Sign-Talker (5 page)

Drouillard sat in deep silence on the roots of a sycamore tree, suspended over the river’s edge, his back against the immense trunk, waiting for deer to come down to the beach in the bend to drink. His long rifle, the finest thing he owned, lay across his thighs. His breath clouded in the dank air. The winter sun was low, screened through leafless treetops. From upriver he could hear the soldiers’ voices. They were no hunters. They stepped heavy, and sniffled and spat, and talked all the time. The captains would be disappointed by this bunch from the Tennessee fort.

All seven of them and their corporal were sitting useless by a fire, up there where their rowboat was moored, brewing coffee, leaving the hunting as usual to him. They were typical of what he had seen of soldiers, never doing anything but what they were ordered to do. Their two main reasons for volunteering for the expedition were the land bounty they would be paid, and their hope of sporting with Indian women along the way. They didn’t talk of that hope knowingly in his presence, they just didn’t understand how well he could hear. Often they didn’t even know when he was around.

Now and then Drouillard sniffed the wind. He had set himself downwind from the hoof-tracked watering place inside the river bend. Soon the sun would be down, the winter dusk deep. If no deer came because of the soldiers’ noises, they would blame him, the half-breed.

He flexed his fingers and wrists in the cold to keep them supple for shooting.

He kept thinking about whether to go with the captains on their voyage. Every day he had decided several times to go, then not to go. He needed to talk with his uncle.

The expedition would surely cause the red peoples out there all sorts of trouble. It would be the beginning for them of what had finally happened to his people.

But the captains would be going whether he went or not, so it wouldn’t do any good for him
not
to go. And he had calculated over and over the money he could earn for his father’s widow and children during such a voyage: eight or nine hundred dollars, if it took three years. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t get paid that money until the journey was over. They could suffer much want until the time he returned.
If
he ever returned. It might be better if he stayed and hunted for Bissell’s fort and trapped and sold furs and sent them a little money at a time. Maybe go to Ontario to see them. They were all very dear to him, especially Marie Louise.

Don’t think of elsewhere when you’re hunting, he reminded himself.

When he put those thoughts out, his senses rushed in. He heard the scurry of small animals and the flutter of wings in the woods down to his left. A crow might warn a deer that a hunter sat here. But no crow called. Drouillard heard delicate hoofsteps and cocked his flintlock slowly, with his palm over it to muffle the click.

A doe emerged onto the beach, a stately silhouette against the shimmering river, ears an erect V, attention upwind, away from him.

His lips moved silently in the prayer that thanked the deer for her life, for the flesh that feeds the Two-Leggeds, and promised to feed her descendants when his own carcass would decay in the earth to nourish plants that deer eat. She was only about fifty paces away, so he aimed just below the top of her shoulder.

When the shot’s echo had rolled away along the river and the powder smoke drifted off, she was on her knees and beginning to topple sideways, her life spirit already going out.

Megweshe
, he thanked the Keeper of the Game. He heard the soldiers whoop. They knew by now he never wasted a shot, and they expected meat. They had no suspicion that the meat they ate had been sanctified by the prayer of a man they probably considered a savage heathen.

Drouillard reloaded his rifle, then went down the riverbank to butcher the doe. He slit open the abdomen and pulled out the guts. Reaching in and forward, he closed his hand around the hot heart and pulled it out. He sheathed his steel knife and took from his pouch a flint blade with no handle. It was sharp as a razor, and with it he sliced out a strip of heart muscle. He chewed it well.

Akowa, the Doe, carried in her heart the spirit of health and the wisdom to perceive the coming of evil, whatever its disguise. He ate of her heart to receive these gifts, which he would need.

In the flickering light of the dying campfire, a soldier named Potts was sitting up in his blanket, filling a clay pipe. His bedroll was closest to Drouillard’s. The other soldiers, except the sentry down by the rowboat, were asleep, or seemed to be, their feet toward the fire. The Cumberland’s swift water burbled and trickled, silvered by a half moon. The tethered boat rubbed and bumped woodenly against the tree roots on the riverbank, and the treetops were full of moonlight and intense star points. Drouillard was ready for sleep, his head on his knapsack, but he could feel Potts wanting to talk. Most of the soldiers said hardly anything to Drouillard, even though he was feeding and leading them. They were uneasy with an Indian in their midst, so uneasy that they never suggested he stand guard, which was fine with him.

