Sign-Talker (19 page)

Captain Lewis erupted into another coughing fit, which grew deeper into gut sounds, nearly like vomiting. Clark turned an
anxious eye toward the tent, waited for a lull in the retching and hacking, and called, “Can I do something for ye?”

“No, I’ll get rid of this.”

This morning Captain Lewis had found a cliff composed of sandstone and some glassy-looking mineral. In pounding it, heating it, and tasting it to determine what it was, he had poisoned himself either by ingesting the stuff or breathing its fumes. Drouillard shook his head and went back to work on his rifle, thinking whitemen would kill themselves before they’d leave anything be. Lewis had taken a dose of salts, in which he had great faith for ridding him of the poison.

Patrick Gass had brought his journal notebook, and he and Captain Clark began comparing their notes for the last few days. “My writin’s so goddamn messy,” Gass growled. “Three or four days in the pot my ink clots up like cunt’s blood and gets too thick for the pen.”

Captain Clark had been depressed since Charles Floyd’s death, and evidently didn’t deem the uncouth Gass a worthy replacement for him. He looked at Gass as if he were a dumb animal. “Well, man, add water and stir when it gets that way. It’s like this Missouri River. If it doesn’t get rain, it’s all sandbars and mud. Or just make less ink at a time, so it doesn’t sit so long. An ink pot’s really pretty simple. Not worth cussin’ over.”

After Gass left, Captain Lewis came out of the tent, pale, breathing through his open mouth. “Call of nature,” he said, and ambled off toward the latrine with his peculiar bow-legged walk. He stopped and turned. “We should reach that haunted hill Dorion told us about in two or three days. I’m sure eager to go up there and see what all that superstition is about.”

Clark raised his eyebrows. “He said it’s ten miles or so from the river. You sure you’ll be up to that?”

“Well, I sure aim to be better right away.” He turned and went on.

“You can’t keep a good man down,” Clark said, shaking his head.

“Not when nature calls, anyway,” Drouillard replied. Clark
laughed. To himself, Drouillard damned Dorion for having mentioned that hill. The old Frenchman had proved himself an invaluable guide along the Missouri, knowing much about distances, tribes, and the traders’ names of rivers, and would surely be a most useful interpreter when the corps reached the Sioux. But it was a shame he had mentioned the Bad Spirit hill with its little devils. It was said to be guarded by knee-high demons with big heads who tormented and sacrificed anyone who came near. Dorion said the people of all tribes avoided the terrible place, that birds hovered over the hill like dark smoke, and that the birds were the spirits of those who had been killed by the demons’ sharp arrows. Whatever the truth of it was, such a place was a sacred place. There were good sacred places and there were bad ones, some good to some tribes and bad to others, but in any case, it was better for whitemen not to know about them. In particular, people like these captains, Drouillard thought, who cut apart snakes and birds and tested the rocks of the earth and then wrote everything down, were much too intrusive and irreverent and should not go to spirit places. And they would, of course, want him, their own Indian, to go with them.

He did not want to go near some other nation’s Bad Spirit place, not even alone and with the protection of reverence. He really did not want to go there in the company of white soldiers who were explaining everything to their Great Father back east. He said to Captain Clark, “I doubt if the cap’n can make it that far on foot. And the horses are out.” Hunters were out on the plains with the horses and there was no sign of them.

“Well,” Clark replied, “he’ll make that choice. If he feels up to it, we’ll go. Probably have horses up by then anyway. I sure hope so.”

Drouillard tried another ploy. “I’ve sure seen elk sign aplenty. When we get the horses, I’d like to go get enough elk to feed us awhile. I’d like to scout us up some Sioux while I’m out. From what Mr. Dorion says, we should meet them any time now.”

“All that in its due time,” Clark said, spreading paper and uncorking his ink pot. “Meantime, we do want to see that haunted hill.”

