The True Account (23 page)

At this a chill went up my back. But Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories shrugged and said, “Who could blame him? Fighting is what Smoke did to protect his people from being exterminated—by the Snake, the Crow, the Nez Perce, and a dozen other nations who would love to wipe every last Blackfoot from the face of the earth.”

Yellow Sage Flower paused. Then she gave a sharp whistle. “Buffalo Runner!” she called out. A moment later a black pony with splashes of white on his sides appeared, with Bucephalus at his side. Yellow Sage took four or five running steps and vaulted over the pony's tail onto his back. Then together we rode west, along the top of the bluff, where who should we meet but my uncle, poking along on his mule and muttering some trial lines from a new poem or play he had in mind. He greeted us with the greatest nonchalance, as though we had never been separated by the storm and he'd known Yellow Sage Flower all her life. But when Franklin appeared a moment later, she put her hand to her mouth, burst into tears, and threw her white tippet over his head and her arms around his neck, weeping for joy and greeting him as brother. Though the savant was not quite so demonstrative, he seemed pleased to see his long-absent sister and patiently answered all her questions, explaining particularly that no, he had not turned exquisite, but had his own good reasons for adopting that guise. And after this most joyful reunion, all four of us rode on together toward the Blackfoot encampment.

Smoke's party was camped on the terrace above the river about a mile to the west. I estimated that nearly five hundred Indians were gathered here, including at least one hundred and fifty warriors armed with bows, lances, war clubs, and British muskets. I was frightened by these ferocious-looking people, who merely stared at us as we approached. But Sage led us directly to Smoke, a ruggedly made man in an unembellished deerskin suit, with eyes as black as the backing of a mirror. He observed us silently for a time, running his eyes first over my uncle, next looking at me, and finally at Franklin. Then, with Yellow Sage translating for us, he said to the savant, “My friend, I see that you, too, have learned how to shift shapes, and to shift loyalties as well. Congratulations, American, upon your new nationality.”

Franklin did not condescend to reply, but merely smiled to himself. Smoke then angrily asked him to state one good reason why he should not, on the spot, destroy my uncle and me and then summarily kill every last man in the white party coming up the river. Before Franklin could reply, Yellow Sage Flower protested that a handful of Americans was no threat to the all-powerful Blackfeet, for they intended merely to pass on up the Missouri on their way to the great salt sea beyond the mountains. But nothing she said seemed to sway Smoke, who ordered that we not be allowed to leave the camp. Then he went to his lodge to put on his war paint.

T
HE
B
LACKFOOT
war council was less elaborate than the ceremonies of the Sioux and Mandans. At twilight the men of the tribe gathered silently in a circle by the fire, and presently Smoke appeared covered in the skin and head of a grizzled bear. The claws dangled from his concealed hands and feet, and the bear's eyes and jaws were circled in red paint. Atop the animal's head was a set of buffalo horns.

In one paw Smoke shook a circular red and white rattle. In the other he carried a spear hung with scalps. As he began to perform a kind of slow, stalking dance, I sketched him, until finally he threw some powder into the ceremonial fire, creating a lemon-colored mist, into which he dissolved. Shortly afterward he reappeared in his own image, wearing only a red clout about his loins. When I showed him my sketch, he declared that now that he had duplicated himself, his people could see him in both his incarnations simultaneously, Smoke and Wa-tok-mic, the mystery bear who revealed the destiny of the tribe. “And that destiny,” he said, with Franklin translating for us, “is to annihilate the Americans coming up the river.”

As soon as the shape-shifter had finished laying out his plan to destroy the captains' party, Yellow Sage Flower walked to the council fire. “Pe-gap, pe-gap, pe-gap,” chanted the people. Meaning, Franklin told me, “Tell us a story. Tell us a story.”

“Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a powerful Blackfoot magician named Smoke. He was also very bloodthirsty. And when a group of desperately ill Americans came into his land, he planned to destroy them.”

“With what illness were these Americans afflicted, Yellow Sage Flower?” inquired a young man named Buffalo's Back Fat.

