The True Account (11 page)

“Uncle,” I whispered. “Who does he think we are? And who is he?”

“I don't know who he thinks
we
are, Ti, but I know I've heard his name,” my uncle said. “I just can't recollect where.”

I had no notion what to make of this bad-tempered mannikin. Once we got him safely to shore and boiled up some tea and offered him half a pipeful of hemp, he asked in the same vexed voice if we would like to hear his story. We said yes, very much; so, crossing his legs like a tailor and puffing away like a miniature chimney, John Ledyard announced that he was a Connecticut man, born and bred, and the first American to set foot in the Oregon Country, when he was there in '76 with Captain Cook.

My uncle lifted his stocking cap and smote his copper crown. “I was certain that I knew your name, sir. You went round the world with James Cook on his first circumnavigation.”

“I did,” John Ledyard said, “stopping in Oregon en route.”

Talking on at a great rate of speed, Ledyard explained that he had met with Thomas Jefferson when Jefferson was ambassador to France, and convinced him that he could travel
by foot
through Siberia, cross the Bering Sea on a Russian fur-trading vessel, then hike across North America west to east (much as my uncle believed we had done). “But I am nothing if not misfortune's stepchild,” he went on, explaining that in Siberia he had been chased by a tiger, nearly trampled by a mammoth, impressed by a local warlord into a salt mine, taken into bondage by a fierce princess directly descended from Attila, and finally imprisoned by Queen Catherine the Great and then expelled from the country.

“But wait,” cried my uncle. “Didn't you next undertake to journey to Africa, with the design of discovering the source of the Niger River?”

“Of course,” Ledyard snapped. “Where else would I go?”

“But I thought you died along the way, in Cairo,” my uncle exclaimed, and he began to tremble quite violently for fear that he was holding conversation with a ghost.

“No, no, that was a base, false rumor bruited about by my enemies, and mere wishful thinking. Though I
was
set upon by lions and hippopotami and a troop of pecking ibises, and finally I had to turn back in the face of an army of one hundred thousand Nigers armed to the teeth. But none of that was anything to what I've encountered here on this infernal Missouri River.”

“This is the Kansas River, sir,” I interjected. “It branched a short way back.”

“Or the
Fluvius Pennae,”
my uncle added. “I believe that is the name that will stick. It is the more poetic.”

“Poetic?” cried Ledyard. “You call this waterway to Hell poetic?
Fluvius Hades
you might better call it. Let me tell you what's happened to me since I took the fork a month ago—evidently the wrong fork, if what you say is so. I have been robbed and stripped of all but my nightshirt by Missouri Indians, beaten with willow sticks by Kansas women, jeered at by the Omaha, stung in every pore of my body by each kind of vicious bug in Louisiana, bitten on the nose by a water viper, and pelted with Osage oranges by some boys belonging to that tribe—I mean the Osage. I was chased by the Yankton Sioux for twenty miles, and finally took refuge in a backwater inside a beaver lodge, and though I evaded the Sioux, a monstrous buck beaver flung mud at me and flailed me so brutally with his great tail that I still have the bruises to show for it. Finally, I found myself—I believe for the first time in the annals of exploration—
befeathered.
With Cook I was becalmed many a time; and often bemused by the marvels we saw; and once or twice nearly beheaded; but never befeathered. I am on my way back to St. Louis, gentlemen. Not to retreat. I never retreat. But to sail to New Orleans and thence Brazil and then round the Cape and up to the mouth of the Columbia on the first vessel going that way.”

“Then for Jehovah's sake, allow us to help you,” said my uncle. “We have extra clothing, and some cornmeal and meat, and a blanket—for the prairie nights are cold.”

I voiced a wish to paint John Ledyard in his dugout, with the molting pelicans on the island in the background, and he consented. But in the late afternoon he set off down the river, with neither thanks for our assistance nor any farewell, paddling hard to get to New Orleans and Brazil.

