Just as the keelboats were casting off from the Osage landing, Benito Vasquez, Lisa’s chief factor, shouted from the bow of one of the boats. “Señor Lisa! Wait! Wait! A man missing!”
“Who’s missing?”
“Bissonnette! His gun and gear are gone, and some goods.”
“Damn him! Put in. Cast on. Mr. Drouillard, you and Benito find his track. If he won’t come peaceably, bring him dead. I’ll go up the Osage to see if he’s headed for the villages. Rose, we’ll take a rifleman and go up in your canoe. Mr. Drouillard, if I see him up there, I’ll shoot. Either a signal or to put him down. Let’s go. And anyone else leaves the boats gets shot too!”
Drouillard trotted to all the outer edges of the camp, remembering where people had been, looking for tracks that kept going or disappeared into deep cover. Most of those would lead to a turd in the bushes, which he smelled before he saw it, and then tracks returning. The ground was soft and tracks were deep, but forty men tracked up a place in a baffling way. Vasquez tried to follow Drouillard as he tacked to and fro like a hunting dog, but finally stopped, panting, and just waited. Drouillard kept hunting.
He thought about his quarry. Bissonnette, a voyageur, had been a boatman for Lisa’s Osage trade for just a couple of seasons. Maybe he had some trinkets to go court an Osage girl. But a day or two back, Lisa had harangued him for skulking, so it was likely that Bissonnette had just deserted in anger. There were settlements just two days back, and St. Louis itself was only 120 miles. Drouillard remembered being sent back three years ago to catch or shoot Private Reed. This could be harder, in deep woods instead of prairie. But Bissonnette didn’t have a day’s head start like Reed. He had been here just an hour ago.…
There. Following tracks on a less-trodden stretch of riverbank, he found a hollowed, trampled place where something had been hidden and then dug up. Then the tracks went on, deeper with the additional weight. They went up the Osage a quarter of a mile, to a shallows, then sliding prints went down the muddy bank. Here the man had crossed the Osage. Drouillard waded in, looking along the south bank for prints coming out.
He followed silently, alert for ambush, because Bissonnette would expect to be followed. Bissonnette’s gun was just a smoothbore, he remembered, and he carried a pistol, too.
After following for half an hour, he heard twigs crackling and got a glimpse of red scarf through the brush.
He stooped and ran closer. Bissonnette was moving through an opening. He carried bedroll and pack, but hanging in his left hand, not on his back. His musket hung by its sling behind his left shoulder. He moved heavily, clumsy with his pack of swag, shirt sodden with sweat.
Drouillard cocked his rifle and called to him. Bissonnette spun and saw him with his rifle pointed at him.
“M’sieu Lisa said bring you back alive,” Drouillard said. “Or otherwise. Allons, mon ami? I would rather not shoot a man for so little reason.”
Bissonnette gave a shrug of surrender and a forlorn smile, then turned away as if to lay down his pack and gun, but he was pulling his pistol out of his sash. Drouillard squeezed the rifle trigger. The shot echoed along the valley.
Bissonnette was still turning as he fell. His pistol was in his hand, but when he hit the ground he dropped it. He writhed and gave out a raspy squeal. Drouillard reloaded and went to him. The man’s teeth were bared in a grimace. Drouillard picked up Bissonnette’s pistol and drew away his musket, and laid them on the pack. He had been lucky all his life and had never quite had to shoot a man. Now this fool had made him do this. He said, “Can you get up?”
Bissonnette’s face was blanched with shock and his breath wheezed. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. Drouillard grasped his shoulder and rolled him far enough to look at the wound. The ball appeared to have gone in under the shoulder blade. The back of the shirt was bloodsoaked, and dirt and chaff from the ground were mixed with gore. He would need men to carry him to the boats, so he shot the pistol in the air to summon help. “Damn you, you made me shoot you in the back. You better tell the truth about it, or I’ll kill you.”
The wounded man received no sympathy from Manuel Lisa. The Spaniard tongue-lashed him all the time he remained conscious. The next day the groaning deserter was put in a canoe with a paddler from St. Charles and sent to St. Louis for medical care. The canoe disappeared down the broad Missouri, leaving Drouillard angry with both Lisa and Bissonnette, because the wounded man had not admitted that he provoked the shot in the back. Maybe he would have if Lisa had stopped scolding long enough to let him talk.
