The True Account (33 page)

“O dear Jesu!” cried my uncle.

We were surrounded by gigantic sea and coastal beasts with human features, twenty or thirty feet tall, scowling down upon us in the dusk as if they meant to devour us. But Franklin bowed and called up to them, “How do you do, good sirs? Pray, tell me. Is the salmon angling lively in these parts?”

By degrees, I gathered my wits together and realized that the giant apparitions were, in fact, the trunks of trees, elaborately carved into the shapes of walruses, seals, whales, bears, and salmon. Several had multiple heads, with human-like faces and open maws painted blue, red, or yellow. In all I counted fifteen figures. Chief Walrus told my uncle that these relics were the handiwork of his people, who from time to time convened here in the cedar grove to carve new memorials to their own fierceness.

Tsar Nicholas, a renowned sculptor, now began carving into a fresh cedar the frowning visage of Private True Teague Kinneson himself, in commemoration of his signal action in dispatching the Devil back to Hell.

In the meantime, the Tlingits prepared for a victory celebration. First they built a large bonfire, into which, to my considerable surprise, each man threw his animal mask and one or two treasured personal items. Also, they lighted trench fires to roast elk, bear, salmon, and many delicious viands from the ship's pantry, not to mention the deceased crew members thereof. Which, the Tlingits complained, were quite fishy-tasting from having been at sea too long. They looked at my uncle and at me, felt the flesh on our arms and hams, and said jestingly (I trusted) that they preferred good lean landsmen to sailors any day of the week.

The following day came the division of the spoils. As guests of honor, Franklin, my uncle, and I were offered our pick. I selected a little china teapot with periwinkle-blue flowers for Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories. My uncle's eyes were larger. He wanted two hundred yards of pink silk, one hundred of yellow, and a large metal cooking brazier, along with a goodly supply of charcoal, from the stores of an Indiaman that the pirate ship had captured and burned off Peru. Finally it was Franklin's turn to choose. The chiefs told him that, as he had personally killed ten men, including the ship's captain, and fought with more deadly purpose than they had ever witnessed—though this was not to detract from my uncle's heroic work—he was to pick whatever his heart desired, even if he chose to strip the ship of all remaining plunder. He told them he would like to sleep on their most generous offer and make his selection on the morrow.

 

More than once during our long journey to the Pacific, my uncle had remarked to me that the one thing we could rely on was that each new day would bring something entirely different from the day before. The following morning was no exception to this precept, which he called “Kinneson's Axiom of Perpetual Surprises, Most of Them Bad but Some Good and Others Bad but Susceptible to Favorable Interpretations.” Soon after dawn, Franklin closeted himself for several hours with Walrus, Ice Bear, and Tsar Nicolas in the cabin of the captured ship. When their tête-à-tête was completed, he came forth all smiles and addressed us as follows. “My dear friends, the great and only constant in life is change. Last night I went to sleep a Blackfoot savant. This morning I was made a Tlingit chief. Yes, my companions. I have been invested as Chief Narwhal. And, in order not to draw out a sad fact, I must now take my leave of you. For my new people have chosen me to lead them in the all-out naval assault on their Russian oppressors at Fort Barrow, and I have chosen for my reward the ship itself. We weigh anchor within the hour. Part we must, I to fight the Russians, and you, Private True, to guide the captains home to safety. And Ticonderoga to make his reputation as the first artist of Louisiana. Work on developing strong story lines in your pictures, Ti. You may yet turn out to be the Michelangelo of the American West. Or”—this with great good cheer—“you may not.”

Chief Narwhal turned back to my uncle, clasped him close, clapped him on the back several times, and declared that his
Comedy of Ethan Allen
was without doubt the finest thing of its sort in the history of the universe. And if he ever, in any port in the world, heard a critic hint that the play violated any of Scholia Aristotle's unities, that wretch would rue the day he had been born. Upon which, all gleaming in his white antelope suit and colored feathers and long, single-tusked whale mask, the new chief stepped to the quarterdeck of the
Tlingit
, as he had named his vessel, and issued the order to raise the anchor. My uncle and Doubting Seal and I watched from the Seal's canoe as the crew sprang to the rigging and unfurled the sails; then the
Tlingit
dipped its bow and skimmed lightly off to the northwest. A few miles off the coast it swung due north, putting on all sail possible, and fired off a cannon in farewell.

