Sacajawea (88 page)

The young Nez Percé mother sat on the ground, her body half-covered, but she was totally unconscious of affectations.
“Ai,
York,” she smiled, her eyes crinkling. “Small Man York. He will be something great in this tribe. See, he does not cry even now. There is no other papoose like him in any village.”

Sacajawea did not say what came to her mind. She thought there were probably several others that York had left in the various villages the expedition had visited. And maybe, she mused, half-white papooses had been left by some of the others.

The evening she first heard the piercing, eerie singing, she began to think that some of the Nez Percé women were a little flighty. The night was still and the sound was easily carried over a wide area.
²
She noticed that it made Ben York shift uneasily, put another log on the fire, and look around anxiously at the others, as if he wanted to move out somewhere. He finally did sidle back to the edge of camp and then lope off into the woods.

Sacajawea could not imagine what had got into him. He had been holding Pomp and making the child laughand giggle. He stopped and just seemed to sniff the air and listen. Most of the others didn’t seem to hear it, or ignored it as some wood noise.

No one paid him any attention as he went away to the edge of camp and then disappeared. Why am I wondering? thought Sacajawea. York can take care of himself.

She washed Pomp’s hands and face and took him to the back of the camp, where he knew what was expected of him before going to bed. Quickly he pulled off his leggings, relieved himself, pulled off his shirt, and ran back to his mother. Sacajawea cleaned him with a handful of leaves. She patted him goodnight on his pile of pine boughs and pulled a robe up to his chin. The fur tickled and he pushed it away, turned on his side, and was asleep in a moment.

The whistle came again, this time close to the edge of the camp. Curiosity, always high in any woman, especially an Indian, got the best of Sacajawea. She stepped away from her sleeping child and tried to follow the strange, shrill whistle. It seemed to come from the edge of the clearing, then from behind a tree. Just when she thought she was close, it moved. It was neither a bird nor an animal. Suddenly she saw a pretty young Nez Percé woman standing in an opening, with tall pines on either side. She was dressed in a deerskin shirt and leggings, which were fringed. A leather band around her forehead kept her long black hair off her face. She moved with a subtle rocking motion, blowing through her hands, which she held in front of her mouth. Sacajawea waved to the young woman. The woman did not seem to notice her. She turned her back and whistled again. From behind a tree came York, his white teeth flashing in the moonlight. He ran for the young woman.

Sacajawea hurried back to the campfire, chuckling to herself, thinking how York followed the whistling like a buck deer followed the sashaying of a desirable doe. That excited Nez Percé woman was leading him all over the Nez Percé country, through the brush and between the pines and through the tall prairie grass. She would be caught sooner or later, and maybe beforenext spring the fun-minded woman would be the mother of another curly-headed Nez Percé papoose.

On June 10, Lewis announced, “Strike camp. We are moving a little farther into the foothills so that the hunters can find more game.”

None of the Nez Percés followed the camp. Shadow left the expedition that evening on the pretense that he wanted to go down to the river to fish. He never returned. Sacajawea knew that he had become more Chopunnish than Shoshoni now and did not actually wish to go over the mountains to see any of his Shoshoni cousins. She tried to explain this to Clark. “It is not surprising that he does not want to go with us over the mountains. He is now like the people of the Nez Percé nation, who did not wish to travel outside their own territory often. He misses his adopted tribe and wants to be with them.”

“We’ll miss him. He was good with translations around here and understood the art of negotiation when we traded with the Nez Percés. I’d hoped he’d escort us across the mountains and parley with the Nez Percés for several more guides. So—if our guide leaves us, we’ll go over the mountains by our own wits,” said Clark.

Five days later, Lewis made another announcement. “Collect the horses, pack the baggage, and strike the camp. We are moving up over the mountains onto the Lolo Trail early tomorrow morning. I have already sent Windsor and Colter out with their rifles to look for deer, wolf, fox, or rabbits for our meals.”

Two hours after dawn the next morning, the two hunters were ten to twelve miles ahead of the main party. They stopped to examine the gray sky. “Looks like snow,” said Windsor.

“Those can’t possibly be snow clouds,” answered Colter, squinting in the sky at the grayish overcast.

“You can’t deny those are snowflakes,” said Windsor when the huge flakes began drifting down.

