That is, I would if either them were paying attention to me.
In the dim light, Crow’s Eye finds something scattered on the ground that intrigues him, and he begins grabbing it up by handfuls.
“Now do you believe me, North Wind? The devils that live here are not as harmless as you would wish.” Crow’s Eye clutches a fistful of raw bones. Some are bleached with age. Others have been more recently gnawed.
The bones are everywhere. Bones and skulls and dried bits of skin and fur. You’d think the Bloody Tendon Wars had just been fought here. Except, most of these remains are mammal.
I am the only injured Saurian.
“Perhaps, North Wind Comes, you should use your shaman magic to get us out of here.”
North Wind doesn’t answer right away, so I take the opportunity to ask what I think is a sensible question under the circumstances:
“Mammal men, how did we get inside the Spirit Mound?”
I’m feeling a bit strange, lightheaded.
Arrak-du.
Lost lands up ahead.
“It happened, Many Lights, right after we ran into Crow’s Eye’s trap. The ice, the snow, had frozen over an opening. Your jumping, and the horse’s stomping, caused great cracks to appear. We might have escaped the cave-in had not Crow’s Eye arrow hit you just before the collapse.”
“I had dismounted and was going to finish you off myself,” Crow’s Eye adds. “Perhaps it’s still not such a bad idea. I will find my way out of here and take this demon’s body back to the Mandans, to let them see where their shamans draw their power.”
“You misconstrue, war mammal,” I say, attempting to gently correct him. “Any power North Wind has is his own. Do you think you could cut this jabberstick out of my limb now?”
In the firelight, I could see Crow’s Eye staring at me in amazement. I had switched from speaking Mandan to the particulars of the Hidatsa tongue. I don’t know if that was the reason he was starting to look even more upset. Or perhaps it was because I was asking him to undo his handiwork with the jabberstick.
“I trust I must have blacked out during the fall,” I say.
“Only briefly.” North Wind is working his way over to me, now that he can see me. Perhaps as a means of keeping Crow’s Eye at bay.
“Crow’s Eye, if we are in a trap set by devils, then the dishonor of being caught so easily would scarcely be offset by killing the lizard man.”
Crow’s Eye considers this observation, then says, “Is that the only mind-trick you have, shaman-to-be? Trying to use words to change my purpose?
“His blood,” North Wind adds, “will only draw the devils to us.”
“But there are no devils. That’s just a story for children and shamans. A warrior wouldn’t really believe such things”
“You just spoke of them.” North Wind says.
North Wind and Crow’s Eye continue their debate. No one is paying much attention to my steady blood loss, or worrying about the eventual effects of necrosis on my wounded extremity.
Nor are they worried at all, as am I, that a technology from another planet has been infected with a disease from another era, which may affect their world far more than small devils, diminutive spirit beings, or tribal rivalries between jittery mammals.
I look around in the expanding firelight and see better the remains around us. I can also see that while neither of my two companions has to contend with protruding jabbersticks, the fall into the void has been hard on their bodies as well.
“We need to leave this place,” North Wind says, deciding that will end his half of the devil argument.
“Yes. Well, my horse is still up there, in the world,” Crow’s Eye replies, pointing. “Outsmarting all of us by avoiding this fall. Perhaps you could call him and he’ll fly down to us.”
North Wind doesn’t answer him. There’s no horse and no flying, but all of a sudden there’s considerable movement, the flickers of many shadows, and breathing.
A lot of breathing.
Glinting just out of range of the firelight, there are many pairs of eyes staring at us from the darkness beyond. I don’t know if these are the devils that North Wind and Crow’s Eye were arguing about.
But now we have company.
Chapter Eleven
Eli: Good Humor Island
September 1804
The last time I had a gun in my hand felt like a lifetime ago. Or at least a couple of months. It was Clark’s rifle, and he wanted me to shoot a buffalo.
The buffalo was shot, all right.
