Lewis’s Journal:
Tuesday May 14th 1805.
… I cannot recollect but with the utmost trepidation and horror; this is the upsetting and narrow escape of the white perogue. It happened unfortunately for us this evening that Charbono was at the helm of this Perogue, in stead of Drewyer,1 who had previously steered her; Charbono cannot swim and is perhaps the most timid waterman in the world… the Perogue was under sail when a sudon squawl of wind struck her obliquely, and turned her considerably, the steersman allarmed, in stead of puting, her before the wind, lufted her up into it, the wind was so violent that it drew the brace of the squarsail out of the hand of the man who was attending it, and instantly upset the perogue and would have turned her completely tosaturva, had it not have been from the resistance mad by the oarning [awning] against the water.
Thursday May 16th
… the ballance of our losses consisted of some gardin seeds, a small quantity of gunpowder, and a few culinary articles which fell overboard and sunk, the Indian woman to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any person onboard at the time of the accedent, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.
BERNARD DEVOTO, ed., The Journals of Lewis and Clark. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1953, pp. 109, 111.
Charbonneau shivered, pushed the perspiration off his forehead with his red neckerchief, then wound it just above his eyebrows so that it would sop the wetness and keep it from stinging his eyes. Poling his canoe was work. Friendly shouts rang out from canoe to canoe as the expedition searched for a suitable camping site.
The spring days were chilly with squalls. The air was sharp, and the water froze on the oars in the early morning. Now and then a flurry of snow came to whiten the April green. When the wind was kind, the sails were spread and tired arms rested. Cruzatte and Drouillard, and sometimes Lewis, took turns steering the pirogues. The captain’s old tricorn, jogging on his head, looked like a live, stubby-winged bird on a small perch, which was looking into the water; it took little swoops, as a bird would.
The expedition passed a high bluff that seemed to be on fire, throwing out great puffs of smoke. The party choked and coughed on the sulfurous fumes.
“Le sacré diable of the river!” called Charbonneau to the men on shore pulling the cordelles—the two ropes attached to the canoes—so that they moved off the sandbars and stayed out of the fast water with its hidden logs.
Someone yelled back, “It’s a volcano!”
“That is burning lignite,” corrected Captain Clark.
Scannon rose from the bottom of the canoe and coughed. He looked as gigantic as a grizzly bear. Charbonneau moved a little out of the way of his tail, which was as big around as Charbonneau’s arm.
Sacajawea called the dog to come sit beside her. As she did, Patrick Gass frowned. She wondered why Gass did not care for her. She had no way of knowing that he felt a woman had no business on a military expedition. She lay her hand on Scannon’s head as he wrapped himself around her feet in the bottom of the pirogue.
By midafternoon the pirogues were beached in front of a meadow rounded into a hollow of a hill and rimmed about with black oaks.
“I show you how to make Indian cakes in the ashes, eh?” Charbonneau suggested to Ben York as he brought out the brass kettles.
“Ashes, eh? It grits my teeth just thinking about it. Why not on a hot stone?”
“With good oak bark in the fire, the cake is clean.” Charbonneau had never thanked the captains for taking him back, and for him there was really no way—except that he could help York with the meals. He could make good corn cakes. He pulled one of the kettles aside, lifted the leather bag of cornmeal, and stood holding it, taken aback at his own brashness. He had no right to make free with York’s things. He began to apologize.
“Go to it!” said York. “You’ve my leave, and more. If you can eat your cooking, I can.”
While York got out the tin plates and spoons, Charbonneau took a swing through the woods and found a black oak with a hole in it. It was mostly dead where the hole was. Charbonneau stuck the handle of his ax underneath the bark and pried; the thick shags peeled off easily. He came back to the meadow with his shirt pulled up in front of him like an apron, full of bark, and made a small fire using one of Dr. Saugrain’s matches.
York had given him a match and told him to break it over a bunch of dry buffalo grass. Charbonneau had never seen such an easy way to make a fire. Then York told Charbonneau exactly what Captain Clark had told him—that Dr. Antoine François Saugrain, a physician to the Spanish garrison at Saint Louis, had made them with phosphorous and sulfur tips. He had brought all the latest scientific lore from France. When all the world depended on flint and steel to make a fire, Paris and Dr. Saugrain made matches. They weren’t magic; they were only a chemical invention, but very handy.2
The fire was going briskly when York came back with a kettle of clear water. The rest of the outfit was settling the gear for the night and turning the canoes over, backside up, on the beach.
