Sign-Talker (30 page)

Drouillard stared straight into the eyes of the chieftain who was still standing at the point of his rifle. He sensed as many as twenty or thirty arrows or muskets aimed at him right now. He remembered the day last fall when Captain Clark stood in the river’s edge with his sword drawn and faced down the threat of three Sioux chiefs and a horde of warriors. This appeared to be just that kind of a moment. One shot by anyone on either side would precipitate a quick burst of killing, and the result would be a few Sioux dead and all the whitemen dead. The two sleigh horses were far away now; there would be no getting them back. One the captains had bought from the Mandans; the other had been borrowed from a clerk of the North West Company. The gray mare Drouillard sat on now was borrowed from the Mandans and had an unweaned colt back at the fort. He didn’t intend to let these Sioux take her out from under him while he was alive.

The chieftain still had not thought out what to do, apparently; he stood holding the rein. Drouillard intensified his stare, that look no one could endure. Holding his rifle by the trigger hand only, he used his left hand to point at the chieftain’s grip on the other end of the rein; then he turned his pointing hand palm up, hoping the man would understand it was a one-handed version of the sign for
Separate
or
Turn loose
. This was the moment. If he couldn’t back this man down, he would have to shoot him and it all would be over. He presumed that Frazier and the other warrior were still deadlocked on Frazier’s rifle but wouldn’t flick his stare away from the chieftain’s eyes to see.

“Mr. Drouillard,” Newman’s voice came quietly, “what do we do? They just took the skinning knives and tomahawk.”

“If you still got that man on your spike, keep him there. Never mind the knives.”

“Still got ’im.”

“Good. I mean to make these sons o’ bitches back off.”

“God help us, man.”

“I’m counting on that,” Drouillard said, and he was; he had been praying fervently even while glaring and aiming at the chieftain. But that one still had not released the rein. His breath froze in puffs of frost at every exhalation, and Drouillard could see in his eyes that he wanted desperately to look around at the situation but was afraid to look away. Drouillard just barely widened his eyelids, intensifying his stare to give the impression he was about to act, and leaned an inch forward as if bracing his gun shoulder for a recoil. That brought his rifle muzzle an inch closer to the chieftain’s eyes, and the little puffs of breath stopped coming out. Obviously the man believed now that he was on the edge of death and didn’t want to be there.

The chieftain released the rein and stood still, sneering. Drouillard backed the mare off one step and kept the rifle on the man’s eyes. None of the hundred warriors, at least none in the edges of his vision, was moving, though he heard several murmuring to each other. He listened for the squeak of any footsteps in the dry snow anywhere behind him, and heard none.

The chieftain, without looking away, said something in a quick, loud voice. It was a good, rich voice, and Drouillard had a strange notion that he could have liked this tall, narrow-faced Sioux chieftain if they had met under different circumstances; the man was certainly more careful than cowardly. When he spoke, some of the warriors began moving back a little way. Drouillard glanced over just in time to see Frazier jerk his rifle free from the grasp of that warrior, who still remained as if pinned in the air by Newman’s bayonet.

Drouillard said, “Good, Mr. Newman. Draw off, now,” and Newman did so. “Now, boys, we’ll just ease out of here and head back for the fort. You get out of arrow range and I’ll catch up directly.”

“This one whoreson savage got my good tomahawk and I want it back,” Goodrich said.

“Damn you,” Drouillard warned, “don’t bust this all up over a tomahawk—” But Goodrich had already grabbed for it, and the warrior kept his grip, and voices were rising all around. It was about to start all over. Drouillard looked down his sights at the
chieftain, narrowed his lips and motioned toward Goodrich and the warrior with a quick tilt of his head. The chieftain said something in three sharp syllables and the warrior released the tomahawk. Drouillard nodded to the chieftain. Newman, Goodrich, and Frazier began edging toward the river, their guns still at ready, and none of the warriors got in their way. He would let them get out of bow shot, maybe even musket range, then he would follow them, but in the meantime he was going to keep his rifle on the chieftain standing before him. He wanted to talk to this leader in sign and ask him to have the horses brought back, but knew the man would not demean himself that much in the eyes of his warriors. The horses were a lost cause. Drouillard knew if he got out of here alive with his three men, that would be answer enough to his prayers.

