Sign-Talker (46 page)

He put the sergeant’s hand off. He was not going to say anything about the Ancient Ones coming, or about the omen directed at Lewis. He said, “Looked like a fit, didn’t it?” and vanished before Ordway could ask why she hadn’t bled to death.

Captain Lewis was getting over the digestive problems that had nearly killed him, but there was a darkness growing in his spirit, or so it seemed to Drouillard, who was now watching for it.

Lewis’s forward force, always intense but methodical, now was heedless, like a boulder rolling down a hill. He was impatient to get to the coast and he seemed to aim straight down the rivers instead of studying everything along the way as he always had before.

Lewis remarked from time to time that dog meat had cured his
bowels and that it was the most nourishing and strengthening flesh he had ever consumed. So now in their rush down the rivers toward the Columbia, whenever he stopped to barter for food from the Indians, he tried to buy dogs.

Captain Clark would eat the salmon and roots they bought, but not dog. He would snap his fingers and call, “Here, Seaman! I’ll protect you. I see how he’s lookin’ at you and licking his lips!”

Drouillard noticed that Lewis’s pet had been growing more detached from his master since that evening when the dog had slunk away from the woman’s spirit power, and he did seem to stay closer to Captain Clark now. Clark was the only person who didn’t eat dog. The rest of the soldiers, hungry for the flesh of Four-Leggeds, had gotten used to dog and welcomed it as a relief from fish and roots. Drouillard himself found it acceptable.

The river called Kooskooskie had run into the one called Snake. The chiefs said this one would flow into the great river itself, soon. That would be the long-sought Columbia. Captain Clark elected to rename the Snake, calling it Lewis’s River. And one day, passing a fast, clear river that poured in from the north bank, the captains decided to name it after Drouillard, in honor of his many services. Captain Clark wrote on his map:
Drewyer’s R
.

There was almost no game along this densely populated route. And wood for fires was as scarce as the game. No wood grew on the hills and plateaus near the river, only on lightly timbered hills seen at great distances from the rivers. It was as if the corps were floating down into a desert. The only wood anywhere was driftwood from the rivers, and the Indians apparently scoured the riverbanks for it, making lodges and fish-drying racks out of straight pieces, stacking the rest up on scaffolds to dry for fuel. It became necessary to barter or beg for wood as well as food, which worsened Lewis’s state of mind because it diminished his store of trinkets and trade goods faster than he had planned. Sometimes the riverside Indians helped the soldiers at boat wrecks, and if the captains didn’t offer to pay them, they would help themselves to whatever lay unguarded. Lewis’s
mood was as grim as the craggy dark basaltic cliffs of the canyon: Indians were supposed to be obedient children. And gullible too, Drouillard thought.

He wondered if Lewis’s dark anxiety was part of what the woman with bloody arms had been warning about.

There were many rapids where good sense would have called for unloading the cargoes and carrying them around, letting the lightened canoes skim the swift water to pass through. But Captain Lewis was desperate about the lateness of the season and did not want to be delayed. On the cold morning of October 14 the vessels approached a long rapid that the Nez Perce chiefs had warned was bad, but Captain Lewis went into it in the little scouting canoe, with Cruzatte in the bow as his pilot. Then one of the four long, heavily laden vessels dipped into the head of the rapid and safely headed into the chute, but the last three boats ground to a halt, lodged on rock, and had to be worked off at great risk in the roaring current. Drouillard was steering the last one, and got it free only by leaping out, standing on the rocky bottom and lifting the stern, then flinging himself back aboard the moment the vessel was free. Then for three miles he steered with all his strength and skill as the heavy, cumbersome vessel slid, plunged, and bucked through three miles of roaring sluiceway. The subchief Tetohoskee rode in the bow, waving left or right as signals for him to steer by. Tetohoskee was added weight in the bow. That worried Drouillard. Often he heard the hull grate and bump rocks, the men whooping in alarm each time, flailing ineffectually with their paddles or fending the canoe off rocks with their hands. At last all the canoes were safe below that long watery gauntlet, and the party put ashore shaky and giddy for rest and food. Tetohoskee decided he would stay with Drouillard’s canoe.

