“That damned halfbreed. Where’s he get off growing a soft heart in this hell-hard place,” said Walter, his breaths rising and falling, his feet shuffling clumsily through the rocks.
The halfbreed interpreter Pierre Dorion was working his way out ahead, his horse following by a short leather lead. The animal’s ribs shone in the soft light of the late-day December sun. The skin was drawn taught around its middle, revealing the parallel ridges and valleys of its midsection. I reached beneath my shirt and felt the evident absence of my own flesh. My ribs were hard and curved and protruded like those on the horse that had become the object of our ravenous desires.
We were on a death march across that forlorn country along the banks of the Mad River, and it was three days since we’d eaten. We’d abandoned the canoes four weeks ago at The Cauldron Linn, where poor Clappine was swept into the torrent with bulging eyes and a final breath, and the miles we traveled since were long, lonely, hungry–full of empty land and desolate skies. It was three days since we’d feasted on Mr. Hunt’s last beaver skin, and every last man was stumbling with his struggle.
“Pierre loves that horse,” I said. “He’d just as soon die than eat his horse. He’d have us all die first.”
Walter stopped and stood in the ankle-deep snow, the orange of the late-day sun playing in his red beard. “You hear that, Pierre?” he shouted. “You’d have us all die, you selfish bastard.”
Pierre Dorion stopped near the crest of a hill and looked back down on us, his eyes indignant. “La maudite riviere enragee,” he muttered. “La maudite riviere enragee.”
Walter looked at me. “He’s the interpreter. Can’t he speak English?”
“He called it ‘the accursed mad river,’” I said. “He called the Snake the accursed mad river.”
I looked to the west where the ice-choked river oozed like amber through the canyon, but I could hear another cascade echo from ridge to ridge below. If not the Indians, then the mountains. If not the mountains, then the river. If not the river, then the desert. It seemed just about anything could kill a man out there.
Across the river I could see a plume of smoke from a fire set by the rest of our party for the night, and the deep loneliness of that place oozed among the canyon walls like the darkness that was beginning to descend. We’d split the group at The Cauldron Linn, and we were scattered to the whims of that unforgiving landscape. One party headed overland to the north in search for the passage Lewis and Clark pioneered a few years back. One had taken to the south bank of the Snake River, and ours worked the river’s northern shore.
I lay my bedroll beneath the chill that night and watched the twinkling lights and periodic streaks of shooting stars as they animated the delicate-looking sky. As I watched the slow cinema of heavenly bodies unfold my mind drifted back to the heavenly body with which I was most familiar, a soft woman with a hard way, who I imagined in fine cloth and scented oils, waiting patiently by a bedside lamp for my return. I could smell her warmth from the cool of my rocky bed. And, with that smiling vision, I passed into the world of dreams where the Mad River’s ceaseless roar tortured my sensibilities.
The next day, December 10, we overtook an advance party of men who were every bit as starved, and Mr. Hunt stopped by a clear stream that descended from the never-ending mountains to the east. I sat on a crimson rock that protruded from a tuft of sage, and Walter squatted in the snow nearby.
“We can’t starve any longer,” Mr. Hunt said. “We can’t stay, for there is no food, and winter has only begun. And we can’t go on without eating. We need to think, Pierre, about sacrificing your horse so that we might go on. We’ve come this far, and I aim for us to find the Columbia.”
“You’ll kill me first,” said that stubborn Canadian son of a bitch. “Or you’ll die trying. Someone’ll die trying.” He was standing next to his emaciated chestnut bay, more skeleton than animal, and the horse nuzzled its nose beneath Pierre’s arm.
“Don’t get your dress in a bunch, not over your damned horse,” said John Day, who had rejoined us from the advance party. “And besides Wil (he called Mr. Hunt Wil, short for Wilson, his first name), besides, we might just find those Shoshonies you was looking for. If we don’t find ‘em, we can kill Pierre’s horse then. We’ll need the food worse in a couple days than we do now anyhow.”
Mr. Hunt paused in reflection and shuffled aboot in the snow.
“Can you men make it another day?” he asked.
Walter was staring at Pierre and his horse. All of us were. And Pierre looked every man back, nearly one at a time.
“Merde,” said another of the Canadians. “Oui. Nous pouvons le faire. We can make it.”
“We can do it,” I joined. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll starve another day with that fresh meat hanging around. We’ll all be damned if we do.”
