The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  As soon as the shape-shifter had finished laying out his plan to destroy the captains’ party, Yellow Sage Flower walked to the council fire. “Pe-gap, pe-gap, pe-gap,” chanted the people. Meaning, Franklin told me, “Tell us a story. Tell us a story.”

  “Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a powerful Blackfoot magician named Smoke. He was also very bloodthirsty. And when a group of desperately ill Americans came into his land, he planned to destroy them.”

  “With what illness were these Americans afflicted, Yellow Sage Flower?” inquired a young man named Buffalo’s Back Fat.

  “Various incurable diseases of the brain and spirit,” Sage replied. “But this did not matter to Smoke. In direct violation of the commandment of Napi, the Creator, never to harm the addlepated, Smoke and his misguided people killed them all. Napi was very angry and decided to punish them. The next morning when Smoke awoke and walked among his followers, he found them running about the camp on all fours. Some were barking like dogs, some grunting like bears, some howling like wolves, some digging in the ground with their nails like badgers. Many had cast off their clothes and were parading about in public. Others strolled here and there with clay cooking pots on their heads. And when Smoke tried to remonstrate with them, gibberish spewed out of his mouth. Dear people, here is what had happened. Great Napi had made the Blackfeet insane as punishment for killing the mad Americans. From then on, Smoke’s people were no longer known as the Blackfeet, Lords of the Plains, but as the lunatic people.”

  At this juncture Smoke interrupted Sage’s story. “What sort of nonsense is this?” he said. “My young ward is a fanciful storyteller, nothing more. Do you mean, Yellow Sage Flower, to suggest that the American incursionists coming up the river are actually insane?”

  Yellow Sage Flower made a bow toward my uncle. Who sprang to his feet, approached the firelight, and, speaking slowly so that she could translate for him, announced that the Americans were indeed a company of madmen, beset by every extravagant caprice of a diseased mind, and that he was one of their number. “In the cruel custom of our country, we have been banished to the wilderness,” he said. “Somehow we managed to forge our way well up the Missouri, but we’ll surely die the most miserable death imaginable, of starvation and exposure, in the Rocky Mountains this winter. Unless, of course, Smoke kills us all first, in violation of Napi’s strict injunction to the contrary.” Then he said that in the morning, if the Blackfeet would conceal themselves on the bluffs overlooking the river, they would see for themselves exactly what he meant, as the members of the insane American party endured every manner of hardship by poling and hauling their cumbersome vessels up the river. For some days past, in a fit of hysteria, supposing their horses to be devils disguised as quadrupeds and bent on their masters’ destruction, they had slaughtered them all.

  “Go to the bluff tomorrow and watch the mad Americans,” he concluded. “Judge for yourselves.”

  Early the following morning Smoke and his warriors waited in the tall grass on a cliff top above the Missouri as the captains and their party came toiling up the rapids into the narrow gorge that Lewis would later name the Gates of the Mountains. Some of the men were stumbling waist-deep in the icy water, hauling at ropes fastened to the bows of the canoes. Others were straining every muscle at the setting poles. Still others were paddling furiously. Yet the canoes and pirogues made next to no progress against the powerful current and were at least an hour covering a quarter of a mile.

  The Indians watched for a short while, then retired to their camp greatly troubled that such mentally afflicted men should be cast out by their own people to die in the wilderness. Even Smoke was distressed to see such a piteous sight and to imagine the horrible fate of the expedition in the mountains ahead. Yet there was an outer limit to his sympathy. He declared that although he would not destroy the Americans at this time, in the autumn he would lead scouts to the mountains to cut their trail, and after they perished in the early snows his people could salvage their rifles.

  At his order the Blackfeet then packed up their tepees to retreat toward the mountains. But before they left, Yellow Sage Flower drew me aside and said, “Now, Ti. Some four sleeps south of here, at a place called the Three Forks, three different rivers come together to form the Missouri. At my earliest opportunity, I plan to run away from Smoke and his warriors. I want you to meet me four dawns from today at the Three Forks and take me with you to the Pacific.”

