Sign-Talker (33 page)

He heard on the wind four gunshots almost at once, then another, some frantic yelling, then another shot and more yelling.

Indian attack or bear attack? He was sure it was another bear incident. Astern he saw the red pirogue with sail up coming along behind, but only four of the six canoes following. Then he saw that a little way back, the other two canoes were on the bank, no men in them. Above on the bluff a huge yellow bear was chasing soldiers all over the place. Six shots. All the men had emptied their rifles and now the bear was doubtless wounded and in a fury. There had been several bear sightings since the camp at the Yellow Stone last month, and as he had feared, in each case the men—including Captain Lewis—had attacked the bears instead of just observing them.

Neither captain was anywhere near this bear fight. Both had gone ashore on the north bank an hour ago to stalk a buffalo herd. Everybody on board the white pirogue was gazing back at
the distant melee in helpless dismay. Two of the canoes were turning, going to help. Drouillard saw that it was too far for him to shoot.

“Pierre!” he shouted to Cruzatte. “Drop the sail!” Drouillard turned the tiller, swinging the pirogue about, and told the soldiers to man oars and row. He hoped to get close enough to help before the bear caught and mauled any soldiers. He saw that two soldiers had tumbled down the bluff and were trying to get into a canoe.

There were two more shots; someone had reloaded. Still the maddened bear was roaring. He saw it chasing a man who was sprinting toward the edge of the bluff. He saw the man drop his gun, run straight off the bluff and plunge twenty feet down into the river.

The bear didn’t stop. It hurtled off the bluff after the man. He couldn’t tell whether the bear landed on top of the man. Now all of the other vessels were turning back to help.

The man in the water surfaced a short distance ahead of the bear and swam toward the oncoming canoes as fast as he could thrash water, but the bear was closing on him.

It was still too far to shoot at a target as small as a bear’s head. Drouillard saw a man with a rifle on the bluff kneel and take aim. It looked like Colter. The muzzle flashed, banged; a puff of smoke billowed on the wind.

The bear jerked and its head vanished underwater. Triumphant shouts came from the bluff and the canoes. The swimming soldier slowed and looked back, then trod water waiting for the canoes to reach him. The men in the canoes pulled him from the water.

By the time the pirogue reached them, they had a rope on the dead bear and had towed it to shore.

Drouillard went ashore to examine the beast, and told Cruzatte to take the pirogue on up. The captains, far ahead on the other shore, must have heard all this shooting. The fleet moved back out into the river, except the two canoes of the hunters who had first attacked the bear. Drouillard was irritated at all of them for going out of their way to attack it, but said nothing; they were
all nearly out of their minds with relief and excitement. They had got
la gloire
, though it had nearly been costly.

With its yellow-brown, white-tipped fur soaked, its massive torso and powerful limbs were terribly evident. The soldiers were guessing its weight at half a ton, but of course it looked enormous to them. Drouillard estimated it at six or seven hundred pounds.

It was leaking blood from everywhere. It looked as if eight rifle balls had hit it before the shot in the head had killed it.

He looked at the disheveled, wild-eyed, jabbering soldiers, and then down at the bear, its head as broad as a man’s chest, its huge teeth outlined with blood from its own bullet-riddled lungs, its long tongue drooping pink against the gray mud of the riverbank. He thought of the powerful spirit that had just passed out of this animal, and he thought that spirit might just now be hurrying ahead toward the west to warn all the other bears ahead that there could be no peace with these whitemen coming up the river. The soldiers were laying claim to claws and teeth to keep as souvenirs of their thrilling battle.

“Get him aboard,” Drouillard said, “and we’ll catch up. Cap’ns’ll want to know what all this shooting was about.”

He sat in the canoe with the carcass and took up a paddle.

“Weather coming,” he said. The pewter-colored water of the broad river was getting choppy. The sails of the pirogues ahead were pale against a purple-gray line of squall clouds running ragged on the western sky.

Now he could see the two captains on the narrow bottomlands on the other side of the river, tiny at nearly a half-mile distance, trotting downstream, waving to signal the pirogues, their calls barely audible in the wind. Probably they were trying to warn the crews of the oncoming storm. The canoes now all veered toward shore to avoid the rising chop.

