From Sea to Shining Sea (124 page)

There was a chance that it might go by. Out here on the high
prairies, William had noticed often, the sky was so immense that a storm might be filling a quadrant of it with thunder and violence while in another a serene sunset was on display.

Another blast of icy wind now rocked the canoe on its truck; hats went flying, and whirlwinds of dust and sand, debris and prickly pear blossoms spun through the air. William ducked his head and squinted as driven particles began stinging his face like bee stings. He had to brace himself, leaning into the wind, to keep from being blown over backward. A blaze of lightning blanked out all shadows; a crack of thunder nearly deafened him, then the wind rose in a catamount’s wail.

“GET LOOSE OF THE WAGONS!” he yelled. The wind whipped his words away unheard, but the men were already shrugging out of their harnesses, crouching to keep their footing in the windblast. If the wind sent the wagons tumbling, he thought, they would drag these boys to death.

Suddenly something struck William’s thighs and shoulder with bullet force, and he was knocked to his knees. With an incredible rattling, hissing din, egg-size hailstones were pelting the hard ground, hitting it at a shallow angle, some bursting to bits, most rebounding ten feet high before rolling to a halt thirty feet farther on. They struck with bruising force, and there was no place to hide from them. William staggered toward the wagons, feeling like some poor biblical sinner being stoned to death. Through the gray slanting veil of hailstones and, now, ice-cold rain, he could see the dark shapes of the wagons, the men crouching and stumbling, their arms crossed over their heads, some down, some getting up and being struck down again. He heard howls amid the drumming and rattling of the ice, whether the men’s voices or the gale he could not tell. Now the ground was white with ice and ricocheting hailstones, sometimes glaring blindingly in lightning flashes. A blow on the top of his hat staggered William as he struggled toward the wagons, and he knew that if he had been bareheaded it might have fractured his skull.

Now most of the men were huddled under the lee side of the canoe, and William got in among them. Collins grimaced and yelled something, but his voice was inaudible under the wooden drumming and crashing of ice against the boat hull.

When everyone was at least partially sheltered, they settled to wait out the bombardment. Lightning bolts like great dazzling spider-legs stalked across the prairie, shaking the ground sometimes within thirty yards of the huddling men. William waited fatalistically, his heart in his mouth, for a bolt to strike the wagons
and kill everybody. Some of the men were moving their mouths, evidently praying.

Another barrage of huge hailstones thundered on the wagon. William was soaking wet now, and the wind was like a knife of ice. His teeth chattered.

He started praying, but it was an angry prayer.
God
, he prayed,
All I know is You won’t find better people than these even in your churches and your monasteries. So don’t hurt them!

After twenty minutes the storm passed and the hot sun blazed down. The ice, two inches thick all over the prairie, quickly melted and turned the ground into a glue of mud. William examined the men, most of whom were severely bruised, but found no fractures or concussions.

They stood in a line, up to their ankles in the clinging mud, as the storm thumped away eastward and a meadowlark sang and they jabbered in relief, while William doled out whiskey to chase away their aches and chills.

“Thank the Lord,” said Private Tom P. Howard, one of the Corps’ most dedicated whiskey-drinkers, draining the cup.

“Thank him hearty,” William said. “We’re nigh out o’ this stuff, I’m afraid. You’re soon going to have to learn to drink water.”

“Water?” Howard said, handing back the empty cup. “Y’ mean that terrible stuff that flows in th’ Missouri?”

T
HEY HAD CONSUMED ALL THE WATER FROM THEIR CANteens
during the ovenlike morning, before the hailstorm, and so lay down and drank eagerly from puddles to chase their whiskey. They refilled their canteens and got back into harness. But they had not gone fifty feet before the wagon wheels were so clogged with mud, and mired to the axles in it, that William told them to stop the vehicles and make a few hours of leisure until the ground could harden.

“As for me,” he said, “this gives me a chance to take the river way, and remake those sketches the wind blew away. Mr. Charbonneau, you bring Janey and Little Pomp, and we’ll have us that picnic I been promisin’. York, what sayee pack us a lunch, and come along?”

