the men moved around Lewis and talked with each other, and yet sensed nothing amiss. Nor had anyone ever, except of course Mother, who knew him best.) Next, they brought out the airgun for the first time since the accident, and fired it. Which astonish’d the tribes, since it made no explosion and needed no powder, no flint or spark.
In the morning, it was discovered Reed hid his things outside camp the night before, collected them, and departed. Sergeant Floyd came to Lewis’s tent with the news, red-faced, in a fury, white spit in the corners of his mouth, and shaking.
“Take two men and locate him, and shoot him on the spot,” Lewis ordered, not meeting Floyd’s white-eyed gape.
Clark, standing nearby, said nothing in poignant disapproval. But if the policy lacked compassion for the souls of the flock, Lewis reasoned, it at least kept it together in one place. And since his own commanders had done thusly, so would he, too.
The next day, a white feather came tumbling and rolling over and over in the current. Lewis sighted it at a quarter mile, while talking to Clark about the desertion, and could not look away from it. It approached. He reached and snagged it, nearly going overboard, saved by Clark, who’d guessed his action a moment beforehand.
Clark’s man York came to see what prize, golden treasure, and Lewis gave it him, all unconcerned. And noted more feathers rocking on the flood, a dozen, no more. Then the river was white with feathers, shore to shore, the water turned to feathers and the boats pressed upward in a fast, rasping current of feathers. Sergeant Floyd, at the helm, turned. “Captain—!” His face was fevered and red, and an orange flume hung down from above his head, surrounding him. Lewis glimps’d it from the corner of his eye, but it vanished when looked at straight.
Clark allowed the feathers to tumble, rush, and bump under his submerged palm. Lewis didn’t try to estimate the number, because none could possibly believe him.
Then they passed out of it, blanket changing to a veil, then a loose-woven net, and at last the river again. Sergeant Floyd held his side at the place where they wounded Christ the Lord. And a sudden flush afflicted Lewis. An all-over blanching, a sinking of the organs, nauseated terror and blackness at the edges of his sight. For York’s hand no longer gripp’d the feather! But no, there it was in the other, which now made a gesture as if to discard it. Lewis’s dry voice, like wood ripping, broke out: “No, I will have that, York!” The men all looked at him, and at York. York looked into Lewis’s eyes, appraisingly. “If you do not mind, York, I will have that,” he said again, lowering his voice. “For the articles and specimens.” York, a remarkable example of his kind, noted something amiss in this (Lewis knew), but gave it over.
Later, Lewis would count this as the first day he was certain that the thing which gripped him in times past was laying hold once more. (And he would remember this event again, this incident of the feathers, when Floyd died.)
“What on earth—?” Clark said, turning to see the flood of feathers though it was already gone around the next bend.
“What, Clark? Have you not seen two miles of feathers before? How doth it compare, in your opinion, to the talking fish of day before yestiddy?”
But they were sent to find marvelous things: mastodons and sabertoothed lions, the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and a river running deep and clear to the Pacific through a neat cleft in a tiny row of pebbles called the Rock Mountains. He was to look for Hebrew hieroglyphs and try out Yiddish words on the tribes. And one question in particular continued to revisit him: Was suicide (and especially suicide from love) as common among them as in white, polite society? His mind hung up on that inquiry. He examined it with vague and advancing dread.
His hand had still not lost the feel of Tom’s, of the president’s. O, why had he put himself in this absolutely gorgeous position to fail, and as publicly as one possibly could? Meanwhile, he continued to feel at odd moments the very thing he’d felt since early boyhood, powerful, wrenching, and inexplicable. He had a strange, malignant affliction: an inability to act in his own best interest. Sometimes, he behaved without right regard for his own safety and was called “brave,” and sometimes without caring for others, which was termed “passionate.”
Around the next bend, they met a tribe wearing coyote pelts, all afraid of what had just transpired across the river: four hundred Mahar wiped out by the smallpox. Clark listened to the account with his intelligent scowl, in skins newly fitted from head to foot, soft deer hide with fringe, tailored to his form, with red beard, and his large red head all woolly and topped by a beaver-skin chapeau. Clark leaned on his rifle barrel, with a no-nonsense set to his mouth, and worked his eyes about. “What is that place called now?” he asked.
“They call it The-Great-Spirit-Is-Bad Town, roughly,” the French engagé said.
“And a good name for it,” Clark said. “Did you hear that, Commander?”
Lewis, carefully separate by several yards, nodded. “Indeed. But why not call it There-Is-No-Great-Spirit Town? Why not catch the sentiment closer to the head?”
“A savage is not so quickly made an atheist,” the engagé said.
Clark wore a badge, like a little flag, turned up on the brim of his cap with a royal-red center and plumes, fanning straight up into the sky, of green, blue, and yellow, giving him the look of a rustic sergeant major.
“Why insist? In the face of tangled wilds stretching over the whole earth, why say that an order exists tho ’tis invisible?” Lewis asked. “Is it not cowardice to demand that a thing be thus-and-so simply because ’twould be lovely if it were?”
The engagé doffed his hat and withdrew and Clark watched him departing and set and reset his lips in various shapes. “Is everything all right, Lewis?” he asked.
“How could everything not be all right?” he asked. “I am on the excursion of a lifetime. If I am not loved by those I command, I am at least obeyed by them. I am healthy, fit, and in the prime of life, don’t you know?”
“You rarely have a rough word for these people, that is all.”
“I find their faith childish today. I lack patience for it when we are thus far behind in our own programme,” he said.
“I thought you were happy with our pace. I had no idea.” He angled the regal head in a dubious way to see Lewis better, and to register concern and doubt.
“How can I be happy with this pace when we are ten years late?” Lewis asked. “We are finished before we’ve begun!”
Moreover, the whole nation saw how tardy they were, and that the prize itself, left languishing thus long on the rocky Pacific coast, was of doubtful value by now. And though he was only midway through life’s journey, as the saying went, the chance in his hands to make up for it seemed blown apart, lost, which gave his heart a pain and relentless desperation.
Just then, cries went up, and the search party issued in a body from the woods, pulling Reed, the deserter, along by a rope wound ’round his wrists. They all looked sore and beat, but the hunters were grinning and not contrite at having ignored his orders to put Reed to death.
“O, for God’s sake!” he cried. “What is that man doing back?” For all knew about the order—it was all they talked about since its issue.
“Are you stupid?” he asked them, coming up. “Are you really so dull as this? You spare this criminal?”
The men made no answer
