Sign-Talker (65 page)

Ravens were descending on a slip of beach under the riverbank about a mile below, and they drew his eye to something
lying there that had not been there when he had come up this morning. Something too indistinct to identify but must be a carcass or carcasses. Something the hunters had killed, perhaps, but more likely the hunters themselves. Between him and the fort. It might be better to swim across the river here and then ride fast down the other bank. Run from Indians to goddamn whitemen! He hated himself for that thought. Then he regretted that he had thought in profanity. In his mother’s language there were no profane words. Lewd ones, yes, but no words for dishonoring
Weshemoneto
, or God by any other name.

Eh bien
. Language. It was language that the officers had hired him for. They might have made it out or back without his hunting skills, but not without his talking hands.

Drouillard the great talker, he told to himself, changed this world by being able to talk between peoples who had never seen each other before. What have I done? Talk is a way to peace and trust, but it opens the way for distrust and trouble. His own father had been an interpreter between peoples, and in trouble most of his life because of it. The Drouillards, the Talkers-Between.

He knew he should be running now, but he was here thinking about talking.

It was said of the Shawnees that, although warlike, they had been famed as peacemakers, because they went far and talked between others.

I could talk the Blackfeet into peace, he thought. We could all prosper up here. There never was a place like this for furs.

He stood in the wind at the edge of the willows with his nervous mare, thinking, instead of running as he knew he should do. He uncocked the flintlock pistol and slipped it back into the sash at his waist, gently biting the inside of his lip between two eye-teeth and thinking that he alone, the Talker-Between, still might undo the harm Lewis did back then, and Colter had done since. He had never had a chance to be a warrior, but where had there ever been a more important Talker-Between?

Come down, just one of you, with your eyes and heart open
, he prayed.
Come down, and we’ll talk, not kill!

This was why he had insisted on coming out of the fort. Not
just to trap beaver, but to make a chance to talk. It had been there all along, under his intentions. It was why he was lingering here when he should be crossing the river or racing down to the fort. It was a possibility as bright as the sunlight sweeping down the slope between the running cloud-shadows.

Did not his people say Creator puts you where you are needed?

The mare nickered, looking upwind. He looked up.

There they were. Blackfeet horsemen. They had not just chanced upon him; they were closing around, curving from beyond the willows and down across the meadow toward the river, all eyes upon him. They were in a file, on handsome horses: colorful riders, with lances, shields, feathered coup sticks held high, trotting their horses down to shut off that wide way he had intended for his flight. By now he would have been through there and gone, had he not stood here thinking words and names and memories and ideas. For a moment after his first sight of them, it seemed hard to get enough breath.

He soothed the nervous mare with a caress on her strong, arched, tensed gray neck.

So. I am here and the Master of Life gives me a chance to talk with the Blackfeet and turn their hearts around, as I thought.

He prayed:
See it thus in your eyes, Weshemoneto, so that it will be. For what you see is what comes to be
.

He was sorry they had found the two hunters first, because if the warriors had indeed killed already, they would want to keep killing, rather than start talking.

The horsemen reined in and paused at a distance, confident they had him in a trap, but respectful of his long rifle. They might even know who he was. If they could see at this distance that he was Indian, they would know him as the Indian who talks for the whitemen and shoots far. They usually knew more than one expected them to.

He took a long breath and let it out. He thought of praying the Black Robe prayer too, just in case they were right about God, but had long ago forgotten those words. He stepped forward, leaving his rifle on the saddle, his pistols in his sash. He
draped the rein over his shoulder so he could use both hands but still grab it if he had to. The warriors were still in hesitation out there, probably mystified that he was neither running nor reaching for a weapon. He counted about twenty of them. It appeared that only about four had firearms. He knew there was a chance that among their guns there might be his hunters’ good long rifles. If it came to a fight, that could diminish the advantage he had with range. But even if they had the rifles, they probably wouldn’t know rifles had to be loaded with a patch, and still wouldn’t achieve the range he could.

