Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Everyone works for the whitemen, he thought. Then they get everything.

  Sometimes when he was thinking these things he would shiver, and it might have been from wading and reaching in the icy water to set traps, but sometimes it seemed to be from thinking about how the whitemen did things. He remembered how they used words not to make you understand, but to keep you from understanding. Like contracts. Somehow by contract he was obligated to Manuel Lisa these three years; half that time was gone. He would probably finish that time, rather than disappear. He remembered what had happened to Bissonnette, who chose to walk away too soon.

  Still, it was a pleasure of times to think of just vanishing. As long as he knew he could do that, he felt like a free man. He was no soldier. Or slave.

  The cold wind down off the mountain rushed around his ears, wind keeping everything in motion: the shivering ripples on the beaver pond, the swift little clouds, the bending grass, reeds, bushes, the aspen leaves shivering beyond the meadow, the stray ends of his own long hair whipping about his face.

  He loved wind; it was the Spirit Voice and it was freedom. The wind was his friend when he was the hunter; it hid his movements and masked his sounds and helped him keep his scent from his prey, and it spooked their instincts. But when he was the hunted, the wind was his enemy; in all those same ways, it helped those who hunted him. Those who might hunt him were Blackfeet. If they found him, he would try to talk to them before they tried to kill him. His hope was that if any found him, they would be few enough that they would be hesitant to attack. If they hesitated, he could start to sign to them. It would be best if it were just one warrior. But that probably wouldn’t happen.

  Now he was bending to cock the beaver trap underwater on the silty bottom, pressing the resistant steel, cocking it underwater to leave no hand scent on it; he was knee deep and elbow deep in clear icy water, tensed against the dangerous, bending steel, when through the rushing wind he heard screams, faint as birdcalls. A rapid sputter of gunshots, down by the river willow thickets. Down where he had left his two hunters. Then, nothing.

  That was not just the two hunters shooting deer, or elk, or even fighting a bear. Too many shots.

  He feared the Blackfeet must have caught them. If so, the warriors knew he was nearby. He, the trapper, was in a trap.

  But it had not yet closed on him. He had slipped out of traps before. First he had to be invisible. Then get to his rifle. Then to his horse. Still stooping, he left the trap on the bottom and waded without splashing into the cattails. Then he crawled like a snake up the bank and through the gnawed sapling stumps and lifted his rifle from where he had hidden it in the fork of a serviceberry bush. Cupping his hand against the wind, he flipped up the frizzen to check the priming powder, shut it, leaving the gun at half-cock. Peering in every direction, he skirted the shore of the pond, running in a crouch through the windblown meadow grass toward the distant willows that waved silvery in the wind down by the river. The grass rippling everywhere helped him move through it unseen, and the wind whispering in it helped him move unheard.

  The shots and cries had ended so quickly he was sure his two hunters must have been caught in the open. There was no continuing fight going on down there. It wouldn’t have been easy to catch those two foxlike Delawares off guard, but it must have happened, judging by what he had heard.

  With this wind, no one down at the fort would have heard the shooting, probably. No help from there.

  He moved as swiftly in a crouch as most men could run upright, and soon reached the edge of the willow brake where he had concealed his horse.

  Going in, he had to face the possibility that the Blackfeet might already have his horse. If they’d stalked his hunters, they surely had stalked him too.

  The chilly wind flowing down from the mountains smelled of the snow still on the heights. He paused to sniff for gunpowder, sweat, smoky leather, bear oil, any trace in the air of warriors nearby. His nose was one reason why he had become a legend among hunters. But beaver trapping had ruined his nose: weeks living besieged in a fort with unbathed whitemen, tobacco smoke, beaver musk bait. That awful, pungent gland odor especially clung dense on hands and in clothes and was always in his nostrils, overpowering any other scent. By itself it was almost too much even for the beavers and had to be mixed with spices or mint to make it interesting to them.

  He told himself to stop thinking about other things. Too much thinking distracted a hunter from his senses. It was the same for prey.

