The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  I had surmised as much myself, but now a terrifying idea occurred to me. “What is to prevent the Blackfeet from returning in great numbers and wiping out Lewis’s entire expedition?”

  My uncle looked off to the west in the direction the Indians had gone. “Us,” he said.

  He nodded, and his yellow eyes gleamed with purpose. “This will be our plan, lad. You cut directly for Chief Mountain and Yellow Sage Flower. I’ll follow the Indians and persuade them and their cohorts that it isn’t in their best interest to pursue Lewis. We’ll meet on Chief tomorrow or the next day.”

  “But what if you can’t persuade the Blackfeet—”

  With my uncle, however, there was never a moment’s doubt once he had made up his mind. “Excelsior!” he called out. And immediately posted west, waving his stocking cap over his head like a young squire off on his first quest.

  On I rode, into the late afternoon. As I drew closer to the huge square mountain, I saw ahead on the prairie a tall dust cloud, which seemed to move neither toward nor away from me. From it came a doleful chanting, which rose and fell in an eerie rhythm unlike any singing I had ever heard. Presently I dismounted, and climbed a low rise about a mile from Chief Mountain. Through my pocket glass I saw, near the base of the mountain, at least a thousand horsemen with whitened faces, cantering in a gigantic circle around a scaffold upon which lay two figures wrapped in robes. As the Indians rode, they sang a strange hymn, now rising to a howl of anger, now falling to a dirge. This had to be a funeral ceremony for the men killed on the Two Medicine, whose blood my uncle and I had discovered. But who were they? Indians or Americans?

  Scattered over the prairie near the scaffolds stood several tall western firs that had sprung up a little beyond the tree line at the foot of the mountain. Their trunks were dense with dead branches for the first fifty or sixty feet up from their base. Tied to several of them, in the tangle of dead limbs, were crude human effigies wrapped in red, white, and blue cloth. As I watched, one of the circling riders dismounted, ran to the base of a fir, and flung a lighted torch onto a pile of kindle at its base. Instantly the entire tree took fire, the flames whooshing up the trunk in a crackling roar and engulfing the cloth effigy, to a shout of triumph from the riders.

  As I watched the burning fir tree through my glass, I felt something hard and cold on the back of my neck. Spinning around, I discovered Smoke’s particular friend, Buffalo’s Back Fat, staring straight down the barrel of his musket at me.

  On our way across the prairie toward the circling warriors, Buffalo’s Back Fat angrily told me that earlier in the day several young Blackfeet had ridden into Smoke’s camp at the foot of the mountain with the corpses of two of their comrades. According to their account, the evening before, while scouting for bison on the Two Medicine, they had run into four Americans. The Indians and the white men had agreed to camp together. But when the Americans revealed that they planned to return to the Rocky Mountains soon and trade not only with the Blackfeet but with their ancestral enemies, including the Crow and the Shoshone, the youths had decided to steal their horses and rifles as a warning of what would follow if the whites tried to carry out their plan. At dawn there had been a skirmish. One of the Indians, a favorite cousin of Smoke’s named Side Hill Calf, had been shot, and another had been knifed to death. The ceremony I had been watching was both a funeral and a war dance.

  The riders were now wheeling about the scaffolds in several concentric circles. Some of the men were inflicting gashes on their legs with knives and jagged pieces of flint. A man wearing bison horns broke out of the outermost circle and galloped toward us. He rode around me once, then reined in his pony and stared at me with eyes as black as the Missouri on the darkest night of the year. “So,” Smoke said to Buffalo’s Back Fat, “you’ve caught one of them already. The young wizard who makes men with paints.”

  To me he said, “Where is the old man, your traveling companion?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in the Blackfoot I had learned from Franklin over the winter.

  Smoke studied me. “Tomorrow morning, wizard, when the funeral is over, we will pursue your American captain, lie in wait for him and the other murderers where the River of Yellow Stones flows into the Mother of Rivers, and wipe out the entire party as we should have done last summer when they first appeared. In the meantime we will see if evil wizards who duplicate people in paint can be burned.”

