The True Account (9 page)

The music began after dinner. Monsieur and Madame Chouteau danced, their sons and daughters danced, the dignitaries danced, and my uncle danced—mainly with Miss Flame, who had conceived a rather terrifying affection for him and scarcely let him out of her sight. They made a wonderful pair, looming over everyone else in the room and stepping as gravely as two geese while gazing into each other's eyes with great fondness.

A mischievous idea occurred to me. At the time it seemed an inspired notion, but some evil genie must have planted it in my mind because soon enough I would have cause to regret its consequences. Drawing Miss Flame a little aside, as if to request the next dance, I hinted that my uncle would like to stroll over the darkened grounds with her, as he had a very important proposal to make, which would be much to her liking and contribute greatly to their future mutual happiness. I added that if she was willing to keep this assignation, she should invite the private to go bear-hunting with her—a suggestion that delighted Flame so much that before I anticipated what she was about she seized me up in a bear-hug herself, and gave me a joyful kiss right in the middle of my forehead.

Then to the attack.

“Would you like to
go a-bear-hunting
tonight, Private True?” the spinster inquired in a throaty whisper, holding my unsuspecting uncle in an iron grip on his arm and guiding him outside and down the lawn toward a thicket of mock-orange shrubbery. I slipped along behind in the shadows, holding my sides and pressing my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing.

The fair huntress then suggested that she show my uncle the arts of the chase in that region, proposing to enact the part of the “bear” and secrete herself in the fragrant shrubbery, where her “dear Private True” would duly “bring her to bay.” He replied, with an uneasy chuckle, that he liked the sound of this game; and, pressing his hands to his eyes, began in his loud schoolmaster's voice to count to one hundred, as instructed. But the old bachelor had not reached twenty-five before he lost his nerve and ran inside, spoiling my entertainment and so enraging the lovely Miss Flame that she spent the rest of the evening darting looks in his direction as fierce as any her famous father ever shot at a ravening bruin. She declared that she was not used to
being jilted
and would soon find a way
to be made an honest woman of
—which frightened him a great deal. At the first opportunity, he whispered to me that we must strike out into Louisiana that very night, both to get a jump on the captains and to escape the furious blandishments of the spinster.

This alarmed me very much. I had harbored some hope that once we reached St. Louis and met Captain Lewis, my uncle would reflect upon what a vast and unlikely undertaking it was to penetrate Louisiana, and sensibly decide to return to Vermont. Now, however, I realized that he was entirely serious about kiting out into a wilderness two thousand miles wide and never before traversed by an American—or, so far as we knew, by any man at all. Though Flame Danielle's threats were the least of my concerns, nothing would do but we must instantly depart.

As we rode off into the night, the music and lights growing ever fainter behind us, I felt again that I must be dreaming, but do what I might, I could not find a way to shake myself awake. What had begun as an ill-advised practical joke had turned into a full-blown disaster.

 

A few hours later my uncle and I took breakfast on a knoll on the west bank of the Mississippi some miles north of St. Louis. Across the river was Captain Lewis's winter quarters, where, under his and Clark's direction, the official expedition was preparing to set out on its own great trek. Men were packing a long keelboat and two big flat-bottomed canoes, one red and one white, while the captains, dressed in their blue uniform coats, were superintending the last-minute arrivals of wagons full of whiskey, flour, meal, nails, bullets, and the thousand other items needed for such an ambitious excursion.

For some time, as we munched on bread and ham left over from last night's banquet, I had been aware of a steady, low, grumbling sound, resembling distant summer thunder, though the day was breaking fair. When I inquired what this noise might be, my uncle pointed up the river. There, in a gap in the bankside cottonwoods, I caught a glimpse of a huge, brimming tributary pouring in from the west. The growl was the boiling, swirling Missouri—bigger, faster, and more powerful than any river I had ever seen. Indeed, it seemed—and was—even larger than the Mississippi. This was a river of an entirely different order. Here came the snow-waters from the Rocky Mountains and the muddy scourings of the Great Plains. Rushing along in the dark current were partly submerged logs, entire trees pulled out by the roots, and chunks of sheared-off bank, some as large as houses. I felt a burst of excitement to think that I might one day allay my thirst from the headwaters of this river and paint the snowy mountains and all of the new animals and birds at its hidden icy source.

