The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  The captain looked up, and I perceived that around his neck on a string hung a small slate much like that upon which I had learned my ABC’s. The word “Speak” appeared on the slate seemingly of its own accord. As Mute Jack erased the word with a black cloth, his eyes, which were as black as the cover of his Bible, never left mine. He waited for my reply.

  “Captain,” I said, “my name is Ticonderoga Kinneson. I am a member of an expedition of discovery and exploration led by my uncle, Private True Teague Kinneson, from Vermont and the United States.”

  Jack Jamieson continued to regard me. Then the name “Meriwether Lewis?” appeared on the slate. I shrugged as if unfamiliar with the Lewis party, and repeated that I had come west with my uncle, and wished to be set ashore at Jack’s earliest convenience.

  The captain and mate then took me back out onto the deck, where the ship’s marines were drilling, barefoot and soundless. Their discipline was impeccable, their silence terrifying. A wild thought of trying to lure the ship onto the breakers off the headland flashed across my mind. But by now my mouth was too dry to speak. At a nod from Mute Jack, the mate hurried to fetch me a drink. The beverage turned out to be seawater, and in a choking spasm I lost consciousness again.

  It was now dusk, and I could see that we were anchored in the mouth of the Columbia. Under Mute Jack’s gaze, the crew was practicing running the cannons in and out, working in deadly silent fashion, the cannon wheels being muffled in cloth. Presently he assembled the ship’s crew, and the mate told them that he believed Lewis’s party was encamped not far distant. Mute Jack’s plan was to remain with the ship while the marines proceeded upriver in the cutter to locate the Americans by their campfires and report back. Just before dawn, the ship would sail into the estuary and bombard the Americans, after which the marines would mount an assault on the camp and finish off any survivors in whatever manner they saw fit.

  As darkness fell, the captain dispatched the cutter and marines, with the elderly mate at the tiller. I could not think what to do, short of leaping over the side, which would have been pointless under the circumstances, the tide here being too powerful for any man to swim against. My head was beginning to spin again when, from the dark water below, a seal barked. Then another. Swarming up the side of the ship and over the rail in the starlight came an army of demi-creatures, with the arms, legs, and bodies of men and the heads of giant seals, walruses, white bears, sharks, and whales, each barking or roaring or bellowing or braying after its kind. And each came bearing a bow or a lance or a club, with which they immediately started round the ship’s deck, prosecuting their grisly business, while I watched in horror. There were halibut-headed men and rayheaded men, men with the heads of giant crabs and mollusks and sea-denizens stranger still, beaked squid and octopi and, most ferocious of all, a man with the head of a salmon, wielding a great white club. At his side fought a warrior in a narwhal mask, bearing a bundle of the sharpened tusks of his watery namesake, which he hurled at the ship’s crew with deadly accuracy. With one he skewered Mute Jack’s arm to the wheel.

  The captain wrenched free, then flung himself back onto the wheel, with the clear intent of spinning it entirely around and broaching the ship. The narwhal-man pitched a tusk directly through his chest, driving him over the rail and into the sea, where milling sharks converged on him with all the swift ferocity of their kind.

  In the meantime the mate’s raiders in the cutter, hearing the death screams of their fellows, raced back to the ship. Under the salmon-warrior’s direction, two of the forward cannons were charged with grapeshot. As the sloop passed below the ship’s bow, the guns were trained directly down onto the marines and a double volley fired point-blank, clearing the deck of living men, all but the mate in the frock coat, who came running up the sheer side of the ship like an ape and leaped lightly onto the rail. His coat now glowed a bright green; two short red horns sprouted from his head, a flaming pointed beard from his chin, and two hairy cloven hoofs appeared where his feet had been. “I’ll see you in Hell yet,” he boomed out to the salmonheaded man in the voice of twenty demons. Spreading his cloak, he made a great leap upward toward the mast; but the salmon-man reached up as he passed overhead, caught him by one ankle and the tail of his frock coat, and, spinning entirely around, hurled him far out to sea, where he vanished like an extinguished meteor.

  “Tooleroo,” said my uncle’s voice from inside the mask. “Hell is the place for him, Ti, and I think we won’t pursue him there. But what a play it would make if we did!”

