Sign-Talker (32 page)

Most of the hoofed animals were still too lean and poor from the hard winter to be good eating, but some buffalo cows provided good marrow bones, and a buffalo calf was like fine veal. Beaver tail also provided some fat the men craved after their exertions in cold wind and river spray. Captain Lewis’s dog had chased a wild goat into the river, drowned it, and swum back to shore with it.

The day before, Captain Lewis, Sergeant Ordway, Joe Field, and Drouillard had walked ahead to explore the juncture of the two rivers, and today when Captain Clark arrived with the boats and canoes, a camp was set up on a wooded point just below the Yellow Stone’s mouth. A delicious, fat supper was cooked, whiskey rations were issued, and greenwood was thrown on the fires to make enough smoke to drive off some of the mosquitoes. Then the musical instruments were unwrapped, and by dusk the fiddle was pacing the dancers around the fire.

Drouillard helped York and Bird Woman erect a tepee frame and pull its skin cover around it. While this was being done, Captain Clark held the baby’s cradleboard and made faces and lip sounds to entertain the infant, whose name was Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. Bird Woman’s husband cavorted around the fire with the soldiers, his yellow teeth bared in a grin that looked like a grimace through his black whiskers. He grew winded quickly, being twice the age of most of the men, but tried hard and cheerfully to compensate for the bad impression he had made on the captains a few weeks ago. He had threatened then to quit his interpreting job if he had to stand guard or serve in work details and had demanded the right to drop out of the voyage any time he might grow discontented with his treatment. So the captains had simply dismissed him, hoping he would come crawling
back, and he had done so a few days later. The captains secretly had been very relieved to see him recant, because they knew they would need his wife to interpret with her Shoshone people in the mountains.

Drouillard himself was perhaps even more delighted than the captains that Charbonneau had repented and stayed on. Though it had at first seemed foolish to bring a woman and baby on such a grueling journey, Drouillard had been changing that opinion little by little. The presence of this little family was growing to be strangely comforting to him, for various reasons, some of which he hadn’t thought out yet but simply felt in his heart. The presence of a woman and child made this seem less like an army, more like a tribe. The soldiers, while not inclined to care much for Indians, had some regard for the presence of a married woman, and if Bird Woman’s presence had done nothing else, it had muted their farting contests. And the sight of this slight, dignified girl with a baby at her breast seemed sometimes to make them wistful. He had seen the soldiers watching her by firelight with something deeper in their eyes than they used to have. Perhaps, as they now were heading farther and farther from their homes, this little nursing mother made them think more of their own sisters and mothers thousands of miles behind. Or for some of them, surely, she was a reminder of recent tender pleasures they had enjoyed in their long winter among the Mandan girls and their families. The baby Jean Baptiste was also an object of their gentler curiosity; there was hardly a man, even the most cocky and swaggering, who had not at least once enjoyed the small triumph of teasing a coo and a smile out of the little half-breed.

Half-breed, Drouillard thought, watching Captain Clark hand the cradleboard to the Bird Woman. One like me. He remembered that, just like Charbonneau, his father had been a French-Canadian interpreter for English-speaking white soldiers, with a petite Indian wife and a half-breed baby. Maybe that was a part of what he felt. Maybe this was how his family had looked among soldiers thirty years ago, back at that distant place called Detroit. His mother a Shawnee girl, this one a Shoshone girl.
Shawnee. Shoshone. Shoshawnee. He played with the words and brushed mosquitoes away from his face.

There were direct and practical reasons for appreciating this Shoshone girl too. She was an excellent forager. Wandering the riverbanks with her baby on her back and a pointed digging stick in one hand, she would come back to camp with tubers, roots, and sprouts that eased the monotony of the meat and meal diet.

So he watched this little family in the firelight with a deep and thoughtful pleasure. He doubted that Charbonneau was as educated or intelligent as his father Pierre Drouillard had been. On the other hand, Charbonneau likely had never been and never would be the sot that Pierre Drouillard had become. Maybe not. Though he was certainly gay and glassy-eyed with the dram he’d had this evening.

Drouillard was seated on a crate that he had never seen opened, though he had seen it in the keelboat’s cargo, and now it was dutifully loaded and unloaded as the pirogues and canoes made their way up the river. It looked like a gun crate, with rope handles, and having helped lift it a few times, he knew it was one of the heaviest parts of their cargo. It was said to be a set of connecting iron bars that could be assembled to make the frame for a cargo boat. Captain Lewis intended to have it assembled at some point along the way and covered with skins, if there should be someplace where boats were needed and no timber to make them, as perhaps on the rivers beyond the Shining Mountains. It was in any case a tremendous burden for the soldiers who had to bring everything along up these rivers. Like many of the things Captain Lewis had brought, it had intelligent planning behind it but seemed more trouble than it was worth. Likewise the immensely heavy gunpowder canisters. They were made of lead, with screw-in lids that were sealed with wax to make them waterproof. When emptied, the canisters could be cut apart and melted down to make bullets. Apparently these were inventions that Captain Lewis and President Jefferson had dreamed up during the long years they had spent planning this adventure.

Drouillard sat on the crate watching the dancing, and listened to the campfire conversations. Potts was lamenting that the
voyageur Rivet had left the party for St. Louis because “I’m sure there’s many an Indian ahead who’s never seen a man dance upside down.”

“Well, then!” exclaimed John Colter. “When that time comes, I’ll dance on my hands for ’em!”

“Hah!” cried Potts. “You can hardly dance on your feet, Colter, let alone your hands!” Drouillard couldn’t see Potts from where he sat, but recognized his voice and Dutchy accent. He remembered a night more than a year ago when, coming up from Tennessee, he had lain by the campfire talking with Potts about dreams. He had been with these whitemen so long that he could recognize their voices in the dark.

