The High Missouri (41 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Let’s go,” said Dru.

Dylan didn’t know what the devil he was talking about.

It was dawn. They were just up, just outside for the first breath of sweet air and the first touch of the sun.

“Let’s go,” repeated the Druid, smiling enigmatically. He held up the book, Nicholas Biddle on the Lewis & Clark expedition. He tapped it. “The White Cliffs,” he said. “The Falls. The Gates of the Mountains. The Three Forks of the Missouri.”

The Druid had been reading Biddle every evening while Dylan sat at White Raven’s feet, devouring the book, almost memorizing it, like a mystic cabala. He had birthed within himself the notion that the river itself held some secret, some great life-enhancement, and that only on the bosom of the river could it be tasted, drunk like the sweetest of waters.

They were free. The trading was done. The sun dance was a month away. They were free.

Dylan thought maybe this old man was as right as the other old men, Ian Campbell and White Raven. The young man wanted to drink those waters. He said, “Let’s go.”

They made a dugout from a cottonwood for a canoe. They wanted to travel on the river itself. The country was very broken and would be hard to cross. Lewis and Clark had gone straight up the river, and so had the traders who followed them. Dylan and Dru thought the river held the promise of a blessing.

“This is the moon of high water,” White Raven reminded them quietly. They took that as a good omen.

Entering the Missouri at the mouth of Stonewall Creek, they were immediately in a land of enchantment. The river flowed between white cliffs, and the cliffs, as Lewis and Clark said, “exhibited a most extraordinary romantic appearance.” They rose two or three hundred feet above the river, sank back to a grassy plain, and rose again. They were white sandstone, which eroded away, and a caprock of sterner stuff. So the wind and rain had played here like an artist mad with whimsy, creating phantasmagorical shapes. Huge toadstools, dark caprock supported by a slender, curving white stem. Gargoyles. Immense baubles of stone. Formal gardens with stone hedges. Oriental trees with dark crowns and shimmering white trunks. A showplace of stone.

Most of all, the cliffs reminded Dylan of buildings made by an architect with infinite materials, centuries to build, the very forces of nature for his workmen, and extravagant imagination. The style was Greek, but wildly ornamented. Stately columns ended in pyramidal roofs decorated with bas-reliefs. Galleries stretched hither and yon, illogically. Expansive stairs footed all. And gardens of statuary were flung to the sides. Sometimes the buildings were whole, perfect, untouched by time. Other times they were romantic ruins, half pulled down, in a sad and poignant deshabille.

They pushed the canoe through eddy after eddy, sometimes drifting back down a little to see a scene once more, or from a slightly different aspect. Sometimes they got out and walked up to structures and touched them, to know with their hands these works were nature and not art.

“You see,” said Dru with a wistful smile, “the old stories are true. This is the heroic age upon the earth.”

By unspoken consent they fell into silence. After two days they passed beyond the White Cliffs, into a stretch of river bounded by high dirt bluffs. Beyond the bluffs, from time to time, they could see the high mountain ranges of eternal snows. They were coming to the highest Rockies. They saw, and it suited them not to speak.

After several more days they came to the great Falls of the Missouri described by the captains. Dylan had stopped looking at the book to describe what he was seeing. He wanted no words between himself and his experience. He wanted to drink the waters purely, for himself and by himself.

The series of falls stirred awe in him. The two men portaged the dugout around them slowly, stopping often, hardly laboring. In the water Dylan felt power beyond power. Above and below this place the river often flowed slowly, sometimes undetectably. Here it sauntered majestically up to a fault in the rock and struck downward in hammer blows. This, thought Dylan, is the power that is in it always. This is a sign, lest we forget.

He thought it was the same power that inhabited the earth everywhere, dangerous, exhilarating, enhancing or destructive according to its own will, always immanent. The empty air could whip and howl. The clouds could bellow forth torrents. A clear sky could burst into lightning. The earth itself could shake, and ravage and ruin and wreck, and show a new face tomorrow. And all these things gave birth to each other, to infinite birthing.

