Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Drouillard loved getting away to hunt early every morning. He would take his horse out of the valley onto the open uplands to get a feel of the lie of the new land and the course of the great river, watching the first sunlight gild the western cloud tops, then the hills, hearing the waking songbirds, watching for the smoke of Indian camps, scanning the ground for well-trodden animal paths that might lead to salt licks or watering places. Some days the game was so plentiful and tame that there was really no hunting to be done, just a leisurely, steady, long-range shot at a fully exposed deer, standing as if placed there as a gift from the Keeper of the Game. Sometimes a soldier would be sent out to hunt with him. The one named Colter was the best hunter. Others went out almost as if apprenticed to Drouillard. The good ones he could send out on tangents, to cover more ground. Far away his fellow hunter’s gun would crack and the echoes would roll, and they would meet at some preselected landmark, and if both had got kills they would take them down and hang them high and safe in trees near the river where they expected the boats to get to. The soldiers loved hunt duty, a day off from slaving on oars. It was a poor day if they came in with less than four deer, a good day with six. Drouillard would usually bag a seventh near day’s end, knowing that any day there was plenty of venison, the captains did not have to issue salt pork. Though there were fifty kegs of the pork, two tons of the boat’s cargo, the men’s appetites were such that all the pork would be gone in less than two weeks if they depended on it alone. Motivating him further to bring in fresh meat was his belief that pork, even from a fresh-butchered pig, was repugnant; salt pork from a keg was just grease—to him no better than eating from a latrine. When he brought fresh meat, the soldiers didn’t have to eat such slop. For all his thoughts of slaves and soldiers, he had never seen slaves work as hard as these soldiers did on the boats, and they needed and deserved fresh meat.

  When the men could row with the oars in smooth water, it was hard enough; they sat on their benches and pulled, pulled, pulled, sweating in the sunshine, nipped by deerflies, suffering blisters and strained backs. But the Missouri was not usually a smooth stream. Sometimes it was swift and shallow, chutes of tricky water racing between sandbars, with no room for oars. In such places the soldiers used long setting-poles instead of oars. Each would set the end of his pole in the mud, brace his shoulder against it, and walk toward the stern along one gunwale or the other, driving the boat forward by leg power. At the stern cabin he would have to yank the pole from the grip of the muddy bottom, carry it to the bow, turn, set it in the bottom again, trudge and push again, the boat creeping forward. In the worst shallows and the swiftest chutes, even poles would not work, and then the men would have to get out and wade in the mud or thrash through riverbank thickets while pulling the boat by ropes, as if they were canal-boat mules.

  The Missouri was usually afloat or jammed with driftwood. As it undercut its meandering banks, trees, sometimes whole riverbanks of cottonwoods and willows, would slough off and cave in. Sometimes nearly the whole wide river would be choked shut with muddy piles of trees, splintered limbs, and gnarled root clumps. Although the keelboat and the two pirogues had masts and sails, seldom were conditions or winds right for such easy going. The keelboat’s tall mast, in fact, was jointed near the base so it could be lowered to lie parallel above the deck, with the sail spread over it as a canopy for shelter. This inventive feature had on occasion kept the mast from being entangled or broken in overhanging trees, when the only passable channels were close to shore.

  A morning rain fell steadily, dribbling and hushing in the trees. Drouillard sat under the projecting rock of a cliff, watching a deer path that led onto a mud bank churned by deer tracks. The cliff overlooked a river bend, and below the bend the river was divided by a long sandbar, whose upper end was covered by a great, tangled pile of weathered driftwood. Now and then a tree, with or without leaves, would float, bobbing swiftly and silently, through the river channels, or hang up on the driftwood pile with a crackling of limbs. Early in the morning he had come out alone, to range a few miles ahead of the boats, and had already killed a deer, which hung gutted on a tree limb a few hundred yards upstream. When the rain started, he had taken shelter here. It was likely he would get another deer, even without moving, if he kept a view of the path.

  Some blackbirds flew up in the rain. Drouillard then began to hear voices through the rain-hush downstream, then some hollow, bumping sounds. The boats were coming up into the bend. They would scare off any deer. So in a little while he would leave the shelter and go up to the carcass above, and hail the boats to take it aboard when they got there. But there was no hurry, so he waited. He liked to watch the boats.