“Pardon me, sir? I was woolgathering.”

“I was saying, Ti, that the race is about to begin.”

“The race?”

“Why, yes,” he said, “the race to the Ocean Pacific. It's our party against theirs, lad. And may the best men win!”

With that he sprang onto his mule and was off. For better or for worse, our great adventure was about to begin in earnest.

I
T WAS A FINE SIGHT
to see the Missouri unspooling from a vast and unknown region as we traced its course through the rolling hills west of St. Louis. Without pressing our mounts, we made twenty or thirty miles a day, camping where we pleased and supping when we wished. My uncle sometimes recited from his beloved old classics, sometimes exclaimed over a landmark familiar from our trip back from the Pacific the previous summer, and now and again trolled out some grim old Scottish ballad. He tendered fatherly advice on all kinds of important matters, from the origin of the universe in a great cloud of cosmic dust into which a Creator somewhat resembling his old tutor, Scholia Scholasticus Aristotle, had breathed form and life, to the proper way to fry up a whiskered catfish so that the meat fell off his bones in beautiful sweet snowy slabs. Soon I began to enjoy our vagabond life in Louisiana.

On our third morning out of St. Louis, we came to a knoll overlooking several cabins scattered about a good plank house hard by the river. This we presumed to be Boone's Settlement, where the great Kentuckian was then homesteading. The smoke from the breakfast fires of this outpost smelled delicious. Though my uncle was reluctant to risk another encounter with Flame Danielle, we had seen no other horses or riders since leaving St. Louis and were pretty sure that she could not have arrived here before us.

As we deliberated, up from the river came a redheaded boy of about twelve, dragging behind him a heavy string of popeyed catfish. He turned out to be Flame's nephew, Boone's grandson Danny, who told us gleefully that his grandpa was fixing to lay for True Kinneson, the ruffian who had “played his aunt false by deserting her at the altar” and was now said to be on his way upriver.

“Left her at the altar?” cried my astonished uncle. Then, with terror in his eyes, “Is your aunt Flame already here?”

“No, but my pa come up on horseback t'other side of the river yesterday and hollered for us to cross him over in the scow. He'd parlayed with Flame in St. Louie the morning afore and she was ripping and tearing and bound to catch up with True and marry him if she had to bring him to the church hogtied. She sent word through pa to hold him here if he showed up while she picked out her wedding dress and she'd be along directly. I can't imagine Flame in a wedding dress.”

“What party is this dastard traveling with, did you say?” my uncle inquired, taking up the boy's string of fish.

“Captain Lewis and Captain Clark. Them are the soldier boys going upriver to teach the red Sioux injuns a lesson they won't soon forget. Only grandpappy's going to teach True Kinneson a lesson first.”

“What, pray, does this True look like?”

“Flame told pa he's a handsome young fellow, made for breaking a woman's heart.”

“Handsome and young, you say?” said my uncle. “Did you hear that, Ticonderoga? Miss Flame sounds like a woman of considerable discernment. I'm of a mind to meet this charming Flame myself. Now that the dashing True Kinneson is out of the picture.”

“I wouldn't care to be in that boy's shoes, that's the truth,” Danny said. “Not for all the river-cats in the Missoura and Miss'ippi together, I wouldn't.”

“Neither would I, Mr. Danny,” my uncle said, shaking his head and winking at me. “Neither would I.”

Boone's outpost had a willy-nilly frontier look about it, as if it had blown in on a cyclone and been left wherever the buildings happened to alight. With Danny trailing along behind, we rode up to the plank house, where we found the tall bear-killer out in his dooryard stirring a large kettle of pitch. As we drew near, I saw that he had scraggly, iron-colored hair and pale eyes. Nearby two redheaded girls, who looked as if they might be Danny's older sisters, were plucking a heap of dead chickens.

“Mr. Daniel?” my uncle said, lifting his stocking cap. “We're advance scouts with Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark's expedition to the Pacific. Sent ahead to issue you an invitation to take dinner with the captains tomorrow noon. They said it would be a great honor to have the pleasure of your company.”

