Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Drouillard thought on that, smiling. A foreknowing, by dream or vision. Then learning that it will be so. Then it is so. It was a thing that often happened, that way. Whitemen called it superstition.

  It also seemed to mean that some Nez Perce already had guns, new guns. Perhaps that was why the chief called Broken Arm had gone to the southwest to war on the Paiutes. Drouillard said: “What else did the old woman tell her, of such interest?”

  They talked, and then Charbonneau turned to him, eyes bugging wide. “Some Nez Perce considered that they should kill us, that the whitemen are a bad thing coming. That we were so weak they could kill us and take the good guns. But that old woman told them no, whitemen are kind, they treated me well, do not harm them. And so, they chose to be friends. The old woman told my wife, fear not, they have promised me. Eh, mon Dieu!” Charbonneau pursed his lips and slapped his cheeks with both hands. “I am having almost too much excitement! Wheeu!”

  Only now that it was time to leave these Chopunnish Nez Perce towns and head downstream did the soldiers start feeling well enough to be intrigued and stirred by the young women, who were uncommonly lovely.

  These women were friendly and generous, but seemed to have no desire for connection with the whitemen, for either social or spiritual reasons. Perhaps the wretched soldiers coming down out of the mountains had been too pitiful and filthy to seem attractive at all. Only Clark, with his beacon of red hair and his solidity, dignity, and healing hands, had a strong female following. But he was too busy running the whole show to have time for dalliance.

  Chapter 18

  On the Kooskooskee River

  October 1805

  They had labored for almost two years to get to the top of the continent, always thinking how easy it would be to coast down the western side to the ocean. But the troubles started at once, and there was an omen that put a darkness upon Drouillard’s spirit. It was an omen tied to remembered dreams.

  Both captains were still sick, but Clark was functioning. A fifth canoe was made, a small pilot vessel. These rivers were clear and swift. Twisted Hair and another chief named Tetohoskee had agreed to ride down in the canoes and help the whitemen make friendships with other tribes. But the two chiefs did not arrive when it was time to shove the canoes off. And some Nez Perce, among those gathered around for the excitement of the departure, stole some tomahawks. One had been Sergeant Floyd’s, and another was an elegant pipe-tomahawk Clark considered his good luck piece. Drouillard hand-talked, saying it was a spirit thing of the captain. Soon it reappeared, with no one having to take blame. Then the little hewn-log fleet set out.

  There were tricks to be learned about going downstream in fast water. The expedition was in the third of many rocky rapids under a cloudy sky when the little pilot canoe, with Captain Clark riding in it, struck a rock just hard enough to make a long crack along the grain, and water began leaking in. That was patched with tin and pitch at the evening camp.

  The river twisted fast down through rocky, piney lands. The next day, the canoes raced through a dozen stretches of roaring rapids, passing islands occupied by salmon fishing camps. Thus the banks were often crowded with Indian spectators as the education of the fast-water boatmen continued. At one of the camps they were greeted by the smiling Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee, and after a smoking ceremony the chiefs were taken aboard. At another camp the officers bought some fresh salmon and roots. Captain Lewis was not fully recovered and thought red meat would help him, but because there was no time for hunting, he took the notion that dog meat might serve, and two dogs were purchased and killed.

  It was Sergeant Gass, steering a long canoe that carried most of the nonswimmers, who had the first of many wrecks. His vessel struck a rock in the middle of the rapid, swung around and hit another. Strain cracked the hull and water poured in. The men hung on, with cold water roaring over and around them until they were rescued by the crew of another canoe, with the help of two Indian fishermen in a small dugout. A tomahawk and several light articles were swept away and lost.

  Sergeant Gass personally took the responsibility for repairing the vessel he had wrecked, and no one else could have done it as well. He found a few pieces of driftwood and shaved them down to make knee-braces that spanned the cracks, set them in place with handmade wooden pins, and then caulked the repair with pine resin, and the vessel was stronger than ever.

