Sign-Talker (38 page)

Charbonneau’s wife, the Bird Woman, said she remembered it as the valley where the Hidatsas had killed her relatives and captured her. This was hunting country of her Shoshone people. That news excited the captains, who urgently wanted to find the Shoshones and acquire horses that could carry their tons of goods over the Shining Mountains to the westward-flowing rivers. Captain Clark had scouted far ahead up the western fork with Frazier, the Field brothers, and Charbonneau, looking for Shoshones. They had found horse tracks and burned prairie but no sight of a
living Indian. Clark had finally returned this afternoon sick from heat exhaustion and fatigue, feet bleeding and infected from prickly pears. In the course of his scouting he had saved Charbonneau from drowning in a swift stream, had climbed high hills to view the basin and river courses, and killed two grizzly bears who were unfortunate enough to cross his path.

The rest of the soldiers were in no better shape; they had been poling and dragging the eight dugout canoes up through swift, cold, rocky-bottom shallows and riffles, and were almost too weak to move. The two hundred miles since the Great Falls had exhausted them almost as much as the portage itself. There had been no evening whiskey to alleviate their miseries since the Fourth of July. The season was deep into summer, the days scorching even at this altitude, and the whole height of the Shining Mountains lay before them yet to be crossed before fall snows would close the passes, those passes they hadn’t even found yet.

Those were the anxieties of the captains, and Drouillard felt their tension. Captain Lewis was ready to take a sortie up the west fork, which he called the Jefferson River, and not stop until he found Indians who would sell him horses and show him the way through the mountains. Drouillard knew he would be one of those going on such a sortie. This was one of those times when Lewis was desperate. But Drouillard also felt something apart from this journey of the whitemen, something about himself and the voices of the ancestors, the faint voices that sang in the wind from high places. As he gazed around and smelled the air now, he thought he could hear those voices.

They sang not just about what had happened here before, or was happening here now, but about something farther ahead around the circle of time.

Up and up the long, scruffy slope they trudged, keeping an eye on the Indian path, through prickly pear, short dry sedge, thistles
and dusty sage, looking ever ahead for the ridge where this treeless slope eventually would have to culminate. Drouillard walked before and to the right of Captain Lewis, Shields left of the captain a few yards, and McNeal following, each carrying a knapsack and blanket roll and a rifle. They scanned the slope in every direction for a sight of the Indian horseman they had seen yesterday, who had waited curiously and nervously as the captain came within a hundred yards of him, signaling to him with trinkets, waving a blanket in the parley sign, and calling out to him over and over a Shoshone word that was supposed to mean “I am a whiteman.” In other words, not your enemy.

But that wary Indian suddenly had wheeled his elegant horse, leaped a creek and vanished among the willow brush.

Later they found the hoofprints of several horses, and places where Indians had been digging roots, but no people. The captain was in a nasty state of anxiety, desperately wanting to make contact with any Indian, but afraid that any Indian who saw them would run to warn the rest and they would disappear.

They were deep in Shoshone country. For two weeks Bird Woman had pointed out places she remembered, and in those two weeks the captains had taken turns scouting far ahead of the slow-moving canoes, searching desperately for the elusive Shoshone. Unfortunately, the Shoshone were an extremely wary people. They had no guns, but their enemies did.

They were excellent horsemen with fine herds, who in late summer made furtive forays eastward onto the plains to hunt buffalo with their bows and arrows, but most of the year lived on the scarce game of these mountains, eating roots and fish, and trying to avoid raiding parties from the tribes who knew whitemen and had gotten guns from them. Bird Woman’s husband had told the captains, “She say, anyone they see they fear to be an enemy.” And her tribe of the Shoshones had never seen whitemen. When she was a girl, they had only heard of them, of those far to the south, where, in the old days, horses had come from. That, the captains presumed, would mean the Spaniards.

So it was no wonder these people were so hard to find. They lived in a vast, high country and did not want to be found. Even
the hunters’ guns, which were needed to feed the expedition, might be frightening these Shoshones farther and farther into hiding.

But they had to be found, and befriended, and persuaded to sell at least two dozen horses. If not, the expedition could never go across the mountains.

