From Sea to Shining Sea (138 page)

“By the guts o’ God!” he roared. “It’s puke! It’s portable puke, that’s all it is!”

Most agreed. “Quick,” someone shouted between gagging sounds, “fish out them grouses afore they git spoilt!”

There seemed to be as much iron in the soup as there had been in the collapsible boat, and it felt as if it were scouring all the enamel off their teeth. Lewis sat bravely forcing down one spoonful after another, listening to the exaggerated sounds of retching and moaning. William grinned at Lewis, a strange, half-nauseated grin. “Y’ could court-martial ’em for disrespect of army rations, if they weren’t so many in agreement.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, Captain,” said Ordway, coming around the fire, “the men say this stuff—er, good as it might be—won’t do, chilled an’ tuckered as we all are. They request permission, sir, to butcher a horse.”

“You know, Ordway, we’ve just enough horses left to carry baggage. We can’t be killing ’em.”

“Then one o’ the colts, sir. That’s what we brought colts fer.”

The captains themselves could feel their bodies clamoring for meat. This ghastly vegetable brew might keep them from starving, but would not give them the strength or inner fire they needed in their condition.

“Permission granted,” Lewis said.

A wolf was howling down the valley. In the pause between its quavering wild notes, William heard, in the trees just outside the firelight, the ax-blow between the blindfolded eyes, the thud
of the falling body as the long-legged colt crumpled to the ground.

The meat, as Ordway wrote in his journal that night, “eat verry well at this time.” And the creek they had crossed above the camp they named Colt Killed Creek.

W
ILLIAM AWOKE IN GRAY LIGHT WITH THE SOUND OF THE
river constant in his ears. He saw York moving along the shore, his breath condensing against the dark backdrop of the wooded mountain across the stream, then saw him stooping to gather wood for the morning fire. The route of yesterday’s march was nagging at William’s mind, so he extracted note paper and a pencil from his clothing and made sketches of the way they had come and the way they should have come.

The party set out after a breakfast of colt meat and picked its way with great difficulty over steep stone spurs and through enormous tangles for about four miles, through groves of great cedars, past several old Indian campsites, until they arrived at a more elaborate salmon-fishing site, where there were remains of many of the willow weirs. Here a much-worn trail turned to the right and led toward the long mountain. The riverbank looking even more impassable ahead, they decided to ascend the mountainside here and regain the main trail along the mountain ridge. They asked Toby about it, and, seeming glad that they still valued his guidance, he said it was the course they should take.

The trail wormed up a steep, rock-strewn rise about a hundred feet, then the slope became gentler, and on this slope the brush was jungle-thick—willows, alders, little maples, chokeberry, honeysuckle and huckleberry and great ferns—on a spongy, yielding, water-squishy soil almost like peat, mostly of rotting plant fibers. The men and horses were wet constantly by droplets shaken off leaves; their moccasins and the horses’ hooves were stained with black muck. They snaked around fallen cedars and firs and pines for ten minutes, sloshing through springs that ran everywhere; then suddenly found themselves at the base of a wall of boulders, spruce trees, lodgepole pines and larches: the mountainside itself.

It was the steepest incline they had encountered anywhere. The Indian trail, probably used only for access to the salmon fishery, could not climb straight up such a grade. Instead, it was a switchback trail, a foot or two wide; it would ascend laterally across the face of the mountain, then double back for twenty to fifty yards, then redouble. At any moment the head of the caravan
was looking down onto the hats of a line of men going left below it, farther down, the hats of a line going right, then another going left. Other times the leaders could not see anyone below because of the density of the evergreen foliage.

The voice of Sergeant Gass, who was bringing up the rear, roared up the trail once: “Potts, ye blaggard! Watch out up there! Your horse just beshit the top o’ my hat!” It got a laugh all up the line, but it was a reminder that if a horse fell here it might well fall on two or three horses or men below.

The trail was muddy and slippery; sometimes it was blocked by tree trunks that had to be climbed over, by wind-felled pines that had to be ducked under. As horses are not ducking and crawling animals, these latter obstacles created the worst problems. Such trees had to circumvented by wild scrambles almost straight up, to the next level of the path above. Or, if that were simply too steep, the axes would come out and the trunk would be cut through while the whole caravan waited. Sometimes these trunks were three feet thick, and would have required hours to chop or saw through, and when such a one blocked a path, there was nothing to do but cut a shorter zigzag path through the undergrowth and rejoin the Indian path farther up.