Drouillard tried to ignore Potts, but the soldier cleared his throat softly, once, then again, so Drouillard sighed, sat up in his blanket and looked at him. Potts was round-faced, fair-haired, with a Dutchy sort of accent. He leaned toward the fire, breath clouding in the cold. He put some sticks on the fire.

Then he offered his pipe to Drouillard. That was a surprise. Drouillard took it with a nod, picked a twig out of the fire and lit
the tobacco. It was harsh, dry army tobacco, but he blew a plume of smoke toward the sky to invite the Creator to hear whatever they were going to talk about. Then he turned the stem toward the four winds one by one, acknowledging all the Old Spirits. Then he touched the pipe stem to the earth and gave the pipe back to Potts with a nod. Potts had watched the ritual with interest. He took two puffs, gazed at the campfire a moment, and said, “You going west wit’ us, scout?”

“Still thinking.”

“Yah? Hope you come.”

“Why’s that?”

“Mmm. Good man. And, I like having an Indian wit’ us.”

“Why so?”

They were both speaking in murmurs. Potts shrugged and tilted his head, as if to think better. “Well … lots of Indians out t’ere, I s’pose? They might, mmm, trust us better, you along?”

“Could make ’em more sly. Most Indians only trust their own.”

“Huh!” Potts was quiet, then said, “Wonder how many tribes there are out t’ere.”

“Scared?”

Potts leaned closer and whispered. “Nah. Reed is, though. He frets so much about it, he’s causing me nightmares.”

“God damn you, Potts.” The voice came from beyond the fire. “I ain’t scared. Just curious about Indians. Damned if I ever talk t’ you about anything again!” Reed was up on an elbow, glaring. “Just you shut up, or—”

Potts stiffened and scowled in that direction. “Don’ tell me to shut up, you damnt scaredy carbuncle.”

A deeper voice spoke from beyond the fire. “Reed, shut up and get up. Time you relieve Howard on watch.” It was the corporal, Warfington.

Reed sighed and grunted and began to stir. Soon he had his coat and hat and shoes on, and with an ugly glare at Potts he trudged out of the fireglow toward the sentry post with his firearm in the crook of his arm and his blanket over his shoulder. Drouillard heard him stop and piss on the ground, farting defiance
at the corporal’s authority. After a while the other sentry, Private Howard, shambled in and got down into his bedroll without even warming himself at the fire or saying a word.

Drouillard had been thinking of what Potts said about his nightmares. Dreams were messages, and he had been having one himself since the day he met Captain Lewis. It was of a flint blade slicing flesh, and blood flowing down bare arms.

When everybody seemed settled and sleep-breathing again, he leaned toward Potts and murmured: “What were your bad dreams? Remember?”

Potts’s eyes widened and he blew out through his lips and passed the pipe back to Drouillard, nodding. “Of me getting shot and cut up by Indians. Lot of ’em. Too many to fight.”

Drouillard shivered. Such dreams were too much alike. Maybe they were sharing a dream, as people sometimes do when they camp together with wilderness all around. Suddenly a barred owl screamed, close enough that Potts jumped and some of the soldiers started in their sleep. Then it queried,
Hook? Hook? Hook hook haw hooo awww!
And soon another replied from far upriver.

Now Potts was looking at Drouillard with meaningful intensity.

“What, Potts?”

“Uh … well … those hooters. Cherokee, down by South West Post, act scared of ’em. You?”

Drouillard gave him back the pipe. To most tribes, Meendagaw, the Owl, was a death messenger. To the Shawnees it was a little different, an adviser. It was something to think on, that it had come just then. He laid back, pulled up his blanket, and tried to ease Potts with a nod. “Cherokees are superstitious savages,” he said, doing his best to look serious.

And then he closed his eyes and went to sleep listening to the
meendagaws
talking.

“Oh God Jesus Jesus Jesus!” Private Hall cried in a quaking voice. “I can’t even stand to watch this!”

