Sign-Talker (56 page)

He half woke in the gray light before sunup, noting that the Indians were crowding around the fire. He saw Joe Field still sitting up with his gun on his lap by the firewood pile, and Reubin and the captain still asleep in their blankets. It had grown cold enough that there were no mosquitoes, and so the sleeping was good. He closed his eyes to doze a little more, the warm weariness humming in his limbs.

“Hey-hey! They got our guns! Git up! Git up!” At Joe’s angry shouts and sounds of scuffling and footsteps, Drouillard bolted awake to the sight of moccasins and leggings stepping and dancing around his head. He saw Reubin surge up out of his bedding like a panther. Drouillard flung back his blanket and was gathering himself to spring up when he felt a touch and a tug and
saw the scar-faced youth crouched and reaching over him, lifting his rifle and shot pouch.

Every fiber of him was in motion at once. He leaped to his feet so fast that the Indian almost fell backward in the fire. “Damn you, let go my gun!” he bellowed, and snatched it out of the boy’s grasp with such quick force that the gun rattled and the Indian cried out in astonishment, or pain. But the youth still had hold of the shot pouch and tried to run with it.

“What? What’s the matter?” the captain’s voice cried out. Drouillard sprinted three steps and grabbed the strap of his shot pouch, spinning the Indian around in his tracks, and with the same movement kicking his legs out from under him. When the thief fell to the ground, Drouillard stomped on his shoulder and jerked the pouch out of his hand. Then he took a moment’s look at everything going on around him.

The morning sunlight was on the bluffs above, but this valley camp was still in blue shadow with a veil of smoke hanging above the campfire. The Field brothers were running back toward camp from a little way upslope, and they both had their rifles. The half-handed youth was running past the big cottonwood trees with a rifle in his hand and Captain Lewis sprinting after him with drawn pistol, yelling at him. When that Indian saw the brothers coming, pointing their guns at him, he just dropped the captain’s rifle on the ground and walked slowly away.

The cut-faced brave was rising gingerly from the ground with his eyes on the muzzle of Drouillard’s rifle, which was cocked and aimed at his face.

Drouillard was panting between clenched teeth, and in his head the blood was rushing hot. He said, “We kill these thieves, Cap’n?”

Lewis, who had picked up his rifle and holstered his pistol, looked around and answered, “No … let him go. We all got our guns back, right?”

Seven young Indians were sidling away, most of them unarmed; one had his musket, but was not threatening with it; two had their bows and arrows. Most of their weapons, robes, and
pouches lay about the camp, including several bows and quivers and one musket.

“Where’s the other one?” Drouillard asked, counting.

“Kilt,” replied Reubin, holding up his bloody sheath knife.

Suddenly the Indians were in two groups, running. “They’re going for the horses!” Drouillard yelled.

“Shoot them if they try to take ours!” Lewis yelled.

Drouillard and the Fields sprinted after five warriors who were hooting and hazing the large part of the herd upstream. Drouillard was overtaking them, the brothers close behind him, eager to thrash a few young Blackfeet fools, when he heard Lewis yelling ferociously back beyond the camp, then heard a rifle shot and, moments later, the dull boom of a smoothbore. Drouillard stopped and looked back. “Go on and get those horses back!” he yelled as the brothers ran up. “I’m goin’ to the cap’n!” He raced back down through the grass and brush, looking for Lewis. The only Indian with a gun was down there somewhere. Several horses, theirs and the Indians’ intermixed, were milling and trotting near the foot of the bluff beyond the camp. Then Drouillard saw the captain coming down at a tired trot, breathing through his mouth, rifle at his side, face alarmingly pale. “You all right, sir?”

“Yah,” Lewis panted. He pointed back at a brushy niche in the bluff. “I shot one in there. Think I killed him. Near got me back too. I felt the wind of his ball go by my head! God, I’m so winded! Come on. I’ve got to get my pouch and reload. Round up some of these horses and get out of here. Try to call the Field boys back. We’ve got enough horses here.”

“Better than ours too,” Drouillard said, setting off at a lope to drive some back to the camp.

