Streams to the River, River to the Sea

  We saw no animals the next few days, except the many buffalo that had died in the ice during the winter and a bear that ran from our hunters. To the west where the prairie stretched farther than the eye could see, the banks were covered with flowering bushes. But it was much too early for berries. So I dug roots every night when we stopped and they were cooked with the last of the pemmican.

  The river was shallow. Yet currents ran strong. Wading in mud up to their knees, stumbling over rocks and logs, the men pulled on ropes fastened to the bow of each boat. Men on the boats had long poles that they thrust into the water at the bow and stern.

  If the wind blew right, sails were raised on the pirogues. But mostly the men clawed their way up the river. Those with the small canoes had less trouble, yet everyone suffered. Boiled camas root with a few shreds of pemmican was not enough for men who toiled so hard from dawn to nightfall.

  Captain Lewis asked everyone to look for animals—antelope, bears, deer, or buffalo. He sent bands of hunters out to search both sides of the river.

  Soon after the bad accident, a grizzly bear was sighted. It was shambling along the shore of a sandbar in the middle of the river, a sandbar like the one I had lived on when I fled from Le Borgne.

  Bearmeat is not the best meat to be found, being tough to the teeth and musky on the tongue. Besides, bears are dangerous. But Captain Lewis had no choice. He sent Captain Clark out to bring back bearmeat.

  Captain Clark, Sergeant Ordway, and a hunter got ready. As they were about to set off the grizzly came out of the bush with a cub.

  "It is black luck to kill a bear that has a young one at her side," I said to Captain Clark.

  He looked at me as if he thought there might be nothing in my head.

  "It is black luck," I said.

  "My men are hungry. What would you have us do, starve?"

  "There are other bears, without young, to kill," I said.

  "Where? We have traveled for nine days. This is the first we've had a chance to kill."

  Charbonneau was in the water, pulling the boat ashore. He stopped and gave me a disgusted look. "Crazy talk," he said. "Crazy Shoshone talk."

  The bear had seen us and had gone into the heavy brush in the center of the sandbar. She took the cub with her.

  Captain Lewis called to Captain Clark, "Take your hunters and follow them." To Charbonneau he said, "Get back in the boat and stay. Watch what happens. Be ready to pull away should you need to!"

  Two hunters waded to the sandbar and took up their places. With his rifle on his shoulder, Captain Clark stood not far from me on the shore.

  The hunter at the far end of the sandbar fired into the brush. The bear came out, swaying her head from side to side. She glanced along the bank, first at the hunter whose gun was still smoking, then at Sergeant Ordway, then at Captain Clark.

  I was wearing the belt of blue beads that Captain Clark had given me. It caught the sun. The bear's eyes fastened upon me. She was making up her mind which one of us to attack.

  "Crazy bear," Charbonneau said, getting ready to put the boat back into the river. "Like crazy womans. What she do, no telling. Crazy."

  I turned away so he would not see me. I closed my eyes and prayed. I asked the Great Spirit to spare the mother and her cub. I prayed that she would flee back into the brush. Night was coming on. If they did not kill her now, she would be safe. I prayed until I heard a second shot.

  Captain Clark had fired his gun. He was wrapped in a cloud of yellow smoke. Dust spurted up from the bear's furry hide. She fell to her knees, but quickly she gathered herself and rose to her full height. She was taller than a tall man.

  Someone shot and missed. The bear did not move. She was watching Captain Clark. He was the closest to her of the hunters, not ten short strides away. I saw the danger he was in. I must have uttered a warning, for Charbonneau became angry.

  "Clark no child of Sacagawea," he said. "Clark no husband of Sacagawea. Why Sacagawea make big fuss?"

  I did not answer him. This was the first time that I knew how I truly felt about Captain Clark. My heart beat so hard I could not have spoken if I wanted to.

  The bear no longer stood on her hind legs. She was watching Captain Clark. He took out a paper tube with gunpowder in it and a ball. He tore the tube open with, his teeth and poured powder into the pan. He crumpled the brown paper around the ball and put it into the barrel.

  The bear sniffed the air. I think she smelled the bitter smell of the powder.

