Sign-Talker (47 page)

“Hams, was it?” said Reubin. “Smelt more like fish t’me, when them ladies was squattin’ ’round here.”

“Still does,” Drouillard said.

“Yeah, but I mean to say you know what I mean to say.”

Joe Field looked upriver into the darkness. Stars were brilliant and the great river rushed by. “Tell ye,” he said, “I don’t know whether I’m glad them ladies went home or wish they’d stayed. Y’ have to admit, they ain’t very perty. It was all I could do to git up a cockstand. But it’s like John said, when y’ ain’t had ham for so long … Those other women, up the river, was a lot better looking, but I was too sick to give ’em a passing hard-on.”

“Passin’, yeah. Passin’ gas,” Reubin said.

“But now these,” Joe went on. “Frankly, they’re ugly. They smile and it’s just gums. But when they just willingly show you a half-acre o’ hams …”

“You al’ays liked fat women, Joe,” Reubin said with a snort.

Drouillard raised his nose to the wind. He was sorting out odors. And he was remembering some things he thought these people had said in sign. He said, “I’ve been wondering how they could eat all the fish they take out o’ this river. I even saw ’em
scoopin’ up the dead ones. Tell you something I just figured out. I think they eat some, trade some, and the dead ones I bet they just dry them and burn them for fuel, since there’s no wood anywhere.”

This had drawn the men’s thoughts away from those other yearnings. “Burn?” Reubin said.

Drouillard was remembering all the uses the plains Indians made of their buffalo. He remembered the grassy, smoky smell of dried buffalo dung burning on a campfire. “Think of all the oil in a salmon. Look.” He produced a small slab of the dried fish from his shoulder bag, tore a strip off the edge and leaned forward to touch it to the flames. It caught and burned like a candlewick.

It was the same odor as on the night breeze over the river.

Gifts from the Creator, he thought.

Drouillard listened to Captain Lewis venting his indignation about the bad fish “those wretches” had tried to sell, and smiled and shook his head. He was pretty certain they had meant to sell it as fuel, not food. But Lewis seemed to enjoy being contemptuous of Indians and scornful of their ways, whether he understood them or not. Whiteman has to look down his nose at somebody, Drouillard reminded himself. So he said nothing about it, and steered down the curving course of the great river toward the sea.

Drouillard at day’s first light took off his clothes and waded into the cold river, taking the clothes with him. It was the only way to keep from being overwhelmed by the fleas. The soldiers didn’t bathe or rinse their clothes in the mornings, so they had more and more fleas every day, and complained, and scratched, and slept poorly.

He went down into the clear water over his head and scrubbed at his scalp with his fingernails and then around his genitals and under his arms. Then he stood in the shallows and scrubbed at the seams of his deer-hide shirt and leggings, and worked his loincloth back and forth over a rock, rinsed it again and wrung it out. He got on shore to wring out the rest of his clothes, which he would have to wear damp and clammy until they dried from the exertions of the day and the desert air. He saw that Indians from the fishing villages were already gathering along the riverbank in the early light to go and watch the soldier camp. Some of them were watching him.

Standing naked in the cold air, he braided his hair into a queue at the back, then signaled to the Indians,
Day sunrise good
, a morning greeting. Some answered with hand signs, others with cheerful voices. His greeting would be about all the cheer they would get. The captains and soldiers were grouchy because of the fleas, which they blamed on the Indians, and because the
Indians were always around watching the camp and picking up untended articles.

Drouillard put on his wet clothes and climbed the riverbank. He watched the sky fill with pale light above the stark, craggy canyon walls. Looking downstream he saw, ghostly in this early light, one of the faraway, snow-topped mountains that could be seen before them sometimes even from the canoes, depending on the course of the Columbia between its cliffs. The captains called one of the mountains Mount St. Helens and another Mount Hood, names given them by a ship captain who had seen them years ago. The Columbia River, they said, was named after an American ship that had charted its mouth thirteen years ago. The mountains had been named by an English captain who had sailed a distance up the river from the Pacific later the same year. This meant, as Lewis liked to say, they were at last reentering the known world. Even before they left the Mississippi, they knew they would eventually see these mountains, and now they saw them.

The captains were impatient. Everyone was sick of salmon and more salmon, and some were even getting tired of dog meat. The fishing places all along this river were piled with unbelievable quantities of dried salmon, in stacks, in baskets, buried in lined pits. The ground at those places was littered with fish skins. The riverbanks were strewn with dead fish, which drew countless pelicans and ravens. At the rapids, salmon jumped out of the water to get above, sometimes almost leaping into the canoes. In deep water, the river was so clear that salmon could be seen swimming twenty feet below the canoes.

The salmon were an encouragement to the captains. They felt that if salmon could come up from the ocean, the waterfalls must be only a few feet high, nothing like those on the Missouri that had required weeks of portage.

As Drouillard went up the riverbank toward the camp, he was greeted with toothless smiles by some of the Indians. He had hardly ever known a toothless Indian of any age, but by middle age many of these salmon-eaters were. Clark guessed their teeth were worn down to the gums by grit from stones with which they
pounded their dried fish and roots, and also perhaps by the considerable amount of fish scale they took in with their salmon. That seemed likely. Drouillard had ground his own teeth on plenty of grit and scale lately.

He had also known very few fat Indians; Big White the Mandan chief had been one. But many of these river Indians were thick in girth, with chubby faces and thick legs, and jowls that quaked when they walked. They were a slow-moving people; only youngsters were quick. Some of the women had so much fat on their lower bodies that their little crotch thongs were invisible within the folds of flesh. He wondered if they were fat because there was so much food all the time and they scarcely had to exert themselves to obtain it.