Above the falls the country changed. They were approaching the high mountains now through a hilly grassland. Before long they could see the first of the great barriers of the mountains, what Dylan remembered the captains called the Gates of the Mountains. In silence they paddled the canoe through the valley toward the huge rock walls. At the last moment the river poured out of a desperately narrow canyon, notched into walls more than a thousand feet high. In silence they entered the canyon, fought the white water, occasionally portaged, fought the white water, and after miles and miles emerged into a huge valley, what the fur men called a hole.

It seemed to Dylan that they had not spoken for days, perhaps a week. He did not want to speak. He felt their silence a bond, a link to each other, a link to the earth, a link to something within.

The big ranges humped up now in all directions, aloof, imperial. The river crashed in their faces, moon-of-high-water strong, and they worked against it. Dylan never thought anymore—he paddled hard, saw, heard, felt the icy water, and paddled hard. He did not tell himself he was hearing the rhythms of the earth, he simply was.

Time became infinite for him, an endless sequence of light and darkness, a time such as the primeval earth felt, with no measuring mind to gauge it. So he did not know, and did not wonder, whether it was still June or now July when they came to the Three Forks of the Missouri.

These were headwaters of the great river of the center of the continent, the fountainhead. It was a meeting of three rivers, which the captains had given names Dylan did not remember. The westernmost one had led the explorers over the continental divide and onto the waters of the Pacific, he knew that. It was a low place, a bottomland thick with willows and good grass, the rivers braided, meandering, a place of nearly as much water as land. And the banks ran full, swollen with snowmelt, big with the fecundity of the earth.

They camped. Dylan wanted to stay here a little.

That night Dru broke the silence.

“I want to go on by myself,” he said.

Dylan accepted that Dru knew that His-Many-Bells-Ringing needed to be alone in this place.

“What will you do?” Dylan asked.

“Go to the Lemhi Snakes on the Jefferson Fork,” said Dru. These were the people of Sacajawea, who lived near the pass over the Rockies used by the captains.

“Why?” Dylan knew it was not to make contact for trading, but something within Dru’s personal world.

“I met a Snake at the Minnetarees’,” Dru said with a shrug. “He told me about the old enemies of the Snakes, the ones who live to the west, in the great desert no water flows out of.” Dru hesitated. “Their name was Ungapumbe Undavich. Since the Snakes moved across the mountains, they haven’t seen these people, but they may still be there. They were tall,” he said, “very tall, almost giants.” He grinned. “Blue-eyed. Red-haired. Fair-skinned. And fighters most fierce.”

Dylan laughed. Every man needed a myth to keep him going.

“Most surely my Welsh Indians,” said Dru, his eyes merry. “I want to find out about them.” He paused. “I will meet you here in a week or ten days.” He looked at the man now known as His-Many-Bells-Ringing.

“Let’s meet the Piegans in time for the sun dance,” Dylan said seriously.

His-Many-Bells-Ringing was apprehensive about the week. He had come here to see—yes, surely, this was his first quest for a vision—and what if he saw nothing? What if the earth had no mysteries, but was just brutely physical? What if it had mysteries and disdained to show them profanely? What if the music he could not quite detect, the music hinted at but never heard, was his imagination?

He didn’t know what to do. Surely there were rituals, gestures he needed to make to invite understanding. He didn’t know them.

But he did what he could. He stripped naked. He gathered cedar, burned it on a small fire, and cleansed himself with the smoke. He gathered sweet sage and burned it to invite whatever spirits existed to come to him.

He sat by his fire and sang songs. Any songs at first, childhood ditties, street songs, songs of the
voyageurs
, songs of the Church. But the words didn’t feel right to him, so he sang the melodies without words. He thought of translating the old words into the Blackfoot language, to see if they would metamorphose somehow, but he didn’t. The melodies alone felt right, uncluttered by words.

When he slept, he remembered his dreams, but they didn’t seem sacred to him. Mainly he dreamed, as always, of sequences of effort that never ended. Usually he was traveling on a great sailing ship across a boundless ocean. He was an officer. Every day he gave the orders and helped the men trim the sails and use the winds to make mile after mile after mile. And again the next day, and the next day, with never a landfall. Sometimes they had storms, terrible storms, and rode them out. Sometimes they fought high seas and vicious winds. Mostly they just sailed, and never a landfall.

