Sign-Talker (31 page)

Only the weather would dictate when the rest of the corps would leave its Mandan and Hidatsa neighbors and head west, but the stirring to move was evident everywhere. Charcoal mounds seethed, making forge fuel. Hammers were steadily ringing a mile away,
clink, clink, clink
, as blacksmiths made arrow points and war axes and repaired guns for the Indians, in exchange for bags and pots of corn. Captain Clark spent hours with interpreters and Indians, getting descriptions of the lands and the rivers ahead. Sometimes they would talk and he would draw. Sometimes they would draw river courses in the dirt and make sand heaps to show where mountains were, and he would sketch his maps from those. The Hidatsas were his best source for those western distances, because they hunted buffalo as far as the Shining Mountains, and sometimes even entered the mountains to steal horses and captives from the Shoshones. They told of a great river that would enter the Missouri from the southwest, which was known by French traders as the Roche Jaune, or Yellow Stone, which came from lands yet unhunted and full of fur-bearing animals. They told of other landmark
rivers coming in from both sides, describing the distances between in terms of the numbers of sleeps, and said that at a distance which he interpreted to be perhaps four hundred miles there was a great Falling Water place, just this side of the mountains, where they would have to carry their canoes around. A hundred and fifty miles above the falls the Missouri would divide into three branches; that was the place where the Hidatsas had captured the Bird Woman four years ago. The branch coming in from the west would lead them up to the ridge of mountains that divided the east-flowing waters from those that flowed west. And from there it would be all downstream, the captains said, to the Sunset Ocean, which they called the Pacific. Drouillard had heard them talking about the route ahead so often that he could have repeated it all himself. He hoped it would be that simple. These captains, he knew by now, heard best what they wanted to hear.

One thing Drouillard heard that meant much to him was that there were many nations of Indians between the mountains and the sea who had never seen whitemen. Except for the Bird Woman’s memory of her Shoshone tongue from childhood, there would be no knowledge of any of those many languages out there, and talking with those nations would have to be by hand-signing. Sometimes he would look at Bird Woman, that girl with her half-breed baby, and he would think: You and I, the Indians among all these whitemen, are going to be important.

Now in charge of the canoe-making, Sergeant Gass was on another rampage against cottonwood. He raged to Captain Clark: “It’ll have to be caulked all over where it’s wind-riven, like here, see, and here. And that crack there’ll want t’ open up when she’s in the water and has weight amidships. I’ll need tin and tacks to cover cracks like that there son of a bitch. And see how that grain runs from here ’round here? Any heavy-footed bastard stomps down a leetle hard there, the whole goddamn bilge’ll bust!” He pointed in disgust at a half-finished dugout canoe.

The captain burst out laughing. “Lordy, Sarge! I thought all the smoke up here was from your wood fires, but maybe most of it’s from your language!”

Sergeant Gass’s axmen had felled four of the thickest cottonwoods and were hollowing them out with fire, ax, and adze. The muddy ground was covered with trampled, fibrous cottonwood bark, dirty wood chips, charred wood, and tobacco spit. The cottonwood was soft, Gass’s tools were sharp, the hewing was easy; the burning was only to temper and dry the sappy wood.

Despite Gass’s dissatisfaction, the canoes were, to Drouillard’s eyes, beautiful things. Throughout his youth and adulthood he had used dugout canoes, had watched Indian men make them, had admired that evolution of the Great Spirit’s creation, a tree, into man’s creation, a graceful vessel for crossing water.

For all his irreverence, Gass was producing four beautiful canoes in the time Indians could have produced one. It was the sharp steel tools that made canoe-making so efficient.

While Clark inspected the canoes, Drouillard hefted his long rifle in his left hand and examined its familiar form with eyes and fingers. This fine weapon was a whiteman creation, made with materials and skills his own people had never had before whitemen came. The Indians had always had flint and wood to
make fire and bows and arrows, but the whitemen had brought the steel and the mysterious knowledge of gunpowder, a kind of fuel, so that now he, an Indian, could be a more efficient hunter than Indians without rifles. His whiteman rifle was like Gass’s steel tools. These were the new things of steel coming into an old land of flint, and everything would change.

“I’ve found two more big trees up on that island,” the captain was saying to the sergeant. “Even after what goes home by the keelboat, we’ll need six canoes and the pirogues to carry what we need. That means two more dugouts. Now I’ve got to go back to the fort and meet with Chief One Eye. He’s finally consented to go down and grace us with his presence. Drouillard will take you up and point out the two trees.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “We’ll need more provisions to work here longer.”

“Yes, you will. Drouillard’ll get you fresh meat right away. Anything else? Candles? Flour?”

“If Shields could spare a sharpening file, ours is about wornout.”

“All right. I’ll have one sent up. Bring the canoes down to the fort as soon as they’re ready. God and weather willing, we’ll be heading west before much longer!”

Every Indian man or woman Drouillard looked at was crying, and he had to clench his teeth to keep from sobbing himself. The fort stood abandoned, with its gate open and no flag on its flagpole, the first day in five months that there had been no flag on the pole, the first day in all that time there was no chimney smoke. Everything that could be moved had been taken out of the fort to be loaded on the keelboat or in the pirogues and canoes.

