From Sea to Shining Sea (129 page)

Maybe he’ll stay, Lewis thought. Maybe he sees my white skin. Maybe … He glanced to his left.
Damn you, Shields, stop! God, make that fool stand still.

Lewis was now a mere hundred yards from the Indian, who watched with keen interest but was wary as a wolf.

“Tab-ba-bone! Tab—”

With a slash of the quirt, the Indian started his horse into flight, leaped the creek, and vanished like a jackrabbit into the willow brush. Lewis exploded then. He flung his trinkets on the ground and howled in a fury:

“Shields! Drouillard! Come here, you God-damn fools! COME HERE!”

And while he waited for them to lope down, he watched the distant willow brush move with the Indian’s flight, and tears of mortification blurred his vision.

Shields tried to defend himself by insisting that he had not seen the captain’s signals. But that was a feeble excuse, he realized; Lewis let him know, with a sarcasm as abrasive as prickly pear on bare skin, that anyone but the sorriest greenhorn should not even have needed a signal to know to stop. “By God, man, if we’ve lost this critical chance and can’t recoup it, I’ll have to hold you responsible for the failure of our whole venture!”

It was the most painful reprimand Shields had ever received in his life. He had always felt himself one of the most favored and amply rewarded members of the expedition because of all he had done at the anvil; now a whole year’s praise was swept from him in a single sentence, and he could not look anyone in the eye for a while.

W
ILLIAM WAS GOING THROUGH SCRUB, IN A SUN-BAKING
gulch, with his head down, following the fresh hoofprints of a small deer. He had come a long way following it, and had not
caught a glimpse of it yet, but was determined to get it because the men had had no fresh meat for two days, other than a few trout and some beaver. They needed huge quantities of food because they were straining and exhausting themselves hour upon hour with the heavy dugouts in the fast, cold water, and in these days on pan bread and fish they had been weakening noticeably, and were covered with boils and hives.

Leaving the one canoe behind had freed several more men for hunting. But game was scarce in these bald and rocky hills. To find fresh deer tracks was cause for great and hopeful excitement. He who brought in meat these days for the famished and aching boat-pullers was the hero of the hour.

Chhhrrrr!
William froze in midstep.

It was a large rattlesnake coiled directly in his path, tail vibrating, head tensing back to strike the oncoming foot.

With a grunt, William struck down with the end of his espontoon, mashing the snake’s head against the hard ground. Its body flailed and flopped and lashed, and at that moment something large and tawny crashed and moved in the corner of William’s eye. It was his deer, startled by the grunt and thud, and it sprang out of the scrub, twenty feet away, up the bare, eroding side of the gulch. William dropped the espontoon, jerked his rifle to his shoulder, the rattlesnake instandly forgotten; he cocked the flintlock as he made a hasty sighting far forward on the animal’s shoulder, and even as he squeezed off what he knew was a desperate and nearly impossible shot he felt the thrashing snake hit his right legging a few inches above his infected ankle. For an instant as the gunshot echoed and smoke billowed in the gulch he had an awful sense of loss and confusion, a sense that he had surely both missed his deer and been bitten by the deadly rattler, a sense that he had somehow in that flurry mismanaged the whole thing.

But no! The deer was clambering ungracefully, slipping and stumbling up above; surely he had winged it, at least, after all. He looked down and saw the rattlesnake still writhing, and its head was mashed and torn. He grabbed up the espontoon and hacked the snake once more quickly and it lay almost still, merely rippling a bit along its length; then he examined the elkhide legging at the place where he had felt the blow. There was no mark there. Obviously the snake had merely hit him with its body in its death throes and had not got fangs into him. If that poor snake had bit
that
ankle, William thought, it would be
him
that died o’ poisoning.

Now he stepped over the serpent and limped through the
scrub after the sound of the deer, which was out of sight now. Bloodspecks led up the draw. It was incredible but that wild shot had found a living mark. William ran, reaching for his powder horn to reload, following the red drops and hoof-scuffed earth around an outcropping of yellowish flintlike rock.

And there was his deer. It was a doe, and her hind legs were collapsed; likely his shot had hit her spine. She was making a desperate, wild attempt to run, scrabbling with her forelegs, her eyes terrorized, not understanding this hurt and this helplessness. Now she was sliding sideways in the dust and rocktrash, her neck strained forward, her hind legs twitching, her mouth open and tongue protruding.

