The True Account (12 page)

T
HE PRAIRIE GRASS
was now beginning to turn yellow. The dawns and evenings were much brisker and a touch of fall was in the slanting afternoon sunlight and in the mist rising like smoke from the river each morning. Our idyll came to an abrupt end one morning when we were scouting along the Missouri for signs of the Teton Sioux, whom we did not wish to come upon by surprise. A dense fog lay over the entire river bottom, and we could see no more than ten or twenty feet ahead. The sopping grasses soaked us to our chests since we had left our mounts behind while we reconnoitered on foot. I hoped that the sun would break through soon and dry us out.

My uncle went ahead, using his wooden sword to push through a dense hedge of wild rose briars. For an hour or more we trudged along in unwonted silence, emerging at last onto a sandy bar piled high with driftwood, from cottonwood trunks to the smallest beaver cuttings. The sandbar extended into a quiet run of water below a bend in the river. Here we stopped to brew a midmorning cup of tea.

“Hark,” my uncle said suddenly, looking upriver and pointing his hearing horn in exactly the opposite direction.

I cocked my head. At first I heard nothing. Then, from somewhere up the river, faint and faraway-sounding, came the tinkling sound of a bell, rather like the bell on my uncle's stocking cap.

I jumped up, thinking to shout or fire my piece; but my uncle shook his head, though I noted that he was pouring powder into his arquebus. Floating around the bend came a large timber raft with what appeared to be several makeshift masts. The bell continued to ring softly. Otherwise, all was as still as a Vermont churchyard at midnight.

By now my uncle had his pocket perspective out. The raft momentarily vanished in the fog. As it reappeared, drifting with the current, he said softly, “My Jehovah, Ticonderoga.” He handed me the glass, through which I made out a horrifying sight. The masts were not masts at all, but crosses, to which the corpses of several men were nailed. Worse yet, I could see that these poor fellows had been skinned like beavers.

Around their flayed remains was a plague of flies, flies by the millions. Blackbirds and crows and ravens, and rats, too, were making a banquet upon the corpses, which had been lashed to the crosses in a hideous mockery of Our Savior's travail, and then filled with arrows. As this floating charnel house bore down on us, swinging willy-nilly in the current, I perceived, to my further horror, that the tolling bell was fastened on a cord around the neck of a crucified priest, still in his clerical collar. This then was the Thibeau trading party, about whom we had heard in St. Louis; and whether their rivals the Pariseaus had been served the same we could only guess.

In an urgent tone my uncle said, “Quick now, man. Do what I do.”

As the raft came slip-sliding down the edge of the current, he plunged into the river up to his waist, directing me to follow. Laying hold of the planks, while the disturbed blackbirds and crows called angrily above our heads and the carrion flies settled all about on our faces, hands, and clothing, we hauled the raft into the slack water on the lee side of the sand spit and made it fast to an uprooted cottonwood at the bottom of the heap of driftwood. We then scrambled up onto the bar, where the dreadful stench caused us both to be violently sick to our stomachs.

My unde recovered first. Scrambling to the top of the driftwood, he began flinging branches and logs down onto the raft tethered below. Two of the jury-rigged crosses toppled over. The smell seemed likely to cause me to faint dead away, and the back of my neck prickled with apprehension that at any moment the Teton Sioux would descend on us from out of the fog and fill us full of arrows.

When the raft was entirely covered with driftwood, my uncle struck his flint and steel in some tinder at the foot of the pile. The flames tore up through the jumbled timber until the whole concern was an inferno, from which we retreated up the bank. Snapping tongues and jets of flame shot thirty feet high; and in a very short time, the raft, crosses, driftwood, and sad remains of the men were all gone, leaving only a few charred and smoking planks on the river.

 

My uncle's plan was to wait for the captains to come up to us—we estimated that they might be a week or two away—and then to report what we had witnessed to them privately in order not to alarm their men. But the next day something occurred to change our minds. After meeting no one except for a few shy river Indians and John Ledyard for three months, we encountered the Pariseau party—fifteen in all—so well loaded with furs that I wondered how they came by them. They were a hard-looking outfit who wanted only rum or whiskey, of which we had none. They claimed not to have encountered either the Thibeaus or the Tetons. But on one of Pariseau's pirogues we noticed a flour barrel stamped with the words “Consigned to R. Thibeau.” And old Pariseau himself particularly asked us, with a snag-toothed grin, if we had not seen some sign of the Thibeaus coming down the river. For he had heard that they had been “skinned out of their furs” by the Sioux.

