Sign-Talker (64 page)

Still, Drouillard believed that the Blackfeet could be won over by persuasion, if only they would come and talk. But they
didn’t talk, they attacked. Sometimes he dreamed of talking peace with them.

“I could parley with them, if I could get one or two to sit still with me,” he had told the fort’s commanders, Andrew Henry and Pierre Menard. In his three years with Lewis and Clark, he had with hand language, reason, and appeals to honor, resolved disputes between Indians who were jealous of each other. This was something like that.

In their desperation, Henry and Menard had dreamed up a plan to get the Blackfeet to sit down with Drouillard and listen: if the Flatheads at the fort could capture and bring in just one Blackfeet warrior, treat him kindly, and let Drouillard persuade him about the whitemen’s desire for peace, trade for good guns, and cooperation in trapping, then free him to carry home that goodwill message to his people, a truce and even a friendship could be achieved. Why not use Flatheads to bring in a captive listener?

“No, you don’t understand,” Drouillard had told them. “The Flatheads won’t cooperate in any trick that will put more guns in the hands of the Blackfeet. You might as well forget that. No. Somehow, one day, I’ll get a chance to make talk sign face-to-face with Blackfeet. Without any Flatheads or Crows or whitemen standing around making them distrust me.”

“Alone?” Henry had exclaimed. “They’d kill you on the spot!”

“They might not. I’m not a whiteman, or a Flathead or Crow or Shoshone. What grudge do they have against a Shawnee? Blackfeet are
people
. You think they just kill everyone they see?”

“They killed your friend John Potts.”

“Because he killed one of them.”

“They tried to kill Colter!”

“They had him and gave him a chance to run. He got away. He’s proof that they don’t just kill everybody.”

“Well, they’re trying to kill us all!”

He had shrugged. “I hope to talk ’em out of that.”

And so Drouillard came out alone to trap while a whole company of whitemen cowered in their stinking fort. Those who
could read were killing time with Sergeant Gass’s book. Drouillard found that amusing.

He stood a little way out from the creek bank, stuck the pointed end of the bait stick in the soft bottom and pressed it in at an angle until it stood firm. Then he put the trap just under the baited end and straightened its chain, outward from the bank, and drove the chain-stake into the bottom to anchor it. A beaver standing in the shallows to sniff the bait stick would step on the cocked trap and it would snap shut, and the beaver couldn’t swim away with it because of the stake, and would drown. Drouillard would come checking his traps in a day or two, skin the beaver, scrape the flesh out of the skin, and take it back down to the fort folded fur side in to dry. Then somewhere thousands of miles away in Europe or Asia the fur would be made into a felt hat for which some fancy gentleman would pay a great deal of money. He knew this had been going on ever since whitemen had come to Turtle Island, more than two hundred years ago. Indians everywhere in the East and Canada had been catching beaver to trade for kettles and knives, needles and awls, mirrors and ribbon, beads and brooches, guns and liquor, so that men elsewhere could have elegant hats. Many tribes, in fact, knew whitemen simply by words which meant, “Men who wear hats.” His uncle, Lorimier, had told him all about that while he was growing up, and sometimes while he was setting traps he would wonder how many millions of beavers had been trapped to make hats for people in far parts of the world, and fortunes for people like Manuel Lisa and the Chouteaus, and Lewis and Clark, and the British of the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was a good thing the Creator had made plenty of beavers. And it was good that beavers lived in communities where they were easy to find, by their dams and lodges, instead of running all over the countryside like buffalo and other Four-Leggeds.

He had heard that in places in the east, around the Great Lakes and along the St. Lawrence, even around Ontario where his brothers and sisters lived, so many beaver had been trapped for so long that there were few left, and then the whitemen didn’t
have much use for Indians, except to hire them to fight their wars for them.

Everyone works for the whitemen, he thought. Then they get everything.

Sometimes when he was thinking these things he would shiver, and it might have been from wading and reaching in the icy water to set traps, but sometimes it seemed to be from thinking about how the whitemen did things. He remembered how they used words not to make you understand, but to keep you from understanding. Like contracts. Somehow by contract he was obligated to Manuel Lisa these three years; half that time was gone. He would probably finish that time, rather than disappear. He remembered what had happened to Bissonnette, who chose to walk away too soon.