“Various incurable diseases of the brain and spirit,” Sage replied. “But this did not matter to Smoke. In direct violation of the commandment of Napi, the Creator, never to harm the addlepated, Smoke and his misguided people killed them all. Napi was very angry and decided to punish them. The next morning when Smoke awoke and walked among his followers, he found them running about the camp on all fours. Some were barking like dogs, some grunting like bears, some howling like wolves, some digging in the ground with their nails like badgers. Many had cast off their clothes and were parading about in public. Others strolled here and there with clay cooking pots on their heads. And when Smoke tried to remonstrate with them, gibberish spewed out of his mouth. Dear people, here is what had happened. Great Napi had made the Blackfeet insane as punishment for killing the mad Americans. From then on, Smoke's people were no longer known as the Blackfeet, Lords of the Plains, but as the lunatic people.”

At this juncture Smoke interrupted Sage's story. “What sort of nonsense is this?” he said. “My young ward is a fanciful storyteller, nothing more. Do you mean, Yellow Sage Flower, to suggest that the American incursionists coming up the river are actually insane?”

Yellow Sage Flower made a bow toward my uncle. Who sprang to his feet, approached the firelight, and, speaking slowly so that she could translate for him, announced that the Americans were indeed a company of madmen, beset by every extravagant caprice of a diseased mind, and that he was one of their number. “In the cruel custom of our country, we have been banished to the wilderness,” he said. “Somehow we managed to forge our way well up the Missouri, but we'll surely die the most miserable death imaginable, of starvation and exposure, in the Rocky Mountains this winter. Unless, of course, Smoke kills us all first, in violation of Napi's strict injunction to the contrary.” Then he said that in the morning, if the Blackfeet would conceal themselves on the bluffs overlooking the river, they would see for themselves exactly what he meant, as the members of the insane American party endured every manner of hardship by poling and hauling their cumbersome vessels up the river. For some days past, in a fit of hysteria, supposing their horses to be devils disguised as quadrupeds and bent on their masters' destruction, they had slaughtered them all.

“Go to the bluff tomorrow and watch the mad Americans,” he concluded. “Judge for yourselves.”

 

Early the following morning Smoke and his warriors waited in the tall grass on a cliff top above the Missouri as the captains and their party came toiling up the rapids into the narrow gorge that Lewis would later name the Gates of the Mountains. Some of the men were stumbling waist-deep in the icy water, hauling at ropes fastened to the bows of the canoes. Others were straining every muscle at the setting poles. Still others were paddling furiously. Yet the canoes and pirogues made next to no progress against the powerful current and were at least an hour covering a quarter of a mile.

The Indians watched for a short while, then retired to their camp greatly troubled that such mentally afflicted men should be cast out by their own people to die in the wilderness. Even Smoke was distressed to see such a piteous sight and to imagine the horrible fate of the expedition in the mountains ahead. Yet there was an outer limit to his sympathy. He declared that although he would not destroy the Americans at this time, in the autumn he would lead scouts to the mountains to cut their trail, and after they perished in the early snows his people could salvage their rifles.

At his order the Blackfeet then packed up their tepees to retreat toward the mountains. But before they left, Yellow Sage Flower drew me aside and said, “Now, Ti. Some four sleeps south of here, at a place called the Three Forks, three different rivers come together to form the Missouri. At my earliest opportunity, I plan to run away from Smoke and his warriors. I want you to meet me four dawns from today at the Three Forks and take me with you to the Pacific.”

Then she spun around and sprinted toward Buffalo Runner, vaulted over his tail in her customary manner, and was off.

 

 

 

 

“I
S NOT THIS JOURNEY
of ours a fine frolic, Ti?” my uncle inquired the next morning as he and Franklin and I rode south toward the Three Forks.

“Sir,” I replied, “we have just narrowly escaped being murdered again, this time by the Blackfeet. With the greatest respect, I do not know that I would have hit upon just that word—I mean ‘frolic'—to characterize our perilous odyssey.”

“Why no, nephew, you would not have. It would take a true lexicographer or—ha ha—the lexicographer True—to come up with so apt a description of our little journey. Either that or a man of singular ways and stays. I have noted something, Ti. You do not seem to have too many little ways and stays.”

