Sign-Talker (49 page)

The map was a copy of one made in 1792 by a British captain, named Vancouver. It showed where an anchorage was supposed to lie in the river’s mouth on this northern bank. If there were any ships in the vicinity, they would likely be there. And just over the outer arm of that bay lay the ocean itself, that ocean so close yet so maddeningly unreachable. “Are you ready to see the ocean?” Lewis asked. They were indeed. “We’ll set out on foot in the morning,” he said.

The bay had not a sign of a ship in it, and Indians they met said there had been no ships for a long time. The rain stopped and started as they marched with squishing steps through the marshy ground on the bay’s north side. They swam across the mouth of a small river, floating their rifles and knapsacks on a raft of bundled driftwood, climbed a long, rocky eminence on the west side of the bay, and headed south toward the point. Captain Lewis said this place was called Cape Disappointment, because
a British sea captain in 1788 had wrongly concluded that no major river met the ocean here. The captain laughed as he told that story; he hated the English and enjoyed telling of their mistakes and failures.

The sky was clearing. From over the ridge came a deep, regular sound, like the breathing of a giant. A shadow passed over the scrubby ground before them and they looked up to see a huge, buzzardlike bird soaring on the wind, its wings appearing to be ten feet from tip to tip. “Let’s go over,” the captain shouted in the wind. They climbed a rocky hill, which was almost bald except for long grass blowing, and came over the crest. The deep, rolling sound now burst upon their ears unmuffled, a hissing boom, a long roar, then another hissing boom, and they looked down over the seaward side to illimitable gray-green water. The horizons were lost in spume and mist, but beams of sunshine illuminated vast areas to the southwest. Below the cape the high waves came marching shoreward, curling, white-topped, to burst against the rocks below, sending towers of white water straight up to dissipate in the onshore wind and fall seething away, followed momentarily by the burst of the next wave.

There was nothing to say. They had all seen immense wonders beyond imagination in these two years, and should have been immune to amazement by now. For the first time the other side of the Columbia’s mouth could be seen, faintly, perhaps five miles to the south, all wooded lowlands and dun-colored expanses of sand. Eastward across the bay the Columbia was full of such a maze of islands and points that the river course was hard to distinguish. A sea captain easily might have presumed it was just an inlet, not a river.

George Drouillard stood in the wind and the noise watching the light play over the endless water. This was the last edge of the land known as Turtle Island by his own people. Once, the Shawnees had lived on the eastern coast, the Atlantic, but they had been pushed away from there a hundred years ago. Drouillard had never seen an ocean until now. Probably no other
Shawnee had ever seen this one, and it was unlikely that any ever would, unless somehow they got on ships.

He thought far back. Two years ago it was that he had met the captains and they asked him to come with them to this ocean, and he had almost said no. Then he had heard the songs of the Ancient Ones and decided to come. Now he was here where they had promised they would come to; he had often had good reason to doubt that they would get here, but here they were. He looked at Lewis, that strange, hard, troubled man. The captain was standing silent looking out, and Drouillard had a notion that he was thinking as much about Jefferson as about his own feelings.

Drouillard reached into his pouch and got sacred tobacco. He crumbled some between his thumb and fingers and turned in a circle, kneeling in each of the four directions to sprinkle some on the ground. This was a time to pray, and so he prayed with the wind beating against him and the ocean booming in his head. He stood with the whitemen behind him so he couldn’t see them and imagined himself an Indian alone.

The sun was actually shining. For the first time in weeks here was a chance to break out the instruments and make observations at this culmination point of their journey. The men in the meantime spread the wet cargoes and bedding out to dry.

Drouillard took five hunters and set out into the rough hills, but found virtually no sign of deer or elk. They shot one goose, a brant, and that was all they brought in after a full day’s hunt.

He reported to the captains that the party would starve if they tried to spend the winter here. “Not even nibblings,” he said. “There hasn’t been any game here for a long time.”