  “Water,” I managed to say. I remember drinking as though I would never stop, and after that I remember nothing else until morning.

  61

  “WHEN FRANKLIN AND I saw the pirate ship,” my uncle was telling me, “we headed for shore. Our intention was to carry our canoe over the headland, cross the Columbia, and return with the captains and their men to attack the ship by night and rescue you. But up a little creek we ran right into the Tlingits, who were on their way downstream in three war canoes. I confess, Ti, that for a few uneasy minutes it appeared as though all was over for us. I won them over by offering them maple sugar on wappato bread, toasted, which they declared the best dish they’d ever laid a lip over. As it turned out, the pirates had just attacked and burned several Tlingit villages north of Vancouver Bay, and the Tlingits were eager for a way to avenge these depredations. I spoke to them first in Norse, but discovered that they have unfortunately lost the language of their Viking ancestors. So I was obliged to address them in Russian, of which they have some rudiments. I asked if they were familiar with the old saw ‘to kill two birds with one stone.’ They were not, but had an equivalent saying, ‘to catch two salmon on one hook’ Therefore, I inquired if they would like to catch two salmon on one hook by eliminating the crew of the warship which had destroyed their villages and then annihilating, in the bargain, the Russians at Fort Barrow, who have oppressed their people for nearly a century. The Tlingits said yes, they would very much like to do that; but they did not see how it was possible. I laid out my plan for a nocturnal attack on the ship, I to lead the assault in the mask of a king salmon, and Franklin wearing the headpiece of a narwhal. Is that not a very pretty story?”

  “It is, sir. But tell me, who were these pirates?”

  “Why, Ti, according to papers in the captain’s cabin, no more nor less than a gang of renegade Englishmen, sailing under a letter of marque, or private commission, with orders to capture or kill Meriwether Lewis to prevent America from establishing a claim on the Northwest Territory. We have saved the expedition’s skin again, nephew. Though Franklin and I agree that it will be best not to mention this little episode to anyone, including the captains, lest it provoke another war between America and Great Britain.”

  I said, “I congratulate you, sir, on the success of your attack. And upon finally dispatching your Gentleman friend back to where he belongs. But I was very surprised that it was the first officer who turned out to be he and not the captain, who was a hideous mute, bloodthirsty fellow.”

  “It is not astonishing, Ti. My old friend, you see, is much more of an abettor than a doer. It’s odd. I rather miss him already. I was not entirely in jest when I said that an expedition to his fiery purlieus would be matter for a great play. There is precedent, you know, in Virgil and Dante. But let that go for the nonce. Paint a picture of me in the salmon mask applying the Old Scotch Spin or, as it is also called, the Devil’s Ceilidh, to my friend. He will trouble us no more, I think. It—I mean the Ceilidh—is guaranteed to keep him away.”

  While a crew of Tlingits acquainted themselves with the particularities of sailing the captured warship, my uncle introduced me to his new friends from the north. There were three divisions in the Tlingit raiding party, each consisting of fifty men. The names of their chiefs were Ice Bear, Walrus, and Tsar Nicholas, and under their escort we now repaired to the stream where they had surprised my uncle and Franklin. The creek was hemmed in on both sides by tall western cedars.
A soft spring rain had begun to fall, and the raindrops slipping off the trees into the still water, the dense fog, and the silence of our paddlers all enhanced the mystery of this place. Soon we put in at a little sandy shore. The Tlingits then led us along a faint path up a knoll and down the other side into a twilit clearing. Silently, Chief Ice Bear pointed upward.

  “O dear Jesu!” cried my uncle.

  We were surrounded by gigantic sea and coastal beasts with human features, twenty or thirty feet tall, scowling down upon us in the dusk as if they meant to devour us. But Franklin bowed and called up to them, “How do you do, good sirs? Pray, tell me. Is the salmon angling lively in these parts?”

  By degrees, I gathered my wits together and realized that the giant apparitions were, in fact, the trunks of trees, elaborately carved into the shapes of walruses, seals, whales, bears, and salmon. Several had multiple heads, with human-like faces and open maws painted blue, red, or yellow. In all I counted fifteen figures. Chief Walrus told my uncle that these relics were the handiwork of his people, who from time to time convened here in the cedar grove to carve new memorials to their own fierceness.