  She moved toward him. She lifted her paws high at each step she took. It might have been the sounds the river made, but I was sure that I heard her claws crunch into the sand. There was blood running down her shoulder. She paused to lick it off.

  The hunters fired twice and the bear fell. But while the hunters began to load their guns again, while Captain Clark finished loading his, the bear was on her feet once more. She staggered toward him. She growled with rage and her eyes were a fiery red.

  The hunters shouted. "Run," I screamed as loud as I could.

  I jumped out of the boat and waded into the river. The baby in his cradleboard was on my back. Captain Clark was in the river. He braced himself against the current and fired his gun. One of the hunters also fired.

  When she was dragged out of the water and laid on the bank, the men found five bullets. One was sunk deep in her heart. The men said that her flesh was dry and stringy, yet they ate all of it that night. They were making up for the days without meat.

  In the morning we left early. The cub stood at the edge of the brush, but Captain Lewis was in too much of a hurry to take time to hunt it down.

  We saw more and more grizzly bears as we moved north. One of the men was chased by a bear and saved himself only by climbing a tree. Captain Lewis stumbled upon a white bear one noon and saved himself by leaping from a very high bank into the river. Bears sniffed around our camp at night, two or three at a time, and would have attacked us had it not been for Scannon. He had a keen nose for bears, a mean growl, and a loud bark.

  But Scannon knew nothing about beavers. One morning we came to a place where some huge cottonwoods were piled up. Beavers had cut them down and were at work making a dam.

  Scannon was beside me in the canoe. He saw the animals swimming around, their coats shining in the sun. One was chewing on a tree. Beaver teeth are long and wide and curved like a chisel. While you watch they can gnaw through a tree trunk with a few quick bites.

  I have no idea what he thought about these glossy things with the tails that looked like paddles. He might have thought they were big squirrels. Anyway, he jumped out of the canoe and grabbed the first one he came to.

  Then, just as he seized the beaver by the tail, it turned and caught the tip of his nose. He shook his head and growled. The animal held on. I yelled at him and he swam back to me. But the beaver did not let go until Charbonneau killed it with a blow of his fist.

  Scannon hurt for days. He lay in the canoe too sick to raise his head. Captain Clark treated his jaws with medicine and I made him eat. Everyone thought that he would die. But he was a strong dog and lived. He was smart, too. He never went near a beaver again.

  During the time Scannon was sick, we had to guard against the bears. Men walked around the camp all night with rifles and watched.

  They watched for bears more than they watched for Sioux or Blackfeet. That is why we had a bad surprise one day during the time Scannon was sick.

  It was near dusk and we had made an early camp because the day had been hard on the men. Most of them were on the shore, pulling the boats, struggling through heavy growths of prickly pear. The thorns had cut their hands and pierced their moccasins. Captain Clark himself had two thorns in his back and seventeen thorns, half as long as my finger, were stuck in his feet.

  The men were sitting by the fire, too tired to talk or even eat. We were camped in a cottonwood grove. Leaves stirred in the wind and the river was making sounds along the bank.

  Warriors who looked like
Assiniboins came out of the trees. They came silendy but if Scannon had been well he would have heard them. It was a large band, twice our number. They carried bows and sacks of arrows. They stood in a row between us and the river, so we could not reach our boats, our cannon, or the firesticks.

  A young man with a roach, hair cut short on two sides of his skull and the hair in the middle painted green, said that he was Chief Green Cat. He wanted to know who we were, why we were there, and where we were going.

  Drewyer answered his questions. He stood up and pointed to Captain Clark and Captain Lewis.

  Chief Green Cat's warriors had their hair cut like his and their chests were painted with stripes and swirls. Green circles around their eyes made them look like prowling wolves.

  Their chieftain shook his head and spoke to Drewyer. Drewyer said that the chieftain thought we had come to make trouble. Big trouble.

  There were two guns lying beside the fire. Green Cat put a foot on them. His warriors quietly strung their bows.

  Captain Clark got to his feet. He told us to be calm and not to move. "We don't stand much of a chance in a fight. We'll lose men and maybe our canoes."

