Streams to the River, River to the Sea

by Scott O'Dell

  Meeko began to cry. I did nothing to stop him. I put the cradleboard on my back, taking my time, and did not get on the horse. I walked slowly around the fire, away from Charbonneau, then ran toward our tent.

  He caught me before I had gone far, caught the cradle-board and wrenched it from my back.

  He put a hand on my throat. "Quiet," he said, "or Charbonneau make you quiet. For a long time, quiet."

  "I must nurse the baby," I said with all the breath I had. "He will die if he is not nursed."

  "Charbonneau will find good food for Jean Baptiste. Buffalo, deer, antelope, good thing all the time."

  He tightened the grip on my throat. "You come, Shoshone?"

  Our talk had awakened some birds. There was no sound from the camp, but a candle burned in Captain Clark's tent.

  "Now, Shoshone, you come?"

  "Yes," I said, with the last of my breath.

  He helped me into the saddle and climbed into his. Quietly we rode out of camp toward the trail we had come along the day before. When we were out of hearing, Charbonneau gave me the cradleboard and the baby. He kicked his horse into a quick trot and shouted for me to follow.

  I followed him for a way until we came to a stream. It ran deep with swift water from the melting snow. I knew it from my childhood. Farther down, it made a wide pool and I had bathed there with my cousin, Running Deer.

  The day before when we crossed the stream, we had had a hard time. One of the men was thrown into the water and would have drowned if Ben York had not saved him.

  Now, as Charbonneau got to the deepest part of the stream, when his horse had to swim, I turned back. There was a short cut to our camp which I knew about. I took it and rode fast.

  The camp was awake and fires were burning. I startled Captain Clark as I rode up. He was angry when I told him what had happened. He wanted to go after Charbonneau and bring him back. York wanted to go, too.

  "We'll make him walk," York said.

  "He'd never get here," Captain Clark said. "Not walking on the feet he complains about all the time."

  "He will find his wife and come back. He is very worried about her," I lied. Again with all my heart I hoped that he would stay with her and the Flatheads.

  Five days later he rode into camp. We were camped in a village on the Yellowstone. The people there were glad to see us, even before Captain Clark gave them the last of our ribbons and some silver buttons from an old coat.

  At one side of the village was a grove of fir trees. Fir has many dry branches near the ground and throughout the whole tree. To welcome us and bring fair weather on our journey, the people had set them ablaze. Each tree was a sputtering spire that flared from top to bottom.

  On this night Charbonneau and his Flathead wife and her two slaves rode into the village. In the blazing light she looked beautiful. In the morning, when I cooked breakfast for her, she looked even more beautiful.

  It was very cold. A wind blew down from the snowy peaks and we were surrounded by heavy drifts of snow.

  She wore white moccasins that were sewn with blue beads and little bunches of porcupine quills. Her white ermine jacket had a circlet of black weasel tails around the collar.

  The breakfast fire shone on her face, which was shaped like a heart. She was the daughter of a chieftain. She looked like a chieftain's daughter.

  She acted like one, too. The camas root I baked for her she did not like. It had been dug long before it was ripe, she said. The elk was stringy. She had a pretty voice. It sounded like a rivulet running over a bed of ferns.

  Charbonneau could not keep his eyes off her. He sat and listened to her babbling, mostly about how powerful her father was. Charbonneau listened with his mouth open wide.

  She had the finest horse I had ever seen, yellow with orange spots. Her saddle was lined with brown beaver fur. That night, while we were asleep, she got into her beaverlined saddle and rode away on her fine horse with her two slaves.

  I urged Charbonneau to go and bring her back. "It is a law," I said. "The Minnetarees and the Blackfeet and the Shoshone say that you can make her come back. You can kill her if you wish."

  He expected me to be jealous. I was not.

  He muttered and tore at his beard, yet he was afraid to go. "I like this Shoshone better," he said and threw his arms around me.

  But the next day, while we traveled through Big Hole Valley, where I knew the trails and streams and could be of help, he was angry. Whenever I told Captain Clark what trail to take, Charbonneau would wait until no one was watching, then give me a slap.