Slowly the men tramped upward in the mountain tanglewood. Then they noticed that the firs were bent from wet snow and they were walking on a path only by guess. “I can tell by those dead branches hurtling down and the occasional dead tree falling that the windis stronger than usual,” said Windsor, turning to face Colter. He turned more quickly than he had planned, and his rifle struck a boulder. It broke near the muzzle and was impossible to fix.

“I hate like hell to make this suggestion,” said Windsor, “but it looks like we’d better turn around and see if we can’t locate the main party before we get lost in this storm and they find us frozen solid as that damn rock that broke my rifle.”

“You’re right. The sooner we find them, the better,” agreed Colter.

Sacajawea carried Pomp in a blanket on her back. The air was cold and crisp. She blew on her hands, often tucked them up under her blanket, but it was difficult to ride the horse and lead the packhorse with no hands. The weather seemed to take hold of everyone, so that after a while each man’s mind was aware not of arms and legs, but of sky and land; the snow clouds an intimate part of the body, the horizon one’s eye. By afternoon the snow was two feet deep. Hours passed and the horses began to stumble. The heavy, blowing snow, piling, drifting, piling again, took away the old shape and face of the land.

Finally, Clark had to admit that none of the landmarks he had expected had come in sight. They were lost. The men were tired, but Clark’s words snapped their minds back to the need to plan for the night—how to keep off the cold, how to be alive and able to go on when morning came. They began to complain about cold feet, and with so much snow there was no grass for the horses and no game for the stew pots. They had found no sign of the two hunters who had been sent ahead. In that swirling snow they could not see the tracks of mice and squirrels. The wind blew with a hundred voices, and the shadows of the trees mingled indistinguishably with the black trunks.

Clark found dried wood after patiently scraping away snow, and tried sparking his flint, but the wind and endless swirls of snow ended any hope of a fire. They camped in a small ravine. The next day their march was shorter. Each day, the hunters from the main partyhunted less; each day, the cold deepened and their fear increased.

The main party was camped in another small ravine when the blizzard broke. They stared at each other with glittering eyes across a hoarded fire, against the back of a pine-bough lean-to, wondering if they would starve to death before getting through the mountains. It was then that Captain Lewis’s mind shook off its paralyzing agony in an overwhelming urge to think.

“A man must keep moving to keep his blood running,” he said.

All the men had been cold before, and each knew that if it got through the skin and the frost bit into the bloodstream to harden it, he might be crippled for life, or there would be fever and then death.

“We must go on, not rest,” said Lewis. “If your hands, arms, feet, or legs begin to feel warm, that is dangerous; then the frostbite is setting in.”

There was no inclination now to talk about how thick and cruel was the snow, how dumb to be caught in the middle of it. All their wit and strength had to be given to figuring how they might keep their feet and find the trail back.

Lewis was looking at Sacajawea. Her hair, dull and lifeless, fell in strands on her shoulders. Her face seemed shrunken so that he imagined he saw her skull more than her features, the wide jaw and far-apart eye sockets. She held the eighteen-month-old child’s face automatically against her breast, and the child made unconscious sucking movements with his mouth.

Which of the men should he send back? Lewis dropped his head on his knees in a wave of dizzy weakness and clung despairingly to one clear thought. “Clark,” decided Lewis.

“What?” Clark sighed.

‘Take the squaw and the child back to the Nez Percé village. We will follow.” He saw that Clark agreed. There was a better chance if they went back now.

“Horses can’t go without food longer than five days,” said Clark. “We’ll take them back, too. But leave the baggage here that we have no immediate use for. It canbe a sign to Colter and Windsor that we have gone back. We’ll pick it up the next time on our way up.”

“This is madness,” said Gass. “Tomorrow we might be more bewildered than today.”

Clark said, ‘“A pioneer is never lost, but occasionally bewildered.’ That’s a phrase from my old friend Daniel Boone. Funny I’d be reminded of that now. Janey, I’ll carry Little Pomp for a while. Come on, tie him to my back.”

Clark led the retreat, with Sacajawea and the others following slowly behind. No one talked much; they seemed to live only in brief thoughts that seemed hours, even days apart. The descent was never steep. A thaw came with rain and melted much of the snow. An occasional slope of mushy snow had footholds that were bad. They lost four horses and the mule when the rain turned to snow again.

