Sign-Talker (57 page)

As they hurried downriver, watching the bluffs for Indians, Sergeant Ordway reported that everything had gone just as planned: finding and raising the old canoes, splitting off from Captain Clark at the three forks, paddling down to meet Sergeant Gass’s party at the White Bear Island camp. Gass had dug up the wooden wheels. With horses pulling, they had retraced the portage route back down past the Great Falls, uncovered the white pirogue, and dug up caches at the lower portage camp. Only yesterday they had loaded and embarked to come down to Maria’s River. They had thought they would have to wait days for Lewis. All in Sergeant Gass’s party were well: Goodrich, Frazier, McNeal, Thompson, and Werner. Sergeant Ordway’s
men, Collins, Colter, Cruzatte, Howard, Lepage, Potts, Whitehouse, and Willard were all well; Private Weiser had cut his leg badly with a knife and couldn’t work. All Captain Clark’s party had been well when they split off at the three forks. Sergeant Gass and Willard were coming along the right bank bringing the horses. It was amazing and thrilling how well everything was working out; the men couldn’t stop chattering about it.

Reaching the mouth of Maria’s River later in the morning, they dug up all their old caches. Water and cave-ins had ruined most of the skins and the men’s belongings, but things packed in kegs and canisters had survived, so now the men had corn flour, salt pork, salt, replenished gunpowder, and, most important to the troops, it seemed, tobacco. They puffed and chewed in bliss. Three of Drouillard’s good beaver traps could not be found in the cache where they had been left, but no time was squandered hunting further for them because a violent storm of lightning, thunder, rain, and hail rolled over the valley. In the afternoon, Sergeant Gass and Willard caught up, bringing the horses from the falls, alleviating a fear that Blackfeet might have found them.

On the island in the mouth of the Maria they pulled away the brush covering the red pirogue. With disappointment they admitted that she was too decayed to use or repair. So they just salvaged her nails and ironwork and left her there. The fleet would be the white pirogue and five small dugout canoes. The river was running fast, deep and muddy. Now there was nothing to hinder their race homeward. Hunters would ride ahead and kill enough meat for the paddlers to eat, fight grizzly bears if they had to, and try to get enough elk hides to cover the cargoes, make clothes and shelters and moccasins. Everyone was so swollen in the face from mosquito bites that they looked like fat men with skinny bodies. But they were too happy to be bothered much by discomfort; they could hardly remember what comfort felt like after nearly three years on this mission. All they wanted now was to eat roasted meat three times a day, smoke and chew their tobacco, make speed down the river, meet Captain Clark at the mouth of the Yellow Stone, stop at the Mandan towns just long
enough perhaps to copulate with their old sweethearts there, and then float on down to collect glory, whiskey, and pay at St. Louis, then disperse to the bosoms of their families in the United States. As far as they could foresee, there were no more obstacles except maybe having to fight their way past the Sioux.

But that didn’t worry them much. They were all pretty convinced by now that they could get through anything unscathed. They sang as they paddled down between the beautiful white bluffs:

First he heard two rifle shots in quick succession from the willow thicket on the island, where Captain Lewis and Cruzatte had gone to follow the elks. Drouillard glanced that way, but they were out of sight among the willows. He heard Cruzatte shout something, but couldn’t make it out over the rush of the high, muddy Missouri. Drouillard and the others kept bailing dirty water out of the bilges of the pirogue and canoes at the shore. They all leaked after their year of disuse—the pirogue at the seams, the canoes through cracks caused by being submerged all winter and then dried—and a hasty repair job had not sealed them entirely, so they had to be bailed often. And the captain wouldn’t stop for thorough repairs because he was too intent upon catching up with Captain Clark.

Four days ago they had reached the mouth of the Yellow Stone, only to find that Clark and his men had been there but had gone on. A tattered note said they had left because of a scarcity of game and too much abundance of mosquitoes, and would halt and wait a few miles farther down. Seven miles down they had found traces of a very recent camp, with part of a Chinook hat that had belonged to one of Clark’s men. But that place had been abandoned too. Since then there had been no sign of Clark’s party, and Lewis expressed a worry that they might have run into hostile Indians.

Shortly after the first two shots, there followed a third, then a
loud but unintelligible shout. It was Lewis. A moment later they heard his voice again, “Cruzatte!” and then several more times, but no reply.

Weiser, still reclining in the pirogue with his thigh bandaged, said: “Hell, I knew the ol’ frog was half blind, didn’t know he was deef too!”

“Hush a minute,” Drouillard said. He had never heard the captain’s voice sound quite like that, though he had often heard him yell.

The voice cried again, this time clear on the wind: “Damn you, answer me! I’m shot! Shot! Cruzatte! Cruzatte!”

Drouillard grabbed his rifle out of the pirogue, and several soldiers were starting up the bank toward the thicket.

Then they heard the captain’s voice clearly, louder now: “Cruzatte! Get out of here! Indians! There’s Indians! They’ve shot me!” Lewis appeared, bursting out of the thicket in an awkward, lunging gait. He had his rifle in his left hand and waved with his right, summoning the soldiers. “To arms! To arms! Indians in there! I’m hit! I think they’ve got Cruzatte! Come on, damn it, come on!”

Shouting and milling as they grabbed their rifles, they quickly sorted themselves out and ran toward him, Drouillard ahead of them all, heart racing, his eyes already penetrating the willows for a sight of Indians.

