Sign-Talker (41 page)

Drouillard gutted the fawn he had just shot, tied it behind the crude Indian saddle, and mounted to ride on down the fork, toward the camp where Captain Lewis was transferring everything from the canoes to packsaddles so the Shoshone horses could carry them west over the ridge to the town. The canoes would be sunk in a pond, weighted down with rocks, to keep them from drying out and splitting or being burned in prairie fires before the troop’s return next year—in the event they did come back this way. Some extraneous items were being stored in another secret cache, hidden from the eyes of the Shoshones.

On the other side of the divide, Captain Clark was exploring the watershed for a navigable stream that would lead to the Columbia River, beyond the maze of the Shining Mountains. Here, between the two soldier parties, Drouillard hunted day by day for meat to feed both soldiers and Shoshones.

At midday he smelled smoke, saw it drifting over a rise, and rode toward it.

It was a family group of Shoshone foragers. They were eating a meal and were startled to see him ride in, but he quickly informed them by sign that he was a friend, dismounted and visited with them long enough to explain the presence and purposes of the whitemen. There were three women, a boy, an old man, and a very nervous warrior with the longest nose and narrowest face Drouillard could remember ever seeing. The warrior had no gun and could hardly keep his eyes off Drouillard’s rifle; probably he was so nervous because this stranger was so much better armed than he. Drouillard was impressed by the quantity of food these people had found in this steep, stark land. In hand-woven bags they had about two bushels of dried service berries and chokecherry cakes, and another bushel of dried roots. They
also had several prepared hides of buffalo, rolled to carry their belongings. They were friendly but watchful, and had the boy stay near their horses as if to protect them. Seeing that he was making them nervous, and needing to get on with the hunt, Drouillard gave them parting signs and walked off to get his horse, which was grazing away from the camp. It kept moving away and he finally caught it about fifty paces away from the fire. He heard hoofbeats then, turned, and was astonished to see the whole family mounted on their horses and galloping away, leaving their fire burning and all their belongings on the ground. He had had no idea they were that scared of him, and regretted it. He led his horse back toward the fire to get his rifle, which he had left where he was sitting.

With a chill and a flush of shame he saw that it was gone. He looked after the fleeing Indians and saw that the warrior was carrying it in one hand and desperately quirting his horse with the other.

Cursing himself for his carelessness, for turning his back on his most critical possession, he swung into the saddle and lashed the horse into an all-out run in pursuit.

He knew this was not a wise thing to be doing. His only weapon was his sheath knife, and the man he was chasing had his long rifle, loaded, and a bow and a quiver of arrows. But by damn, he thought, no man was going to steal George Drouillard’s rifle and vanish without fighting for it!

Drouillard’s pistols were in his gear with Lewis’s party miles below. If this Shoshone thief decided to turn and fight, he had all the advantage.

As he chased them up the pass, Drouillard reflected that the Shoshone was a stranger to the gun, had only the one load that was in it, and hadn’t gotten the shot and powder horn.

But the Shoshone had arrows.

There was plenty of time to weigh these things, because the chase was over open ground, and his horse was no better than theirs, if as good. He wasn’t gaining. Now and then the distant warrior turned and brandished the rifle, but didn’t shoot.

The race went on and on. The lean, spare Shoshone horses had
admirable endurance. Drouillard thought of throwing off the dead fawn to lighten the load, but was too intent on staying up to fumble with knots.

The pursuit had gone perhaps eight or nine miles when he saw that the family’s horses were not keeping up with the warrior’s. He was overtaking them. The women were crying out in fright.

Now Drouillard could see a chance.

He caught up with the family and rode in the midst of their flagging horses. He grabbed reins and pulled them to a halt, in a flurry of dust and confusion. He convinced them by sign that he was not going to hurt them. They sat on their heaving mounts looking ashamed.

Their plight had caused their warrior to circle back. Drouillard imagined he was torn between coming back to protect them and getting away. He did what Drouillard expected of a warrior. He kept riding nearer, pointing the rifle and crying
“Pahkee!”
which was their word for enemies, and his face was full of torment and doubt. He couldn’t shoot at Drouillard in the midst of his family, and he looked frustrated enough to cry.