  Now his mare muttered in her throat among the willows, smelling his approach, greeting him. As he moved closer, her shape emerged gray and shadowy amidst the blind of waving willow slips. He paused in a crouch next to a root clump for a moment, in his most invisible state, his eyes and ears and hunter sense penetrating the thicket all around, knowing that if the warriors had tracked his mare and found her, they were now waiting here around her like trap-jaws around bait for him to return. Pale willow leaves blew aside and he saw her eye, looking at him only, unafraid, knowing him. Her eye would tell him if they were close. Chickadees flitted to perch on one willow slip, then another, and their unconcern was another sign that he was not surrounded. His wet deer-hide leggings and moccasins and sleeves were frigid in the wind, but his blood was hot in his taut veins and he didn’t shiver.

  Still no more sounds from below. If his Delawares had indeed been killed, there was not a friend alive within the sound of gunfire, not with this wind. Eighty men, who came two thousand miles up the Missouri to get rich by trapping beaver, were afraid to step out of their fort because of the Blackfeet, so he should expect no help. Maybe they would come to help if they had heard the shooting, but probably not. These were not the same kind of whitemen as Lewis’s soldiers.

  Don’t think Lewis! He tried not to think that name. It was bad. He was prey now, and what happened would need all his quickest strength and instinct. It seemed as if the name of that man was trying to force itself into his mind and befuddle him.

  He slipped close to the mare and stroked her throatlatch, his customary greeting. She nudged his flank with her nose. He hung his rifle by its sling on the horn of the saddle and reached back to untie the heavy hank of beaver traps behind the saddle, a dozen of them hanging by their chains. He couldn’t risk their clink and rattle as he made his way out of here. He eased them into a depression by a root clump and with the edge of his foot nudged sand and twigs over to cover them. They were valuable, and he might live to come back up here and retrieve them later, if the Blackfeet didn’t find them.

  Or if they didn’t find him.

  Now he unhitched the rein from the willow and stood beside the mare for a moment, listening all around and watching her ears and letting her smell the breeze for him.

  She was sensing something out there in the open now, upwind, upslope. Her nostrils flared and her ears aimed at the sunny meadowland up there. Something, maybe only elk or deer or grizzly. Or Blackfeet war ponies.

  So he turned her head and led her downwind through the willow brake toward the river, footfalls and hoofsteps sometimes grating gravel, sometimes muffled by sand, sometimes crackling in dry flood litter. Shadows danced wildly all over the ground.

  If he was surrounded, the river was his only way to escape down to the fort. A race down the riverbank. Or, if it came to that, the river itself. Colter had escaped by diving into the Madison River that one time and hiding under driftwood. One could become a fish when necessary.

  Leading the mare through the thick willows, he took one of his pistols out of his belt sash, cocked it, carried it muzzle up, at his right shoulder. It would be easier to use in this close brush than the long rifle.

  Ahead now the Jefferson River glittered with sun sparks through the willows. He thought the name Jefferson and remembered when Captain Lewis gave this river that name. Great Father Jefferson. And Drouillard remembered that Lewis had also named a river after him: the Drewyer River.

  He also remembered he had had a premonition, the f
irst time here.

  Soon he would have to move out into the open. Both good and bad. He couldn’t be invisible out there, not with a horse. Lorimier used to joke that three things are impossible to hide: love, smoke, and a man on a horse.

  Stop thinking words!

  He couldn’t be invisible out there, but the Blackfeet couldn’t either, and their bows and arrows, even their muskets, had but a fraction of the range of his rifle. On the plains with Captain Lewis he had killed deer and antelope so distant they looked the size of mice. This rifle.

  Lewis! His heart clenched when that name came in again. One in danger of death must not think the names of the dead!

  Drouillard was sure Lewis was dead. Months ago in a dream too strong to doubt, he had seen Lewis slashing himself like the grey-haired woman of the other dreams.

  Stop thinking the name!