It turned out Floyd — Kentuck — was coming up behind us, and he was firing, practically right over my shoulder. It was a dangerous thing to do, but he was a good aim.
Floyd’s dead now. Just like the buffalo. But with Kentuck, it wasn’t a gun. He fell sick and died in August.
We’d been going upriver, sketching the animals, counting the fish, pulling the boats, swatting the mosquitoes. It took so long to get anywhere. How did people do anything except stay home?
Were Thea and Clyne on journeys like this, too?
“My stomach ain’t right,” Kentuck said to me one afternoon.
“I think it’s all this meat,” I told him. “It’s like being stuck on some crazy grownup fad diet.”
But it never got righter. He couldn’t keep any food down and he kept shaking from a fever. This went on for a couple weeks or so.
The last couple days, we’d stopped completely to let him rest. And he just died… in the middle of the night.
Me, Clark and a few of the others were sitting up with him when it happened. “Here,” Kentuck said. He took something from under his heavy shirt and tried to press it in my hands. He didn’t have much strength. “For good luck.”
It looked like a really old, really falling apart, softball of some kind. A leather softball. “What…?”
“Shhh.” Clark said. “Looks like he was saving his old Fives ball.”
“‘Fives?’ What is…?”
But Clark held his finger to his lips again. He didn’t want to use up the last of Kentuck’s strength telling me about some old softball.
It was hard to think of Kentuck with no strength. The same guy who always made jokes with me in the keelboat, or showed me how to cut and skin an animal that’s been shot.
That’s what we did with the buffalo he killed. Since I was already eating buffalo meat (I still am — it’s the main part of our diet now, and it still makes me run off to the bushes sometimes), I decided that maybe I had to take some responsibility… for my food. It didn’t come in some tidy package from a store, so I couldn’t pretend that the “food” had once been anything else but a living, breathing creature.
So when Kentuck had his big knife out that day and asked if I wanted to help, I said yes. He was covered in blood up to his elbow as he cut through the stringy white and pink tendons that kept the “meat” — the young bison’s fat and tissue and muscle — connected to its skin and fur.
“You can live all winter sometimes off’n one well-dressed animal, if it’s big enough.”
“Dressed? I thought we were cutting it up?”
Kentuck laughed. I’m not sure if he thought I was making a joke, or if he understood I really didn’t know what he meant. It turns out that dressing an animal is how you cut up the meat, and how you save the really big pieces — whether you smoke them or cover them in salt — for eating later. Sometimes a lot later.
“Whatever state you said you were from, must be a lot of funny people there.” Kentuck smiled. Did I tell him I was lived in California? “Here.”
He handed me two big handfuls of… guts. Guts, stomach, intestines, I’m not sure which. I almost passed out right there, thinking we were going to eat all that. Then I remembered that these were the parts the men usually threw into the river.
“Tres bon pour les poissons!” Cruzatte said. Good for the fish. Apparently these guys believed there were a lot of piranhas in the water or something.
But t
hey kept the livers. The men liked cooking up the livers.
Soon I was covered in blood myself. I wasn’t happy about it, but if you’re going to eat food that used to walk around you can’t keep fooling yourself either. But I still told the Corps I didn’t want to hunt.
Right now, though, there’s a gun in my hand, and members of the Corps are telling me to get ready to fire my first shot.
What’s even worse is that this isn’t a hunt and they don’t mean to shoot a buffalo.
They mean, “Fire at a human being when you hear the order.”
Basically, I’m expected to murder someone, because we’re on the verge of maybe getting murdered ourselves.
We’re on a sandbar, in the middle of the Missouri River. Clark has named this little patch Good Humor Island. Across from us is a tribe of Lakota Indians lined up onshore, with their arrows pointed at us.
Clark is in front with a drawn sword, looking real expedition-leader-like, yelling across the water at a Lakota chief whose name, of all things, is the Partisan.
It’s a name for someone who takes a side in a debate, or an argument, or a war. Lewis told me that. It’s a funny kind of name, and, right now, about the only funny thing at all on Good Humor Island.
