Sign-Talker (39 page)

“Drouillard,” said Lewis, whose cheeks and shoulders were by now thoroughly smeared with grease and face paint, “I’m anxious to talk with these people about us and what we need.”

So Drouillard slipped off his knapsack and got out the pipe. Soon all the Shoshone warriors, except a few boys left tending
the horses, were seated in a circle, with the captain and his men in the center. The Indians had taken off their moccasins. Drouillard explained: “It means they will go barefoot if they don’t keep their word, whatever we say here.”

“Oohoo! Pretty serious pledge, considering the prickly pear!” McNeal exclaimed.

It was hot in the afternoon sun on this scrabbly slope, and the passing of the pipe took a long time. Drouillard had to remind the captain not to let his impatience show. “The pipe’s not just a preliminary, sir. It’s the main thing. The rest’s just details.”

“All right. Thankee. Now I take it the long-face with short hair’s their chief?”

Drouillard began signing, and watching the replies. Fortunately, their signs varied little from the plains peoples’, and the understanding would not be difficult.

The chief gave his name as Cameahwait, meaning He Does Not Walk. He said his men had come out so aggressively because they expected enemies; lately they had been raided by enemies with guns and had lost some horses and lodges, and that the men with hair cut short were in mourning for lost relatives.

“I’m going to give them some beads and vermilion,” Captain Lewis said. “Then tell them we want to go to their camp because we have much to explain and to ask them. That a council should be held nearer to water than this, because it will take a long while.”

Drouillard told them all that with signs, and it seemed to go well enough with them. They accepted the token gifts very gracefully, got up and put on their moccasins. “Now I’ll give this Cameahwait our flag,” Lewis said. “Tell him it is an emblem of peace, and bonds us to him in a union, sort of like taking off your moccasins.”

These Shoshone were rich in horses and hospitality but poor in almost everything else. The destructive raid of the Atsinas had left the band with only one skin tepee lodge. All their family shelters and their council house were cleverly made but crude tepees and huts of willow brush. There seemed to be only three
firearms in the whole band, cheap smoothbores of the sort the English traders sold to the Missouri tribes.

The Shoshone camp was in a fertile, level bottom on the east bank of a clear, wide, shallow river, quick-flowing north over many-colored round stones and gravel. It was a beautiful place in the shadow of the mountain range. Captain Lewis seemed gaunt and exhausted but his eyes glowed when he looked out and saw the horse herds.

Cameahwait had prepared seats for the whitemen, green boughs covered with antelope skins, in the brush council house. The chief and his people were excited and fascinated. They had never seen whitemen, and these had suddenly appeared in their land like spirits. The chief told Drouillard by hand language that the people wondered if they were children of the Great Spirit. Everybody had crowded around the council lodge to look at them. Drouillard understood that he was himself an object of curiosity, a real person traveling with these pale ones and speaking for them, but Cameahwait was too civilized to ask him a personal question about that. Instead he asked Drouillard to request that the pale men now be barefoot so that their sincerity could be assured. After that was done, the Shoshones could scarcely keep their eyes off the visitors’ bare feet, which were even whiter than their sun-weathered faces and hands, and showed much sign of abuse: bloody punctures from the prickly pears, bruises, and red-rimmed toenails.

A strange thing about this camp-village was that there was no smell of cooking, usually the most pervasive and compelling stimulus in any Indian town. Drouillard was particularly aware of that absence because he and the soldiers had eaten nothing since the previous evening. Feeding guests was usually the first act of hospitality. He could tell by the gaunt look of all these people that the reason they offered no food was that they had none. This was a bleak and terrible realization, and his urge as a hunter was to borrow horses from these people, go out in the remaining daylight and get meat for everybody. No one was supposed to go hungry when George Drouillard was present.

But the pressing matter for Captain Lewis was not eating
but talking, and Drouillard was the only one who could make that happen. Therefore the chief began a long and meticulous pipe ceremony which would enable everyone to speak well and truthfully.

