The True Account (22 page)

“He may at that, sir.”

“Ti? I can never recall having seen your uncle in low spirits. Have you ever seen him down in the mouth?”

“Only in the presence of suffering. He cannot bear to see a man or an animal suffer. He thinks hemp would alleviate much needless suffering.”

“As an herbal specific?”

“Why, yes, and as a preventive, as well. He believes that its mellowing effects would prevent us from getting ourselves into so much mischief. My uncle attributes all of our spiritual ills to our failure to use—”

“Hemp!” said the captain. Laughing and shaking his head, he walked off for one of his many nightly circumambulations of the camp, leaving me to contemplate what a very good man he was, and what a very good man my uncle was, and where
he
might be placed in his own system, or any system, of classification.

“I
T SEEMETH, GENTLEMEN,”
said my uncle one evening, “that the immediate problem for Captain Lewis is to get round these infernal waterfalls without succumbing to the bears, hail, heat, vipers, or thorns. I intend to use some good old-fashioned Vermont ingenuity to have him back on the river again in two days. Otherwise, our little race to the Pacific will be no challenge at all. A victory will mean nothing.”

Just what, I inquired with some trepidation, did he have in mind? But he only chuckled, and said I would learn in good season. In the meantime, he would need Silas Goodrich, the expedition's best carpenter, and five other men at dawn the next day. And off he strode to harangue Captain Lewis about the matter, though it seemed to me that one thing Meriwether Lewis did
not
need at this time was another invention.

Early the next morning, clad in his chain mail, stocking cap, and galoshes, with Miss Flame Danielle Boone's little pink riding cushion stuffed inside his trousers for a codpiece, and besmeared with his stinking mosquito nostrum, my uncle rousted out the carpentry crew to search for the largest cottonwood in the area. Near the water above the third falls they located one with a girth of about three feet. This they hewed down, and from the bole sawed out four crude wheels. With the remaining timber they fashioned axles, a helm and deck, and three tall masts. Behold—a prairie ark was taking shape before our eyes. This wheeled schooner of the plains, which my uncle baptized the
Flying Dutchman,
was five full days a-building. When complete, it was a good twenty feet in length, with a capacity (declared the inventor) of ten tons. It was steered from the stem with a long cottonwood tiller reinforced with my uncle's prehistoric bison bone. To this land-frigate the admiral, as the men had begun to address him, stepped the masts, each with a full suit of sails stitched together from tenting material. He even added a jaunty little spritsail jutting off the front of the hulking machine.

Captain Clark had watched these proceedings with a very reserved expression. Now he inquired whether my uncle had ever sailed a ship before. At this the private drew himself up to his full height and said it would be very strange if he had not, having been raised just a stone's toss across the hills from Loch Champlain. Clark favored him with a thin smile and returned to his map-making. But George Drouillard inquired whether they should begin gathering up the animals of the plains, two by two, against the impending flood. My uncle, who was waiting only for a favorable wind to embark, said “Tooleree” and kissed his hand, and went a-fishing with Franklin to take advantage of a thick hatch of green drake flies on the water.

Sergeant Patrick Gass inquired how the good wheeled
Dutchman
might fare on such rough terrain, full of gullies, draws, ravines, and ledgy outcroppings. “She'll skim lightly o'er them all, like her namesake on the high seas, matey,” my uncle assured him. Then he called up many nautical terms, such as weighing anchor, blue-water sailing, and the perils of a lee shore; he spoke of sails fore, aft, and mizzen, and ropes and pulleys and blocks, like a man who had been at sea his entire life. Finally he expressed a regret that the captains had sent the cannon back to St. Louis with the keelboat, for he would have loved to mount it on the
Dutchman
's bow as a chaser.

Charbonneau was afraid of the ship. Sacagawea was amused. Sergeant Ordway asked whether we might expect to sail it all the way to the Rocky Mountains, in which case two or three such vessels would save the party a world of paddling. My uncle took it all in good humor; smiling with great assurance, he said that we would see what we would see. He was habilitated for the maiden voyage with a pair of dark goggles fashioned from flakes of mica he had found on the Little Missouri and, over his stocking cap, Captain Lewis's best tricornered dress hat, which he had borrowed to give himself a proper naval air. Presently a breeze arose. The admiral was piped aboard by Pierre Cruzatte, sawing out “Yankee Doodle” on his fiddle, and assumed his position in the stem to the applause of the men. Seizing the bone tiller in both hands, he bade me—his only crew—to take my station in the bow; and in his stage voice gave the order to weigh anchor and “let her rip.” Private Wiser cut the elk-rope thongs by which the ship was attached to stakes driven into the prairie. I unfurled the sails.
Snap!
As loud as a rifle report, the wind filled the canvas sheets towering overhead. The
Dutchman
gave a great lurching bound, and off we tore at a truly horrifying rate of speed.