Then Drouillard noticed that Cruzatte was not at the tiller of the distant white boat; he was forward near the mast. Charbonneau was steering. Cruzatte must have given him the tiller so he could go forward and shorten sail for the coming blow. Not a wise choice: Charbonneau had almost capsized the pirogue by
steering her broadside to a gust the last time he had the tiller. He could not swim and had no sense of wind or sail. His wife with their baby sat low among the bundles and instruments. Cruzatte and Labiche were just getting ready to take in sail when the wind struck the vessel on her fore quarter and turned her almost broadside.

Charbonneau, instead of putting the pirogue before the wind, threw the tiller the other way to head into it. With a whap audible halfway across the river, the square-sail brace was jerked from Labiche’s hand. The pirogue heeled over, part of the sail shivering, part in the water, side-slipping downriver and foundering in bursts of spray. Through the rush of wind Drouillard heard Cruzatte bellowing at Charbonneau, and Charbonneau wailing to heaven in his terror. Two gunshots banged on the far shore, the captains apparently trying to get the crew’s attention; they were yelling but the wind carried their voices away. Drouillard saw Captain Lewis drop his rifle, sling off his gun bag, and start to strip off his coat as if to swim out, but Clark restrained him.

At last the halyard was cut and the sail was being hauled in. Cruzatte had drawn his pistol and was aiming it at Charbonneau, screaming in French that he would shoot him if he didn’t recover the tiller. Charbonneau did so at last and slowly the pirogue came into the wind and her mast rose almost vertical. She was swamped within an inch of the gunwales, with every whitecapped wave spewing in more water.

The canoes were ashore now, the red pirogue heading for the captains under oars and shortened sail, and Drouillard watched the desperate struggle of the white pirogue out there on the water.

Cruzatte had put two men to rowing and two others to bailing, and the vessel crept toward shore. As it came he could see the disorder inside; Bird Woman sitting in the icy water up to her ribs, holding the shrieking baby up on her shoulder with one hand, with the other hand tending to instrument cases, sodden journals, books, papers, and medicine stores that were immersed and afloat all around her.

It was dusk by the time the pirogue was beached and emptied,
the officers rejoined with their fleet, the bear carcass brought ashore, and all members gathered in a camp. Over one campfire the men drank a dram and celebrated their deliverance from everything that had nearly happened to them, and over another they rendered six gallons of bear oil. Captain Lewis kept reminding everybody that if the pirogue and its contents had been lost, the expedition would have been utterly ruined. The soldiers knew he was in a state, and listened to his harangues patiently, waiting for him to simmer down and leave them alone to tell each other their bear story with all its elaborations. Drouillard’s attention was mostly on Charbonneau’s family. Charbonneau kept getting up and stalking around, not looking anyone in the face. Bird Woman was making sure her baby was warm and calm.

All that had actually been lost overboard were two cooking vessels, some gunpowder, a book, and the Indian baby’s cradleboard. Everything else would need to be spread on the ground to drain and dry.

It was agreed that Charbonneau would not be allowed to steer a boat again.

For several days they had been coming into an increasingly hilly country where pitch pine grew on the slopes, a welcome change after a thousand miles of treeless plains. A less welcome change grew underfoot: a spiny cactus plant, low to the ground, with stiff spines that stabbed through moccasin leather. Anyone walking had to learn a new way of seeing his path because of this “prickly pear,” and also because warm weather was bringing out rattlesnakes.

As they moved into this new country, they found fewer of the undercut riverbanks that used to cave in suddenly, endangering the boats. Now the firm, dry banks allowed the soldiers to walk easily onshore and pull the loaded vessels up the shallow river by long tow ropes of braided elk skin. They walked and pulled and sang. In the evenings some of the men shot beaver in the water, and the black dog Seaman would leap into the water, swim out and bring them ashore, which delighted his master. But one evening the dog retrieved one that was only wounded. With its great chisel teeth it bit the dog’s hind leg and he almost bled to death from a cut artery before Captain Lewis was finally able to stop the bleeding.