Captain Lewis was grim in his desperation. He had blamed his men for scaring off the man on horseback. He had angrily sworn that he would find the Shoshones if he had to hike these mountains for a month. After that, of course, it would be too late because of the seasons. But he had laughed today, once:

Coming up a narrow, grassy stream bed on this endless slope, Private McNeal had stood with one foot on either side of the clear trickling rill, fumbled with his breeches, and yelled: “Thank God! I’ve lived to bestride the end of the goddamn endless Misery River! And now I’m going to take a piss ’at goes plumb to the Gulf of Mexico!”

Drouillard gave him a hard look and said: “Among my people, it’s the women who straddle to piss.”

Captain Lewis laughed out loud, but then scowled at McNeal. “Stop that. Our people are downstream.” Shamed, McNeal quit.

A little farther up they found the source of that stream to be a clear, ice-cold spring emerging from the earth. Here Captain Lewis had drunk and sat to rest, and he said, with a long, long look in his eyes, gazing back down the long slope, “I’ve done it! Drunk from the very fountainhead of the greatest river of this continent. Boys, we’ve come three thousand miles up this Missouri. Now, let’s cross over this ridge and get us a drink from the fountainhead of the Columbia.”

And so now here they were, trudging up onto the ridge that separated the east-flowing from the west-flowing waters. The Shoshone trail led over a pass; the ridge rose higher both north and south. If the Shoshones had a village, it must be over on the west side of the divide. That way went their path. And from this ridge it was supposed to be all downhill to the Pacific Ocean in the west. They climbed toward the ridge. In his mind’s eye Drouillard anticipated a long, easy slope down the other way,
with wide rivers for boats. These captains had been right so many times, he was ready to see what they expected to see.

What they did see when they crested the rise, into a howling updraft, left them speechless.

The western slope fell away steeper than the one they had just climbed, and was the same sere, brown, treeless kind of ground.

But as far as they could see to the west, rose range after range of immense, craggy, snowcapped mountains, some shining in sunlight, some somber and almost black in the shadows of drifting clouds.

For a year he had heard the captains speak of the western mountains as if they were a single range, to be easily crossed by going up one side and down the other. But here lay before them an endless maze of obstacles. Any one of those peaks was higher and steeper than anything they had yet climbed. And there were scores of them ahead.

This was the most beautiful and magnificent sight Drouillard had ever beheld, greater even than his eagle dreams.

It was not good. The captain now must speak of turning back.

But when Lewis at last spoke, he said, “Let’s head on. We
really do
have to find some horses.”

Drouillard took the women to be a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. They were digging and talking, and had gathering baskets and root-digging sticks of the kind Bird Woman used.

They would flee like the pronghorn if they saw the whitemen at a distance, so Drouillard led the soldiers close in the defilade of a long ravine.

When the three saw the soldiers rise a few yards away, they looked like startled rabbits, but only the young woman ran, leaving her basket and stick. The old woman and the young girl stood stunned. Captain Lewis laid his gun on the ground and turned up his sleeve to show his white skin, saying “Tab-ba-bone! Tab-ba-bone,” trying to tell them he was a whiteman. Drouillard raised his right-hand palm forward, with the forefinger and middle finger pointing up, believing that “friend,” would be more reassuring than something as alien as “whiteman.” As
the soldiers approached, the woman and girl sat on the ground with their heads down, apparently awaiting inevitable death or capture.

Captain Lewis took their hands, opened them, and put in gifts: awls and small pewter looking glasses. When they looked up, confused and still wary, the captain smiled at them and said, “Drouillard, tell this old one to call the woman back. Don’t want her to go and alarm the people to run off! We’ve got some in hand at last!”

Drouillard knelt before her and signed,
Call woman back. Friends
. He could see the young woman lurking in the distance, almost out of sight, still as a deer. The old woman’s eyes were red-rimmed, deep in wrinkled sockets, and suspicious. He signed again, adding,
Bring good
. She looked intently in his eyes, and he saw trust take hold. She was small and scrawny, but when she turned and called, her voice was strong as a bugle.

Slowly, the distant woman emerged into view and came back, looking as if she would dart off at any minute. Drouillard smelled horse and had the feeling that someone else was out there watching, but could see no one.