York was delighted. He had been too long confined below the cliffs in the lower camp. He capered around Sacajawea laughing, his feet sucking in the mud, and she laughed with equal exuberance and tried to dance with him, flashing her white smile, pirouetting in the ooze, the baby in its carriage-board on her back cooing happily. Charbonneau looked sullen, disapproving,
until William gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, smiled disarmingly at him and exclaimed, “Eh, Big Tess? For once, ye won’t have to cook!” A big, yellow-tusked smile finally spread reluctantly through the Frenchman’s matted whiskers. You’re not such a bad sort as y’ seem, William thought expansively. I reckon I could make a real friend of you if I had twenty-four hours a day to work on it.

And so they had come along this spectacular high stone bluff, stopping at every bend to look down into the thundering, seething river two hundred feet below them, while William sat down now and then to sketch and take readings on the large compass. They were a carefree and colorful and curious crew now, William with his tomahawk-umbrella over his head, Charbonneau stripped to the waist, the soiled scarlet sash around his waist matching the scarlet wool stocking-cap, whose tasseled crown hung jauntily over his left ear, his girl-squaw in her quill-decorated tunic walking along, pigeon-toed, singing, the papoose on her back, while York fairly strutted along in the rear with his rifle in the crook of his arm and his gold earring glinting in the sun. They stopped to examine formations of eroding lavender-pink shale, which could be pried apart into flakes almost as thin as paper. They saw huge rocks, square as quarry blocks and big as houses, that had fallen into the river below. They saw perpendicular cliffs on the opposite side, honeycombed with round holes and subtly colored by orange, bluish-green, white, and yellow lichens. They watched the spare, yellow-green grass wave in the wind, the shrubbery shudder, the prickly pear mask its treachery in delicate blossoms. They looked down at the green, lush little islands and bottomlands that lay in the river far below, seeing on some of them the remains of old Indian lodges. Sacajawea studied those old sites, raising her fingers toward her mouth, growing tense and vibrant like a pointing dog. “My people those,” she said softly.
“Ai
, Shoshoni.” William looked at her profile, at the straight, grease-shining black hair pulled into bound braids, at the round, brown face of the raven-haired baby on her back, then down at the river in the abyss far below, and he felt space and time without measure; he sensed her instincts, her yearnings, her yearning love for those wild nomadic people of hers. Savages or no, he thought, family’s family.

“The eagle goes home,” Charbonneau said nearby, pointing to the west, and they watched the great lonely bird circle down into the chasm by the hissing, rumbling waterfall and alight on its nest in the cottonwood on the island, where it raised and lowered its wings and settled itself. Sacajawea watched it with
particular fascination, perhaps herself thinking about returning home, and she turned to look at William with a glow of pure joy in her face.

York came running up now, full of excitement about something, pointing to a dark mass on a grassy knoll a mile from the river. “I surely would like to slay us a buff’lo calf to cook for our picnic, Mast’ Billy, with you p’mission. Look.” There were some calves in the edge of the little herd.

“Aye,” William said, “veal would be a nice change. Now mind, though, York, keep us in view. And if ye see any bear sign, don’t get bold. Keep your gun loaded.”

“Heyo, Big Tess,” York cried, “come ’long with me, we get us some veal!”

But Charbonneau was not disposed to leave his squaw and baby alone with the Red Hair Capitaine.

“Non,”
he said. “I stay.”

York shrugged and took off at a lope toward the herd. “Don’t stray too far,” William called after him. “Y’ve got our brandy!” York waved his hand in acknowledgment without looking back.

For an hour then William and Charbonneau and the squaw moved up the south bank of the bluff, almost breathless from the view of the mighty river and the stupendous skyscape above. They were about a quarter of a mile above the great cascade when another towering, silver-edged black cloud cast its shadow over them and hit them with a blast of cold wind that had that same feel and smell to it as the recent hailstorm. William was instandy alarmed. He glanced at the Indian girl and saw the keen edge of fright in her face, too; she had taken the papoose’s carrying-board off her back and was carrying it in her arms and she was sniffing and watching the lowering sky. The wind suddenly came whipping across the plain toward them, flattening the brush and grass as if it were a giant invisible hand passing over it, and when it hit them, it nearly knocked them down. Yellow tumbleweeds came bounding across the plain, scarcely touching the ground, and sailed down into the wide canyon.