But he prayed that this would be talking, not fighting. He was sorry they were so many. The fewer, the more likely to talk.

He raised his right hand, open palm toward them. Then touched his chest with his fingertips, extended the hand toward them, then back to his chest, then scooped his upturned right palm from his mouth toward them, the invitation to talk.

On the wind he heard someone laugh. But they looked to a rider near the middle of their line, a man wearing a tunic with a quillwork circle on the breast and a buffalo poll headdress with polished horns. That one sat his horse resting the butt of a gun on his thigh. So Drouillard held his gaze on that man, who probably was their chieftain, and repeated the gestures inviting talk.

It would be too much to hope that he had already won his chance to parley. But their continued hesitation seemed to mean interest.

The chieftain with the slightest motion urged his spotted horse forward a few steps, stopped, looked about, rode forward a few more steps. And the others moved closer.

Drouillard’s mouth was dry. He ran his tongue between his lips, made the signs again. Everywhere the grass and willows whipped and swayed in the wind, crisp waves raced on the shining river. This was that pure, bright wind in which, he had been taught, the Creator speaks to us. The fringes of his tunic and his breechclout blew and swayed in the wind, and the feathers on the warriors’ lances and bows and coup sticks, and in their hair braids and bonnets and their ponies’ bridles and manes, twirled and fluttered. All those feathers were for brave
deeds, he knew, given by their tribe. Drouillard was pitifully conscious that he had not a feather on him for them to see. They could see that he was indeed Without Eagle Feathers. Not to be feared.

This wind was the Creator’s whisper. Maybe these warriors were listening to hear what it said. But they were still wary and severe in their postures. Some had nocked arrows, but it was still much too far a range for those.

So Drouillard made the sweeping, upward-spiraling signs to say, as if this were already a council,
The Master of Life has put us together here
. To say this to any people meant that the Master of Life had brought them together for his own purpose, not their own. It was a call for faith and trust. Making these signs, he hoped to see them ease down their weapons and dismount and come walking on foot, in peace.

A shadow raced along the sunlit ground, toward him and then over him, and down the wind shrilled an eagle’s cry, a whistle from the sky. He went cold inside.

Eh bien. C’est ça
. The eagle had told him what the Creator’s purpose was. Even before the declining note of the eagle’s cry faded in the wind, an arrow came from just where he had been in the willow thicket, whispered over his shoulder and with the sound of a fist pounded into a palm, it stuck halfway up its shaft in the hard flesh of his mare’s neck.

Drouillard grabbed the rein with the quick strength of his left hand before she could rear or bolt away. He drew a pistol from his waist, cocked it, and shot the bowman in the head as he drew back another arrow. He heard the riders whoop. They were dancing their horses, readying their weapons, no doubt meaning to charge him before he could reload. He swung around, reached up and pulled his rifle from the saddle and ducked around to place the mare between himself and the warriors. A puff of gun smoke appeared, a musket banged, and a ball whacked the saddle and spun off with a burring sound, its force staggering the mare. The whole line of warriors was starting toward him now, from about two hundred yards away.

He dropped the rein and stood on it, raised his rifle to sight on
the quillwork target on the chieftain’s breast. He knew now that he should have known the Creator’s purpose for him here, from that premonition five years ago: to die. This was to finish the voyage that had begun seven years ago in old French Fort Massac above the Ohio River, the day he met that man Lewis and, false to his own heart, began serving the conquerors of his own people, in return for dollars.

I’m too much an Indian to be caught by Indians
, he had boasted this morning.

Eh! Not as much an Indian as I should have been.

He squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked and bucked and the chieftain fell back over his horse’s rump, shot through the heart. At the sight of such a shot at that range, the Blackfeet checked their charge and began milling. He was already reloading: a charge of powder down the barrel, greased patch over the muzzle and a ball thumbed over it, ramrodded home. He held the ramrod under his left arm and primed the pan, hearing another shot go by him. They had stopped milling and a glory-seeker was charging forward to come full tilt at him. Drouillard shot him out of the saddle before he had gained twenty yards. The rest whirled and hesitated again, wheeling to discharge muskets at him. He stood behind the skittish mare, reloading, and heard two bullets hit her. She was whinnying and he had to grab the rein and settle her. Arrows were arcing over him, were falling around him, sticking in the ground and in the mare. One whiffed by his forehead, and he saw that it had come from the willows close by. He drew his other pistol and shot a man moving in the thicket.