Drouillard, stripped to the skin, ignored the soldier as he
stepped off the riverbank and waded in, breaking the thin skim of ice as he went. At waist depth he threw himself horizontal and swam out to the middle of the river where the faster current had kept ice from forming. His heart pounded and he gasped for every breath, but the cold was thrilling and his inner fire burned and made him feel stronger. He swam back through the ice he had broken and waded ashore. There, he stood and sluiced the water off his pale brown skin with the edges of his hands, and then he was still a moment, saying, without speaking, his going-to-the-water prayer.

Master of Life, here I am making myself clean so I will not offend and drive off the game with man-smell
.

Master of Life, here I am alive because you gave me a piece of Kilswa the Sun to warm me from inside
. Megweshe.

Weshemoneto. Weshecatweloo.
Master of Life, let us be strong
.

The soldiers of course thought he was crazy. He did this every morning. He had, every morning since he was a boy, except when the ice was too thick to break. Sometimes it made his bones ache.

These soldiers never bathed, or maybe they did now and then in the summer. Half of them said they couldn’t swim. Maybe that was why they were afraid to bathe. Breath clouding, he stood till his skin was dry and then he put on his clothes, while the soldiers shook their heads. They didn’t understand that he washed off his man-smell so he could hunt well and keep feeding them.

Louis Lorimier looked at his nephew and shook his head, his lips stretched in that grin of his that looked like a yellow-toothed snarl.
“Tu, avec soldats américains?”

“Oui, mon oncle.”
He explained his mission to escort the soldiers to the American captains. He had left the men camped at the river and come up to the trading post. He talked about the
captains and about their offer that he join the expedition. The old trader smoked a pipe and listened. He had pulled his long queue of black hair forward over his left shoulder, as was his habit, and was drawing the braid absently through his left hand. He was vain about his knee-length hair, which he sometimes used as a quirt when riding, or a fly-whisk in summer. Outside a window, men were standing in the cold, arguing loudly over the worth of horses they were trading.

“The
capitaine
, Lewis, visited me,” Lorimier said. “He was clever, I think, in not bringing the one called Clark. It might have been difficult for us to be so hospitable, had he come. As it was, we found Monsieur Lewis quite amiable, especially after he had drained off as much of my brandy as I would have drunk in a week. He was rather too much attentive to Agatha, whom he referred to as a ‘lovely nymphet’—then apologized.” Lorimier shook his head again, musing. “But I am glad he came by. I now perceive President Jefferson’s purchase of the territory in a more favorable light. It will be troublesome, of course. But instead of opening it up for squatters to pour in, as I feared, they seem to favor trade with the natives. Less bad.”

“Or so the captain said to you.”

“I believe he meant it,” Lorimier said. “In truth, the
capitaine
made hints of a good prospect for me when their flag flies here. Hinting that I am well situated perhaps to become an agent for the Indians.”

Drouillard sat in astonishment. He could remember from childhood the sight of this man, descendant of French marquises, setting out in war paint and feathers to raid American settlements in Kentucky, less than twenty-five years ago. And now he was speaking of becoming an agent for them! Obviously his uncle was not going to condemn him for consorting with the enemy. Lorimier had long been disappointed with his nephew for running away from the Black Robes and becoming a hunter in the woods instead of someone who could write and figure and be helpful in trade. Drouillard had been dreading his uncle’s censure, but Lorimier had obviously been swayed by Lewis’s talk. The old man continued:

“He offered to send Guillaume and Louis to army officer school.”

Those two were Lorimier’s sons. Drouillard said, “Officer school?”

“A place called West Point, in the state of New York, where they will educate officers for their army. It would be amusing, would it not, for them to make officers of the sons of their old enemy Lorimier? Ha ha! And it will give the Lorimier name much prestige in this new part of their country.”

Drouillard could see that Captain Lewis had caught his uncle like a fish on a hook baited with flattery and promises. Lorimier said now, “As for you,
neveu:
they want you to go with them. Will you?”

“I am still studying on it. I would not even think of it but that I need money for Angelique and her family. But I do think of it.”