  Then she spun around and sprinted toward Buffalo Runner, vaulted over his tail in her customary manner, and was off.

  TO THE MOUNTAINS

  46

  “IS NOT THIS JOURNEY of ours a fine frolic, Ti?” my uncle inquired the next morning as he and Franklin and I rode south toward the Three Forks.

  “Sir,” I replied, “we have just narrowly escaped being murdered again, this time by the Blackfeet. With the greatest respect, I do not know that I would have hit upon just that word—I mean ‘frolic’—to characterize our perilous odyssey.”

  “Why no, nephew, you would not have. It would take a true lexicographer or—ha ha—the lexicographer True—to come up with so apt a description of our little journey. Either that or a man of singular ways and stays. I have noted something, Ti. You do not seem to have too many little ways and stays.”

  “No, sir. I fear I am most deficient when it comes to ways and stays, little or otherwise.”

  “It is not surprising. Your mother, for all her excellent qualities, is deficient in ways and stays. She was a Kittredge on her father’s side and a Hubbell on her mother’s. We Kinnesons, you know, are much stranger. My father was incomparable when it came to ways and stays. I thought of him just yesterday when we passed that colony of kingfisher-birds nesting in the clay banks above the river.”

  Franklin had been listening to my uncle very attentively. Now he said, “This is most intriguing, True. In what way did the kingfisher-birds remind you of your father?”

  “Because it is the very bird he adopted to be inscribed above the crossed pen and sword on the Clan Kinneson family escutcheon,” my uncle said. “He believed that its blue topknot gave it an utterly unique appearance—and my father’s physiognomy rather resembled that of the kingfisher. For Ti’s grandfather was a locally renowned philosopher, and so busy with his books and philosophizing that he never brushed his back-hair in his life, and it stuck out behind like a kingfisher’s crest.”

  It occurred to me to ask where my uncle had placed the kingfisher in his great Systema Naturae Americanae.

  “Why, Ticonderoga,” he said, “where else but between the turnip and the horned lizard? For like the turnip, which is neither potato nor beet, and like the horned lizard, which is neither toad nor reptile, the chattering kingfisher is neither fish nor fowl but partakes of the characteristics of both. The kingfisher-bird looks as though he went to sleep ten million years ago and just woke up and hath not yet bothered to comb his hair. He looks like a little mistake of Dame Nature that nonetheless worked out capitally in her great overall scheme. As our own mistakes often do, if we have but sense enough to turn them to our advantage.”

  We soon had an opportunity to test this new axiom when, at the Three Forks, we made the mistake of separating from one another. Franklin and my uncle and I parted very early on the morning of our arrival there, each of us to trace a branch of the three tributaries that conjoin to form the Missouri, with plans to meet back at the Forks that evening. Had we stayed together from the start, what I must now narrate almost certainly would not have happened.

  The second serious error was mine alone. When, to my great joy, I came upon Sage a short way up the westernmost tributary, I should have announced myself to her immediately and then ridden off with her to rejoin my uncle and Franklin. All I can say on my own behalf in this regard is that when I first spied her, preparing to bathe in a deep pool across the river, I was so transfixed that I could not bring myself to call out.

  To be sure, the beautiful Yellow Sage Fl
ower bathing in the river at sunrise was a glorious sight. I set up my easel in some young willows and prepared to paint her picture. To tell the truth, the fact that I was spying on her much enhanced my pleasure. After her dip she sat on a lizard-shaped rock by the water to dry off, rubbing some crushed sage on her arms and legs, repainting her fingernails, toenails, and scalp line, and touching up her cheeks with vermilion rouge. She donned her white antelope dress, and while she basked in the sunshine, I finished my picture. Never had my brush, or I, been so inspirited.

  Then I made the third, and by far the greatest, blunder of the morning. Leaving Bucephalus and my rifle by the drying painting, I called out a greeting and began to splash my way across the river to her. There was a sudden yell, followed by a scream from Yellow Sage. Instead of returning to the horse for my weapon, I ran toward her—and toward four Indians on horseback, leading my uncle on Ethan Allen, with his hands bound behind him, his night-stocking askew, his face bruised, and his expression as dolorous as that of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance himself.