  The excitement of the whitewater was lifting the spirits of most of the soldiers, while terrifying a few. In camp that evening it was finally noticed that Toby the Shoshone guide was gone. Someone who had been collecting resin remembered having seen him running back up the riverbank with his bow and quiver and blanket roll, right after the boat wreck. Apparently this was all a little too thrilling for him. The captains asked Twisted Hair if he might send someone to bring Toby back so that he could be paid the goods he had been promised for his guide services. But the old chief advised against it. He said that a little old Shoshone man passing through many camps with valuables would have nothing left anyway.

  Drouillard hung back from the campfires, a cold anger eating in him as he stared at Captain Lewis. The captain was up and about now, still weak, ravenously chewing roasted dog meat and exclaiming how good it was. Even better than a coyote they had killed and eaten the last day in the mountains. There were many Indians around the camp, watching the soldiers with great curiosity, and sentinels had been placed around the wet baggage to ensure that Indians took nothing. Captain Clark was shaking his head, telling Lewis that he still couldn’t bring himself to eat a dog. Pierre Cruzatte had left the fireside to fetch his fiddle.

  As he brought it back in its battered, scuffed carrying case, he paused and said to Drouillard: “Pourquoi la colère, ami?”

  Cruzatte had Indian blood, and Drouillard wondered if he felt this anger. He tilted his head toward Lewis. “Him.”

  “Le capitaine? What?”

  “If he gave the least damn for an Indian, he’d have got on his knees and kissed Toby’s hand as soon as the old man had brought him through the mountains. You know why Toby came down this river, farther and farther every day from his home? Probably because he was waiting for the captain to remember to pay him what he promised.”

  “Peut-être.” Cruzatte nodded. “He should have asked.”

  “Eh, so? He should have to remind a man he saved his life? All these lives? The whole Jefferson mission? All you hear from the cap’n is how he triumphed over those mountains!”

  “Hm. Mmm.” Cruzatte nodded, thinking. “Eh bien. Maybe some music from my wondrous feedle will brighten your spirit, eh, mon sauvage?”

  “Heh! Never mind my spirit. I’m just a damned Indian. Play for the captain. His stomach hurts.”

  Surely there had never been a sound anything like this fiddle here in this rough valley where the mountain waters rushed headlong toward the western sea. It squeaked and squawked and groaned and whined, faster and faster. At first the Indian fishermen and their women and children winced and put their hands over their ears. The fiddler himself must have looked like some sort of one-eyed demon, hopping, stamping one foot, his tongue lolling out of one corner of his mouth then the other, concentrating on the clublike thing he held tucked under his chin and the whiplike thing in his right hand with which he tortured it, making it scream and whine.

  And the noisemaking demon seemed to be casting a spell on all these other Hairy-Faces; they stamped and whirled, grabbed each other’s hands and arms as if fighting, and swung each other around. And among them was another demon, huge and black, leaping and stomping and wriggling in some kind of ecstatic spell, while everyone whooped and clapped hands. It was not long before some of the Indian men and women began whooping and trilling in the margins of the firelight, and then one, and two and three, hopped in among the hairy-faced dancers and began twirling and hopping with them.

  Drouillard was used to this, and was usually glad to hear the whitemen’s laughter. But tonight he was affected in a different way. He was
angry and was troubled deep inside, felt himself pulling away from these men. This music and dancing, which he usually knew as just a frolic to reward the soldier-slaves for their courage and labor, now looked to him like a manic ceremony; men were laughing while a merciless force thrust through the delicate balance of the Sacred Circle. He was not of those men now; they seemed strangers. He was one with the fishermen who had been here taking salmon from the pure water for generations; he was one with the root-diggers and the buffalo-chasers, and he was also one with man’s brother the bear, and with the ground-snuffling buffalo, and with the eagle in the treetop, and with the eagle’s eye at the edge of a cloud looking down on a vast circle of horizon. It was at this moment that a woman began singing, and came out from the shadows into the center of the firelight.

  She was a striking, square-jawed woman with intense eyes and long, loose-flowing gray hair, an erect, spare, but broad-shouldered figure. He had seen her come into the camp before sunset with a fisherman who was probably her husband. She had come carrying a large basket of quamash roots, while he brought dried salmon. She wore an ankle-length dress of fringed elk hide, almost white in color, ornamented with dangles of brass and some pearly kind of shell. The dress had long sleeves, open under the arms so the arms could be bared by slipping them out of the sleeves, which were then thrown back to hang behind the shoulders. Now this woman came out with arms bared, revealing many brass bracelets.

