The True Account (29 page)

My uncle then told the men that if they would go along the next day like the good soldiers they were and do as the captains bid them, and if they didn't all freeze to death or starve, he would tell them the following night how he had bested the Devil and expelled him from the Green Mountains forever.

 

The next day was by far the worst of the crossing. Weakened from hunger, the men had all they could do to catch their horses, some of which had scattered widely during the night in search of grass. We did not get under way until nearly noon, and by dark had made less than ten miles. Again the party's hunters managed to shoot only a few grouse, so the captains were obliged to order that a colt be killed for food. But how many more horses could they slaughter and still pack their gear through these terrible peaks? Clark wrote in his journal that the lack of food and the difficulty of moving through the wilderness had much “dampened the spirits” of the men. Lewis, however, reminded my uncle that he had one more tale to tell—that of himself and the Devil. After lighting his pipe, the private began as follows.

“Now the Devil, gentlemen, is also known to us New Englanders as Ned, the Black Man, the Homed Devil, Lucifer, Satan, and Old Harry. But he is known
principally
as the Gentleman from Vermont because Vermont has the greatest number of individualistical, independent-minded, cussed free-thinkers in the Union, and therefore provides him—I mean my Gentleman friend—with the most clients.

“So when Ethan Allen, who was the
most
individualistical and cussed free-thinking Vermonter of all, came to his deathbed, with me at his side, the Gentleman in question manifested himself in Ethan's bedchamber with a great tow sack in which to lug him off, in the same manner that said Gentleman had conveyed all Vermont free-thinkers to Hell since Vermont had existed. Ethan had just denounced the ‘pious, prattling religiosity' of a parson he'd bodily tossed out of his chambers when—poof!—in a cloud not of smoke but of maple-scented steam, the old boy appeared before us.”

“What did he look like?” Sage asked.

“Why, dear madam, he looked like—like a Vermont schoolmaster! He was tall and lanky, with a bottle-green frock coat and a mortarboard and a pedagogical expression—and he was already opening the mouth of the sack. But do not suppose that I sat idly by. No. I had my arquebus at the ready, primed and loaded, and I shot him. After I shot him I stabbed him. And after I stabbed him I tried to grapple with him with my own two hands. But it was all in vain. It was like shooting and stabbing and grappling with a man-shaped wisp of steam from a maple-sugar house. ‘Damn you, sir!' I cried.

“‘Too late!'” says he. ‘But I'll bargain you a bargain, Private True Teague Kinneson. For I know you well, and to tell the truth I have had my eye on you for a great long while. Here it is. I'll spare Ethan if you can answer a riddle.'

“‘I can answer any riddle ever riddled,' I said. ‘But what, on the off chance that I don't'—the Gentleman being a canny fellow—‘would you want from me?'

“‘Oh, nothing very material. We'll arrange that trifling matter later.'

“‘Riddle away, then,' said I. ‘With the additional understanding that, if you lose, you'll never set foot in Vermont again.'

“‘Done,' said he, with an oily smile.

“And ‘Done,' said I, with no smile at all.

“At this, Ethan muttered something.

“‘What?' I said.

“‘Foot or
hoof,
' said he in a ghastly low voice. ‘Never set foot or
hoof
in Vermont.'

“‘Yes, that you'll never set foot or
hoof
in Vermont.'

“Well, sirs. The Gentleman did not like this addendum because it balked his scheme to crawdad out of his part of the bargain should he lose. But he was so confident I could not answer his riddle that he said, ‘Here it is, then, Schoolmaster Private Playwright Kinneson. Which state has the prettier autumn prospects, Vermont or New Hampshire? And why?'

“Now, being the Gentleman from
Vermont,
the old boy might be expected to plump for the Green Mountain State. But, knowing his subtlety, I expected a trick. So did Ethan, who beckoned me close and whispered, ‘New Hampshire. Tell him New Hampshire.' I drew in a breath and said, ‘The answer to your riddle, sir, is New Hampshire.'

“The Gentleman frowned and smiled at the same time. ‘Is that your final answer, schoolmaster?'

“‘It is.'

“‘Well,' said he, fiddling with the mouth of his sack, ‘you say right. New Hampshire has the better views. But that's only half of it. It might save Ethan, but it won't save you.' He gave the sack a shake, and whatever was inside hissed.