We’ve got to find shelter, he thought, or we’ll be blowed right off this cliff. Or beaten to death with hail. “Come on,” he yelled over the whistle of the rising wind. “The ravine!” God, but it comes up so quick, he thought. They leaned into the wind and tried to run for the ravine that lay across their path a few hundred yards ahead. He remembered that there were shelving rocks in that ravine under which they could hide from hail. It was simply the only place within miles that could shelter them.

They struggled onward into the cold, howling gale, squinting
against the wind-driven debris—grasses, seed pods, flower petals, uprooted scrub and prickly pear, sand, and buffalo chips—that stung and beat their faces.

The first icy drops of rain were pelting them when they reached the lip of the ravine and scrambled down a steep defile between the rock-shelves. The floor of the ravine was full of boulders and rock detritus and animal bones and dead scrub. “There!” William pointed toward a ledge made by strata of flinty rock, and they ducked under the ledge. They pressed themselves under the stone, against the dirt, panting, and watched the rain darken the earth all around them. Everything was in motion now, dirt swirling, rain steaming, sticks and particles streaking across the sky above the ravine; the wind was screeching and whistling now like a hurricane. It was the strongest wind William had ever seen, and he knew that if they had stayed up on the prairie they surely would have been blown off into the chasm by now. He and Charbonneau leaned their guns against the rocks, and William set the compass down in a niche where its glass would be protected from harm. He lay his shot pouch and powder horn and the tomahawk-umbrella next to it and tried to arrange himself a little in front of Sacajawea and the baby, to shield them against flying debris. He hoped York had found something to get under. If he had killed a calf by now, he could have crawled under it. The men on the portage trail of course had learned by now to get under the wagons, so he was not so worried about them.

Everything was a strange dull blue now and smelled of wet earth, and William could hear water rushing. A hundred yards down, the ravine opened into the canyon, and he could see a few feet of fast river, and beyond it the far side of the canyon, a somber brown beyond a swirling veil of rain. Sacajawea had taken her baby out of the cradleboard, preparing to put him inside the blanket with her where he would be warmer; she had lain the baby on the ground for a moment. He was naked, kicking and crying, his little high voice audible for just a moment before everything blazed white with lightning and the skies opened up again with a crash. William saw Charbonneau squinting up, mouthing what probably were Hail Marys, and now the rain came in such a deluge that it was like being under the Great Falls themselves. William had never seen so much water come down at once, and it was mixed with hailstones the size of cannonballs. Thank God we’re out o’ that, he thought. But then he felt a frantic clawing at his sleeve. Charbonneau was wild-eyed, gesturing up the ravine, and when William looked, what he saw made his heart seize up.

A flash flood of brown water was coming down the bed of the gully, tearing everything before it, boiling with rocks and mud and tumbling boulders. Mud was dribbling down off the shelf above them. It would be only instants before the gully they were in would be a torrent of muddy water. They were in danger of being washed down the ravine into the deep canyon and over the great waterfalls below.

“OUT! OUT!” William bellowed into the din of the storm. He grabbed Charbonneau’s arm and gestured violently up the slope. The Frenchman came to life, ducked out from under the ledge and clawed his way up the muddy side of the gully toward the plain above. “Janey!” William roared. He grabbed the baby from the ground, and with his free hand gripped Sacajawea’s arm and shoved her out after her husband. William turned then to snatch up his rifle and shot pouch. To his horror he saw that the roaring brown water had risen to his knees, and already it was pulling him, as if to carry him and the infant down into the river. He lunged with all his strength and got out from under the ledge and onto the slope, which now was slimy mud. The water in the ravine was rising so fast now that it was climbing faster than he climbed. With each step he took upward the brown torrent rose a yard. Sacajawea had stopped right in front of him, unable to gain a purchase on the muddy slope; he put a shoulder under her rump and shoved upward, yelling:

“Tess! Tess, damn ye! Give your woman a hand!” Charbonneau might have heard, but he was too intent on getting to high ground to turn and reach down for her.

She began singing, in a keening, mournful voice; it was her death song. We’re like to die here, William thought, it’s true.