But the damage was done now. The voyageurs assumed a cold, distant manner with Drouillard. It was too familiar a feeling. It was like the beginning of the expedition with Lewis and Clark, when he had been regarded as the captains’ man by his fellow French-speakers, their talk falling low when he came near. Only Weiser and Potts seemed to remain comfortable in his presence.
One evening in camp a day or two below the mouth of the Platte River, sitting in as much smoke as possible to reduce the old torment of mosquitoes, listening to the voyageurs sing and jingle their tambourines, Pete Weiser said to him, “Ain’t seen no more thieves or deserters since, though, have we?”
Lisa and Vasquez came out of their tent into the fireglow and moonlight, both as usual in clean, loose-fitting white shirts and knee-high black boots, Lisa carrying his gentleman’s walking stick, which was also the scabbard for a straight, concealed sword. The two Spaniards kept a half-breed boy who served them and maintained their wardrobes, as York had served Clark. They knelt by the fire. Potts and Weiser, so recently soldiers, touched their hat brims as a salute. Lisa said, “We need to overhaul the keelboats very soon. Pay the seams, drain the bilges, dry some cargo. What do you think of the Platte as a place to do it, Señor Drouillard?”
He remembered the place in his mind’s eye. It was where he had walked up behind the wretched deserter Reed and lifted his rifle away from him. As he would have preferred to do in Bissonnette’s case. He remembered the great sandbars thrown out into the Missouri by the shallow Platte. “I can’t think of a better place,” he said.
“Me neither,” said Potts, who enjoyed giving Lisa his unsought opinion, and knew he could get away with it when Drouillard was nearby. “The Platte. That’s where George here brought the cap’ns their first Indians, wasn’t it, George?” Lisa had given up trying to make these two call him Mr. Drouillard. “Hey,” Potts went on, “know who I’d like to see? That perty Indian ever’body thought was sweet on you. What’ll y’ bet he’s a chief by now?”
“Hospitality. No, not a chief. Wise man, maybe. If he’s alive.” Drouillard had thought of him, but doubted he would see him again.
The expedition returning last summer had sped toward St. Louis too fast to permit visiting. Now Lisa was hurrying toward the Upper Missouri, hoping to get beyond the Mandans before winter, so there was little dallying. Not much hunting. None of that exploring and note-writing or giving the Jefferson screed along the way. The voyageurs were on the oars as soon as there was light, made camp late, and ate mostly provisions that had been brought along. There were no horses, so Drouillard and Weiser and Potts hunted afoot, ranging ahead and killing game only if they found it by the river where the boats could retrieve it easily.
The old French merchant families in St. Louis for the most part were slow to evaluate an opportunity and reluctant to take risks. Manuel Lisa was different. His purpose was to get up into the best beaver country first, build a post, get traps out, and make trade contacts with the Indians up there. He and his backers in this venture had one motive: a head start on profit-making.
“I hope we’ll see Hospitality’s people near the Platte,” Drouillard said. “But I don’t count on it. They’ll likely be out on the buffalo hunt, like last time. Big country. Hard to find people.”
He stood on the familiar height north of the mouth of the Platte, looking far. No sign of Indians anywhere, not even distant smoke. From below on the sandbar came faintly th
e thump of caulking mallets and the voices of boatmen working. He saw something floating in the river bend about three miles up the Missouri. Not a drift tree. So he waited, standing in the clean wind. Before long he could make out that it was a hollow-log canoe, not a big one. In it was one paddler, stroking steadily. It was staying along the near bank.
When it was closer, he saw that the paddler was a man, shirtless, long-haired. It wasn’t an Indian; he was bearded. Centered in the canoe was a large bundle, and a gun lay on the bundle, within the paddler’s easy reach. The man was alert, watching the river and both banks as he came, but seemed not to have noticed him yet. Drouillard sat down slowly in the deep grass so as not to be too visible.
