From Sea to Shining Sea (130 page)

Now the dogs’ ears pricked up on the arrival of McNeal and Drouillard, who were coming over the brow of the hill. The men looked at each other in puzzlement at the sight of their captain’s posture. One dog wagged its tail. “Help me lure these mangy coyotes,” he said. “Come, boy, come!” And soon Shields arrived, too, and for five more minutes the four explorers, the advance scouts of white civilization, were kneeling, whistling, cooing on a hilltop in a valley surrounded by gigantic mountains, trying to entice a half-dozen scrawny brutes into their service. “Shame we et our pork last night,” Shields said. “Chunk o’ that would fetch ’em.”

But at length the pack apparently tired of this surfeit of attention; two of them turned and trotted down the Indian trail, then the rest lost interest in the white men and ran off after them. Lewis stood up with a morose sigh and put his fists on his hips and watched them disappear.

“Eh, well. Let’s get on, boys.” He really looked gloomy now.

“Chirk up, Cap’n,” McNeal offered. “It can’t be far to town.”

“So. But I’m worried th’ town’ll be alarmed and gone. Or worse: up in arms. Set to attack us without asking any questions. We’ve got to look peaceable, lads, but be set for anything.”

They were descending the trail into the narrowing valley, all four close together now moving alongside the tortuous creek, scanning the terrain for signs of the elusive Shoshonis, whom they were now beginning to imagine as wraiths, will-o’-the-wisps, forever vanishing, luring them deeper and deeper into a towering, mythical landscape.

And then there before them, so close Lewis almost fell backward, were three female figures, looking up with an astonishment as complete as his own: an old Indian woman, a young one, and a thin girl, who had been so engrossed in foraging that they had not heard the white men coming around the creek-bend. All were in ragged, undecorated, almost colorless elkhide tunics, kneeling on fresh-dug earth, and before them was a wide, shallow woven-grass basket partially filled with serviceberries, chokeberries, and roots.

The young woman leaped to her feet quick as a deer and fled, a flashing of bare brown legs, into a thicket down the stream, but the elderly woman, and the girl, who appeared to be ten or twelve years old, remained where they knelt, their faces transfixed in terror. When Lewis laid down his gun and advanced on them, they lowered their heads and shut their eyes as if ready to be struck dead.

Lewis walked up and stood over the old woman, who was so patiently awaiting her fate; her unbound hair was grizzled and hung down to hide her face entirely; he could see her bony shoulders move with her quick breathing. The girl sat likewise; she was trembling; there were rashes and scabs on her arms, as from scratching poison ivy.

Lewis reached down gently for the old woman’s right hand, a gnarled bundle of frail bones in dry, brown, skin covered with dirt from the root-digging. He pried her fist open with his thumb and put into her palm a short string of blue beads. While she was looking at this, he took the right hand of the girl and put a small pewter looking-glass in it. Then he stood back. The men had come abreast of him now and were all standing close, watching the abjectly bent heads, the dirty brown hands examining the bright and unexpected gifts. Somewhere up the valley a crow was cawing.

The old woman’s head began to rise, and her red-rimmed eyes in their baggy folds of skin traveled up Captain Lewis’s dusty leggings, up to his hunting shirt, the pistol and tomahawk in his belt, then to his hard brown face, and the three-cornered hat on his head. Her age-puckered mouth was open and she had no teeth.

Remembering then, Lewis stripped up his shirt sleeve to point at his untanned forearm. “Tab-ba-bone,” he said. “Drouillard, come here and try to hand-talk to ’em. See if you can make her call back that squaw, ere she goes and alarms her town.”

The old woman and the child were so nearly overcome by everything—their delivery from death, the gifts, their first sight of white skin—that it seemed they would never respond to the Indian gestures Drouillard was making. Or maybe, Lewis thought, these signs don’t mean a thing to these people anyway.

But at last the old woman seemed to come to her senses, and she got to her feet, smiling a rapturous, even beautiful, old smile, her face full of fine creases, tears glimmering in her eyes. She was dreadfully hunchbacked, yet so full of excitement that she shuffled in a feeble dance of joy. The girl jumped to her feet and stood there turning, looking at her eyes in the little mirror. It was, Lewis thought, probably the only time she had seen herself,
except reflected in water; and he thought for a moment of all the young white women he had known in the East, and how essential their mirrors were to them, and this notion enhanced his sense of moment.

