Free Across the Endless River by Thad Carhart Page A

and smiled wanly. The two men conversed briefly in German.
    â€œHe fell from his horse several miles from here,” Paul told Baptiste, “and these women found him and carried him here on their litter. He has only bruised his shoulder, but since he was very thirsty and far from water, they gave him the buffalo’s blood to drink.” Baptiste nodded as if this were normal. Paul’s hand, too, was stained with blood and his moustache soaked in it. In fact, everyone they passed bore the same markings. We look like a pack of wolves, he thought, our muzzles and paws soaked with the blood of our prey.

S IX
    D ECEMBER 1823
    B aptiste gazed out over the gray expanse of the Mississippi Delta in the early-morning light and thought back to the beginning of the voyage. From his youngest days, he had been in and out of canoes on the Missouri and the Mississippi and on most of their tributary streams. Long river voyages were nothing new to him. Even the trip he and Paul made from St. Louis to New Orleans had not been so very different from what he had expected, though he had never before traveled by steamboat. The river was the river, and while it grew ever wider and more powerful as they headed south, its essential nature didn’t change. Its waters roiled constantly in muddy turmoil, snags of bushes and branches sometimes blocked the entire width of the channel, sand bars could ground a boat suddenly in a place where deep water had flowed only days before, but the fundamental proposition was always the same: the current wanted to carry you downstream, and your efforts and calculations had to take into account the simple fact of the river’s southward flow. He had been impressed by the way a river pilot could read its currents and moods in a glance, as if he were a hunter looking at a trail and assessing the recent passage of animals.
    Living on board the small steamboat had taken some getting used to. Its engine ran constantly and the paddle wheels churned to keep them in the channel and added to the downstream momentum. The lack of effort was the hardest part to accept, and the absence of contact with the water. In a canoe, the steady rhythm of one’s paddling became as automatic as breathing. He felt cut off, idly watching the banks roll by and sleeping on the boat, rather than making camp on the shore.
    At first the countryside was familiar, and boyhood memories returned as they steamed past places that held meaning: the broad sandy island in a bend of the river where he had shot and dressed his first buck; the flat shoals along which he and his father had camped twelve years earlier and been roused from their sleep by a tremendous shaking of the ground that turned the river into rapids wherever they looked; the fast-moving channel where a friend had drowned with his entire family when their flatboat smashed against submerged rocks.
    In those first days, too, they had passed the tiny group of wooden buildings on a sheltered inlet—a two-story tavern and three low shacks—where men stopped for an hour or two of pleasure with one of the women who lived there. Baptiste had visited a number of times in the last year with his earnings from Curtis & Woods, and he shrugged as he recalled the peculiar mix of longing, relief, and sadness that stayed with him after these encounters. Young women in the Mandan villages had encouraged his first awkward advances years ago, but since then he had understood that, in the white man’s world, marriage or payment were the only sure ways to be with a woman. The last time, it had been a Creole girl from downriver no older than him. When they had finished, she bit his ear as he sat up, then rubbed herself down with a cloth like an animal that has been exercised.
    Gradually he had watched the banks of the river change, and two days after they had passed the place where the Ohio joined the Mississippi, he became aware that he had never been so far downstream. He would