During the day some Chinooks had come from their villages to the north with a sea otter skin and a little food to trade, and
that had been a disheartening experience. These Indians had been dealing with ship merchants for several years and had learned the art of overpricing. They had seen all kind of whitemen’s goods, and were not impressed by the dwindling store of tarnished, moldy, water-damaged goods the corps could produce. The only thing they seemed to want badly was blue beads, not red ones or white ones but blue ones, and there were precious few of those left. Bird Woman a few days earlier had given up her most cherished possession, a belt of blue beads from her waist, so the captains could trade it for an otter-skin robe.

The captains and the men soon built up a seething dislike for these Chinooks, not just for their avarice in trade but also because of their thievery. In every one of their few encounters with them so far, they had caught them stealing or trying to steal something or other, and Captain Lewis had put the word out that the next Chinook who tried to steal a rifle would be shot instantly. That condition was declared to every Chinook who came to visit.

So there was no game here on the north bank of the Columbia, no evident place for winter shelter, and surely no chance of being able to afford food bought from the Chinooks at their prices. And yet the captains wanted to stay close by the mouth of the Columbia, in hopes that ships would come.

The soldiers, after their initial satisfaction in having reached the Pacific Ocean, were sick of this place. Here they had suffered three weeks of incessant rains and gales, seasickness, a short-ration diet of rancid, moldy fish-pulp, infestations of fleas, sodden clothes and bedding, and the proximity of the most disagreeable Indians they had seen since the Sioux. To order them to stay in these circumstances through a whole winter against their will, just in the wan hope of seeing a ship, might well undermine their morale and even lead to mutiny. Drouillard had a quiet discussion with the captains. He and his hunters recommended a return up to the falls, where they had seen signs of more varied game, where a man could wear dry clothes, and where the Indians had inexhaustible stores of good fish and would sell it cheap.

“No,” Captain Lewis argued. “There will be ships. I have the President’s letter of credit. It will buy us provisions, or enough goods to trade for food even with these greedy Indians. And a ship could take word back to the States that we’re alive and well. And all our reports to Mr. Jefferson. I want him to know that I’ve done what he sent me to do! If we don’t get back, no one will ever know we got here! Do you think anybody back there imagines we’re still alive?”

Captain Clark was in agreement about staying near the coast in expectation of meeting a ship, but he believed that living near the sea was not healthful. He was in favor of exploring the other shore of the Columbia. Some of the Indians had said elk lived in the woods over there. “If there are elk there, we can live there. If there are elk, we can make clothes and moccasins. In those woods we can build shelter from this damned sea wind but still be near if ships come.”

“Unless it gets colder than this, Cap’n, meat won’t keep,” Drouillard said. “We’ll need a smokehouse. If we jerk elk meat, we’ll have to do it over fire. Nothing will dry here.”

“Salt,” Captain Lewis said. “We’ll boil down seawater for salt. We’re out of it. Elk’s awful without salt. And if we can make enough salt, that’ll help us preserve meat. Salt meat and jerky. Drouillard, if there’s any elk over there, you and your hunters can keep us fed.”

“If
there is elk. If there is plenty of elk. I need to see that country,” he said. “And even then, my hunters and I would rather be at the falls. Better country.”

“Understood,” Clark said. Then he turned to Lewis and said, “We need to let our boys have a say in this. Like when nobody believed which fork was the Missouri. Once they had their say, they were happy to go along with our judgment. If we stay here without letting them have their say, they’re like to mutiny on us before winter’s over.”

So they called a council that evening.

As Drouillard said, most of his hunters wanted to return to the mountains near the falls. Ten other men wanted to go to Sandy
River, back up the Columbia about a hundred miles—a wide, lush, wooded bottomland they had passed on the way down, a place teeming with game birds, far above this dismal coastal weather and within view of the beautiful cone-shaped mountain called Mount Hood.

The other twelve men were agreeable to scouting the south side of the Columbia for game and a protected site for a winter bivouac.