William had advised the hunters not to waste shots, both to conserve powder and to keep from alarming the Shoshonis unduly. William did not like to see a deer in this awful twitching pathetic state, and he wanted to dispatch her with a shot through the head. But he remembered his own policy about shooting, so he just advanced on her, those last few intimate yards, his heart beating hard, until he stood directly beside her. Then, keeping his eye on the sharp hooves, he put his gun on the ground, moved in with the steel-tipped espontoon, and with a thrust powered by both arms he drove the weapon through her heaving ribs and into her heart. He stood back panting as blood poured out of her mouth and soaked into the parched ground, and she died, the wild terror fading from her brown eyes until they became dead and dull as bottleglass.

Well, there was more meat for the boys. But he hoped he would never have to kill a deer that way again, close enough to watch the life die in the eyes.

He had killed deer and elk and buffalo beyond count, but the only thing he was glad to kill was a rattlesnake.

L
EWIS HAD PUT YESTERDAY’S DISAPPOINTMENT BEHIND HIM
, and now he and Drouillard and Shields were moving forward in the same wide line as before, searching for fresh Indian tracks, looking for a well-traveled path, while McNeal followed with an American flag on a long willow pole which, it was hoped, would be interpreted as a sign of peace by any Indians who might be watching from the high meadows.

An hour ago they had found some of the sunshade bowers at a place where Indians had been digging for roots. The diggings were fresh, less than two days old. Now they were on a well-beaten Indian road that ran in and out of ravines, parallel to the streambed. Lewis’s hopes were waxing again; he was sure that
these traces would lead within a few more miles to some Shoshoni village. But he could only hope that the Indian who had fled on horseback yesterday had not alarmed them all to the point of flight.

And now the stream they had been following had dwindled to a mere brook. “Cap’n, sir!” McNeal called. Lewis turned around.

There stood the grinning young private with one foot on each side of the water, waving his flag, and yelling now.

“Praised be th’ Lord, I’ve lived f straddle this here thought t’ be endless Missouri! Yeeeeeee HAAAAAA!”

T
WO MORE MILES UP THE TWISTING VALLEY THEY CAME TO
the base of a ridge that made a saddle between two mountains. From the base of the ridge issued a rivulet of ice cold water. Lewis waved Drouillard and Shields in and the four men sat to rest. Lewis seemed almost rapturous. He said:

“Gendemen, this is a moment my mind’s been fixed on for many a year. I’ll have a drink now from the extremest fountainhead of the mighty Missouri. And you have spent so many toilsome days and restless nights with me to reach it, you’ll drink with me!”

He lay down to drink first, his heart beating against the ground, and kissed the surface of the fresh, crystalline water, inhaling the scent of wet rock, and drew in a mouthful of water so cold it made his palate ache, and swallowed it, and a teardrop fell off the end of his nose into the water. Then the other men drank. “Now,” he said, his eyes glittering, and pointed up to a saddle of land between two mountains straight ahead. “See where the trail goes over that pass? That I’ll swear is the Great Divide! What’ll y’ wager before nightfall we’ll be on th’ yonder side tastin’ a sip from a like fountainhead of the Columbia?” Now they all had teary eyes, and were impatient to get back on their feet.

The ascent was gentle, and they walked in a close group up that last half mile. “Bejeesus,” Shields exclaimed as they slogged upward between two barren, windy peaks. “Y’ mean it’s all downhill from there on?”

They went on, each wondering in his own manner of thinking what the western side would look like. Perhaps a descending rank of foothills, hills maybe like the Alleghenies, dropping away and away, lower and lower, with the blue and peaceful ocean lying out there somewhere on the horizon? McNeal, who had seldom heard his captains talk about the geography, probably was envisioning
it that way. Drouillard and Shields had been around the captains more and probably had a less simple foreview of it, but in their souls they, too, were starting to think downhill, downstream, westerly. Captain Lewis himself knew there were probably more mountain ranges, but he knew that the waters leading down that western watershed would wind among them probably to the Columbia—or some other, as yet unknown—river, and that to the Pacific. He knew that in descending from this divide back down to the Gulf of Mexico, the easterly waters dropped gradually, some three thousand miles down the Jefferson and Missouri and another thousand down the Mississippi. He knew also from coordinates that the Pacific likely was no more than five hundred miles due west of this divide. Thus the westering rivers must make a comparatively short, steep rush down to sea level, or else twist and wind through an incredible maze of mountain ranges. All these long-held expectations were coloring his thoughts as he climbed the Indian trail to the top of the ridge. But still he was not prepared for what he saw.