  In a few minutes the dark prow of the keelboat emerged through the veil of pale willow foliage, nosing slowly against the swift current of the wider channel. The smaller boats, first the red pirogue rowed by voyageurs, then the white-hulled one manned by Corporal Warfington’s eight soldiers, appeared in the narrower channel on the other side of the sandbar.

  In the bow of the keelboat stood Cruzatte and Labiche, his two métis friends who had surprised him by joining the army. Their rainsoaked clothes clung to their brawny torsos. Behind them were the twenty soldiers straining on their long oars, most shirtless and hatless. Cruzatte and Labiche each held a long, thick pike-pole with a sharp iron tip, their tools for fending off drift trees. Cruzatte ogled the river with his one good eye.

  As the keelboat pulled past the sandbar, Cruzatte’s high, nasal voice called a warning. Drouillard looked upstream and saw a big drift tree barreling roots first down the bend, right into the keelboat’s way. The rowers, alerted by his cry, paused, looking back over their shoulders.

  Cruzatte crouched, jabbed the tip of his gaff-pole into the jagged root bole, and his sinewy body arched with strain. The pole began to bend as the great weights of the boat and tree pressed together through it, and Cruzatte was nearly lifted off his footing. Labiche jammed his spike too against the roots.

  Slowly the root bole swung off the keelboat’s larboard quarter.

  But Cruzatte was at once in action again, yelling, “Pas encore!” He yanked back his pole and jabbed again with it, this time at the trunk of the tree, which had begun to swing around toward the prow. And the keelboat, now veering to starboard from the force of the fending effort, was quartered by the swift current, threatening to broach with the tree coming parallel. The powerful stream had the boat and tree in its grip, carrying them sideways toward the sandbar. Drouillard’s heart raced. In this moment on the muddy gray, rain-spattered water he could see the voyage coming to an early end. The weight of the tree would overset the boat or crush it like an eggshell against the tangle of driftwood. Cruzatte and Labiche were still straining to push the tree away. The oarsmen were jumping up from their places and stretching out their oars to help, all in a clamor of shouting, but apparently oblivious of the sandbar on the other side. Drouillard cupped his mouth to yell a warning, but suddenly a bellow overrode all the hubbub:

  “All hands back on your oars! And back off! Now! Back! Back!”

  It was Clark. He had seen the threat of the sandbar. The soldiers scrambled back to their places, dropped their oars into the rowlocks and pushed them instead of pulling them. Slowly, then faster, the keelboat backed out from the narrowing trap, then wheeled about stern-to in the swift channel, while the huge tree rolled onto the end of the sandbar. In a moment the rowers and helmsman had the keelboat back on course up through the river bend.

  Drouillard stood shaking his head, breathing fast, as the ponderous vessel moved on up through the bend, flanked by the red and white pirogues, everybody laughing and howling to each other about yet another close escape. This would be all the talk again in camp this evening: another of those thrilling, terrible moments, and the desperate strainings and near-panics they went through almost every day to save the boats and themselves. This time they had avoided splinter-gashed hands or fearsome dunkings. Tonight they would brag, and the captain
s might come and brag on them all, and they wore praise like a warrior’s honors. Sometimes Drouillard listened and almost envied them their frights and miseries and hard-earned celebrations.

  But they weren’t free, and he was. As the convoy moved on up through the bend, their laughter faded. Cruzatte’s voice started up a rhythmic voyageur paddling song. Drouillard slipped out of the rock shelter into the rain to go to the place ahead where the venison hung. Those poor bastards needed meat, and they deserved it.

  July 4th Wednesday 1804

  The Plains of this countrey are covered with a Leek Green Grass, well calculated for the sweetest and most norushing hay—interspersed with Cops of trees, Spreding ther lofty branchs over Pools Springs or Brooks of fine water. Groops of Shrubs covered with the most delicious froot is to be seen in every direction, and nature seems to have exerted herself to butify the Senery by the variety of flours Delicately and highly flavered raised above the Grass, which Strikes & profumes the Sensation, and amuses the mind throws it into Conjectering the cause of So magnificent a Senerey in a Country thus Situated far removed from the Sivilised world to be enjoyed by nothing but the Buffalo Elk Deer & Bear in which it abounds & Savage Indians.