Two miles farther down an island split the river into two short but roaring chutes. One by one the vessels slid past the island. Drouillard, praying that the chief’s extra weight in the bow would not make the canoe run too deep, followed into the chute. At once the laden bow scooted onto a flat rock just under the surface
and the stern was swung out across the current. In an instant it was broadside, tilting. Tetohoskee leaped into the water and swam, and the soldiers abandoned ship and jumped onto the rock, leaving Drouillard in the stern with no ability to steer. The soldiers grabbed the bow and held on. The stern rode up on another rock and the canoe listed into the current, quickly filled and sank in the chute, with Drouillard scrambling forward trying to grab the most valuable items before they floated away. He grabbed a few shot pouches and two rifles and threw them to the men on the rock, who were shin-deep on the slippery rock in the fast water. Some of the soldiers’ bedrolls, some hides being saved to make clothing, and two tomahawks went overboard before he could reach them. All the quamash roots recently bought for food went floating over the side. The men were yelling at the top of their lungs, and the canoe that had gone through just ahead turned toward shore, where its crew started heaving bundles onto the bank so they could try to come back up and rescue the men from the rock. Drouillard was too busy even to curse. Probably the most important thing in the vessel was gunpowder, in powder horns and in one of the lead canisters whose waterproof seal had already been broken. There were two unopened canisters in the bilge, but they had been tied down and were safe. But a great deal of gunpowder was already wet. The canoe paddles were floating down the river, and the crews of the boats below would probably pick them up.

When there was nothing left light enough to save, Drouillard at last clambered out over the bow onto the rock and helped the men hold the canoe steady so she wouldn’t roll over underwater and lose even more. He was fully soaked and chilled, and ashamed and furious with Captain Lewis for his reckless haste, which had caused this.

“Hey, skipper!” Private Shannon yelled in his ear over the rush of the water, “Why’d ye go an’ hit that rock?” The young man was grinning.

“Cap’n’s orders!” he yelled back.

And in the midst of the watery uproar, Shannon laughed.

*     *     *

Here was the smell of plenty again: decaying flesh. Now it was not buffalo carcasses rotting, but dead fish, dead fish in prodigal quantities in the water and along the banks. And even though Drouillard was by now thoroughly used to the smell of salmon in the fishing camps, where the Indians split them and hung them to dry in the arid breeze from the west, uncountable tons of fish drying, this fish-rot was overpowering.

Here was abundance greater than all the buffalo and antelope and elk of the plains, yet it was all in a desert. And it supported bigger populations than he had ever imagined. Even in the great gathering place of rivers on the Mississippi, near St. Louis and Cahokia and Kaskaskia and St. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau, where he had spent his youth, there were not populations to compare with these in their mat-covered shacks along the lower stretches of Lewis’s River. At every rapid there were scores of spectators lining the shores to watch the bearded strangers crash on the rocks, to help rescue them and pick up any unwatched item as their due toll. They were not afraid of the whitemen; Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee usually went ahead to explain who was coming, and any lingering apprehension was dispelled when Bird Woman and her baby came into view.

These fish people were different from the game-and-fish Nez Perce people. Their language was similar; the two chiefs could still speak with them without resorting to much signage, but they seemed to have little use for horses. Their lives were all about fish and they traveled by canoe. They made rock weirs at the rapids to narrow the channels, and with fish traps and gigging spears they simply scooped and snagged their food out of the water from morning to night. They didn’t have to go hunting. Their food came to them. And they said that was the way it always had been, from the beginning of the world.

And so, Drouillard thought, they probably believe that it will always be so. Why should they fear a few whitemen? How could a few hairy-faced people in five canoes change something that had been unchanged since the beginning of the world?

Once long ago on the east coast, when the Shawnee ancestors had seen a few whitemen coming in ships, they had thought that
same way, and had welcomed them, as these people were welcoming these whitemen from the east. How were they to know?