  Tsar Nicholas, a renowned sculptor, now began carving into a fresh cedar the frowning visage of Private True Teague Kinneson himself, in commemoration of his signal action in dispatching the Devil back to Hell.

  In the meantime, the Tlingits prepared for a victory celebration. First they built a large bonfire, into which, to my considerable surprise, each man threw his animal mask and one or two treasured personal items. Also, they lighted trench fires to roast elk, bear, salmon, and many delicious viands from the ship’s pantry, not to mention the deceased crew members thereof. Which, the Tlingits complained, were quite fishy-tasting from having been at sea too long. They looked at my uncle and at me, felt the flesh on our arms and hams, and said jestingly (I trusted) that they preferred good lean landsmen to sailors any day of the week.

  The following day came the division of the spoils. As guests of honor, Franklin, my uncle, and I were offered our pick. I selected a little china teapot with periwinkle-blue flowers for Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories. My uncle’s eyes were larger. He wanted two hundred yards of pink silk, one hundred of yellow, and a large metal cooking brazier, along with a goodly supply of charcoal, from the stores of an Indiaman that the pirate ship had captured and burned off Peru. Finally it was Franklin’s turn to choose. The chiefs told him that, as he had personally killed ten men, including the ship’s captain, and fought with more deadly purpose than they had ever witnessed—though this was not to detract from my uncle’s heroic work—he was to pick whatever his heart desired, even if he chose to strip the ship of all remaining plunder. He told them he would like to sleep on their most generous offer and make his selection on the morrow.

  More than once during our long journey to the Pacific, my uncle had remarked to me that the one thing we could rely on was that each new day would bring something entirely different from the day before. The following morning was no exception to this precept, which he called “Kinneson’s Axiom of Perpetual Surprises, Most of Them Bad but Some Good and Others Bad but Susceptible to Favorable Interpretations.” Soon after dawn, Franklin closeted himself for several hours with Walrus, Ice Bear, and Tsar Nicolas in the cabin of the captured ship. When their tête-à-tête was completed, he came forth all smiles and addressed us as follows. “My dear friends, the great and only constant in life is change. Last night I went to sleep a Blackfoot savant. This morning I was made a Tlingit chief. Yes, my companions. I have been invested as Chief Narwhal. And, in order not to draw out a sad fact, I must now take my leave of you. For my new people have chosen me to lead them in the all-out naval assault on their Russian oppressors at Fort Barrow, and I have chosen for my reward the ship itself. We weigh anchor within the hour. Part we must, I to fight the Russians, and you, Private True, to guide the captains home to safety. And Ticonderoga to make his reputation as the first artist of Louisiana. Work on developing strong story lines in your pictures, Ti. You may yet turn out to be the Michelangelo of the American West. Or”—this with great good cheer—“you may not.”

  Chief Narwhal turned back to my uncle, clasped him close, clapped him on the back several times, and declared that his Comedy of Ethan Allen was without doubt the finest thing of its sort in the history of the universe. And if he ever, in any port in the world, heard a critic hint that the play violated any of Scholia Aristotle’s unities, that wretch would rue the day he had been born. Upon which, all gleaming in his white antelope suit and colored feathers and long, single-tusked whale mask, the new chief stepped to the quarterdeck of the Tlingit, as he had named his vessel, and issued the order to raise the anchor. My uncle and Doubting Seal and I watched from the Seal’s canoe as the crew sprang to the rigging and unfurled the sails; then the Tlingit dipped its bow and skimmed lightly off to the northwest. A few miles off the coast it swung due north, putting on all sail possible, and fired off a cannon in farewell.

  “Thither goes a great man, Ti,” my uncle sighed. “I’d fight to the death the fellow who said otherwise. Heaven above knows that Franklin—I mean Chief Narwhal—may have his little ways and stays; but he is a noble fellow, and the best friend who ever walked God’s green earth. He will make a splendid Viking chieftain. Oh! The salt spray gets in my eyes. I weep.”