Captain Lewis ordered the men to throw on the campfire most of the Blackfeet belongings, including bows and quivers and shields. He left a peace medal hung on the neck of the warrior Reubin had stabbed to death. “That will let them know who we are,” he said with apparent satisfaction. The brothers had retrieved four of their own horses, but the gray given Drouillard by Cutnose was gone—a sad loss. They tied the Indian’s musket on
a packhorse with some buffalo meat the Blackfeet had been carrying.

Lewis led up out of the valley and headed southeast at the hardest pace the horses could sustain; the captain believed the mouth of the Maria to be still more than a hundred miles away. Within hours the fleeing Blackfeet youths could reach one of their bands, and surely a war party would be coming for revenge. Or, knowing that these whitemen were going to the mouth of the Maria to meet others, a large war party might speed straight down there and attack the unsuspecting troops coming down from the falls. There was no time to waste. Fortunately, the plains were level and grassy, there were no major streams thwarting their route, and recent rains had left watering holes. Large and small herds of buffalo were grazing everywhere, shepherded by wolves. Constantly scanning the horizons, Drouillard saw no sign of Indians. By mid-afternoon they reached a stream they recognized, which told them they had made more than sixty miles. Here they stopped to eat and let the horses graze and drink, and then rode on.

At dusk Drouillard rode out toward a small buffalo herd to shoot a tender young cow for supper. As he approached, the Indian horse he was riding got excited and wanted to run at the herd. He realized that this was a buffalo-hunting horse, trained to race up and flank the herd and chase it. This was no time or place to start a stampede, so Drouillard reined in hard, walked the horse near the herd in defilade until he could pick his cow, and felled her with a long shot. He chewed a bite of her heart raw as he butchered her out, taking hump and tongue to cook now and some tender muscle for the trail. They cooked the delicacies over a smokeless fire of buffalo chips, and after a two-hour rest set out again by bright moonlight.

The spirits were powerful on the moonlit plain this night, playing with Drouillard, troubling him. The plains seemed as vast and empty as that ocean he had seen a few months ago. And where the surf had boomed and pounded incessantly on the rocky coast, there now was the distant booming and muttering of
thunderstorms, in every distant part of the sky, lightning flickering low and high, thunderclouds everywhere except above, where the sky stayed clear to let the moon light the way for him and these three whitemen.

Something terrible throbbed deep in his soul like a drum as he rode with these men tonight. Two of them, Reubin and Lewis, had killed Blackfeet boys in their own country. Worse, he himself had been so much in the whitemen’s interest that he had been eager to kill an Indian. He had been that stirred. Now he was glad that he hadn’t, but for a moment he had almost been a warrior: after he disarmed the scar-face and threw him down and stood ready to kill him, for a moment he had the notion of taking a scalp. He had never taken a scalp; he had never been a warrior. Take a scalp, earn an eagle feather. He had not run looking for exploits in youth, as these boys had. They were still living in their old way. His name was Without Eagle Feathers.

He knew that if the Blackfeet youths had been a little luckier and gotten the good rifles, they might have used them to capture or kill these whitemen, for scalps, or to earn feathers to wear on their heads. Or they might have just fled away, whooping, with those wonderful rifles, becoming the best-armed Indians anywhere in the plains. That was why they had taken such a risk to steal the rifles: because Lewis had bragged on them so extravagantly.

Or because he had made them think that their enemies would have rifles like these.

What stupidities! And Joe as sentry had laid down his rifle while all those young Indians were up milling about. He should have woken us all when they got up, Drouillard thought.

But then he remembered waking up and seeing them around the fire and going back to sleep instead of getting up. Yes, he himself had been stupid. Everybody had been stupid. The only good thing about the day was that they were still alive.

As he rode, softly rocking in the moonlight, midnight now, fatigued by the fight and the hundred miles of riding, he saw things strangely. He saw the gray-haired woman with bloodied arms, and she was walking beside Captain Lewis’s horse, leading
it. Then he saw Captain Lewis walking with bloodied arms, leading the horse with the bloody woman riding it. He saw boats on a wide river, the captain lying bloody in a boat. He heard snorting and snuffling sounds, and opened his eyes to realize that he had been, possibly, asleep, dreaming, and that they were now riding softly past yet another enormous herd of buffalo, making them nervous, the bulls trotting out to investigate these horsemen coming by. He had to rein the horse; it wanted to go chasing them. Bright moonlight still, and distant lightning and thunder.

