Sign-Talker (43 page)

By September 18 the third and last colt had been devoured. Game was so scarce that the hunters had not fired their rifles for days. The reconstituted soup gave no strength; the men were gaunt, losing flesh visibly, plagued with dysentery and skin
eruptions, and were finally becoming drained of spirit. Provisions had been depleted to a few more canisters of the soup, a very little bear oil, and about twenty pounds of tallow candles. Some of the men were already gnawing their candles, which, though tasteless, helped their craving for fat to stoke their ever-chilled bodies. Drouillard, though more accustomed to cold and fasting than the others, found his hands going so shaky he wondered whether he could hit an animal if he ever saw one to shoot. Some of the soldiers, remembering the old guide’s mistake on the divide, feared that he had gotten them permanently lost. But Toby confidently asserted that they were still on the Nez Perce trail and would soon be descending into a rich lowland where everyone could eat well.

They awoke before daybreak famished and shaky. Reubin Field and John Shields blinked dumbly around in the firelight, all their hunter keenness gone. Their eyes were so hollowed and dark the men looked like skulls with whiskers. As morning dusk lightened the snowy copse, they looked around in vain for even a grouse to shoot. There was nothing.

The seven men mounted at daylight and clambered back up the rocky banks of Hungery Creek to regain the high trail. After about six miles without a sight of game, they entered a long glade full of snow. Drouillard rode shivering, yearning for the lowland plain they had seen yesterday from a mountaintop, afraid it might have been just a vision. Captain Lewis and the
main party by now might have reached the height of that mountain from which the plains were visible. Drouillard imagined old Toby pointing down at it and smiling in the face of his doubters, proving that an Indian can be right. He hoped they had seen it by now; if not, their hope might be dead.

To his left, motion: snow cascading off the branches of a pine. Then in all that white snow and dark evergreen he saw a tiny spot of reddish-brown, like an animal’s hair. With cold-numbed fingers he readied his rifle and focused on the place. The animal must have brushed the tree and shaken loose the snow. He veered toward it, rounding a thicket, and saw it: a gaunt horse in shaggy winter coat, pawing snow, seeking grass, unaware of his presence. But then his own mount saw it and whickered. The wild one, a stray perhaps, raised its head and pricked up its ears, and came wading through deep snow to investigate. Drouillard heard Reubin say, “Horse meat, Cap’n!”

“Shoot it, then,” Clark said.

The horse heard the voices and shied. Drouillard and Reubin fired at the same instant. With a grunting sound the horse fell kicking in the snow, and went still.

The horse meat was lean but not poor. The anticipation of meat was almost unbearable. While Collins and Colter were butchering the horse, Drouillard rode out in one direction, Shields and Field in others, hunting for other horses or any game. Captain Clark was hoping that with this horse meat and a fair quantity of anything else, his hunters could turn back toward the main party and feed them today.

But there was not even a track of anything else, so Clark decided to hang the major portion of the horse carcass up out of the reach of wolves, where the main party would find it by the trail, and keep hunting down toward the plain. As the meat was broiled and served around, Drouillard saw some of the men shut their eyes and move their lips. Praying, in this expedition, was an individual matter. Lewis, like his president, didn’t believe in a god who listened or intervened, so he neither encouraged nor discouraged prayer. Clark seemed to believe, but the captains never disputed over it. Lewis claimed that man’s reason was sufficient
to guide him. Lewis sometimes talked to Clark about what seemed to be a sort of brotherhood or clan of principled men everywhere in the world who were called “Masons.” Lewis was extremely proud to be one of them and told Clark that he should become one when he returned to civilization. Those in that brotherhood, he said, always knew what was right, so Drouillard figured that would be just the thing for Captain Lewis.

Drouillard, in the manner of his people after a long hunger, put his first morsel of meat into the fire as thanks to the protecting spirit. He was salivating like a wolf as he put the meat in his mouth, and as he chewed he kept thanking the horse for its body and the protecting spirit for guiding the horse to this place.

They went from dank cold to dry heat, from mottled boulders and gray cliffs to level prairies of short grass and open pine glades, all in a few hours of descending from that last terrible mountain. They had made it at last through the inhospitable maze of the Rocky, or Shining, Mountains. Drouillard looked back at the rocky ridge they had descended, seeing how a river came around each side of the mountain to join here in the gentle lowland. He had ranged in prairies and wooded hills and along creeks and rivers all his adult life as a hunter, seldom confused by stream courses or the lie of the land, but in those mountains he had been disoriented as never before. He had memorized as
well as he could every knob and cliff and chasm, with as much detailed concentration as Captain Clark used in his measurements and maps. Always, if Drouillard had come by a way, he could go back by it. But there was something that had shaken him in those mountains. Rivers and roaring creeks zigzagged through the cold canyons with no apparent regard for the Creator’s rules of water flow. In that precipitous maze he had sometimes had to steady himself to keep from believing that a rapid rushing downhill had reversed its flow while his back was turned and started running uphill. Water rushed everywhere at the feet of those mountains, and it was hard to tell whether you were crossing five different streams in a day or the same one five times.

While he was looking back at that wall of mountains, he heard Reubin Field say, “Lookee, Cap’n! Young’uns!”