“Yeaw-hooo! Yeeeaw-hooo!” It was Joe Field running down the high north bank toward the boats, thrusting his rifle overhead and capering with every few steps. The soldiers, who were tediously poling the big boat into a powerful headwind, through low water channels among sandbars, had to squint into fine, stinging sand even to see where the voice was coming from, and then they made out what he was shouting: “Got me a buffalo! Yeaw-hooo! I got our first buffalo, by God!” He cavorted on the bank, holding his hat high with one hand and pointing with his rifle upstream. “Big son of a bitch! Way past that high land! Goin’ to need a pack o’ help to haul ’im down!”

Drouillard was standing with Captain Lewis near the hatch of the after cabin. The clouds of blown sand now and then fully blanked Field from their view. The sand was so fine and so full of dried riverbottom dirt that it stuck to their faces, their clothes, even to the sides and bulkhead of the vessel. Lewis grinned, blinking, and glanced at Drouillard. “Hard luck, George. I always reckoned it’d be you, or me, getting the honor of bagging our first buffalo!”

“Eh, Field’s welcome to the honor, sir. I got my first one when I was about twelve.”

“Oh?” Lewis squinted straight into his eyes, as if to gauge whether he was telling the truth. “Really!” Then he cupped his hands around his mouth, as much to keep sand out as to project his voice into the wind, and shouted to Field, “Good man! Go on up! We’ll come ashore for it when we get there!” Field responded with a wave and his hat blew off. Drouillard hoped he’d be able to find it in this sandstorm. The captain shouted in the wind to the men straining on their set-poles, “Hear that? Reubin Field’s shot us our first buffalo!” The men gave a cheer.

Drouillard said, “That’s Joe, sir. Reubin’s out with the horses.”

“Right—Joseph,” Lewis mumbled. Drouillard was troubled, as he often was by the captain’s little slips. Lewis was a conscientious commander, careful for the safety and welfare of his men, but sometimes he seemed hardly to know them. He could
glance at a soldier and remember what he was good at or poor at, but often didn’t seem to know his name, after all these months on the same boat. Drouillard felt that as intense a presence as Lewis was, he wasn’t all here. He was like something in heedless passage from far behind to far ahead.

It was disturbing to think of an arrow-spirit like Lewis’s aiming at a round, seething spirit-swarm like the haunted hill. And it seemed to Drouillard that this storm of blinding, howling, clinging dust and sand was a warning against going there.

On the vast plain under an oppressive yellow haze, the Bad Spirit hill was visible from miles away, the only high place within all the horizons, and dark as if charred. It was a hill standing where no hill should be standing, and although it appeared bald, it reminded Drouillard of the great mound beside the Mississippi, which had been covered with trees. He was walking ahead and off the left flank of the file of seven men who followed the captains. There had been eight, but one had been sent to take Captain Lewis’s black dog back to the river after it collapsed panting in the heat. The slave York looked as if he too would collapse, but he kept trudging along behind his master, clothes sodden with sweat, gun over his shoulder, chest heaving. Ahead on the other flank was Colter, striding alert even in the great heat. Captain Clark with his long legs and deep chest was a great walker too, and though drenched with sweat, he was striding along through the parched grass with ease.

It was Captain Lewis whom Drouillard watched from the edge of his eye. With every step he seemed to be losing strength. Perhaps that was because of the poison he had taken from the earth, or the medicine he had taken for the poison, but perhaps it was something beyond that. Drouillard kept hoping to see him stop and give up and turn back. But Lewis staggered on, obviously determined to investigate the Bad Spirit hill.

It was hard to guess distance on this featureless plain, but at
what seemed about a league from the hill, Drouillard began to feel its force. It was like a prickling, hot pressure building in front of him. It was not the wind; it had nothing to do with the wind, which was blowing on him from his left. It was like a thickening and heating of the air between him and the hill, telling him not to come closer.

They moved on, the pressure growing. Blackbirds and larks rose from the grass or flew to and fro across their path in ever-increasing numbers. Drouillard thought he heard, under the sounds of the birds’ cries and wing beats, faint, shrill voices, as if hundreds of angry women were scolding from the hill. They grew louder and louder. He looked over to the column. Lewis was still stumbling onward, the others were gasping and coming along, and no one seemed to be noticing the voices.

