“Many Lights—“
I tense and jump, though the softness of the freeze-blanketed surface hampers my liftoff. I manage to get both myself and North Wind to the other side of the mound. We seem to be clear of the horses and the hunters now, or at least we should be. Yet I still hear a horse close by, which seems strange, because they were behind us when —
Oh. I see what North Wind Comes was trying to warn me about. There is another horse. In front of us.
On top, there sits another young man with long black hair like North Wind, but more colors painted on his face and more feathers in his hair. And not too much buffalo cousin wrapped around his body. He’s showing lots of bare mammal skin. As if he enjoys the cold. Or perhaps is challenging it.
We’ve been driven right to him. Trapped.
Bad Cacklaw move for me.
The ice under my feet continues to crack. Like glass. Like frail lenses.
Always riding out
Never coming home
The trail takes me far
Blood and honor
dancing
The man on the horse is singing a song as he slowly takes out a bow of his own.
“Crow’s Eye,” my shaman friend says. “Crow’s Eye has found us.”
Crow’s Eye notches a jabberstick and is about to shoot one now. From this distance, he won’t miss.
I am too young for this to happen. Who will there be to report the findings about slow pox and plasmechanics?
Crow’s Eye pulls the bow, and the ground below us starts to roar. And opens up.
Chapter Eight
Eli: Journals
June 1804
June 8th: A jentle brease proves a welcome companyun on the second month of our great journey…
Error. Suggest: “gentle.” Error. Suggest: “grease” or “breeze.”
Error. Suggest: “company,” “companion,” or “comparison.” Suggest: Use Language Options Menu if attempting to write in a language other than English.
…much of which I have undertook in a canoo, these past weeks…
Error. Suggest “can you,” “can do,” or “cannolli.”
It’s no use. I may have to write on actual paper. I’m amazed to still have a vidpad at all. It was rolled up and stuffed deep in my pocket and stayed with me all the way from my tumble out of Clyne’s ship, through the Fifth Dimension, and back to Earth. It recharges with the sunlight, so I can use it during the day when no one’s looking.
But even with power, it doesn’t seem to be working right
Suggest: Maintain spell check function.
It’s like the vidpad is refusing to do what I ask. It’s designed to handle being stuffed in a pocket, but maybe not if that pocket keeps going through different dimensions and times. I mean, now it won’t even let me override the spell check. Which out here will be a real problem.
Everyone is keeping a journal: Clark, Lewis, and a few other men, like Patrick Gass. Gassy has been showing me some of his writing: We should be respeckted…
Suggest: respected.
…if we return. For we have been both brave & foolish, and will have many tales to tell.
They all want to tell their tales, record their own histories. Who can blame them? With no vidnews, no Comnet how is anybody else supposed to know what they’re doing? Or what they’ve done, after it’s over? How will anyone find out?
Only problem is, none of them can spell really well. I don’t know for sure if spelling has been invented yet, but I’m trying to write down some of their versions of words so I can remember them when we return.
If we return. Like Gassy says.
Canoo [Also suggest: “cannot”] came from Lewis, and Clark wrote speshul [Suggest: “specious”] for special, and there are tons more like that, including all the versions of words Gassy is coming up with.
If I ever find myself in school again, I’m going to mention these guys whenever a teacher gets upset about how I do on a spelling test.
But school — and everything else I know, even the Danger Boy stuff — seems a long way off now. I’m not even sure how much time has passed in my world, my real world, my home. I don’t know how my father is. Or whether he managed to locate my mom.
Actually, I’m growing less and less sure about which world, which time, really is my own, anyway.
In this world, we’ve been gone, out in the then-unknown, a couple of weeks. We’re into June, and it’s summer everywhere out here in the country.
What am I saying? It’s all “out here in the country.” Even what I saw of St. Louis was more like a mid-sized town at most and not what we think of as a city. The country isn’t “out” there. It’s everywhere around us. On both sides of the river.
And the river itself.
I go back and forth between riding in the keelboat and riding in the canoe with Gassy or Kentuck. Sometimes, I walk along shore with Lewis and his dog, Seaman. We’ve seen amazing sights: tall, waving grasses; endless hills; flowers that I don’t recognize, sprouting up all over; and a nearly impossible number of animals. It’s hard to believe this many animals ever existed outside a zoo. I’ve seen elk grazing by the shore, fish jumping out of the water, a bobcat mom and her cubs looking for food, deer eating berries and leaves, and even a pair of foxes that stood and looked at us before scooting away.
Like maybe humans weren’t something they see every day. Or have to be afraid of yet.
Seaman keeps barking all the time, so maybe we’d see even more animals if he didn’t scare them.
The sky is filled with birds. Filled with them. One time, I thought we were having an eclipse. “Pigeons,” York told me. “Make good pies, if you catch ‘em. And God made so many, people can be eatin’ those pies from here to Judgment Day, and the sky is still gonna be full of those birds.”
He was talking about passenger pigeons. I know about those. I remember them from when I was in school. They don’t exist anymore. That last one died over a hundred years before I was born.
There is so much… nature out here, that it feels more like a Comnet game than anything else. It’s as fantastic, really, as anything in Barnstormers.