By now Drouillard had conveyed his message, and the old woman turned her face down the valley and screeched a syllable, then again. And in a minute the young woman came running back up the path, her breasts bobbling in her tunic. She came up panting, wild-eyed, still frightened until the other two showed her what they had received. Then she bounced up and down a couple of times on her heels, in a gesture poignantly reminiscent of feminine delight such as Lewis had seen a thousand times in his own race without really noticing it. He gave her a moccasin awl. Then he told McNeal to find the jar of vermillion in his knapsack and open it.

Now Lewis dipped his fingers in the yellow-red pigment and painted the women’s russet cheeks with it, and everybody was smiling and laughing. The young woman went to McNeal and rubbed a dab of the color off her cheek and thumbed it onto his, and he laughed and smeared her own paint from her cheeks down to her chin, in the meantime getting as close to her as possible, rubbing her large breasts as if by chance, and she laughed and pressed against him. Shields watched this and grinned. “Been a long time, ain’t it, Hugh?” he said. And McNeal answered:

“Oh has it ever! I’m a-gettin’ me a cockstand already, old Johnny!”

“Well, save that,” Lewis warned. “She might belong to somebody.”

Soon Drouillard had expressed by hand signals that they wanted to be taken to the chiefs and warriors. The girl picked up the forage-basket and the two women cheerfully beckoned and started on down the trail.

They had gone about two miles this way, following the squaws, and had emerged into a narrow, treeless valley, the women ambling happily several yards ahead on the dusty, well-worn trail, when Drouillard raised his head and hissed, “Listen!”

Lewis heard it now: a thundering of hooves. And then immediately, over a sloping rise, riding straight at them at full gallop, came a horde of armed warriors mounted on excellent horses, raising a cloud of dust, shaking bows and spears above their heads. Lewis felt a thrill of fright, and in the corners of his eyes saw his men instinctively raise their rifles. There were sixty or seventy warriors in the band.

“No,” Lewis snapped. “McNeal, give me the flag!”

The horsemen, at a shouted command, wheeled their mounts to a whinnying, dust-swirling halt a hundred yards away. At once three horsemen separated themselves from the band and came trotting their steeds forward to meet the three females. Good, Lewis thought, and he put down his gun and pack. “Stay here,” he told the men, and began walking forward holding the flag at his shoulder. His heart was practically fluttering, but he was determined to show no fear.

The women and girl were now capering around the three advance horsemen, showing them their gifts and chattering like birds. Lewis advanced resolutely toward them. Now the three leading horsemen came riding slowly toward him through the grass, and he could feel the soft heavy tread of their horses’ unshod hooves on the ground and hear their slobbery blowing, that beloved horse-sound he had not heard for so long, and he could hear the slight jingling whisper of ornamental quills and claw-necklaces and shells and horn. The men were agleam with oil and their faces were garish with paint. Feathers in their hair and in their horses’ manes and on their bows and lances swiveled and bobbed. And now they were close enough for him to smell: horse-sweat, smoke, bear-oil, body-musk. The man in the center was gaunt, sunken-cheeked; every fiber of his long muscles, every vein in his arms stood in relief. He wore a bonnet made of a hawk’s skin with feathers and head intact, and a necklace of claws. He was bare to the waist and carried a two-foot painted shield strapped on his upper left arm; in his right hand was a long, iron-tipped lance whose entire shank was decorated with a comb of eagle feathers. His dark, deep-set eyes were drilling into Lewis’s face. Lewis met them with his own intense stare for a moment, then smiled and turned back his sleeve to show his white forearm.

Now the three riders had reined in their fine horses around Lewis. The chief’s stallion was all white; an ochre handprint had been made on the side of its brawny neck. The other two men, apparently subchiefs, now sat on their horses flanking Lewis, and he noticed that each held a long war club covered with rawhide. He could hear them breathing, and he had a notion that it all might well end right here for him with his temple bashed in with a stone-headed club.

“Ah-hi-ee,”
the chief said in a breathy voice.