“Thither goes a great man, Ti,” my uncle sighed. “I'd fight to the death the fellow who said otherwise. Heaven above knows that Franklin—I mean Chief Narwhal—may have his little ways and stays; but he is a noble fellow, and the best friend who ever walked God's green earth. He will make a splendid Viking chieftain. Oh! The salt spray gets in my eyes. I weep.”

March 22, 1806

Charles and Helen of Troy Kinneson

Kingdom Common, Republic of Vermont, U.S.A.

 

Dear Father and Mother,

 

I write hurriedly to say that after a most productive winter by the Pacific, uncle and I leave with Captain Lewis tomorrow for our return trip up the Columbia to the Rocky Mountains, thence down the Missouri to St. Louis and so home. We are both in excellent health. Our arrival may precede that of this letter, which I have left with my friend Doubting Seal, to entrust to the care of the first homeward-bound American trading vessel to put in at the mouth of the Columbia. But I must not omit to mention
—
in the bustle of preparing for our departure I nearly forgot
—
that we will be making a brief detour on our return trip, to the Land of the Glaciers.

With haste but fondest regards from

Your loving son,

Ticonderoga

D
URING AN OTHERWISE
uneventful trip from the Pacific back up the Columbia, Serpent, and Clearwater rivers to the Bitterroot Mountains, Captain Lewis had a serious misunderstanding with the Nez Perce Indians. As it turned out, these people were quarreling among themselves and at first refused to give back our horses. How the recrossing of the Bitterroots could be undertaken without mounts was a very anxious concern for everyone. But my uncle announced that he had yet another little trick up his sleeve, and the Indians would soon be so grateful to him that they would return all of our horses and be clamoring to give us a great many more besides. He assembled the entire American party, along with the chiefs and the most athletic young men of the Nez Perce Nation, and said that he intended to teach them a great and marvelous game, which he had invented in his former profession as a schoolmaster for his scholars to play at recess.

He divided the men into two thirty-man teams, with Lewis and the American expeditionaries on one side and us and twenty-eight Nez Perce on the other. He then arrayed the Indians on our team in strategic positions around a riverside meadow, in which he placed four square bags stuffed with fir needles and spaced about one hundred feet apart, making the shape of a diamond. Next he produced a fist-sized sphere he had fashioned from a kind of gutta-percha made of gulls' feathers bound together with pine resin and wrapped in elk hide.

Handing his prehistoric bison's thigh to Drouillard, the party's hunter, my uncle strode out on the playing field and declared, “Gentlemen, I will hurl this ball—which I have named ‘Punisher,' for reasons that will very soon become apparent—toward George Drouillard. He will strike it—
if he can
—then attempt to run to each of the sacks, which I call ‘safe-sacks,' in turn before a member of my team can recover the ball and strike
him
with it. He may, however, tarry on any safe-sack he wishes, there to be secure from persecution, while the next striker on his team essays to solve my cunning serves. When ten explorers have been struck off a safe-sack by the Punisher, or have fruitlessly swung the bison's club five times without touching the ball, the two sides will reverse positions and my team will strike. The first team to send one hundred men safely round the circuit wins.”

Then in his great stage voice he cried out, “Let the first game of Kinneson-ball begin.”

Drouillard stepped up to the first safe-sack. My uncle smiled grimly, windmilled his throwing arm round his head several times, twisted his body into a dozen fantastical contortions, kicked his lean shank high, and blazed the Punisher by Drouillard—who, a full second after the missile had passed, made a feeble hacking motion with the bone.

“You must do better than that, frog-eater,” cried my uncle. “Try this for size.” Again he wound himself up like a top and hurled the Punisher at the expedition's hunter. But Drouillard, however skillful at bringing down game, had no notion what to do with his striker and actually fell to his knees trying to hit the ball. Five times my uncle threw. Five times Drouillard missed.

“Sit down now, varlet, hang thy head in shame; root up some truffles, swine,” cried my uncle. And to John Shields, who batted next: “Hey, striker, hey, striker. What? Art blind? You missed by a furlong.”

