Sign-Talker by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

Author:JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307763150
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-17T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Great Falls of the Missouri

June 13, 1805

A hard wind from the southwest was beating and whiffing around his ears. Yet there was another sound, something deeper under the wind, like far off thunder. But the vast plain was shimmering under midday sun; there was not a sign of a storm in any direction. The sky was unbroken, vast blue, with flights of vultures wheeling over the plains, and white-headed eagles whistling and swooping above, sometimes dropping out of sight as if into the earth. Drouillard could not see the river course, but knew it was off to the south of him, where the eagles dropped out of sight. The treeless plain stretched away fifty or sixty miles in every direction, the western and southern horizons edged with dazzling white mountaintops, and a few bold hills beyond the river in the southeast. Massed on the green, wind-whipped plain were dark herds of buffalo, countless hundreds or thousands of them, some tramping up clouds of gray dust that billowed downwind from them. For, despite the pale grass that looked so verdant at a distance, the ground was dry, harsh and scrabbly underfoot, yellow with the flowers of the ground-hugging prickly pear, now so thick that even with double-soled moccasins and a watchful step, sore, pierced feet were a part of every day’s discomforts along what Private Gibson had begun calling the “Misery River.”

If it even was the Missouri River now!

Drouillard, Captain Lewis, Joe Field, Gibson, and Goodrich had hoisted knapsacks two days ago and set out afoot up this branch that no one but the captains believed was the correct course. Before leaving the forks, they had tied the red pirogue upside down among trees on an island and hidden it under brush. On high ground, they had cached and buried extra lead, powder, tools, clothes, furs, kegs of pork and salt, flour and meal, which they intended to retrieve on their return next year. In the midst of all that preparation, Charbonneau’s wife suddenly doubled over in pain and became sick and weak. The last sight Drouillard remembered that night was of Captain Clark kneeling beside her in the lodge, cutting her arm to let blood, which had seemed a thing of the poorest judgment, in his opinion. That, and their insistence on coming up this river despite Cruzatte’s advice, had shaken his whole faith in them still again.

Drouillard was stalking a small herd of buffalo that he had seen wandering down into a draw, upwind from him. He intended to select a fat young cow or a calf to kill, and the only way to approach these herds without being seen on this treeless land was to use the gulches and draws. Far down to his left he saw Gibson trying to get within rifle range of another herd. Gibson, one of the tough young hunters Captain Clark had recruited in Kentucky, looked not much bigger than a mite in this immense landscape. Somewhere out of sight in the other direction, Silas Goodrich was hunting.

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