Charbonneau looked for a large piece of bark for a mixing board but could find none that suited him, so he pulled off his leather shirt and smoothed it on the ground. The back side looked clean enough. He poured the meal there from a tin cup in the bag. He found the small clay pot of drippings from the antelope ration they had had the night before, and he placed the pot near the fire until the drippings melted. He poured the grease into the meal, kneading as he poured, until the grainy stuff was wadded into a large, stiff ball. He dipped the pot into the water kettle. He could hear Captain Clark’s ax going whkk, whkk across the meadow, slashing saplings for the camp. When the ax strokes changed to a tssh, tssh sound, he knew that the captain had finished cutting and was trimming boughs off the young trees to make their beds more comfortable. He also knew that his woman was there helping the captain bring the boughs into camp.
His knuckles worked the water into the big lump of meal until it felt about right. He portioned the lump into about three dozen pieces, setting them on a clean rise of green moss after he had patted each of them into a round cake the width of his hands and thicker than his thumb. The oak bark had burned down by then into a pile of gray ash with red underneath. He raked a hollow in the ashes with a stick and laid a dozen cakes wrapped in leaves into it, just so, with a deep layer of ash brushed over them. He built a wall of fresh bark all around them.
“That sure do look like a little council house with a smoke vent all along the roof,” said York, smiling. The fire began to creep up through its walls.
“By damn, it is too small,” said Charbonneau, putting on his shirt. The captain was coming out of the woods, his arms full of dry sticks. Sacajawea came trailing a few paces behind, her arms loaded high with the brush boughs.
“We’ll be eating directly,” said York. It was getting dark fast in the glade. Charbonneau put another dozen cakes in the coals, carefully pushing aside the first batch.
Then Charbonneau started gnawing at the hole in the oak trunk with an ax again. Long slabs came away—good dry stuff that had seasoned while the tree was dying. He’d come back and fell that tree after supper; it would keep them in wood all night. When he gathered up an armload of the splintery slabs and headed for the swale, he saw that Sacajawea was coming in again with more boughs to make the ground soft under the men’s blankets. “Hey, femme, don’t you forget my bed!” he yelled. He put the last batch of cakes in the red coals and piled more ash over them, then a layer of fresh bark, keeping the other cakes warm at the side.
While he sat with his back against a tree, Clark munched his cake and looked over the large medicine box, taking a rough inventory. When Sacajawea was finished, she came to sit quietly and watch. Lewis brought his cake over and sat down counting out vials and boxes with Clark.
“Say, Bill, look at this!” exclaimed Lewis, holding up a tiny vial. “I’d almost forgotten about these.” He took out five more small, thin glass bottles. “That royalist Saugrain gave them to me with explicit instructions on how to vaccinate. It’s something new from Paris, but I think Saugrain said it was first used last year—no, the year before, in London. Anyway, it is new, and according to the doc everybody is talking about it.”
“I’ve not heard of it until now. What is it?” teased Clark.
“It is something that might—will—change medicine.”
“Aw, Lewis, Saugrain is enthusiastic about the simplest remedies. What is this? Some of his ‘electrified water’?”
“Bill, it’s something we should have used before. Already it could have lost its virtue. It’s cowpox serum.”3
“Cowpox? And who wants that?” But with intense interest Clark watched Lewis break the top of the fragile vial and motion to Sacajawea to hold out her leg. Just above the knee he made a tiny scratch with the broken glass. She pulled her leg back, making a face.
“No, no—not yet,” said Lewis. Carefully he put a drop of the serum from the vial on the scratch and scratched over that again.
Sacajawea frowned.
“You’re hurting her, Lewis,” said Clark.
“Good Lord, what’s a little hurt now if it keeps her face from getting deep scars. This will keep her from having smallpox.”
Clark used hand signs to tell Sacajawea that the tiny scratch would keep her from having the dreaded smallpox and her face would always be smooth, not marked. Sacajawea put her hands on her face. It was impossible that a scratch could be so powerful as to stop such a killing sickness.
“You should have used it on those Omahas who died like cattle in that plague of smallpox,” Clark continued.
“I know I should have used this stuff before. Loses strength if it sits around. Hey, you want some? I ought to give it to the men just in case we run into an Indian camp that is infested.”