Three Indian boys had just seen them, turned, scattered, and hid in the grass. Captain Clark said, “Don’t want them to alarm their people. Reubin, take my gun.” The captain turned and fumbled into his saddlebag. He brought out short pieces of bright ribbon. Dismounting, he walked out into the grass, holding up the ribbons with one hand, making the Friend sign with the other. He came upon two of the cowering boys and urged them to stand up. Smiling, he gave them the pretty ribbons. Then he signed to them,
Go. Say friend men come
. The boys, eight years old perhaps, looked at the ribbons, looked at the big, red-haired, blue-eyed creature before them, their expressions a mixture of fear and fascination, and ran. Clark mounted and they followed the boys at a walk. Beyond the pines they saw a camp, twenty or thirty tepee lodges of various sizes, covered not with hide but with rush or reed mats, situated in a pleasant bottomland, mostly overgrown with the slender leaves of a plant that looked like wild onion. As they rode toward the camp they saw trampled areas and large piles of bulbous roots.

“Wonder if those are good,” Collins said. “I’m pretty damn hungry.”

“Here comes a man out,” the captain said. “I reckon we’re about to meet the Nez Perce at last.”

“Hope we don’t scare him away,” Colter said. “We look like the league o’ death.”

It was true. Scrawny, sunken-eyed, hair and beards in filthy disarray, skin and ragged clothing smudged from resin-pine campfires, they looked like skeletons raked out of a pyre.

“Now, Drouillard,” Clark said, “tell him about us.”

Drouillard bent nearly double with the pain in his gut. But he straightened up quickly because the gassy swelling of his stomach squeezed his lungs and he could scarcely breathe. The bulbs harvested by these people were delicious and plentiful, and the natives had been generous with them. Captain Clark and his hunters, ravenous after their descent from the mountains, had stuffed themselves. They had eaten the roots steamed, and eaten them dried. They had eaten a delicious sweet bread whose main ingredient was a flour made from the dried roots. And the Nez Perce women had also served them dried berries and dried salmon.

Then the hunters went out for meat to send back to Lewis in the mountains, but found no game. So Clark scraped together all the goods and trinkets he had in his saddlebags and pockets, and traded them for a packhorse load of dried roots and salmon.

With a young Nez Perce as a guide, Reubin Field was sent back up the mountain trail to meet the others with the load of food.

After that had been sent, the recent meal began to take effect. The men swelled up and belched. Then they began farting like buglers, but in the middle of their noisome serenade they suddenly were spewing and scouring. They flinched with cramps and stabbing pains.

Drouillard hurried down to the stream to purge and clean himself in the way his mother had taught him, inside and out. He stripped, rinsed his filthy clothing, and scrubbed his body with sand. Then he went upstream a few yards, spread his clothes in the sun, ignoring the scores of curious women and children, went into the water and drank from his cupped hands. He drank
until he could drink no more. Then he stooped and gagged himself until he had emptied his stomach, drank his fill again and expelled it again. Then once more. The water was cold and he was trembling and wretched, and would have been embarrassed by all the public attention had he let himself care about it. But he knew it was more important to purge himself, because he could not afford to be sick. He thought there was something going on among these people, and he would have to be well and alert. He stood naked in the sun sluicing water off his body and limbs with the edges of his hands, noticing that he had never been this spare; every vein, cord, and sinew of his arms and legs was as visible as if he had been flayed. He would need to eat to restore his strength, but could not eat, as he and the others just had, too much at once. They had been eating nothing but meat for months, and then had nearly starved, then eaten a great amount of something too different. That had made the gassy swelling, he thought. But the rest, the spewing and scouring: when he had eaten the salmon, his nose had warned him it might be too old. Sometimes one had to eat meat that was not fresh; he was used to that. But this had been fish, old dried fish, and had he not been so famished, he would not have eaten it.

Captain Clark was now visiting with one of the headmen, and was so swollen and sick he could hardly breathe, but was pretending to be well. Clark needed to purge himself the Indian way. So did the rest of the hunters. They were all so sick they could hardly walk or ride. They were helpless. They needed to be well, because something might happen.

The Nez Perce, who called themselves Ni Mi Pu, or True People, were generous, and seemed to be fascinated by the whitemen and eager to help them. They said they had heard of whitemen, by word from the tribes far down the Columbia who had met whitemen on big trading boats. But these were the first they’d seen. The Indians hung around and watched the whitemen, but Drouillard smelled nervous fear on them. It was something down deep that was troubling them. Not witchcraft; it was not anything like that. It was more like the fear of not knowing what to do. One minute a crowd would be following the red-haired
captain along, joyously admiring him. Then something would make them draw back, even run away.

For one thing, their chief, Broken Arm, was not here. He was away raiding enemies far in the southwest. Few men of warrior age were here, just boys and older men, and many women who had come to harvest the great quantities of roots. Sometimes when Drouillard would look up and around from his hand-signing with the old men, he would see men looking at the captain darkly.

The one person among these Nez Perce who had seen whitemen, and in fact had known them well, was a respected elder woman, Watkuweis. When she was young she had been captured by enemies in the north and treated badly. Then she had come into the care of whitemen traders in Canada who had treated her well. Drouillard had watched her during the talks. She looked favorably on the captain but was nervous. She stayed nearby while Clark talked with a sturdy and friendly old chief whose name was Twisted Hair. Clark had learned to talk fairly well with his hands, but he was usually so busy thinking of his own next signals that he missed things. So Drouillard stayed with him most of the time to help.

Twisted Hair said the Nez Perce were expecting whitemen to come, and were not surprised when they came down off the mountains. They’d had foreknowledge of it. Captain Clark presumed they were claiming some kind of a vision. “Indians often pretend that they knew something was going to happen,” Captain Clark told his men.

Oh yes, Drouillard thought, superstitious savages.