“‘So I'll put it to you once more.
Why
is it that New Hampshire has the finer prospects?'

“Again Ethan beckoned me close and whispered in my ear. And this time it was I who smiled. Drawing myself up tall and noting that I had a good half-inch of height on the Gentleman, I said, ‘Because, sir, New Hampshire has many a fine, tall mountain from which a certain Gentleman may look out over the most beautiful place on the face of the earth—the great sovereign Republic of Vermont!'

“At which the Devil stamped his foot, and off came his slipper, revealing a hairy cloven hoof; he clapped his hand to his head, and off came his scholarly mortarboard, revealing two short scarlet horns; and he whirled around to leave, revealing, under his green frock coat, his pointy tail. But before he could be off, I wrested away the sack, trussed him up in it, and heaved it as far into Loch Champlain as I could. And since that time he has never set foot or hoof in Vermont.”

“Did Ethan Allen recover?” Lewis asked.

“Why, yes,” my uncle said. “Ethan did. But the next week he went to Town Meeting and drank his usual gill of rum afterward at a tavern. And during the telling of this very story, he died of a thundering apoplexy. But at least the Gentleman didn't get him, nor will that Gentleman ever enter Vermont again. Though when I hove him into the lake, he roared out of the sack that I had not seen the last of him, and the next time we met it would be on his terrain rather than mine, and I could expect a very different outcome. I believe that we may encounter him soon, for these hellish mountains they call the Bitterroots are exactly the sort of place I'd expect to find him.”

 

Later that evening the captains made a bold decision. Early the next morning Clark, with six of the best hunters, would go on ahead of the main party, traveling as fast and light as possible, in the hopes of reaching, that day or the next, the Nez Perce Indians, who lived on the prairie to the west of the mountains. They would send back food to Lewis and the rest of the men coming along behind with the pack horses. My uncle volunteered our services to range out in front of Lewis's party and, with Yellow Sage's help, find and shoot an elk or a deer to fend off starvation.

Clark and his men departed at dawn, and Sage and my uncle and I shortly thereafter, taking with us an extra horse to carry back to Lewis any meat we found. Through a mix-up, the saddlebags of the horse we selected contained some of the expedition's medical supplies, which we discovered in midmorning when we stopped to drink at a little stream.

As we broke trail up the steep and heavily wooded side of yet another snowy mountain, we came across the tracks of a goodsized mule deer being stalked by a mountain lion. Sage thought we might be able to scare the cat away and overtake the deer ourselves in the deep snow. An hour later we reached a ridge-top saddle where the trail branched, with one fork going north and one west. From here we saw, about a quarter of a mile ahead, in a narrow place on the north path, a large mule deer hanging by its antlers from a tree branch. After a moment's reflection, my uncle opined that Clark and his advance party had left it there for us earlier that day, though why they would head
north
instead of staying on the main trail to the west, we could not guess. As we started toward the hanging deer, Sage suddenly reined in Buffalo Runner. In an urgent voice she said that in a dream some nights before, which she had forgotten until this very moment, Smoke, in the guise of a panther, had been waiting near a place just like this to recapture her. The deer was a trap, and on no account would she proceed.

I urged my uncle to turn back to warn Lewis immediately. But he continued up the trail, saying merely, “Let us then use this deer to prepare a special feast to set before the good Blackfeet. They must be as famished as we are.”

“Uncle,” I said, “I beg you. Smoke and his men won't rest until they capture Yellow Sage and have the party's guns in their possession to boot.”

But nothing would do but he and I must ride on ahead to where the deer was hanging. While I skinned and butchered it—the hair on the back of my neck prickling the whole time—my uncle built a great crackling fire and began to cook up, in our iron kettle, a most delicious-smelling venison stew, into which he incorporated some savory hemp leaves, ground very fine, and also some medicaments from the saddlebags on the spare horse. We left the big kettle of spiced venison simmering in its fragrant juices and headed back down the trail, giving the impression that we intended to bring up the rest of the party to partake of the luncheon.

