Trail of Bones (8 page)

Suggest: respected.

…
if we return. For we have been both brave &
foolish, and will have many tales to tell.

They all want to tell their tales, record
their own histories. Who can blame them? With no vidnews, no Comnet
how is anybody else supposed to know what they’re doing? Or what
they’ve done, after it’s over? How will anyone find out?

Only problem is, none of them can spell
really well. I don’t know for sure if spelling has been invented
yet, but I’m trying to write down some of their versions of words
so I can remember them when we return.

If we return. Like Gassy says.

Canoo
[Also
suggest: “cannot”]
came from Lewis, and Clark wrote
speshul
[Suggest: “specious”]
for
special
, and there are tons more like that, including all
the versions of words Gassy is coming up with.

If I ever find myself in school again, I’m
going to mention these guys whenever a teacher gets upset about how
I do on a spelling test.

But school — and everything else I know,
even the Danger Boy stuff — seems a long way off now. I’m not even
sure how much time has passed in my world, my real world, my home.
I don’t know how my father is. Or whether he managed to locate my
mom.

Actually, I’m growing less and less sure
about which world, which time, really is my own, anyway.

In this world, we’ve been gone, out in the
then-unknown, a couple of weeks. We’re into June, and it’s summer
everywhere out here in the country.

What am I saying? It’s
all
“out here
in the country.” Even what I saw of St. Louis was more like a
mid-sized town at most and not what we think of as a city. The
country isn’t “out” there. It’s everywhere around us. On both sides
of the river.

And the river itself.

I go back and forth between riding in the
keelboat and riding in the canoe with Gassy or Kentuck. Sometimes,
I walk along shore with Lewis and his dog, Seaman. We’ve seen
amazing sights: tall, waving grasses; endless hills; flowers that I
don’t recognize, sprouting up all over; and a nearly impossible
number of animals. It’s hard to believe this many animals ever
existed outside a zoo. I’ve seen elk grazing by the shore, fish
jumping out of the water, a bobcat mom and her cubs looking for
food, deer eating berries and leaves, and even a pair of foxes that
stood and looked at us before scooting away.

Like maybe humans weren’t something they see
every day. Or have to be afraid of yet.

Seaman keeps barking all the time, so maybe
we’d see even more animals if he didn’t scare them.

The sky is filled with birds. Filled with
them. One time, I thought we were having an eclipse. “Pigeons,”
York told me. “Make good pies, if you catch ‘em. And God made so
many, people can be eatin’ those pies from here to Judgment Day,
and the sky is still gonna be full of those birds.”

He was talking about passenger pigeons. I
know about those. I remember them from when I was in school. They
don’t exist anymore. That last one died over a hundred years before
I was born.

There is so much… nature out here, that it
feels more like a Comnet game than anything else. It’s as
fantastic, really, as anything in Barnstormers.

Which is good, because since there is no
Comnet, my vidpad is useless for any kind of gaming. But I’m
getting ideas for new characters: “The Buffaloner”— half man, half
buffalo, all loner. A cleanup hitter who’s the last of his kind,
drifting from town to town, looking for a team to play with, an
outcast even among Barnstormers.

The real buffalo are pretty awesome. Huge,
and shaggy, like a force of nature all by themselves. A kinda
slow-moving force. We see them more and more often as we head up
river.

Of course, not all of this nature stuff is
so great. I’ve had ticks under my skin, and they only came out when
one of the guys burned them with a piece of charcoal from the
campfire. And we all have constant — and I mean all the time —
mosquito bites.

The bites have made everybody crazy at one
time or another. Sometimes we can’t even sleep, and Seaman’s even
been driven to howling. The “skeeters” as Kentuck calls ‘em, have
gotten him all over his nose and ears.

“Hey, young Eli, grab a hold of this — we’re
gonna push over to shore and get out for awhile.”

It’s York. I’m on the keelboat now, and he
wants me to grab one of the long poles that are used for what they
like to call steering. Basically, all you do is push against the
bottom of the river and send the boat in whatever direction you
want to go. The poles are handy when the boat is stuck near a
sandbar, but they only work when the water is shallow enough.

I wonder what these guys would think about a
digital system that let you steer by getting signals back from
satellites?