“A large American military party is coming up behind us,” my uncle replied, “with the prerogative to exercise martial law over all crimes committed in Louisiana. Do you know of a crime that should be reported?”

“All I know is you'd best watch out for them thieving injuns upriver,” the trader growled.

It immediately occurred to both of us that these ruffians might well have murdered the Thibeaus, priest and all, for their furs and made it out to look like the work of savages. Indeed, from the furtive looks of Pariseau's men, I thought this a very real likelihood. Without more proof than the flour barrel, we could do little. But my uncle, quite convinced that they, not the Tetons, were responsible for the massacre, now felt confident in proceeding on up the river. He assured me that we would make a full report of what we had witnessed when we returned to St. Louis.

Now, though, for a strange twist to a strange tale. We learned later that fall that the captains' party never saw a sign of the Pariseaus. The murderers had simply vanished in that vast and mysterious country, where, my uncle and I had no doubt, they had met their just deserts.

O
NE CLEAR
S
EPTEMBER MORNING
, Bucephalus and Ethan Allen showed signs of disquiet, sawing their bits and tossing their heads as we approached a low hillock, over which there drifted five or six ragged-winged turkey buzzards. Cresting the rise, I stiffened in my saddle. Not ten feet distant a figure lay face down on the prairie. It was an Indian boy, with hair cropped just below his ears, clad only in a buckskin shirt, clout, and moccasins. He had fallen across his lance, but since we saw no wounds or blood, my uncle believed that he had been struck by a rattlesnake, of which we had encountered a great many of late, taking advantage of the sunny autumn weather to wind their way through the grass to their winter dens in the stony bluffs above the river. “Be careful, Ti,” he said with a shudder. “I have reason to believe that we are besieged by a squadron of dangerous vipers.”

I judged the dead lad to be about my age or a year or so younger. I was trying to summon the courage to dismount for a closer look when out from behind a rock appeared another buzzard. Spotting me, the thing gave a great sideways hop, at which the boy raised his head and stared first at the vulture, then at me, then at my uncle. His eyes were nearly as large and dark as a deers. And though I could see that he was in great pain, there was a look of defiance on his face that caused me to hesitate a moment longer before I jumped off my horse.

My uncle was at his side immediately. “What have we here, Ti? What strange new adventure awaits us? We must help this lad, even if the dreaded Lord Pluto himself is trying to drag him down into his fiery purlieus.”

I now saw that the boy's left arm was trapped beneath him in a cairn of rocks. In the meantime the emboldened buzzard ventured closer, and with astonishing temerity drew back its naked red head as if to drive its beak into the boy while he was yet alive.

“See how the eagle torments poor Prometheus, lying chained to the rock,” said my uncle, “whose only offense was to show mankind the use of fire.”

“We'll see about that,” I said, and reached for my rifle, poured powder into the pan, rammed in a ball, and took aim at the hideous creature. The boy began to chant in a dry voice, continuing as I blasted off the vulture's inflamed head. It struck me that he must have supposed that we had intended to dispatch not the bird—but him. But now my uncle, who still supposed the boy to be Prometheus, shook his fist angrily at the sky and loudly defied Zeus to manifest himself in his own shape, or as a white bull, or a ray of sunlight, or in whatever other guise he chose, and he would fight him to the death; for this was a mean, unworthy use of his omnipotence, and he should know better. “Smite me with your thunderbolts yet again, if you will!” the private shouted to the blue sky—not, perhaps, the wisest invitation, given his unfortunate history with electricity—“Jolt me again and again, but I shall never submit to your will.”

“Sir,” I cried, “you alarm the boy. Please.”

“O Jesu,” my uncle exclaimed, and instantly began trying, by many contorted gesticulations, to show the Indian that we meant him no harm. I knelt and helped him drink from my water-bag, which he greedily emptied in several gulps. His body was now turned in such a way that I could see that his left arm was imprisoned all the way up to his shoulder. It occurred to me that he had reached into this fissure, perhaps after a prairie groundhog or a burrowing owl, and by accident wedged his hand between two rocks. My uncle was still of the opinion that he was caught by the jaws of a great serpent sent by Zeus.