Over prickly pear, over tufts of shortgrass, over sage and cactuses we bounced at a good twenty knots, while I clung to the foremast for dear life. Wrestling the tiller first to starboard, then to port, with all the strength of a latter-day Hercules, my uncle began to tack the
Dutchman
back and forth, as the ungreased wooden axles shrieked dreadfully. On our second sweep to the right I was certain that we would be driven into the river. Somehow my uncle got us back on course. But the gullies were so deep, the stone outcroppings so dense, the wind—fast rising to a gale—so strong, that at every moment the ark threatened to overset itself and murder us both.

We had now come nearly even with a mixed herd of buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope, which began to run beside us. We easily outstripped them. But suddenly the
Dutchman
swung entirely around and we found ourselves headed back in the opposite direction, with the wind behind us. As we bore straight down upon the party's main camp, the men raced hither and yon for their lives. At the last moment we swerved away and headed straight for a deep draw at right angles to the river, which would certainly have put an end to our voyage altogether if, just before reaching the ravine, the ship had not actually taken flight. It sailed a good fifty feet through the air and came down on the far side of the gully with a jolt that pitched me out onto the prairie in a breathless heap. I picked myself up in time to see the ark, with my uncle still at the helm, making for the bluff above the river.

“E
UREKA
!” cried the private, as the
Dutchman
, airborne again, hurtled over the edge of the precipice. He threw up one arm, evidently as a kind of farewell. As he did so, a sudden gust blew him clean off the deck and he plummeted to the river below, where Franklin, who was fishing with great unconcern, pulled him to safety. The prairie ark, for its part, wafted down onto the water with some of the grace of its spectral namesake ghosting through the night skies. Still under sail, it proceeded quite majestically with the current toward the thundering falls, over which it bobbed in stately fashion, then came to pieces on the rocks below.

When it was apparent that my uncle was unharmed—he was now standing with his hand over his wet goggles, in a sort of rapture—some of the men began to laugh. Sacagawea told her tiny son that he had witnessed a great thing such as he was never likely to see again. Lewis, having satisfied himself as to my uncle's safety, led a party to retrieve the
Dutchman
's sails from the river below the falls.

That afternoon, however, Captain Clark took me aside. “Son,” he said with a very grave expression, “a word with you. You and your uncle and your Indian friend had best ride out into the prairie or scout ahead up the river for a few days. For if I encounter Private True before I cool off, I'm afraid I'll have to shoot him. No, lad. Don't argue with me. Just do as I say. Do it now.”

Though my uncle was much bruised, his pride was more so yet; for this reason, he was willing enough to absent himself from the expedition for a time. Endeavoring to cheer him as we rode out together that afternoon, Franklin said that the
Dutchman
was
in theory
a sound idea, but the terrain in the vicinity was not geared for such refined machines. As for the unexpected gale, Franklin reminded him that even King Aeolus had been unable to control the winds, and in his determination to go down with his ship, True had conducted himself with great honor. I promised to paint the scene, showing the
Dutchman
high over the river and my uncle still at the tiller, and to give him the painting to display in the elegant playhouses when he and his revised
Ethan Allen
took the great cities of the world by storm. He brightened up considerably, and said he believed he had acquitted himself manfully enough, and perhaps we would try the ark again, on smoother ground, on our way home from the Pacific, when the prevailing winds would be in our favor—though I fervently hoped that would not happen.

O
N THE SECOND DAY
of our banishment, while Bucephalus and I were hunting supper some miles apart from Franklin and my uncle, we were overtaken by one of the terrific late afternoon thunderstorms that seemed to hammer those barren fastnesses of Louisiana almost daily at that time of year. There was no place to take shelter. All I could do was to continue riding miserably, fearing that if we remained stationary one of those broad blue rivers of electricity, so much more terrifying than any lightning I had ever seen in Vermont, would somehow seek us out. Finally the storm passed, leaving the sky to the west a deep green. Darkness soon fell, and I judged it best to stop altogether until morning. When dawn arrived, neither Bucephalus nor I had the faintest idea where we were.

