Charbonneau (32 page)

Sacajawea began to croon her mourning song; in the near-darkness others heard, and their voices joined hers. Baptiste lowered Running Stream’s head, stood up, and walked out among the creosote bushes. He put his face in his hands and cried.

After a few minutes, he walked through the chanting mourners and knelt by her body. He took off his necklace, slipped the thong around her neck, and centered the hoop and stone on her chest. In his mind he said, “For your journey.”

They had to make camp no more than an hour or two from East Fork Lake. The moon had not risen, and it was too dark to travel. Baptiste was irritated about that. He had moved all day long on a tide of impatience: At rendezvous they could stop dragging Mountain Ram along on the travois, bearing the bumps to his splinted leg in silence. At rendezvous they might get some better medical help for him. At rendezvous they might trade for the Hawkens that Stewart and Campbell had brought to sell or to give away as prizes—the Shoshone needed them. Besides, Baptiste could get some whisky. He couldn’t remember when his dry had so wanted some wet.

“Paump,” Sacajawea said quietly. She sat down next to him in the dark, ten yards from the fire, and waited for his attention. “Spotted Deer is your squaw now.”

He looked at her like she was crazy. “She’s what?”

“You know this, Paump. Spotted Deer is your squaw. Not because Running Stream is dead. Because she is Running Stream’s sister and her brave is dead.”

“Jesus Christ,” he swore in English.

“She did not come to you last night because you were deep in your grief. But she will come tonight. She belongs to you.”

“I don’t want her.” He was a little surprised that he didn’t feel as adamant as he sounded.

“It is your duty. Mountain Ram will expect it. Everyone will expect it.”

“No.”

“If you do not want her, you may trade her to someone else, which would humiliate her. In the meantime she is yours.” Sacajawea stepped back to the fire.

“Tell her not to come tonight.” He had halfway noticed that she had been doing things attentively for him since yesterday, but he’d forgotten the custom for the moment. He put down his blankets far out in the dark, and she did not come that night.

Rendezvous was petering out by the time they got there. Baptiste did hallo some old friends—Gabe, Joe Meek, Doc Newell, Black Harris, and Mark Head had come in. But Carson and Fitzpatrick were off playing nursemaid to Lt. Fremont, Bill Williams and Long Hatcher were gone to Bayou Salade, and others were scattered across the landscape, gone to Oregon, or gone under.

Campbell traded him three new Hawkens and some DuPont and G’lena, but warned him against stirring up the Snakes, which would only shed more blood. He managed to pick up two more used rifles.

Captain Stewart cultivated him. He was intrigued with the paradox of Baptiste. The second evening he made an offer: “Bob and I are going to do some hunting up in the mountains,” nodding toward the Wind Rivers. “Why don’t you guide us?”

“Naw,” said Baptiste, “Bob knows ’em.”

“He hasn’t been there for ten years. He says you know them better.”

“Mebbe.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars for the month. Your people can stay here at camp.”

“Don’t that shine? Why didn’t you say so right off?”

He told Jim to come along and split the hundred. At least this was a way to keep the situation from getting sticky with Spotted Deer. And he had something in mind other than guiding.

He stopped Pilgrim, when they rode into the bottom of the high basin surrounded by the Cirque of the Towers, just to drink it in for a moment. The basin undulated gently toward its upper end. The floor was a mossy, spongy, tundra-like grass; they had left trees behind a thousand feet below. Tiny streams hatchworked the floor, some no wider than a man’s hand, some several feet across, all running with the coldest, clearest water a man would ever expect to drink.

At the head of the basin the grass, so green it hurt the eyes, gave way to a glacier; the glacier angled up toward the peaks, a band of white dividing the region where plants and animals can live from the region where they cannot; the peaks jutted up from the glacier into an immense circle of nine high towers, huge slashes against the sky. The towers were slabs on slabs of perfect, unbroken, gray granite, laid behind each other as neatly as playing cards. They rose in an assault on the blue, as though the rocks had been blasted from the earth by some huge energy, and had been frozen at the top of their flight.

