Sign-Talker (25 page)

Fifteen hundred miles they had come; the horizons of many eagles. And yet he was still not in a place or time untainted by hairy-faced whitemen and their vainglorious ignorance. He remembered an image from a recent dream: an eagle nest in a tree above mist. From that high nest, he understood now, the eagle watched whitemen coming, and it knew something, something he yearned to know.

Now, catching the tune of Cruzatte’s old fiddle, the voices of Werner and Whitehouse started up.

Over the silhouetted low bluffs on the far shore, the last lilac light was draining out of the sky, and in the deeper dark above, the first bold stars were shining. Reflecting the last light, the Missouri looked like rippling silk and sounded like a scarf fluttering in a wind. Soldier voices above were laughing at the song, and soldier voices below were fussing and joking over the women. Suddenly there came a loud, fierce, rapid argument, first in two voices, then three or four, incoherent over the singing and the fiddle.

By the time the music trailed off, the dominant voice was that of First Sergeant Ordway, bellowing over the hubbub of derisive
voices: “God damn you, Newman! You—You—You are under arrest for that! By the authority of—”

“By the ’thority o’ your rancid ass, y’ goddamn puppet! God damn high horse Lewis got no right to make a slave out of a white man! I’ll go tell that son of a bitch myself! Turn me loose, you reekin’ turd!”

“Mutiny, Cap’n!” Ordway shouted. “Hold him down, Shields.… Get back, Reed. Get back, get back … You’re under arrest too. Cap’n! Mutiny up here at the mess!”

When Newman and Reed were brought on board, Newman had a lump above his left eye and his clothes were rumpled, soiled with ash on one shoulder and river mud on the knees. He was scowling but subdued. Reed was forlorn as usual. They stood in lantern light, at attention, near the mast, and Lewis stood glaring at them with his hands clasped behind his back. “First Sergeant alleges that you’ve been impugning your superior officer, Private Newman, and repeatedly. How do you answer?”

“Sir, I don’t know how I could
im-pune
when I don’t even know what it means. All’s I ever said was, Moses ain’t no nigger, to be made a slave of. When you whipped and discarded him you said he’d be sent back on a boat. You didn’t say he—”

“That plan was changed. No boat is going back till next spring. Reed’s not at issue here, it’s you fomenting mutiny.”

“I didn’t mutiny, sir. I just raised hell at what ain’t right.”

Lewis sighed and stood back. “Reed, he says this is because of you. How much of it comes from you we’ll find out in court-martial.”

“You can’t court-martial him, Cap’n,” said Newman. “He ain’t in your damned army anymore.”

Lewis’s fists and jaw clenched. “Mr. Newman, by tomorrow you might not be either.”

The Arikara chief Eagle’s Feather stood with Drouillard and Gravelines at the hatch, watching this confrontation with anxious tension, blinking rapidly. Drouillard glanced at his profile: bony-jawed, skin creased like old boot leather, yellowed by candlelight from inside, comb of feathers in his headdress
turning in the breeze. He turned his face to Drouillard, a sad eye glinting.

No use trying to explain anything, Drouillard thought, and just shook his head.

Drouillard stood on the riverbank with Captain Lewis and Eagle’s Feather in a cold northwest wind under gray skies and sighted his rifle on a pronghorn that was so far away it looked as small as a mouse. It was on the edge of a herd. If he were hunting in his own way, he would stalk in closer for a more certain killing shot, but Lewis wanted him to shoot it from here, to impress the Arikara chief with the American rifles. At this range the captain would have rested his muzzle on his espontoon. Drouillard didn’t like to shoot from a rest because it interfered with the instinct. He had grown from a boyhood of killing rabbits with a throw-stick, birds with bolas, and game with arrows, before he ever had a gun, and so to him prayer and instinct had as much to do with the fate of the prey as the accuracy of the weapon. There had to be an acceptance between the animal and the shooter to
allow a kill, and that was a thing of the spirit known as the Keeper of the Game. This excellent rifle only made greater distance possible.

The pronghorn raised its head and looked in Drouillard’s direction. It did not run. The spirit connection was now fixed, and he squeezed the trigger. The extra-heavy powder load discharged, and the distance was so great that he had time to lower the muzzle and watch through the smoke for the result. The animal leaped almost straight up. Its herd was already in flight toward the river by the time the body fell to the ground.

“Whewee! Good!” Lewis exclaimed softly, and glanced at Eagle’s Feather, who was gawking. “I think he’s impressed.
I
am!”

The captains for about four days now had been working their strong impressions upon Eagle’s Feather, who was the first wild Indian they had had so long as captive audience. The chief watched them respectfully as they seemed to pray to their navigational instruments and their journals. He studied, like a swivel-head owl, the strange cooperative force by which the many parts of this complicated unit moved on and on against the stream: the soldiers rowing; the Frenchmen in the red pirogue rowing nearby, but always singing or laughing or arguing; the hunters going out and then reappearing farther up the river with hides and meat; the three cooking messes setting up every evening, the tattered tents rising in the twilight; the few soldiers lining up before the captains at every stop for treatment of their boils and blisters and gashes and sprains; the constant packing and unpacking of bundles; the jolly, almost frantic lineup for the evening whiskey ration; the never-ending strain and struggle to keep the ponderous boat under control and moving on. Drouillard, only half Indian, after nearly a year with this ongoing community without women or children, still sometimes had moments of soul-clarity in which it seemed as if there could not really be something like this; he would glance at Eagle’s Feather and wonder how it must seem to this man of another world, into which these strangers had so suddenly come with their alien ideas and overwhelming demands. The chief had protested and
wept aloud at Private Newman’s whipping. All the rest of this must seem as incomprehensible to him as had that terrible custom.