  I was sitting with my back against a tree, away from the fire, nursing my baby.

  "Green Cat hasn't seen you yet," Captain Clark said to me. "Come here by the fire."

  I put Meeko in the cradleboard and went and stood beside him. Green Cat looked at me. He saw the cradleboard. He heard Meeko fuss and cry, now that the nursing had ended.

  For a while Chief Green Cat was silent. He glanced at his feet, then at me. Then, without a word, he picked up the two guns lying in the grass. Then he motioned to his warriors and they went back into the cottonwood trees as silently as they had come.

  The men felt better. They forgot that they were tired. They remembered that they had not eaten since dawn. I got my pointed stick and started off to look for camas roots.

  Captain Clark stopped me. He put an arm around my shoulder.

  "You're much better than Scannon," he said. "Scannon would bark at the first sound. We'd reach for our muskets. People would be killed. As it is, we're all alive, with the loss of only two guns."

  He took the digging stick, gave me a hug, and went off to dig camas roots.

  Soon afterward, when Scannon was over his beaver bite, we had another bad time. Almost as bad as the one with the Assiniboins. It happened this way.

  Soon after supper, while the camp was asleep, our sentinel was startled by loud barks from Scannon. The sentinel, Sergeant Pryor, told us what happened then.

  A big moon was shining on the water. The sentinel thought the dog was barking at it. But after a time he heard something splashing around and saw a bull buffalo swimming across the river.

  The bull got ashore, clambered over our boats, and climbed the bank. He was huge, Sergeant Pryor said.

  The beast stopped on the bank and looked around, then started for our tents. He charged through the fires, kicking up a shower of sparks. He was close to our tents, right on them, the sergeant said, when Scannon rushed at him. The bull changed his course and went crashing through the trees.

  We were all awake by this time, me with the baby in my arms, the men with the guns, staring at one another, asking the sentinel what had happened.

  Scannon was a hero soon again. A bull elk was grazing along the bank in front of us. As we came nearer, George Drewyer, our best hunter, wounded it with a single shot and the elk started to run away.

  Scannon had been catching squirrels most of the day, bringing them back for Captain Lewis, who liked them better than any other meat. The dog was worn down, breathing hard with his huge mouth open and his tongue hanging out. But he roused himself and jumped out of the canoe. He overtook the elk, wrestled it into the river, and hung on until the beast drowned.

  Captain Lewis gave him an elk bone to gnaw, a big one. Scannon begged for more.

  The men welcomed the good elk meat. They had worn thin. For a long time now no two days were alike. Halfnaked and burned brown as Blackfeet, they struggled with the balky canoes. One day they tramped in deep mud along the shore, pulling on the ropes. The next day the shore might be thick with prickly pears or slippery with loose rocks. Often they pushed the boats with poles. When the river was shallow they waded in and pushed. Sometimes they had to climb along a steep bluff holding the towlines. There were very few days with enough wind to use the sails. I looked at the men and wondered why they did not give up.

  The day after Scannon's feat our hunters killed two more elk, but it was a hard day like all the rest. And late in the afternoon a cloud of clacking black-spotted grasshoppers descended upon us. A hot wind blew them against us so hard that I had to cover Meeko with a blanket and lie down in the bottom of the canoe.

  It was a bad day—we made only seven miles up the river—but that night Cruzatte got out his fiddle, Sergeant Ordway got out the tambourine, and Drewyer got out the sounding horn. We built a big fire and banked elk ribs against it. The men sat around the fire and cut slices of the fat meat for themselves, told stories, and sang songs of home.

  Chapter Sixteen

  How the sickness came upon me was a mystery. Early the next day, before dawn, I woke sweating all over. By sunrise I was cold, as if my blood had turned to water. I was too sick to make a fire, which I did every morning. Charbonneau came and stood over me.

  "Why you sleep?" he wanted to know. "Charbonneau hungry. Captain Clark, he hungry. What for no fire?"

  I was too weak to answer. Even when he gave me a prod with his foot, I said nothing.

  Captain Clark got up and looked at me. He put his hand on my forehead. "The girl is feverish," he said to Charbonneau. "You make the fire while I give her some medicine."

