Sign-Talker (54 page)

Cutnose took Drouillard’s bear-claw necklace as proof of his courage, and admired him for it. Now and then Cutnose asked Drouillard about his tribe, and gave him the rare opportunity to talk about the Shawnees, about their long wars against the whitemen far back in the East, about their role as traders and
peacemakers and warriors, about their ancestors who had been the builders of temple mounds and burial mounds as big as hills. Cutnose was uplifted by those stories, even though they were told slowly and painstakingly in hand language. The hand-signing was a practical, day-to-day language, by which it was hard to convey such ideas as honor and spirit-life.

Cutnose signed that Drouillard’s people must have been a fine people, like the Nez Perce. Then he said they must have worn many eagle feathers. Then he said,
You wear none. Question: You have not been in war?

Drouillard had to admit that he had not, because his people had been defeated when he was still a boy. He didn’t tell him that his real Shawnee name was Without Eagle Feathers. It would be hard to put that in sign, and he didn’t like to talk about it.

What he had to talk about now was difficult and essential. The captains and their soldiers had started over the mountains; they couldn’t wait any longer, or they would not get back to their country this year. But the snow was still so deep in the mountains that the trail could not be seen. They needed guides, and they had sent him and Shannon back to try to enlist some.

Cutnose thought for a while, lighting a pipe and sharing it with Drouillard. Eventually he said,
Our people have been afraid you would ask this. We knew you would. Any Nez Perce who go east over the mountains might be killed by the Atsinas and the Blackfeet. Therefore we go over all together in strength, only in fall to hunt the buffalo
. Then he told Drouillard something he did not know: the Atsinas lately had killed many of the Ootlashoots and the Shoshones, the people of the Bird Woman. Cameahwait’s people. Cutnose didn’t know whether Cameahwait had been killed.

Again they smoked for a while in a sad silence. Outside was the steady pounding noise of women making flour of roots. And in the air was the smell of salmon being smoked. The salmon finally had arrived in these rivers, late, alleviating the food shortage the Nez Perce and the soldiers had endured for so many weeks. Shannon was out there in the village, probably saying his last goodbyes to a girl. Shannon was a beautiful young soldier
and had a sweetheart in every village. It was another of those things that would make it hard to leave the Nez Perce.

Finally Cutnose said,
I have a brother who knows that trail well, snow time or summer. He might go with you. What will your officers pay? Will they pay guns?

Drouillard signed,
They have two guns they can pay. They hope for two or three guides
.

Cutnose smoked and looked at the eagles. Then he said,
Remember two men, last moon, each gave one of your captains a horse at the council. The day I gave you the gray
.

I remember those men. One was Twisted Hair’s son. The other was Bloody Chief’s son
.

Yes
, Cutnose said.
They are brave men. They have much respect. They know the trail over the mountains. If I asked their fathers, they might ask those two young men. I would ask them, if it would please my friend Followed by Buzzards
.

It would please me
, Drouillard said.
It would make my heart like sunrise
.

He thought,
Megweshe, Weshemoneto
. Thank you, Creator.

The Indian guides, with great cheerfulness, took pine torches from the campfire and ran out into the darkness. They had said they were going to do something that would make good weather for the trip over the mountains.

Suddenly, a column of fire shot up through the darkness with a rush and crackle, then a fireball separated from it and exploded in the air a hundred feet above the ground with a deep boom. Then another column of fire, another fireball, a little off the left, then another to the right. The soldiers whooped and whistled in amazement.

“Like fireworks, b’God!”

“Independence Day early!”

“Yee-ha!”

Another half-dozen blazes shot up and roared, and the
meadow was bathed in light. Then the Indians came back into the camp laughing. Out in the field, nine fir trees glowed for a while and sparks rose and swirled and drifted. The Indians had ignited the dead branches that covered the lower trunks of the tall trees. Now, they said, it would not snow in the mountains while they were passing over. The captains were delighted to have guides, and they were particularly pleased to see whom Drouillard had brought to lead them.

