“I am hearing you, Mother,” Gray Bear said, his anger and pain mixing with awe of this healer woman who talked with the spirits of the forest, cave, and mountain. Word was that Pa’waip, the powerful Underworld spirit woman the Shoshoni called Water Ghost Woman, had taken her dream soul, the navushieip, through a crack and down into the depths of the earth. There, Water Ghost Woman had given her immense power, and the ability to heal and see the future.
“Someone must go and find the Taipo, the white man traders.” She looked around the clearing, taking in the mutilated bodies; her black eyes burned suddenly sharp in the withered mask of her brown face.
Her short-cut gray hair stirred in the wind as she added, “A vision came to me last night. Wolf came, tears in his eyes, to tell me of the end of our world. It will come, he told me. But whether the Newe survive it, or die like these beloved friends, is up to us. Who will go to the east to find the traders? Who is brave enough to save the people?” Her eyes fixed on Gray Bear. “The man who does will become a great leader, a man who may save the Kuchendukani.”
“The Pa’kiani must pay!” Gray Bear’s throat choked tight with anger. “My friend lies at my feet! Does water run in the veins of the Shoshoni? They have his scalp! They have taken his wean, his manhood! His heart has been ripped from his body, and with it, the honor of the people!”
The old woman raised her hand, instantly stilling Gray Bear. She gestured to the clearing, her eyes never wavering. “Look and listen to your people.”
Anguished cries rose around the little meadow as other young men and women found dead companions. People had begun to trickle out of the chokecherry bushes and up from the creek. Keening voices rose to a fever pitch.
Five Strikes screamed as he learned the Pa’kiani had murdered his son, taken his two young daughters, and perhaps all of his horses.
Whistling Wren—her face tracked by tears—bared her arms and slowly ripped the flesh where she crouched over the body of her dead husband. Someone had dragged him up from the creek bed. An old man pulled a flopping little boy’s corpse from the brush beneath the red splotch where his brains had been dashed against a tree.
“So you would ride and fight the Pa’kiani?” Aspen Branch’s sandy voice taunted. “The thunder sticks did this to us!” She hissed. “It is Taipo power.”
People stared at her, disbelief in their haunted eyes, as though they couldn’t quite fathom her meaning.
“Once,” her voice softened, “we hunted as far north as the Great River. We chased thePa’kiani from those lands with our horses. The name of Tam Apo was our power. The Great Mystery was our strength. The Pa’kiani are not braver. They have this Taipo thunder stick. They have many knives of steel, needles of iron, seeing mirrors. The Minnetaree, the Pa’kiani, the Crows, all of these people trade with the Taipo. We must trade too! We must have Newe brave enough to go to them!”
Aspen Branch looked around. “Who is so brave? A foolish man who would chase Pa’kiani with a rabbit stick? Look at your people, see them suffer, see the unavenged dead, and tell me where you will go, Gray Bear? Three Feathers is dead. You are young but brave. Many would talk of you as a leader. Are you yet a boy, bursting with anger like the yearling bull, or are you ready to accept wisdom and responsibility like a taikwahni?”
“Me?” he asked, placing a hand to his heart. “Why me?” Then he swallowed hard. “What else did you see in this vision of yours, Pia?”
Her dark eyes might have become burning obsidian. “Are you cunning enough to go into the land of the Arapaho? They have had Taipo traders with them this year. Are you brave enough to cross their lands? Can you bring the men back safely? Can you trade our calf hides for thunder weapons for our people?”
Her thin mahogany finger pointed at him as her toothless mouth puckered into a thin line. Gray Bear swallowed hard, glancing at the stack of buffalo calf hides.
He watched a mumbling, grief-stricken woman chase a crow from the red-spattered remains of her son’s bullet-gutted body. His gaze dropped to Three Feathers’s face. His friend seemed to be staring through the urine pooled in the red sockets. He could see where it leaked from the half-open mouth. A fly buzzed around the bloody wound at the crotch.
Gray Bear’s voice sounded like sand rubbed on rock. “If any will follow me, waipepuhagant, I will go.”
