Sign-Talker (29 page)

This was what Jessaume had described as the Calling of the Buffalo ceremony. Every year young husbands gathered the greatest of the old men here and asked them to pass on their veteran skill and knowledge in this way, for three nights. When the ceremony was done, buffalo would usually appear nearby, and the young hunters, their spiritual powers enhanced, would go out and kill them. Often these old men were so feeble they could hardly walk, and could not perform the connection, but sometimes one would come back with the young woman, both looking satisfied.

Drouillard was astonished to find himself here, but Colter had changed his fortunes with the village women. On New Year’s Day and the next day, most of the soldiers of the fort had been invited to Mittuta-Hanka and Rooptahe towns to make music with their fiddles, tamborines, Jew’s harps, and sounding horns, and to demonstrate their ways of dancing. They had put on splendid shows, to the delight of the townspeople. Then this morning Captain Clark had called Drouillard to him. “You’re to go up to
Mittuta-Hanka Town this afternoon, invitation of one of their medicine men. They want you to be in a ceremony that’s supposed to draw the buffalo.”

“Me? Why do they want me?”

“Well, as best I understand it, they wanted our best hunter, so they asked Jessaume who it was, and he asked Colter, and Colter told ’im it’s you. Nobody will argue that, so it appears you’re our man to go. From what I hear of this ceremony, Colter might be wishin’ he said he was the best himself. Wish he’d said I was. It’s sure something I’d like to see.”

And so now the young woman was close in front of him, almost enveloping him in her outspread robe, and he, sitting, was face-to-face with something he had not seen for many months. She bent her knees in time with the drum and thrust her pelvis forward so that his face was almost kissed by it, and she smelled clean with a musky odor which he recognized as eager sincerity. Above him in the shadowy robe her breasts hovered, her shadowed face looking down at him between them, her expression trancelike, smoky light flickering warm and ruddy on the rafter poles above her. And her husband, with one hand under Drouillard’s elbow, was urging him to stand up and go with her, his voice almost a cooing prayer. Drouillard was so aroused already that he was afraid he might ejaculate before she could lead him to wherever she was taking him. They went out and walked through smoky wind over packed snow and entered a smaller lodge, snug and warm with a bright fire burning in its fire ring, and there she plucked at the fastenings of his clothes and then threw her robe over a pile of bedding near the wall and lay down naked upon it, golden brown in the fireglow, and waited for him to undress.

He had never done this with a woman who knew none of the languages he spoke, and so he could not say anything about her beauty or his gratitude. And perhaps no language would be needed for that. But even in his eagerness, kneeling over her, he thought of York and the soldiers coming to the captains for venereal treatments, and before touching her he held his hand up in a question sign. She made a querulous frown, and he signed,
You
sick below?
She answered so quickly her hands were a flutter.
No. Hurry. I want
. Then she reached for him and took him in.

He was quick as a sneeze, but she yelped and then sank back and sighed. He wanted a longer pleasure, but she hopped out of the bed, seeming marvelously happy, and signaled for him to get dressed. She led him back to the medicine lodge with its three effigies above it and took him in. The drum and rattle were still going and another young couple were importuning a scrawny, craggy-faced old man with snow-white hair hanging to his waist. They got him up and he went out with the young woman. People were smiling at Drouillard, and his young woman was beaming and nodding as she led him back to where he had been sitting. Her husband smiled and nodded and cooed to him, and pressed his cheek, then the couple went away behind the circle of elders as he was motioned to sit back down. He had hardly had time to reflect on that quick moment of pleasure before another fine-looking young husband brought him a pipe to smoke, then laid the trail of sticks across the floor again to him. Everybody was looking at him with great kindness and cheer, and very soon he realized that another handsome young naked wife was advancing upon him.

