the tent. He followed it as far as his eye could reach. God surely hated him because he was still alive, feeling bludgeoned, butchered, and skinned. Clark was talking to him. They’d been conversing and he’d dozed. “—as for what was in your mind, I cannot presume,” he said, and was waiting for Lewis’s answer.
“I wish to call it accident,” Lewis said.
“Lewis, you do not take careful care!” Clark snapped.
My, he sounded alarmed! But that was Clark, with a body full of reliable anger and outrage that broke out as easily as his sweat.
“Something’s amiss,” Lewis said, holding his head. “I want to eat a yard of earth. I could chew rocks or eat dung. Some element is lacking in me.”
“How are you now?” Clark asked. “And have you heard? Sergeant Floyd is dying.”
“Somehow, I knew that he was,” Lewis said. “I must see to him.” He tested a foot on the ground. He sat up, temples pounding.
“That seems hardly wise,” Clark said. “And useless, too, for he will not last the night.”
He was up already, and staggering off with Clark still talking, bursting out of the tent, finding a friendly tree to lean on while the rollicking earth settled. Going tree by tree, and not believing a thing was real ’til he’d touched it, he found the right tent and slipped in. Floyd, on his back, with that singular look of the dying, those thousand-mile eyes, greeted him and then said, “I am going away.”
“Are you, then? Are you sure that’s a sound idea?” he asked.
“Please write me a letter,” Floyd said, through wet mutton-chop whiskers. Lewis smiled, and nearly made a joke about letters of reference to Saint Peter. He felt they were brothers at this moment, sharing their nearness to death. For Lewis felt his own life would end any moment, though it was curious how it persisted and hung on. A little after he took the letter down, Floyd died.
At dawn was a solemn little ceremony, a yawning shallow trench, prayers, a lively pitching of fresh earth into a hole, onto Floyd. The men looked to Lewis to say something. Finally he knelt and put a hand on Floyd’s cold forehead and said, “Ah, Floyd, you whom we invited with us on our expedition. And now you go and leave us out of yours!”
That task done, Floyd entombed, enshrined in limestone, all desire abandoned him. He felt trumped by death. The men waited on him in dismay, with searching looks, until at last he gave an order to load boats.
Later on, they saw the first buffalo and Private Fields shot and killed it. Lewis walked out and stood by, his mouth yet aching from the mineral, burnt lips stinging, tongue still thick and hard to work. Was there any hope of getting to the Pacific without some slight desire to do so? Clark joined him, to toe the cooling animal.
“This before us is the first buffalo, Clark,” Lewis said, with difficulty. “The very first one.”
“And a very grand fellow indeed,” Clark said. “A tasty-looking morsel.”
“I am not making myself clear,” Lewis continued, and wiped his eyes, which cried tears, for some reason. “I must not be well. I simply wish to say that here at our feet lies the first buffalo. I cannot say more than that, though I apparently feel a great deal about it.”
But O, feeling! What a nuisance, bubbling up so suddenly and irresistibly. Why was it so excessive, so contradictory? He must be going out of his mind, or perhaps he already had, years ago.
Farther on, a group of Sioux came up on foot and bade them pay a visit to their town, using signs. Later, they escorted Lewis to a large hill that appeared man-made. He was told, through interpreters, that it was the home of little Christian devils, eighteen inches high, with freakish large heads, whose blowguns could kill at great distances.
He burst out laughing, certain the interpreters had got it wrong. The Indians, blankets on their shoulders, feathers tied in their hair, scowled, and their chief made a sign, a single finger drawn away sharply from the mouth, twisting and turning, for an untrustworthy person. Lewis choked back the untimely mirth, which only doubled its intensity, finally biting his tongue ’til he tasted blood. Then they soberly investigated the hill, but no little demons were about.
Nevertheless, the place had an airless, doomed, and motionless sense, and was gusted with dry, hot winds, the grasshoppers singing at a steep infernal pitch. Its chest-high grasses were full of currents and whisperings, making it palpably a region of spirits and bad medicine.
“Something awful occurred here once,” he said to Clark. “Certain places on earth have this about them, this dark sort of dread.”
He’d seen it all before, he was sure of it, as if he were repeating this same journey over and over, endlessly, like an inward-turning circle, as though his life had got loose from the mainstream and was caught in an eddy. They walked down from this “spirit mound.” There would be a road up to it one day, just there. He traced the path with his finger. One day, he’d come up it. In fact, he’d already done so.
The 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