I found Ledyard's story most foreboding and wished again that we, too, were posting back to St. Louis and safety. But as he passed out of sight, my uncle said, “I don't know, Ti, when I've met a fellow who pleased me more. John Ledyard is undaunted. Mark my words. That brave man will be heard from. For he has a vision and he cleaves to it. I should be proud to be beaten to the Pacific by an expeditionary of his mettle. God bless him. God bless all the John Ledyards in the world!”

“Amen,” I said, thinking that they would need it, and we would, too. And for good measure I said again, “Amen.”

T
HE FOLLOWING DAWN
I awoke to discover Bucephalus gone. I whistled like a jaybird—his signal to come—to no avail. Though my uncle did not seem unsettled, my panic grew as the daylight strengthened. To be stranded horseless in this country would surely throw us upon the mercies of the local Indians, a prospect I found very alarming after hearing how John Ledyard had fared at their hands.

Nothing else was missing, only Bucephalus. But once more I felt that we were being watched closely. My uncle thought the same, and after a few moments of reflection, came up with an idea for recovering my mount and meeting our first Indians into the bargain. I thought his plan, as he explained it, improbable at best. But in the absence of any better strategy it seemed worth trying.

In what I hoped would appear to be an unhurried manner, I set up my easel on the prairie about one hundred paces from our camp and the same distance from the cottonwoods along the river. Then, while my uncle went a-fishing as if we had no concerns in the world, I began to paint. In the background I painted the river and the bluffs opposite, some trees, a pelican flying overhead, and our camp, leaving a large space in the center of the canvas blank. Presently an Indian rode out from the trees on a black and white pony. After watching me intently for a time, he began to dash back and forth along the edge of the cottonwoods, approaching a few feet closer with each sprint. I continued to fill in the background and foreground of the painting, which he could not yet discern from his angle.

As he drew closer, I was surprised to see that he was just a boy, one or two years younger than myself. He was dressed in buckskins much like my own, only with a fringe of yellow, white, and red quillwork on his leggings. His face was painted somewhat differently from those of the Indians who had followed us earlier, with red predominating on his forehead, upper cheeks, and nose, then black below to his chin. Perceiving that I was unperturbed by his darting feints, which were sometimes accompanied by a howl, he suddenly leaped off his running horse by bringing one leg and foot forward, vaulting over the animal's mane, and alighting perfectly balanced, strung bow in hand. As he sidled closer, nocking an arrow, I continued my work—though my heart was in my throat—now painting my young friend in the central space I'd reserved. He advanced one step at a time, edging around to come at me from downwind, as if stalking a deer or some other keen-nosed quarry. This very much amused me, though I was constantly aware of the arrow fitted to the string of his bow, which I painted at the ready in his hands, so that the boy appeared to be about to loose his barb directly at the viewer of the picture.

When I was done I casually boxed up my paints and returned to our camp, leaving the picture on the easel. As I walked away with my back to the Indian, the hair on my neck prickled; it would have been but a moment's work for him to send his long-shafted arrow straight through my heart. But when I reached the camp I could see him, from the tail of my eye, approaching not me but the easel, creeping closer and closer, and still taking great care to keep downwind of it.

I cut a willow sapling about eight feet long, attached a fish line and hook, and repaired to the nearby backwater where my uncle was angling. In the meantime, the Indian boy peeked around the corner of the easel and saw his portrait. Letting out a yelp, he jumped back. At this I laughed aloud, causing him to stamp his foot in anger. He then lifted his bow, pulled the nocked arrow to his shoulder, and approached the picture again, no doubt believing that he was taking his life in his hands. This time, after regarding his portrait for a few moments, he dropped his bow to the ground. Both his hands shot up to his mouth. Snatching up the bow again, he compared it to that in the painting. He appeared to count the colored bands of porcupine quills on the figure's leggings, then on his own, matching color to color. Again he was overcome by wonderment, covering his eyes with his hands and reeling. Finally he touched the canvas, smelled the wet paint on his fingertip, and brought it to his tongue.

This seemed the right time for me to withdraw altogether. I continued fishing down the slough behind my uncle, who soon hooked a fine catfish of two or three pounds, shouting “Fish on” as if we were home on our little Vermont river, seeing who could catch the most trout. As he played it he declared that he would fish his way across Louisiana, and he did not know but that the chance to do so was not half his reason for making such an odyssey in the first place. Which seemed to make as much sense as any other reason he had thus far advanced for our journey to the Pacific.