At that moment, from the hole in the ground we heard a low growl. Something very much alive had a death grip on the boy's arm. I tugged gently at his shoulder. The creature growled again, and the boy gave a yelp. Then he motioned with his free hand toward the lance lying beneath him. It was made of a dense, heavy wood, with the business end split to admit a flint point. At the other end were several crane feathers. Apparently our young friend had wounded the creature in its den and, supposing it dead, had reached in and been trapped in its jaws. With the aid of the lance tip I was soon able to widen the opening enough to peer by the boy's shoulder and see, deep in the earth, two fiery red eyes. Supposing this to be a bear—though the hole did not seem wide enough to accommodate a very big one—I unsheathed my rifle. But the boy shook his head and motioned again toward the lance.

“This Prometheus is a wise lad as well as a brave one,” said my uncle. “He doesn't wish you to shoot his arm by accident, though no doubt”—with a fierce glance upward—“that would please the tyrant who torments him.”

Maneuvering the lance gingerly in order not to further injure the arm, I lowered it into the hole, then drove it with all my strength between the glowering eyes. The boy screamed; but the denizen's skull was so adamant that the flint point glanced off it several times before I scored a clean hit and pierced the brain-pan. Even then, it was a great while dying, and the boy was in excruciating pain from the jarring.

When the beast finally expired, my uncle and I enlarged the aperture until I could reach in, disengage its long claws from the rock it had grasped hold of, and draw out the animal, its jaws still fastened to the boy's arm. What I had supposed to be a young bear was a badger. It weighed about twenty pounds and was striped gray and brown, with powerful mandibles and long feet. So strong were its jaws, even in death, that to free the boy I was obliged to wedge them apart with the spear point.

The lad's arm, just above the wrist, was bitten through to the sinews. Though no bones appeared to be broken, he had lost much blood. We cut away his shirt sleeve, and my uncle, who from his many campaigns knew as much medicine as many doctors, cleaned the wound and bandaged it with his spare neckerchief.

But imagine my surprise when, cleaning the blood away from the Indian's neck and shoulder, I happened to glance down the front of his shirt and glimpse indisputable evidence that he was no boy at all. The young lady hunter, for her part, merely smiled and shrugged.

I helped Little Warrior Woman—for we later discovered that this was her name—onto Bucephalus behind me, and we set out for her village, which she indicated was about one and a half days' ride up the river. Each time I turned around to see if she was all right, she grinned. And though she must have been in great pain, she never uttered a sound. As for my uncle, though he was tremendously impressed by her bravery, he said that soon enough Zeus would try to punish us for interfering with his cruel plan. “When he does, Ti, he will find out that it is one thing to terrorize a defenseless Indian girl, and another matter altogether to fight a New Englander armed with an arquebus.”

When we stopped to camp that night, Little Warrior Woman made us understand, through signs and pantomime, that she had come down the river by canoe to hunt alone, when some roving Omahas on horseback fired arrows at her. She escaped by crossing to the opposite side of the river and paddling down with the current for several hours, intending to come back upriver in the easy water under cover of darkness. But just before dusk she sank her canoe on a cottonwood sawyer—whose whipping motion beneath the surface she comically imitated with her good arm—and had to swim to shore with her spear and make her way back afoot. Her arm had been trapped in the badger hole for a day and a night when we'd come across her.

So far from repining over her mishap, Little Warrior Woman busied herself collecting seeds from the purple coneflower and some strips of the moist inner bark of the river willow. These she chewed up with her strong white teeth into a paste, which she applied to her hand and arm with such good effect that the relief seemed instantaneous. My uncle called her another Aesculapius; but thinking of that good healer reminded him of the serpent-headed staff, which he said made his flesh creep. Just at dusk Little Warrior Woman killed a rabbit with her lance, and cooked it for our supper. After which I drifted off to sleep, while my uncle swept his spyglass across the heavens from horizon to horizon, chuckling and exclaiming, and Little Warrior Woman sat nearby with her spear at the ready in case we should be attacked by the Omahas.