Which is good, because since there is no Comnet, my vidpad is useless for any kind of gaming. But I’m getting ideas for new characters: “The Buffaloner”— half man, half buffalo, all loner. A cleanup hitter who’s the last of his kind, drifting from town to town, looking for a team to play with, an outcast even among Barnstormers.
The real buffalo are pretty awesome. Huge, and shaggy, like a force of nature all by themselves. A kinda slow-moving force. We see them more and more often as we head up river.
Of course, not all of this nature stuff is so great. I’ve had ticks under my skin, and they only came out when one of the guys burned them with a piece of charcoal from the campfire. And we all have constant — and I mean all the time — mosquito bites.
The bites have made everybody crazy at one time or another. Sometimes we can’t even sleep, and Seaman’s even been driven to howling. The “skeeters” as Kentuck calls ‘em, have gotten him all over his nose and ears.
“Hey, young Eli, grab a hold of this — we’re gonna push over to shore and get out for awhile.”
It’s York. I’m on the keelboat now, and he wants me to grab one of the long poles that are used for what they like to call steering. Basically, all you do is push against the bottom of the river and send the boat in whatever direction you want to go. The poles are handy when the boat is stuck near a sandbar, but they only work when the water is shallow enough.
I wonder what these guys would think about a digital system that let you steer by getting signals back from satellites?
“We’re gonna look for some game for tonight,” York tells me, as I step over with him to the boat’s starboard side —that’s a sailing word I learned from Clark that means the right side, if you’re looking toward the front. And it’s the side closest to shore right now.
When York says
“game,” he’s talking about deer or elk or maybe one of those buffalo that we’ve been spotting.
‘”Course, you’re lookin’ like maybe some other things out here consider you the game.” He’s pointing to my arms, which are covered in mosquito bites.
At first, when the ticks and skeeters started to chew me up, I got really scared. What about West Nile virus? Dengue fever? River blindness?
What about slow pox?
But none of the guys had ever heard of those things. Then I remembered that in the days before global warming, diseases all had separate homes — the shifting weather hadn’t let them spread all over the place yet, like in 2019.
If anyone here in the Corps of Discovery knew what was coming, would they do anything different to change it? Head it off?
Could they do anything? Can the future really be changed?
Isn’t that why the government and Mr. Howe want to turn me into Danger Boy, so that, somehow, the future can be more controllable?
“I like the quiet out here,” York says. “ I like bein’ away from most people. What about you?”
Since there are about seven billion people living on the earth I come from, I’ve never seriously considered the question.
In my time, it’s hard to get away — from people, or viruses.
“Castor! Castor!”
York and I are pulling the boat to shore and one of the men who’s gone ahead is holding up a dead beaver by its tail, pretty happy about his kill.
“Castor!”
It’s Pierre Cruzatte, one of the main boatmen. He’s half French and half Indian. Besides hunting and steering boats, he plays his fiddle a lot at night by the campfire. I had never heard of any of the songs he plays. I wonder if he makes them up.
Maybe he’ll make one up tonight about dead beavers. Castor mort. See, I picked up a few words. Cruzatte likes to talk a lot during the day. He also seems to only see well out of one of his eyes, but he’s still able to steer the boats pretty well.
As for castor mort, well, there’s a lot of mort in my time, at least when it comes to animals. There aren’t too many beaver or buffalo or bear left out in the once-wild parts. People and bugs have mostly taken over. I never even thought about it much until I wound up here.
The problem with all these animals now, though — like that beaver that’s been caught and killed — is that they’re going to expect me to eat it later. And when I start to think about it, my stomach starts acting funny.
“Hey, where are you—?”
But I don’t have time to answer York’s question. As soon as we’re close to shore, I jump out and run into the bushes.
Most of what they have to eat here is meat — any kind of meat. They hunt it, skin it and stew it. Pretty much anything they can get their hands on: deer, birds, snakes, all kinds of fish, gophers (I think), and, lately, more buffalo.
I asked Lewis once if he’d ever heard of people eating veggie dogs.
“Dogs?” Clark pointed to Seaman. “You wish to eat my dog? He’s right there. But we’re not that desperate yet, and I’d hate to break a promise to the shaggy fellow.”
It seemed like a joke, but you couldn’t always tell with Lewis.
Either way, meat wasn’t doing to his stomach what it did to mine. And I don’t mean just a bite or two. I mean big heaping piles of cooked meat two or three times a day.
And nobody worried too much about side dishes.
I’ve been burping a lot on this trip. And worse. Like now.
Once, when my stomach was queasy, Clark tried to give me a shot of whiskey. That only succeeded in burning my throat and almost making me to throw up.
At the moment, sitting in the bushes, it’s not stuff erupting from my mouth I’m worried about. I try to get comfortable — as comfortable as possible — to take care of my business without getting my butt or legs all scratched or bitten.
There are definitely some places you don’t ever want to get bit.
I guess using this vidpad means I’m keeping a kind of journal, too, just like Gassy, Lewis, Clark — like a lot of them. And since a journal is supposed to be a truth-telling place, I need to write about something that happened earlier today. It’s connected to the whole food thing.