“No, sir. I fear I am most deficient when it comes to ways and stays, little or otherwise.”

“It is not surprising. Your mother, for all her excellent qualities, is deficient in ways and stays. She was a Kittredge on her father's side and a Hubbell on her mother's. We Kinnesons, you know, are much stranger. My father was incomparable when it came to ways and stays. I thought of him just yesterday when we passed that colony of kingfisher-birds nesting in the clay banks above the river.”

Franklin had been listening to my uncle very attentively. Now he said, “This is most intriguing, True. In what way did the kingfisher-birds remind you of your father?”

“Because it is the very bird he adopted to be inscribed above the crossed pen and sword on the Clan Kinneson family escutcheon,” my uncle said. “He believed that its blue topknot gave it an utterly unique appearance—and my father's physiognomy rather resembled that of the kingfisher. For Ti's grandfather was a locally renowned philosopher, and so busy with his books and philosophizing that he never brushed his back-hair in his life, and it stuck out behind like a kingfisher's crest.”

It occurred to me to ask where my uncle had placed the kingfisher in his great
Systema Naturae Americanae.

“Why, Ticonderoga,” he said, “where else but between the turnip and the horned lizard? For like the turnip, which is neither potato nor beet, and like the horned lizard, which is neither toad nor reptile, the chattering kingfisher is neither fish nor fowl but partakes of the characteristics of both. The kingfisher-bird looks as though he went to sleep ten million years ago and just woke up and hath not yet bothered to comb his hair. He looks like a little mistake of Dame Nature that nonetheless worked out capitally in her great overall scheme. As our own mistakes often do, if we have but sense enough to turn them to our advantage.”

We soon had an opportunity to test this new axiom when, at the Three Forks, we made the mistake of separating from one another. Franklin and my uncle and I parted very early on the morning of our arrival there, each of us to trace a branch of the three tributaries that conjoin to form the Missouri, with plans to meet back at the Forks that evening. Had we stayed together from the start, what I must now narrate almost certainly would not have happened.

The second serious error was mine alone. When, to my great joy, I came upon Sage a short way up the westernmost tributary, I should have announced myself to her immediately and then ridden off with her to rejoin my uncle and Franklin. All I can say on my own behalf in this regard is that when I first spied her, preparing to bathe in a deep pool across the river, I was so transfixed that I could not bring myself to call out.

To be sure, the beautiful Yellow Sage Flower bathing in the river at sunrise was a glorious sight. I set up my easel in some young willows and prepared to paint her picture. To tell the truth, the fact that I was spying on her much enhanced my pleasure. After her dip she sat on a lizard-shaped rock by the water to dry off, rubbing some crushed sage on her arms and legs, repainting her fingernails, toenails, and scalp line, and touching up her cheeks with vermilion rouge. She donned her white antelope dress, and while she basked in the sunshine, I finished my picture. Never had my brush, or I, been so inspirited.

Then I made the third, and by far the greatest, blunder of the morning. Leaving Bucephalus and my rifle by the drying painting, I called out a greeting and began to splash my way across the river to her. There was a sudden yell, followed by a scream from Yellow Sage. Instead of returning to the horse for my weapon, I ran toward her—and toward four Indians on horseback, leading my uncle on Ethan Allen, with his hands bound behind him, his night-stocking askew, his face bruised, and his expression as dolorous as that of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance himself.

The Indians had surrounded Yellow Sage Flower and were shouting triumphantly. I half ran, half swam across the channel, only to be confronted by one of these warriors. Supposing them to be Blackfoot scouts who had come across True while in pursuit of Sage Flower, I shouted at them to mind their manners. But I was wrong on two counts. The horseman herding me up the bank toward the others had long hair that swept over his mount's tail and appeared much better dressed than the Blackfeet I had met a few days ago—indeed, he was the best-dressed Indian I had seen thus far, with the most elegant beadwork on his shirt and moccasins. I suddenly realized he was not a Blackfoot. More startling still, though as tall and well set up as any man, the rider was a woman. As were the other three.