  The Indians had surrounded Yellow Sage Flower and were shouting triumphantly. I half ran, half swam across the channel, only to be confronted by one of these warriors. Supposing them to be Blackfoot scouts who had come across True while in pursuit of Sage Flower, I shouted at them to mind their manners. But I was wrong on two counts. The horseman herding me up the bank toward the others had long hair that swept over his mount’s tail and appeared much better dressed than the Blackfeet I had met a few days ago—indeed, he was the best-dressed Indian I had seen thus far, with the most elegant beadwork on his shirt and moccasins. I suddenly realized he was not a Blackfoot. More startling still, though as tall and well set up as any man, the rider was a woman. As were the other three.

  By now two warriors had seized Yellow Sage, bound her wrists together, and carried her upstream to a little sand beach, where a third Indian was waiting with my uncle. Shoved along by my captors horse, I stumbled on the slippery rocks. The horsewoman gave me a cutting lick across the back with her quirt. Infuriated, I seized her by the wrist with the object of yanking her off her mount. But while I was wrestling with her, one of the others came galloping down on me, and the last thing I saw was her stone war club descending toward my head.

  Crows. Cawing black crows lined up on a limb. Four of them, with the Green Mountains of Vermont rising in the background. Then someone said, “Crows.”

  My head ached violently, but by degrees my vision returned and the four birds in the tree resolved into the four warrior women, looking down at me and laughing. My uncle, still on his mule, looked more sorrowful than ever. I tried to move, but my hands and feet were bound.

  “These women are Crows, Ti,” Yellow Sage said. “They belong to a society of female warriors, and they’re on a self-proving mission, scouting for Blackfoot horses to steal. They know I’m a Blackfoot, but they can’t figure out who or what you and your uncle are, and they don’t know yet that your horse is across the river. Whatever you do, don’t tell them.”

  “How, sir, do you find yourself in this fix?” I asked my uncle. Who, for a rare moment in his career, seemed at a complete loss for a reply.

  Then he said, “If you want the truth, Ti, I was taken whilst performing a private function in the bushes. What’s more, these Louisiana Amazonians laughed quite uproariously at my predicament. I might have reached for my arquebus, which was near at hand, but modesty dictated that I first reach for my codpiece—I mean Flame’s cushion—and hitch up my breeches. By then it was too late. This same Queen Hippolyta who rendered you senseless had me on the ground and trussed up like a Christmas goose; and damme, Ti, she was laughing the whole time. I shall never live this down.”

  My greater concern was that we might not live much longer at all. The women were now all talking at once, debating something, I thought. “Can you understand their lingo?” I asked Yellow Sage Flower.

  “Scarcely anyone can, even them. It’s a mishmash of clucks and clicks and gobbles. But we’ve had enough Crow captives around that I’ve gotten the drift of it.”

  “Just then I recognized the root word for ‘fish,’” my uncle suddenly said. “It’s quite universal among the Indians of America, suggesting a possible linkage dating back several thousand years to China. I wish my hands were free so I could get at my lexicon.”

  “Not to mention your weapons,” I ventured to say, a bit vexed that he would be thinking of lexicography at such a moment.

  “I gather,” he continued, “that Hippolyta is rather sweet on me. We might purchase our freedom in exchange for my attentions.”

  In a high, utterly ridiculous voice, he called out, “O Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Your admiring swain awaits you with all eagerness.” He made big moon eyes at the giantess, accompanied by such contortions of his long face and lantern jaw, and such an attempt to bow in a courtly fashion while bound to his mule, that the four Crow women had to support each other to keep from falling on the ground with laughter.

  “What do they propose to do with us?” I asked Yellow Sage Flower.

  “That’s what they’ve been arguing about,” she said. “Tall Mare, whom your uncle calls Hippolyta, wants to tie us to cottonwood trees and use us for target practice. One of the others suggested that they skin us and stuff us with meadow grass like scarecrows. Another wants to roast us over a low fire.”

