The True Account (18 page)

Accordingly, early in April, my uncle on his white mule, I on Bucephalus, and Franklin on his Indian pony rode out of the Knife River village with the Hidatsas, leaving behind the scene of the saddest season of my life, in a place I will always think of as the burial ground of my dear Little Warrior Woman.

 

 

 

 

L
IKE NIGHTFALL
and dawn, full spring on the prairie comes of a sudden, with a rush of warm wind, a drenching rain, emerald grass, and thawed potholes full of waterfowl. As our party of three headed west with Blue Moon, his bear and eagle, and the Hidatsa warriors, we encountered buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope everywhere. The songbirds were back, too—western larks and blackbirds, a bluebird closely resembling ours in New England, only with softer azure wings, and the bright cock robins that always precede the females of their tribe north, which made me lonesome for Vermont all over again. On our second day out I paused to do a miniature watercolor of a Canada goose nesting in a cottonwood—the only instance of a goose in a tree I had ever seen. I believe it used the former home of a fishing hawk.

Traveling with the Hidatsas, I was struck once again by how much more distance we could cover on horseback than the captains' party ever made paddling their cumbersome canoes against the Missouri's endless boiling current. The Indians pushed their ponies hard, and early in the morning of the third day, we swung up the valley of the Little Missouri.

Soon the river canyon narrowed and the air grew hazy, inspiring Franklin to name the place Portes d'Enfer. “Aye,” said my uncle, bouncing along on his mule with his belled cap jingling and his arquebus cradled under his arm, “it makes me long for the tree-cloaked hills of New England.” A tear started to his eye, whereupon he delivered himself of a violent attack on sentimentality in literature; in conclusion, he flattered himself that his
Ethan Allen
was unblemished by such an abominable defect. He repeated this disquisition in Hidatsa for the edification of Blue Moon and his warriors, defying them to tell him differently. They nodded and said, “Ah—ah—ah,” an utterance conveying great approbation.

As we rode deeper into Franklin's Gates of Hell, the savant pointed out that the rock walls of the canyon were seamed with dark veins of bituminous lignite, some smoldering from fires deep in the earth that had been burning since time out of mind. The silent blue flames played over the escarpments like gypsy lights, causing my uncle to declare that he would not care to make this ride alone after dark.

We now found ourselves surrounded by the strangest geological configurations. On both sides of the river stood a forest of soaring stone columns resembling great stalagmites. In color they were yellow, red, copper, or brown, and they stood thirty to fifty feet high and were two to four feet in diameter. Odd overlapping stones sat atop them, like the caps of meadow mushrooms. True examined several of these formations minutely, then announced that they were made of weathered sandstone, like the low sandstone cliffs overlooking parts of Loch Champlain at home, which had been worked into curious shapes by the wind and water. But Blue Moon assured us that the columns were no more nor less than the petrified sex organs of an extinct race of giants, adding that barren women from his nation sometimes came to this place, in the hope of being cured of their affliction.

As we progressed up the canyon, the coal fires in the cliffs burned brighter and the smoke thickened. At a place where the murky river bent sharply, we came to a tall mound of white buffalo bones at the base of a precipice at least one hundred feet high. This was Buffalo Jump.

“Heyday!” exclaimed my uncle. On a shelf of rock above the opposite riverbank, he had discovered what he believed to be the ossified thigh bone of an ancient bison. To judge by its length, which was upward of eight feet, this animal must have been twice the size of a buffalo of today. Wielding the bone like a cricket bat, he said grimly, “Gentlemen, I will use this relic as a war club to do service against any and all who speak a word against Ethan Allen, or Vermont, or Scholia Aristotle's unities, or my play.” At which Franklin said he thought it unlikely that we would meet in this hell-hole any such calumniators, or any living creatures at all. And indeed, all life here seemed to have been turned to rock, including the bison, the trees, and the fish.

“There were Gorgons in this land, Ti,” said my uncle, as he limbered up his angling rod and tied a red and green fly that he called Kinneson's Pedagogicus onto his horsehair leader. “Behold the Medusa who cast the spell.”