In fact, as I stand here holding a rifle that I really have no intention of using, the thought strikes me that the Partisan could be a kind of Barnstormer character — a ghost Indian, haunting people who took his land.
Buffaloner, meet the Partisan.
At the thought of it, I giggle. Everyone — Indian, American, French — stares at me. Right. No laughing on Good Humor Island.
Except maybe for one other rule-breaker: He’s a Lakota boy, about my age, holding a bow and arrow, pointed pretty much right at me. I think he’s the son of Black Buffalo, one of the other chiefs. He’s been watching me the whole time we’ve been here. Now, I guess, I’m his number-one target in case a war breaks out.
Except that my giggle almost made him laugh, too.
The Lakota, I learned, is a tribe that lives by the river and demands a kind of toll from anyone who passes by. A shipping tax. Even if what’s being “shipped” is you.
We just want to get upriver to a place called Mandan Village. It’s where we’re supposed to be spending the whole winter. We need to be there in a few weeks.
But we’re not spending the winter anywhere unless we get off this sandbar. The Corps tried to pay the tax with some knives, an American flag, an old but usable coat, some buffalo meat, and some medals.
Those were the “Great Father Jefferson” medals Lewis and Clark had with them to introduce all the tribes they were meeting to the president, since the idea was that the land now belonged to America, and the president was going to be the main chief now.
You can imagine how that idea didn’t really sit well with anyone who was already living here, with chiefs of their own already picked out.
Plus, the Lakota are smart enough to know that when the American “Great Father” takes over, they’ll be out of the shipping-tax business, and they don’t want to see a good thing go.
Well, not such a good thing for us in the Corps.
Everyone was edgy and nervous. Maybe the Indians could sense that no matter what they did to us — fired their arrows, or let us pass — it might not really matter. Big journeys change things. Lewis and Clark’s journey would change things forever. Eventually tons of people would be pouring into the West, once they knew what was out there. For the Indians, that would be another kind of death.
Maybe the Lakota thought that by killing us, they could just put that particular death off a little while longer.
“I am going away,” Floyd had told me, right before he died. “I want you to write me a letter.”
I was sitting there, silently, just like Clark wanted me to. Not asking about “Fives” or anything else. I thought Clark wouldn’t mind if I asked who Floyd wanted the letter sent to, though.
But Kentuck never got to tell me. I went to find some sheets of paper and one of those feather quill pens everybody uses. I couldn’t use my vidpad in front of him. Though maybe, if he was dying, why not? It wouldn’t mess up history too much for him to have seen it, would it?
Anyway, when I got back to where Floyd was laying, he was gone. Just like that. From nothing more than what seemed like a real bad flu. Lewis called it something else — like that thing babies get — cholera? No — colicky, that’s it. Cholic.
I didn’t know that could kill you.
“We name this river Floyd’s River,” Clark said at the funeral. We buried him on a hill in a really pretty spot, and the men in the Corps fired off their guns. Cruzatte played a sad fiddle tune, and Seaman howled, so it was an official military event. I’d never been to anyone’s funeral before.
“We name this hill Floyd’s Bluff. Both will bear his name for ages afterward, and those names will tell of his great deeds. He was a brave and worthy man. And now he’s gone.”
Clark wasn’t a preacher and there didn’t seem to be much more to say. He turned to the other captain. “Meriwether?”
Meriwether shook his head. “Kentuck was among the most cheerful of us,” he added. “The universe doesn’t always reward cheerfulness. Perhaps, in honor of our friend, we should all remain cheerful, out of spite. May God take his soul.”
No one said anything else, but really, how could they? They were all trying to figure out what Lewis meant.
Everybody took a turn putting a shovelful of dirt on Kentuck’s body. It was wrapped in an American flag, and I could actually see his feet sticking out from it, down in the hole. I put some dirt on him, too.