Snow was whirling in the dawn sky above the smokehole of the love lodge by the time he withdrew from the sweet, moist depths of the last wife. He rolled onto his back tingling and exhausted, ready to sleep for a day. But the woman’s husband and other family members arrived with the daylight, all full of laughter and caresses for him, and began fixing him a breakfast of beans, corn, persimmons, and chokecherries to fortify him for his walk back to the fort. In sign language they thanked him for calling the buffalo for them. They fed him and smoked with him, and touched him so often and so softly that he had to hold back a sob because he had not been surrounded by love like this since he had lived with his mother and cousins at Cape Girardeau.

Captain Clark was putting together a map from several small maps when Drouillard came out of the snow into the fort. The
captain put the sheets aside and laid out some scribble paper. “You look a bit puny,” he said. “York can make some coffee, or a toddy. I’d like to make some notes about that buffalo-calling ceremony for our summary to the President. I presume you had one of their women and have the venereal now like everybody else.”

“Four women, sir. I know how careful you like to be about number-counting.”

“Four …
four?
They offered you four?” His jaw hung open.

“They offered me six, Cap’n. I didn’t take on the two sick ones.”

The captain had a pencil in his hand but seemed to have forgotten it. Finally he asked, “And how d’ye know that?”

“You hired me to talk to Indians, Cap’n. So that’s what I did. I asked them.”

Hooves clopped on the river ice, and the waxed runners of the sleighs hissed and squealed. Willard had shod the three horses with cleated iron shoes that gave them protection against rough ice and good footing on smooth ice, and so the frozen river had become like a wide, level road. In places where broken ice had frozen up jagged, Drouillard rode the mare up onto shore to detour over land, where the snow lay as shallow as an inch and deep as two feet, depending on wind-drifting. The three soldiers rode on the two sleighs behind him, their talk and laughter muffled by the high collars and scarves bound over their lower faces to protect them from frostbite. They all wore fur hats and mittens, and blanket coats or rough-tailored skin coats with the hair side in. Their faces were muffled to invisibility, but he could hear them joking about how this was the way the Corps of Discovery should have come up: just wait till midwinter and come up on horse sleighs and maybe ice skates, so much easier than rowing and towing a barge. Drouillard himself wore a fur hat made from the skin of what had been his pet beaver until the voyageurs ate it, and he wore it pulled down to his eyelids, and his face-scarf pulled up almost to meet it. So he was seeing the whole vast, glaring white world through a mere slit, the only way to avoid going snow-blind on days like this. They had swiftly come down the river more than twenty miles since morning, but still had almost twice that far to go down to the meat caches, near the Heart
River. Down there, Clark’s hunters had left several hundred pounds of boned elk, deer, and buffalo meat closed up tight in wooden pens, and now Drouillard and three soldiers were going down to get it before the wolves could.

Actually, only two of them were officially soldiers, Goodrich and Frazier. The other man was John Newman, the man who had been whipped and expelled for talking mutiny. He had been brought along as a laborer to help load the frozen meat on the sleighs, and push or pull when necessary. Forbidden by his sentence to carry a gun, he had been issued a broken musket and a bayonet, so as not to appear defenseless.

Drouillard knew where the two meat pens were because he had been in that hunting party, the chief hunter, as usual. That had been a nine-day ordeal: hunting and sleeping out in the most bitter cold, feet cold and beaten by rough ice, plunging after wounded game in knee-deep snow, butchering and boning meat before it could freeze solid. Captain Clark on the second day had broken through ice and gotten soaked to the hips. The hunting party of sixteen soldiers had killed forty deer, sixteen elk, and three buffalo bulls in that period, but many of the animals were so lean and meager from the winter that they were hardly fit for use. The party had hunted more than fifty miles down the river. It had nearly done in the sixteen men before they staggered back into the fort yesterday.

Drouillard had gone to sleep last night to an astonishing sound: a baby crying in the interpreters’ room next door. Charbonneau’s little Shoshone wife, after a long and excruciating labor, had given birth to a boy baby, her first child. Charbonneau had returned from the hunt to find himself the father of a two-day-old son. The delivery had been brought on after long labor by one of Jessaume’s remedies: rattlesnake rattle crumbled to make a tea. Among the specimens Lewis had collected for the President was a rattle. Ten minutes after taking the tea, Bird Woman had given birth, with Jessaume’s woman as midwife.

