next day, he and Clark walked out ahead and found, in ev’ry hollow and thicket, ev’ry knoll and copse—ready for the picking and eating with wild juices running down chins and fingers stained red—grapes, plums, and blue currants. Each thing that was new, they named, and with the naming of each lark, wren, and blackbird, he could see a time coming when all things would be named, and none cared about the natural world disappearing, because new methods of valuing, unimaginable now, would arise and determine what was good or ill.
When they made camp, Shannon was missing. This man, with the poorest sense of direction ever, was forever losing his way, even going to the latrine. This time, he’d utterly vanished with two U.S. government horses, as though he’d stumbled off that plane of existence. But the man had a genius for finding hidden places, doors in hillsides, folds in the garment of time. And was never far off, for they found signs of him all over, a warm ash pile, a half-gnawed rabbit skull, a hastily buried turd. But he remained hidden. Did God so love George Shannon? And could there truly be a bearded old man in the sky? Or was He only a scapegoat for all man could not answer? If so, then enormous lies were being told, and defended with torture by black-clad tonsured craven bullies. Now and then, the tribes caught one of these, these missionaries, covered him in soot, pulled off his skin, lashed him to a tree, then put the tree in some rapids.
That next morning, the object was to shoot one of the gazelles or antelopes they’d seen, like an animal of the Serengeti. They ambushed him, and Lewis sat stroking the coat of bright yellowish silver, reddish-brown and a leaden gray, and looked into the emptied eye, of a deep sea green. Then they wanted a female for comparison, but too late—those animals moved over the plain more like flighted birds than quadrupeds. Clark killed a prairie wolf, lean, distant figure loping forever on the edge of life. It gave Lewis a strange pain to watch it fall and lie still.
Often and often, he had to pause and wonder whether honour, glory, dominion, and renown could still be his. The plain they skirted was as close-trimmed and neatly cultivated as a beautiful bowling green and bore the appearance of man’s handiwork. But what purpose to mow broad swaths up and down the prairie, and then lay them head to head? He counted eighteen of these features, all carefully arranged on a piece of land.
Several miles above them, Drouillard was riding upriver as hard and fast as he could go. And though he nearly killed a horse in the bargain, he’d at last overtake Shannon and bring another of his insane flights to a close. George had been quite crazy for days, trying to catch a party that was not there. And afterward insisted he’d heard their voices ahead, and smelt their horses, cooking, and latrines, but could find them nowhere. Shaking, clothed in rags, peppered with cockles, he rubbed one eye, then the other, deranged by lack of sleep. Nature played such sport with this man, making him think north was south and up was down.
That night, the men came ’round to be stabbed, cunningly wounded, by Lewis. And Lewis was only too happy to oblige, for few things did he hate more than a festering boil. A poultice of sugar and soap might suffice for some, but give him the lancet and the needle, white-hot from the flame. His readiness to pierce and puncture elevated him in the men’s eyes to a place not far from godhead, for they respected only agony and copious bleeding.
A day or so after, they met a party of Sioux and went ashore to palaver. But within a very few minutes a horse had gone missing, and then sundry small articles as well. Lewis, standing under a huge, leafless tree, shielded his eyes to look up from the river at the chiefs on the ridge with the sun behind their feathery heads.
“I’ll have you know we are not afraid of Indians!” he shouted up to them, knowing that the words meant nothing, that his tone carried all his meaning. “When Indians steal from us, we kill them! Isn’t that so, Commander?”
“O, yes!” Clark said, standing in the sun, a hand on his sword, a second tiny figure they looked down at. “We have possession of your country! And we only deal fairly with those who are fair to us!”
The chiefs, blanketed, thin, squinting, and as wrinkled as raisins, expressed consternation and shock, anger, and outrage with a long retort, and so Lewis had his answer. He and Clark turned and walked down the hill, and with them flowed a body of two hundred warriors, and women and children, the entire village. He wondered, with a bitter curiosity, if it was almost over, if his slaughter would be next. Some young men got to the bateau and seized its line. Clark drew his sword. Lewis cried, “Men, take arms!” And then waited for the Almighty. But a doddering old chief limped into the shallows and took the rope from the young men, and indicated that taking him on board would avert a massacre. So they were allowed to escape, and put the old sinner ashore a few miles above.
That night had everyone in bad spirits. At the next village, they were skittish, and every sparrow’s fall was possibly a slaughter commencing. Those women, decorated with the scalps of defeated enemies, danced. Many had flint- and iron-pointed arrows run through their arms in grief for loved ones recently fallen in battle. So, apparently, did love hold sway with those people. But hatred did, too.
Lewis, reflecting on what had almost happened, had a bitter night. His sorrow acted like claws curved backward, and the more he struggled in its grasp and tried to escape, the deeper it dug and faster it held. His sentiments were crafted like a thousand tiny gold fishhooks into which he’d blundered, and now he attempt’d not to panic or resist. He got down and prayed with his head to the earth for it to be lifted, and was surprised there by Clark. “Are you ill, Lewis? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing at all. Merely resting.”
Clark stared and angled his head in that interrogative Irish way, and frowned as he did when a thing was irrational.
“Lewis, what was in your heart, making that call to arms?” he asked.
“Nothing. Curiosity to see how it would fall out,” he said, standing and feeling foolish about the dirt on his knees and his brow, making him appear like some sort of Catholic.
“But to fight rather than to bargain—?” Clark said.
“But Clark, I didn’t choose it!” Lewis protested. “I never choose a thing to do or say but what is thrust on me by my station, rank, training, situation, time of day, even the position of the sun. In effect, no choices appear to me at all but always the one course as though it were already writ somewhere. As though all this were occurring in God’s head, and He were setting it down, and rapidly, with no hesitation or crossing out.”
“Would you prefer some crossing out?” Clark asked with a worried smile, slapping dust out of his beaver hat.
“I do not prefer at all,” Lewis said. “I cannot resist a bit in these traces. They are snug and double.”
Clark plainly didn’t care for his answers and didn’t pursue them. The tribe later walked them out to see two large boulders with a third smaller, purported to be star-crossed lovers turned by the gods to stone, side by side for eternity. And their dog. “Romeo and Juliet,” Clark said.
“Though I can’t help but think of the Gorgon, Medusa,” Lewis said. “And of Lot’s wife, also.”
That evening, they confined a man (Newman) for mutinous expression, and sentenced him to seventy-five lashes. Lewis was curious to see an actual mutineer and visited him where he was shackled, finding a character with long blond hair and a rosy face, a regular cherub, but sunk into sullen study of his right shoe.
“What’s the game, Cap’n?” he asked.
“What? There’s no game, Private.”
“Sure, this here, the whole thing, is it. I’m just askin’, what’s the rules so