He had other dreams. In one he was trying to get his father to say some words, magic words, perhaps, an incantation, a spell, words that would open a castle door, or the like. But his father wouldn’t say them. However he asked, angled, begged, wheedled, Ian Campbell wouldn’t say the words. If he did, Dylan knew, his father would become someone else, and so would he. Dylan wanted desperately to feel what that was like. But his father wouldn’t say the words, never would.

Dylan was very aware that no spirit appeared to him.

A coyote did appear, but it was a real, ordinary, physical coyote. It stood off to the left of the fire and just looked at him. True, it did stay a long time, unnaturally long, almost supernaturally long. Then it was gone, and Dylan went to sleep. While he was sleeping, the coyote touched his bare hand with its damp, cool muzzle. Frightened, Dylan pretended to keep sleeping. Then, unable to bear the tension, he opened his eyes. The coyote was gone.

The next morning he tried to figure out what of that experience was real and what was dream. He couldn’t. He thought it was all some mixture of sensation and dream-seeing and imagination, or a kind of waking dream. He didn’t know what. But it wasn’t a vision. Probably not.

On the fourth day he decided to walk up the mountain. When evening came he was in the timber but far short of the heights. Instead of sleeping, he kept walking. Maybe he would walk all night. Maybe he would get to the summit at dawn and have a great panoramic view.

At midsummer in the high country, days are long and the twilights seem to last forever. But this time it got dark early. The clouds closed in, ominous, suffocating. The sky got a dark gray, an ugly gray. It began to rain.

Foolishly, His-Many-Bells-Ringing kept walking toward the summit.

Rain poured down. Once sleet slashed at him. Water ran underfoot. Dirt and rock got slippery. He walked.

Lightning began to hammer the ridges, and thunder clapped him in the head. He knew it was dangerous. He didn’t care.

He came to a ridge, and now, out of the trees, he could see the electrical storm. The lightning played on the ridges, but it was the rough play of gods huge and heedlessly destructive. They pounded the earth, buffeted boulders, smacked summits, pummeled, knocked, swatted, clubbed, bruised, and battered the earth.

Sometime Dylan had to cover his ears. His consciousness pitched and rolled and trembled and quaked.

Madly, utterly madly, he began to sing.

At that moment the brute force was transformed into something else, the thunder raised itself from a bewildering, overwhelming, killing cacophony into a kind of music, a kind of art, more than human, touched by the divine.

He sang louder. He had no idea what he was singing, but he bellowed. He did not know what he sang for, but he roared his soul into the sky.

The roar was a kind of incantatory wail, and he heard in it the song that once seemed so alien, the song of the beaver dance of the Piegans. And within the song, part of it, its heartbeat, was the throbbing of the drum, muted thunder.

He let his feet begin to move to the drum. His feet danced, his body danced, all of him danced, as it soon would dance in the people’s homage to the sun.

Now, dancing and singing, he heard them roar. The bells.

The thunder and his body and his voice combined somehow, thunder the pedal tones, his body the sounding board, his song the melody, and there gushed forth a vast pealing of bells. Awesome bells, the most tremendous bells ever cast, resounding forth a music primeval, bonging out a knell such as the earth had never heard, or the one made at the moment of creation, or maybe a music it made every moment since and no one ever heard because it was too loud. Glorious music His-Many-Bells-Ringing heard at last, music he sang, music he was.

When the storm eased, after dawn, he was not only hoarse, his throat ached. He had rung his many bells until there was nothing more to ring. He was utterly, sublimely happy.

He sat on the ridge and watched the light seep back into the sky and bring the earth to his eyes. It emerged gradually, peacefully, beautifully from the mists.

As the sky cleared, he saw the rain everywhere. It dripped from the needles of the pine, fir, and spruce. It dropped from the leaves of the quaking aspens. It glistened on the feathers of the jays and the fur of the squirrels. It ran in tiny fingers down the mountain. It made rivulets which followed intimately, like lovers, the smallest undulations of the flesh of the entire mountainside. It formed into tiny streams—gullies that were dry yesterday and would be dry tomorrow bubbled wet today. It ran into the small flowing creeks and into the big jostling creeks and it bolted and charged down the mountain and onto the plain and into the three forks, and there, on the plain that lay open and gleaming before him, it braided itself into the great bands of silver water.