From Sea to Shining Sea (131 page)

Lewis told them now what he needed. He would like some people of the tribe, and about thirty horses, to go back beyond the great ridge and meet the rest of his people, and help carry his party’s goods across to this place. He would like guides to show them a route for boats to the great river that flowed to the west-em lake. He would like their help in finding large trees for making canoes to float down that river. And if it should be necessary to cross mountains to reach such a route for boats, he would want to buy enough horses from the Shoshonis to carry the party’s baggage to that route. All of this Ca-me-ah-wait found reasonable, but he warned that this little river, and a larger river it flowed into, a day’s march below, were too full of rocks and foam for passage by boats. He said too that there was little more timber on that lower river than here, and that the other river wound between unclimbable mountains.

Lewis glanced at his men, and saw their faces looking grim. This was bad news, but perhaps, he thought, the chief exaggerates.

“But now,” Lewis said, “our needs are simpler. We have eaten nothing today.”

To his astonishment, the chief replied that there was not a bite of meat in the village that he knew of, as his hunters had had no fortune for many days. All the Shoshonis had to eat were a few cakes of sun-dried berries. Lewis looked around at the gaunt natives and understood. But, Ca-me-ah-wait said, the people would share what they had.

It was almost night when the parley broke up. The chief had his people bring dried serviceberries, and the white men were fed. “I promise you,” Lewis told him, “tomorrow my two hunters here,” he indicated Drouillard and Shields, “will take their fine firesticks and will hunt meat for your people.”

That sounded good to Ca-me-ah-wait and he announced it to his people, who responded joyfully. A bonfire was kindled in the twilight, and a merry dance ensued. The music and the manner of dancing were similar to those of the Missouri tribes, and the soldiers were quickly absorbed in the eager and affectionate society
of the tribespeople. It was still going strong at midnight when Lewis grew too sleepy to stay up. He was taken to a small bower, where he put up his mosquito net and retired. He was awakened several times during the night by the exuberant yelling of the men and Indians, but was too weary to stay awake long. The decision to hunt meat for the Indians was a good one, he knew; it would further strengthen this bond that had begun so well, and he suspected, too, that William and the main party would need another day at least to reach the forks where he had left instructions for them to halt.

Aye, he thought, dozing with the beat of drums in his head, things seem to be going well.

Maybe too well, he thought.

No, he told himself. Expect the best.

D
URING THE VOYAGE
, D
ROUILLARD HAD KILLED SEVERAL
pronghorn antelope even while hunting afoot, and so Lewis was certain that he would be able to kill some of those fleet beasts while mounted on a fine Shoshoni horse. Lewis was proud of Drouillard, and when a herd of a dozen pronghorns was spotted in the valley next morning, Lewis told Ca-me-ah-wait there would be meat soon.

Drouillard and Shields were quickly mounted on fast horses, and, accompanied by some twenty young Indian men, set out to pursue the herd.

The chase swept hither and yon through the sunny valley for about two hours, most of the time within view of the village, and it was a good entertainment. But, perhaps because of their carousing the night before, Drouillard and Shields were not up to their usual level of skill. The Shoshoni hunters were unable to get within bow range of the antelope, which moved more like birds than earthbound beasts, and early in the afternoon the hunters rode in empty-handed on their sweat-lathered horses and there was no meat for the village after all. So Lewis gave Drouillard one sullen look and then ignored him for a while; the Indians ate berries again, and the white men ate berries cooked in a little flour paste.

That afternoon Lewis continued his conferences with Ca-me-ah-wait and made observations on the living mode of the Shoshonis. He noted that they were almost as flighty and wary as antelope themselves, that each warrior kept at least one horse staked near his lodge day and night, and that the whole male population could be mounted and armed within seconds. They were all superb horsemen, so much a part of their mounts that
they seemed like centaurs, and gave the impression of being awkward, incomplete, half-creatures when afoot. The horses themselves were fine. “Indeed,” he wrote in his journal, “many of them would make a figure on the South side of the James River, or the land of fine horses.” Drouillard made a count of the horses, both tied and grazing loose, and said they numbered about four hundred. The Indians also had a few mules, which they said had been obtained by other Shoshoni tribes far to the south, from some source Lewis had a hard time understanding until he saw a bridle bit of Spanish manufacture. Yes, Spanish, Ca-me-ah-wait said; that was their name. But the Spanish would not sell guns to the Shoshonis because they appeared to fear the thought of Indians with guns. Ca-me-ah-wait’s own tribe had never been to the Spaniards.

It was agreed that Indians and horses would go with Lewis next day toward the creek fork back on the other side of the divide, and meet there his friend the Red Hair Chief with the boats. This settled, the hungry Shoshonis and their hungry guests launched into another evening’s entertainment, and the dancing and carousing lasted late.