“Ah-hi-ee. Ah-hi-ee,” said the other two. And then all three moved suddenly and slipped off their horses, landing lightly on their feet around Lewis. The chief in the hawk-skin bonnet stood
so close Lewis could smell his breath. Then his teeth bared white; he put his greasy left arm across Lewis’s shoulders, gripping him in a sinewy hug, and rubbed his painted cheek on Lewis’s cheek. Then he released Lewis and let the other chiefs hug and caress him. Everyone was smiling and exclaiming,
“Ah-hi-ee”
which he knew was their exclamation of joy, and the first chief summoned the warriors forward, and Lewis called to Drouillard and Shields and McNeal, and then for the next fifteen or twenty minutes everyone hugged and patted everyone else until Lewis, even though almost overwhelmed by relief and gratitude, was altogether besmeared with paint and grease and heartily tired of the national hug. All the Indians were scrawny as dogs; all were armed only with clubs and bows and spears, except three he noticed who held poorly made light muskets of the kind traded by the North West Company. There was hardly a piece of metal to be seen among all these warriors; even their knives were of flint. Yet, for all their gauntness and poor equipment, they were unusually fine-looking warriors, much more handsome and lithe than the Sioux or Mandans, certainly. And there was no doubt that they were a good-hearted, cheerful people, childishly extravagant in their affections. Lewis thought of Sacajawea. These were the people from whom she had sprung.

“Gawd!” McNeal was saying. “If their squaws are this lovey, let’s git on t’ town!”

T
HE CHIEF SAID HIS NAME WAS CA-ME-AH-WAIT. THROUGH
Drouillard’s hand language, Lewis was able to convey that he came in peace, that he had been seeking the Shoshonis for a long time, that he had small gifts for them, and that a larger party of white men was coming along with boats several days behind, that these boats contained more articles which he wished to trade for horses, and that a woman of their nation was with the boats. All of this seemed agreeable to Ca-me-ah-wait. Lewis brought out a pipe and tobacco. The Indians seated themselves in a circle around the four white men and removed their moccasins, and the white men removed theirs. The chiefs noted the swollen, cut and blistered condition of their feet, but said nothing.

It was a strange parley, here in the sun-baked meadow with no lodges or water nearby. Lewis gave the Indians some small gifts, of which the best received were blue beads and vermillion paint. “Tell them now,” Lewis said to Drouillard, “that we want to go to their camp and tell them our whole story.”

T
HE
S
HOSHONI ENCAMPMENT WAS REACHED AFTER A MARCH
of about four miles. It was in a fertile, level plain through which ran a fast, clear stream about forty yards wide and three feet deep. There were perhaps a hundred Indians but only two poor lodges, one made of willow brush and another of leather, and a scattering of small brush shelters. Ca-me-ah-wait explained that his people had been attacked in the spring by Indians from the plains, who had killed and captured about twenty of his people and had stolen many of their horses and all of their leather lodges. He took off his hawk-feather bonnet to show that he had cut off his hair in mourning for his murdered relatives.

T
HE OLD UNHURRIED CEREMONY OF THE PEACE PIPES REsumed
then in the lodge, in pleasant shade, with everyone seated on antelope skins spread over green boughs, moccasins off, all the elegant and solemn ritual in which the chief presented the pipestem to the heaven and center of the earth and the four quadrants of the horizon, and then the long and heartfelt preambles to longer and more heartfelt speeches. It was late afternoon now and Lewis and his men had not eaten a bite of food since the night before, and their empty stomachs gurgled and growled, and the native mixture in the pipes made their heads buzz. The business took about ten times longer even than usual, for want of interpreters, and much of it surely was lost because sign language could convey only so much. I wish Sacajawea was here, Lewis thought over and over. The sun was going down.

Then it was his turn, and he stood and told of the large party he had back over the mountain, and how they were going to the great lake where the sun sets, and would find a route by which tools and hunting guns and other fine things from his nation could be brought to the Shoshonis to make their life easier and richer, and how the Great Chief in the east would protect them and enrich them if they would be peaceful and helpful now. Ca-me-ah-wait was rapt as Drouillard signaled all this to him; it was obvious that the lot of the Shoshonis was particularly hard, and these promises made him feel that good things were to come during his time as the head of the tribe, and that he would be remembered for them. While Lewis talked, scores of women and children stared into the shelter at these men with white feet and light-colored hair, the first such men they had ever seen. Then Ca-me-ah-wait harangued his people for another long spell, and told them they should help these new friends in any way they could. He told Lewis that they were on their way down to the plains to join their friends the Flatheads and hunt buffalo for
their winter’s meat, but that they would help before they went if the white man would tell them what they needed. He explained that he had come out against them as a war party because the Indians who had seen them approaching that morning had come and alarmed the village, and he had feared that these strangers were allies of the Blackfeet. Lewis learned only now that
tab-ba-bone
meant “alien,” that there was no Shoshoni word for “white man.”