When she came up, Captain Lewis made soothing noises, and with his thumb he dipped into a little packet of vermilion powder and put red marks on their cheeks that meant Peace. The women and girl had been trembling, but now they were surreptitiously admiring the little gifts in their hands and talking rapidly and softly to each other. In their voices was the lilt of relief and deliverance. McNeal and Shields were already making admiring eyes at the young woman, and she was aware of them and not displeased. Though the soldiers must have seemed very strange to someone who had never seen bearded faces, they might have appeared splendid. They were tall and lean, with sun-bleached whiskers, sun-browned faces, and bold blue eyes.

“Tell them we wish to go to their camp and meet their chiefs and warriors,” the captain said.

Soon, then, the three women were leading them down alongside a small, clear river on the worn footpath. Captain Lewis kept up cheerful banter with his men in hopes that his tone of
voice would reassure the women. Drouillard knew that Lewis must be as nervous as the women. Captain Clark and all the men, canoes, and gear were on the other side of the continental divide, anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles back, utterly out of communication for nearly four days, except for a note Lewis had left on a willow pole two days earlier at a fork in the stream, telling Clark to halt the boats there and wait for further word. As narrow and shallow as the streams had become, the boats might not even have reached that note yet. It might not even be there anymore; a similar message pole several days ago had been cut down by a beaver, causing the scouts and the main party to diverge at a lower fork and lose each other for a day. There was getting to be too much chance and remoteness as this desperate search for the Shoshones continued. The western mountains were daunting; time was running out.

And geese were already flying south.

“It’ll be up to you, Drouillard,” Lewis said as they hiked along with the cheerful but nervous women. “I expected we’d have Charbonneau’s wife to translate when we found ’em. But she’s clear over on the Missouri watershed, and God knows when we’ll get her here. I sure hope they use the same gesture talk on this side of—”

“We find out now,” Drouillard said. “Here they come.”

Drouillard had been noticing that the women were becoming more animated, and then he heard hoofbeats. Now he pointed ahead. Dust was drifting above a rise, then a great body of horsemen came into view over the crest: more and more, bristling with long lances and painted shields. By now the riders had seen the soldiers and whipped up their horses, coming at full gallop; there seemed to be sixty or seventy of them.

“Ooooh, my God,” Shields groaned.

“Been nice knowin’ ye, gents,” McNeal murmured, starting to raise his rifle even though the odds were hopeless.

Lewis said: “Drouillard, send the old woman to inform ’em we’re peaceable. Don’t let the young ones go; they’re hostage if we need ’em. McNeal, get the flag out of your pack and give it to me. Quick! Look, they’re reining in!”

The horsemen had stopped a hundred yards distant. When they saw the old woman coming, three riders separated out and came forward at a trot. Lewis said, “Ease down your guns. Don’t even look hostile!” He slid the ramrod out of his rifle, shrugged his knapsack off onto the ground, and laid his rifle on top of it. Quickly he tied the little flag on the ramrod and said, “Stay back. I’m going up there. If anything happens to me, try to get back to Cap’n Clark. You’ve got range on their weapons and you’ve got their females; you might make it. Here I go.” He paced out with the little flag high over one shoulder and the other hand held up in the peace gesture. He was five paces forward when the young woman and the girl, not being restrained, suddenly ran past him toward the warriors. He muttered “Damn you!” but continued forward. The three women were talking excitedly to the horsemen and showing them their gifts.

The three riders dismounted. With immense relief, Drouillard watched the Indian leader put his left arm over Captain Lewis’s right shoulder and press his cheek against the captain’s, saying,
“A hi ee! A hi ee,”
an utterance he had heard often enough from Bird Woman to know it meant “Thank you,” or “I am pleased.” Then the other two embraced Lewis, making the same sounds, and soon all the other riders had come up and dismounted to get in on the hugging. The captain called his men forward to join in. Drouillard thought he would burst with gratitude and kindly feelings as all these beautifully decorated warriors, smelling of grease, wood smoke, and horse sweat, milled about, greeting these strangers with such open delight. This was good, this was how people could be when they were not afraid of others. This was a greeting of joy that made him remember the Missouria youth named Hospitality, a year ago. The three women were happy with all this; they stood flexing their knees and patting their palms.