There was something about the man in the canoe: the way he held his head, the shape of the sun-browned torso, shining with sweat in the sun … The paddler seemed to notice the big boats on the sandbar below; he stopped paddling, just keeping the paddle to steer, with one hand, the other hand shading his eyes. The canoe was almost opposite Drouillard, a hundred feet below, when he realized who it was and laughed. He stood up, cocked his rifle and fired it into the sky, and yelled, “Hey, you!”
The man in the canoe looked all around, dropped the paddle and snatched up his gun, then lowered it, shouting: “God damn, Drouillard! Is it you?”
“It’s me, Colter!” Drouillard ran down the hill, thinking, What was I just saying about hard to find people in all this country?
Colter laughed. “A million square miles, and my problem is I can’t get home ’cause I keep running into people I know!”
He had decided to join Señor Lisa’s expedition and his old comrades, and go back up once again instead of continuing to St. Louis. His partnership with Dickson and Hancock had not worked out, for reasons he didn’t want to discuss. So he had taken his share of traps and set off alone to camp and hunt and trap farther up the Yellow Stone. He hadn’t seen Dickson and Hancock since. So Colter was the only one among them, in fact, in Lisa’s whole party, who knew the Yellow Stone.
Now, Lisa and Vasquez knelt on the sand with the four veterans while Colter traced a map in the sand. “To get to such good beaver on the Missouri, you have to go way up around here,” he said. “But just this far up the Yellow Stone, you got beaver thick as mice in a pantry. I got as many in that canoe as it’d carry. By the way, from there it’s not far overland to the three forks that you like so well, George. Now near this stream here, there’s a huge, I mean to say, huge, Indian ceremony place. So you know that Indians must come there by hundreds some time o’ year. All customers for a tradin’ post.”
“Of what tribe?” Lisa asked.
“Up there, I’d reckon Crows, right, George?”
“Crows. Apsaloka. Right.”
Lisa looked at the sand map and thought. The voyageurs were singing and clapping at their fire down by the boats. Finally he said, “We intended to trade on the Missouri up there, take business from the British, who are going to be forced out anyway.”
Colter looked at him, then at Drouillard, with surprise. “Y’mean Blackfeet, Atsina, Assiniboines, and such? Ain’t that kind of foolhardy?”
Drouillard shrugged. “Best way to get rid of an enemy is make him your friend. Those Blackfeet we had trouble with up on the Maria: there wasn’t anything particularly bad about them till Cap’n Lewis said things that scared ’em. If we don’t befriend them now, we’ll have to fight ’em from now on. Cap’n’s trouble was he thought he’d make Indians do what the President wanted, just by telling ’em to. Plain fact is, Lewis and Jefferson put together didn’t know any more about Indians than Lewis’s dog did.” He sat back. He didn’t like to talk that much, but had needed to get that off his chest.
Lisa had been listening to this with a smile, having his own reasons for disliking Lewis. He said, “I will trade with anybody who wants what I have and has what I want. Crows, Blackfeet, what difference to me? I like what Señor Colter says about the Yellow Stone. Maybe we will go there. I am glad you are coming with us, señor.”
“Guess I wasn’t as ready to go back to civilization as I thought.”
Drouillard realized he had a new thing to keep in mind about Lisa. He could be awfully fickle about plans. It was no wonder he and Colter took to each other so well. “Gentlemen, a drink, eh?” Lisa said. And off at the other fire, the Frenchmen were singing:
“Alouette, Gentille alouette,
Alouette, je te plumerai!
Je te plumerai la tête …”
Skylark, lovely skylark, Drouillard thought, remembering the song from the Black Robe school. Lovely skylark, I am going to pluck your head.…
He shuddered.
Chapter 27
Bighorn River
Spring 1808
Drouillard stood waist-deep in the clear, fast, numbingly cold stream and watched her swim toward him naked, underwater like a trout. His heart, racing from the cold, was full of delight and sadness. Always in the mornings he had bathed alone and given thanks for his life and strength. Here in the mountains the woman had shared this with him. But it would be the last time, because he had to leave and go far back down the rivers to St. Louis with Manuel Lisa.