Then, in a moment when the warrior was occupying himself with the unfamiliar workings of the flintlock, Drouillard lashed his horse into a charge straight at him, and with every bit of his angry strength and quickness grabbed the rifle barrel with such force that the gun gouged and wrenched the warrior’s trigger hand, likely breaking a finger. All the warrior could do before he relinquished the rifle to Drouillard’s superior strength was flip up the frizzen and spill out the priming powder—very quick thinking.

The thief whipped his horse and fled, leaving the others to fend for themselves.

Drouillard in an instant reprimed the gun and was about to shoot the fleeing man from his saddle when he thought of the consequences of shooting a Shoshone in Shoshone country while the captains were crucially reliant on their cooperation.

So he left them and rode back. On the way to Lewis’s camp, he picked up the food baskets and hides they had abandoned and
loaded them on the tired horse. He was pretty sure the warrior and his family would never show up to claim them.

Despite many opportunities to steal the goods of the soldiers, the Shoshones had never taken one item. In their society, it seemed, it was not done. That one warrior apparently had just been overcome with desire for the best weapon he had ever seen, and it likely would be a long time before he would show his face among his people.

That evening, Captain Lewis had a feast prepared for the Shoshones. He had corn and beans boiled, and dried squash from the Mandans, and hundreds of fresh trout the soldiers caught by making a dragnet of brush. Part of the feast was the fawn and the roots and berries Drouillard had brought in. The always hungry Shoshones were delighted.

Drouillard was too disgusted with Captain Lewis to look at him, and so was glad to be riding out ahead as hunter.

The poor and kindly Shoshones had finally fulfilled their promises to the whitemen, then with relief had hurried their migration toward their buffalo hunting grounds.

The demands of the whitemen had delayed their hunt for two weeks and had eventually tried the Shoshones’ patience to the limits. After they had helped the soldiers carry all their tons of goods westward over the divide, and helped them plan a route through the western mountains, even providing an old man to guide them to the Nez Perce country, Captain Lewis had found occasion to scold Cameahwait and make him apologize for putting his own people’s hunger before Lewis’s desires. And then the Shoshones had been forced to wait still longer while the whitemen haggled over the prices of twenty-nine horses. What a self-important ass Lewis could be!

The soldiers now led those horses, and one mule, along rocky riverbanks into a jagged maze of mountains steeper and higher than they had ever imagined, mountains already capped with snow and sometimes shrouded in purple clouds that would leave more snow. Drouillard was aware that his days of easy hunting were over. Here there were no buffalo. Elk were seldom seen, and the few deer were hard to track on the stony mountainsides, quick to vanish in the pines. It was no wonder the Shoshones
were so lean and hungry, and so impatient to go to the plains for buffalo.

Drouillard was riding a buckskin-colored gelding among tumbled, mottled boulders and gnarled driftwood alongside a rapid, rocky-bottomed stream that ran almost straight north—back north, after coming so far southwest from the falls. Long way around, it seemed.

The smells of this valley were clean, crisp: pine, crystal water, moss, cedar, berry bushes—but the only animal smell most of the time was that of his own horse. Beaver now and then. He remembered the stench of plenty at the Great Falls: the countless dead buffalo rotting at the river’s edge, whiffs of animal dung on every breeze, the acrid urine of wolf boundaries, the last putrid odor of elk carrion declining to the worms and beetles after the bears and buzzards and wolves were through—where there was much to eat there was much to smell. This cleanness, to a hunter, was the scent of hunger. The only life prolific in this mountain valley was insect life: mosquitoes and biting flies, clouds of them, annoying him and his horse to twitchy distraction, swarming at eyes and mouth, whining in the ears.

