Sign-Talker (61 page)

When it was closer, he saw that the paddler was a man, shirtless, long-haired. It wasn’t an Indian; he was bearded. Centered in the canoe was a large bundle, and a gun lay on the bundle, within the paddler’s easy reach. The man was alert, watching the river and both banks as he came, but seemed not to have noticed him yet. Drouillard sat down slowly in the deep grass so as not to be too visible.

There was something about the man in the canoe: the way he held his head, the shape of the sun-browned torso, shining with sweat in the sun … The paddler seemed to notice the big boats on the sandbar below; he stopped paddling, just keeping the paddle to steer, with one hand, the other hand shading his eyes. The canoe was almost opposite Drouillard, a hundred feet below, when he realized who it was and laughed. He stood up, cocked his rifle and fired it into the sky, and yelled, “Hey, you!”

The man in the canoe looked all around, dropped the paddle and snatched up his gun, then lowered it, shouting: “God damn, Drouillard! Is it you?”

“It’s me, Colter!” Drouillard ran down the hill, thinking, What was I just saying about hard to find people in all this country?

Colter laughed. “A million square miles, and my problem is I can’t get home ’cause I keep running into people I know!”

He had decided to join Señor Lisa’s expedition and his old comrades, and go back up once again instead of continuing to St. Louis. His partnership with Dickson and Hancock had not worked out, for reasons he didn’t want to discuss. So he had taken his share of traps and set off alone to camp and hunt and trap farther up the Yellow Stone. He hadn’t seen Dickson and Hancock since. So Colter was the only one among them, in fact, in Lisa’s whole party, who knew the Yellow Stone.

Now, Lisa and Vasquez knelt on the sand with the four veterans while Colter traced a map in the sand. “To get to such good beaver on the Missouri, you have to go way up around here,” he
said. “But just
this
far up the Yellow Stone, you got beaver thick as mice in a pantry. I got as many in that canoe as it’d carry. By the way, from there it’s not far overland to the three forks that you like so well, George. Now near this stream here, there’s a huge, I mean to say,
huge
, Indian ceremony place. So you know that Indians must come there by hundreds some time o’ year. All customers for a tradin’ post.”

“Of what tribe?” Lisa asked.

“Up there, I’d reckon Crows, right, George?”

“Crows. Apsaloka. Right.”

Lisa looked at the sand map and thought. The voyageurs were singing and clapping at their fire down by the boats. Finally he said, “We intended to trade on the Missouri up there, take business from the British, who are going to be forced out anyway.”

Colter looked at him, then at Drouillard, with surprise. “Y’mean Blackfeet, Atsina, Assiniboines, and such? Ain’t that kind of foolhardy?”

Drouillard shrugged. “Best way to get rid of an enemy is make him your friend. Those Blackfeet we had trouble with up on the Maria: there wasn’t anything particularly bad about them till Cap’n Lewis said things that scared ’em. If we don’t befriend them now, we’ll have to fight ’em from now on. Cap’n’s trouble was he thought he’d make Indians do what the President wanted, just by telling ’em to. Plain fact is, Lewis and Jefferson put together didn’t know any more about Indians than Lewis’s dog did.” He sat back. He didn’t like to talk that much, but had needed to get that off his chest.

Lisa had been listening to this with a smile, having his own reasons for disliking Lewis. He said, “I will trade with anybody who wants what I have and has what I want. Crows, Blackfeet, what difference to me? I like what Señor Colter says about the Yellow Stone. Maybe we will go there. I am glad you are coming with us, señor.”

“Guess I wasn’t as ready to go back to civilization as I thought.”

Drouillard realized he had a new thing to keep in mind about Lisa. He could be awfully fickle about plans. It was no wonder
he and Colter took to each other so well. “Gentlemen, a drink, eh?” Lisa said. And off at the other fire, the Frenchmen were singing:

Skylark, lovely skylark, Drouillard thought, remembering the song from the Black Robe school. Lovely skylark, I am going to pluck your head.…

He shuddered.

