to climb. Field rested in a fork twenty feet up. Drouillard straddled a limb below him, slipped out of his rifle sling and said, “Now call him.”

“Eh? What? Me?”

“Let him hear your voice. You’re the one they hate.”

Field looked down at him oddly, but then hooted, “Hey, goddam bear!” They waited. Field whooped again. Drouillard felt a blast of cold air, smelled rain in the distance. Leaves turned underside up in the wind and the surface of the river darkened with shivering ripples. Their tree began to sway. A brilliant scribble and flash of lightning hit the trees nearby, followed instantly by a deafening thunderclap. “Jesus almighty! I want out of this tree!” Field gasped.

But Drouillard answered: “No, you don’t. Look down there.”

The pale bear had just burst out of the brush and was under their tree, where he heard their voices or caught their scent, and paused, swinging his enormous wedge-shaped head from side to side.

N’nochtu makwa, Pehthon aha ’y keeteh
, Drouillard prayed. Chief war bear, I salute you to heaven. Just as it looked up and saw him with its intelligent eyes, he fired a ball between them. Another lightning bolt and thunderclap shook them, and hailstones now were tearing down through the foliage, shredding leaves. Drouillard bent over his rifle to reload it, hearing Field swear away in awe and amazement just above him. Then he slid down the tree trunk to inspect the dead bear. Field dropped to the ground beside him. Drouillard, hunched up against the hail that was beating his back, looked at Field and said, “Satisfied now?”

He was fleshing hides that evening at the White Bear Camp, and Joe Field kept telling all the soldiers about how Drouillard had killed the biggest of all bears while perched in a swaying tree in a lightning storm. Some of the soldiers had been terrorized by the
storm and even blown down by the wind. Finally all that talk made Drouillard remember an old Shawnee story, and he started telling it as he scraped the hides.