  William Clark, Journals

  Alexander Hamilton Willard was a soldier whom Drouillard had noticed at the beginning of the journey for the contrast between his daunting physique and his quiet, obedient behavior. The rawboned giant was so shy that Drouillard might never have come to know him at all if the captains had not sent him out with him often, with instructions to teach the man some hunting skills. Willard had been a blacksmith. His hands were so huge and strong that Sergeant Floyd joked, “Drouillard, you just find him a bear, and let ’im wrang its neck like a chicken. Save powder and lead.”

  Willard was good to hunt with in that he wasn’t a talker and didn’t have to be hushed all the time like some of them. Colter, and the two Field brothers, Joe and Reubin, were the best hunters among the troops. They were talkative, but not on the hunt. Willard seldom talked even in camp. But it didn’t look as if he would ever become much of a hunter. He was too much a daydreamer and didn’t concentrate as one must to find sign or do tracking. He just could not concentrate, it seemed, and sometimes as they rode over the grasslands, Drouillard believed that the big man was asleep in the saddle with his eyes open.

  Hunting was different here on the plains. Drouillard had spent most of his life under the gloomy green canopies of hardwood forests. Here, except in the ravines and river valleys, scarcely a tree was to be seen anywhere. Grasses waved and rippled in the wind, miles in every direction. Game on the plains had to be approached by staying in defilade, in gullies and draws, and taking very long shots. No buffalo had been seen yet. Hunting for deer, Drouillard therefore stayed much in the bottomlands, where the deer behaved pretty much as deer did anywhere.

  July 11th, Wednesday 1804

  Several hunters Sent out to day on both Sides of the river,

  Seven Deer Killed to day. Drewyer Killd Six of them made

  Some Luner observations this evening.

  William Clark, Journals

  “No damn fair, is it, Reubin?” Joseph Field whined to his brother, looking up from the deer hide he was flensing with his hunting knife in the firelight. He tilted his head toward Drouillard. “This feller’s makin’ us miss out on the fun, cleanin’ all these damn deer hides!” Over by the big bonfire most of the soldiers were stomping, hooting, and capering to the fast, jiggling French tune Cruzatte played on his fiddle. Soldiers were keeping time with clapping, and a couple of voyageurs were making their tambourines sound like rattlesnakes. Captain Lewis’s big dog, excited as always by the men’s dancing, was bounding around in the sand as if he were one of them, and his proud and doting master was roaring with laughter at the sight. Beyond the fire were the straight edges and sloping surfaces of the long, half-faced tents of oiled linen, hung with mosquito-barring gauze, in which the soldiers off guard would sleep in rows when their party was over.

  Drouillard looked up from his own work and saw that the brothers were smiling and glancing at him, joking, not really complaining. They were pretty good hunters themselves, and he had made a big impression on them. Sometimes when they didn’t know he was around, he would hear them talking to the other soldiers about him, building him into a proper legend. Some of the troops had taken to calling him Nimrod. It was a name he vaguely remembered from the whiteman’s religion. Captain Clark eventually had told him that in the Bible, Nimrod was the mightiest hunter of the ancient times.

  “We’ll be glad we got all them hides,” said a man named Shields, sitting nearby. “My army clothes an’ boots ’bout wore out and tore up from all this river rat work. We’ll all of us be wearin’ leather, come winter.”

  “Come winter, give me bear skin, fur side inside,” said Reubin. “You notice how long we been goin’ north and more north since we camped at the Kanzas?”

  Shields, being a skilled gunsmith and tinkerer, spent much time near the captains, repairing things. He eavesdropped, and then talked about what he’d heard of their discussions. He said, “We got another three, four hunnerd miles more north to go. Start runnin’ into Sioux ’bout two hunnerd miles, that’s what ol’ Dorion said.”

  Since he had joined the party, the old trader had talked mostly about Sioux, since that was what he knew most about. His camp boy was part Sioux. Drouillard had tried in vain to talk with the boy, who was strange and dense. Drouillard suspected that one or two of the voyageurs were playing with the boy at night. Maybe that was why Dorion kept him too, but the main thing on the old man’s mind and tongue was the Sioux. His band, the Yanktons, were reasonable and probably would agree to go east. But the ones farther up, the Teton or Burnt Thigh Sioux, were belligerent, and jealous of their control over the trade in British goods from Canada. They were not likely to cooperate, even talk, with the Americans. They might even try to attack and rob them. Over and over Dorion warned them not to count on convincing those Sioux of anything.