Drouillard stood waist-deep in the clear, fast, numbingly cold stream and watched her swim toward him naked, underwater like a trout. His heart, racing from the cold, was full of delight and sadness. Always in the mornings he had bathed alone and given thanks for his life and strength. Here in the mountains the woman had shared this with him. But it would be the last time, because he had to leave and go far back down the rivers to St. Louis with Manuel Lisa.

She was perhaps as old as he, maybe a little older. Drouillard was thirty-five. This woman was an Apsaloka, a Crow, twice widowed when her husbands fought the Blackfeet—once north of the Yellow Stone, once south of it on a branch of this river called the Little Bighorn. She had a son who was old enough to ride with the buffalo hunters, and that was where he was now; he lived with her when he was not away hunting. Last winter Drouillard had lent the young man two of his traps, had taught him to set and bait them, and how to prepare the beaver skins to suit Benito Vasquez and Manuel Lisa at the fort. Since then her son, whose name was Split Hoof, had caught enough beaver to buy three traps of his own, and an iron kettle for his mother. Her name was Moves Behind, a name that Potts and Weiser thought was funny and appropriate because of the way she walked. He had explained that a fuller translation meant She Who Follows the Rest, but by then it was too late, and everyone at the trading
post was using the more suggestive name. There were many problems being a translator.

Like Drouillard, she had always gone to the water in the mornings. So it was natural that when he was in her camp, they would get up from bed naked and put blankets around themselves and come down to the water together. Mountain streams in springtime were much too cold to stay in very long, so after they swam they would go back to her lodge and lie in one blanket together until they were warmed by each other. Then they would toss off the blanket and kneel one above the other, caressing and breathing their breath all over each other and looking, until she would make the sign he knew meant,
Come inside
. Sometimes they would lie connected, both controlling themselves to keep from moving their bodies, just flexing the connected parts, looking at each other’s faces, until nothing else mattered but that pleasure, crouched and waiting in their very center. Then suddenly she would gasp and shut her eyes and that part of her would tighten and pull him so far in that he felt he was touching her heart.

Moves Behind was as strong and tight inside as she was in her limbs and torso. When he loved her, he felt as much admiration as pleasure. She was as perfect a creature as anything he had ever seen, even a doe deer or antelope, and he was awed by the Creator’s kindness when he looked at her. She and her people had not been around traders; they were neither diseased nor dishonest.

Drouillard had hiked and ridden hundreds of miles last winter and this spring, southward and eastward from Lisa’s fort, finding Crow winter camps, talking to the people in hand sign, encouraging them to bring furs to the fort and trade them for beautiful and useful things of the whiteman’s manufacture. He had ranged far in the Bighorn Mountains, sometimes on snowshoes where the snowdrifts were deeper than his height. He had made friendships with many bands of the Crow. He had even met a band that happily boasted of stealing the horses of the whitemen who had come down the Yellow Stone two years ago. They told him they had seen a red-haired chief among those men, and a man all
black, but they had taken the horses so skillfully that the whitemen had never seen them at all. Drouillard had of course complimented them on that skill. And he told them that it was all right; the whitemen had not suffered from the loss of their horses, and got home safely, that they were not mad at the Crows for it, but admired them and wanted to be their friends, to trade with them. And, he said, tell your allies, the Shoshone and Kootenai, to come to the fort. They are already friends of that Red Hair Chief.

These Crows were perhaps the handsomest people Drouillard had ever seen, and clean, hospitable, and cheerful. Often one band would offer him a guide to take him to another band. In those wanderings in the winter and spring, he had memorized the directions and distances and the looks of places: magnificent canyons and waterfalls, a vast and fertile basin of beaver streams entirely ringed by timbered mountains, grasslands teeming with herds of elk, buffalo, antelope, and cliffs where the big-horned sheep looked down on everything below.