“Here’s a beaver dam!” Clark yelled back. “Maybe we can get a beaver or two to roast.”

The men milled around the beaver dam. York built a small fire. Sacajawea heated water in a kettle on a tripod of sticks. York found some dried fish and
kouse
roots to put in the boiling water for a fish stew.

Colter and Windsor meandered into camp while the men were standing around with their tin cups, sipping the hot meal. “Hey, if you guys had stayed in one spot we would have caught up with you two days ago,” said Colter. “Thank God we are here. That snow and wind was bad. I’d forgotten how cold it could be.”

While the men were crowded around Colter and Windsor, John Potts was still at the beaver dam stubbornly trying to chop a hole in the ice so that he could bring out a couple of the animals. Suddenly he was on his hands and knees yelling for someone to help him. “Help! I cut my leg! Help! The ax slipped on the ice!”

“I’m coming!” yelled Lewis. He saw that Potts had cut a vein in his leg and the blood was gushing from the wound. It was touch and go for a while as Lewis tried to stop the bleeding.

Potts was given a cup of the fish stew and then put on his horse to continue the downhill ride until evening.

Sacajawea, free of Pomp, helped York clean up thetin cups and put the fire out before joining the others on the downhill trail.

Windsor and Colter were each riding horses now near the end of the line. Sacajawea and York brought up the rear.

“Hang on!” York yelled out as Colter’s horse reared and bucked. But it did not help. Colter fell on the rocks in the middle of Hungry Creek. He clung to his rifle and his blanket. Sacajawea and York stopped their horses in the middle of the creek and watched Colter whirl downstream, get a shaky footing, then climb out of the ice and water. York gave him a dry blanket to replace his wet, frozen clothing. As York was picking up the stiff, wet clothing, a porcupine fell out of a tree. He surprised the three of them. Sacajawea quickly climbed from her horse and threw a large stone on the head of the animal, crushing it. Still shivering, Colter skinned out the frozen flesh and chewed some off the bone. “He’s frozen solid. You didn’t have to hit his head.”

“Hey, I roast that for you,” said York.

“No need,” laughed Colter. “I’ll have it eaten by the time you get the fire going. Here, have some.” He passed around pieces of frozen porcupine to York and Sacajawea. They ate, enjoying it. Then they rode up to the rest of the expedition. There was no view, for the clouds hung low on the wooded ridges, and streamers of mist choked the aisles of the trees.

Exertion seemed to take the sting out of the cold, and now the men’s senses were alive. There were no smells, only the bleak odor of sodden snow, but the woods had come out of its winter silence. The hillside was noisy with running water and the drip of thawing firs.

That evening, Cruzatte brought in a mountain delicacy, several dozen large morels. These were mushrooms that the Nez Percés rarely ate. York roasted them. Cruzatte, Drouillard, and Clark ate heartily. Sacajawea, York, and Colter were not hungry, for they had finished off the raw porcupine. Charbonneau and Lewis thought when the mushrooms were cooked in this fashion, without salt or grease, they were truly an insipid, tasteless food. Charbonneau gnawed maple twigs with some of the other men and fed his mushrooms to Pomp.

Now the thought of fat salmon, fresh from a wellfed winter in the sea, became irresistible. The men, with few fish hooks left, fell back on the infantryman’s last resort. They bayoneted salmon.

Sacajawea was kept busy making a smooth cut the length of the belly and scraping the guts and blood out of each fish. The head and tail cut off, she made a cut from end to end, close to the backbone. The fish lay open, held together only by the skin of the back. She made the next cut by slipping the knife under the exposed bone and removing it from the other side of the fish. She removed the backbone without waste. When the hunters brought in deer and a black bear, their diet improved. Their heads cleared, and their cramps became almost unnoticeable.

During one night the wind changed, and the cold became so severe that it stirred the men out of sleep and set them building up the fire. Sacajawea awoke to air that bit like a fever, and a world that seemed to be made of metal and glass. The cold was more intense than anything she had ever imagined. Under its stress, trees cracked with a sound like shots from machine guns. The huge morning fire made only a narrow circle of heat. If for a second she turned her face from it, the air stung her eyelids as if with an infinity of harsh particles. To draw a breath rasped the throat. She kept Pomp inside her tunic next to her own warm body.