Above, a hawk circled in flight.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
William Clark unfolded the letter from Manuel Lisa and ran stubby freckled fingers through his thinning red hair. Slowly he let his eyes scan the pages. The letter contained a report of the travel upriver: so far, so good. No evidence of British tampering with the trade. But it was the last paragraph that held Clark’s interest.
John Tylor? The name had such a familiar ring to it. Again the man’s name came up. Just where was it that Clark had met a John Tylor? Lisa assumed he had something to do with the fur trade. Clark eased himself back in his overstuffed chair and let his thoughts ramble to the men he’d known on the frontier.
There were several Tylers. None seemed to match the description Lisa had outlined in the letter or in their earlier conversations. According to Lisa, Tylor was running from something and seemed an educated man.
Not that the former was unreasonable. Men ran to the frontier for many reasons: murder, bankruptcy, crime, the loss of a loved one, betrayal by someone they’d trusted, or a bevy of other causes.
Educated? Perhaps that would imply someone from the east. He’d know a John Tylor—spelled with an o as he recalled—in Washington. Clark frowned. Yes, it had been a long ago dinner. The vice president at the time, Aaron Burr, had been there, too. Burr? Tylor? The insane plot to carve out a nation based on a Burr monarchy? Could it be?
If the man were the same, and if he had been involved in the Burr conspiracy, what new troubles might be loosened on the upper river? Worst of all, could this Tylor be working for the British?
Clark rested his chin on his palm as he thought: Burr had been fairly tight with Anthony Merry, the British Minister. Was there a connection there?
“Do I dare take that chance?”
Clark’s frown lines deepened. He reached for his quill and shuffled out a clean sheet of paper. Dipping into the inkwell, he began penning a careful inquiry.
On Monday, the 15th of June, the expedition was held up for most of the morning by hard rain and gale force winds that swept over the plains of the Missouri. Not that men couldn’t work in the rain, but the winds were violent enough to push the boats onto the far shore should the cordelle fail. In the end, the skies cleared, and before noon they were on the river. Once again Tylor was working on the cordelle, struggling along ahead of Baptiste Latoulipe.
Thoughts of plots, disaster to the boats, the threat of Fenway McKeever, and how precarious his bid for escape was—all dogged John Tylor’s preoccupied mind. Behind him, the indefatigable Baptiste Latoulipe chortled happily.
“Ah, Tylor,” the boatman muttered, “I wonder . . . I should be a hunter instead of a puller of boats. Did you see LaChappelle and me capture those sneaky pigs? We were magnificent, non?”
“Might say that Baptiste,” Tylor laughed back. “I’d love to see you and LaChappelle pull a ton of bull buffalo out of the middle o’ the water. The day you do that, I’m gonna be on dry land—and you’d better have a lot bigger boat.”
“Oui. It is no small thing, though: There are none better than LaChappelle and me when it comes to hunting pigs. Certainly not you, but for LaChappelle, you would have drowned.”
“Reckon, as the frontiersmen say, thar ain’t gonna be no argument o’er that,” Tylor told his friend, slipping into the vernacular. “Seems to me that you two be the best swine swimmers on the river.”
A glob of slimy mud smacked into the back of his head as Baptiste got his revenge. The gooey stuff began to dribble down through Tylor’s hair.
The current grew ever stronger as they pulled the boat through the outside of a major meander o
n the river. To make matters worse, the river here was braided into five separate channels, each with a fierce current.
The men struggled to make their way against the rapid water. No more breath could be wasted on idle chatter. The channel continued to narrow, and the current was getting stronger by the foot; white foam built under the high riding bows of the boats.
Polly’s mast bent under the strain, wood groaning. By cordelle and pole, the men held tight to a vessel opposed by gravity and fast water. Lisa had taken a postion down on the deck—out of the way should the mast snap. The Spaniard’s face had become a grim mask of tension.
As they pulled around the bend, a shout came from the man heading the cordelle, “Log!” And it was passed down the line.