  The medicine, a spoonful of black stuff in a cup of water, felt bitter in my throat. Worse, much worse, than the pieces of snake rattle they made me swallow the day Meeko was born.

  It did no good. When they were ready to leave I was so weak they had to carry me to the boat.

  I lay all that morning with a heavy blanket over me, though the sun was hot. I watched the sun move among the clouds, casting light, then shadows. In the shadows I saw strange faces I had never seen before. I shut my eves in fear of them until the sun came out again.

  Captain Clark gave me another cup of the black stuff. Twice I roused myself to nurse the baby, but that was all.

  The river ran swift that day. The men with the poles pushing and those near the bank pulling on the ropes tired early. Captain Clark decided to make camp long before nightfall. He was worried about my sickness. I heard him outside the tent talking to Captain Lewis and Charbonneau. I understood most of what was said.

  "What if she dies?" Captain Lewis said. "What can we do with the baby? We can't drag it across the mountains, all the way to the sea. It can't eat buffalo or deermeat or duck or goose. It drinks milk. We have no milk. I say send her back to Fort Mandan before something happens. There'll be some woman at the fort who can feed the baby."

  "It's better to take a chance on her getting well," Captain Clark said. "For one thing, the men all like her. She livens their spirits. And just as important, she has a good effect upon the Indians we meet. Seeing a girl and a baby with us, they see that we mean them no harm and wish to be friends. Another thing: we are coming into mountain country that she knows, where we'll no longer need boats but the horses she can find for us. We need this girl badly."

  "What do you say?" Captain Lewis asked Charbonneau. "You are her husband."

  I was not surprised at his answer.

  "She die, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau die," he said. "Better we go back. Quick!"

  I was not surprised, because I knew why he wanted to return to Fort Mandan. He had not wanted to leave in the first place. He had fought with the captains and only made up with them when I argued him into it. I still wondered about the Canada men. Did he have a secret pact with them?

  "Wait until morning," Captain Clark said. "I'll bleed her tonight.
Take a pint of blood."

  "No more," Captain Lewis said.

  "I wish we had leeches, but I've seen none on the Missouri, except in human form."

  "There's only one sharp knife left out of the three we owned before the boat turned over."

  "One's enough," Captain Clark said. "If it's sharp."

  Whether the knife was sharp I do not know. They gave me another cup of the black stuff and I felt nothing when they drained my blood.

  But in the morning I felt weaker than I ever had and fell into a long dream. I woke up with the sun in my eyes. Later I found out that two days and nights had gone by. The boat was moving along under a bower of trees.

  For a while I thought Charbonneau and I were alone with Meeko and we were going back down the river, back to Fort Mandan, the three of us.

  Then Captain Clark was looking at me. "You're better," he said. "You'll live. You look like a ghost, but a pretty ghost, and you will live."

  "Where are we?" I asked him. I still believed that I was in a canoe with Charbonneau and my baby, going back down the river.

  "We're in Blackfoot country. At least they claim it, Do you know any of their words?"

  "Not many. A word or two, maybe. They raided the Shoshone long ago when I was a child. They are fierce people."

  "They don't like the whites."

  "They do not like anyone, only themselves," I said. "And not always themselves."

  "You would know Blackfeet if you saw them from a distance? Their dress, their horses?"

  "Yes, I would know them anywhere, also their footprints. They do not walk with their toes pointed in like the Minnetarees or the Shoshone."

  "We saw a campfire yesterday and some tracks. Charbonneau thought they belonged to a party of Sioux."

  "This is too far north and west for the Sioux. They do not come here in the spring. I learned this from the Minnetarees."

  Two days later I had a chance to show my knowledge of the Sioux. One of the men who was pulling a long rope fished a headband with an eagle feather tied to it out of the river. The feather looked like any eagle feather, but the band I knew at once. It was red, a color the Blackfeet liked. The sewing, the way the sun was stitched, with arrows sticking out from it, was Blackfoot. Once my brother killed a Blackfoot and kept his headband. It was just like the headband they fished out of the river.