From Sea to Shining Sea (133 page)

Drouillard, even while translating, looked at Lewis with admiration for this piece of lying. Ca-me-ah-wait seemed about half-willing to believe all this, but his advisers seemed to be trying to talk him out of it. So Lewis continued:

“If you do not believe me, I have a way of proving my word. It is almost night now, and this is a good place for us to make a camp. Before the sun tomorrow I will send my hunter here down to meet the Red Hair Chief and tell him we are here waiting. One of your men may go with him; in fact I will pay him gifts to do this. I and my other two men will stay here with you, and you have our guns. If you will not desert me now or tomorrow, your brave will come back and tell you that he has seen my people and that they are as I have told you. You will meet them soon, and they will have many beautiful things to trade you for horses. But if you leave me and do not meet my brother chief, and go to hide in the mountains instead of helping us, then our great father in the east will forget you when we come back in later seasons with guns and provisions, and you will remain poor and hungry as I have seen you to be.”

Ca-me-ah-wait agreed, but it was apparent that he less than half believed in the safety of it. In the light of a small campfire of willow brush Lewis wrote a note for Drouillard to take to Captain Clark in the morning, urging him to come on with all possible haste as there was not a moment to spare.

The chief now, with six of his closest advisers, bedded down close to Lewis’s mosquito net, while most of the braves went out to camp hidden in the willow thickets where they might be safer if the camp were attacked during the night.

Lewis was exhausted, but had little expectation of sleeping well this night. The fate of the expedition, which he had long held to be more important than his own life, seemed now to depend on the caprices of these few fickle and flighty savages, who he expected might well kill him or vanish in the night.

L
EWIS
HAD
BARELY
BEGUN
TO
DOZE
WHEN
HE
BECAME
aware of excited whisperings around him. He lifted the edge of his mosquito netting and saw by the starlight and the glow of Drouillard’s nearby campfire that Ca-me-ah-wait was sitting up, listening to some of his men who had come to crouch beside him and hiss in his ear. Lewis suspected this might be the moment he had dreaded, and stealthily he slipped his knife out of its sheath.

Then he heard Drouillard chuckling, and called to him, “What goes?” The half-breed’s deep, soft voice came back:

“Eh,
mon capitaine
! I am tell these Shoshoni there ees our man of black skeen and hair like burned prairie grass! They scoff, but I theenk they stay weeth us to see thees monster eef nothing else!”

Lewis sighed and relaxed in his bedding. “Drouillard, God bless ye, you’re a genius! Why didn’t I think o’ that?”

I
T
WAS
SEVEN
IN
THE
MORNING
,
AND
THE
CANOES
WERE
loaded and the men were taking their places on the tow ropes to begin their daily suffering. It was a fair but cold morning, with the rising sun slanting through mist, and the men were slow to begin because they knew from experience that the water would be shockingly cold and their bones would be aching from the start. They had been saying often lately that they wished they could leave these accursed heavy canoes and the burden of goods and just walk the rest of the way to the ocean. They had said it in jesting tones so they would not sound like real complainers, but the sentiment was heartfelt, and William had no trouble understanding it. He had done enough of the poling and rope-pulling himself up the Missouri and Jefferson and Beaverhead rivers and now up this shallow, stony, twisting creek that he felt he could say truthfully that this Voyage of Discovery had deteriorated into what was probably the longest and most strenuous and most painful ordeal of labor any group of soldiers ever had suffered. It didn’t take Hannibal this long to cross the Alps, William thought, and he had elephants to carry his canoes if he had canoes.

This morning, as was the custom, the hunters would be out on the flanks and he himself would walk ahead scouting the route and watching for signs of the Shoshonis and for Captain Lewis, whose absence, now in its eighth day, troubled William so much he had scarcely slept. This morning, as usual, he would have Sacajawea up ahead with him so that she would be ready to interpret in case the expedition got lucky and met her people. And, suspecting that Charbonneau had struck Sacajawea the other evening over that old jealousy business, William had excused Charbonneau from work on the boats and let him come along in the advance to see for himself that his squaw and William were not hopping into the thickets to cuckold him.