“I’ll let you try it on me, but I’m not sure it works. Why don’t you use it on our boy Pomp?”
“You hold Pomp firmly, and Lewis will make a scratch on him,” said Clark. Slowly Sacajawea nodded agreement, holding out the baby’s leg. Pomp’s eyes grew large and watery, but he did not whimper.
“In a few days there will be a hard scab over the scratch,” explained Lewis. “Do not touch it. It will heal, and that will be a sign you will never have the pox.”
For a long time Sacajawea stared at the scratch above her knee.
Lewis took the handful of vials and went out after the men who had not had smallpox.
“Hey,” called Clark after him, “hadn’t you better vaccinate yourself first?”
“If there’s any left, I will!” yelled Lewis. “Lord, I’m glad I found this stuff before it spoiled.”
The days became milder and the sun warmer. Hunters were sent ahead, who picked out campsites next to a spring or clump of trees. It never took long for the brass kettles to swing across gypsy poles, nor for Charbonneau to twist the dry buffalo grass into a round pile so that he could light it with a match.
When the hunters dressed a buffalo they had killed one morning, Charbonneau, now acting as cook, called, “Keep all the guts! Two bobs and a flirt in the muddy Missouri and she is ready for stuffing and the fine meal.”
Charbonneau held fast to one end of the six-foot-long piece of large gut with his right hand, while the thumb and forefinger of his left hand compressed to discharge, as he explained, “That which we’d choke on.” He stuffed the gut with fillets and kidney suet, salt, pepper, and flour, calling it “Bon pour manger.” Then he tied both ends of the gut, boiled it, and fried it to a golden brown in bear’s oil over a fire of buffalo chips.
Sacajawea licked her fingers when she had finished her sausage, then wiped her fingers in her hair to make it shine from the bear’s oil.
One evening Lewis set himself up as cook and made a suet dumpling for each man. But generally he was off in the hills with Clark, taking a look at the country, finding plant and mineral specimens, or recording temperatures and wind directions and measuring the terrain, noting the information later on his maps.
Sacajawea often brought in cress and other greens for an evening salad. She studied the ground, searching for things that were edible. In sunny spots the white stars of the bunchberry were already opening, and bluebeard lily buds swelled at the tops of their tall stems. Wild strawberry blooms hid under sprouting ferns and grasses like bits of leftover snow. She saw brown toads blink in the damp shade and brightly spotted green frogs hop away from her. Once a tiny chipmunk fled with a squeak and watched her from the top of a stump that was garlanded with trailing strands of dark green, soon to be covered with paired, pale pink twinflower bells. She stopped at some driftwood and saw the holes that field mice had made. She poked into the holes and then dug deeply as she found the clean white artichoke roots the mice had stored. She made several piles of the wild roots, then ran to find Clark.
“Eat.” She indicated they should be boiled and eaten.
“It seems to me,” Clark said, “if they are good, we should have them for dinner.” He helped her take them back to the camp.
York and Charbonneau served the boiled roots on the tin mess plates with roast venison.
“Hey,” said Pat Gass, “these here wild potatoes ain’t bad.”
“That’s a treat from Sacajawea, here,” said Clark.
Gass glanced quickly in her direction and spat on the dirt.
Drouillard laughed. “Once she gets to your belly, you’ll think the woman is wonderful.”
Some of the men guffawed and slapped their knees.
“Never!” snapped Gass. “It is not my idea of a military outfit to let a squaw gather its food.”
Around the evening fire the captains brought out stub quill pens and inkhorns so that they and the others could record the day’s adventures. Ben York sang a spiritual, soft and low, and Scannon howled at the night sky.
Sacajawea, who was never idle, bathed Pomp with warm water from the cooking fire, and filled his cradleboard with clean moss. Then she mended several of the men’s moccasins, fortifying the shoes with hard, dried buffalo skin so that the sharp stones and prickly pear thorns would not so easily penetrate them.
Shannon sat shyly beside her. Using hand signs and the words of Minnetaree he had learned from Otter Woman, he told Sacajawea the words in York’s songs. Then he began to talk of Otter Woman. “She is quiet and not bossy like the white girls back home.” Sacajawea smiled, understanding that the boy felt a tenderness toward the sad-eyed Shoshoni girl. She put her hand over her mouth so that Shannon would not talk more, for Charbonneau had come to sit close by. His jealous nature would not permit another man to admire his women.
