Sacajawea (71 page)

The men guffawed and pounded York on the back.

“Them natives is an outfit, all right,” agreed Gibson.

For the next couple of days the expedition was in the valley of the lower Columbia, the home of the warm Chinook wind. The country was one of long slopes, running against the sky. The hills and swales were still green, and the air was warm and moist with rain. Swarms of swans, geese, ducks, cranes, storks, gulls, cormorants, and plover flew overhead. They were a delicious change in diet from the salmon. For a time the canoes drifted smoothly, then suddenly they descended into deep river canyons, and then in a little while they were back on smooth water between rapids again. There were the unique wooden huts of the Chinooks on both sides of the river. The huts always had racks of drying salmon around them, and everywhere the banks of the river were strewn with fish skins, making a sickening stench.
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When the expedition passed by the Hood River inlet, the Chinooks ran from their outside chores into their lodges. All were terrified as though they had never before seen white men. They could not be persuaded to come out, and they never ventured near the expedition’s camp. This tribe was dressed in skins from the shaggy mountain goat. Beside each hut was a wooden box with salmon, halibut heads, and roe, putrefying. Holding her nose, Sacajawea showed Clark the carved goat-horn spoons and wooden dishes, elaborately carved, that lay inside the boxes. She pointed out that this might be a tribal delicacy, comparing it to the Hidatsas’ liking of rotten buffalo flesh. She laughed when Clark made a face and held his stomach. They called to the people as they passed lodges and racks of salmon and other fish, split, dried, and some boxed with oil. Finally Clark left a few gifts near a large cache of dried fish. The odor of decaying fish and rancid oil lay heavily over this village.

Below the Hood River there were abandoned wooden huts, which the captains examined. They were built of split red cedar with a top smoke hole, or roof well, that could be opened for light or shut by an arrangement of sliding boards. The entire hut depended on notching and mortising; no pegs were used. The dead were placed in open wooden boxes, which Bratton found in an area to one side of the abandoned village. Inside, the bones were weathered white. Some of the boxes contained baskets made of spruce and cedar roots woven together. There were bowls beautifully carved with a kind of sea monster. The features were a mixture of bear and shark, with curved lines on the cheeks representing gills, a shark’s tail, and bear’s paws. The men found carvings in stone and baked clay in the grave goods. Sacajawea half believed that the spirits of those people might not wish to be disturbed, so she fought her curiosity to look inside and looked instead inside the forsaken huts. She found a tiny amulet of a human figure, carved from a beryl; the knees were slightly bent and drawn up against the chest, the kneecaps were flattened, and the feet were merged with the base. The head was large in proportion to the body, almost equaling the shoulders in width. The figure lay discarded in a corner, and she found it because its reddish coloring attracted her attention. She squealed with delight and ran out to find some discarded rope or sinew that could be used to tie around the little doll. She found some braided, hairlike twining in another hut and placed the doll around Pomp’s neck. His baby fingers examined it, then he popped it into his mouth, sucking on the feet. Sacajawea belatedly remembered the captains’ policy of not taking anything from any village unless it was especially given as a gift. She knew Captain Lewis would judge her more harshly than Captain Clark.

“Why didn’t you tell me you wanted a toy for the child?” chided Clark.

“I didn’t know until I saw this. It is a gift to him from me.”

“I should have had one of the men make Pomp a doll. Gass could make a toy to amuse the boy. I was not thinking or would have had something made weeks ago.”

“Now he has it,” she said, her face brightening. “I do not have to put it back?”

“It did belong here, and if the former resident came looking for it, what would he think if he found it around your son’s neck?”

“The right size for that child,” she said, holding her breath a moment.

“You believe the child who owned it before grew up and discarded it?”

“Ai.”

Clark was amused and put his arm around her shoulders. “Let your son enjoy it, then.”

Sacajawea was more breathless than after an uphill run. She was weak in the knees. Then it came to her that being with the white men was happiness. Some days were hard,
ai,
but there was always happiness. And here with Chief Red Hair outlining her eyebrow with one finger gave her more happiness than her heart could contain. It ached. And she thought that this was a pain that only more pain could cure; like some sickness, she’d feel worse before she felt better.