  This woman emerged into the firelight, her eyelids quivering and blinking, eyes rolled far up as if looking into her own skull. Her mouth drooped open, emitting a tremulous Indian song of terrible poignancy, beginning high in her nose and descending to a low, bass groan, then suddenly starting again at the top and descending again. She carried her big basket of roots before her. Suddenly the whole camp was aware of her.

  Her song was so powerful and heart-wrenching that it made Cruzatte come out of his fiddling trance and lift the bow off the strings to look at her. The dancers stopped, to stand gaping.

  Her song seemed to be coming not from her throat but up through her from the ground. Drouillard felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. On the far side of the fire Bird Woman and her baby were motionless, staring at the singing woman. This was the oldest of all songs.

  The singing woman began offering the quamash roots to everyone around the fire, the standing dancers and the sitting spectators. No one reached into the basket; they drew back instead of reaching, as if afraid of her. She held the basket against her belly with her left hand and held handfuls of roots out to them with her right. A few men gingerly held out their hands and took them. When others drew back, she just tossed the handfuls at them, still singing. Her face was glistening with tears, her eyes still rolled up, yet she seemed to see. When her basket was empty she dropped it on the ground and began shaking the bracelets on her forearms; they clinked and rattled. She kept moving around the circle with a shuffling step like a dance, slipping the bracelets off over her hands and offering them. Her song was not of words, but Drouillard thought that she was asking them all to take everything she owned, pleading with the whitemen to take the gifts and go away.

  Captain Lewis was watching her intently.

  Some of the soldiers reached and accepted the bracelets she was offering, but some hung back as if afraid to take them. She tossed them into their laps. Then she came to Captain Lewis. He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. His refusal caused her song to become more shrill, a sound of agony and fury, and suddenly with a shriek she spun and threw the rest of the bracelets into the fire. She darted to her husband and said something to him, and he put something into her hand. On the far side of the fire Chief Twisted Hair was trying to say something in sign talk to the captains. The woman moved back into the firelight.

  Soon she was standing in front of Captain Lewis. Her song changed; it was still that achingly plaintive fall of notes, but with a sob at each note of descent. Her teeth were fiercely bared. With a flint in her right hand she began hacking at her left arm, then at the right with the left, and a murmur of shock went up around the crowd as blood began streaming down both arms. Drouillard had seen this in dreams. The woman stopped singing. She ran her right hand up her left arm, scooping blood into her palm, and then she drank and licked the blood from her palm. She did the same with her left hand; her mouth and chin were red with blood. The amount pouring from her wounds was astounding. It gushed from the cuts faster than she could scoop and drink it, and her dress was soon spattered and smeared with it like a butcher’s apron. Though her eyes looked inward, her power pressed on Lewis.

  Everyone seemed immobilized. The captains were frozen in place. Lewis was flinching and seemed to be bracing himself. Meanwhile, the Nez Perce chiefs were just looking on with resigned, saddened faces, as was the woman’s husband, as was Bird Woman. Only the captain’s dog moved; he whimpered suddenly, leaped up and slunk away into the darkness with his tail between his legs.

  The woman stood like a fountain of blood in the center of the camp for a long time, or it seemed a long time, singing her song again, which suddenly ended with a groaning whimper as she pitched forward on the bloodsoaked ground. All the whitemen were still too spellbound to move, but women emerged from the shadows and hovered around her. They cleaned her wounds and face with cold water from a pot, and when she came out of her trance, they helped her stand and escorted her away. The only sounds were the rushing of water over rock and the whiffling and cracking of the fire burning in the wind. Then men began talking, in querulous, hesitant voices. Cruzatte put his fiddle away. The captains tried to talk to Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee by sign, but they seemed not to understand, so Drouillard decided this was a good time to vanish.

  As he edged away, Sergeant Ordway put a hand on his sleeve and asked: “She had a fit, eh?”

  He put the sergeant’s hand off. He was not going to say anything about the Ancient Ones coming, or about the omen directed at Lewis. He said, “Looked like a fit, didn’t it?” and vanished before Ordway could ask why she hadn’t bled to death.

