The flashing lights on the horizon had come often last fall, a sign from the youngest son of the Cold Man. Cold had come early, and it would last a long time. Here in Lone Elk’s winter village, on the Tukupa, they were already running out of dried salmon, and their stores of camas and qawas bread and dried berries were low. Game was scarce; it had been too cold for most hunters to stay out overnight, and game within a day’s ride of their village had been hunted out.
She stopped to squat at the latrine, then walked to the river, where she used a large oval stone to break the ice. She dipped each basket in turn into the freezing water, then lugged them up the hill to the longhouse, where she set them outside the door. She turned to the shed opposite her family’s doorway, which was almost empty—even firewood was scarce. She took a load of willow and alder and reentered the lodge. She put down the wood, sank to her knees and placed a few small sticks on the coals, leaned over and gently blew until one caught fire. Then she quietly added wood until the fire took hold. Finally, she added three large stones to the fire.
She squatted beside Black Horn, put both hands under his buffalo robe, and rolled him over on his other side. He stirred, then sank back into sleep. For five snows he had been unable to move his hands or feet. For the last two he had been unable to move his arms or legs.
She heard someone else stir, looked toward the sound. She could make out Winter Walking kneeling by another fire pit, blowing on the coals. Swan stood up now and went back outside to retrieve the bags of water. When the rocks glowed red she used a forked stick to lift them out, one by one, and place them in one of the water bags. Soon the water was steaming, and she moved softly past Black Horn and Lone Elk to retrieve dried serviceberries and the last pieces of qawas bread from the kakahpa bag. She returned to the fire and crumbled the bread and berries into the boiling water, to make komsit.
After a few minutes, Spotted Wolf rose and poured komsit into his bowl. He nodded his thanks, then sat back on his heels and brought the bowl to his lips. He was tall like her husband but broader across the chest. When he finished he put down the bowl and spoke quietly: “I will hunt farther away today, stay out tonight.”
He had been hunting for all of them. His father, Black Horn, could not move, Lone Elk was too old, and her husband was dead. She was grateful, but she hated to be in Spotted Wolf’s debt, lest he think that, as her husband’s brother, it was his right to take her as his second wife. “I will gather pine nuts and ho’pop,” she said.
He frowned. People resorted to baking the black moss that grew on pine trees only when starvation threatened. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I will find game.”
Swan stepped out on the ice, wondered if it would support her. This was only the second winter she had ever seen the Tukupa frozen. She took another step, then another. Perhaps if she got to the middle, where the current was swiftest, she would fall through, and her misery would end. She was halfway there when she heard her name.
“Swan Lighting!”
She stopped, looked back, but made no move to return. It was her brother, Black Eagle.
“Come back, or I will come out there after you!”
He wore a bearskin robe, which reached almost to the ground, and a headdress of rabbit skins around his ears. When she did not move, he stepped onto the ice.
“Stop!” she called. “I will come.” She walked slowly toward him, and he stepped back off the ice. They could both hear it cracking.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Gathering wood. We are running out on this side.”
He stared at her, and they both knew she was lying. “In our longhouse we have plenty of wood and meat. An extra horse I brought for you to ride home.”
“This is my home now.”
“They are starving here.”
“Black Horn needs me.”
“His people can care for him. You are just another mouth to feed.”
“Spotted Wolf’s wife is lazy, and Weeping Turtle and Lone Elk are old. My husband would want me to help.”
He took her gloved hands in his. “Your husband was my closest friend. I knew him before you did. He would want his wife to go on with her life.”
She looked down, fighting back tears.
“Come home, Sister.”
She could only shake her head, no.
“What are you trying to prove? What do you think will come of your obsession with Black Horn?”
“I just want my husband back,” she said, knowing as she said it how ridiculous it sounded.
They warmed up beside the fire in the shadowed longhouse, and she made mountain tea. It was hard for Black Horn to drink when he was lying down, so Black Eagle raised him up.