Behind came the grating hooves and the snorting horses and the voices of the troop. These were not very good horses. The Shoshones had had hundreds of excellent horses, but the captains had not been willing to pay enough, and had come away with these. At first the Shoshones had been so bedazzled by the whitemen’s novelties that they would give a decent horse for a cheap knife, a used cloth shirt, a few metal trinkets. But they had learned quickly about value. Theirs were the only horses to be had, and they could hold out for the true worth of their animals; good battle axes, considerable quantities of ribbon and beads, awls and mirrors. In the end, Captain Clark had yielded up a pistol and a musket and some ammunition for a final pair of horses, despite their policy of not trading away any firearms.

From the indifferent quality and condition of the packhorses, and the scarce sign of game, Drouillard could predict that the soldiers would taste horse meat before they were through these mountains—if they ever got through.

As he rode, his mind kept going back to those wild, spare Shoshone people. He had felt everything with them in two weeks: affection, anger, exasperation, joy. Every one of that people was free to do or not do according to conscience or judgment. The chief could not order, only persuade or inspire, which of course the two army officers had found maddening, even contemptible. Children were not punished, for fear it would break their spirit. And yet the Shoshone were cheerful, tough, generous; they kept their promises, and, in Drouillard’s judgment, had more elegant manners than Lewis: When the chief, driven by his people’s desperate hunger, had begged to hurry on to the buffalo hunt, it was Lewis who reminded him of the deer Drouillard had shot to feed his hungry Indians. He clenched his jaw when he thought of that. To remind someone of a kindness you’ve given him was boorish. Had Cameahwait reminded Lewis of the berries and fish his people had fed the hungry whitemen when they first arrived?

When the canoes were unloaded and all the treasures spread out to dry, no Shoshone had stolen a single object. All had asked permission even to examine things.

As for the warrior who had picked up his rifle and fled with it, that had been more of a
coup
than a theft. Warriors were admired for taking things from their enemies, and maybe the warrior had believed Drouillard was a
pahkee
, as he had called him.

Besides, Drouillard reflected, he had deserved that
coup
for leaving his rifle where someone could grab it. In getting it back, he just did a better
coup
. How he had hated telling Lewis of that incident! If he had been a soldier, he probably would have been tried and whipped. And of course there were other reasons besides censure not to leave your gun unwatched. He and that warrior had taught each other good lessons that day.

They were going back north because Captain Clark had found the west-flowing river too violent and its banks too steep and rocky. Cameahwait and the old guide had said the only safe way to go beyond the mountains was by the trails and passes the Nez Perce people traveled to hunt buffalo in the plains. That route,
the old man said, was about nine sleeps north; there they must turn west and climb over the pass.

Among the voices from the column behind, Drouillard could hear, faintly now and then, the Bird Woman’s. She spoke in her tongue to the old guide. He was wiry, brown and wrinkled as jerky. The captains had given him the nickname Toby, because it sounded something like the first part of his unpronounceable Shoshone name.

To Drouillard it was strange that the Bird Woman was still with the expedition. Seeing her reunion with her relatives, he had thought she would never leave them again. In the first few days she seemed to have felt that way too. She had spent as much time as possible with the few people she remembered, especially with her brother the chief, and had begged sugar and other little gifts from the captains to give them. Drouillard had presumed that Charbonneau would go on with the expedition, according to his contract, and perhaps on the way back reunite with his wife and son among her people. She seemed to love her blood people more than she loved her husband. And he, though he had some pride in his little son, demonstrated no deep attachment to Bird Woman. She could have stayed with her people and been rid of Charbonneau, who was three times her age. And smelled bad too.

But in the period of crossing the divide and trading for horses, something had changed. Drouillard had noticed it; some of the women had cooled toward Bird Woman. Maybe her far-ranging adventures had made her something beyond a Shoshone. Perhaps she, full of those adventures and enjoying prestige among these powerful white strangers, had lorded it over these poor mountain women whose lives had been lived on a smaller scale.

There was also among the Shoshone men one to whom she as a child had been promised in marriage by her now-deceased parents. That man now had two wives and had long presumed her dead. While asserting that he had a right to her, he told the captains that he didn’t want her anyway because she had borne Charbonneau a child. Perhaps some of the men and women in the tribe had assumed some of his disdain.