  No more willows now. Sand, shingle, and succulent spring grass spread wide before him on the inner bend of the fast, shallow Jefferson. He squinted to scan the open country for Indians, or sign of them, saw nothing, and sighted down the long bottomland meadows in the mountain-ringed basin, meadows open as a racecourse. At full gallop he could be halfway to the stockade by the time any Blackfeet saw him. Unless they were down there between him and the fort. He yearned to feel the saddle under him, the mare pounding swiftly along, out of this place that felt so like a trap.

  Not that he’d seen a single warrior yet, even a trace of one. No, but there was that gunfire. And his instinct was tingling now. He felt them nearby. So did the mare.

  Ravens were descending on a slip of beach under the riverbank about a mile below, and they drew his eye to something lying there that had not been there when he had come up this morning. Something too indistinct to identify but must be a carcass or carcasses. Something the hunters had killed, perhaps, but more likely the hunters themselves. Between him and the fort. It might be better to swim across the river here and then ride fast down the other bank. Run from Indians to goddamn whitemen! He hated himself for that thought. Then he regretted that he had thought in profanity. In his mother’s language there were no profane words. Lewd ones, yes, but no words for dishonoring Weshemoneto, or God by any other name.

  Eh bien. Language. It was language that the officers had hired him for. They might have made it out or back without his hunting skills, but not without his talking hands.

  Drouillard the great talker, he told to himself, changed this world by being able to talk between peoples who had never seen each other before. What have I done? Talk is a way to peace and trust, but it opens the way for distrust and trouble. His own father had been an interpreter between peoples, and in trouble most of his life because of it. The Drouillards, the Talkers-Between.

  He knew he should be running now, but he was here thinking about talking.

  It was said of the Shawnees that, although warlike, they had been famed as peacemakers, because they went far and talked between others.

  I could talk the Blackfeet into peace, he thought. We could all prosper up here. There never was a place like this for furs.

  He stood in the wind at the edge of the willows with his nervous mare, thinking, instead of running as he knew he should do. He uncocked the flintlock pistol and slipped it back into the sash at his waist, gently biting the inside of his lip between two eye-teeth and thinking that he alone, the Talker-Between, still might undo the harm Lewis did back then, and Colter had done since. He had never had a chance to be a warrior, but where had there ever been a more important Talker-Between?

  Come down, just one of you, with your eyes and heart open, he prayed. Come down, and we’ll talk, not kill!

  This was why he had insisted on coming out of the fort. Not just to trap beaver, but to make a chance to talk. It had been there all along, under his intentions. It was why he was lingering here when he should be crossing the river or racing down to the fort. It was a possibility as bright as the sunlight sweeping down the slope between the running cloud-shadows.

  Did not his people say Creator puts you where you are needed?

  The mare nickered, looking upwind. He looked up.

  There they were. Blackfeet horsemen. They had not just chanced upon him; they were closing around, curving from beyond the willows and down across the meadow toward the river, all eyes upon him. They were in a file, on handsome horses: colorful riders, with lances, shields, feathered coup sticks held high, trotting their horses down to shut off that wide way he had intended for his flight. By now he would have been through there and gone, had he not stood here thinking words and names and memories and ideas. For a moment after his first sight of them, it seemed hard to get enough breath.

  He soothed the nervous mare with a caress on her strong, arched, tensed gray neck.

  So. I am here and the Master of Life gives me a chance to talk with the Blackfeet and turn their hearts around, as I thought.

  He prayed: See it thus in your eyes, Weshemoneto, so that it will be. For what you see is what comes to be.

  He was sorry they had found the two hunters first, because if the warriors had indeed killed already, they would want to keep killing, rather than start talking.

  The horsemen reined in and paused at a distance, confident they had him in a trap, but respectful of his long rifle. They might even know who he was. If they could see at this distance that he was Indian, they would know him as the Indian who talks for the whitemen and shoots far. They usually knew more than one expected them to.