So Drouillard had gone to sleep to the sound of a crying baby, and had awakened to the sound of axes chopping ice. For nearly two weeks the soldiers had been trying to free the keelboat and
pirogues from the grip of the frozen river. They had even tried heating water in the bilges to melt them free, but nothing was working.

This morning the pride-swollen Charbonneau had given Drouillard a look at the tiny baby while the soldiers were harnessing the horses, and he had remarked, “Eh! Little half-breed, just like me!”

And now he was thinking of that little half-breed baby as he led Frazier, Goodrich, and Newman down the frozen Missouri. Three inches of new snow had fallen last night and was blowing in fine streamer shapes across the old snow and the river ice, and the wind was cutting through his clothes, but even that bitter discomfort didn’t keep him from daydreaming about that little half-breed, which sometimes he thought of as himself, long ago. If Charbonneau and his wife were actually going to come along with the captains as interpreters, as planned, then that meant this Corps of Western Discovery, as Captain Lewis now liked to call it, would have an infant member. It was getting crazier all the time. This spring they would be setting out into unknown country, two thousand miles across, surely much more dangerous than anything yet, with a suckling baby in the ranks. He shook his head, squinting into the snowglare, thinking, At least York will be happy we’ve got another “colored folk” with us! He was chuckling at that thought when he saw many figures come running out of a draw ahead, spreading out left and right, at least a hundred of them, high-stepping through the snow from every direction, beginning to yell and whoop.

They were Sioux warriors. Drouillard and his three men were being swiftly surrounded.

He yanked down his scarf to yell a warning to the men, but they were already yelling their warnings to him.

With the reckless courage of overwhelming numbers, the Sioux were rushing straight through the snow without regard for cover. Most of them had bows with arrows nocked, most wore shields on their left arms, some had lances, and a few carried muskets.

Drouillard, angry with himself for letting his fatigue carry
him into daydreams, reined in the mare he was riding and pulled his rifle from its sling on the saddle horn. The soldiers were clambering off the two sleighs and reaching for their rifles, which lay nestled among ropes and tools on the sleighs. Newman already had his useless musket in one hand and was making it useful by attaching its bayonet.

The warriors were not shooting arrows or bullets, so Drouillard guessed that killing was not their foremost objective, although he knew very well they would start killing at any provocation. He scanned them as they swarmed down, trying to see who might be their leader. Keeping his rifle pointed skyward, he warned the three men, “Be ready, but don’t shoot!”

Some warriors charged at the sleigh-horses and, with knives flashing, they cut away harness and collars, while the rest kept their weapons aimed at the soldiers. Swiftly they mounted the horses and galloped off up the riverbank through the snow. So it seemed their first purpose was robbery. A man whose bold carriage suggested that he might be their chieftain was striding toward Drouillard with a fierce expression, motioning for him to dismount. Drouillard reined the horse in a backstep. The chieftain lunged forward and grabbed the reins right under the horse’s chin and tried to jerk them out of Drouillard’s hand, but he kept a tight hold, and when the chieftain looked up, he found the muzzle of Drouillard’s rifle pointed right between his eyes. He froze in the pose and appeared to be doing some deep thinking. Drouillard kept the rifle steady on that spot and slowly shook his head. Most of the warriors had stopped darting about. By the sleighs there was some grunting and commotion. He saw that a warrior had laid hands on Frazier’s rifle to take it away from him but was no match for the soldier’s work-hardened strength; he might as well have tried to pull an oak tree down by grasping one of its limbs. At that moment Newman swung his bayonet around and put the point at that Indian’s throat. And Goodrich had his rifle cocked now and was slowly sweeping it back and forth at the several nearest warriors who looked ready to charge Frazier. For a moment the whole tableau was stock-still except for a few warriors who were edging around toward Goodrich’s sleigh
with the apparent intent of grabbing two skinning knives and a tomahawk that lay among the ropes, glinting temptingly in the sunlight.