  He turned to Buffalo’s Back Fat. “Lash him up in a fir tree,” he said. “Maybe that will flush out the old man. Then we’ll serve him the same.”

  There was a heaviness in Smoke’s voice and eyes that made me think he took no pleasure in this business and no pleasure in contemplating Lewis’s destruction. I realized that he believed he was in the right, just as the American party did. My uncle’s wise words—“our lives are mighty paradoxes”—came back to me, and I knew better now what he had meant by them.

  Like the effigies around me, I was bound to the trunk of a tree about thirty feet off the ground in the midst of dozens of tinder-dry dead limbs. Nearby, the pitchy trunk of the tree that had earlier been lighted afire continued to smolder. And although one might imagine that the Okeepa ritual I had undergone back at the Mandans would have prepared me for such an ordeal as this, I found that it had not.

  “Smoke,” I called down, “where is Yellow Sage?”

  “Where you can’t get at her with your wizardry.”

  The Blackfeet continued to ride in concentric circles, tightening in on me as the sun dipped toward the peaks to the west.

  Buffalo’s Back Fat and Smoke began piling brush around the base of my fir tree. I thought of Joan of Arc and other old sainted martyrs. But I was no saint, nor did I wish to become a martyr. I imagined my remains, a charred husk of a person on a blackened tree. The white faces of the riders glowed blood-red in the sinking sun, which was now a huge crimson orb, like the shining glass ornaments on our Yuletide tree at home. Thinking of Vermont and Christmas reminded me of my parents, sitting in our farmhouse kitchen, my father scanning last week’s Boston paper to see what items he could glean for the Kingdom County Monitor, my mother rolling the fragrant, gingery dough for her cartwheel cookies and talking happily about our reunion.

  Smoke remounted his pony and joined the innermost ring of riders. Someone had already handed him a lighted pine torch.

  As the sun started to drop from sight, its upper half turned from red to pink, with bars of yellow across it. The sun actually seemed to be moving toward me through the sky. The Blackfeet looked up and seemed transfixed as on it came. Suddenly I realized that it was not the sun but a great ball moving through the sky. No, not a ball—a balloon! Drifting our way on the evening breeze came a vast balloon with a basket depending from it and, standing in the basket, the figure of a man. The Indians watched in perfect silence. Even Smoke seemed spellbound.

  “The sun is about to swallow us up!” Buffalo’s Back Fat exclaimed.

  Smoke narrowed his eyes. When the air-craft drew almost overhead, its pilot reached into the bottom of the basket and produced his tin hearing trumpet. Lifting it to his ear, he roared, “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the First Continental Congress, surrender Ticonderoga!”

  As my uncle fed more charcoal to the brazier affixed just below the mouth of the great pink and yellow silk bag, a second figure arose beside him, a woman with long dark hair, wearing a white dress. Yellow Sage Flower threw a rope over the side and descended hand over hand, as fast as a sailor. By the time she reached the ground the balloon was directly above our heads. Holding the rope like a tether, Sage called out, “Smoke. Private True Kinneson, on high in his great sky-barque, orders you to release your captive. Hurry! Cut him down before the private hurls brimstone at you or shoots you with his great gun with the belled muzzle.”

  But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than a sudden gust of wind caught the balloon and yanked the rope out of Sage’s hand. In a twinkling the balloon and the basket, with my uncle i
nside, had lifted high into the firmament, sailing east faster and faster on the strong breeze. And though my uncle called out encouragingly to me and waved his jingling night-stocking as triumphantly as if my rescue had gone exactly as planned, soon the silk bag was just a speck in the heavens. Then it was gone.

  With great presence of mind Sage said, “Piegans, Lords of the Plains, I come with a story. Hear my tale. There’s a message for you inside it.”

  “No more tales, Yellow Sage,” Smoke said. “These Americans are evil people. They must be destroyed.”

  “If you don’t wish to hear it, put your hands over your ears like the wayward child you remind me of. But first you will cut the young painter down from the fir tree. He wasn’t with the men who killed Side Hill Calf and Elk Ivory, and he hasn’t harmed anyone.”