Still, it was a pleasure of times to think of just vanishing. As long as he knew he could do that, he felt like a free man. He was no soldier. Or slave.

The cold wind down off the mountain rushed around his ears, wind keeping everything in motion: the shivering ripples on the beaver pond, the swift little clouds, the bending grass, reeds, bushes, the aspen leaves shivering beyond the meadow, the stray ends of his own long hair whipping about his face.

He loved wind; it was the Spirit Voice and it was freedom. The wind was his friend when he was the hunter; it hid his movements and masked his sounds and helped him keep his scent from his prey, and it spooked their instincts. But when he was the hunted, the wind was his enemy; in all those same ways, it helped those who hunted him. Those who might hunt him were Blackfeet. If they found him, he would try to talk to them before they tried to kill him. His hope was that if any found him, they would be few enough that they would be hesitant to attack. If they hesitated, he could start to sign to them. It would be best if it were just one warrior. But that probably wouldn’t happen.

Now he was bending to cock the beaver trap underwater on the silty bottom, pressing the resistant steel, cocking it underwater to leave no hand scent on it; he was knee deep and elbow deep in clear icy water, tensed against the dangerous, bending
steel, when through the rushing wind he heard screams, faint as birdcalls. A rapid sputter of gunshots, down by the river willow thickets. Down where he had left his two hunters. Then, nothing.

That was not just the two hunters shooting deer, or elk, or even fighting a bear. Too many shots.

He feared the Blackfeet must have caught them. If so, the warriors knew he was nearby. He, the trapper, was in a trap.

But it had not yet closed on him. He had slipped out of traps before. First he had to be invisible. Then get to his rifle. Then to his horse. Still stooping, he left the trap on the bottom and waded without splashing into the cattails. Then he crawled like a snake up the bank and through the gnawed sapling stumps and lifted his rifle from where he had hidden it in the fork of a serviceberry bush. Cupping his hand against the wind, he flipped up the frizzen to check the priming powder, shut it, leaving the gun at half-cock. Peering in every direction, he skirted the shore of the pond, running in a crouch through the windblown meadow grass toward the distant willows that waved silvery in the wind down by the river. The grass rippling everywhere helped him move through it unseen, and the wind whispering in it helped him move unheard.

The shots and cries had ended so quickly he was sure his two hunters must have been caught in the open. There was no continuing fight going on down there. It wouldn’t have been easy to catch those two foxlike Delawares off guard, but it must have happened, judging by what he had heard.

With this wind, no one down at the fort would have heard the shooting, probably. No help from there.

He moved as swiftly in a crouch as most men could run upright, and soon reached the edge of the willow brake where he had concealed his horse.

Going in, he had to face the possibility that the Blackfeet might already have his horse. If they’d stalked his hunters, they surely had stalked him too.

The chilly wind flowing down from the mountains smelled of the snow still on the heights. He paused to sniff for gunpowder,
sweat, smoky leather, bear oil, any trace in the air of warriors nearby. His nose was one reason why he had become a legend among hunters. But beaver trapping had ruined his nose: weeks living besieged in a fort with unbathed whitemen, tobacco smoke, beaver musk bait. That awful, pungent gland odor especially clung dense on hands and in clothes and was always in his nostrils, overpowering any other scent. By itself it was almost too much even for the beavers and had to be mixed with spices or mint to make it interesting to them.

He told himself to stop thinking about other things. Too much thinking distracted a hunter from his senses. It was the same for prey.

Now his mare muttered in her throat among the willows, smelling his approach, greeting him. As he moved closer, her shape emerged gray and shadowy amidst the blind of waving willow slips. He paused in a crouch next to a root clump for a moment, in his most invisible state, his eyes and ears and hunter sense penetrating the thicket all around, knowing that if the warriors had tracked his mare and found her, they were now waiting here around her like trap-jaws around bait for him to return. Pale willow leaves blew aside and he saw her eye, looking at him only, unafraid, knowing him. Her eye would tell him if they were close. Chickadees flitted to perch on one willow slip, then another, and their unconcern was another sign that he was not surrounded. His wet deer-hide leggings and moccasins and sleeves were frigid in the wind, but his blood was hot in his taut veins and he didn’t shiver.