“Hey, this soldier is still hungry!” yelled LePage, who was sitting beside the cradleboard, contentedly watching his namesake make sucking noises in his sleep.
“He be mostly belly!” yelled Charbonneau back at him.
Sacajawea reached for the baby to put him to her breast.
The men gradually rolled up cocoonlike in their Mackinaw blankets, with their feet to the fires, while one man stood guard, listening to the melancholy wail of coyotes and humming insects. Sacajawea, with Pomp, the two captains, Drouillard, and Charbonneau, slept on the soft boughs in the skin tent. The wind rose off the prairie grass and roared among the cottonwoods.
On two sides of the expedition’s camp lay camps of the Sioux, each one’s presence unknown to the other. This tribe had gone to attack the expedition’s camp at Fort Mandan because they thought the white men were bad medicine. They had missed them and were now going home. Chief Black Cat of the Mandans had disapproved of this Sioux scheme so strongly that he had not let his people trade or give food to them. By Indian standards this was the sharpest rebuff possible. Black Cat knew this band was warlike and wanted mainly the guns and ammunition the white men carried.
The Missouri River was beginning to look something like a swamp. The bed was shallow, and the men with the cordelles were sometimes out all day pulling and hauling the canoes. Sometimes the banks were steep and the men had to wade up to their armpits in the cold river; other times they climbed and scrambled over the sharp rocks and prickly pear along the shore. At times the banks were slippery with mud that clung to their moccasins, so they were forced to go barefoot. Dirt and stones showered these men from the crumbling cliffs.
One afternoon during a heavy rain, the expedition was forced to stop. A fire was laid on high ground in the center of the skin tepee, and as many as could gathered inside to keep dry. The others built small lean-tos that were not completely watertight but much better than sitting in the open or even under a tree.
Gathering sticks and saplings for the lean-tos, Gass noticed hoofprints. Drouillard and Cruzatte came to investigate. They reported to Clark that a Sioux war party traveling with many horses had been in this same spot only twenty-four hours before. No one wanted to meet these Sioux. The men began to speak of Corporal Warfington’s party going downriver to Saint Louis in the keelboat. Would they miss the attacking Sioux? Fortunately both parties had traveled sooner and much faster than the warring Sioux had reasoned they would. The Pirogues and canoes averaged about twenty miles a day going upstream.
Alkali dust rose, blown into clouds, and sifted into Clark’s double-cased watch until the wheels refused to move more than a few minutes at a time. The riverbank was perfectly white, and the river itself became milky white. Lewis remarked, “The Missouri looks to me like a cup of tea my grandmother used to make, with a tablespoon of milk stirred in it.”4
The game became so tame that the men had to drive the elk and deer from the cordeliers’ path with sticks and stones. Sometimes the yellow cougar watched from some rock ledge. When a rock was thrown in its direction, the animal would growl and slink away. The expedition ate beaver, elk, prairie hens, turkeys, and ducks.
Little meadows were radiant with shooting stars, honeysuckle, morning glories, trillium, dogtooth violets, spring beauties, and buttercups. Wild cherry and plum blossoms perfumed the air. For two days they traveled past second-growth fir. The original timber had been burned off a generation before. The undergrowth was filled with vine-maple, or Virginia creeper. The captains investigated a clone of aspen, genetically identical, which had grown from one root.
Toward the end of April, Lewis studied the map drawn by the Wolf Chief and led a small party ahead to the mouth of the Rochejaune, or Yellowstone River. This had been named on a map drawn by James Mackay ten years earlier. Lewis had a copy of that map for study also, and he decided that the junction would make an ideal location for a future trading post. Pat Gass suggested the post be made of local limestone. Charbonneau suggested starting trading fairs, such as the Mandans and Minnetarees held.
Lewis and Drouillard wandered about, studying the terrain. There were a couple of square miles of open ground, walled on three sides by a stand of black fir timber that looked solid until the men got within two yards of it; on the fourth side was a growth of mountain-ash saplings fencing the river. The open ground was a swale of yellow snapdragons and lavender-flowering wild pea vine. Silently, out of the timber, loped two grizzlies.
Instantly Lewis recalled the awe and terror with which the Mandans had described these “yellow bears,” the king of western beasts. Never did they go out to meet the grizzly without war paint and all the solemn rites of battle. As with the cave bear of ancient legend, no weapon of theirs was adequate to meet this dreaded beast. In parties of six or eight they went, with bows and arrows or, in recent years, the smoking-sticks of the French-Canadian traders. To kill one grizzly was equivalent to killing two enemies.