That must be why there always seems to be a tiny part inside grownups that seems a little sad, because if you live long enough, you see it. You know.
People go. Places, things.
You love them, and they still go. Thea knows that now. Look what happened to her mom.
Even being unstuck in time, like I am, you don’t get “do overs.” Not really. You can’t hold on to everything.
Or anything. Sometimes.
Standing on Floyd’s Bluff, I couldn’t remember from school if anyone on the Lewis and Clark expedition actually died. What if they hadn’t, originally? What if I caused that by being here, by changing history?
That’s what’s going through my head now, here on Good Humor Island, with this big museum gun in my hand, pointed at people I hardly even know. I’m pretty sure Lewis and Clark survived, but what if my changing things means, this time, they don’t?
What if things go really wrong in the next few minutes, and a lot of us don’t even make it out of here?
“Eli?”
It’s York. The Indians seem fascinated by him. They were touching his skin before. They’ve seen French fur traders coming down the river, but they’ve never seen a black man. It’s hard to imagine a time in America when having different skin color was unusual.
“What is it, Mr. York?”
“You ready to fire that thing, if you have to?”
“I’ve never fired a gun before. I’ve never killed a person.”
“Well, me neither.”
“And I’m not going to start now! This isn’t some Comnet game!”
“Some what?”
On the shore, the Indian boy, with his bow and arrow, is watching me talk to York. You can see his eyes follow us every time we shift positions.
I’d like to throw my gun down, to show how ridiculous I think this all is, but any sudden move like that would get everyone scared, and all those bullets and arrows would go flying. But I wonder, if there was some way to signal a truce to that Lakota kid, would he go along?
I’m not sure how it all went so wrong, anyway. Clark had been going back and forth from our island, giving gifts to the tribe for the last day or two. Maybe it was the “Great White Father” medal that finally rubbed them the wrong way. Or maybe it was when they tasted Lewis’s “portable soup.” That was probably a mistake, as gifts go.
> Clark had ordered us to set off from Good Humor Island, but when we were getting the pirogues ready, the Partisan grabbed the ropes to keep us from leaving.
That’s when we noticed all the arrows pointed at us.
Lewis, for his part, calmly got out his air rifle. He explained what it was, the translator told the chiefs, and nobody moved an inch after that. Nobody gave in.
This silence is dangerous. Unless somebody says something soon, shots will go off just from the tension.
Clark must be thinking the same thing. “We are not squaws, but warriors,” he says suddenly, out loud.
I’m not sure that’s the kind of silence-breaking that helps. I guess Clark is getting pretty frustrated, too.
Why does he make fun of girls, anyway? Like all girls are scaredy-cats and all boys aren’t. That’s not true. If they met Thea or her mom, they wouldn’t say stuff like that. Or if they met my mom.
Though it doesn’t exactly help to think about her right now.
The Lakota translator is telling the Partisan, Black Buffalo, and the others what Clark said. He gets a reply.
“We are not squaws, either.”
I get it with my lingo-spot, before our translator —Cruzatte — tells Clark.
Share…
What? Share what? Was that me thinking that?
Somebody has to think of something, though. These grownups will get us all killed.
What would Kentuck be doing if he were here? Would it have changed our luck if he was still alive?
Kentuck…
With my non-rifle hand, I slowly reach into my pants pocket and pull out the scraggly, leathery “Fives” ball he’d given me. It feels like every eye in the world is watching me.
I slowly hold up the ball. And then I start to bend over and — slowly, slowly — lay down the rifle on the sand.
Clark and the others are casting glances at me, too, while trying to keep an eye on the Lakota. “Eli? What in thunder are you doing?”
“Trust me, sir.”
Showing the Lakota I only have the ball in my hand, I point across the river to the boy. He’s confused and looks over to his chiefs for advice. The Partisan just shakes his head no, without knowing what I’m going to do. Black Buffalo, though, holds up his hand in more of a let’s-wait-and-see gesture.
Trail of Bones Page 8