As I said before, Lewis likes to walk along the shore a lot, sometimes with Seaman alongside since the keelboat and pirogues move so slowly. Suggest: “peruse.”
He can walk along and make notes, sketch birds, take plant samples, and, as he says, “chart longitude and latitude for the maps and settlements to come.”
“You already know where the cities will be?” I asked, before realizing the question may have given too much away.
“Cities?” he laughed. “Cities like Philadelphia? Like Richmond, Virginia? Why, even if we survive this expedition, these wild lands won’t be settled for hundreds of years. No, young squire, I’m talking about very small outposts, leaving people all the room they’ll ever need out here in the Far West.”
“Alors!”
Suggest: “aloe” or “allow.”
It was Cruzatte again. Usually those shouts meant that some new animal had been shot. Given he’s only got the one good eye, I just hope Cruzatte’s aim is careful and he doesn’t shoot one of us. I’ve seen some of his shots ping trees and branches.
“Regardez!”
Suggest: “regalia.”
He was asking the rest of us to come take a look at whatever it was.
“Let’s go,” Lewis said. I hurried along with him, through the cottonwoods and willows (Lewis and some of the others were teaching me how to identify the different kinds of trees), and then we saw it, too: not just the endless stretch of prairie and grassland — all of which would be long gone and turned into suburbs and cornfields before I was born — but buffalo.
Not a whole herd. Not yet, anyway. But three buffalo standing on the edge of the tall grass, chewing and looking at us.
“We eat good tonight!” Cruzatte said, aiming his gun. They all had these long rifles that you had to stuff full of gunpowder, down into the barrel. And you could only get off one shot at a time.
Lewis had the most advanced gun. He called it an air rifle. It fired like a normal gun, I guess. You could just pull the trigger, as long as there was something in it. You didn’t have to stuff the barrel first, anyway.
Cruzatte lifted his rifle and turned to Lewis. “You, monsieur. One shot with the new gun. You take the animal.”
Some of the other soldiers from the Corps had come over to us. One of the regular jobs if you weren’t on the boat was to hunt along the banks for food.
“Shoot one, sir,” one of the soldiers said. “Do the honors. You’ll be provisioning us for a week!”
“Indeed.”
Of the three buffalo, two were humungous — like the kind you see in zoos. The other one was smaller. It wasn’t a baby, but it wasn’t as big as the others, either. Maybe a teenager?
Maybe it wasn’t much older than me. In buffalo years.
“The lad hasn’t had a shot this whole expedition,” Lewis said. “Let him.” And without even asking, he handed the air gun to me.
It wasn’t a toy. It was too heavy.
“Pick one out, Master Sands, and aim straight for the head. For maximum mercy.”
Mercy, I thought. “But I don’t want to kill them,” I said. “They’re practically extinct!”
Lewis didn’t know what that meant. “I should say they’re right here, right now, and we need the meat.”
“I don’t want to kill them.”
“Just one.”
“I don’t want to cause death.” My stomach was feeling funny again.
“Death is always over our shoulder, young Sands, just a half step behind life,” Lewis said.
The youngest buffalo, with its thick woolly hide and its big flat wide nostrils and round black eyes, stood staring at me.
“I can’t. I won’t.”
“He is a strange boy, eh?” Cruzatte said. Not very helpfully.<
br />
“But in death, the bison will help others live. It’s a practically optimistic system, if I do say so myself,” Lewis added.
Then he raised my hand. The gun was pointing straight at the teenage buffalo, who chewed and looked at me calmly.
“You will be fine,” Cruzatte chimed in. “And we, c’est bon, will be full.”
“Master Sands.”
I wanted to close my eyes.
“Just pull the trigger.”
I didn’t want to do this.
“We all need to eat. Even you.”
I didn’t…
But the shot came anyway.
I dropped the gun.
Another shot went off.
The men jumped.
And the young buffalo was down, lying on the grass, his tongue lolling to the side, all the calmness — all the everything — slowly slowly draining from his eyes.
Chapter Nine
Thea: Mulberry Row
May 1804
Clink-clink-clink.
I follow the hammer sounds down the dirt road outside Jefferson’s house. His great home on top of this forested hill: Monticello.
And like all great homes, many people are required to tend to its rhythms and needs, the many wants of the building, and its inhabitants.
Many of those people live right outside the house itself — in a string of small clapboard buildings called Mulberry Row. In Eli’s English, they’re called shacks — and this is where the slaves live.
Whole families dwell in one or two rooms, crowded together, laboring, growing Jefferson’s crops, making clothes, doing laundry, fabricating construction material so that more of Monticello may be refined and built.
Clink-clink.
I am looking for the one they call a blacksmith.
One who works shaping metals.
A man named Issac.
Clink.
He fashions building fasteners — nails — out of raw metals. And he makes shoes, too. For horses.
I am here to see one horse in particular.
Clink.
A small boy standing in a doorway waves at me. His mother, who is washing something in a large tub, pulls him back inside. I am considered the “new slave” here. The other slaves don’t know if they can trust me yet.
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