  “Dear Jehovah!” exclaimed my uncle. “We can’t allow any of that. I have an idea they’ll like better. It’s called the Race for Life, and was often employed by the Persians with their Greek captives. An archer would shoot an arrow as far as his bow would throw it. That’s how much of a head start they’d give the Greek. When he reached the arrow, the whole Persian army would tear out after him, and the Devil take the hindmost.”

  “How often did the captive get away?” Yellow Sage inquired.

  “Why, so far as I know, never,” my uncle said. “But there’s always a first time. I’ll wager that with these ladies after us, we could run like the wind. Go ahead and propose it, my dear. Not to put too fine a point on our predicament, I fear it’s our only chance.”

  47

  THE CROWS LISTENED to Yellow Sage’s proposal, then nodded. It appeared that the Race for Life was on, though as Sage explained to us, she would not be required to participate in this contest, since our captors planned to make a present of her to Tall Mare’s father, one Horse Stealer, who had recently lost his wife of many years. I scarcely knew whether to thank my uncle for his inspiration or curse him. But with the captains and their party still fifty or sixty miles away, battling their way foot by foot up the swift current of the Missouri, and Franklin off on the easternmost of the three tributaries, we had little hope of rescue. I had to agree that running for our lives would be better than being posted up for a target or skinned alive.

  Tall Mare jerked me to my feet, cut the thongs binding my hands and feet, then freed my uncle. As she fetched her bow from her horse and nocked an arrow, an idea occurred to me.

  “Quick,” I said to Yellow Sage Flower, “try to talk her into shooting the arrow across the river. Dare her to do it. Say I challenge her to shoot across the river.”

  Yellow Sage Flower spoke fast, more clucks and gobbles. But Tall Mare laughed and shook her head. “Ha ha, Ti,” chuckled my uncle. “Letting us cross the river is evidently more of an advantage than they care to give us. We’ll have to come up with a different ruse.”

  “We’d better do so quickly,” I said.

  Sage Flower looked around, and her gaze alighted on the lizard-shaped boulder where she had been captured. She spoke in Crow again, and Tall Mare relayed her words to her three companions.

  To us, in English, Yellow Sage Flower said, “I think I’ve persuaded her to shoot the arrow down near that big stone. I told them they should kill you where they found me, that it would make a grand story to tell. Now here’s a story for you. I’ll make it short. Long ago the Blackfeet trapped Sleek Otter out on the open prairie wher
e he couldn’t get away. Never having seen an otter before, they didn’t know anything about his ways. So when he asked them to let him go down by the riverbank to say a last prayer to Creator Napi, they fell for it. Sleek Otter waddled down to the water, turned around, and instead of a prayer, shouted out a curse on the Blackfeet. Then he plunged into his natural element and disappeared forever.”

  As Tall Mare fired her arrow high into the blue sky, I said to Sage, “But we aren’t otters.”

  “Think like one,” she said. “It will help.”

  Tall Mare barked something at me as her arrow came to rest near the lizard rock.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said strip off your clothes, both of you, and hightail it,” Sage said.

  Now the Crow women were painting diagonal vermilion stripes on their faces. At the same time, I became aware of a large black cloud climbing up in the sky from the south.

  “Ask her, with the greatest respect, if I may, for modesty’s sake, leave on my tights and codpiece,” said my uncle.

  “Leave them on, by all means,” Sage said, to my considerable relief, since I was no more eager than he to stand stark naked before her and the Amazonians. “Just go. And remember Sleek Otter.”

  “For Sleek Otter and for Scholia Aristotle!” cried my uncle, and broke into a lumbering sprint, which I thought to accelerate somewhat by taking his hand in mine and half-dragging him along beside me. I refused to look back, even when an arrow whizzed just over our heads and another appeared quivering in the ground by my bare foot.

  “Run, run, as fast as you can,” Private True called back over his shoulder to the Crows. “You can’t catch me, I’m the—”