By noon they had traversed back and forth more than a hundred times, climbing five miles by William’s estimate, and still were but halfway up the mountain. He paused at a switchback, sweat steaming in the cold air, and looked down at the tops of trees, at the hats of men, at the packsaddles on horses’ backs, at the thick-timbered spurs and mountainsides and ridges enclosing them in every direction, and saw snow falling on mountains to the west, and for an awful moment had a feeling that they were trapped, finally and inescapably trapped, in these endless, gloomy, hungry mountains. Above him now there was little living timber. The whole mountainside from here nearly to the summit was mostly a dead forest, killed by forest fires and mowed down by windstorms, looking like one huge logjam of dead spruces and lodgepoles, scattered like straw, studded with charred fir trunks still standing thirty to fifty feet tall amid the gray debris, softened only by new green pine growth and scrub a few feet tall. It was as bad a tangle as Fallen Timbers, and on a steep slope to boot.

“Eee yah! No!” “Whoa!” And then that awful thumping and crashing and whinnying. William looked down to see a white-and-brown piebald mare below him rolling down the slope, crushing the baggage it carried, including William’s own field desk. The horse tumbled through two lines of climbers, miraculously
missing everybody, until it was brought to a halt by a sturdy juniper tree forty yards down. Papers and notebooks and pieces of desk lay scattered all the way down. The whole party was halted for an hour, getting the horse back on its feet, checking it over, gathering and repacking the strewn materials, reloading. The pieces of desk were tied in a bundle and put back on the mare, in the wan hope that Shields might be able to repair it. The desk was important, as both captains had been using it as their outdoor office ever since Lewis’s desk had been cached.

By midafternoon several more horses had slipped and rolled backward, two of them hurt badly but able to continue because no bones were broken. Up here in the devastated part of the forest, it was lighter but windier. Heavy clouds swept the mountaintop, sometimes hiding it, and the wind moaned. A bald eagle materialized from the underside of a cloud, screamed as if astonished at the sight of these ground creatures intruding in its lofty domain, then soared off eastward and out of sight over a ridge.

By late afternoon, the climbers had reached live timber again, the alpine fir and whitebark pine of the very high country, and the clouds blew open enough to show them the ridge a few hundred feet above. Here there was old snow behind the north sides of boulders and under lightning-blasted trees. All of the horses that had fallen were still coming up, but two other horses had simply given out; they had gone to their knees and then keeled over on their sides to lie on the slope, unable to rise, slobbering, sides heaving, necks stretched. Their loads had been distributed among the other horses, and those two defeated creatures had been left behind. It was no use to kill them for meat; they were too gaunt and poor; there wasn’t time to butcher them; and every man and horse was too heavily burdened and exhausted to add even a pound of bad horseflesh to his load.

William’s legs were twitching with a fatigue that had become like a pain of burning; his chest felt as if it would break open with its efforts to expand and extract some oxygen from the thin mountain air, his throat was parched and raw from gasping, and his shoulders were aching and raw from the pull and chafing of his knapsack. He reckoned they had climbed eight or ten miles on the zigzag path to reach this ridge. Below, in the dismal gorge, the fast river was invisible and too distant to be heard under the moan and whistle of the wind.

Scannon had long since given up his desire to move; he wanted to lie down and lick his bloody paws or sleep, and
now York had made a leash for him from a rawhide strap and kept yanking it to make him come along, bellowing now and then: “Come ’long, you lazy black scound’l!” This, and the collapse of the two horses, redoubled William’s admiration for his men.

They’re stronger than horses and dogs, he thought.

They were on the ridge at last. There was the main Indian road again, that beaten footpath around rocks and along the crest, leading westward on this long, long ridge. And down on the other side of the mountain was another river gorge, probably the north fork of the Koos Koos Kee, William presumed, a thread of water winding below still another distant ridge, beyond which he could see peaks of snow, faint through the mist.