  Captain Clark was not sure of the country. It all looked alike to him. But not to me. I remembered Shoshone Cove from the way the cottonwoods grew on a little island. And I told him that soon we would come to a gap in the mountain where we would find the canoes we had hidden the year before.

  By good fortune I was right. We reached the gap and found the canoes in the river where we had sunk them. We also found the supplies we had left. The pounded meat and berries were still good.

  It was the chewing tobacco that the men were most glad to see. They had been chewing tree bark mixed with dry leaves, kinnikinnick, for weeks. They chewed and chewed and spat and spat all day while they searched for a second lot hidden the year before. The chewers never found it. "An awful loss," they said. "The most awful yet."

  To travel downstream by boat was much different from going upstream. Before, the men had to toil against the current, pulling the boats along by ropes, pushing them with poles, their hands blistered and their feet full of thorns.

  In one day alone, the first day, we now made ninety-seven miles. We reached Three Forks on the third day.

  We did lose some horses to the Crow, who are the best horse thieves anywhere. One misty night they stole up and rode away with half our herd. They could not be followed because the ground was hard and gravelly and left no hoofprints.

  The next day the stinging flies were so bad we had to build smoking fires and lather mud on the horses that were left. Our camp was surrounded by buffalo bushes but the red berries were not much good to eat.

  The next day was better. We came to a field of prickly pears. The pears were deep purple and ripe. But they grew surrounded by thorns, the big ones that pierced thick leather. Also they were covered with tufts of little thorns, sharp as needles. The men were hungry but looked at the thorns and turned away.

  I had eaten many prickly pears. They are full of small hard seeds but the flesh is smooth. It tastes like warm milk when you drink it and dream all the time that you're in a meadow of sweet violets.

  There's only one way to fix a prickly pear. You knock it off with a stick, roll it quickly in a fire, and burn off the tufts. I showed the men how to do this and they ate pears until they lay on the ground and groaned.

  At Three Forks, Captain Clark divided the party. He took eight men, Charbonneau, me, and the baby with a large herd of horses and struck out to the east to meet Captain Lewis beyond the Rosebud River and the Powder, at the mouth of the Yellowstone.

  Before we got there, Captain Clark carved his name on a tall rock we came to beside the river. He held the baby up and pointed to it.

  "See, that's my name carved on the rock," he said to Meeko. "And I have named the rock Pompey's Pillar. Do you like it?"

  The baby laughed and showed his teeth. Captain Clark had taught him to say American words long before he could speak Shoshone. He thought of Meeko as his son. Tears came to my eyes.

  Captain Lewis was not at the mouth of the Yellowstone as he promised to be. We waited a day for him. But the mosquitoes and gnats were so bad that Captain Clark decided to move down the Missouri. He left a note on a tree for Captain Lewis to let him know where we were.

  We floated into nests of rattlesnakes. They swarmed everywhere. They even swam in the river, but no one was bitten.

  The mosquitoes came with us. They swarmed over our horses and stung them so hard the men had to build big fires and tether the horses in the smoke to ke
ep them from bolting. Sergeant Ordway's eyes swelled shut, as did the baby's. Hunters killed a deer, but it was so thin we could not eat it. The men said that the animal was so poor because the mosquitoes had sucked away all of its blood.

  Our problem was now to find Captain Lewis. We floated down the river for half a day, traveling fast, three times as fast as when we pulled and pushed our way up against the current. At noon we heard a shot. It was much louder than the shots of the Shoshone or the Nez Percé or the Flatheads, for these people used only a pinch of powder.

  Captain Lewis's men whooped and waved their shirts and fired the air gun, but the news they brought was bad. They had traveled far to the north and run into a band of Blackfeet, who stole some of their horses and nearly killed them in an ambush. Worse, Captain Lewis had learned that the Maria's, the River That Scolds at All the Others, did not flow into the Saskatchewan, the river that flows down from the far north and the rich fur country.