In the afternoon the canoes were unloaded above a violent raceway of water and everything was carried almost a mile down below the rapids; the canoes were eased down through on elk-skin ropes and reloaded in the calm water. They then shot through four smaller rapids and passed three bare islands. Indians on horseback were watching them from the south bank. Stopping at another rapid, the party was joined by five horsemen. Drouillard talked sign with them and they smoked with the captains. Their dress and language were similar to the Nez Perce. Their horses were excellent, stout, with speckled coloration. The captains gave these horsemen some tobacco to take home and smoke with their people, and they rode off at full gallop, until they were out of sight.

One more hour in the canoes brought them around a bend and into a wide expanse of water and low, sloping desert land.

“Eeeaay
-hah!”
came Captain Clark’s mighty voice from ahead. “Columbia!” And a loud cheer rose up from all the crews. Drouillard knew this was one of those landmarks, like the divide, that the captains had fixed in their minds. Now when the afternoon sun peeked through windblown clouds of rose and lilac, its glare sparkled on the expanse of swift water. The stench of dead fish blew even stronger into their faces. Another shout was relayed back: “Put ashore starb’d, on the point! There’s our Indians!”

Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee had roused up a huge welcoming party of several hundred people from several villages around the confluence of rivers. A few miles above the mouth of the Snake, or Lewis’s, River, another flowed into the Columbia from the west, called the Yakima. The people had not seen whitemen before, but knew of them from tribes farther down the Columbia, and in fact wore brass trade ornaments and a few
woolen blankets. They milled about, gawking at these strange men with their guns and bundles and strange devices, awed by the big black man York. Their dogs were similarly awed by the big black dog Seaman, whose intrusive cold nose made many of them go sidewinding away with their tails between their legs and fearful snarls on their lips.

The soldiers were that curious about the posteriors of some of the women in the crowd. Unlike the Nez Perce women, whose long, fringed dresses concealed their bodies to the ankles, some of these women wore no skirts at all. They had waist-length jackets, but were bare the rest of the way down, except for a leather thong tied around their hips and passed between their legs. Some of the soldiers couldn’t keep their eyes off the bare buttocks and the barely concealed crotches.

Not one tree was visible in any direction, but soldiers were sent along the riverbank and managed to gather enough driftwood for small fires. Then, as the camp took shape in the evening, a murmur of voices and a rhythmic drumming caught their attention.

Into the camp came a parade of two hundred men, beating on small drums with sticks and singing a wailing song, another of those songs in which Drouillard heard the sounds of the ancient ages, like those he had heard atop the mound by the faraway Mississippi, at that other gathering of rivers. He watched their chief, a tall, sturdy, stately man, lead them in a half circle between the soldier camp and the riverbank; there they halted and faced the campfire and continued to sing.

Later the chief, Cutssanem, and his subchiefs were given medals, handkerchiefs, and elegant shirts. A pipe was passed, and with Drouillard’s hand signs and the help of the Nez Perce chiefs, Cutssanem was given the usual Jefferson message. He gave no sign of being much impressed, perhaps because Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee themselves had such vague conceptions of the ideas they were trying to convey to him. But he let it be known that he was happy to meet these whitemen and that some of his people wanted to present them with a little firewood and a large basket of good dried horse meat. Then Cutssanem took his
men back up to their own camp, a short distance above, and the tired soldier camp settled down.

“B’ damn, these ones close down early, don’t they?” Cruzatte mused. He hadn’t even had an opportunity to show off his fiddling to these fishing people.

Drouillard glanced down at the dwindling campfire, which was made of driftwood sticks, weed-stalks, and any other combustible woody material anyone had been able to scrape up, which was very little. He said, “When the lights go out, it’s time for bed. I’d guess they’re used to it.”

Colter scooted in by the fire. Reubin and Joe Field appeared out of the darkness and sat looking at the last little flames. Fortunately, it was not cold. The captains’ lodge stood a little way up the bank, its skin covering aglow with candlelight from within, where they were writing. Colter said: “Did y’ ever see the likes of those women? Hams! Hams! Man, I miss ham and bacon!” The soldiers laughed.