Sign-Talker (42 page)

Any or all of those considerations might have made her feel she no longer belonged among her tribe. But probably the strongest reason she was still coming along was that the captains still needed her for a while.

Only she could talk fluently with old Toby, the one man who knew, or claimed he knew, the way through the terrible maze of these mountains.

He held his little mirror and tweezered out his chin hairs. Sergeant Pryor, whose face was all blond whiskers from the cheekbones down, said, “Drouillard, you’ll wish you left every hair on your face when it gets winter, which ain’t that far off, feels like.”

Whitehouse, nearby, said, “Him care ’bout cold? Him ’at takes a bath every morning even if he has to break ice? Damn fool Indian!”

Drouillard motioned toward Whitehouse with the mirror. “I can smell you coming a long way. Game have a better nose than mine. You like meat, so be glad your hunter rinses off.”

Whitehouse laughed. “I
am
glad. I’m glad that’s you in ice water of a morning, not me.”

Snow was ankle deep on the ground. The soldiers had been
without tents for weeks, as the canvas had rotted and been shredded by the winds on the plains. They slept crowded together under the ragged remains of boat sails and old tarpaulins and skins. The officers and their retinue stayed well sheltered in Charbonneau’s tepee, rigged with any available support. The surveying and navigating instruments, whose cases and boxes had become battered, were additionally wrapped in the skins of wolves killed along the way. The captains now shared Clark’s small desk, Lewis’s having been cached back by the Great Falls. Yesterday, rain had turned to sleet, and several more horses were hurt, slipping and falling down mountainsides. In one of those accidents their last thermometer was broken. The hunting had been so poor that supper consisted of nine grouse stewed with corn, a mere taste compared with the amount of meat these men were used to consuming. Drouillard had seen bighorn sheep, but too high and far to be shot or retrieved.

Private Frazier, who had been keeping a journal and making map sketches, complained about how much time and effort could have been saved if they had simply come straight over this way from the falls, instead of so far south and now back north. When Lewis got wind of it, he reminded everybody that the President’s orders were that the Missouri was to be explored and mapped to its head. It had also been necessary to get Shoshone horses, which could only have occurred where it did. That closed that discussion.

Still, the soldiers needed something to grumble about, so they began lamenting that so much of the tobacco had been left in the caches to lighten the loads. Almost all the men were addicted to smoking or chewing it, and the supply dwindled fast. The prospect of being without tobacco as well as liquor was dreadful. Drouillard had been showing them several plants the Indians used to stretch their tobacco into kinnikinnick, such as red willow bark, sage, and wood punk. “You’ll be used to kinnikinnick by the time you run clear out of tobacco,” he said, “and hardly miss tobacco at all.” His solution didn’t interest them much; they
needed
to complain. Fortunately, as always, they had miseries aplenty. This morning the men moved about aching and
shivering, hugging themselves, their breath clouding, and as usual making the crazy-head sign when they saw Drouillard go down to the edge of the fast water, naked, and wade in. It was so cold he could not breathe, only gasp, and many minutes in this water would have made his bones ache for the rest of the day, so he didn’t stay in long.

Whitehouse shivered and shook his head. “I got bone-chill enough when I was pullin’ those damn canoes. S’cuse me, Drouillard, I just cain’t bear to watch y’ do that!”

“I’ll bring you a deer for supper,” Drouillard gasped. “You’ll be glad your hunter doesn’t smell like you!”

Two years ago Whitehouse would have torn into him as a cheeky redskin for talking that way to a whiteman. Things sure had changed since then. Nowadays they didn’t even brawl among themselves, or call York a nigger. Out here in the wilderness they were getting almost civilized.

Drouillard found fresh hoofprints and moccasin tracks. One man had stood here in the snow, dismounted, watched from a thicket, then left, recently. Drouillard checked his flintlock and rode forward, sniffing and scanning. A raven was gurgling and croaking not far ahead. Near it, he thought he saw something of a buckskin color retreating through the bush. When he got to that spot, there were the fresh prints again, the scent of horse still in the air.

Someone was spying on their approach and withdrawing as they came. When the captains caught up, he told them. They concluded that any Indians in this vicinity probably were Flatheads—the tribe the Shoshones were planning to meet down at the three forks for their fall buffalo hunt.

Now the valley broadened to open their view on sloping ground with copses of evergreens, like a wide bowl ringed by snowy mountains, easier travel for the limping horses and footsore soldiers. As they rode along the bold stream, Lewis proposed naming it Clark’s River, since he had been the first to come upon it. Old Toby and Bird Woman were chatting cheerfully as the guide walked alongside the packhorse she was riding. She rode balanced atop the packsaddle, wrapped in a blanket that sheltered also the cradleboard on her back. Her baby, seven months old now, seldom cried. He slept, or rode with calm, dark-eyed curiosity through magnificent landscapes. When released from the confining cradleboard, he was always eager to kick up his fat legs and wave and reach, coo and laugh, and was most lively when he heard any kind of music, the singing of men or the squeak of the fiddle. Captain Clark had nicknamed him Pomp the Dancing Boy.

Drouillard now saw several sets of hoofprints in the snow and soft ground, so he quickened his pace and went out ahead, swinging eastward away from the river toward pine timber, to have some cover as he studied the valley ahead.

He smelled wood smoke.

He rode among the pines and passed through, and when he came through to the other side, saw smoke hazing the dark pines of the distance, then the source of the smoke: tepee lodges, about thirty of them, beside the river and in the path of the oncoming soldiers. People were milling about on the near side of the camp, mostly men with lances and shields, some mounted, others holding horses by their bridles. Whoever had been watching the soldiers come had alerted the community, but for some reason the warriors had not ridden out yet.