That day the canoes passed by villages of Chinooks who had flatter heads because of the practice of strapping a padded board across the head of every infant.

“It is
I’malade!”
Sacajawea cried, imitating Charbonneau’s French.

“I don’t like it, either,” agreed Clark.

“Worse even than putting a bone through the nose,” said York.

In the evening they camped upriver from a village that was packing fish into large canoes. The expedition had not seen such long, light craft on the river before. These were tapered at the ends, wide in the middle, and the stern and prow lifted into beaks like a Roman galley. The projecting bows served to repel wave action in rough water and prevented swamping. The canoes were painted red, brown, black, or white, and had carved figures at the bows.
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“Good Lord,” said Lewis, “those craft will carry sixty men and maybe three tons of fish.”

The canoe was paddled with leaf-shaped paddles with a crutch-top handle. The steersman in the bow had a longer paddle.

“They use sails,” remarked Shannon, pointing to a canoe with very thin planks reinforced with strips of wood and sewn at top and bottom. Then he pointed again. “Two canoes lashed together. See, there!” Two canoes were tied and a plank deck was being laid over them.

Not far from the canoes was a platform over a stream. The women there were gaffing and netting the tightly packed fish as they moved upstream.

“These people look too busy to be interested in visiting with us,” said Drouillard.

Around the expedition’s camp the cedar timber grew scant because the ground was too sour and weak for it. Only a few dwarf trees grew between black-mud marshes full of cattails and dwarf elder bushes heavy with bunches of mouth-puckering blackberries.

Before sundown the wind came up and brought in a rank sea smell, along with great marsh hawks and a flock of sandpipers and dippers looking for a tasty mouthful in the stream’s backwater.

“Oh, is that the smell of the Stinking Waters?” asked Sacajawea.

“Janey, the Western Sea can’t be far,” said Lewis, twitching his nose, “but the ocean smell is so mixedwith rotting fish, it is no wonder it is called Stinking Waters. Lord, will I ever smell anything but decaying fish?”

“I am wondering if we’ll ever get to the ocean. Constantly now, I ask myself, what will the terrain be like? What sort of natives live on its shores? Will we meet with a sailing vessel? Lewis, I can hardly wait for the days to pass now until we get a view of that ocean,” said Clark, nudging a little tree toad off a deadfall into the lush ferns.

York brought in a few wild blackberries. Sacajawea went out to gather wapato root from the marshy soil.
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Sacajawea chased a long-toed salamander, colored like the dark mud and with a wide yellow band from the back of its head to the tip of its tail. All of a sudden she stopped. She was face to face with a black bear digging lily bulbs or grubs from the mud. The bear backed a few feet away from her, but continued to dig. Saliva ran from its mouth. Sacajawea turned slowly, and still looking over her shoulder to make certain the bear did not leave, she hurried back to camp to find Captain Clark. “I know a hunter can have a good shot. Wouldn’t fresh bear steaks be good?” She licked her lips and rubbed both hands over her braids, as if wiping off the bear’s grease already.

“I’ll get McNeal and Hall to go after it,” said Clark, his mouth watering.

One crack from a rifle was heard, and before the men had time to argue who had shot it, the two were back in camp with the bear over their shoulders. It was the best meal the expedition had had in days. The men stuffed themselves as though they would not get any meals the next day. About all they could do that evening was sit around the fire and sing and tell stories.

Slowly the Chinooks from across the river came over, inspected the five canoes of the expedition, then sat quietly listening to the white men sing. The captains smoked with the chief and learned that these people smoked dried clover. In fact, the clover patches seemed to be privately owned, and small areas were marked off by grass ropes. The chief explained through Drouillard and with hand signs their fishing habits.

“When spawning time comes, the salmon ready tospawn make their way back to the freshwater streams from which they came, leaping falls and overcoming all obstacles. We have five to seven salmon runs a year.” He held his fingers up. “The fish going upstream are ready for the taking.”