Drouillard had promised Captain Clark in St. Louis that he would come and see him if he ever came back. Clark was completing his great map of the lands from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. He had asked Drouillard to keep thinking of the map when he was back up in the West, and requested that he bring back drawings and descriptions of places the Corps of Discovery had not seen, to verify what Indians had told Clark, to fill in places that were still blank on the big map. Having been Clark’s translator during most of his map talk with the Indians, Drouillard remembered the big map very well. He knew what was still blank; he knew the questions still in Clark’s mind: where rivers started, where mountain ranges they had seen met other ranges they had only heard of, where tribes lived, what their favorite routes were through the mountain passes, where the Platte and Bighorn headwaters were nearest each other, where the rivers began that were said to run southward down into the Spanish country.

And so while traveling far all the last fall and winter and now into the spring, among the Crows and their allies, and trapping
beaver, and teaching the mountain bands how to use the steel traps, Drouillard had also been seeing in his mind the great map. Colter was doing likewise as he ranged through other mountains farther to the west and south of the Yellow Stone, summoning those Indians to Lisa’s trading post. Though they were thousands of miles from that admirable man Clark, they were still doing what they could do for him.

Drouillard thought often of Clark. He wondered whether he had freed York yet. Whether he had married. He wondered whether Charbonneau and Bird Woman had yet found a way to take their little boy down to St. Louis to be schooled by Clark, or by the Black Robes. Coming up through the Mandan and Hidatsa towns with Manuel Lisa’s boats late last summer, Drouillard had not been able to inquire about Charbonneau’s family because the Mandans and Arikaras were at war again. Their war had made it a dangerous journey. It had seemed no tribe wanted to let the boats pass. The Arikaras had fired warning shots as the convoy passed, probably fearing that they were going up to trade with the Mandans. Then the Mandans had refused to be civil because Lisa would not stop there and stay with them for the winter; they feared he was hastening up to trade with their rivals the Assiniboines. To show his disdain for Mandan anger, Manuel Lisa had got off his boat and walked alone through the Knife River towns. His show of bravery was so impressive that no one had bothered him. But no one had talked to him either. Drouillard, in charge of bringing the convoy past the towns, had gazed up at hundreds of grim Mandan warriors, former neighbors and companions in the Fort Mandan days, armed and scowling down, while half the boatmen rowed and the others stood with guns ready. Even one who had given Drouillard his wife in the ceremony stood scowling down.

Later, farther up, they were threatened by great numbers of Assiniboines shouting from the bluffs, resentful because they were faithful to the British traders in Canada and saw these boats as a threat to their dominance in trade. The Assiniboines had backed down only after a fusillade of shots over their heads.
Drouillard had held a pipe smoking ceremony and council with them, persuading them to stop menacing the convoy.

Often he had thought, on that troubled voyage up the Missouri, how disappointed the captains would be with the utter failure of their peace councils. The ideas of Jefferson meant nothing up here.

Lisa had established his first post on the Yellow Stone instead of the Missouri because of the lateness of the season. In autumn his men had built him a stockaded trading post at the mouth of the Bighorn River, the first whiteman building ever constructed on the Yellow Stone. From there, Colter and Drouillard and the mulatto man Edward Rose had trekked out into the surrounding country to invite the tribes to trade. Rose had taken goods and vanished, to live as a big man in a Crow town, confirming Lisa’s judgment of him.

To the ambitious Lisa, this trading fort was just a start. Now he would leave Vasquez and some of his men here to trap beaver and develop the trade with the Crow nation. He would go back down to St. Louis and prepare a bigger expedition, to come up next year and build a second post, up on the three forks of the Missouri. He would take Drouillard back with him to help arouse investors for the three forks enterprise. It was Drouillard who best knew the richness of that beaver country: the best he had seen anywhere on the continent.

And so Drouillard knew that this would be his last morning with Moves Behind. She knew it too, but didn’t resent his leaving. He had been a good lover, filling her loneliness, and through him she had attached her band to the whitemen’s store at the mouth of the Bighorn, where they could get guns and powder to hunt and feed their people better, but also defend themselves against such enemies as the Blackfeet who had killed both her husbands.

She swam to Drouillard and her streaming head and face rose from the water in front of him and she breathed, gasping from cold, and laughed. They had never talked together with spoken words, not knowing each other’s words. She embraced him in
the water, wrapped her legs around his waist, motioned with her head and eyes toward her lodge.