Sign-Talker (34 page)

Drouillard halted in the brush, sniffing the air, and held up his hand to warn Charbonneau, who was panting along behind him.

Charbonneau had asked to come hunting today in the hope that it would be easier than the ordeal of pulling the boats and canoes up through the rocky, muddy straits of the Missouri’s rapids. Hauling on tow ropes, on banks so mucky their moccasins were sucked off their feet, much of the time in fast, icy water as deep as their chests, through rapids that swamped the canoes and time and again nearly overset the pirogues, the men were nearly as crippled by the stony river bottom as they had been by the prickly pear thorns out on dry ground. Though these narrow bottomlands were glorious with flowering berry and currant bushes and delicate spring greenery, they were full of danger and misery: blowflies, mosquitoes, and rattlesnakes of springtime vying with rainstorms and snow squalls to torment them as they labored along. But Charbonneau was finding out that keeping up with Drouillard was not much easier. He stumbled to a halt behind him, wheezing and blowing.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
he gasped.

“Shh!” Drouillard warned.
“L’ours!”
Bear. He had smelled its barnlike odor; now he could hear its throaty breath. It was that close ahead, just upwind. But he couldn’t see it yet in the foliage. He pointed back down the trail, several quick jabs of his forefinger. Charbonneau, his face gone ash-gray, needed no encouragement to retreat. But instead of slipping quietly back, he turned and bolted, crashing through the shrubbery and kicking rocks as he went.

Drouillard cocked his rifle. The bear surely heard Charbonneau’s panicky rout.

It did. Above a cluster of blooming wild rose not ten yards away, the bear’s broad, pale brown face and shoulders rose into view, ears up, listening. Immediately it dropped out of sight with a coughing grunt, and the foliage shook as it came running.

Drouillard leaped to one side and scrambled a few feet out of
the bear’s path, then spun about, hoping for an instant’s clear shot at him in the open.

It tore past him at a distance of ten feet, looking as big and fast as a galloping horse. It didn’t see him, and was going down the trail after the sounds of Charbonneau’s flight. It would catch the Frenchman in moments. Drouillard yelled to warn him that the bear was coming, then ran after it.

Emerging into more open ground, he saw Charbonneau pelting along in full flight, the bear gaining on him. Charbonneau looked over his shoulder, saw his pursuer, fired his rifle straight up in the air, wasting its precious and crucial load, and sprinted toward a clump of brush with a leaning cottonwood tree in it.

Drouillard, catching up as fast as he could run, saw Charbonneau vanish into the thicket. The bear was about to go in after him.

Drouillard yelled, the war trill of his warrior ancestors. It fully captured the bear’s attention. The beast spun and stood up. It opened its great maw and roared its reply to his war cry.

This time there were no soldiers standing around with loaded rifles in reserve to riddle this bear from every direction. Charbonneau’s gun was empty and he was probably too distraught to reload it. It had to be this one load in Drouillard’s rifle, and the only shot likely to kill the bear was a perfect one in the head. He sighted on its red palate as it roared, and squeezed the trigger. Before the gunshot had echoed away down the valley and the powder smoke dispersed, he was already sprinting around to flank the bear, reloading as he ran. Then he stopped.

The grizzly had toppled and hit the ground. It moved no more.

It was ten minutes before Charbonneau, scratched all over the face by the brush, could stop shaking enough to get a load into his rifle. He kept praying in rapid French, the old familiar Black Robe prayers. Finally Drouillard interrupted and asked him why he had shot into the air.

“Je—Je ne sais pas
. I—I thought the noise would scare him.”

“Eh! Next time,
mon ami
, don’t try to scare the bears, eh? They are already annoyed.”