Tylor paused to look. Log, hell! An entire uprooted cottonwood was tumbling in the current. The tree looked like a waterwheel as it spun—the sun glinting off the leaves as they rose and sank.
As the polers rushed forward to fend off the tree, the full weight of the boat fell on the cordellers. Men set their feet against any braces they could find or dug their heels into the hard silt of the bank, striving to hold the boat.
The polers had caught the tree with their poles and were pushing it toward the bank where the water was deeper. The added resistance of the tree stretched the cordelle; water beaded from the singing rope. The strain worsened as the polers angled the tree past Polly.
The cordellers—propped and braced as they might have been—were torn loose and dragged along the bank. The cordelle slipped through the hands of some while others fought futilely to stop the rushing boat.
It was no use; Polly rode loose on the current. Tylor could hear orders being hollered from where he had been dragged, tenderly cursing the tear-building sting in his rope-burned fingers.
Polly kept spinning in the current like a toy, while men ran from one side to the other with their poles and fought to keep the boat from bank and tree. They teetered between disasters. The men on shore sprinted down the bank shouting, watching the drama on the river.
Tylor could see the stricken look on Lisa’s face as boat and tree spun and whirled next to each other in a deadly dance. The big boat’s fate dangled in the caprice of the current. The few polers on board were barely enough to keep the boat pushed from shore. LaChappelle had his pole ripped from his hands as it caught in the tree and spun away.
Polly was ejected from the channel by the swift thread of the current, and as the tree finally rolled its way clear, the men on the passe’ avant tiredly poled the boat toward shore.
Tylor shook his head; it had been close. So very damned close. Had the little boat been in the narrow passage at the same time the outcome would have been disasterous.
Polly came to a sudden and unaccountable stop; Lisa and the polers began to run back and forth in frenzied activity.
“Hurry!” the trader shouted. “Someone get the cordelle! Help us! We are grounded against a sawyer!”
Tylor, Baptist Latoulipe, and Josef Leclair dove into the muddy brown water and struck out for the boat where the cordelle floated past and downstream. They reached Polly, and were dragged up onto the deck. Latoulipe and Leclair grabbed poles to join Isaac Fourcher in the fight to keep the boat away from the sawyer. Ignoring the pain in his palms, Tylor began hauling the heavy cordelle from the water. The waterlogged rope was heavy, and pulling it in was more than enough task for one man whose skinless fingers lanced living fire.
Polly had grounded on a small sandbar, which had snagged one of the dead trees that bobbed with the current. Inexorably the sawyer kept grinding its way into the side of the boat. If it were to chew a hole in the hull, the boat would sink. Trade goods worth a fortune would be gone. The expedition would be reduced to travel on the little boat, and the rest of the engages on foot.
The Missouri Fur Company would be broken.
From where he panted for breath and hauled the cordelle hand-over-hand, Tylor could hear the sawyer grinding against the keelboat. It had to be close to holing the hull.
François and two other men, having swum across the current, climbed over the side and ran to help. With François’s added strength, they got the cordelle strung out to the bank some fifty feet away where the rest of the cordellers scrambled to line out.
Tylor leapt over the side, striking out to swim ashore, shouting and swearing—fighting time. Slowly, Polly pulled away from her death.
They re-crossed the current to the high bank, and the cordelle was run out again as the eastern channel of the river was tried. Progress there proved no different than the western shore—a constant battle with poor footing and a fast and unrelenting current.
As the afternoon sun slanted down on rippling muscles exposed beneath torn shirts, they pulled Polly into the narrow channel.
Tylor was back to sweating and gasping as they made foot after foot up the narrow waterway. The gods of fate and misfortune had a sense of humor: the struggling engages found no less than five rattlesnakes coiled in the brush and deadfall over which they had to clamber. Thrashing about with sticks they chased the snakes away and somehow didn’t lose the boat a second time.
Tylor turned to Latoulipe. “Ever noticed? You can’t put your feet on the ground after you’ve seen buzzworms?”