To the sound of burbling and groaning stomachs, Drouillard put his talking hands to work, to explain that whole complex story of the Great White Father Jefferson and what he wanted, and the part these Shoshones of the western slope would be expected to perform in it. He passed on the usual promises, about the guns and goods the Shoshones might expect to get if they were good and true and helpful.

But he did not translate the threats, the threats about how they would be left out of the prosperity and how they would be punished by countless soldiers if they didn’t cooperate. The captain spoke to them in his usual veiled and diplomatic way, but Drouillard didn’t translate this because he knew the captain had taken off his moccasins and smoked the pipe, and thus must not lie. But Lewis could not tell these people of the western slope that the White Father in the East was their new father whom they must obey, because he knew that Jefferson had purchased the country only as far as the dividing ridge, and these people were beyond that. Any help they chose to give they could give of their own free will, in response to promises.

They did not
have
to do anything, which was the way it always should be, and Drouillard felt good about it. His people, the Shawnees back on the far side of the continent, had expended their lives for generations in refusing to obey orders the whitemen had had no right to give them.

It was dusk by the time Captain Lewis got around to explaining what help he needed immediately from the Shoshones. He had Drouillard describe the main party coming up the other side with canoes full of goods, with the other soldier chief in charge. He told of their need for Shoshone horses and for people to help them bring all the goods across the ridge. All this was fairly easy to tell. Although most of these mountain people had seldom seen
canoes or boats, they knew about them and understood what Drouillard was saying.

He was an excellent sign talker in the same way he was an excellent hunter: he could see and sense more than just the apparent. Now he was seeing and sensing that some of the Shoshones were growing fearful and suspicious. He saw little side glances and squints in the eyes of even the agreeable Cameahwait. He saw warriors on the outer circle of the council stiffening, leaning to whisper to each other, and he saw fear replacing curiosity in the faces of the women and children who were crowding the periphery of the lodge to watch the whitemen. Cameahwait changed the subject to say that his people had just been getting ready to cross the divide and descend into the plains to hunt buffalo, and that they needed to do this soon or they would starve here in the mountains when winter came. They had to rendezvous with their friends the Flatheads very soon to go down in strength for the buffalo hunt.

All this carrying for the whitemen, the chief suggested, might delay their crucial hunt too long. The winter was hard in these mountains. There were pronghorns and a few deer here now, but they were so swift that even hunters on good horses could not catch them except by surrounding them and running them to exhaustion. And with cold weather, the hoofed ones would be going away, down to the good grazing. Drouillard saw that this was a genuine concern of the chief, but he sensed there was more to it.

He translated those statements to Lewis and saw the captain beginning to puff himself up for a demanding argument, so he added: “Cap’n, the real trouble is, they don’t trust us. Asking them to follow us out of their haven here has got some of ’em nervous. If I were these people, I’d be wondering who we’ve got coming up the other side: enemies waiting there for you and me to trick ’em out? Hidatsas? Blackfeet? They’ve already been hurt by the Atsinas. Don’t get mad, Cap’n, but I think we’re worrying ’em and I think that’s why.”

Lewis clenched his jaw and thought. He said, “Tell them that if they help us, the United States will bring them trade and good
guns so they won’t even have to hide here from their enemies. That they could go out and live where the buffalo are. And while they’re thinking that over, tell them that we haven’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll tell them that, sir. From the looks of ’em, they might reply that they haven’t eaten for a week. I think we’d do ourselves and them the most good by killing them some meat tomorrow.”

Lewis nodded. “That would be good. And impress on them what American rifles can do, while you’re at it.”

This was the most exciting but least effective hunting he had ever done.

He rode at a headlong gallop through the short vegetation of the valley, a Shoshone horseman far off to his right and several to his left, chasing a small herd of pronghorn that the horses could not possibly overtake. White rumps, reddish backs, bounding and flashing ahead, the antelopes diminished rapidly in the distance. It was like chasing birds.