  October 9th 1805

  a woman faind madness &c. &c. Singular acts of this woman in giveing in Small potions all She had & if they were not received She would Scarrify her Self in a horid manner &c. Capt Lewis recovring fast.

  William Clark, Journals

  Captain Lewis was getting over the digestive problems that had nearly killed him, but there was a darkness growing in his spirit, or so it seemed to Drouillard, who was now watching for it.

  Lewis’s forward force, always intense but methodical, now was heedless, like a boulder rolling down a hill. He was impatient to get to the coast and he seemed to aim straight down the rivers instead of studying everything along the way as he always had before.

  Lewis remarked from time to time that dog meat had cured his bowels and that it was the most nourishing and strengthening flesh he had ever consumed. So now in their rush down the rivers toward the Columbia, whenever he stopped to barter for food from the Indians, he tried to buy dogs.

  Captain Clark would eat the salmon and roots they bought, but not dog. He would snap his fingers and call, “Here, Seaman! I’ll protect you. I see how he’s lookin’ at you and licking his lips!”

  Drouillard noticed that Lewis’s pet had been growing more detached from his master since that evening when the dog had slunk away from the woman’s spirit power, and he did seem to stay closer to Captain Clark now. Clark was the only person who didn’t eat dog. The rest of the soldiers, hungry for the flesh of Four-Leggeds, had gotten used to dog and welcomed it as a relief from fish and roots. Drouillard himself found it acceptable.

  The river called Kooskooskie had run into the one called Snake. The chiefs said this one would flow into the great river itself, soon. That would be the long-sought Columbia. Captain Clark elected to rename the Snake, calling it Lewis’s River. And one day, passing a fast, clear river that poured in from the north bank, the captains decided to name it after Drouillard, in honor of
his many services. Captain Clark wrote on his map: Drewyer’s R.

  There was almost no game along this densely populated route. And wood for fires was as scarce as the game. No wood grew on the hills and plateaus near the river, only on lightly timbered hills seen at great distances from the rivers. It was as if the corps were floating down into a desert. The only wood anywhere was driftwood from the rivers, and the Indians apparently scoured the riverbanks for it, making lodges and fish-drying racks out of straight pieces, stacking the rest up on scaffolds to dry for fuel. It became necessary to barter or beg for wood as well as food, which worsened Lewis’s state of mind because it diminished his store of trinkets and trade goods faster than he had planned. Sometimes the riverside Indians helped the soldiers at boat wrecks, and if the captains didn’t offer to pay them, they would help themselves to whatever lay unguarded. Lewis’s mood was as grim as the craggy dark basaltic cliffs of the canyon: Indians were supposed to be obedient children. And gullible too, Drouillard thought.

  He wondered if Lewis’s dark anxiety was part of what the woman with bloody arms had been warning about.

  There were many rapids where good sense would have called for unloading the cargoes and carrying them around, letting the lightened canoes skim the swift water to pass through. But Captain Lewis was desperate about the lateness of the season and did not want to be delayed. On the cold morning of October 14 the vessels approached a long rapid that the Nez Perce chiefs had warned was bad, but Captain Lewis went into it in the little scouting canoe, with Cruzatte in the bow as his pilot. Then one of the four long, heavily laden vessels dipped into the head of the rapid and safely headed into the chute, but the last three boats ground to a halt, lodged on rock, and had to be worked off at great risk in the roaring current. Drouillard was steering the last one, and got it free only by leaping out, standing on the rocky bottom and lifting the stern, then flinging himself back aboard the moment the vessel was free. Then for three miles he steered with all his strength and skill as the heavy, cumbersome vessel slid, plunged, and bucked through three miles of roaring sluiceway. The subchief Tetohoskee rode in the bow, waving left or right as signals for him to steer by. Tetohoskee was added weight in the bow. That worried Drouillard. Often he heard the hull grate and bump rocks, the men whooping in alarm each time, flailing ineffectually with their paddles or fending the canoe off rocks with their hands. At last all the canoes were safe below that long watery gauntlet, and the party put ashore shaky and giddy for rest and food. Tetohoskee decided he would stay with Drouillard’s canoe.