After retracing our steps to the saddle, we drew our mounts off into the trees and lay on a flat rock on the ridge top to see what would happen. Presently Sage rejoined us. As we waited, the snow clouds began to lift for the first time in five days. Just as the sun broke through, forty or fifty warriors, covered with the skins of bears, buffaloes, and panthers, emerged from the forest. Led by Smoke, dressed in a catamount's skin, the Blackfeet began to share out the venison. In the meantime my uncle had spotted Lewis's party coming up the opposite side of the mountain, still two or three miles away but headed straight for us and the Indian party.

True chuckled. “Remember old Isaac, who in his dotage asked Esau to make a mess of savory pottage to regale his nostrils? No doubt you saw me add some condiments to the stew.”

“Do you mean the hemp leaves?” I asked.

“Nay, Ti. The hemp was merely to make them calm. For this work we needed something more vigorous. Aye”—training the telescope—“see them? See them, Yellow Sage?”

He handed his spyglass to Sage, who began to laugh while trying not to make any noise. As the figures around the stew kettle scattered, she gave me the glass and put both her hands over her mouth to keep from laughing aloud. Through the eyepiece I saw the all-puissant Blackfeet rushing for cover. Some had their hands pressed tightly to their hinderquarters and some were hobbling with their buckskin trousers down around their ankles. This exodus was accompanied by reports, explosions, and detonations—not musket fire directed toward our party, but rather the effects of the handful of “Thunderclapper” purgatives with which my uncle had leavened the venison gravy. Every last Blackfoot, including Smoke, was staggering toward the trees with what, had our cows back in Vermont contracted the affliction, we would have called the scours. Sage and I could no longer hold in our laughter, nor did it matter. For we knew that the effects of just one of these powerful emetics, much less twenty or thirty, would put the Blackfeet out of commission for the rest of that day and well into the night.

In this way the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific was saved by three tales told by a Vermont schoolmaster around a campfire and an old-fashioned dose of salts.

To cap our good fortune, the swirling clouds far to the west broke apart, revealing the glimmer of distant prairie. But before I could express my joy and relief, Yellow Sage astonished us by declaring that she must return home with Smoke or jeopardize our entire expedition and the captains' as well. Nothing I said would change her mind. All I could extract from her was a promise to meet me the following summer on our return trip from the Pacific, at Squaresided Chief Mountain in the Land of the Glaciers. And with that she hugged my uncle, kissed me on the cheek, leaped onto Buffalo Runner in her customary manner, and trotted up the north trail to join her people—vanishing into the wilderness as suddenly as she had appeared earlier that summer, and as much a mystery to me as ever.

I
PAINTED
Crossing the Bitterroots
during the first week of October while the men of the expedition rested with the Nez Perce Indians, my uncle fished for a new kind of trout—a high-jumping salmonoid with a brilliant crimson stripe down its side—and Captain Clark burned out canoes from large pine logs for the last leg of our trip to the ocean. I began with a rough sketch and worked straight through that week, which was as sunny and bland as the preceding fortnight had been wintery.

The painting was another story tableau. If I had any one day in mind, I suppose it was the fifteenth or possibly the sixteenth of September, when we were lost in the mountains and trying to make our way up out of that terrible sink our guide had blundered his way into. In the background were range upon range of snow-clad peaks. In the foreground a precipitous mountain slope ended in a straight drop of several hundred feet to a river, which almost immediately lost its way in more mountains. Partway down the snowy mountain three pack horses were overset on their sides, legs splayed in the air. Around the forequarters of one, Sergeant Patrick Gass, looking gaunt and starved, was fastening an elk-hide rope, snubbed at the other end to a western cedar tree. Captain Lewis, hatless and in worn buckskins, stood beside the cedar. His left arm encircled the shoulders of Private Gibson, who, with Private Shannon and Private Willard, was hauling on the end of the rope to help raise the fallen horse and assist it up the slope. Just above them, around a campfire on the edge of the woods, sat the rest of the men, listening with rapt expressions, though otherwise in the last stages of fatigue, misery, and hunger, to my storytelling uncle. He stood up to the tops of his galoshes in snow, his stocking cap askew, part of his gleaming head plate exposed, his mail encrusted with frost. His whimsical yellow eyes glowed with humor and hope, and as he spoke, he faced west toward a narrow gap in the jumbled mountains, where a single patch of blue sky was visible and, far below, the slightest hint of prairie.