“So y’ say!” Colter cried. “Watch me!” He leaped into the firelight, bent down and put his palms on the ground, kicked his feet skyward, went on over and landed with a thump on his back with his feet in Sergeant Pryor’s lap. “Well, I need a little practice.”

Among the soldiers for some days there had been much speculation about the white bears, or grizzlies, about which the Indians had given such dire warnings. “The Hidatsas,” Captain Clark said, “told me that they actually put on paint and go through the war prayers before they hunt these bear, just as if they were going to war against men.”

Captain Lewis waved a hand as if to dismiss the whole notion. “With bow and arrow, and those worthless muskets the British sell ’em, it well might be a frightful scrap. But with these rifles, and American riflemen, why, this bear will prove to be just another animal. Let’s ask our bear hunter. Drouillard, are you fearful of the white bear?”

Several people were looking and listening for his answer. He thought for a minute, and then, having had his dram of whiskey, he replied, “Well, Cap’n, I guess I’d greet a white bear the way I’d greet a white man: with good manners and some suspicion.”

There were still a few men with energy left to sing after the dancers had dropped with fatigue. Hugh McNeal and Tom Howard, accompanied only by a tambourine, were singing, one bass and one falsetto, with many elisions and slurs:

As their song went on, interrupted by disputes over what came next, whether the wife took fever and died in the same stanza, or waited to die in the next stanza, whether the husband “laughed and he cried” or “laughed
till
he cried,” Drouillard got up and slipped out of the firelight to make water. He noted with gratitude that he had no discomfort from it, apparently having avoided the cock pox that almost every other man had caught. He moved in the darkness down toward the Yellow Stone’s bank and stood watching the sentry who was guarding the boats. From ten paces away he could smell the man’s dense odor: woolen clothes bearing countless days’ dried sweat, cock dribbles, and shirttail smirch, and his breath reeking of tobacco quid. The sentry now and then tried to hum the tune that came so haltingly from the glowing camp off through the cottonwoods, and Drouillard would hear him spit. The breeze was busy with other odors. He could smell the latrine close by; he could smell the putrescence of old carrion, here in this rich valley where elk and buffalo carcasses lay so abundant that the wolves and buzzards and ravens couldn’t pick them all clean, and left them for the flies and beetles to finish; he could smell buffalo dung and deer scat, and the rank boundary piddlings of wolf urine; he could smell fishy river-muck and beaver gland, campfire smoke and tobacco smoke, and, when the breeze shifted, that sentry again. But what he was trying to pick out was bear.

He had detected what he thought was a slight whiff of bear earlier today, while coming down the Yellow Stone’s bank.

He wondered again whether the so-called white bears, or yellow bears, could really be so different in spirit from the bears he knew back home.

These days the captains themselves were doing much of the hunting. They took turns walking on shore as the pirogues and canoes came along, and both were spoiling for a fight with the bears. So their invasion of bear country would be hostile from the beginning. The bears would spread the word ahead: whitemen are enemies, not brothers.

Or, he thought, maybe the bear will smell these soldiers coming and say, Those must be bad! He and the Bird Woman were the only two members of this party who bothered about bathing their bodies or rinsing their clothes every day. She went to the water first thing every morning if possible, as he did, no matter how cold the water was. Her husband Charbonneau, like several soldiers of the corps, could not swim and thus was afraid to wade in and bathe, but she kept herself and her baby clean.

In his years as a trader, Charbonneau had probably spread the pox, or at least gonorrhea, in many a village, and Bird Woman likely had it from him. And as she had been traded among several Hidatsa captors before Charbonneau got her, she might have been sick with it even before Charbonneau bought her, and the other Shoshone girl, from the Hidatsas.

It was by no means a love story. Yet she seemed a dutiful wife to him, and they occupied their own little circle of existence, with their baby at its center.

McNeal and Howard argued a little in the distance, and soldiers laughed, and then the song went on:

When Charbonneau and his wife first visited Fort Mandan last fall, some flinching, cringing manner about her had made Drouillard suspect that he was brutal to her, but he had seen no sign of it since. Her timidity might have lingered from her girlhood ordeal among her Hidatsa captors. It was not a love story, it was a slave story.

The music was different now that the voyageurs were gone. Drouillard had liked their music. Fortunately, Cruzatte was still along with his fiddle, and Labiche now and then sang in French.

It was strange to him, how he was about this body of people. He was still the hunter, the Indian, independent from them. But in their minds he had become theirs. He knew they took pride in his prowess. And the truth was that he found himself concerned about them all the time. Keeping them fed fresh meat was his job, and at first that had been all of his concern. Now he was bemused to find himself worried about anything that might happen to them, be it sickness, drowning, or stirring up bears.

He shook his head, silently laughed at himself, and went back toward the firelight.

Drouillard was at the tiller of the white pirogue with a good east wind from astern, steering close to the south bank with the sail shading him from the afternoon sun ahead.

The captains had deemed him a “natural sailor,” as they put it, and so now he seemed to spend more time crewing the captains’ boat with Cruzatte than hunting. This boat carried all the medicine, sky instruments, books, journals, notes, and specimens—everything used in their work for the President. It also carried the people who couldn’t swim, since it was the most stable vessel.

As a rule, one captain or the other stayed with this boat, which led their little fleet, but neither was aboard now. Cruzatte and Labiche were forward near the mast, tending the braces of the square sail. Three soldiers loafed and gambled amidships, and Charbonneau and his family were nestled amidst the cargo nearly at Drouillard’s feet. Bird Woman had the baby out of his cradleboard and was repacking it with clean filler, which she made by pounding the inner bark of cottonwood until it was fluffy.