These unattractive characteristics only increased the disdain the captains felt for them, much of which was due to their “thieving” tendencies and their intrusiveness about the camp. Drouillard sometimes seethed when Captain Lewis complained about their intrusiveness, he who had come uninvited into their country. All the soldiers, irritated by fleas and flies, vented their wrath in ferocious language about the “filthy Indians.” Drouillard had observed that the Indians bathed more and stank less than the soldiers. But their living environs were so permeated with fish and fish waste that the people must be helpless against the fleas and flies. It seemed as if fleas lived even in the ground and in the poles and mats of the lodge-houses. He knew that merely by sleeping on the ground in this land, he got fleas. The only way these people could get rid of fleas would be by moving away. And they couldn’t do that. They were salmon people and always had been here. How could they even imagine life without fleas? And their ancestors were here, buried on islands in family or community graves surrounded by picket fences and covered by wooden houses and elaborately carved canoes. The captains had stopped and examined many such burial places, poking about, making notes for Jefferson. Drouillard stayed back, as he had last year at the hill of the little devils. There were countless skulls, and signs of even older burials. These people must have been here since the Beginning Times; thus they had become the
way they were. It mattered little, Drouillard thought, if these whitemen coming through found them disagreeable.

By the next day they were out of the desert. Mountains and cliffs rose high on either side of the river, and high up there were trees. Moisture and the scents of greenery were on the cool breeze, vaguely detectable even through the pervasive smell of fish. The gorge of the Columbia was deep. It appeared to have bored its way through a mountain range; in some places it was half blocked by huge boulders as if whole cliffs had fallen in. They ran through fast, roaring channels, skillfully avoiding boulders as big as houses. The long canoes were clumsy to steer, but they had become skillful, confident that if they had a foot of water under the hull and two feet of paddling space on either side, they could go anywhere. They swept by Indians fishing on flimsy pole scaffolds and in graceful, wide-bottomed canoes. They swept by the mouths of spectacular little rivers that fell into the Columbia on the south side through steep canyons. They passed big fishing towns that appeared to be permanent, not seasonal, nestled on picturesque rock ledges. They saw smoke drifting over the villages and sniffed the welcome odor of real wood smoke, tangy and piney.

Now Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee were tense and alert, and suddenly the old chief signaled toward the right bank, almost frantically.

And up the high-walled gorge rolled a sound deeper than the familiar rush of river and rapid: that familiar roar of a waterfall.
Ahead a mile or so the broad river appeared to end at a wall of rock, and from beyond it rose a mist. Near the head of a rock ledge the five canoes were brought to shore on a rocky beach, above which a large village perched on a high, straight ledge. Behind that ledge rose high hills that dwarfed the town, echoing and magnifying the booming roar of the falling water.

This was the great waterfall the Nez Perce had been telling of for days, at the village of the Eneeshur nation. Here they would have to get out and carry everything.

They walked out, exploring a huge island of rock cut through by several narrow channels of racing water. Toward the other bank lay another rock island of about a quarter mile in length. A cascade of five steps thundered between the two islands, falling perhaps forty feet in a beaten, greenish-white froth. Drouillard felt the water force through the solid rock beneath his moccasins and inhaled deeply of the fresh wet air, his face up into the refreshing mist. His spirits were higher than they had been for days. What a place this was to see: cliffs, mossy rock, pure water churning, mist full of sunlight, eagles, pelicans, cormorants against a blue sky straight overhead, dizzying to watch. And by facing a particular way he could see no whitemen.

The carry path was a little more than half a mile, along the north bank, down to a little cove around the bend, and the Eneeshurs had a few horses for hire to carry the bundles of goods. There the bundles were set under guard and the corps camped. The next day Clark took the canoes upriver a way and then brought them down and landed on a rock bank just above the sheer pitch of the falls on the south side of the river. Most of the men were needed to carry the water-soaked vessels down a dry channel about a third of a mile to emerge below the main pitch of the falls. Unfortunately, that portage channel was a sun-warmed trough of silt and fish skins and rotting vegetation, putrid and infested with so many fleas that the men were covered instantly. Below this portage remained a fall of eight feet, down which the canoes had to be lowered by ropes. All the men took off their clothes and did this work in the water to wash off the fleas. The natives gathered on high banks and ledges on both
sides to amuse themselves with the sight of the naked, white-skinned men shouting and easing their long log canoes down through white water. An elk-skin rope broke when one of the canoes was being let down, the men shouted and the vessel bobbed and floated loose below, but some Eneeshur fishermen in their canoes rounded it up, and it cost the captains a bit of merchandise for their trouble.

That evening Captain Lewis traded for one of the finely crafted native vessels, giving the little pilot canoe, a hatchet, and some trinkets for it. Eight dogs were purchased for food. The men rinsed as many fleas out of their clothes as they could, and settled down for a tired camp with real wood to burn and the thunder of the vanquished falls behind them.

The next morning, the Nez Perce chiefs wanted to leave and go home. They explained in sign language that the people below the falls—the Chinooks—had a different kind of language and were not friendly to the Nez Perce. They expected that they would be killed if they went on down.

But Captain Lewis was not through with them yet. The next falls, near below, they had said were very dangerous, and he wanted their help in approaching them.

And the captain had not forgotten his peacemaking mission. If the people below were hostile, that should be changed.

No, they said. They wanted the goods that had been promised them for their services to this place, and they wanted to go home.