  “O’ course,” Shields went on, “ye say somethin’ like that to Cap’n Lewis, he take it as a dare, an’ he means to try, I reckon.”

  Drouillard, still working on hands and knees over the fresh deer hide that he had staked flat on the ground, listened and nodded. Unlike Shields, he kept to himself what he heard from the captains, and he heard much more, because as their interpreter he tented with them. It was true that Lewis had that cocksure idea that all the Sioux would just have to listen to him, and how could they quibble with what the Great Father Jefferson intended for them?

  So here they were anticipating how they would deal with the Sioux already, while so far in all these hundreds of miles up through the plains they had not encountered Kanzas, Ponca, Oto, Missouria, Pawnee, Omaha, any of the tribes they should have met before getting into Sioux country. Since the Kickapoos in May, they had not met one solitary living Indian. It was eerie. Drouillard had seen a few old village sites, and today Captain Clark had caught a stray Indian pony. But from the very old burrs in its mane and tail, it appeared to have been astray a long time. Dorion had said there were hardly any Indians along the Missouri for a long stretch ahead, as most were up the tributaries or out on the plains hunting.

  “Anyway, I want a bear fur coat,” Reubin Field said. He leaned over to sit on one haunch with his elbow supporting him, and said, “Do I hear a bear growlin’?” and blew an imitation bear growl out of his rear end. Then he laughed at his own humor, slapping his knee.

  “Nope, but don’t I hear a hoot-owl?” Shields raised a thigh, squinted one eye, made a noise like a boot being pulled out of mud. He opened both eyes wide and puckered his mouth and said, “Oop! ’Scuse me …” He got up gingerly, bent forward and hurried out of the firelight down to the river. The Field brothers watched him go, then burst out laughing, hitting each other on the shoulders. Reubin, gasping between guffaws, finally managed to say, “Guess ol’ Shields jes’ remembered to do his laundry!”

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nbsp; Drouillard shook his head and grinned. What a people! To his surprise, he sometimes had a good time among these whitemen.

  Drouillard, sleeping out, was awakened by intense, angry voices. A quick look at the low place of the moon and the burned-down campfire embers told him it was far past midnight. The voices were coming closer, from down by the river. He started to rise, and others were stirring around him. Over by the tents Captain Lewis’s dog barked. Someone nearby whispered, “What is it? Indians?” Under a glory of stars, Drouillard was up on one knee on his blanket with his rifle in hand and his thumb ready to cock the flintlock. He heard footsteps coming heavily through the sand, two people walking hard, cutting straight through camp from the boat mooring toward the captains’ tent. Several people were stuttering and mumbling about Indians.

  Then one of the walkers, Sergeant Ordway, said loudly, “Hush, boys. No, it’s not Indians. Damn good thing it ain’t, by God, this son of a bitch asleep on guard!”

  “I wasn’t sleepin’!” the other voice said, almost whining.

  “Devil ye weren’t!” Ordway’s voice growled as they went on toward the tents. “Think I don’t know snorin’? Y’re a dead man, Willard.…”

  “Ooooh damn,” someone said in the dark nearby. “Poor Willard!”

  And Collins’s voice, familiar by now to everyone, said, “Thank God, somebody but me catchin’ hell for a change!”

  Willard’s trial was scheduled for eleven o’clock. Sleeping on sentinel duty was punishable by death, so the captains had to try him, instead of his enlisted peers.

  Because of the trial, the fatigue of the boat crews, and the need to take some sky measurement, the captains decided to keep the camp here another day. The camp was on an island opposite the mouth of a little river that Dorion called the Nemahaw. Captain Clark took Drouillard and four other men to explore a few miles up that stream, and Drouillard soon became aware that this was another mound-hill place of the ancestors. He could hear their songs in the blowing grass, and in a sandstone cliff there were carved animals and what appeared to be a boat. Drouillard got away from the others for a brief time, lit his pipe with a magnifying glass and smoked to the Old Ones, standing atop the highest mound. He felt the spirits tingling through his feet. He was thankful that being among so many whitemen had not entirely dulled him to the subtle messages of the ancestors.