Far down the valley, two miles beyond the fleeing herd, a line of Shoshones on fresh horses would gallop out and turn the herd of pronghorns in another direction, toward another waiting line of horsemen on rested mounts. Drouillard and his fellow hunters now veered off toward a knoll where boys were awaiting them with fresh horses. This was the third horse Drouillard had ridden to exhaustion so far. Almost all the riders who had come out to meet them yesterday were here on the plain surrounding the fleeing antelope, chasing them five miles one way, then six another, in hopes of eventually wearing them down enough to be able to ride within bow shot. Thus far he could see no hope even of getting within long rifle shot of one. Private Shields was with another group of Shoshone riders elsewhere in the valley. The chase had been in progress for more than two hours, usually in sight of the Shoshone town, but not one antelope had succumbed yet. This morning Captain Lewis had requested horses to allow his best hunters to go hunting. But the Shoshones, reluctant to let them ride out of sight, had joined them, and, seeing this herd, had drawn them into this thrilling but futile pursuit, which seemed
more like a racing sport than a way to feed the hungry people. The white visitors, and the whole band of Shoshones as well, had gone to bed last night with nothing more to eat than cakes of dried berries and a bite or two of leathery dried salmon. The Shoshones had honored their visitors with a dance until late. The captain had declined, saying he was too tired to do anything but write a few notes by firelight and then go to sleep in his mosquito net. The soldiers, professing to be too hungry to sleep, had stayed up watching the Shoshones do their circle dances and showing them some of their own high steps—as well as they could without benefit of fiddle music.

Now the pronghorns found a gap between two racing groups of Shoshone hunters and sped up a draw to freedom. The fifty riders returned to camp on their lathered horses, hungrier than ever. Drouillard wanted to go out and hunt his own way, but by now Captain Lewis had spent the morning unable to ask Cameahwait anything or tell him anything, and was prowling with impatience for his interpreter. McNeal had made a sort of pudding with flour, water, and berries, which was at least edible and assuaged the hunger pangs a little. “Now,” Lewis told Drouillard, “I want to talk to this Never Walks chief about geography. About the way through those mountains, and some navigable way to the Columbia. We should allow another day for Clark to get the boats up to that fork, so we should use the day well. Now, Cap’n Clark did well talking maps out of the Hidatsas last winter. Think you and I might do as well here?”

Drouillard said, “If Never Walks has ever walked out that way, and if he can draw lines in the sand, I guess so.” He sighed. Map talk was a most tedious kind of interpreting. Where he really wanted to be was out in this valley along the streams, finding game to ease the hunger of these people. Too much hunger makes people small in spirit. These Shoshones were becoming dull and fearful.

If whitemen were this hungry, they would be eating their horses, he thought.

It was going to take much cajolery, many promises, to persuade these furtive people to postpone their buffalo hunt and
cross the divide, risking exposure to enemies, just to help these mysterious people with their strange request. But Cameahwait had promised to help.

Drouillard saw the deer jerk its head up. It had seen one of the Shoshone horsemen and was about to flee, so he would have to shoot it now at this long range instead of stalking closer to it. He made his prayer to the Keeper of the Game and the deer itself and aimed high to compensate for the distance.

It was the second day out of the Shoshone camp, and now that they were back on the east side of the divide, the Shoshones were as fearful as they had been before their chief shamed them into coming. When he and Shields had ridden out this morning to hunt, the Indians insisted on sending riders along to keep an eye on them. Captain Lewis had argued to the chief that the presence of such scouts could scare off any game, but the Indians were afraid that if the two hunters got out of their sight, they might go down and call in the dreaded imaginary enemies. The more Lewis protested the escort, the more suspicious the Shoshones became, and so now Drouillard and Shields were hunting with the handicap of highly visible horsemen off on their flanks. These people were nearly starved, having eaten absolutely nothing for days, but apparently they feared their enemies worse than they feared hunger. They had wanted to turn back last night, but Lewis told them that one of their own long-lost relatives was with the white men in the boats, a young woman captured by the Hidatsas five years ago. They remembered that raid and nodded.