She was perhaps as old as he, maybe a little older. Drouillard was thirty-five. This woman was an Apsaloka, a Crow, twice widowed when her husbands fought the Blackfeet—once north of the Yellow Stone, once south of it on a branch of this river called the Little Bighorn. She had a son who was old enough to ride with the buffalo hunters, and that was where he was now; he lived with her when he was not away hunting. Last winter Drouillard had lent the young man two of his traps, had taught him to set and bait them, and how to prepare the beaver skins to suit Benito Vasquez and Manuel Lisa at the fort. Since then her son, whose name was Split Hoof, had caught enough beaver to buy three traps of his own, and an iron kettle for his mother. Her name was Moves Behind, a name that Potts and Weiser thought was funny and appropriate because of the way she walked. He had explained that a fuller translation meant She Who Follows the Rest, but by then it was too late, and everyone at the trading post was using the more suggestive name. There were many problems being a translator.
Like Drouillard, she had always gone to the water in the mornings. So it was natural that when he was in her camp, they would get up from bed naked and put blankets around themselves and come down to the water together. Mountain streams in springtime were much too cold to stay in very long, so after they swam they would go back to her lodge and lie in one blanket together until they were warmed by each other. Then they would toss off the blanket and kneel one above the other, caressing and breathing their breath all over each other and looking, until she would make the sign he knew meant, Come inside. Sometimes they would lie connected, both controlling themselves to keep from moving their bodies, just flexing the connected parts, looking at each other’s faces, until nothing else mattered but that pleasure, crouched and waiting in their very center. Then suddenly she would gasp and shut her eyes and that part of her would tighten and pull him so far in that he felt he was touching her heart.
Moves Behind was as strong and tight inside as she was in her limbs and torso. When he loved her, he felt as much admiration as pleasure. She was as perfect a creature as anything he had ever seen, even a doe deer or antelope, and he was awed by the Creator’s kindness when he looked at her. She and her people had not been around traders; they were neither diseased nor dishonest.
Drouillard had hiked and ridden hundreds of miles last winter and this spring, southward and eastward from Lisa’s fort, finding Crow winter camps, talking to the people in hand sign, encouraging them to bring furs to the fort and trade them for beautiful and useful things of the whiteman’s manufacture. He had ranged far in the Bighorn Mountains, sometimes on snowshoes where the snowdrifts were deeper than his height. He had made friendships with many bands of the Crow. He had even met a band that happily boasted of stealing the horses of the whitemen who had come down the Yellow Stone two years ago. They told him th
ey had seen a red-haired chief among those men, and a man all black, but they had taken the horses so skillfully that the whitemen had never seen them at all. Drouillard had of course complimented them on that skill. And he told them that it was all right; the whitemen had not suffered from the loss of their horses, and got home safely, that they were not mad at the Crows for it, but admired them and wanted to be their friends, to trade with them. And, he said, tell your allies, the Shoshone and Kootenai, to come to the fort. They are already friends of that Red Hair Chief.
These Crows were perhaps the handsomest people Drouillard had ever seen, and clean, hospitable, and cheerful. Often one band would offer him a guide to take him to another band. In those wanderings in the winter and spring, he had memorized the directions and distances and the looks of places: magnificent canyons and waterfalls, a vast and fertile basin of beaver streams entirely ringed by timbered mountains, grasslands teeming with herds of elk, buffalo, antelope, and cliffs where the big-horned sheep looked down on everything below.
Drouillard had promised Captain Clark in St. Louis that he would come and see him if he ever came back. Clark was completing his great map of the lands from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. He had asked Drouillard to keep thinking of the map when he was back up in the West, and requested that he bring back drawings and descriptions of places the Corps of Discovery had not seen, to verify what Indians had told Clark, to fill in places that were still blank on the big map. Having been Clark’s translator during most of his map talk with the Indians, Drouillard remembered the big map very well. He knew what was still blank; he knew the questions still in Clark’s mind: where rivers started, where mountain ranges they had seen met other ranges they had only heard of, where tribes lived, what their favorite routes were through the mountain passes, where the Platte and Bighorn headwaters were nearest each other, where the rivers began that were said to run southward down into the Spanish country.