  62

  March 22, 1806

  Charles and Helen of Troy Kinneson

  Kingdom Common, Republic of Vermont, U.S.A.

  Dear Father and Mother,

  I write hurriedly to say that after a most productive winter by the Pacific, uncle and I leave with Captain Lewis tomorrow for our return trip up the Columbia to the Rocky Mountains, thence down the Missouri to St. Louis and so home. We are both in excellent health. Our arrival may precede that of this letter, which I have left with my friend Doubting Seal, to entrust to the care of the first homeward-bound American trading vessel to put in at the mouth of the Columbia. But I must not omit to mention—in the bustle of preparing for our departure I nearly forgot—that we will be making a brief detour on our return trip, to the Land of the Glaciers.

  With haste but fondest regards from

  Your loving son,

  Ticonderoga

  63

  DURING AN OTHERWISE uneventful trip from the Pacific back up the Columbia, Serpent, and Clearwater rivers to the Bitterroot Mountains, Captain Lewis had a serious misunderstanding with the Nez Perce Indians. As it turned out, these people were quarreling among themselves and at first refused to give back our horses. How the recrossing of the Bitterroots could be undertaken without mounts was a very anxious concern for everyone. But my uncle announced that he had yet another little trick up his sleeve, and the Indians would soon be so grateful to him that they would return all of our horses and be clamoring to give us a great many more besides. He assembled the entire American party, along with the chiefs and the most athletic young men of the Nez Perce Nation, and said that he intended to teach them a great and marvelous game, which he had invented in his former profession as a schoolmaster for his scholars to play at recess.

  He divided the men into two thirty-man teams, with Lewis and the American expeditionaries on one side and us and twenty-eight Nez Perce on the other. He then arrayed the Indians on our team in strategic positions around a riverside meadow, in which he placed four square bags stuffed with fir needles and spaced about one hundred feet apart, making the shape of a diamond. Next he produced a fist-sized sphere he had fashioned from a kind of gutta-percha made of gulls’ feathers bound together with pine resin and wrapped in elk hide.

  Handing his prehistoric bison’s thigh to Drouillard, the party’s hunter, my uncle strode out on the playing field and declared, “Gentlemen, I will hurl this ball—which I have named ‘Punisher,’ for reasons that will very soon become apparent—toward George Drouillard. He will strike it—if he can—then attempt to run to each of the sacks, which I call ‘safe-sacks,’ in turn before a member of my team
can recover the ball and strike him with it. He may, however, tarry on any safe-sack he wishes, there to be secure from persecution, while the next striker on his team essays to solve my cunning serves. When ten explorers have been struck off a safe-sack by the Punisher, or have fruitlessly swung the bison’s club five times without touching the ball, the two sides will reverse positions and my team will strike. The first team to send one hundred men safely round the circuit wins.”

  Then in his great stage voice he cried out, “Let the first game of Kinneson-ball begin.”

  Drouillard stepped up to the first safe-sack. My uncle smiled grimly, windmilled his throwing arm round his head several times, twisted his body into a dozen fantastical contortions, kicked his lean shank high, and blazed the Punisher by Drouillard—who, a full second after the missile had passed, made a feeble hacking motion with the bone.

  “You must do better than that, frog-eater,” cried my uncle. “Try this for size.” Again he wound himself up like a top and hurled the Punisher at the expedition’s hunter. But Drouillard, however skillful at bringing down game, had no notion what to do with his striker and actually fell to his knees trying to hit the ball. Five times my uncle threw. Five times Drouillard missed.

  “Sit down now, varlet, hang thy head in shame; root up some truffles, swine,” cried my uncle. And to John Shields, who batted next: “Hey, striker, hey, striker. What? Art blind? You missed by a furlong.”

  Hapless Shields had the same luck as Drouillard and was subjected to even more abuse from my uncle, to the great amusement of our Indian teammates and several hundred Nez Perce spectators. The next two strikers, Privates Pryor and Bratton, met with an identical fate. Moreover, my uncle continued to make up new rules as the contest progressed. When Bratton elected not to swing at an offering that flew high over his head like a flushing grouse, it was counted as a miss for the batsman, on the grounds that the ball was strikable. As indeed it would have been, had the man stood ten feet tall.