  “He is a dangerous liar,” Smoke said. “With his paints he makes things that are not so appear so. Such a sorcerer must be burned.”

  “Hear my story before you determine his fate. What harm can there be in cutting him down?”

  “We will leave him there,” Smoke said. “Don’t press your luck, Yellow Sage Flower. You have permission to tell your story. Be quick about it.”

  Sage gave Smoke a fierce look, but he merely gestured for her to begin.

  “People,” she said, “you all know that many of the original Piegans were animals. In those early days a catamount named Tawny Panther was born in the Piegan Nation. Tawny Panther was a great artist. On cured buffalo robes and tepee covers he depicted in paint the many accomplishments and victories of his people. He even painted Napi making the world and his first and second wives, Old Woman and Old Woman Two. But eventually Tawny Panther began to long for a wife himself. He went to my grandfather and said, ‘Great Creator, I have painted you making the world and given you the completed picture and many other pictures as well. You have said that these pictures please you. Very well. Now I want you to create a panther wife for me.’

  “But Napi, as you know, never liked to do for his children what they could do for themselves. He said, ‘No, my large feline friend. I won’t make you a wife. But you are an artist. Make your own wife with paints. If your picture pleases me, I’ll breathe life into it.’

  “So Tawny Panther painted a beautiful panther-woman. My grandfather was delighted with the picture. As he had promised, he invested it with life, and named the panther-woman Mint and gave her the natural scent of the fragrant wild plant that grows near our beautiful streams. And Tawny Panther and Mint were joined together in matrimony. But I ask you, my lords, when in the course of human events, or animal affairs either, did matters ever run smoothly? Soon enough Napi, who as we all know has a wandering eye, began to lust after Mint himself. Knowing this, the brave Tawny Panther challenged the old trickster to single combat at dawn.”

  A murmur went up from the Blackfeet.

  Sage looked at me. “Quickly, Ti,” she said in English. “Challenge Smoke to fight you on Chief Mountain at dawn. Your lance against his.”

  Though my heart was beating fast, I called out, “Smoke! I challenge you to meet me on Chief Mountain at dawn. Your lance against mine.”

  The chief rode forward to the base of my tree. “Agreed,” he said. “I will meet you in Red Paintbrush Meadow, on the lower southeast slope of Chief Mountain, at daybreak tomorrow.”

  Just then the moon lifted above the plains to the east, as orange as the field pumpkins my mother grew between her rows of corn at home in Vermont, causing the white clay on the faces of Smoke and the other Indians to shimmer and glow.

  “But Sage,” cried Buffalo’s Back Fat, “you didn’t finish your story. What about the combat between Napi and Tawny Panther? How did it end?”

  “I will tell you how the story ended tomorrow evening, after the combat between Smoke and Ti.”

  “By tomorrow evening,” Smoke said, “my men and I will be many miles from here, riding to annihilate the Americans. That is my first say.”

  “And my second say,” Sage shot back, “is that the winner of your duel will determine the fate of the American party. Now you will cut the painter down from the tree and let him properly prepare himself for tomorrow’s combat.”

  Later, as Sage and I sat a little apart from the beclayed riders, I scanned the moonlit side of Chief Mountain through my telescope for any sign of my uncle’s balloon, but I could see no trace of it. As I set down the glass, Sage said, “Ticonderoga, your uncle is fine. Napi has many wonderful new adventures in store for him, I promise you. In the meantime, I must tell you that Smoke has promised me ten buffalo hides for tepee covers, and a new chokecherry bow, and two Crow servants to wait on me hand and foot if I marry him. What could you give me that could possibly match all that?”

  “Only this,” I said. Opening the metal tube containing my paintings, I extracted the picture I had done the year before, which I called Yellow Sage Bathing at the Three Forks. I unrolled it and handed it to her. “It’s yours,” I said, “however tomorrow turns out.”