At about a mile from the mound he could see a cloud of what appeared to be black smoke leaning off the top, and heard Colter call out about it. Soon Drouillard saw that the cloud was not smoke, but hovering, swirling birds, the birds Monsieur Dorion had spoken of.

A few yards from where the base of the mound rose abruptly from the sloping plain, rocks lay amid the grasses. The prickling sensations on his breast and face were now intensely sharp and stinging. Suddenly the hot pressure grew cold. The shrilling voices were nearly drowning out the twitter of the birds. The stings now were not just on the front of him, but penetrating him. He stopped. He would go no farther. The captains were talking, the men were talking, milling about, starting to make their way up the slope. Their voices were loud and clear but he could not understand any of their words.

He prayed a wordless prayer of apology, turning in a circle and crumbling tobacco all around his feet. He saw York sink to the ground at the base of the hill and sit mopping his brow on his sleeves. He saw the captains climbing the slope, he saw Captain Clark glancing back down and calling something, his name probably, Drouillard thought, but the voice was an incomprehensible, quavering bellow that instantly faded away and was replaced by bird twitterings and the scolding of tiny, savage
voices. The captains and the soldiers climbed on up and up. Drouillard saw Colter stop and look down at him strangely, then turn and go on up through the swarm of angry spirits. The spirits were like hornets swirling around Drouillard, held off only by his circle of tobacco, and he understood perfectly well that he was not to go onto this hill, but these whitemen seemed impervious, even oblivious, to them.

Drouillard stepped backward and felt the pressure lighten. Another step and it was less. Understanding, he turned and walked quickly away from the mound. At a hundred paces the painful swarming had eased so much that he could stop and stand comfortably. The spirits now knew that he understood them and would stay off the hill. He pinched some more dry tobacco from his pouch and cast it into the wind. He heard York’s voice calling his name and asking, “What you doin’, man?” He just waved away the question and walked another forty or fifty paces away from the hill, growing still more comfortable. Looking up, he watched the whitemen casually wandering atop the hill, examining things and talking or gazing into the distances. He saw Captain Clark walk along the ridge of the mound toward the east end where the birds were still swarming. Something told Drouillard he should make an offering circle around the base of the hill, so he set off at a swift trot. The mound was long and narrow. At each end and side he sprinkled a little tobacco. Half a mile of running brought him around, back to where York still sat bewildered on the ground. Drouillard was hot and the run had made him very thirsty. “Mist’ Droor, you sure strange!” York exclaimed. “Run in this heat? Ooooh!”

“Eh so? Those whitemen are stranger. Climbing a hundred-foot hill in the heat.”

“Oh, they jus’ crazy. You
strange.”

Drouillard waited at the edge of the shrilling and swarming until the whitemen came down. They seemed to be all right, just desperately thirsty. It seemed that if they didn’t believe in something, they were impervious to it. But Drouillard did wonder if they would be changed after this.

Drouillard had walked forty miles alone over the moonlit plains looking for young Private Shannon and two horses. He hadn’t seen a trace of the man. It had been a night bright enough to track by. Now before dawn the morning star came up, uncommonly brilliant. The shallow Missouri glimmered below, braiding among sandbars. It had been a long night of beautiful solitude and no sound but wind, water, the rustle of small scurrying animals, his own moccasins whispering in the prairie grass.

He didn’t think Shannon had deserted. He was a well-liked, agreeable lad, about nineteen, not very experienced. He had just got lost hunting.

When Drouillard came in without him, the captains sent Joe Field and John Shields out to continue the search, and Drouillard slept the morning away in the cabin of the moving keelboat, which the soldiers were pulling through the shallows much of the time with a long rope of braided elk hide. He would half waken to the groans and bumps and voices, then fall back into
deep sleep. He dreamed of a black eagle high in a tree that stood above a mist like clouds.