When Black Horn lay down again and dozed off, Black Eagle spoke, in a quiet voice, so no one else could hear. “Red Hair told me what you did at our aunt’s village, after I departed last fall. What did you learn?”
She looked up, surprised. “With a Soyappo you spoke of this?”
“He asked me.”
“He is rude. He should mind his own fire.”
“I never found him rude.”
“Perhaps because you are not a woman.”
He gazed at her for long seconds. “He made advances?”
“He touched me.”
“Our customs are not his customs, Sister. Perhaps he did not know you were in mourning.”
“Then he is stupid, as well as rude.”
Black Eagle smiled. “You know he is not stupid.”
She put another stick in the fire.
“Sister, why did you do it?”
“I was worried about you. I did not trust them.”
“I believe we should befriend them, learn from them. Am I wrong?”
She nodded.
“Red Hair is an enemy? A danger to us?”
“I did not say that.”
“Then why am I wrong?”
“His people are hard. Aggressive, like Blackfeet, like Cutthroats. They take whatever they want. We cannot trust them.”
“Red Hair and his men?”
“Those who will come later.”
Black Eagle looked relieved. “So we can trust Red Hair?”
“Why do you ask so much about Red Hair?”
“He is my friend. We risked our lives together in rapids below Celilo Falls. We are like brothers.”
She frowned. Black Eagle was full of surprises.
He waited.
“Yes,” she finally answered, “you can trust him. He has a good heart.”
NINE
March 1806
Clark stared out at the rain. In the last four months, they had seen only 12 dry days, only six of sunshine. Beyond the open stockade door, he could see the old Chinook bawd and her six girls who had arrived two days before and laid siege to the fort. Clark found them unappealing, with their squat legs and thick torsos—nothing like the Chopunnish women he had so admired. Luckily, he had not indulged in their services. Many of the men had come down with the venereal after the girls’ first visit, and their symptoms were recurring, despite heavy doses of mercury.
Lewis turned to him: “I say we depart on the twentieth. Why wait for April?”
“We need one more canoe.” Clark was bent over his writing desk, putting the last touches on one of his maps. A fire hissed in the fireplace.
Lewis just stared out the open door. “We can’t afford to purchase another. Drouillard tells me the Clatsops value their canoes as highly as their women. When they want to marry, they give the father a canoe.”
“We’ve got some robes. And your uniform coat.”
“We’ll need those to procure horses when we hit the rapids.”
“We could sell them a flintlock.”
Lewis scoffed. “We shall steal a canoe.”
Clark turned in his chair. “Are you mad?”
“These thieving savages take everything they can get their hands on! You remember the six elk they stole?”
“They pa
id us with dogs.”
“After we confronted them, yes. When they had no choice.” He peered at Clark. “Don’t tell me you have scruples about stealing from these people?”
Clark pondered this. He knew his partner was edgy, anxious to leave Fort Clatsop behind. Lewis never idled well; he thrived on motion. Months of rain had forced him indoors, and he had sunk into one of his black moods. He would be better when they were on the move. “All right.”
“Send a detail. The men will take it better from you.”
Rain, wind, and hail hemmed them in for six more days. Several of the men were ill again; sickness had been rampant all winter. Some of it was venereal, but influenza and fevers had been common. Now Drouillard was taken with a violent pain in his side, Willard had a bad leg, and Bratton’s lower back had been so painful for two months that he could barely walk.
On Sunday, March 23, the weather finally cleared, and they quickly loaded the canoes and departed. But three days later another storm blew in, and the winds that roared up the Columbia raised waves that made paddling—against the current now—extremely difficult. The Indians along this stretch of river were a wretched lot, dirty and naked. They charged so much for food that the captains decided to save all the remaining tobacco for trading. All but eight of the men were regular users, and they quickly grew desperate. They tried the inner bark of the red willow and sacacommis leaf as substitutes, even chewed the bark of the crab apple tree, though it helped but little.