He pointed up at the exposed remains, in the eastern cliff, of a perfectly preserved winged lizard a good thirty feet across. I could hardly believe my eyes. But my uncle merely nodded, and Blue Moon, who had seen these marvels many times before, said that he would ride on up the river with his bear and eagle to a rock shaped like a bison, where he would say a prayer for luck in the buffalo drive to be held the next day.

As the afternoon waned, the wind began to howl through the canyon. The dark water gurgled and moaned, vanishing into subterranean passages, only to re-emerge darker yet. And though my uncle plied his rod diligently, dropping his Pedagogicus on the opaque surface of the Little Missouri with an aplomb that the great Walton himself might have envied, he could entice no fish to rise.

Around four or five o'clock, though Blue Moon had not yet rejoined our party, we rode with the Hidatsas up a hidden winding path to the western bluff top and the open prairie. By now even the Indian warriors, who had taken an oath “to fear nothing and never turn back, be the danger however so great,” were glad to be out of the canyon with its sulphurous fumes, blue fires, and stone monsters.

Here on the wide plain above the river, I was astounded by the multitudes of buffalo. By the thousands they were traveling north on a broad, beaten path about half a mile west of the brink of the cliff, accompanied by the usual gang of gray wolves on the lookout for a stray calf or sick old cow. Last year's prairie grass, still brown and dry, would burn well when the time came to set the fires.

While we waited for the arrival of Blue Moon, and the Hidatsa braves planned their strategy for the following day, I positioned myself on the edge of the bluff and began to sketch the stone menagerie preserved in the cliff opposite. Later I planned to paint a picture called
In the Chasm of the Little Missouri.
For the time being, I had entrusted most of my canvases to the care of the Shoshone woman Sacagawea, who with her husband and infant son had joined the captains' expedition, and whom I deemed the most reliable person to perform this service. She had promised to guard them faithfully.

By the time I finished my sketch, the buffalo had stopped for the day, to graze and to water at the prairie potholes. A silence broken only by the endless sweep of the wind had settled over the land. Franklin was plaiting some white swan feathers into his hair, and my uncle was frowning at the manuscript of his play, with an eye toward improving Ethan Allen's line “Surrender the fort in the name of the Great Jehovah and the First Continental Congress.”

“How's this?” he said. “‘Surrender the fort in the name of Yahweh' . . . no, damme. What is it I'm after here? This is maddening, Ti. Never take up the pen, except for your sketches. Writing will harry you to an early grave. I expect to be dead before I reach forty.”

“Uncle!”

“Well, well. We all grow old in the end. But harkee”—cocking his head and reaching for his ear trumpet—“I trow a Punch and Judy show does wend our way. Hear the Merry Andrew's drum?”

All I heard was heat thunder, grumbling far off in the distance, and, nearer at hand, the buffalo lowing like barnyard kine waiting to be fed. But then I thought that I, too, could make out a muffled drumbeat vibrating down through the canyon walls below. The sound came from the south, accompanied by the eerie tinkle of little bells, as if a great caravan out of an antique storybook were approaching. The drumbeat became louder. And over it, and over the chiming bells, came a high, thin piping.

We moved our mounts back from the edge of the bluff. I fetched my spyglass from Bucephalus's saddlebags while Franklin whistled like a prairie curlew, motioning for the Hidatsas to approach the brink quickly, on foot and staying low. As I trained my glass upriver, around the furthermost bend came what appeared to be a brightly colored dragon.

B
Y DEGREES,
the dragon resolved itself into a troop of horsemen painted over their entire bodies with moons, half-moons, stars, pentacles, and other arcane symbols. Their horses were painted as well, and the men sat them so easily that they might almost have been centaurs. Four horses pulled a cart conveying a drum ten feet high, which a gigantic drummer, wearing only a breechclout and with no hair on his head or body, beat at regular intervals with a stick as long as my uncle's old bison thigh. Behind the giant came more mounted men, also painted, all bristling with bows and arrows, muskets, and lances from which dangled many scalps. They carried shields bedizened with bits of glass that caught whatever rays of sun found their way into the gorge, magnifying the light a hundred times and hurling it glinting back into our eyes. As they came closer, I perceived tiny bells attached to their long hair and to the painted manes and bridles of their horses. Bringing up the rear of this devils' procession was a chief whose war bonnet was made entirely of fresh human scalps.