The Indians had named the highest and most jagged tower Lightning Peak. Probably it got its name because it attracted lightning; Baptiste thought it looked itself like lightning stilled and fixed.

In fact only a few Indians had ever been there, and Baptiste had come only once before. He had camped, looked, played songs, and done nothing that first time. This time Stewart’s desire for a bighorn sheep, found only in remote places, would provide a good excuse to do it again.

“What’s this—Orpheus?” Captain Stewart cried. Baptiste put down his harmonika as the horses and mules clattered up to camp. He guessed everyone would be in high spirits: Two bighorn sheep were draped over pack mules, a considerable day’s work. “A little minstrelsy?” Stewart repeated.

“A little music to soothe the
savage
breast,” replied Baptiste.

Stewart swung off. “But not savage enough to enjoy a little hunt. A fine trick splitting the work and the fee with Jim here. Did you see?” He grabbed one of the sheep by its horns and stared it down. The huge, curling horns dwarfed the head—it was a splendid specimen.

Stewart’s best came out that night, Scotch whisky and Drambuie. Stewart tried the meat of the sheep, but it was stringy and they ended up having hump ribs instead.

“Baptiste,” asked Stewart, “what were you playing this afternoon? Can you give us some music? The party needs some livening.”

Baptiste had not played from the night of Running Stream’s death until that day. Entirely alone, he played his own songs, and even toyed with an idea for a new one, a kind of
rondo
with a principal theme suggesting the Cirque of the Towers and nine themes for the individual towers. But he felt too private about his own songs right then. “You have a choice of Mozart, Beethoven, backwoods American, French-Canadian, and Indian.”

“Leave out the weighty ones and let’s have the rest.”

It was a cold night, there at more than ten thousand feet; clouds had spit a little snow that afternoon; the men were crowded close around the fire, front sides scorching and back sides freezing—Stewart, Campbell, Baptiste, Jim, and the three muleteers. Baptiste tossed off a boatman’s ditty, which Stewart applauded heartily, and then a new song, “Across the Wide Missouri,” which, without lyrics, seemed to miss.
“Mes Voyageurs”
went over because Antonine, one of the muleteers, knew the words.

So Baptiste decided to take a risk. “This is a Navajo song, an invocation of the most sacred powers, an appeal for their blessings.” Throwing his head back, looking at the glacier and the granite walls and the reaching towers and the remote sky, he chanted with all his force:

Tsehigi.

House made of dawn.

House made of evening light.

House made of dark cloud.

House made of male rain.

House made of dark mist.

House made of female rain.

House made of pollen.

House made of grasshoppers.

Dark cloud is at the door.

The trail out of it is dark cloud.

The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.

Male deity!

Your offering I make.

I have prepared a smoke for you.

Restore my feet for me.

Restore my legs for me.

Restore my body for me.

Restore my mind for me.

This very day take out your spell for me.

Your spell remove for me.

You have taken it away for me.

Far off it has gone.

Happily I recover.

Happily my interior becomes cool.

Happily I go forth.

My interior feeling cool, may I walk.

No longer sore, may I walk.

Impervious to pain, may I walk.

With lively feelings, may I walk.

As it used to be long ago, may I walk.

Happily may I walk.

Happily, with abundant dark clouds, may I walk.

Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk.

Happily, on a trail of pollen, may I walk.

Happily may I walk.

Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk.

May it be beautiful before me.

May it be beautiful behind me.

May it be beautiful below me.

May it be beautiful above me.

May it be beautiful all around me.

In beauty it is finished.

A hush lingered among the men as the echoes of the chant died away.

Finally Stewart, as though taking responsibility as leader, spoke up: “By God, the Indians do love the earth, don’t they?”