Range after range of immense, purple-sided, snow-capped mountains stretched away to the west until they were lost in each other. Many of the peaks seemed to stand much higher even than this ridge upon which the four white men now stood. Over and through those incredible gleaming towers and dark valleys moved the shadows of clouds, and a silence so deep it seemed to make the ears ring from within.

It was a long time before anyone spoke, and it was Shields, who said:

“God have mercy on us! That sure don’t look downhill t’ me!”

T
HIS WESTERN SLOPE OF THE RIDGE WAS STEEPER. LEWIS
tried to hearten the men as they made their way down the Indian trail. He reminded them that they enjoyed the honor of being the first Americans to cross the Divide, and assured them: “You have indeed passed over the rooftop of the land, doubt me not.”

“I’m not a-doubtin’ you ’bout that rooftop, sir,” Shields ventured to joke, emboldened now by Lewis’s apparent high spirits, “but them out there’s surely the most turrible lot o’
gables
I ever seen!”

And then, three-fourths of a mile down the slope, the Indian path veered along the bank of a bold, leaping little creek of cold water. Here again Lewis stopped to lie down and drink. He stood up, grinning, bright-eyed. “Help yourselves, boys. By my soul, this is our first taste of the great Columbia, and I swear she’s the best stuff I ever drank, except whiskey.”

“Please don’t say that word, sir,” McNeal pleaded. “Yell make me cry.”

T
HEY CAMPED THAT NIGHT AT A SPRING BESIDE THE INDIAN
road where there was willow-brush for a fire, and ate the last of their pork. As they had done the night before, they hung awls and pewter looking-glasses on a pole near the campfire, but as far as they knew, no one came to see them.

The next morning they were still following the Indian road and had come about ten miles, and were moving down a rolling plain within a valley when Drouillard whooped once and pointed toward a rise about a mile ahead. Lewis looked up and his heart skipped.

On the brow of the height stood three Indians—a man and two women—and several dogs.

Lewis was elated. This time there would be no stupidity like that before. Shields and Drouillard would not risk that kind of tongue-lashing again. And this time the Indians were on foot, and thus less likely to flee so quickly. In fact, they seemed to show no alarm at all yet, but were watching, immobile as statues. The two women sat down as if to wait for their approach.

When Lewis was within a half mile of the group, he directed the men to stop. He put down his pack and rifle and took the flag from McNeal, unfurled it, and began walking slowly up the slope toward them, one hand full of trinkets.
Stay
, he thought, as if trying to project his thoughts across the distance to them.

But suddenly the two women rose and disappeared over the hill. The man still stood, watching. Lewis stripped up his sleeve and called, “Tab-ba-bone!
Tab-ba-bone!”
Two of the dogs began edging down the slope toward him, their wolfish faces alert and wary.

But the man at the top of the hill turned and vanished.

Damnation!
Lewis ran toward the top of the hill, but when he arrived where they had stood, there was not a sight of them. Only the dogs remained, circling him warily at a few yards distance, or sitting down to scratch at fleas with their hind legs. It was incredible how quickly and completely the savages had disappeared. Lewis waved back for the men to come on.

Then he had an idea. Perhaps if he could tie a few trinkets on a dog’s neck with a handkerchief, the animal would carry these tokens of friendship to its masters. This would be a precedent in diplomatic envoys, he thought, feeling a sense of the absurd. He knelt and began snapping his fingers, whistling, and cajoling them with crooned entreaties. “Come! Come, fellow! Come on!
Good beastie!” A couple of them were cringing near. “Tab-ba-bone,” he added, and made himself laugh. The laughter, or the bared teeth of his smile, somehow struck the dogs wrong, and they all moved several yards out of his reach, their hackles rising. “Come, now, good boys,” he said sweetly, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. They looked at him with their yellowish, half-vulpine eyes, but would not come forward. “You’re sure sorry-mannered beasts compared with my Scannon,” he felt compelled to tell them, but he said it nicely.