Lewis turned and started to lead the charge back into the bush. The seat of his leather breeches was dark with blood. The men followed him into the thicket with guns at the ready, and then he began limping and staggering. He stopped and leaned on his rifle. “Sergeants,” he yelled, and gasped. “I … can’t go on.… Go help Cruzatte. If there’s too … many, retreat in order … keeping up a fire. I’ve got … get to the boat …” Seaman had appeared from somewhere and was whining and barking, smelling his master’s blood and sensing his pain. The sergeants, Gass and Ordway, called their men to follow, and they moved flinchingly into the thick willows. Drouillard went in with them, and it reminded him of something, something.… It felt like their war
on the bears last summer at the end of the portage. They inched slowly forward, brows shining with sweat.

The first thing he saw ahead in the thicket was a dead elk, its horns still covered with the season’s shaggy velvet, a bullet hole neatly placed just behind its left shoulder.

Then he saw something else, and he called out, “Don’t shoot! Here’s Cruzatte!” He crept up to him, and asked,
“Que va?
Did you see Indians?”

Cruzatte looked fearful, confused. He shook his head, looking down and around. “I … I wound an elk. Reload, try to shoot him again … What?”

“No Indians?”

“Non!”

They combed the willow island and found another elk, which had trailed blood a quarter mile and finally fallen. There was not a trace of Indians. He said to Cruzatte, “You didn’t know the captain was shot?”

Cruzatte looked astonished, his one eye bulging.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est? Le capitaine est mort?”

“Non, non, non. Blessé.”

They all went down to the boat. The captain was aboard, kneeling, unable to sit, his pistol, rifle, and air gun readied to fight against Indians. He looked wobbly and pale. He said to Cruzatte, through a grimace, “Didn’t you hear me yelling at you?”

“No, my captain. No, no!”

“You shot me. You must have. No one else was there. When you didn’t answer, I was sure Indians had shot me and got you. Why did you shoot at me, Cruzatte?”

“Please, my captain! We went to follow my wounded elk,
n’est ce pas?
I think I see him, I shoot! If it was my bullet, please, I did not intend! I—I—” He pointed at his one nearsighted eye.

The captain had found the rifle ball in his breeches. It had passed through the back of his left thigh at the buttock and out the right, missing bone or artery. It was the same size ball as that of the short rifle Cruzatte was using. Cruzatte left, shaking his
head, almost weeping, while Sergeant Gass braced the captain and helped him undress. He had bled much but it was slowing. He told the men to go and butcher the two elk, and then he lay contorted in the sunlight, wincing, teeth chattering, tending his own wounds even where he could not see them, not trusting the sergeant to do it. He inserted a roll of lint gauze in each entrance and exit wound, which would allow the wounds to drain and could be slowly pulled out as the wounds healed from within. Then he bound his hips and loins with linen swaddling that was hardly whiter than his own skin. The blood was rinsed out of his clothes, and he reclined on his stomach atop a soft, smelly bundle of bighorn and bear hides, and was covered with a blanket. Then, Drouillard steering, a mortified Cruzatte with his gaff-pole in the bow, they set off accompanied by the canoes, everybody more anxious than ever to catch up with Captain Clark’s party. About an hour later they came to Clark’s campsite of the previous night; he was still dropping down the Missouri almost too fast to be overtaken.

At the campsite, Clark had left a letter that contained mixed news. The horses being taken overland by Sergeant Pryor to be given to the Mandans had all been stolen, probably by Crow Indians along the Yellow Stone. Pryor’s men, robbed but not molested, had hastily built two hide-covered tub-boats like those of the Mandans and sped down the Yellow Stone, then the Missouri, and caught up with Captain Clark here.

So everybody was safe and reunited, except Colter and Collins, who had fallen behind hunting several days before—and except for the difficulty of catching up with Clark.

Drouillard steered and the oars rose and fell, and once in a while he would see one of the rowers biting his lips to suppress a smile, and he thought he knew why.

Of course, they were worried about Lewis. Their lives had been in his hands for three years and he had shown them the world and shown them what men could do. He was a hard-driven man with a brain like a hurricane, stiff-necked and hot-tempered and carrying out a sacred mission, brave as a Caesar and tough
as whipcord. All that was true, and he was as important to them as any man, probably even their fathers, had ever been.

But he was lying up there hurting like blazes no doubt, and they didn’t want to smile over the fact that after all this, coasting home to glory, he had got shot in the arse by a half-blind Frenchman.

Whitehouse would probably make up a ballad about this. But he wouldn’t dare sing it.

“By the great fickle finger of fate, what a day!” Colter bellowed. “Drouillard! Come ’ere! Meet an old ’quaintance o’ mine, Joe Dickson. Joe, this here is George Drouillard, best hunter ever walked ground. Y’ oughter try to get him t’ come with us!”

Dickson didn’t bother to stand or offer his hand. He was all whiskers and eyebrows, weathered brown skin, pale gray eyes appraising intently. There was no mistaking that appraisal.
Drouillard wondered why Indian haters didn’t stay where there were no Indians.

All around there was campfire smoke and a hubbub of happy voices as old comrades reunited after more than a month. All had tales they couldn’t wait to tell, and the biggest news to many of them was that their leader had been shot “where the sun don’t shine even as much as it do at Clatsop,” as Potts discreetly put it. Clark was in the white pirogue, cleaning and putting new dressings on Lewis’s wounds, being a doctor again. Lewis fainted from the pain, but soon came to. Clark’s men all came by and paid him their respects and sympathies. Nearby, Bird Woman’s baby, naked and giggling, stomp-danced in glee at the sight of the big black dog, which advanced and licked his face so forcefully that the toddler fell on his bottom, squealing with delight. His mother reached out and fondled the animal’s silky ears. York’s laughter was booming through the camp.

Dickson and Hancock were the first people they had met from the States in two years. It was a remarkable coincidence that it was someone Colter knew.

Drouillard said to Colter, “What d’ you mean, get me to go with you?”