So Drouillard rode his horse out of the pines straight down toward the camp with his hand up and two fingers together in the Friend or Brother sign. This would be better than running back to tell the captains, he thought; doing that, he would look like a war scout going to give a warning. As he came out from the pines, he saw their horse herd on a grassy bottom beyond the camp, and there were hundreds.

Just then someone saw him coming and yelled, and four mounted men broke from the crowd and rode toward him at a trot.

They were dressed in beautifully tanned skins and robes, and their horses were superior. All the men wore their hair neatly plaited, with the braids wrapped in otter skins and hanging forward on both shoulders. They were gaunt like the hungry Shoshones, but did not seem timid or suspicious. The gray-haired rider in front returned Drouillard’s peace sign.

They talked by hands without dismounting. The old one said he was glad the strange men were coming in peace. He had been watching them come and had seen a man among them with his face blackened, as for war. But he had seen that they had a woman with them, unlike a war party. The old man was Three Eagles, a chief. He called his people Ootlashoots; some tribes called them Flatheads. Drouillard told him that the people behind him were whitemen who were going to see the ocean, that they sought friendship with all peoples, and had recently been with the Shoshones. He said they would want to camp here because of the lateness of the day, and smoke and talk. That they gave gifts to express their desire for friendship.

When the soldiers came down, a crowd rushed out to meet them. Many put robes over the whitemen’s shoulders; it was presumed they must be cold, because they were so pale.

Neither Bird Woman nor Toby spoke the gurgling, throaty language of these people, and it appeared that Drouillard might have to sign-talk everything. But living among these people was a bright Shoshone boy who was fluent in both tongues. He translated the Flatheads’ words into Shoshone; Bird Woman translated Shoshone into Hidatsa; Charbonneau translated Hidatsa into French, which Labiche translated into English for the captains. That process was reversed as the captains explained their mission and trade prospects, offered gifts and medals, and swapped for more and better horses. It gave Drouillard time to go and hunt, as the Indians had nothing but dried berries and roots to share with their guests. He brought in a deer toward evening, which was stewed and gave at least a taste of meat to many hungry people, Indian and white. By then the captains had obtained three colts for emergency eating, and enough good horses to bring the number of pack animals to forty—enough to carry all the packsaddles, with a few relief horses, and to allow four hunters to go out mounted all the time.

Neither group could linger. The tribe was running late for its buffalo-hunting rendezvous with the Shoshones. The whitemen needed to get through the mountains westward before too much snow fell. Some of the Flatheads said the trek across the mountains could be made in five sleeps.

Five days travel had become ten, and there was still no sign of an end to the mountains. They had gone four days northward just to reach a creek that came down from the pass they were seeking, then two days up that creek on a brutally rough climbing trail often blocked by fallen trees, camping at night on slopes so steep there was no level place to lie down, and barely enough grass to keep the horses going. They had seen stone circles and charred wood from old Indian camps, which Toby said were former Nez Perce camps, evidence that they were now on that tribe’s trail over the mountains. Near the crest of the pass was a plume of steam, rising from a spring whose water was so hot it was painful to hold a finger in it a second. Several paths led to this spring, and a rock dam had been built below to form a bathing pool. A few miles farther up they had crested the divide to stand in the wind and look at an endless array of towering, snow-topped peaks thickly clothed with evergreen timber on their slopes. The next day Toby had taken a wrong turn and led them down to a clear, shallow creek rushing over round, many-colored cobbles and boulders, where the discovery of fishing weirs showed him that he had chosen a fish-camp trail instead of the correct route.

In that steep-sided valley amidst gloomy forests of pine, spruce, and fir, wet and chilled by rain and hail, with no fresh meat, losing faith in their guide, they had killed and butchered a colt for meat to supplement the moldy “portable soup,” made
of dried vegetables, carried from the East in tin boxes and more than two years old. They named a branch creek near that wretched camp Colt Killed Creek, then set out the next morning to climb several miles up a steep, rocky, deadwood-strewn switchback trail to regain the Indian road at the ridge, a climb that took all day and ruined two of the packhorses, which had to be abandoned. Other horses had tumbled unhurt down the mountainside, one such accident smashing Captain Clark’s portable desk. On regaining the snow-covered trail atop the mountain that night, they found no water, and had to melt snow for boiling the last of the colt meat.

The next morning they all awakened nearly chilled to death and found themselves covered with snow that had fallen before daybreak. Drouillard had watched with pity as the soldiers, who had no socks, wrapped their benumbed feet in rags and pulled their frozen moccasins on over them. There was no game to be found on this snowy mountain, and the Indian path had become so filled in with snow that sometimes it could be discerned only by finding trees that had been worn and rubbed by the Indians’ packsaddles in past migrations.

By the middle of the month they were on steep mountainsides whose thick pine forests were so laden with snow that the passing pack train was constantly covered with wet snow that cascaded from the branches upon them. The air was frigid, their clothes and thin moccasins soaked, and the fear of slipping down steep slopes kept them so tense that they were doubly fatigued at every day’s end. Then there was no level place to sleep. Visibility was poor, either because it snowed or because the mountaintops they traveled were in the clouds. More horses fell and were injured. On several days, the departure from camp had been delayed because of strayed packhorses. It seemed to Drouillard that he spent almost as much time hunting for horses as for game.