Then he surprised Drouillard by telling his belief in the supernatural power of the salmon. In fact, he taxed Drouillard’s interpretive powers and he was not certain he got the story straight. “The fish allows itself to be taken in our nets, or by our gigs. Its spirit, released by death, returns again and again, provided the proper “are is taken that no offense is given. The salmon live in great houses under the sea. There they assume the same form as you and I and have feasts and potlatches among themselves.” Here, Drouillard shook his head and told the captains he was not sure his interpretation was what the chief meant, but it was some Chinook mythology that they had believed for a long time. “So,” Drouillard went on, “only when they assume salmon form do they sacrifice themselves. And so—it is our custom to return their bones to the sea, just as those dead salmon are seen returning downstream; then they can assume their human form under the sea and can come again to us.”

The chief waved his arms all around. “To throw salmon bones carelessly away would prevent the return of the spirit to the sea and give great offense. The salmon might withhold themselves, and the humans on land would suffer. My village asks you to please return all the bones to the river.” The chief crossed his arms in front of his chest and sat silently a few moments.

Captain Clark noted that this particular group of Chinooks had a cleaner-looking village than most because they did not leave the fish skins, heads, and bones lying around.

Lewis wondered how this village dealt with the villages farther upstream, who were so much more careless with the salmon leftovers and did not appear to honor this myth.

“I think they ignore them,” said Drouillard. “Once they had a smart headman who knew a way to keep the stink down and have a cleaner place for his peopleto live. This village remembers those ideas; the others have forgotten over the years.”

“I would have thought other smart men would have seen the same thing and done something about keeping villages cleaner,” said Clark.

“The rain cleans things up,” said the chief after Drouillard had tried to make the captains’ questions clear to him.

The following evening the wind came down off the snow peaks with a stiffening coldness, and the expedition camped in the protection of a cliff. The wind snapped at their fire and brought rain. Rain fell throughout the next day from low, leaden clouds, which concealed the snow mountain. They ate the bear meat until it was gone, then had wapato stew.

The rain continued. Beneath the grasses the earth was now a level, dark brown floor. The weather was foggy, cold, and raw. The wind grew more violent, and the waves in the wide river became higher. The water became brackish. It was so salty that a few of the men became ill from using it to prepare the dried and pounded salmon, which, after the bear was finished, had again become the mainstay of their diet. No other game was seen anywhere. They searched the water for beaver, but it was too salty.

The tips of the snow peaks dropped lower in the northeast and at last vanished beneath the floor of the earth. The wind stirred the cold sand of the wide valleys and lashed the men’s faces with it. Sacajawea pulled a robe high around Pomp’s face for protection against the biting sand. The valleys were bordered by ridges whose rim lines were scribbled across the sky.

The blankets and robes were continually wet and mildewed, and there was no way to replace them or slow down the growth of mold. After two weeks of this wet weather, even their clothing was rotting away to rags.

If there had been large game, there would have been no time to tan the hides. The shores on each side of the river were steep and rocky, with pinnacles rising up and up. Once the canoes passed over a forest of gigantic submerged tree trunks. One small stream after anothercame tumbling down, free of rock, in cascades of white, frothing water. The north shore was an unbroken battlement of beautiful multicolored rock. None of the men had dreamed of such a magnificent land. But neither had they dreamed of this raw wind, and rain, and penetrating dampness.

“Vicious, beautiful country,” Clark remarked. “Rather think I’m dreaming, or can it be as bad and as beautiful as it seems?”

“Oh,
Jésus,
worse,” said Charbonneau, sniffing and coughing and shivering, “much worse. We have to keep working to keep from shivering to death.”

The expedition spent the night of November 8 in Gray’s Bay on the north side of the Columbia River. They all felt miserable. Sacajawea sat huddled in a blanket, with Pomp wrapped in a small robe, trying to keep him from fretting. He was too old now to be happy confined to a robe all day. He squirmed and whined and nearly wore his mother out rocking him and singing to him. He wanted to walk or crawl and explore his surroundings as any ten-month-old would.