The loss of tobacco turned Lewis’s disposition toward violence. Four times as they ascended the Columbia he threatened to kill Indians: once when three natives stole Seaman, his black Newfoundland; later when an axe, a tomahawk, and a saddle robe disappeared.
The salmon had not yet arrived, and the native stores of dried fish were gone. The Columbia was more thickly settled than any place Clark had ever seen, and none of the Indians they passed had enough to eat. Their children wore the vacant eyes of starvation; their parents scavenged for discarded bones the men threw away.
When the corps finally reached the Chopunnish, in early May, the first few villages were so destitute of food they refused to trade. Finally, at the third, the men managed to buy two dogs, some roots, and bread.
They huddled around a small fire, shivering under a slate-gray sky, waiting for the stew to cook. Children stood around them, wrapped in buffalo robes, staring with their big dark eyes, their bellies empty. The only sound was the rushing of the Kooskooskee, which ran swiftly just a few yards away, swollen with snowmelt, twice the size it had been last fall.
Clark felt empty, like he could blow away. As he lowered himself onto the grass to eat, the hungry children watched his every move. He motioned with his plate at the closest one, to see if she wanted some. The young girl moved back several feet, accusation in her eyes. “We’re probably eating her pet,” Lewis said.
Four young men approached, talking loudly. They were wrapped in buffalo and bear hides, and the one in the lead held a half-starved puppy in one arm, its long ears dangling. The man moved with a confident swagger. He turned to his friends and said something, and all three laughed.
You have something other than dog to trade with us? Clark signed.
The Indian grinned: Don’t like dog?
Clark gave his head a small shake.
“Tell him I like it,” Lewis said.
Clark signed it, and the man held the puppy up for Lewis to see. The Indian said something to his friends, who guffawed. Then he lobbed it onto Lewis’s plate, and stew flew everywhere.
Lewis was so startled he did nothing for an instant. Then he sprang up and hurled the pitiful dog at the Indian’s face. He yanked his tomahawk out of his belt and leapt at the man, knocking him down and pinning him. “You goddamn savage, you make one move and I’ll split your skull!”
Clark took hold of the tomahawk from behind. “Easy now.”
“Son of a bitch,” Lewis snarled. Clark let him fume over the man for a minute, then gently pulled him up. The Indian scrambled to his feet and stared at Lewis as if he were a madman.
His friends began to laugh, and he whirled, glowering, and spat a few words at them. They quieted, but their grins remained. Their leader gave Lewis one last angry glare, turned, and departed.
That evening they reached a longhouse with 15 fires down the middle, housing 30 families. Its frame of branches lashed together supported layers of dry tule reeds, sewn into sheets. The local chief, who called himself Cut Nose, was a short, thick man; a large red scar started in his right nostril and crossed his cheek. It had happened in battle with the Snakes last fall, he told them. But they had won a great victory, and he had brought back a Shoshone slave, so they were able to converse in words. Labiche translated from English to French, Charbonneau from French to Minnetaree, Sacagawea from Minnetaree to Shoshone, and the young slave from Shoshone to Chopunnish.
Clark handed out ribbons to the village squaws, smiling and flirting. They were exceedingly thin, but after the short, fat Clatsop women, he found them tempting. As he started to give out cloth Lewis seized his arm: “Control yourself, now, Captain. We can’t give away every trade good we own.”
Clark grinned. “I sorely need a woman.”
There was a sudden uproar from inside the lodge. Recognizing Charbonneau’s voice among the bellowing, they hurried toward the longhouse. They found Cut Nose haranguing Charbonneau, the red-faced Frenchman protesting in his native tongue.
The captains stepped between them and gradually calmed them down. When they had finally assembled the translators, it became clear that Charbonneau had been demanding that the Indians sell him food. “Our people have little food!” the angry chief declared. “Cold gripped us for many moons, we had much sickness. People have not enough to eat. I lost one of my wives.” He stared at Clark, then at Charbonneau. “I sacrificed twenty-eight horses to ensure that her spirit would travel in comfort to Place of Happiness.”