Mr. Hunt was in this way compelled to grant Pierre Dorion’s horse a reprieve, and we recaptured the painful, slow cadence that we’d maintained for four weeks since abandoning the canoes at The Cauldron Linn.
Fortunately, we hadn’t traveled more than another half day when, as the sun was crawling toward the western hills, we arrived within sight of a Shoshonie lodge on the bank of the Snake River, where horses grazed in snow-swept grass. Mr. Hunt ordered us to stop and pulled the group back into some rocks on the edge of the river. I nestled in a crook near where he and Mr. Day talked.
“They must’ve just come down out of the mountains,” Mr. Day said.
Mr. Hunt nodded. “We don’t have much to offer ‘em, and they’r not usually willing to part with their horses. If they see us, they might run and hide.”
“We’ll go in low. We’ll go in slow,” Mr. Day said, and Mr. Hunt nodded again.
They worked through the rocks, informing us of the plan, and at Mr. Hunt’s signal, a party of five of us worked through the sage until we were within a few hundred feet of their hovels. I looked to my left where Mr. Hunt waved his arm, and we stood, then ran into the camp shooting a few rounds into the air. The Indians scattered in surprise, and we easily seized five of their horses. Walter shot one on the spot. We worked to quarter the animal and cooked a part, which vanished in a frenzy of clenched jaws and gnashing teeth.
A portion of the meat was sent to a group we’d left behind, and after they ate they easily gained the camp we took over from the Indians by dawn. We then set about preparing more meat for the party on the opposite bank, and Mr. Crooks ordered a small group of men to fashion a canoe from the horse’s hide, a trick we learned from the Indians near the abandoned Henry’s Fort back when the weather was warm. The river was so narrow and deep in that place that it was easy for us to call across, but there was no man among us brave enough to test that slithering serpent again. A vague and almost superstitious terror had infested our minds, and we imagined more horrors bred by the dismal scenes and sufferings that had already come to pass.
We regarded the crew on the opposite bank with apprehension. They were “hovering like specters of famine,” and it seemed as though some great danger lurked with their potential company. After considerable prodding, and one failed paddling attempt by Mr. Crooks himself, a Kentuckian by the name of Ben Jones volunteered to navigate across the torrent and deliver some of our newfound provisions. He broke the ice as he went, nearly flipping in the raging ice-cold current, but he arrived safely on the other bank, where a Canadian by the name of Jean Baptiste was running wildly up and down the bank, offering pleas to be delivered away from that awful, starving place.
“I’ll not march another footstep, but lay down right here and die,” he screamed.
The Kentuckian Ben Jones had returned without the madman Jean Baptiste, but after pondering the situation Mr. Hunt sent it back once more under the command of another man, Joseph Delanny, to fetch the Canadian. Our stomachs full, we watched with mixed feelings of concern and amusement as Joseph Delanny refused to allow the crazed Canadian to board the canoe. Delanny began to paddle away from the shore, but the Canadian wouldn’t have it. He trudged into the icy water and forced his way aboard, sitting stubbornly near the front of the canoe before Delanny finally succumbed.
The return voyage went smoothly enough until the mad man was overcome with his apparent elation at the prospect of eating. His lips curled in a great savage grin, and as the vessel neared our shore where the scent of stewing meat wafted into the river, he began to jump and clap his hands, shouting and dancing as a madman. Delanny hardly had a chance to quell the man’s excitement, and the canoe flipped. The poor wretch was swept away by the surging current and vanished without a sound.
That’s how the reckless whims of the Mad River claimed a Canadian madman in that dark and desolate place.
And that’s how Pierre Dorion’s skeleton horse was saved.
© Greg Stahl
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* The above scene, derived from a story written by Washington Irving in his 1868 book, Astoria; or Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains, combines Irving’s account of the Astor Expedition’s 1811 exploration of southern Idaho with what I know of the region’s landscape and the general predictabilities of human behavior, though I suppose I failed at developing any real interpersonal drama here. In other words, the above entry is entirely made up, except for the fact that it is derived from a work of non-fiction. Call it creative non-fiction, historic fiction or something. I won’t dwell on the label. The scene takes place as the Astorians are making their way into what is now called Hells Canyon on the Snake River. (Point of fact: John Day was in the party on the west side of the river, not the east.)