Once, shortiy before midnight, McNeal came staggering blissfully out of a brush hut, sat down by a happy-faced Shields near the bonfire, sighed, and said, “Stud York better get here soon. We a-goin’ need some reinforcements.”

*     *     *

A
GAIN TODAY
W
ILLIAM HAD BEEN STRUCK AT BY A RAT
tlesnake; then, later, while fishing in the evening in the late sun at the foot of a steep bluff, he had looked down from a drowsy daydream to find a rattler coiled between his feet. He had sat quietly waiting until it unwound itself and slithered away. Then on returning to camp he saw Sacajawea, gathering cottonwood down for Little Pompey’s cradleboard, leap backward suddenly with a little outcry. He ran to her, his string of trout flopping beside him, and saw the scaly pattern of a big rattler’s back streaming into the brush. She had not been hit.

The place was infested.

The party had made fourteen miles along the twisting river this day, but it was only about six miles in direct distance. The men had been almost constantly in the cold water, and they ached in all their joints. William yearned for whiskey to allay their miseries. Fortunately the Fields brothers had fared well in their hunting, and there was meat from five deer and an antelope, as well as plenty of trout, to stoke their inner fires, and they were jolly enough tonight, though they all moved like old men around the camp.

Maybe it was because of the rattlesnakes, but William felt a particularly tender kinship with the Indian girl tonight. It seemed marvelous that she and her little fat baby were alive, and that the playfulness of fate had put their vulnerable lives into his care. It was a remarkable situation to which everybody had become entirely accustomed, and yet sometimes in the evenings like this, by the campfire, it would all come over him again so poignantly, the
domesticity
of it. That was what it felt like, domesticity: food by firelight, writing by the light of a little lamp, York humming in his baritone as he sand-scoured a kettle, Scannon lying nearby with his muzzle on his paws, probably dreaming of his master, Sacajawea sewing something for the baby or mending something for William. And he would have that feeling which was so natural until he would think the words for it: the words were that he felt
married
to this squaw-girl, this Janey, and he felt as if the little fat baby boy with his alert eyes and ready giggle was
his
boy. And he would pick him up in his big hands, and hold him while the baby’s strong little legs kicked, and laugh and call him “my little dancing boy Pomp,” and would look into those perfect obsidian baby-eyes with fireglints in them and would feel a miniature hand close around his
thumb, and the little red mouth would form a perfect leer of a mansmile and the voice would chortle and coo, and William then would glance up at Sacajawea and find her beaming at him with pure intimate sharing in her eyes. William would have that strange and wonderful notion then, as incredible as it was natural, that no man and wife could be more truly akin to each other than this.

Charbonneau in those moments would seem not to exist, and it was largely his own fault, because he preferred the company of his old compatriot Le Page, and would nearly every evening go to sit and talk French with him and Cruzatte, bragging about his reputation as a sharp trader and a drinker of taffia and a steely-nerved gambler and a famous
paillard
among Indian maidens from Canada to the Missouri. That was what he was doing at this moment, when across the camp came a clucking sound like that of a galloping horse: the sound of
Le Capitaine Clark
making tongue-noises to the baby on his knee, calling him Dancing Boy, and the little high hoot of glee the baby made in response, and a laughing syllable in Sacajawea’s voice. Le Page and Cruzatte smirked at each other, and Charbonneau saw them do it, and they might as well have made cuckold-horns at him, because he was quite aware of that domestic scene over by the captain’s fire; he had been watching it out of the back of his head all evening. His eyes went dark and murderous and he glared at his countrymen in a way that meant
this is beyond joking
, so they lowered their eyes to the willow-wood fire and began discussing the best recipes for beaver-trap bait.

But Charbonneau had been stung to a rage by the sight of that knowing smirk and the cheerful sounds from his wife and baby. He stood up and wandered slowly among the campfires and the blanket-wrapped sleepers and the low-talkers still sitting up, and went down to the water’s edge, and stood there with his breeches open making his contribution to the source waters of the great Missouri. He mumbled to the sentry who stood, a dark shape, by the canoes, then went a little way up the shore until he was in the shadows near the captain’s fire. He had no real notion of what he might do, but he was full of a sense of outraged honor, and he squatted in the dark fingering his skinning-knife and having a fantasy in which
Le Capitaine Clark
would come down to the water’s edge to relieve his bladder and suddenly there would be a knife through it and a hand over his mouth and then he would be dead in the river and no one would ever know what had happened to him. Charbonneau had dispatched an Indian
that way one night long ago after a rum-soaked dispute near a British trading post, and had never been found out.

He squatted here by the liquid whisperings of the little river, where the captain most likely would come down at least once before bedding down; he was not really planning anything, but his hands and body and nerves were enacting and reenacting certain swift moves, each time giving him a kind of grim satisfaction, each time healing his wounded pride a little bit.