All that day we continued to wander on the great trackless steppe under thick, low clouds. If the sun had come out I could have trended south toward the Missouri and sooner or later rejoined Franklin and my uncle or the main expedition. But with no sun and such dense weather, I did not know south from last Wednesday. That night I was so exhausted that sleep came hard; but around midnight, I dropped off and slept fitfully. In the hour before dawn I had a strange dream. Little Warrior Woman appeared before me on her small Indian pony. Not in her dark paint, disguised as Black Wolf, but as the pretty young girl I had met on the prairie, wearing the same buckskin apparel she had worn the day I discovered her with her arm trapped in the badger den.

My dead friend said nothing. But she beckoned for me to rise and collect my belongings and follow her and her pony on Bucephalus. This I did, noting that as we rode we kept the North Star on our right shoulders. I was neither frightened nor saddened. In her steady eyes, sure movements, and dignified bearing, I sensed great purpose. I wanted to reach out and touch her, but feared that if I did she would vanish. A moment later I awoke, with the same sense of peace I had experienced in my dream.

It was still dark, but the sky was clear and the North Star as bright as I could ever recall. I saddled Bucephalus and began to ride, keeping Polaris on my right shoulder just as Little Warrior and I had done in my dream. Presently the sky behind me began to lighten and the stars in that quarter dimmed. A salmon-colored wash seeped out along the horizon, succeeded by a gold band blending into the soft blue canopy.

Just ahead, on a low rise, sat a figure facing away from me, toward the west. In the early light I perceived that it was a young woman, her hair sweeping down her back to the grass. As I approached, I called out my name and indicated that I was an American. I was quite astonished when she replied, in perfect English, “Hello, Ticonderoga. I see you're a dreamer, too.”

The girl had a low, laughing voice, as though she found my name and everything else about me amusing, and as I drew closer I saw that she was about my age and strikingly beautiful.

“Kindly get off your horse, Ticonderoga,” she said, “so that I can have a good look at you.”

I dismounted, all the time unable to take my eyes off her. She wore a short antelope-skin dress, fringed with colored strips of buckskin and dyed quills. Over her shoulders was an ermine-skin tippet. She had a straight nose, full red lips, and a lithe figure, with lovely slender legs. Now she stood up and walked all around me, regarding me with interest. I was surprised to see how tall she was. Though still three or four inches below my height, she was at least five feet and eight inches. She was clearly an Indian, with skin the color of my uncle's copper crown, but her wide-set eyes were the deep purple of the sage at twilight. “Very well, Ticonderoga,” she said. “Will you take my hand?”

She held out her right hand, which was shapely and long-fingered, the moons of her nails painted red, yellow, white, blue, and green. I started to shake hands with her. Instead she took my left hand in her right and led me to the edge of a nearby bluff overlooking a great curving stretch of the Missouri. So I had not, after all, been too far from the river when I'd stopped the day before with Bucephalus. As we stood hand in hand, looking down at the river, I could smell the crushed herbs and prairie flowers she had put in her hair, and the fainter, more delicate attar that seemed to hover over her, calling to mind the scent of sage.

“Once upon a time, a girl with eyes the color of the dark blue lupine flowers that blossom in the high meadows on Squaresided Chief Mountain, in the Land of the Glaciers, and with the natural scent of sage flowers, was born to a Blackfoot mother and a British father,” she said in a conversational tone. “Therefore she was named Yellow Sage Flower. Since she had also, from a very young age, told fascinating stories about the animals of the plains and mountains, her name was soon lengthened to Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories. Sadly, the parents of Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories both died young. She was sent away to school. In time, she returned to her mother's people, and one Smoke, a young Blackfoot chief, was appointed her guardian. Now just as Yellow Sage Flower was renowned for being able to know what a mule deer or a panther was saying, Smoke was famous for his ability to shift shapes. In the blink of an eye he could turn himself into a badger, a grizzled bear, a buffalo, or what have you. But not content with being a wizard, Smoke wished for even more power. Therefore he became a great warrior. And a great warrior must constantly make war. So it should come as no surprise that when a band of Americans appeared in Blackfoot territory one summer, Smoke's first thought was to exterminate them.”