*     *     *

They found the boats that evening at a point opposite the mouth of a major river. The camp was in a pleasant, narrow bottomland covered with cottonwoods. The captains were perplexed. The Hidatsas had not mentioned any juncture of rivers here. The next landmark the Hidatsas had told them to expect was the great falling water of the Missouri, where they would have to get out of their boats and walk a half a day to get above the falls. But now here were these two rivers coming together, one coming from the west, turbid, the other from the south and seeming too clear to be the Missouri. The evening being cloudless, the captains set up instruments to read moon and stars, and determined to send canoe parties up both streams the next day to explore them and determine which was the Missouri.

The soldiers were grateful for this day of indecision. Their feet were so bruised and mangled they could hardly bear to stand up, let alone labor on over more rough ground. Here they could sit and limp around, dressing hides to make clothes to replace the tattered remnants of their cloth uniforms, and make moccasins with double soles to deflect the prickly pear spines. They could eat to nourish their strained, exhausted muscles and get the ice-water ache out of their bones and joints.

And they could speculate and bet on the choice of rivers. They smoked and talked with Pierre Cruzatte, the expert riverman. He thought the right-hand river was the Missouri, because it looked
like the same muddy water they had been on for more than a year, and the men were tending to side with him.

Drouillard, being much in the presence of the captains, found them leaning in favor of the south fork. “This is clear water,” Lewis argued. “This is water right down out of the mountains. And we’re almost in those mountains. And the Hidatsas said we’d make a heading southwest to reach the waterfalls.”

Captain Clark nodded, agreeing with those inferences, but kept wondering how the Hidatsas, as well as they knew this country, could have failed to mention a major river coming in on the starboard. “Every other landmark they told of has proven true,” he said. “I guess we won’t, can’t, be sure until we find the falls. I am almost sure they’re up this left-hand stream. And no more than seventy miles, at most.”

Drouillard sat fleshing the bear hide he had gotten yesterday, and cleaning the bear claws which would someday make a necklace, and as he worked he remembered his uncle Pierre Lorimier and how that man loved wagering. Lorimier had often said that one reason he loved the Shawnees was that they would bet on anything. After thinking on these things awhile, he scooted over to sit beside Charbonneau, who was just now cleaning the rifle he had fired into the air yesterday. Charbonneau beamed at his savior, and Bird Woman too looked up from the cradleboard she was making and smiled at him, quickly and shyly.

“Monsieur,” Drouillard began, speaking low in French, “you could do me a small favor.”

“Quelque chose!”
he replied. Anything!

“Will you ask your wife if she remembers whether she came from that way,” he pointed up the right-hand river, “or
that
way?” He could have asked her himself in sign, but did not want to be seen talking about this by those like Cruzatte and Lepage and Private Gibson, who could read a bit of signing.

“Mais oui, mon cher.”
Charbonneau spoke to her in Hidatsa. She raised her head, as if sniffing the air. She looked at each river, then squinted at the sun, which was just beginning to fade behind clouds. Then she looked down the Missouri in the direction from which they had come. Then she said something to her
husband, and pointed with her chin toward the south. Charbonneau said, “She was but a child then, but she feels her people were from that way, not the other.”

“Merci. Et vous, m’sieu
. When you were interpreting for Capitaine Clark at the fort, about rivers and falls and mountains … do you remember much of that?”

Charbonneau tilted his head and shrugged, his yellowed teeth bared in an embarrassed grin.
“Très peu
. It needed all my attention just to understand and change tongues. They spoke of so many rivers. I don’t remember. But,” he added, raising a finger, “those warriors come on horse, not boat. May be they miss some rivers? Eh?”

“Peut-etre. Merci, mon vieux.”

“Pas de quoi, mon cher ami!
Heh heh!”