Now they had come about a mile this morning and William had dropped a few yards behind the couple to try to get a good look at a new kind of crow-sized bird he had spotted up on the
bluff, a pale grayish-brown sort of bird with dark wings. But it had kept darting over rocks up the bluff and he had not been able to get a good image of it, so now he was moving ahead to catch up with them. Charbonneau was hulking along with his red cap bobbing with every step and the girl-squaw was walking a few paces behind him in her bright scarlet blanket with its wide blue stripe running down the back, with that hump-backed look caused by the papoose on her back, and suddenly that steady, graceful, pigeon-toed stride of hers faltered. She was doing something odd, and William squinted in the sunlight to see what was happening. He thought first that she had come up against another rattlesnake.

The girl was dancing. She was hopping from foot to foot and turning in circles around Charbonneau. She was uttering small cries like a bird. William trotted forward to investigate. With each turn she would point up the valley, and when William looked he saw them.

Several Indians on horseback were trotting toward them down the streamside path. One of them was slightly ahead of the others, riding with his right hand held high. A thrilling shiver, of pleasure but also of apprehension, buzzed through William’s scalp down his neck and spine. He caught up with the pirouetting Sacajawea now, and as she whirled around he saw shining in her face the purest joy he had ever seen. Her laughter was like a shower of silver; her teeth flashed in her brown face. Even her baby was infected by her joy, and was laugh-gurgling as he swayed in the cradleboard with her gyrations. Now the squaw would lean forward toward the distant horsemen, making
mmmm, mmmm
sounds in her throat while sucking her fingers. This sign William knew: it was that she had eaten with them; they were her native people; they were Shoshonis!

William was so swept with happiness that despite the presence of Charbonneau he grabbed her hands and whirled with her twice, then held her face in his hands and kissed the end of her nose. Charbonneau was too transfixed by the sight of the approaching riders to notice. “Come along!” William cried, and they began striding briskly toward the Indians, William holding high his right hand.

Now the first rider kicked his horse and loped ahead of the others, and as he came closer that white flash of a smile looked familiar. “By heaven!” William whooped. “Drouillard!”

Sacajawea had broken out in a trilling song-chant now, and it was taken up by the voices of some of the oncoming riders. It was as keen and full of longing as a meadowlark’s song, and the
sound of it made William’s throat ache and his eyes blur. It was a song of homecoming.
Home
! he thought, and his heart clamped. Drouillard’s horse was among them now, blowing, hooves thudding in the dewy grass, and Drouillard, his cheeks smeared with vermillion, was off its back with his arms thrown around William’s brawny shoulders, kissing him on this cheek, then the other, in the most extravagant emotional release the half-breed had ever shown. William pounded him on the back of his white ermine shawl, and yelled in his ear over all the noise of greetings: “
Cap’n Lewis?
” Drouillard nodded his head vigorously.

“Yes,
mon capitaine!
” He pointed up the stream. “Not far!
Tout va bien!
He has a chief!” William felt a flood of relief.

Now Cruzatte came running up from the main party to investigate the tumult, and skidded to a halt at the sight of horses and Indians. William yelled at him: “Bring ’em on, bring ’em on! We’ve met the Snakes!” Cruzatte peered myopically into the milling group, leaped three feet off the ground, crossed himself when he landed, then spun and darted back down around the bend shouting the news. Within half a minute a roar of deep voices rolled up the valley to blend in the chorus of greeting.

N
OW
W
ILLIAM
AND
S
ACAJAWEA
AND
C
HARBONNEAU
STRODE
ahead briskly up toward the end of the valley, Drouillard leading them toward the forks, while the warriors rode alongside still singing their greeting song with the greatest appearance of delight. Sacajawea stumbled along nearby, chewing her smile, tears streaming down her face. As they went, Drouillard told William the tale of the week past: of their first glimpse of the Shoshoni, of their first tenuous meeting, of the poor starving village, of the ceremonies, and the dances and the horses, of the Shoshonis’ timidity, of Captain Lewis’s desperate ruse of the notes. Even above all this hubbub, singing and talking, William could now and then hear some leather-lunged huzzah come echoing from down the valley, where, he was sure, his stalwart boys were pulling the boats on with a renewed vigor, in the knowledge that they might not have to pull them another day beyond today. Likely, too, they were thinking of Indian maidens.