Hapless Shields had the same luck as Drouillard and was subjected to even more abuse from my uncle, to the great amusement of our Indian teammates and several hundred Nez Perce spectators. The next two strikers, Privates Pryor and Bratton, met with an identical fate. Moreover, my uncle continued to make up new rules as the contest progressed. When Bratton elected not to swing at an offering that flew high over his head like a flushing grouse, it was counted as a miss for the batsman, on the grounds that the ball was strikable. As indeed it would have been, had the man stood ten feet tall.

Captain Lewis encouraged his men greatly; but my uncle's servings were all but impossible to strike, and after the first four batters had gone down, Lewis came forward and said he would now show how it should be done. My uncle laughed and cried, “Step up to the sack, captain, and wield the striker if you're able, not like a doddering old woman but like a man.” So saying, he whirled his arm, twisted, kicked, called Lewis a crippled donkey, and hurled the Punisher straight for his head. As Lewis threw himself to the ground, the ball grazed his temple. “Hi, hi, five men down,” shouted my uncle. “What say you to that, Captain Clark?”

Rushing up to Lewis, who was still sprawled on the ground, Clark cried, “What do I say? I say you've done for the captain, you madman.”

My uncle replied that Kinneson-ball was no effete gentleman's pursuit, like cricket, but a rough-and-tumble
American
sport, in which anything was allowed if you could get away with it, and winning was the only objective, and to stop whining and drag Lewis off the field so that the contest could proceed.

In the event, Captain Lewis shakily stood up and, though still dazed, was told sharply to go sit down and reflect on how to acquit himself better when next he struck. Then, in a frenzy of false starts and leg-kicking, throwing sometimes overhanded, sometimes under, and sometimes from the side, my uncle proceeded to knock down, or stun, or cause to swing wildly in self-defense five more members of the American team. At which juncture they were very glad to take to the field and give us our turn to hit. In truth, the bison-bone club was too ponderous for all but the biggest and strongest men to swing. But when my uncle's turn came, he proved himself as able a striker as a hurler, dealing the gutta-percha missile thrown by Clark such a blow that it sailed entirely over the Clearwater River into some fir trees on the opposite bank. Whereupon he capered round the safe-sacks, kicking his legs out in front of him like a Prussian soldier, while Lewis sent his big Newfoundland dog, Seaman, to fetch the ball.

The game of Kinneson-ball proceeded until dusk, with our team eventually winning by a score of 100 to 2. The Indians were so delighted with this new entertainment that they gave back the expeditions horses that very evening and made my uncle an honorary shaman, calling him Too-lap-stran, which, loosely translated, meant “Noble Hurler and Striker in the Greatest Pastime Ever Invented.”

B
ETWEEN THE MARATHON
game of Kinneson-ball and our departure for the Bitterroots, I sketched and painted several new birds. One was a woodpecker with a crimson throat and black back feathers tinted with a green sheen, whose bright neck plumage my uncle found especially effective in tying flies for the huge numbers of crimson-sided trout then in the Clearwater. Next I painted a large, jay-like fellow, though rounder and fuller in the body than our blue eastern jays, with a longer beak. Also a lovely orange, red, yellow, and black bird, which some of the men called a parrot. My uncle reprimanded them, pointing out that in shape, song, and boldness of coloration it resembled a tanager. But when he saw one of these birds eating wasps, the way a small boy gobbles sugar-trifles, as they emerged from a thawing mud bank above the river he was so horrified that he refused to add it to his
Systema Naturae Americanae
and claimed it to be a stray blown up from the tropics of old Mexico.

We started out to cross the Bitterroots in mid-June and were driven back once by the high snow in the passes. But late that month we accomplished the crossing in a period of several days, after which Captain Lewis divulged the following plan, which would split the party into three divisions. Captain Clark would travel by way of the River of Yellow Stones through the heart of the Crow Nation, back to the Missouri. Sergeant Ordway was to accompany Clark to the headwaters of the Beaverhead and from there take a small party down to the Three Forks and on to the Great Falls. Captain Lewis, with Drouillard, the Field brothers, and my uncle and me, would explore north to the forty-ninth parallel and the southern boundary of British North America. Our party would then link with Ordway's at the falls on the Missouri, whence we would spin on down to the mouth of the River of Yellow Stones and rendezvous with Clark.