As the soldiers made their way across the glaring snowscape, he could feel his ears, face, hands, and feet freezing into numbness, and he had all he could do to keep from shuddering violently in the saddle. He presumed that all these Sioux men were equally miserable, surely as eager as he was to quit standing immobile in the bitter cold. He looked at the chieftain and thought of the few Sioux words he had learned from Cruzatte. He nodded to the chieftain and said,
“O wash tay.”
This is good. It was easy to remember because it was like
weh sah
in his own people’s language. The chieftain perhaps didn’t think it was that good; he didn’t respond. Or maybe, Drouillard thought, in his cold-benumbed mind he had remembered the wrong words.

His three men were now about forty paces away. He saw that a few of the warriors had lowered their weapons and now hugged them to their chests to put their freezing hands under their armpits. He began backing the mare toward the river, following the other three, squinting at the snowglare. If any of the warriors wanted to make their glory by shooting him, this would be their last chance.

But they all stood still. A hundred or more Sioux warriors stood watching the whitemen get away. He hoped with all his heart that he would not have to shoot, because he couldn’t feel the trigger, and in the glare his eyes were going bad.

When he caught up with his men, he dismounted and walked with them to get his circulation going. They kept looking back but no one was following. The Sioux might yet, of course. They might follow in the dark. Drouillard estimated that it would be midnight when they got back to the fort, even later if they stopped to hunt and build a fire for a supper, which they would need to do. He hoped this snow-blindness would not make them totally blind by night. The crisis seemed to be over, but the ordeal had several hours to go. They might not even make it back. They just crunched on through the dry snow on the river ice, wrapped in thought, no one talking, until Goodrich said, “Cold out here. But not as cold as I expected t’ be by now!”

“Tell ye what,” Frazier said after a while. “I mean to tell the cap’ns that this here Newman is a soldier and by God he should be put back on!”

“Amen!” said Goodrich.

“Thankee, boys,” Newman said in a voice almost strangled by emotion. Then he said, “Damn me, but those redskins really had us outnumbered, didn’t they, though!”

Drouillard couldn’t resist. Grinning, he said, “What d’you mean ‘us,’ white boy?”

He was almost too sore to sit up, but Captain Clark had him bent over a small tub, Newman on the other side, with their heads covered with a draped cloth. Now and then York put a heated stone in the tub and threw snow on it to make steam. Drouillard and Newman blinked and blinked their burning eyes in the steam. Captain Clark told them it would cure their snow-blindness. They talked with the captain through their drape. Drouillard told him how bravely Newman had stood up in the crisis with just a bayonet and recommended that he be returned to duty. Clark said he would bring it up with Captain Lewis when he returned. Captain Clark was supposed to be working on maps and lists, but he kept getting up and pacing, pacing until his own
feet, punished by the long hunt, hurt too much to walk on. He was plainly very worried.

In a fit of temper, Captain Lewis had set out with twenty-four soldiers and a few half-hearted Mandans to go chasing those hundred Sioux warriors, with the thermometer at sixteen degrees below zero. This could be a disaster, the end of the whole enterprise and the deaths of many good men if it went wrong. Now and then Drouillard could hear Bird Woman’s baby squall briefly in the next room, and the woman talking and chortling to him. Drouillard prayed that Lewis wouldn’t catch up with the Sioux.

By evening his vision was almost normal and the pain gone, and he was resting with his feet in a tub of lukewarm water, when two of the Mandan warriors from Captain Lewis’s war party came into the fort, supporting Private Tom Howard, whose feet were so frostbitten he had been unable to go on. As Clark began to work on him, Howard told him that Captain Lewis had decided the Sioux party was so far ahead it couldn’t be overtaken. Therefore, the twenty-four soldiers were going to go on down and get the meat Captain Clark’s hunters had left, and then spend a day or two hunting. Clark was very relieved, for two reasons: there would be no battle, and the meat supply in the fort was entirely exhausted.

A few days later it was clear that Private Howard’s feet were recovering and no toes would have to be taken off. Drouillard’s eyes and feet were back to normal. Charles McKenzie, the North West Company clerk whose gelding the Sioux had stolen, visited the fort for a couple of days, and was decent and forgiving when he heard about the incident. The subchief of Mittuta-Hanka Town, whose name was Little Raven, visited the fort. He told Captain Clark that one of the old men the captains had met there had died, at the age of 120 winters, after requesting that his body be set on a stone facing south down the river toward the hole in the ground from which all the Mandans had come.