He stopped and regarded Clark again, as if to see if he was suitably impressed. Clark immediately apologized. Still holding several cloths in his hand, he picked the red one and handed it to the angry chief. “Please, take this. We are sorry for your losses.”
The haughty chief looked down at the offered cloth for a moment, as if above such a humble gift, then reached out and took it. He glared at Charbonneau, and Clark led the hapless interpreter out into the cold.
Early evening light filtered into the longhouse. A fire crackled at each end and in the center; the smell of wood smoke mixed with the sweet scent of tule reeds and the more pungent odor of bear grease and sweat. Seated near the middle fire, next to the chief, Clark relaxed in the heat—it was the first time he had been warm in days.
A circle of six Chopunnish men sat pounding a large drum and singing in their flat, insistent way. Others danced in the middle of the floor, surrounded by women and children and most of the Corps of Discovery. The dancers wore full headgear—bear heads, wolf heads, eagle feathers, even beaver heads. Their bare upper bodies glistened in the warmth of the lodge, over leggings heavy with fringe. In their hands they held war clubs, lances, and pieces of animals: wolf tails, bear claws, a dozen rattles from the tail of a snake. Several had painted their foreheads red; one had painted his hair white. Their feet rose and fell to the sound of the drums, their upper bodies diving and ducking like birds swooping for their prey. Clark found the high, nasal wail of the singers and the steady pounding of the drums hypnotic.
He gazed at the women who stood around the edge of the dance floor, their knees dipping in rhythm to the drums, the fringes on their hide dresses swaying. He smiled at a beauty, saw a flash of amusement in her dark eyes before she looked away. Perhaps the chief would offer him one.
A shadow fell on him, and he looked up. A thin, wiry man with a huge black buffalo head and horns atop his graying head danced in front of him. His forehead, which bore the scars of smallpox, was painted red, and his cheeks sported jagged streaks of white lightning. In his left hand he hel
d a staff wound round with strips of buffalo fur whose ends flared out when he shook it, like the fringe on his leggings.
The dancer bent his torso toward Clark, lowering the buffalo horns until they almost touched him, his feet still moving with the drums. Around his neck he wore a string of bones.
Three times he bent down, then straightened up, closed his eyes, and slumped to the floor. Clark rose to help him, but Cut Nose held his arm, nodded for him to keep his seat. The drums continued, the high-pitched singers raised their volume a notch, and the other dancers moved around the floor as if nothing had happened.
For long minutes the old man lay in front of them, motionless. Clark’s eyes strayed back to the tall beauty, who stood swaying only a few rods to his right. She met his eyes again, and when he smiled this time, she smiled back.
The old man stirred, sat up, and the music grew quiet. When he began to speak, his voice was harsh. The people listened intently, staring at the captains. Clark motioned for the translators.
When the old man finished speaking, the Shoshone boy spoke in urgent tones, and the translation passed through Sacagawea to Charbonneau to Labiche. “Mon capitaine, he says this old man, Talks With Buffalo, is a medicine man,” Labiche reported. “He has had a vision. He tells his people we are evil, that white men will come and kill many of them.”
“Get your weapons,” Lewis grunted.
Clark held him down: “No.” He turned to Cut Nose and signed: We are guests in your lodge. You wish to treat us this way?
The chief glared at him: He always speaks truth.
But we come in peace. We intend no harm.
He says white men will follow who do not come in peace.
He cannot know what is to come.
The stout chief raised his eyebrows: He is a medicine man.
It is not possible to know what has not yet happened.
Cut Nose’s scar spread as he sneered: You are a stranger here.
The old man, who had been watching this exchange, suddenly moved toward Clark, shouting and shaking his staff at him. “You have insulted him, mon capitaine,” Labiche said into Clark’s ear.
The Coming Page 5