William could hardly bear to look at Sacajawea now; her transported visage made his throat knot up with caring. She was so close to her people now, and, being so far from his, he could understand the terrible poignancy of her longings, as if foreseeing
his own homecoming, sometime in the far future, his own homecoming from a far place and a long time.

T
HEY
WALKED
OUT
FROM
BETWEEN
THE
BLUFFS
AND
ONTO
the yellow-brown grass of the plain where the creek forked. Above the fork they could see smoke rising from a copse of willows, and a skin tent stretched over a clump of willows for a shelter; at this distance it looked like a handkerchief dropped on grass. Twenty or thirty people were coming across the plain from that place, running and riding; they had heard the homing song and were coming. Most were young men; there were a few women. William felt a shiver as he saw them coming; they were colorful and full of eager motion, and they were an entirely new people, and if Sacajawea was representative, they were a fine people, a primitive, uncorrupted highland people who lived on the roof of the continent. They came hurrying over the meadow, hooves and moccasins. Part of the meadow was in the shadow of a high, fast-moving cloud, and the edge of the shadow ran silently off the field to leave it all glowing fresh and gold in the morning sunlight. Around the plain there were ridges with blue cloud-shadows running up their flanks, and above and beyond them in the blue were streaks of white, the snowy tops of mountains. Behind the running crowd of Indians there were three men who walked together and they all looked like stately chiefs, with their wild headdresses and vermillion-painted faces, but one of them was bowlegged and there was no mistaking his walk; it was Meriwether Lewis.

The air was still cold and fresh, and as the people came close William smelled them, the wood smoke in their clothes, rancid grease, fish, and something like wet tea leaves. It was much like that nearly forgotten earthy smell of the Mandans, but cleaner and sharper.

The Indians stopped a few yards away, and William and his
party stopped, and they all stood looking at each other for a moment. The singing braves fell silent and reined in their horses to watch.

William stood with his feet widespread, his fine rifle cradled in his left arm, the leather bill of his lynx-fur cap shading his eyes. Charbonneau stood posing with his thick chinwhiskers thrust out.

The Shoshonis were as colorful as a field of flowers, the yellow-orange painted on their faces, their leather clothes and shields decorated with patterns of quills and shells and dyed grasses, colored feathers shaking in the morning wind, claw necklaces, collars and tippets of small-animal fur, headdresses of bird skins and buffalo horns, lances festooned with down and scalplocks.

Sacajawea stood stockstill in this hush, in her red blanket with the baby slung on her back, and her glinting dark eyes searched theirs, all those pairs of piercing eyes in bony faces. And then suddenly one of the women slipped out from between two horses, came out staring at Sacajawea, mouth agape, slowly raising her hand to her face as she came, and then her eyebrows rose and her face crumpled as if she were going to cry, and she began making the
mmm
sounds and sucking her fingers. Sacajawea’s gaze now fixed upon that young woman, and her eyebrows flickered the same way, and then the two spoke some syllables to each other with their arms reaching. They came together and wrapped their arms around each other, and with their faces buried in each other’s necks they softly began crying, “
A-hi-ee! A-hi-ee!
” and patting each other, and William gulped down a groan and blinked rapidly.

Charbonneau listened to their soft exclamations, seeming, for once, to be at least somewhat moved by his squaw’s emotions, and he turned to William, and said, “Thees I bleef was woman name Otter, capture weeth her but escape. She has tell me of thees sometime!” He seemed genuinely affected, perhaps a little awed, perhaps for the first time aware that she, his third and least-favored squaw, was a person whose heart had come from someplace before she had become his.