While Captain Clark was writing this story down, Drouillard saw anguish in the face of Little Raven. He remembered the
deep sadness that used to pervade the Shawnee settlements when any of the ancient elders passed away, taking with them the powerful wisdom of great age. He thought of the young women in the buffalo-calling ceremony, who had hoped to pass on some of that great power of age, and he understood the ceremony better, and felt a deep wave of humility at having been honored. In the next room he heard the nine-day-old baby trying out its voice. Captain Clark put down his pencil, and said, “Born about 1684 then. To think I met a man who lived in the seventeenth century!” This captain really loved number counting.

Drouillard stood in melting snow on high ground near Mittuta-Hanka Town, inside a circle of nearly a hundred human skulls, whose eyeholes all faced inward and seemed to be looking at him. He could hear the ancient spirit songs, not through his ears but faint inside his head, as he had heard them that cold, drizzly night more than a year ago, up on the great mound beside the Mississippi. What he was hearing through his ears was the faraway garbled talk of the geese, who were at last returning to the north. North Grandfather Spirit was retreating toward his home, drawing after him the high-flying fowl and the cold that froze everything. The captains and their soldiers were joyous at the end of a winter they had feared would kill them before it ended, a winter that had frozen their feet and faces and made them retreat into their smoky little rooms in the fort, or into the warm beds of
the Mandan and Hidatsa women. Several of the soldiers were in love with the same girls, and almost every man was now taking the mercuric calomel for the sickness in their private parts. Drouillard had not contracted the disease, and to his knowledge the captains had not either, although he believed that Captain Clark had been in bed with someone during his visits up at the Hidatsa town of Black Moccasin.

These skull circles were the cemetery of the Mandan town. Off to the east stood several tall scaffolds made of poles, holding up the bodies of those more recently dead. The scaffolds kept the bodies out of the reach of wolves, and the bodies were encased in tightly sewn buffalo and elk hides to discourage vultures and ravens. There they remained until nothing was left but bones and dry skin, when their families would take them down and bury the bones, and leave the skull on the ground in this circle, where it could be visited, talked to, cried to, prayed over, and smoked to with sage and tobacco. Some of these skulls were very old and sun-bleached white, some were still nose-deep in snow. Around some the snow had melted down and the teeth and chins were visible. Jessaume had told him of these things. And on one mild day not long ago, Drouillard had passed close enough to this cemetery to see a few people sitting before skulls, and to hear them talking and singing and crying to them, a sound much like the spirit voices he heard now.

On this day, most of Mittuta-Hanka’s people were across the river near the fort, watching the soldiers’ great efforts to pull the two boats and the ship up out of the ice. They had started almost a month ago to free the vessels but the weather had defeated them over and over. Every day the captains more urgently feared that the spring breakup of the winter ice might crush or wrench the hulls. Finally now, with their iron-blade pikes, the soldiers had freed them, and made a windlass to pull the ice-caked vessels ashore. From here in the Mandan cemetery Drouillard could see the keelboat, almost as long as Fort Mandan itself, imperceptibly moving up the far riverbank with the soldiers laboring around it through a crowd of Mandan onlookers, the figures tiny at a mile distant. Farther up the river, out of sight beyond Black
Cat’s village, Sergeant Gass had been scouting for cottonwood trees big enough and straight enough to make as many as six dugout canoes for the river voyage on west to the Shining Mountains. The keelboat, too broad and deep-draughted to go much farther up, would instead be loaded with the tons of plant and animal and mineral specimens, the notes and records the captains had been writing, and with skins of beaver trapped on the way up. It would sail home under the command of Corporal Warfington, with a small crew of soldiers whose enlistments had run out, and with most of the voyageurs. Also with them would be the two disgraced men, Reed the deserter and Newman the mutineer. The pleas of Drouillard and several soldiers on behalf of Newman had failed. Captain Lewis refused to pardon and reenlist him. The destination of Warfington’s cargo—including the prairie dog still alive in its cage—was President Jefferson’s office. Warfington’s little crew expected to have to fight its way past the Sioux on the way back through their country. They had vowed not to be stopped.