Drouillard worked on his bear skin and thought of all that for a while. He thought of the hunting camps and war-party camps he had seen all along the way, some fresh, some old, all abandoned. They had seen not one Indian party since their encampments on the Yellow Stone River. Most of the traces along the north bank had been Assiniboine, those called Stone Eaters because they cooked by dropping heated stones in the cooking water. Lepage had remarked that the Hidatsa usually traveled south of the river to avoid such people as those, and the Blackfeet. These last few days the boats had traveled between steep stone riverbanks and white cliffs as vertical as walls and towers, but the river had turned from west to northwest, then abruptly southwest again. It made sense that warriors or hunters on horseback would continue straight west toward their destination in the mountains, and thus might never have seen this fork. That might explain why they had not told Captain Clark about it.

He got up and wandered through the camp to find Cruzatte, and knelt by him. “Pierre, old
camarade!
It is said you believe
that
is our river.”

“Oooh,
mais oui
. Everyone thinks so, except the
capitaines.”

“We will soon know, after a little exploration. But while there is still doubt—”

“There is no doubt,
ami
.”

“Then, while it is still undecided—would you care to wager on it?”

“Wager what?”

He shrugged. “Our evening whiskey ration for a month, perhaps?”

Cruzatte leaned back, peering at Drouillard through his merry eye. “Oh,
non
. Even though I am right, surely, I would not risk losing
that
. Perhaps, instead, ah, wages?” He rubbed his palms.

That was what Drouillard had hoped he would say. “Wages?”

“Oui
. When they pay us, back in St. Louis. Next year,
Dieu voulant.”

Drouillard cocked his head and pretended that he had not thought of such a thing. It was true that he had not had much thought of money lately, but if on his return he might gain even more than just his wages … “Perhaps. Tell me more.”

Cruzatte laughed. “Ah, friend! You’re too much with the officers. You believe what they say. But if you believe in that, you will bet on it, eh? Well, how much? Let us consider.…”

Since all the men believed with Cruzatte, Drouillard was able to go around and make small bets with half of them.

If he and the captains were right, he would have twice as much money as he had expected on his return. If the captains were wrong, he would have half as much.

He felt confident that he would be richer, and with all the others, he awaited the return of the scouting canoes with enhanced eagerness.

Five days later, after inconclusive reports from the two canoe parties, followed by scouting parties far up both branches, there was still no proof of which was the Missouri. Captain Clark had taken five men nearly sixty miles southwestward along the left branch and back in two days without finding the falls, while Captain Lewis with six, including Drouillard and Cruzatte, had made a strenuous four-day trek more than seventy-five miles up the other. These sorties were made in raw, rainy weather which turned the earth into a mud as slick as bear grease. Captain Lewis and Private Windsor one day had slipped and nearly fallen
to their deaths off a river cliff. During this trek the expert riverman Cruzatte convinced everyone—even Drouillard—that this river was still the Missouri. But he did not convince Captain Lewis.

They slogged on and on, sometimes in muddy water chest deep. Drouillard was now afraid that he had lost half his fortune by putting too much faith in these damned stubborn white captains.

But of course he could not rescind his bet on the other river, even though he had lost his faith in it.

A hard wind from the southwest was beating and whiffing around his ears. Yet there was another sound, something deeper under the wind, like far off thunder. But the vast plain was shimmering under midday sun; there was not a sign of a storm in any direction. The sky was unbroken, vast blue, with flights of vultures wheeling over the plains, and white-headed eagles whistling and swooping above, sometimes dropping out of sight as if into the earth. Drouillard could not see the river course, but knew it was off to the south of him, where the eagles dropped out of sight. The treeless plain stretched away fifty or sixty miles in every direction, the western and southern horizons edged with dazzling white mountaintops, and a few bold hills beyond the river in the southeast. Massed on the green, wind-whipped plain were dark herds of buffalo, countless hundreds or thousands of them, some tramping up clouds of gray dust that billowed downwind from them. For, despite the pale grass that looked so verdant at a distance, the ground was dry, harsh and scrabbly underfoot, yellow with the flowers of the ground-hugging prickly pear, now so thick that even with double-soled moccasins and a watchful step, sore, pierced feet were a part of every day’s discomforts along what Private Gibson had begun calling the “Misery River.”