With these things swirling in their minds, Lewis and Drouillard faced the snarling animals. Each man fired his rifle; each wounded his bear. One beast ran back into the dense copse. The other turned and chased Lewis. A lucky third shot from Drouillard laid the bear low. He was only a cub, but the men estimated his weight at close to five hundred pounds, larger than any bear in the Atlantic states.
No wonder Indians who slew the grizzly were respected and in line to become chiefs. No wonder the bear’s claws became a badge of honor, an emblem of unflinching valor, and the skin a chiefs robe. There must be no enemy so fierce as an enraged and famished grizzly, thought Drouillard.
They pulled the huge animal to the shore for butchering, and its fleece and skin made a load that two men could scarcely carry. York rendered several gallons of oil from the bear. Charbonneau was so pleased with this much bear butter for his cooking that he volunteered to steer the white pirogue that afternoon.
No one, except perhaps Lewis, quite realized that Charbonneau was the worst steersman of the party. Both the captains were on shore at the time, which was very unusual. Almost always, one of them remained with the pirogue.
Charbonneau began to sing, “I’m a riverman. I’m half alligator and half horse, with the rest of me crooked snags and the red-hot snapping turtle. Cock-a-doodle-do!” He stopped, amazed at his own powerful voice. He was going to steer the pirogue and show those rogues he was more than just a cook with this outfit.
Scannon barked. Charbonneau turned and grinned, “By gar, you growl at me again and I’ll scream through my nose. I’m all bull ‘gator. If I set my teeth in your ear—”
He became silent; a puff of wind came up, then another, stronger one. Instead of putting the pirogue before the wind as he had been told, he luffed her into the wind; then he gloated about his seamanship, never giving another thought to luffing. A sudden squall struck the pirogue obliquely. The wind came in such a strong gust that it drew the brace of the square sail out of Drouillard’s hand. Sacajawea looked about, then toward the shore. Lewis had fired his gun to attract Charbonneau’s attention, gesturing him to cut the halyards and take in sail.
“Let Drouillard steer!” called Sacajawea.
The craven Charbonneau stood paralyzed with fear. His knees were jelly, his mind water. He squawked, “Shut up, squaw, we are going to drown.” Then he dropped the tiller and crossed himself, saying, “Jésus, l’enfant, save us.”
Charbonneau had turned pale and was staggering.
“Take hold of the helm, or I’ll shoot you on the spot!” yelled Cruzatte, enraged at Charbonneau’s cowardice.
Charbonneau was conscious of a tremendous weight upon him and the feeling that he would burst open. Instinct alone made him cling to the bottom of the boat.
Looking three hundred yards across the river, the two captains saw the pirogue heel over, then lie for an agonzing half minute on her side. Finally the sail was pulled in and the pirogue righted, but she was filled with water to within an inch of the gunwales. Lewis began unbuttoning his coat to swim out, but then realized how hopeless that would be. “Lord help that Frenchman!” he exploded.
Gradually Charbonneau came to and began to spit out muddy water and gasp for breath. Cruzatte hauled him out of the water in the bottom of the pirogue, and Charbonneau slumped against the gunwale in a half-conscious condition. His hands were numb, and he kicked a cask of water, deciding that was the weight that had been on top of him as he lay half-submerged in the bottom of the pirogue. If his life had depended on his doing something, he would have been lost.
Sacajawea, with her baby tied to her back in the cradleboard, began swimming after papers and articles that had floated off the deck. Beside her was Scannon, who had rushed into the water the moment she did. Drouillard frantically bailed as Cruzatte rowed the pirogue to shore.
There was nothing to do but stop the expedition for the rest of the day and unload the dripping, muddy cargo. Sacajawea paddled to the shore. Her arms were filled with papers from Lewis’s journal and his botanical notes. Hitched under one arm she carried Cruzatte’s violin in its dripping case, and the sextant. Slumping down on the moss-covered bank, she pulled the tumpline from her forehead and slipped out of the cradleboard. She was spreading the baby’s clothes, which she carried in the foot of the cradleboard, on stones to dry as Lewis ran up.
“Man,” he said to Charbonneau, “if the pirogue had capsized while you were steering, it would have cost us dearly.”
Scannon shook himself, spraying water over the two men, then barked loudly.