I handed the glass to my uncle, who studied the procession for a moment, then passed it to Franklin. “Anasazis,” the savant said after a moment. “An ancient tribe of professional murderers and cannibals, whose remnants dwell in Mexico. I make fifty of them, with more coming.”

He returned the glass to my uncle, who looked again, then said, “I see, gentlemen, that Hell hath let out for recess.”

Attached to the painted leggings of these demons were more scalps, as well as shriveled human ears, sex organs, and fingers; and they sported bracelets and necklaces that appeared to be fashioned from human teeth. On they came, more and more, to the boom-boom-booming of the drum and the tinkling of the bells in their hair like the harness bells of a peddler's cart; some played unearthly melodies upon fifes and panpipes that seemed carved from human bones, while others shook castanets made from small human skulls.

They chose a campsite directly below us, just across the river from Buffalo Jump. As those in the vanguard began to mill about on the sandy shelf beside the river, more of their kind appeared from around the far bend. Some wore breastplates of such antiquity that they seemed to date to the time of the conquistadors and helmets of Moorish design from an earlier age still. Some of the painted riders appeared to be white renegades with cropped ears and brands like those of the murderous Harpe brothers.

Now came a moaning, like the sound the wind is said to make before a hurricane. Round a bend in the distance appeared wheeled cages transporting Indian captives. Other slaves, shackled and playing the part of beasts of burden, walked beside these rolling prisons with great packs on their backs. There could no longer be any doubt: this was the Spanish Force of Terror, advancing with the spring and annihilating everyone in their path, on their way to serve the captains' party the same, to prevent the Americans from laying claim to California and Mexico.

The horsemen who had first arrived in the canyon continued to ride round and round, trampling the ground in a tightening circle. When they had cleared a campsite at the base of the cliffs, they jumped down, hobbled their mounts, and began to gather up driftwood. The chained captives set up a louder wailing.

A blast of bugles split the air as round the bend came two heralds with silver trumpets, followed by four milk-white horses bearing a tall palanquin, upon which sat a slender man with a pointed black beard and mild brown eyes, wearing a flowing white robe and a bishop's miter encrusted with jewels. On his knee perched a tiny child with alabaster skin, white hair, and pink eyes. She was plucking feathers from a large bird with an arrow through its neck, which I took to be a wild turkey, and strewing the feathers right and left with a kind of childish delight, squealing with pleasure when the wind caught one and whirled it away. Upon further scrutiny I could see that this creature was not a child at all but an albino woman, the smallest person, other than an infant, I had ever seen. Behind the palanquin came a wagon filled with costumed courtesans of both sexes, decked out in every imaginable mode of attire from short togas to animal skins.

Bringing up the rear of the caravan was a knot of still more outlandishly costumed riders—a tonsured “priest” in a cassock, a dancer in a red dress, one wearing a long funeral veil, another in a silk top hat, yet another in a crimson fez. In their midst was an Indian, also mounted, but neither he nor his horse was painted. His hands were bound together behind his back, and two of the Anasazis, one painted yellow, one red, led his horse by the bridle. As this trio came closer, I saw that the captive was the Hidatsa chief, Blue Moon. Behind him came six men bearing his dead bear on a long pole; and, turning the glass back on the white dwarf, I realized that the bird she was de-feathering with such glee was no turkey but Blue Moon's war eagle. It was all my uncle and Franklin could do to prevent the Hidatsas from attempting to rescue their chief on the spot, which attempt surely would have resulted in our own destruction.

 

Under the direction of the gigantic drummer and the chief in the war bonnet of scalps, the Anasazis began building up a pyre of driftwood. When the wood was as high as a man, the drummer lighted it and signaled for his fellows to bring him half a dozen slaves, whom, to my great horror, he summarily cracked on the head with his drumstick. The Anasazis then spitted the bodies of their victims on long poles and began to roast them over the bonfire. The hearts they cooked separately, then delivered on gold chargers to the bishop and his dwarf, who, enthroned on their palanquin, ate with silver cutlery. And all the while he feasted, the bishop watched these horrible proceedings with a benign expression in his gentle brown eyes.