But when we returned to our camp half an hour later, the easel and portrait were gone. In their place, placidly cropping the wet morning grass as if he'd been there the entire while, stood Bucephalus.

T
WO DAYS LATER
we came to a flourishing village on the riverbank. It was inhabited not by the Oto, Osage, or Sioux but by several hundred creatures much like our common groundhog in Vermont, yet more communal, each one living in a small hole by a mound of dirt close by its neighbors. But catching one for me to paint proved difficult.

At first we chased all round their village, stumbling over their dirt mounds and diving at these sleek little tricksters, which popped up out of one hole only to vanish immediately down another. Next we tried digging one out with a pointed stick When I was down three or four feet, my uncle came up with a supple cottonwood pole longer than he was tall and thrust it all the way into the den without reaching the end. “We have discovered another Cretan labyrinth, Ti, with a thousand cunning small Minotaurs,” he said. He next essayed to “whistle them up,” a method he had used to converse with Vermont groundhogs, which would sometimes whistle back to him. But these western fellows were not so obliging and stubbornly remained out of sight, though my uncle tried several lively airs. Then he hit upon another idea. He filled with river water the pannikin in which we boiled our tea and poured it down a hole, expecting to flush out the animal. That wouldn't answer, either. It would have taken a barrel of water to drive them out, and we never did catch one. My uncle named them “Kinneson's hermit chucks” because of their extreme shyness.

There were many other new and quite wonderful animals to be met with on the prairie, and I loved making their acquaintance. One morning while the dew still lay thick on the grass we came onto four comical hopping deer with black tails, somewhat larger than our eastern white-tails and with ears half again as long, resembling the ears of jackasses; my uncle immediately denominated them “Kinneson's mule deer.” Then he must dismount and imitate their method of locomotion, bouncing along on the prairie in his chain mail and galoshes, with his belled cap jingling, and encouraging me to do the same. I do not know what a party of traders or Indians might have thought had they come by just then and seen a man dressed as a knight-errant and his gangling young squire hopping hand in hand across the prairie like a pair of kangaroos.

A fortnight later we discovered a rabbit with long hind legs capable of leaping twenty feet at a bound, which we henceforward called “Kinneson's long-jumping hare.” Near the mouth of the Platte River (which my uncle renamed the Helen of Troy on his “Chart of the Interior”), we encountered the slinking, doglike, smallish wolves that chorused at twilight in great numbers, causing the prairie to ring all round our campfires. My uncle said that when he marched with Cortez in the Southwest the Spanish called these fellows “coyotes,” but he would call them
Canis kinnesonius.
One of these thievish rascals tried to run off with the tube in which I kept my finished paintings, but I scared him into dropping it by firing over his head. I would be many months learning how to capture their sidling, hip-shot gait on canvas.

 

A few days later, on a knoll at a distance of forty or fifty rods, we spied a homed creature resembling a cross between a large goat and a deer, blotched with white, tan, and black, with horns pronged like a two-tined fork. To my eye it was quite African-looking. My uncle had the same impression, which caused him to conjecture that at one time a great isthmus or land-bridge had stretched from Africa to the Americas, over which the ancestors of this gazelle-like citizen had migrated. For which reason he named it
Africanus kinnesonius.
But when we began to approach, it caught our scent, and ran much faster than even Bucephalus could gallop. This animal, I learned later, was the antelope.

Our idyll was marred by only one small contretemps, an argument over, of all things, a yellow-headed blackbird I'd spotted while off hunting alone on the prairie. When I painted this new bird perched on a tall shaft of grass, my uncle insisted quite vehemently that no self-respecting blackbird would ever sport a yellow head, even in Louisiana, and moreover that no single grass stem could possibly support the weight of a blackbird of any hue. I held my ground, and the conversation grew heated, until what should we see just ahead but exactly such a sight as I had painted, at which my uncle laughed heartily. And so we proceeded with all the good will in the world, two wide-eyed Vermonters at large in this wondrous Eden called Louisiana.