“We’re gonna look for some game for
tonight,” York tells me, as I step over with him to the boat’s
starboard side —that’s a sailing word I learned from Clark that
means the right side, if you’re looking toward the front. And it’s
the side closest to shore right now.

When York says “game,” he’s talking about
deer or elk or maybe one of those buffalo that we’ve been
spotting.

‘”Course, you’re lookin’ like maybe some
other things out here consider
you
the game.” He’s pointing
to my arms, which are covered in mosquito bites.

At first, when the ticks and skeeters
started to chew me up, I got really scared. What about West Nile
virus? Dengue fever? River blindness?

What about slow pox?

But none of the guys had ever heard of those
things. Then I remembered that in the days before global warming,
diseases all had separate homes — the shifting weather hadn’t let
them spread all over the place yet, like in 2019.

If anyone here in the Corps of Discovery
knew what was coming, would they do anything different to change
it? Head it off?

Could they do anything? Can the future
really be changed?

Isn’t that why the government and Mr. Howe
want to turn me into Danger Boy, so that, somehow, the future can
be more controllable?

“I like the quiet out here,” York says. “ I
like bein’ away from most people. What about you?”

Since there are about seven billion people
living on the earth I come from, I’ve never seriously considered
the question.

In my time, it’s hard to get away — from
people, or viruses.

“
Castor! Castor!
”

York and I are pulling the boat to shore and
one of the men who’s gone ahead is holding up a dead beaver by its
tail, pretty happy about his kill.

“
Castor!
”

It’s Pierre Cruzatte, one of the main
boatmen. He’s half French and half Indian. Besides hunting and
steering boats, he plays his fiddle a lot at night by the campfire.
I had never heard of any of the songs he plays. I wonder if he
makes them up.

Maybe he’ll make one up tonight about dead
beavers.
Castor mort
. See, I picked up a few words. Cruzatte
likes to talk a lot during the day. He also seems to only see well
out of one of his eyes, but he’s still able to steer the boats
pretty well.

As for
castor mort
, well, there’s a
lot of
mort
in my time, at least when it comes to animals.
There aren’t too many beaver or buffalo or bear left out in the
once-wild parts. People and bugs have mostly taken over. I never
even thought about it much until I wound up here.

The problem with all these animals now,
though — like that beaver that’s been caught and killed — is that
they’re going to expect me to eat it later. And when I start to
think about it, my stomach starts acting funny.

“Hey, where are you—?”

But I don’t have time to answer York’s
question. As soon as we’re close to shore, I jump out and run into
the bushes.

Most of what they have to eat here is meat —
any kind of meat. They hunt it, skin it and stew it. Pretty much
anything they can get their hands on: deer, birds, snakes, all
kinds of fish, gophers (I think), and, lately, more buffalo.

I 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 big as the others, either. Maybe a
teenager?

Maybe it wasn’t much older than me. In
buffalo years.

“The lad hasn’t had a shot this whole
expedition,” Lewis said. “Let him.” And without even asking, he
handed the air gun to me.

It wasn’t a toy. It was too heavy.

“Pick one out, Master Sands, and aim
straight for the head. For maximum mercy.”

Mercy,
I thought. “But I don’t want
to kill them,” I said. “They’re practically extinct!”

Lewis didn’t know what that meant. “I should
say they’re right here, right now, and we need the meat.”

“I don’t want to kill them.”

“Just one.”

“I don’t want to cause death.” My stomach
was feeling funny again.

“Death is always over our shoulder, young
Sands, just a half step behind life,” Lewis said.

The youngest buffalo, with its thick woolly
hide and its big flat wide nostrils and round black eyes, stood
staring at me.

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“He is a strange boy, eh?” Cruzatte said.
Not very helpfully.

“But in death, the bison will help others
live. It’s a practically optimistic system, if I do say so myself,”
Lewis added.

Then he raised my hand. The gun was pointing
straight at the teenage buffalo, who chewed and looked at me
calmly.

“You will be fine,” Cruzatte chimed in. “And
we,
c’est bon
, will be full.”

“Master Sands.”

I wanted to close my eyes.

“Just pull the trigger.”

I didn’t want to do this.

“We all need to eat. Even you.”