“Would you play one of those ‘weighty ones,'” Campbell said, “just to satisfy my curiosity?” So he gave them a lovely
adagio assai
of Mozart, which may have bored everyone but Campbell. “Baptiste,” he said seriously, “you’re a virtuoso on that thing. With the mouth organ and the Indian music, I believe you could have had a concert career. Don’t you think so?” he asked Stewart.

“The public in Britain and Europe would flock to hear that music.”

“I might have liked that,” Baptiste said. “I also compose my own songs.”

“Play us one,” Campbell asked.

Baptiste considered. “Not tonight,” he said. “An Indian must keep his magic to himself, lest others borrow it.”

Stewart called Baptiste into his tent while the others were breaking camp. It was snowing lightly for the second straight day, and a nasty wind was up. He handed Baptiste a cup of hot coffee and poured some Scotch in.

“I have a proposition for you, and I want you to take me seriously. I hear that when you first came to the mountains, you were planning to write a book.” Baptiste nodded. “About the Indians?”

“About my own life as an Indian and a white man.”

“I don’t know whether you’re still interested in it, but if you are, I’d like to help you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Come back to Scotland with me. You can live at Murthly Castle. You’ll have a sinecure for life. For life. Isn’t the trapping at an end anyway?”

“It’s dwindling.”

“You can write your book, which will be much more colorful now. I may be able to help you place it with a publisher, and the income will be yours alone.”

“Interesting.”

“You might also give some concerts,” said Stewart. “I know nothing of that world, and have no judgment about what is possible. Whatever my support is worth, you will have it.”

Baptiste just looked at him. He was partly overcome with an impulse to burst into laughter at the coincidence of having two European aristocrats invite him to be members of their households. But that wasn’t the point.

“What do you think?”

“I’ll put it under my hat for a while,” Baptiste said.

“Would you like another drink?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

They chitchatted for a while, but let the main subject go. Baptiste didn’t mention what was heaviest on his mind. William Stewart, baronet, was taking back live elk and buffalo to roam his ancestral Scotch estate. Would Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau be his live, souvenir Indian?

Back at the main camp Spotted Deer moved in with Baptiste without asking. Apparently his interval of mourning was considered over, and regardless of what he ultimately wanted to do with her, she was his property for now.

He liked her well enough. She was not a beautiful woman—her features were too strong and blunt for that—and she was thirty-five or forty. She was tall—strapping, in fact—and had a hard, wiry body that looked cut out for hard work. Like Running Stream she had mind enough of her own to talk back to him; she was full of common sense, and would sometimes make jokes that made him wake up in the night laughing. Well, she wasn’t keeping him from taking a second squaw, if he wanted, so why not?

He noticed one night that the fact that she was lying down nearby had the simple effect of making his cock stand up. So he took her. It turned out to be a treat—she was athletic—and Spotted Deer seemed very pleased about it. He didn’t mind it himself; for however long she belonged to him, he thought he’d keep it up.

Stewart’s party rode with the Snakes all the way to Fort Bridger on Black’s Fork, since Stewart wanted to see Gabe again before he moved toward St. Louis and ultimately Scotland.

The morning before they got to Fort Bridger, Stewart approached him after breakfast.

“Have you decided?”

“Yes. I’ll stay here.”

“You feel attached to the Shoshones?”

“I feel attached to this land.”

Stewart let his eyes run in a wide circle over the scorched plains and the high mountains beyond them. He thought maybe he understood.

JANUARY, 1844: Washakie had agreed to have the big tribal council start in two days. The Shoshone nation was spread out through the Cache Valley, along the Bear River above the great rapids that rush it toward Salt Lake. The chiefs and principal warriors of all the tribes would come from their winter camps to sit at Washakie’s council circle; Washakie had a huge lodge made especially for this meeting, and sent his hunters for enough meat to last several days. It would be the biggest council since the fight with the Crows on the Wind River three years earlier, when Washakie had persuaded the chiefs that the Shoshones must drive the Absaroka people from the Wind River Mountains and claim those hunting grounds for themselves. When it came to other Indians, Washakie was a warrior.