  He took a long breath and let it out. He thought of praying the Black Robe prayer too, just in case they were right about God, but had long ago forgotten those words. He stepped forward, leaving his rifle on the saddle, his pistols in his sash. He draped the rein over his shoulder so he could use both hands but still grab it if he had to. The warriors were still in hesitation out there, probably mystified that he was neither running nor reaching for a weapon. He counted about twenty of them. It appeared that only about four had firearms. He knew there was a chance that among their guns there might be his hunters’ good long rifles. If it came to a fight, that could diminish the advantage he had with range. But even if they had the rifles, they probably wouldn’t know rifles had to be loaded with a patch, and still wouldn’t achieve the range he could.

  But he prayed that this would be talking, not fighting. He was sorry they were so many. The fewer, the more likely to talk.

  He raised his right hand, open palm toward them. Then touched his chest with his fingertips, extended the hand toward them, then back to his chest, then scooped his upturned right palm from his mouth toward them, the invitation to talk.

  On the wind he heard someone laugh. But they looked to a rider near the middle of their line, a man wearing a tunic with a quillwork circle on the breast and a buffalo poll headdress with polished horns. That one sat his horse resting the butt of a gun on his thigh. So Drouillard held his gaze on that man, who probably was their chieftain, and repeated the gestures inviting talk.

  It would be too much to hope that he had already won his chance to parley. But their continued hesitation seemed to mean interest.

  The chieftain with the slightest motion urged his spotted horse forward a few steps, stopped, looked about, rode forward a few more steps. And the others moved closer.

  Drouillard’s mouth was dry. He ran his tongue between his lips, made the signs again. Everywhere the grass and willows whipped and swayed in the wind, crisp waves raced on the shining river. This was that pure, bright wind in which, he had been taught, the Creator speaks to us. The fringes of his tunic and his breechclout blew and swayed in the wind, and the feathers on the warriors’ lances and bows and coup sticks, and in their hair braids and bonnets and their ponies’ bridles and manes, twirled and fluttered. All those feathers were for brave deeds, he knew, given by their tribe. Drouillard was pitifully conscious that he had not a feather on him for them to see. They could see that he was indeed Without Eagle Feathers. Not to be feared.

  This wind was t
he Creator’s whisper. Maybe these warriors were listening to hear what it said. But they were still wary and severe in their postures. Some had nocked arrows, but it was still much too far a range for those.

  So Drouillard made the sweeping, upward-spiraling signs to say, as if this were already a council, The Master of Life has put us together here. To say this to any people meant that the Master of Life had brought them together for his own purpose, not their own. It was a call for faith and trust. Making these signs, he hoped to see them ease down their weapons and dismount and come walking on foot, in peace.

  A shadow raced along the sunlit ground, toward him and then over him, and down the wind shrilled an eagle’s cry, a whistle from the sky. He went cold inside.

  Eh bien. C’est ça. The eagle had told him what the Creator’s purpose was. Even before the declining note of the eagle’s cry faded in the wind, an arrow came from just where he had been in the willow thicket, whispered over his shoulder and with the sound of a fist pounded into a palm, it stuck halfway up its shaft in the hard flesh of his mare’s neck.

  Drouillard grabbed the rein with the quick strength of his left hand before she could rear or bolt away. He drew a pistol from his waist, cocked it, and shot the bowman in the head as he drew back another arrow. He heard the riders whoop. They were dancing their horses, readying their weapons, no doubt meaning to charge him before he could reload. He swung around, reached up and pulled his rifle from the saddle and ducked around to place the mare between himself and the warriors. A puff of gun smoke appeared, a musket banged, and a ball whacked the saddle and spun off with a burring sound, its force staggering the mare. The whole line of warriors was starting toward him now, from about two hundred yards away.

  He dropped the rein and stood on it, raised his rifle to sight on the quillwork target on the chieftain’s breast. He knew now that he should have known the Creator’s purpose for him here, from that premonition five years ago: to die. This was to finish the voyage that had begun seven years ago in old French Fort Massac above the Ohio River, the day he met that man Lewis and, false to his own heart, began serving the conquerors of his own people, in return for dollars.