Free Trail of Bones by Mark London Williams

asked Lewis once if he’d ever heard of
people eating veggie dogs.
    “Dogs?” Clark pointed to Seaman. “You wish
to eat my dog? He’s right there. But we’re not that desperate yet,
and I’d hate to break a promise to the shaggy fellow.”
    It seemed like a joke, but you couldn’t
always tell with Lewis.
    Either way, meat wasn’t doing to his stomach
what it did to mine. And I don’t mean just a bite or two. I mean
big heaping piles of cooked meat two or three times a day.
    And nobody worried too much about side
dishes.
    I’ve been burping a lot on this trip. And
worse. Like now.
    Once, when my stomach was queasy, Clark
tried to give me a shot of whiskey. That only succeeded in burning
my throat and almost making me to throw up.
    At the moment, sitting in the bushes, it’s
not stuff erupting from my mouth I’m worried about. I try to get
comfortable — as comfortable as possible — to take care of my
business without getting my butt or legs all scratched or
bitten.
    There are definitely some places you don’t
ever want to get bit.
     
    I guess using this vidpad means I’m keeping
a kind of journal, too, just like Gassy, Lewis, Clark — like a lot
of them. And since a journal is supposed to be a truth-telling
place, I need to write about something that happened earlier today.
It’s connected to the whole food thing.
    As I said before, Lewis likes to walk along
the shore a lot, sometimes with Seaman alongside since the keelboat
and pirogues move so slowly. Suggest:
“peruse.”
    He can walk along and make notes, sketch
birds, take plant samples, and, as he says, “chart longitude and
latitude for the maps and settlements to come.”
    “You already know where the cities will be?”
I asked, before realizing the question may have given too much
away.
    “Cities?” he laughed. “Cities like
Philadelphia? Like Richmond, Virginia? Why, even if we survive this
expedition, these wild lands won’t be settled for hundreds of
years. No, young squire, I’m talking about very small outposts,
leaving people all the room they’ll ever need out here in the Far
West.”
    “ Alors! ”
    Suggest: “aloe” or
“allow.”
    It was Cruzatte again. Usually those shouts
meant that some new animal had been shot. Given he’s only got the
one good eye, I just hope Cruzatte’s aim is careful and he doesn’t
shoot one of us. I’ve seen some of his shots ping trees and
branches.
    “ Regardez! ”
    Suggest:
“regalia.”
    He was asking the rest of us to come take a
look at whatever it was.
    “Let’s go,” Lewis said. I hurried along with
him, through the cottonwoods and willows (Lewis and some of the
others were teaching me how to identify the different kinds of
trees), and then we saw it, too: not just the endless stretch of
prairie and grassland — all of which would be long gone and turned
into suburbs and cornfields before I was born — but buffalo.
    Not a whole herd. Not yet, anyway. But three
buffalo standing on the edge of the tall grass, chewing and looking
at us.
    “We eat good tonight!” Cruzatte said, aiming
his gun. They all had these long rifles that you had to stuff full
of gunpowder, down into the barrel. And you could only get off one
shot at a time.
    Lewis had the most advanced gun. He called
it an air rifle. It fired like a normal gun, I guess. You could
just pull the trigger, as long as there was something in it. You
didn’t have to stuff the barrel first, anyway.
    Cruzatte lifted his rifle and turned to
Lewis. “You, monsieur. One shot with the new gun. You take the
animal.”
    Some of the other soldiers from the Corps
had come over to us. One of the regular jobs if you weren’t on the
boat was to hunt along the banks for food.
    “Shoot one, sir,” one of the soldiers said.
“Do the honors. You’ll be provisioning us for a week!”
    “Indeed.”
    Of the three buffalo, two were humungous —
like the kind you see in zoos. The other one was smaller. It wasn’t
a baby, but it wasn’t as