Indeed it did not snow anymore. But there was still deep snow on the mountains. It averaged seven feet deep along the ridges and slopes of the trail. Fortunately, the spring sun had been shining on it and it was crusted and packed deep enough to support the horses and riders and their loads. They rode carefully and nervously over this slippery crust. A hoof usually would sink two to four inches in, giving some purchase, but there were slips and falls. This was the reason why the Nez Perce had kept telling the captains not to leave yet. On the fifteenth they had first tried to start over—without guides, because the Indians had said it was impossible to go yet—and ran into soft drifts fifteen feet deep. They had had to turn back and camp in the quamash prairie for a week, thwarted and impatient, until Drouillard came with the guides.

In one way, this ordeal of riding on crusted snow was better than no snow: the awful tangles of brush and fallen trees that had been such obstacles last fall were now buried several feet below. But also buried far below were the rubbed and blazed traces of the Nez Perce road.

On a high mountain, the guides pointed to a stripped pine pole sticking up from a rock pile. They asked to stop at this route marker to smoke a spirit pipe. This appeared to be the very peak of their Road to the Buffalo, as they called it. In every direction lay more stupendous, snow-covered mountains to the limits of vision, and here Drouillard heard the captains admit to each
other in low voices that if they had tried to come without guides, as they first planned, they never would have made it.

They were down to cooking roots in bear oil. In places where the snow had melted, Bird Woman noticed the white blossoms of spring beauty and dug up their small roots, which added a tasty variety to the
quamash
and
cous
roots they had bought in the Nez Perce towns. These spring beauty roots were a Shoshone food.

This morning before full daylight the captains sent Drouillard and Reubin Field out ahead to hunt toward the hot springs that were just over Lolo Pass. As the sun rose over the ridge into their eyes, Reubin said, “I recognize this. We’re almost at the end of the hard part, ain’t we?”

“Almost.” They rode out of the snow near the Kooskooskie River.

“Sure seemed easier comin’ back!”

“Maybe you’re just tougher than you were—Hush! Look. Deer.”

Drouillard shot one, and the other three were gone before Reubin got a shot. They gutted the deer and hung it close to the worn trail. They refreshed themselves and let the horses drink at the river, which tore singing and chattering over its bed of green, white, black, and brown stones rounded by their constant tumbling. It was about thirty yards wide, clear as crystal. On the other side of the river the trail plainly climbed eastward up toward the pass, and they rode up. It was a two-mile, steep ride, and they were still supposed to be hunting, but Reubin was too excited to keep quiet. “I am just plain ready to head home,” he said. “I wish Cap’n Lewis didn’t have that damn scheme of his to poke around up yonder in the Blackfeet country. And damnit, he’s picked you and me and Joe to go with ’im, you know that, I reckon?”

“Sure. Wouldn’t you want your best men with you if you were going into hostile country?”

“Well, now ’t y’ put it thataway … But I still got a bad feelin’ about it. Wish he’d leave well enough alone and head on home.”

They went over the pass without seeing any more game near enough to shoot, and rode down the east slope along an eastward-flowing creek. A few miles down Drouillard pointed northward up the slope toward some familiar cliffs. “That’s what I’ve been looking for. A hot soak.”

“Oh, God, yes! There’s them lovely hot water springs!”

They stripped and lay in the pool that Indians had made by damming the hot spring with rocks and gravel. It was just about as hot as skin could bear, but Drouillard stayed in, feeling it dissolve the aches of countless nights sleeping in the cold and riding long days on ill-made saddles and straining himself running and climbing and carrying two-hundred-pound carcasses. He could see how the sick chief got healed in the sweat pit.

“Lordy!” Reubin sighed. “I’ve gone from stiff as a hard-on to limp as a hound’s ear!”

“Now we go dive in the creek.”

“You crazy redskin!”

Drouillard looked at him and laughed as they raced out of the hot water. “Heh! You’ve been running with me so long, you’re getting to be a redskin yourself!” Field was rosy pink from the heat.