  Worse yet, at least to us, Captain Lewis had been shot. As his canoe floated up and we waded out to see him, we found him lying under a blanket beside Scannon. He had been in an accident with Peter Cruzatte. The two men had gone out hunting for meat. Cruzatte, who had weak eyes, mistook Captain Lewis for a deer or something and had shot him in the back.

  Captain Lewis was always getting hurt in one way or another, but he was made of iron. By nightfall he was on his feet again and we all started down the river.

  We were near Fort Mandan now. The men cleaned their clothes as best they could. But the fringes on their jackets had all been cut off to make strings for their moccasins. They oiled their guns. Captain Lewis set up the cannon and the air gun, ready to fire as soon as the fort came into view.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Captain Lewis fired a cannon at the first sight of the Minnetarees, and all the people ran down to the river. Black Moccasin came to welcome us, but he looked sad as he embraced me. Red Hawk had been killed not long before by the Blackfeet. To mourn his son, he had cut off one of his fingers, as was the custom of the Minnetarees and the Shoshone.

  Charbonneau's wife, Otter Woman, came down to the shore. She was carrying a baby in a cradleboard. Charbonneau looked at the baby and seemed pleased until he saw that it was a girl. Then he hunched his shoulders and turned away.

  Captain Lewis fired his cannon three times more. He and Captain Clark smoked a peace pipe with the chieftains and invited them to go with them and meet the Great White Father. The chieftains said that they would like to go but were afraid of the Sioux. The Sioux were camped on the river now, not far below, waiting to kill them.

  We camped across the river from the village and had many visitors the rest of the day. Le Borgne himself came to visit us. He left his canoe and stood on the shore, casting his eye about. He looked as tall as a tree.

  It had been raining a little but now it was steaming hot. Le Borgne wore a heavy buffalo robe, a towering headdress of foxtails and feathers, and around his neck a double circlet of bearclaws.

  Ben York said, "The chief's dressed for winter. Maybe this means we'll get a wintry welcome."

  Charbonneau said, "One Eye showoff. Mean nothing. All time big, ugly, showoff, dress-up chief."

  "My advice to you is to keep your thoughts to yourself," Captain Clark said. "We deal with a dangerous man. At the end of our journey I don't wish to be scalped."

  "Not the end," York said. "We still have some long miles to go. We're not in St. Louis yet."

  For me it might be the end. My heart sank at the thought. Yet I clung to the hope that Captain Clark would take me with him. He knew that I loved him. He knew that I hated Charbonneau.

  After supper that night he gave Charbonneau the money that President Jefferson owed him. It was a piece of paper worth five hundred dollars, Captain Clark said.

  Charbonneau put the paper in his jacket and went off to play the Hand Game with Le Borgne. Otter Woman left her baby with me and trailed after him.

  They had not been gone long before Captain Clark came to the tent. He took Meeko out of the cradleboard and sat down and held him in his lap. We were outside by the fire.

  For a while he played with the baby. He spoke only to him and not to me. But I felt that he was thinking about me. I was sure that he had something he wanted to say before Charbonneau came back.

  I waited. The night was full of sounds. Wild birds were calling to each other. The trees and the sky were filled with their cries. Sounds came from the river that Captain Clark arid I had traveled together. I waited.

  After some time he put Meeko back in the cradleboard and came and sat beside me on the ground. The fire was dying but live embers cast light on his face.

  "Pomp has grown fast," he said. "How old is he? Eighteen months, at least."

  "Nineteen."

  "He'll soon be ready to learn. I would like to take him back to St. Louis and put him in school. I talked to Charbonneau this evening and he thought that it would be a good thing for the boy."

  I was disturbed. "The boy is still a baby," I said.

  "But he's not too young to start learning American words. I've taught him three words already—'yes,' 'no,' and 'papa.' He takes after you. He learns fast. Remember how you learned to count from one to twenty in only one day?"

  "I remember."

  I remembered many things. All the days and weeks and months. All the things we had done together.

  "You could go to school, too," Captain Clark said. "To a young ladies' school. There's a fine one for young ladies in St. Louis. Some good ones in Washington, where President Jefferson lives."