He had shot two more pronghorns, the last near a little river the chief called Elk Shed Their Horns, almost in Mandan land. As Drouillard went down the bluff to hail the boats, to get men to help him fetch in his three kills, he began hearing over the wind a commotion of excited cries. He broke into a lope along the bluff, and after a few paces he saw beyond the cottonwoods the keelboat and pirogues coming up, far below. Captain Lewis and Eagle’s Feather had lingered near the antelope carcasses, to guard them against wolves, but also because Lewis had found a new kind of small prairie bird in a tuft of grass, a bird either injured or so weak it didn’t fly away.

The shrill yelling was coming from the riverbank a little way above the oncoming boats, and as Drouillard loped along looking down over the last rise, he saw a swarm of quick-moving figures and he had to stop where he was to take it in and understand what was happening.

A herd of several hundred pronghorns was in the river. On both riverbanks Indians were running. When the animals tried to come ashore, the hunters headed them off, forced them back into the water, shot them with arrows. Some hunters were in the river with the herd, clubbing the animals with sticks and dragging them ashore. When he got down close, he saw that these hunters were almost all boys, not yet even of warrior age. They were having a thrilling time and were harvesting enough of the delicious animals to feed their people far into the coming winter. By the time Captain Clark came up from the boats to observe the slaughter, carcasses lay on both riverbanks for half a mile, and the boys were still swimming to shore, towing dead pronghorns with arrows protruding from them. With his usual exactness, Captain Clark recorded that the boys had killed fifty-eight. Drouillard noted ruefully, “I only got three.”

At dusk the youthful Arikara hunters came from their camp to see the big boat, visit their chief, and bring loads of meat as a gift
to the whitemen. Still exuberant from their great hunt, they sang and danced until late at night. Eagle’s Feather obviously was very proud of them, and so was Drouillard.

Eagle’s Feather observed that since there was so much meat, they had not needed to eat the tonah bird. He was sorry they killed it.

The spirit of North Grandfather grew stronger. Drouillard was wind-whipped, walking in snow, when he saw the great bear tracks.

Every year, winter had come down from the north to wherever Drouillard lived. This was not the same. The boats were moving to meet winter, up the cold, gray, endless river through a land ever more vast and bleak. The leaves blew off the trees in the bottoms and ravines, the nights were bitterly cold. The soldier tents, weakened by months of sun, moisture, mold, and wind, were now coming apart in these north winds that never stopped. The country was full of old signs of long ago life, things that the Arikara chief tried to explain, but which made the heart shrink: rocks with ancient markings that told of old catastrophes and
predicted those to come; old forts where Mandan towns had been, only ruins now; a sacred tree all alone on the open plains, survivor of countless prairie fires; an oak upon which the Mandans in ceremony hung from ropes pinned into the flesh of their chests and necks. Gravelines had never seen such a ceremony but knew the Mandans and the Cheyennes still performed them. The captains listened aghast as the interpreter tried to explain it. Young men volunteered for the torture to make themselves men, but more importantly, to bear such pain on behalf of their People, so the People would not have to suffer so much. Drouillard had heard tales of these ceremonies, from traders:
okeepa
, the Mandans called it; the Sun Dance, other peoples called it. He listened and remembered the Jesus of the Black Robes who hung by his pierced flesh to take the pain of the people upon himself.

In the boat at night with the wind howling around, Eagle’s Feather talking as if in a trance would tell the captains of the ancient, giant snakes and turtles in the beginnings of the world, awakening in Drouillard memories of the creation stories his mother’s people told, different but much the same.

We are on the edge of the places where whitemen have come, he would think, and the magic is still so strong it could force you to your knees.

No, this was not like North Grandfather coming down as he always did; this was going closer and closer, day by day, to the home of North Grandfather. At daybreak today the freezing rain had turned to snow and looked as if it would fall all day.

And yet, bleak and frightening as the land was as it gave way from Arikara to Mandan country, the game grew more and more plentiful. Two days ago Clark, counting as always, had written that he saw fifty-two herds of buffalo and three of elk while standing in one place. Yesterday eight deer had given themselves up to Drouillard’s rifle. Captain Clark had killed three, and the other hunters two. Herds of the pronghorns were crossing the river to go to their winter home in a sacred range the chief called Black Hills. These grasslands were a paradise for the hoofed animals.

Each day, Drouillard had to draw deeper and deeper for the fire inside him, the life-heat of Shawandasse, the South Wind, to keep from shrinking in the north wind. Though he had not yet seen a Mandan, he already admired a people who could live in such a treeless, merciless, wind-scoured land. Eagle’s Feather said the Mandans had kept moving north to stay distant from the Sioux. Once they had been numerous enough and strong enough in their fort towns to live where they chose to live. But years ago the traders had brought the burning-up disease, the smallpox, and it had reduced them as badly as it had reduced the Omahas. Now they survived the raids of their numerous enemies because their towns were like forts, and also because they were exceedingly brave and tough. But also, it was believed, because of the sacred thing in the center of their main town—a protection they had always carried with them since the beginning of the world.