And as Captain Clark had predicted, once every man had had his say, they were ready to do what the captains wanted: look for a place on the other side of the river. Only John Shields objected to the other shore; he still wanted them to go to the Sandy River, which had looked like a paradise to him.

Even York was allowed his say. In the past two years he had proven himself anybody’s equal and was liked by everyone; in the isolated little society of this corps, he was temporarily more than just a Negro and a slave.

And then Charbonneau startled everyone by standing up and pointing to his wife and saying,
“Elle veut voter aussi.”

Drouillard hid his smile with a hand. This was a delightful surprise.

“What’s this?” Captain Lewis said.

Drouillard said, “His wife wishes to vote.”

Captain Lewis frowned. “Nonsense. She’s just an Indian!”

“I’m an Indian too, Cap’n,” Drouillard reminded him.

Lewis hissed, “Women don’t vote. Let’s get on—”

“Pardon, Cap’n. Indian women do vote.”

Charbonneau spoke again in French.

“Sir, he says if she doesn’t vote, he doesn’t,” Drouillard said.

“Well, then, strike his damned vote. Of all the damned cheek!”

Captain Clark interrupted. “What might her vote be, Mr. Drouillard?”

He and Bird Woman talked with hands. “She says she would like us to go live where there are plenty of
wapato
roots.”

Clark smiled at Drouillard and scribbled with his pencil. “Sounds reasonable to me,” he said.

“Assieds-toi, m’sieu,”
Drouillard said to Charbonneau.
“C’est accompli. Merci.”

Charbonneau told her, and she gave one firm nod and drew the edge of her blanket closer about the baby’s face.

Drouillard thought he understood what had caused that protest: both Sacagawea and her husband were still angry about her blue bead belt being traded away. It had been her only valuable possession.

The Chinooks and Clatsops, with their wide, high-prowed canoes, came and went in the estuary in any weather. They were incomparable boatmen. The low, narrow dugouts of the corps were just not suitable for such high seas. The soldiers had to paddle miles up the Columbia and cross the wide river in the lee of islands because of the high waves that raced up the channel from the sea.

Elk were seen at places on the south shore, but it was impossible to shoot any because of the downpours. Most of Lewis’s hunters gave up and returned to his party because the woods were so thick they couldn’t make their way through them. Drouillard stayed out, slithering like a snake through the woods, ferns, briars, alder, salmonberry, and skunk cabbage, finding and memorizing animal trails, getting the lie of the land, eating squirrels when he could find them, salmon pulp from his pouch when there was nothing else. It was good to be alone for a while, away from all those miserable soldiers with their fleas and diarrhea and swellings and scabs. Captain Lewis and his men were somewhere below. Clark and the rest were somewhere above. And he was by himself, as he had been so seldom in these last two years, as he used to be almost all the time before. Although he was soaked to the skin, and the tall trees above him waved and groaned as if they would topple on him, he was in his old, lone predator state now, learning where everything lived, learning where the prey went, and when. If those thirty men were going to depend upon him for food all winter in this strange, dark, wet, evergreen place, he had a whole new territory to learn.

There was barely enough light left to aim at the elk, but Drouillard sent his prayer message to it just as it turned to see him, and he fired. He heard it thrash in the foliage as the gunshot echoed, and then he couldn’t see the animal. But it was soon still among the ferns and the evergreens and he knew it was dead. He made a picture in his mind of the place where it was standing when he shot it. He reloaded. He turned back down to the edge of the river and slipped through the foliage, down to the fork where he had left Shannon butchering. It was raining softly and the woods were wet and dripping. It was always raining here. The expedition had reached the mouth of the Columbia more than a month ago, and in all that time the rain had not stopped for more than an hour or two.

He edged through the underbrush and stepped into the grass at the river fork so suddenly and silently that Shannon was startled. Shannon said, “I heard you shoot twice. I s’pose that means you got two more?”

“That’s right. Too dark to find them tonight. Better head home before it gets too dark. And bring canoes up tomorrow for them. I hope they’ve got that smokehouse built. Nothing keeps long in this weather. Ready?”