  "What would I learn in a school?"

  "To do needlework."

  "I can do needlework now. I have sewn you three jackets and five shirts and..."

  "I mean fine needlework. Like pillows and spreads. Sheets and nice underclothes for yourself."

  "I would learn something else?"

  "Oh, yes. You'd learn to write, to use all the words that now you can only speak."

  "Other things, too?"

  "Many. You can jump from a canoe to the shore in one leap. You can climb a cliff. You can run down a deer, though I have never seen you do it. But you haven't learned to dance. Not yet."

  "Is dancing important where you are going?"

  "Important. American girls love to dance. They dress up in their fancy clothes and dance and dance and dance. All night, sometimes."

  "Sometimes until the sun comes up?"

  "Often."

  "If I learned to sew nice things and write words and dress up and dance all night when I go to this ladies' school, then I would be a lady myself?"

  The embers had turned to ashes. But a fire was burning in front of the lodge where Charbonneau and Le Borgne were playing the Hand Game. The fire lit up the sky and cast flickering lights on Captain Clark's face. He was puzzled.

  "Then I would be what you call a lady?" I said. He did not answer.

  "Would you like that?" I asked him.

  He stared into the ashes. He was uncomfortable.

  "You wish me to go to school and become a lady?"

  "Not at all. I like you the way you are, Janey."

  It was the sound of the words, not what the words said, that made me suddenly remember what Ben York had told me.

  "If," he had said, "if a white man marries you, he will be called a squaw-man and people will look down on him."

  I had never forgotten his words. I remembered them now.

  A gray mist was drifting up from the river. Captain Clark made another fire, using a fuse like the one he had used on the Columbia River with the Neerchokioos. It sputtered and burst into flame. A bitter smell of powder rose around us.

  "About the boy," he said. "Of course you would come along, too. He'll need you. What fun you'll have together. And how much he'll learn. You'll be proud of him."

  "I am proud of him now."

  Captain Clark hesitated. "And how much you'll learn also."

  "I am much too old to go to school." />
  "You're still a child."

  A child? Is that the way he thought of me? All this last year, all these days and weeks and months we had been together, he had thought of me as a child.

  "A beautiful Indian child," he said.

  "I am an Indian woman, Captain Clark. An Indian woman who has a child nineteen months old."

  He shrugged at my sharp tone and put a stick of wood on the fire. I was quiet. He talked about St. Louis and Washington, where Thomas Jefferson lived. And how after I was through with school I would meet the Great White Chieftain who ruled America. I listened with one ear.

  In the midst of all the talking, screams burst out in the lodge. Charbonneau and Otter Woman came back to the tent.

  She was blaming him for losing all of his money to Le Borgne, the five hundred dollars Captain Clark had given him. And he blamed her for trying to tell him how he should have handled the plum pits.

  They kept on fighting after Captain Clark left, so I took Meeko and went down to the river and crawled into one of the canoes.

  I did not sleep. I thought about Captain Clark. I thought about how he wanted me to go to a school and learn things and become a lady. I thought about what Ben York had told me. I remembered his warning. I saw it written across the sky. Also, I thought about Meeko.

  Captain Clark would take him to a big place somewhere. He would send him to school and teach him things. Meeko would learn to talk like a white boy. He would grow up and have a lot of hair on his face. He would look like a white man and try to act like a white man. But he never would be a white man. He was a Shoshone!

  I would teach Meeko myself. He would learn to run beside a stream all day from dawn until the sunset and never stop once to take a drink. He would learn to put his hand in boiling water and say that it was cold. He would be a Shoshone always!

  In the morning Captain Lewis talked to Le Borgne. He told him that if he kept the peace he would be rewarded by the Great White Chief in Washington. And as a proof of his friendship, Captain Lewis gave him his valuable air gun, which pleased Le Borgne so much that he said he would think about keeping the peace.

  Captain Lewis gave me a wonderful present, too. It happened that night while I was at the river getting water to cook with.