“They shall have the pleasure of my company, all right,” said Boone, who appeared to perceive nothing strange about my unde or his mode of dress. “Tell me, friend. Is there a rascally young fellow named True Kinneson with them? Styles himself a regular tomcat with the gals?”

“Why, yes, sir, I'm afraid there is. Beau True is a bad one. He does like the girls, and he likes the redheaded ones best.” At which the brace of carrot-topped feather-pluckers giggled.

Boone shot us a look. “I intend to make Beau True a bridegroom—that or tar and feather him for jilting my Flame Danielle,” he said, stirring the bubbling pitch.

At this my uncle shuddered so hard his chain mail clinked and the bell on the end of his cap jingled.

“You boys want some breakfast?” Boone said.

“Why, yes,” said my uncle, “we might at that.”

We hitched Bucephalus and Ethan Allen to a tree on the edge of the clearing and joined Boone and Danny and the two redheads and some others at a long table. The table was downwind of the pitch fire, to keep off the bugs, so we ate coughing in the smoke. Over bacon and turkey and deer and fish and ham and bread and eggs and pie, washed down with whiskey straight from a brown jug, I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Boone. But are you the gentleman who blazed the first trail through the Kentucky wilderness?”

“I am,” he said, with an eye on the scalding-hot pitch. “And afterward, when I commenced to see what riffraff and trash availed themselves of it to come through to the Ohio and St. Louie, I wished I'd let the wilderness well enough alone.”

“Tell what you're going to blaze next, grandpappy,” Danny said.

Boone got up and drew out of the fire a branding iron that had been heating in the coals under the pitch pot. “Do you see this implement, gentlemen? It has my initials on it. But I'm very much tempted to use it to blaze a great ‘D' for ‘devil' and a ‘B' for ‘bred'—‘Devil Bred'—in the middle of True Kinneson's forehead. That's if he don't yoke up with Flame.”

To show how he intended to serve True Kinneson if he did not marry Flame Danielle, Boone thrust the business end of the iron into the top of the table directly under our noses. Seeing the great sizzling
DB
inscribed deep in the weathered plank, my uncle started up as if he had been branded himself. Collecting himself, he said, “This daughter of yours, sir. Miss Flame. She must be the apple of your eye.”

“She is, and ever has been,” Boone said. “But tell me now, boys. What manner of man is this True Kinneson? Speak freely. You're among friends here.”

“Well, then,” my uncle said, “as for young True. As reported, he is a fine, tall figure of a man, nigh as tall as you. And a famous scholar and playwright, not to mention a lexicographer of renown . . .”

But Boone's pale eyes were wandering, as if he had lost the thread of the conversation, though whether from the whiskey or some other addlepated condition, I couldn't tell.

“We aim to hold a turkey shoot,” the woodsman said. “Foot races, wrastling catch-as-catch-can, horseracing. We aim,” he said, fixing us with his milky stare, “to lift some of General Clark's money after we capture his boy True and marry him off to Flame.”

At first we knew not what to make of Boone's “General Clark.” But by degrees, as he rambled on, we realized that the aging bear-hunter had somehow gotten it into his head that Captain
William
Clark was General
George
Clark, under whom Boone had once served. Nothing we could say to the contrary shook his conviction, or his delight in the thought of “lifting some money”—a considerable amount of money—off his old crony and comrade-in-arms.

After breakfast, the men of the settlement practiced shooting. They tied a sick, half-featherless old tom-turkey to a post and took potshots at it in turn, missing entirely or only winging its tail. Old Boone decided to give the turkey some whiskey, claiming he couldn't shoot at a sitting bird, and the libation might enliven it to leap about and present a more suitable natural target. But the poor bird did not seem as fond of strong drink as the men were, and what the marksmen had been unable to accomplish, the liquor did; before they could take up their rifles again, the turkey fell over on its side, stone dead.

Next my uncle volunteered my services to draw Daniel's portrait, as a token of gratitude for our entertainment. After gruffly feigning much modesty, Boone got out a large bear rug, with the head still attached; throwing the skin over his head and shoulders, he told me to fetch my pencil and “do my worst.”