Charbonneau cringed. He dried his face with his shirtsleeve, but it stayed wet.
“You realize,” Captain Lewis went on angrily, “we have valuable instruments, papers, medicine, and presents for natives on board, to say nothing about the people here, including your own woman and child. Clumsiness cannot be tolerated on this trip!”
Charbonneau hung his head and mumbled, “Go to the devil!” And he mumbled something about a changing wind. He looked at Scannon and shook his head. What good was the dog, anyway, he thought.
Scannon growled and showed his teeth.
Charbonneau stared at the dog. “Holy saints, that dog’s mouth looks like a crater, and his bark can shake the canoe worse than the river rapids. It was that dog that caused the pirogue to shift. I’ll shoot him if he tries to bite me!”
“He won’t bite,” Lewis said, then softened his reproach of the dejected Charbonneau. “Lord, you gave us a scare today. But the damage to the pirogue is less than it might have been. Let’s have a drink.”
Charbonneau slowly relaxed.
Lewis had York break out a ration of spirits all around while they inspected the pirogue’s cargo. Some of the small medicine vials were ruined, but others could still be used and they were set out to dry. Only a few articles had rolled off the deck and sunk. The rest of the equipment could be salvaged.
Cruzatte examined his violin. “Dry in the prairie air and she be good as new. Many thanks.” He bowed to Sacajawea. “I’ll show you how to make music. You show me how to dance—sometime soon?” Sacajawea nodded and put her fingers on the sagging strings. “Oh, after I tighten a few things,” said Cruzatte.
Sacajawea went to help Lewis place the wet pages from his journal and his loose botanical notes on a clean, sandy place, with small stones on the corners of the papers to keep them from blowing into the river again.
When she finally sat down beside Pomp, she was exhausted. She picked up the baby and nursed him, half dozing herself. Something wet bumped against her arm. She looked quickly. It was Scannon, who lay with his head on his front paws beside her. She put a hand on his head, and it felt solid and strong. She passed down his neck, his back and flanks. He seemed to quiver and leaned his huge body against her. Then he bowed his head and licked her wet moccasins.
She began to talk. She told Scannon about the People, the family of Catches Two, Redpipe, and Charbonneau. Scannon listened, his eyes half-closed.
Charbonneau came over to tell her that York had food ready and she ought to dry her clothes out.
“Why you talk with that beast?”
“He does not talk back,” she said.
“Zut!” spat Charbonneau.
Lewis did full justice that evening to Sacajawea. “She showed equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board,” he said to the men. Clark clapped his hands, and the others followed. Sacajawea lowered her head. Never had she had such great praise.
“Mon dieu,” said Charbonneau. “I’ll never be able to do anything with that squaw if you make her something special and give her compliments.”
Sergeant Gass looked darkly at Charbonneau. “She didn’t ask for anything, but a little praise goes a long way. It is harmless.”
Sacajawea looked up. What had Gass said? She had understood only part of it. Was he defending her against her man?
“You have to thrash women once a week, maybe more if you treat them too nice,” answered Charbonneau.”
I guess you don’t know women like I do.” He laughed from deep within his throat.
“You ought to be hanged and have it prove a warning to you,” snapped Gass. “Maybe we could call the lass our mascot. Soldiers often have mascots, you know.”
The men clapped. Sacajawea sensed he had said a good word for her, and was pleased.
“Hey, Frenchy!” called John Ordway, “what were you thinking of out there this afternoon?”
Charbonneau looked up, shaken. “I—I did what I could.” He became quite pale.
“What does that mean?” asked one of the men.
“I can’t swim,” said Charbonneau with an awful grimace of embarrassment.
“My dear friend,” said Pat Gass, “you made the princely and self-sacrificing gesture of steering the pirogue when you were a stranger to water? We are two or three thousand miles from anywhere. With less men and equipment, the captains would have had to turn back.”
“Oui,” admitted Charbonneau, his liver doing flipflops.
“Your behavior is intolerable in a military outfit,” said Gass.
“I’m mortal sorry,” said Charbonneau. “The dog growled and jumped at me, and I must have blacked out for a moment. Oui, that is it—I blacked out for a moment. Fainted.”
Sacajawea looked from her man to the others. It would not be the last time she would see him go to pieces under stress, but this night she did not know this and excused him, thinking he was frightened by the dog and had miscalculated the strength of the wind in the sails.