“Oui, it is the only time that I think I can walk on air like the saints.” The engage frowned at the pile of brush he had to push through. “The only thing is that if we walk on air, the boat, she will go downriver again, and Manuel Lisa will make us think rattlesnakes are small thing compared to his wrath, non?”
“Might have a point there,” Tylor agreed, as he sighed and leaned into the cordelle, wondering if he shouldn’t have let the government hang him after all. It would have been so much easier.
The sun sank further into the west, slanting through green leaves and shadowing the dark waters. Tylor didn’t remember when he had been so exhausted.
“Look out! Loose boat!” came an excited cry.
Tylor looked up in time to see the little boat rushing down toward them—the cordelle trailing in the water. Men were running along the bank, shouting, racing to keep up with the boat.
Lisa, perched high on the cargo box, stood stricken, watching as the little boat came rushing down on top of him.
“Cast loose!” he bellowed at the cordellers; and for the second time that day, Polly drifted with the current. The trader stomped along the cargo box shaking his head and cursing.
For the moment it looked as if she would be safe. Tylor began to draw a sigh of relief. It was then that a knot in the cordelle snagged a cottonwood tree. The cordelle pulled tight and hummed as the strain of Polly’s full weight and her momentum hit the stout line.
The mast bent almost double accompanied by a creaking of wood; Polly came to an abrupt and full stop, tumbling the men aboard. As they fought to regain their balance and assess the situation, the little boat was coming stern-first in a headlong rush.
“Patroon! Steer for shore! Steer for shore or we are all gone!” Lisa shreiked at the top of his lungs.
Polly almost heeled over in the water as the patroon threw his weight hard to port against the steering oar.
The big boat darted straight into the trees that overhung the bank amidst the crashing, snapping, and banging of breaking timber. In that instant the strain on the mast was too great; the overtaxed member gave way with an ear-splitting bang worthy of a fieldpiece.
The little boat shot past, leaving no more than two feet between the gunwales. By a hair, they had averted disaster for the third time that day. Polly was being shoved into the shore by the polers while Lisa, Mayette, and a couple of others tied her off.
Downstream and out of the current, they could see the little boat being poled and rowed to the bank in the quieter waters. The cordellers were trotting down the shore, dodging through the thick trees and brush to reach the now-beached boat.
Lisa was climbing through the branches that covered Polly, trying to make an estimate of the d
amage caused by this latest upset. The sun had sunk completely behind the western horizon, leaving only the glowing orange sky to see by.
“It looks like the hunters we have left stranded on the other shore will have a lonely night, mon ami,” Baptiste whispered mournfully. “What is worse yet, the game they shot today will have an even more lonely night with them. We in turn will miss the company of thick steaks of venison roasting over the fire.”
“Cheer up, Baptiste,” Tylor told him, an amused glint in his eyes. “You have several barrels of hominy in the boat that haven’t been touched. There’s a tub full of salted fish, too. Why that ought to be just about enough company for any man.”
“You keep good company with the hominy, John Tylor. I shall do so only with a heavy heart as I think of the fresh venison. Of the hot juices dribbling down the hunters’ chins as they are even now eating on the other bank.”
“Sure they are,” Tylor nodded sagaciously, “that notion being just deer to your heart.”
“And you call that humor? It will be a long night,” Baptiste sighed mournfully.
They slept as they were, laid out piecemeal in the brush and among the trees wherever space for a bedroll could be made. The wind kicked up several hours after dark. Next the heavens opened; it rained steadily.
Baptiste and Tylor crawled under a tarp as rain pattered on the oiled cloth. Latoulipe carefully smeared grease on Tylor’s bloody, blistered fingers.
“Would that we were in Saint Louis, my friend.” Regret filled the Frenchman’s voice. “My Elizabeth, she would prepare a fine meal for us. We would relax by a warm fire, enjoy the finest ale in all Saint Louis, and smoke our pipes while little Charles and Michelle crawled about our laps.”
“Didn’t know you were married,” Tylor muttered through gritted teeth, barely able to see his companion in the dark. Damnation, his fingers and palms stung.
Flight of the Hawk: The River Page 12