The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis. Michael Pritchett

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, these twelve hour, ever since the moon come up,” he said blandly, and clumsily loaded a pipe.

      As if at a signal her voice, in transports of agony, sounded high and clear above the songs of the dancers. “My God, you might’ve said something before! She is in distress.”

      “She ’as me worried, ’at she ’as,” the fellow said.

      Lewis went to the hut and found her there with a woman of the village, midwife, arriving just in time for a terrible sight of her gray skin, and to feel of her icy hands and feet, and to hear her scream instead of making the healthful grunt and bearing down of a successfully labouring woman. Her throat seemed to rip, to be torn in two. She continued this way for another hour, and he left her and attempted to go about business elsewhere. But her cries awakened ev’ry nerve he had and worked them like an iron file on harp strings, like a hurricane in a dry field of rye. He found no refuge anywhere, and heard it when it wasn’t there, while the sergeants queried him on various things. He was helpless inside it, like a child at the hands of a fiend. At last, he stumbled into the hut for the medicine kit, found dried rings of rattlesnake tail, crushed them fine, mixed with water, and ran. And though the midwife viewed ’t suspiciously, he held it to her lips and she drank with a tender awful trust in her eye, and fiery hands grasping his.

      Within ten minutes of his departure, from the suffocating confines of the maternity ward, she delivered a healthy boy, whose cry he perceived from where he had fallen, face foremost, in the snow.

      Then, a few days later, she walked out for the first time, mother and child rivaling each other for radiance in the spring light. He did not dare go near her nor dare to stay away and so glanced only a moment at her prize.

      The husband, standing some distance from her and appearing heedless, was in fact very carefully observing this visitation (Lewis knew), devouring each detail of his expression and hers with starved attention. Lewis felt the moment, like ev’ry moment since Creation, was formed of iron and bolted on ev’ry side. And knew he had a dog at heel now, and a shade by his side, which was the husband, who was waiting and watching for some particular sign, some telltale glimmer in her eye or his to give him cause to act, to pounce.

      But how? When had he made the slip and put that bloodhound on his scent? No, it wasn’t possible. He’d not made the least error, never an imprudent glance. No—the fellow awaited evidence. Lewis was sure of it, or almost certain, moving carefully away from the little gathering, out of the fellow’s sight.