The snow had melted off the ground, and tiny flowers and shoots of green grass showed on the trampled slope, but the deserted fort looked more desolate in springtime than it ever had when roofed and banked in blowing snow. There was no ice on the river for the people to walk over to the fort. So the Mandan people who were here, watching the men load up the boats, had
come over in their little round leather tub boats, and there were only a few dozen of them. Most of the population of Mittuta-Hanka were still on the other shore of the Missouri, and their voices were a piteous drone of weeping and farewells. The whole soldier town they had loved and cohabited with through the winter was leaving them. It was as if the Mandans had expected them to stay.

A young man and woman were coming toward Drouillard, making their way among soldiers who carried bundles and knapsacks down to the canoes. He recognized them after a moment of confusion. This was the last of the young wives who had taken him to bed the night of the buffalo-calling ceremony, and her husband who had given her to him. Their faces were terribly earnest, their eyes shining.

He stopped where he was and set his bedroll on the ground, and stood ready for he knew not what.

The man signed a greeting,
I see you
. Drouillard replied likewise.

The couple stood close in front of him, and the expressions on their faces were of the greatest tenderness. With his fist and then open palms the husband signed that his heart was too heavy to hold up.
You go. Heart is heavy
. The woman stood, not signing, but nodding in affirmation. Drouillard signed that he too was sad to go.

The man made the spiral before his brow that meant medicine, then pointed from Drouillard to the woman and to himself. He swooped his hands in the sign for
Many
, then with his forefingers crooked by his temples he said
buffalo
.

Drouillard smiled and nodded. It was true that just a few days after the buffalo-calling, a herd had come near the town and the hunters had killed many. With his right fist the man said,
I kill
, then held up his little finger, then the one next to it, then the middle one.
Three
. Then with both open hands he made the sign
Thank you
.

The young wife, whose beauty and ardor he had remembered in reveries many nights since, had nothing to say here. The hunting power had been a gift from him to this young man, and she
had been only the passage for it. Still, her husband had brought her here for the thanking and the farewell.

Drouillard signed
My heart
and then
Sunrise: I am glad
. The man made two soft syllables, then stepped up and put his arms around him, pressed their cheeks together, and stepped back. The wife still stood back. It would not do for her to embrace him here.

But she did have something to say; she made the little finger-flick from her mouth.
I
, she signed. Then, frowning with thought, obviously not a practiced sign talker, she hesitated before making the sign
work
, then,
baby
. And with a shy smile, she looked down and touched her belly.

So she was in the work of making a baby. Her husband stood there beaming. He made the sign,
Question
. Then,
Medicine
. Then he pointed to himself and finally to Drouillard. And he laughed.

Drouillard nodded, then stooped and picked up his bedroll. He looked at their handsome faces. They were smiling at him with that same sweetness, but tears were standing in their eyes. He turned away, so as not to have to see those expressions anymore, and went down to the canoe, thinking, I don’t know either, Brother. But whether it’s yours or mine it seems to make you happy!

He slapped his neck. First mosquito of the season. Oh damn.

He watched the men carrying bundle after bundle of Mandan corn down to the boats, and saw the Mandan people going around trying to express themselves to the soldiers, and he wished the captains had tried somehow to thank these people for keeping their men alive and in good spirits through the cruelest of winters. And he hoped that somewhere in their long writings they had told their President that.

Nineteen days above Fort Mandan the expedition reached the juncture of the Missouri and the Yellow Stone, an unexpected garden of beauty and plenty. Here lay rich bottomlands five miles wide between steep, pale rock bluffs, grown up in more timber than they had seen for months: cottonwood, ash, and elm. And on a vast second bottom a few feet above the floodplain grew a profusion of gooseberry, chokecherry, currant, and honeysuckle bushes, mixed with open glades. They saw a pea vine sort of plant already in full yellow blossom, and expanses of bright green new grass. Here at last was relief from the violent, cold winds that had slowed their progress and some days kept them from launching the boats at all, winds so full of dust and fine sand that everybody had eaten and breathed it for days on end, sand that scoured and gritted up their eyes, already tortured by the glare of afternoon sun on water. This was a paradise of refreshing greenery and moisture and shade and shelter. And of course the most plentiful life swarming in this paradise was the mosquito.

Drouillard had never known that so much game could be found in one place. Immense herds of elk, buffalo, and pronghorns were everywhere, the timber was full of deer, and lately a kind of cliff-dwelling ram had been seen nimbly skipping from crag to crag on the steep bluffs. Buffalo in the bottomlands were so unaccustomed to man that they were as tame as cattle. One
curious calf had attached itself to Joe Field and followed him four miles, right into the camp. Grown elk and antelope would come close and follow the men to see what they were. Grouse, rabbits, and porcupines were numerous, and in the watercourses the beaver had created dense populations. The captains were excitedly evaluating this place as the site of a fur-trading post and fort.