That same evening, Captain Clark came in from a long advance trek, with more cheerful news. Climbing the highest hill he could find, he had seen ahead the mouth of a major river flowing into the Missouri from the south, one the Hidatsas had told of, and it was where they had said it would be. Even more satisfying to the captain was that in the distance, perhaps fifty miles west, he had seen a high snowy mountain.

Captain Lewis leaned back with a sigh. “Not fair, Clark. You get to see mountains first.” He reached down and fondled the ear of his unconscious dog. “I’m not sure old Seaman here is going to make it to see a mountain.”

That night in the lodge, Captain Lewis wrote late by candle while Charbonneau’s family slept. Captain Clark was making pencil notes. Drouillard was trying to sleep, but there was some troubling spirit inside the shelter. When he would open his eyes, he would see Lewis gazing into the shadows instead of writing, and his eye sockets were black as caves. Drouillard didn’t think the plight of the wounded dog was all of it, though that might have brought it on. Finally, Captain Clark sighed and asked, “What is it?”

Lewis was silent for a long while. Then he said, “We almost lost everything. It can happen so sudden.” He was still thinking of the near loss of the boat, apparently.

“But we didn’t. Don’t fret over it. We’re getting on splendid.
We’ll be in those mountains in days! And from there on it’s all downhill to the sea.”

“Clark, friend.” Lewis sighed. “Sometimes, when you carry so much of my load, I … I just get so ashamed of the rank thing, it—”

“We weren’t ever going to talk about that,” Clark said in a whisper.

“The President should have done something!” Lewis’s whisper almost rose to a whimper.

“Never mind. The men don’t know, and I thankee for that. I’m perfectly happy and having the time of my life. You should be too, damn it. Get your chin out of your chest. This is no time to let your faith go limp.”

“Well, then …” Lewis corked his inkwell.

“Lights out? Are you through writing?”

“Leave it on till I go piss,” Lewis said, and went out.

Clark glanced around and started when he saw that Drouillard was awake. He looked embarrassed. “Hello, George.”

“Hello? I’ve been here all the time, Cap’n.”

“Well …”

“Sir, I would like to know what that ‘rank thing’ is about.”

“Nothing important.”

“It seems important to him. Cap’n, you said when I hired on that I’d be privy to anything affecting this voyage.”

Clark sighed. “You also said you could keep confidence?”

“You’ve never seen otherwise.”

“All right, then.” Clark leaned close, listening for Lewis’s return. “Secretary of War didn’t give me the co-captaincy Lewis promised me. Politics. Favoritism. Some folks in the capital hold grudges against my brother. They can’t forgive him for the way they’ve treated him, I reckon that was a part of it. So, anyhow, I’m just a lieutenant, not a captain. Lewis was mad, then said, ‘The hell with it, as far’s anyone’s concerned, you’re co-captain.’ And he’s stuck by that, God bless ’im. But it eats on him. Now, by God, this is between you and me and we never speak of it again, right? Because Lewis and I can serve better this way.”

“I can see that. Nobody will hear of it from me.” He added, “Cap’n.”

Drouillard pretended to be asleep when Lewis came back in. “Looks like good weather tomorrow,” Lewis said. “How’s old Seaman?”

“Snoring away in dogland. How about you? Better?”

“I guess. A good, steaming pee by starlight’s like a prayer, I suppose.”

“Am I supposed to report to Jefferson that you pray?”

The candle went out with a puff of breath. “Not really. But all those stars! They make one’s worries seem pretty small, eh? Good night, Cap’n.”

“Sleep well, Cap’n.”

Drouillard lay there thinking about the “rank thing.” He thought of all the force that was in this Lewis, and he thought of the dark spirit and the doubt that sometimes rose up around him.

But the “rank thing.” It was actually one of those matters in which deceit seemed better than the truth. The way Drouillard had been taught, one deceived only enemies. But this seemed a good thing. And when he thought of Captain Lewis saying, “The hell with it, you’re co-captain,” the man rose far up in his esteem, narrow and uppity though he sometimes was. Those jealous Sioux chiefs could have learned something from these two whitemen.