  A delighted smile came over Yellow Sage’s face; for a moment she looked more like a girl of thirteen or fourteen than a young woman of eighteen. But then she whipped the picture away from the firelight and said, “Who is this brazen hussy? I shan’t have you looking at her. If you want the truth, I’m very jealous. I may have to burn her up. In the meantime, I’ll finish the story of Napi and Tawny Panther. It is very true that my grandfather had a twelve-foot-long lance tipped with the feathers of a war eagle, which had never missed its mark. What’s more, like Smoke, Napi can change himself into any animal, and even make himself invisible. But the artist Tawny Panther was more powerful still. For he could make what was invisible, except in his head, visible. Hear now how the wily Blackfoot panther used his lance to defeat my grandfather, then lived happily ever after with his fragrant wife, Mint, in the Sweetgrass beyond Chief Mountain, in the Land of the Glaciers . . .”

  68

  AT DAWN, SMOKE, wearing red and black war paint and carrying his feathered lance, and I, with my easel, paints, brushes, and the metal tube containing all my finished paintings, rode our horses toward Chief Mountain with an escort of twelve Blackfoot warriors. At the base of the mountain I gave my rifle and ammunition to Buffalo’s Back Fat to hold for me, telling him that I would rely entirely on my “wizardry.” Smoke assured the other riders that well before noon he would be back with my scalp, and he ordered them to be ready, along with his thousand warriors, to ride to the place where they would ambush the Americans. The other men rode off without looking back, and Smoke and I started up the first slope.

  As we approached a stand of tall firs, he said to me, “There is a glade on the other side of these woods, American. I’ll meet you there in the same time it has taken us to ride this far”—which was about an hour. Then he appeared to transform himself into a wisp of mountain fog and slipped out of sight into the woods.

  I dismounted, removed my belongings from Bucephalus, and took off his saddle and bridle. “Now, sir,” I said. “For two years and more you’ve served me better than I could ever have wished for. Regardless of what happens to me today, you’re free.” I whacked him on the flank, and he nickered once and headed back down the mountain.

  I started into the woods and some minutes later reached the glade Smoke had mentioned. Here, surrounded by lupines and paintbrush flowers, I set up my easel and went quickly to work.

  Smoke was approaching. I could not hear him, but I could smell the tang of charred wood as a man-shaped column of smoke drifted toward me across the opening. Abruptly, the Blackfoot chief appeared in his own shape, not far from where I was kneeling. So swiftly I could scarcely follow the motion, he brought back his lance and hurled it straight through my chest. With a war cry he sprang at me, flourishing his knife—only to discover that a painting of a man cannot be scalped. His shout of triumph turned to a scream of anger. But by then I was gone from my hiding place in the nearby forest, and he was left with nothing but a torn painting. The great Smoke h
ad killed a picture.

  Noon. The sun beat down through the stunted trees and glanced off the cliffs above me. I was faint from lack of food, but there was plenty of water on the mountain, and the breeze off the ice fields above the cliffs was cool. This time I was wedged into a fissure in a rock wall. Just as the sun reached the meridian, a white wolf trotted up the defile. He tested the air with his nose, howled, and transformed into Smoke, who instantly threw his lance through my second painting. When he realized his mistake, his cry of rage was not a man’s but a wolf’s. He changed back into the animal and, with a dodging motion, ran off howling.

  So far, Tawny Panther’s stratagem had worked perfectly. But I knew I would see Smoke once more before nightfall. And our third encounter would determine Lewis’s fate as well as my own.

  Sunset was less than an hour away. All afternoon I had eluded the shape-shifter, who had taken the form now of a wolf, now a bear, now a bighorn sheep. As we climbed higher on the mountain, up onto the steep snowfields, where I needed to use the metal tube holding my paintings as a walking staff, I grew weaker.

  I found the ice cave exactly where Yellow Sage had said it would be. And just as she had told me, it seemed to go entirely through the side of the mountain, a natural tunnel with frozen blue walls. I hurried through the passageway, past flickering images in the ice of long-dead Blackfoot chiefs and medicine men. At the far end I removed my paintings from the tube and arranged them around the walls of the cavern so that the slanting sunlight shone in on them, illuminating my tableaux of the Great Falls, the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises, the Bitterroots, the Columbia, and all the rest. Then, with the last of my strength, I set up my easel and rapidly began to paint what might very well be my final picture.