Two soldiers had burst the muzzles of their rifles by shooting with snow or dirt clogging the barrels, and Shields the gunsmith cut the barrels off short and repaired the guns. Captain Lewis took back the two good long rifles he had given the guides for their service, and gave them the short ones. Drouillard turned away, clenching his jaw. The short guns would not be as accurate.

The Indians didn’t know that, though, and seemed pleased
with the weapons. Since they did so much of their hunting from the backs of running horses, they probably thought the short guns would be easier to handle.

The corps gave them sufficient meat to feed them on their way home. The guides told the captains which rivers to follow to go east across the divide the short way to the Great Falls, assuring them that the Buffalo Road was too plain for even whitemen to lose.

The parting was deeply emotional. The guides were afraid the enemy tribes would catch the soldiers in the plains and kill them.

Twisted Hair’s son came to talk sign with Drouillard. He said he was glad the Nez Perce had not killed the soldiers last year when they came down from the mountains starved and helpless and sick. They almost had done so, because their prophecy had warned that whitemen were dangerous and bad, but the old woman Watkuweis had begged them not to. Drouillard nodded. He didn’t say the prophecies were probably right.

Then the brother of Cutnose came to say goodbye to him. Drouillard told him, in hand sign:
Tell Cutnose I will always remember him. That my heart stays in the mountains with your people. He will see me again if I live long and can return
.

As he signed those words, he realized in his heart something he had never quite thought out in his head: Maybe this expedition was just his first, not his only, journey to these mountains.

And the Indian signed to him:
My brother’s little eagles will be big then. He wants to give you a feather if you come back
.

The woman with gray hair and bleeding arms came into Drouillard’s dreams often as he slept. She also appeared sometimes in his spirit when he was awake and thinking without words.

Her image came to him now as he rode downstream through honeysuckle, berry bushes, and cottonwoods on this swift, pebbly branch of Maria’s River. Bluffs rose steep on both sides. He was watching for deer. Somewhere on the plain above, riding in the same direction, were Captain Lewis and the Field brothers.

Maria’s River, named after one of Lewis’s cousins, was the river that the soldiers had all wrongly presumed to be the Missouri last summer, when Drouillard had won his wager by betting on the captains’ choice. Now on their return, Lewis had explored it farther toward its source. He had hoped to find its origin far north, which would expand Jefferson’s land claim up into Saskatchewan country. But by yesterday, after ten days of riding, it had become obvious that both branches of Maria’s River came from the spectacular range of the Rocky Mountains straight west of there, not from the north. And so Lewis had turned around this morning and they were heading back toward the Missouri to meet Sergeant Gass and his contingent of troops.

Drouillard had been finding considerable trace of Indian hunters. Whoever these were, they would almost certainly be enemies of the Shoshones and Nez Perce—probably Blackfeet or Atsina. It seemed marvelous that they had not met any yet. A
mere four men meeting any band of those people would surely be in trouble. This reconnaissance had been important to Lewis, but like a sneaking in and, he hoped, a sneaking out.

The danger and the purpose had brought out the best in Lewis. When he had something like this to do, it seemed, he could better control his demon. The darkness in his eyes, the violent temper, the great lethargy that had been on him from the Pacific back up to the mountains, seemed to be in check now, and his personal force moved him tirelessly on and on.

Now that they were back in the plains, eating buffalo, pronghorns, and deer instead of fish and roots and dog, Lewis’s spirits were better. Down around the Great Falls, where Sergeant Gass and his men were probably doing their portage about now, the buffalo were in their rut season, the bulls roaring and bellowing in an incredible din. About a week ago, coming north, Lewis’s party had ridden for ten or twelve miles past what appeared to be all one bawling herd, countless thousands of them, stalked by wolves.

Drouillard halted his horse in a thicket now and made the bleating sound of a fawn in his throat, hoping to attract a doe. There were not many deer tracks in the narrow valley, but there were some, and he wanted to get one for supper. Up on the plains this morning there had been no buffalo in sight or earshot, no pronghorns within range.