Now it was deep dusk, and the chill wind whipped the warmth of climbing out of sweat-drenched clothes immediately, and every man was trembling and twitching with cold and hunger and pain. Only Sacajawea and her papoose were riding. Everyone else walked and led a laden horse. William looked at her. Her blanket was pulled over her head and she held it closed over her mouth, her eyes half shut, caught up in destiny, again going away and away from her people. The horses limped along the ridge as the caravan moved on in the howling, blue-gray dusk, the distant mountains growing dimmer and then being swallowed by darkness. They went on, over knobs bare of trees, along saddles of ridgeline where the bent trees shuddered in the windblast; they went on, looking for a level place to camp. They would have to stop soon. They could hardly see the road.

Toby yelled. He had found water.

A small spring gushed from rocks a little way below the ridge. It was not a level enough place to camp, and there was no grass for the horses, but in the lee of a boulder, a hasty fire was built and a ration of the portable soup was heated. This time the men drank it without complaint. Then the fire was stamped out and the caravan continued along the ridge. Toby assured them there was a place not far ahead where they could stop.

There was old snow underfoot now, and they could see a vague grayness before them, but below everything was black and howling.

At last they were on a wide, rounded eminence. It was the bare, treeless promontory of a mountaintop, and in its center a scarp of stone stood like an old castle wall. The baggage was unloaded and piled near it to make a windbreak. Enough deadwood was found to make a small fire and melt snow for more of
the portable soup. The horses were hobbled and let out to forage on the sparse ground cover.

It was all that could be done. No journal-keeping tonight, no washing, no undressing. The flames and sparks of the campfire were whipped by the wind, and soon all the firewood was gone.

The Corps of Discovery rolled, clothes, moccasins, and all, into their blankets and lay down on the trampled snow in utter darkness, on the backbone of a mountain range, pulled their heads inside to muffle the woeful dirge of the wind, some perhaps thinking for a moment of their dismal and Godforsaken circumstances, but were all, except the sentry, plummeting into the numb sleep of exhaustion within ten minutes.

Only the sentry saw the snow begin to fall.

“L
ORD-A
-G
OD, WE’RE IN FOR IT NOW!”

Sergeant Ordway’s shout, in the whistling wind, made William sit upright in his blanket. He saw a whirling blankness, with shapeless gray lumps here and there where the men were sitting up in their blankets to peer around. Farther out were the ghostly shapes of horses. William shook his blanket, and snow fell off of it. On the ground around him the snow was two or three inches deep. The packsaddles and baggage bundles were almost hidden by drifted snow. He could see as the snowflakes drove across the face of the stony escarpment that they were large flakes. It was no mere flurry. It looked like the kind of a snow that goes on all day.

William’s feet and legs and shoulders ached so fiercely that he could hardly move. He thought with heavy dread of the weight of his pack and the walking and climbing that would have to be done today, with the snow making it still harder and more dangerous. But this snow meant more than just hard going: it meant that the Nez Percé trail likely would be obliterated. And it meant that if there were any game animals around, they would be invisible at a hundred yards.

“We’d best make what distance we can early,” Lewis said, “while we can still see where the trail is.”

“Got a good excuse for skipping breakfast, anyway,” William said. “No food.” There was nothing left but a few pounds of the dried soup.

Few of the men had stockings anymore. They spent a few minutes wrapping their feet in rags, then mending their moccasins. Sewing the leather was excruciating and clumsy with their cold-stiffened fingers. Men sat huddled over this work,
shuddering, their noses running. When they were done, they pulled the repaired moccasins on over the rags on their feet and then rose painfully to go out and round up the horses for loading. But even in the midst of this misery, there was laughter. Some of the men were warming themselves up with a snowball fight. Scannon, who apparently had slept off his fatigue rolled in a ball with his tail over his muzzle, was now among them, leaping to try to catch snowballs in flight.

Sacajawea knelt, her blanket draped tentlike over her, cleaning Pompey’s cradleboard and repacking it with new down. She smiled up at William as she administered to the baby. She put the child to her breast, keeping him, as always, close to her skin’s warmth and sheltered from the snowy wind. “At least one of our boys is a-gettin’ some breakfast today,” Sergeant Gass remarked.