and without so much as a backward glance at her husband.
Lewis felt it had happened before, yet everything had changed. Now he had someone, one whom he was able to watch without needing his eyes. He saw her with his mind’s seeing-organ, and noted so many things about her: her sportive willingness to journey, the wry silent witness she was to a large party of men. Also, formed last by God, her labours were now heavier after the departure of the old wife, even though her belly showed that she was far gone with child.
In the following days, he knew her proximity, direction, and activity every moment. If ever asked her whereabouts, he could answer without looking up—but never dar’d.
That night, near 10 P.M., the dark erupted into shouts of anger and a woman’s cries of pain. He and Clark forced a way through the mob and found a lady bleeding on the ground from three deep knife gouges, and her husband, smeared with the warm life of his beloved, with three privates sitting on him. It seemed she engaged in sport with the men, and the husband caught her, coming in late.
“You see, Clark?” Lewis asked. “This bedroom diplomacy does violence to souls unsuited to it.”
“’Tis puzzling,” Clark said, shaking his head. “To a savage, jealousy is generally thought impractical.”
“O, ’tis the least practical thing in the world,” Lewis said. “Please to tell the men to turn in.”
After Clark did, Lewis stayed a while and stood where he could not be seen and watched the bridegroom sitting half naked in the bloody snow, gasping and blowing and spitting red from having bitten his tongue in anguish. Behold, the angry forlorn cuckold. He seemed not to care whether he froze to death, lost in wonder. Why, little one? Why do you do this to me when you know I love you? Or words to that effect, while her blood dried on him. Ah, love. Lewis at last withdrew to his own bed, but lay too agitated to sleep, tossing and remembering his French mistress, being bathed in her gushing blood.
The next afternoon, Sergeant Pryor, a mere youth with twinkling blue eyes, curly locks, and smooth, high forehead, got his hand wrong in a rope, helping to raise a mast, and the violent wrench tore his shoulder from its socket, and he fell on the deck and writhed and kicked, and was sat upon by three of his fellows while a fourth tried to draw the arm out straight. The first try failing, Pryor all but bit his own tongue off and blood dribbled out of his mouth. “Goddamn you men! You butchers! You filthy, lazy, worthless wretches!” he cried. “You have been against me! I know you do not respect me! But I am . . . agh! . . . your sergeant, you stinking filth!”
On the second try, the joint ground in the socket, then jumped out again. Pryor kicked out and would have screamed could his jaws unclench, which they could not. With eyes squeezed, leaking tears, he espied Lewis, and blinked and made guttural growls and gnashed his teeth. “I see them! The lights about your head! Look above your head!” he said.
At the third try, Pryor seemed to go unconscious for a moment, and went limp as if dead, in a contorted, tortured pose. He slowly opened his eyes. “O, yellow pack of miscreants! You vile, disobedient demons! I at last see you! I see what ye really are!”
On the fourth attempt, at the pop of the shoulder going fully home, Pryor dropped dead away and was left where he was, the men walking off muttering about what a pip Sergeant Pryor could be at times, though not so bad, after all, as some officers.
Lewis waited nearby, curious, with never an inkling that the sergeant could be so wild and vindictive. Pryor opened his eyes and glanced about, seeming not to see him at first. He looked around expectantly, then his face dulled with disappointment. “Everything is . . . as before,” he said.
“And how should it be, Sergeant?” Lewis asked.
“A bright flame played about your head,” he said. “All this—” he gestured at the woods, “—was of the most variant hue and brilliance. Each blade of grass was a bit of fire.”
Lewis stared the sergeant in the face, for Floyd had actually emanated some sort of orange flare from the crown of his head, while the feathers came down the river. And then, very shortly after, expired from no certain cause.
“Never mind, Sergeant,” he said. “You will be your old self in a day or two.”
Pryor nodded, but didn’t look relieved at this news.
Over the long winter days, when she was in the hut, he was careful to be elsewhere, and worried he’d be discovered by his avoidance of her rather than the contrary. The temperature in the Mandan village fell and fell, until it seemed they had found a place on earth without limits. But it at last stopped, at 72 below. York went out hunting, and from dragging buffalo carcasses into the wind, got frostbite on his feet and p—.
One night, above the wind, they suddenly heard a most terrific wailing, a concatenation of shrill female voices, lifted in a fever of ritual song. With lanterns raised, Lewis and a few privates ventured forth to peer out at a party of squaws just within the woods. Charbonneau somehow materialized at his elbow. “Berdachers,” he pronounced. “Do ya know what they are?”
“They are females,” Lewis said.
“Only in manner and appearance. Dem’re witches. Able to change form and fornicate with men. There’s nothink like a night with a berdacher, but a man kills hisself in the morning. Better keep an eye to your sodjers.”
He glanced at the flickering French eye beside him, the thick, wet lips, thrust tongue, and rolling white, like something atop a cathedral. Each night, she laid her small, perfect head beside that visage.
“These men are confined to quarters after dark,” he said. But as soon as he’d got it out, the husband crooked a finger forth with a laugh.
“Dere he goes! Catch him, boys, catch him! Tie him to a tree!”
In fact, a man had set out and was halfway to the woods, trying to reach that dark band of white-faced furies, when he was overtaken and tackled and forcibly retrieved.
“Shackle him,” Lewis said. “And if you must, sit on him all night, but keep him indoors!”
He watched that they did this, but when he turned back he no longer saw the husband, that face of the hell-born agoniste, or the berdaches.
The next night, the Nation got up a huge medicine dance to bring the buffalo back north in the spring, and they gave this man, the one who tried to run, a seat of honor at the feast and four maidens, for the good luck it would bring the tribe.
Then came a total eclipse of the moon, and much chanting and singing.
Lewis suddenly received Charbonneau, who came to his tent to show him a red rising on his tailbone. “Either you are sprouting a tail,” Lewis noted with some relish, “or you have an abscess forming. Let it rise ’til you cannot bear it, then summon me.”
And indeed ’twas strange, this general epidemic of boils and abscesses, so that every man suffered some such complaint, almost as tho they drew near to some invisible disruptive force, disord’ring their flesh.
“O, one other thing,” the husband said before departing. “It seems her time is nigh.”
Lewis gaped at the milky, insolent blue eyes, one and then the other, before the meaning at last dawned on him. “Sir, do you mean your wife is giving birth? This moment?”
“Aye,