The mare was standing stupefied, bleeding. He had no idea how many arrows and musket balls she had taken that were meant for him. He primed the rifle as another rider yodeled a war cry and lashed his horse forward.

Drouillard had been the best of the hunters and talkers but had never had the honor of being a Shawnee warrior. Now he could be a warrior. He answered the war cry. The rider was halfway to him when Drouillard fired and hit him.

The good mare was heaving loudly and bleeding from the mouth, her head beginning to droop. There would be no riding
her out of here. She could only be his fortification as long as she stood.

They were still afraid to come on all at once, it seemed; some were even riding back to get out of his range. In their hesitation he had time to load the rifle and pistols.
Wehsah!
Good! The Blackfeet were clumsy with their guns, evidently not very familiar with them, and it was a long time between their shots.

Drouillard stood behind the mare, sweat streaming down his face. Now there was gunpowder smell, not just beaver gland. He selected one of the warriors who had ridden farthest away, and just to put more fear into them, fired a three-hundred-yard shot, and the warrior’s horse crumpled to the ground, spilling its rider. He reloaded again; the rifle barrel was warm.

He kept an eye on as many of the Blackfeet as he could, watching the willow thicket as well as the distant riders. There was movement in the foliage. Several more arrows and a musket blast came out of the thicket, and the mare sank on her haunches. He fired a pistol over her saddle and heard a yelp of pain from within the willows.

Then he was staggered by the force of an arrow slamming through muscle at the right side of his waist. Bracing himself with an exhalation of breath, he discharged the other pistol into the thicket.

Most of the riders were still regrouping in the distance, and he had a load in the rifle and started to reload a pistol. Blood from his waist was beginning to run down his hip and thigh, but the wound didn’t hurt terribly yet; the shock of the arrow had numbed it. It wasn’t bad. In muscle, not guts.

He had taught them that they had good reason to be afraid of his rifle. He was beginning to get the outrageous idea that they might just give up and leave. Indians did not like to waste the lives of their people, and already he had hit perhaps a fourth of their number. As the mare stretched her front legs out forward as if to lie down for a roll in the grass, he knelt behind her, and now he saw her off side for the first time since this started: totally slick with blood, and bristling with six or seven arrows sunk deep.

All three of his guns were loaded again and no one was charging. He laid the guns in the grass beside the wheezing, gurgling mare and felt around the right side of his waist. The flint point had gone in at the front of the muscle and come an inch or so out the back. So he unsheathed his knife and cut off the arrow shaft just ahead of the fletch, sheathed the knife, reached back with his right hand and gripped the arrowhead, clenched his jaw and pulled the arrow on through. He blew out a loud sigh and blinked against a bright blizzard of pain. When his vision cleared, he saw a warrior limping toward him with lance and shield. It was the one he had shot off his horse a hundred paces out. He had gotten on his feet and here he came, blood all down his front, but charging.

Drouillard grabbed up a pistol, cocked it and fired at the man’s chest, but the bullet hit the edge of his hide shield, which deflected it enough that it hit his shoulder only. He spun all the way around, but then came right on at Drouillard with his lance. Drouillard thought, You’re like one of those bears, aren’t you? He rolled quickly aside and the lance stuck in the ground and its shaft broke. The warrior, a big-boned boy, grimaced and staggered, but didn’t fall. A war club hung from one wrist by a thong, and he grabbed the handle, raised it and came at Drouillard swinging. Drouillard ducked under the blow, grabbing his knife from its sheath, and stabbed the warrior under the ribs. As the man stumbled and fell, Drouillard heard the howls and the hoofbeats coming, and they were close. They had used this scuffle to get into close range.