Still no more sounds from below. If his Delawares had indeed been killed, there was not a friend alive within the sound of gunfire, not with this wind. Eighty men, who came two thousand miles up the Missouri to get rich by trapping beaver, were afraid to step out of their fort because of the Blackfeet, so he should expect no help. Maybe they would come to help if they had heard the shooting, but probably not. These were not the same kind of whitemen as Lewis’s soldiers.

Don’t think Lewis!
He tried not to think that name. It was bad.
He was prey now, and what happened would need all his quickest strength and instinct. It seemed as if the name of that man was trying to force itself into his mind and befuddle him.

He slipped close to the mare and stroked her throatlatch, his customary greeting. She nudged his flank with her nose. He hung his rifle by its sling on the horn of the saddle and reached back to untie the heavy hank of beaver traps behind the saddle, a dozen of them hanging by their chains. He couldn’t risk their clink and rattle as he made his way out of here. He eased them into a depression by a root clump and with the edge of his foot nudged sand and twigs over to cover them. They were valuable, and he might live to come back up here and retrieve them later, if the Blackfeet didn’t find them.

Or if they didn’t find him.

Now he unhitched the rein from the willow and stood beside the mare for a moment, listening all around and watching her ears and letting her smell the breeze for him.

She was sensing something out there in the open now, upwind, upslope. Her nostrils flared and her ears aimed at the sunny meadowland up there. Something, maybe only elk or deer or grizzly. Or Blackfeet war ponies.

So he turned her head and led her downwind through the willow brake toward the river, footfalls and hoofsteps sometimes grating gravel, sometimes muffled by sand, sometimes crackling in dry flood litter. Shadows danced wildly all over the ground.

If he was surrounded, the river was his only way to escape down to the fort. A race down the riverbank. Or, if it came to that, the river itself. Colter had escaped by diving into the Madison River that one time and hiding under driftwood. One could become a fish when necessary.

Leading the mare through the thick willows, he took one of his pistols out of his belt sash, cocked it, carried it muzzle up, at his right shoulder. It would be easier to use in this close brush than the long rifle.

Ahead now the Jefferson River glittered with sun sparks
through the willows. He thought the name Jefferson and remembered when Captain Lewis gave this river that name. Great Father Jefferson. And Drouillard remembered that Lewis had also named a river after him: the Drewyer River.

He also remembered he had had a premonition, the first time here.

Soon he would have to move out into the open. Both good and bad. He couldn’t be invisible out there, not with a horse. Lorimier used to joke that three things are impossible to hide: love, smoke, and a man on a horse.

Stop thinking words!

He couldn’t be invisible out there, but the Blackfeet couldn’t either, and their bows and arrows, even their muskets, had but a fraction of the range of his rifle. On the plains with Captain Lewis he had killed deer and antelope so distant they looked the size of mice. This rifle.

Lewis!
His heart clenched when that name came in again. One in danger of death must not think the names of the dead!

Drouillard was sure Lewis was dead. Months ago in a dream too strong to doubt, he had seen Lewis slashing himself like the grey-haired woman of the other dreams.

Stop thinking the name!

No more willows now. Sand, shingle, and succulent spring grass spread wide before him on the inner bend of the fast, shallow Jefferson. He squinted to scan the open country for Indians, or sign of them, saw nothing, and sighted down the long bottomland meadows in the mountain-ringed basin, meadows open as a racecourse. At full gallop he could be halfway to the stockade by the time any Blackfeet saw him. Unless they were down there between him and the fort. He yearned to feel the saddle under him, the mare pounding swiftly along, out of this place that felt so like a trap.

Not that he’d seen a single warrior yet, even a trace of one. No, but there was that gunfire. And his instinct was tingling now. He felt them nearby. So did the mare.