Now and then he heard the captain say something, one or another of the brothers answering. They all rode at a distance behind him and to his left; he was always their scout, off at a distance, their Indian. He rode remembering all the explanations and apologies and decrees and requests he had shuttled back and forth between the captains and the Indians for more than two years now: Otoes, Sioux, Arikaras, Mandans, Hidatsas, Shoshones, Kootenai, Nez Perce, Chinooks, Clatsops.… It had taken every bit of intelligence he had, sometimes, to try to make the Indians understand and welcome and accommodate these strange whitemen, in particular the demanding and impatient Lewis, who saw everything through the eyes of his Great White Father, Jefferson. Again Drouillard thought: I would like to teach Jefferson about Indians.

They were still riding at two in the morning, and Drouillard had begun seeing something over and over in his memory’s eye: before Captain Lewis threw the four Blackfeet shields on the fire, he cut off the little guardian totems that hung on them, those little bits of shaped horn and shell and braided hair, sacred to the carrier of a shield, and dropped them in his pouch as trophies of his victory.

Drouillard carried his own totems in the medicine bag he wore under his shirt. He knew that if anyone took his totems, he would always be able to follow and find the thief, in This Side World or the Other Side World. That was the stupidest thing Lewis had done, even worse than leaving a peace medal on a corpse to taunt a people.

But then he thought, No, stupid is doing something you know you shouldn’t, like stealing a canoe from a trusting friend, or mocking someone in his own country.

This taking the totems was not so much stupid as it was ignorant. Lewis was ignorant of what was sacred to Indians; though he had had years to learn, he had chosen to stay ignorant, because he believed Indians were incapable of sacredness. To him, totems were just souvenirs. He had no idea what they could do.

No point trying to tell him. What was to come of it would come.

They stopped after two, unloaded and side-hobbled the horses, and slept till daybreak. They were all so sore they could hardly stand up or lift the saddles, but Lewis reminded them of the urgency of getting out of the Blackfeet country and warning the rest of the party on the Missouri. So within minutes they were mounted and on their way again, scanning the horizons for the Blackfeet. The captain was certain they must be near. He instructed the men that if the Blackfeet found and attacked them on this open plain, they should tie the horses’ bridles together and stand the Indians off with their best long shooting, and that if it became hopeless, they should sell their lives as dear as they could. Having no idea just how far along the rest of the party might be, he talked of various plans for finding them and warning them of the Blackfeet threat.

About three hours of painful riding toward the blazing morning sun brought them to gullies and slopes that told them they were nearing the Missouri.

“Hear that?” Drouillard said, reining in.

“Sounded like a gunshot to me,” Joe Field said. “Way off.”

They rode on for about an hour more. Some of the horses were beginning to limp and stumble with exhaustion, but the captain was afraid to stop and rest.

“Guns,” Drouillard called. He had heard two shots, from the south. In the next few minutes they heard another, then two more. They were rifle shots. It meant the soldiers were already under attack by Blackfeet, or it meant they were hunting. To Drouillard it was the familiar sound of the expedition coming
along, shooting at anything that walked or flew; he had heard that sound coming along behind him for thousands of miles and was sure it was no Indian attack.

They veered off in that direction, urging the exhausted horses. There were more occasional rifle shots.

Suddenly they were on the bluff with the wide Missouri flowing below. Drouillard knew this place exactly. He had hunted here.

He pointed up the river, and couldn’t keep from laughing. “Here they come. There’s that old white pirogue, and canoes around her like ducklings!”

Sometimes it seemed that Captain Lewis was doomed by bad spirits, but other times it seemed that all the powers were setting everything to his advantage. This arrival of the men with his canoes at the same place in the same moment was good fortune beyond belief. The captain fired his pistol in the air to get the boatmen’s attention, and was answered by rifles and swivel gun. Then they rode down the bluff and met the soldiers on the shore, in a wild outburst of whooping and hugging and backslapping and sheer, giddy laughter, with Seaman the black dog barking and bounding around his master. Then Captain Lewis sobered them all with the warning about the Blackfeet. Swiftly all the instruments and baggage were unloaded from the horses and into the pirogue and canoes.