Into the Wild
The beat of wrongness in the land felt like the cawing of Raven…if Raven had gone mad. It was like the taste of bad meat in the mouth. Something was wrong and getting worse.
I told Toussaint Charbonneau, the man who had claimed me as wife after winning me in a poker game, that things were getting worse, that we were in a realm of wrong magic. Charbonneau told me to keep my mouth shut.
We pushed deeper into the wrongness. I didn’t want my child to be born in the realm of bad magic. The feel of the land beneath my feet thrummed like the beating of a war drum. And I did not like the dance.
—Sacagawea’s dictated diaries, Archive of the University of Virginia, Department of Arcane Studies
Beneath the canopy of trees and the flimsy canvas of his tent, Meriwether Lewis twitched, muttered in half-protest without wakening.
Seaman barked and whimpered, pawing at Meriwether, but he failed to wake the captain. As he slept in the wilderness, Meriwether was in a dream where he traveled a land he’d never seen. It was quite different from the rugged wilds of Virginia or even the lands of the frontier’s edge he had traversed for eleven days now since the departure of the expedition. Instead, his dream landscape was wild in its own way, an expanse of low green hills and modest homes. He recalled the wizard Franklin’s words, the idea of terrain where the past was submerged as deep as water, where the land remembered peoples long vanished and ways of life no longer recalled by anyone living.
In his ethereal state, Meriwether traveled the land from above, somehow flying smoothly over it, his nostrils filled with the acrid smoke of burning peat. Yet he felt right and proper, as though he’d done this many times before.
And he had…but only in dreams. He felt his arms extended, his wings like giant rugs against the resistance of the wind, the sky beneath him, the ground far below. He twitched his tail—
His tail?
He let out a cry of surprise, but it came out as a roar. He felt the taste and burn of flames in his mouth.
Meriwether heard a laughter larger than any man’s laugh, as though the land itself laughed at him, mocked him. As the words formed in his head, he let out a cry in a voice he’d heard once before, Ah, dragonling!
“Lewis! Lewis, wake up, man!”
Meriwether sat up, startled and disoriented. He’d been sleeping in his buckskins and shirt, covered with a light army blanket. As he drew his knees up to his chest, Seaman jumped close, licking at his face.
He simultaneously patted the big dog and pushed him away. “No, Seaman. Down!” Having settled the dog with an arm around his furry neck, Meriwether looked to the entrance of the tent, where a worried-looking Clark knelt, looking in.
“Yes, Captain?” Meriwether asked, addressing him out of habit, though he was no longer under William Clark’s command.
“You screamed, and the dog barked. The whole camp heard it. I thought perhaps some creature had got in the tent with you.”
Some creature? Some creature perhaps, but in my dreams, not in the tent. Something like a cold finger ran up his spine. What was this curse? What was that strange land of dreams, and what sort of creature did he become in those dreams? He knew of mythical beasts created by magic since the Sundering, and of people who could transform into ensorcelled creatures that then lay waste to the countryside. He remembered stories from the old country, long before the magic had returned, stories of beasts like werewolves and weretigers who killed people and livestock.
Stories to scare children. Had to be.
Meriwether forced a laugh that sounded unconvincing, even to his own ears. “It was but a nightmare. I’m prone to them, just as I’m prone to my melancholies. You should know that by now, my friend. Nothing really. I can’t even remember it.”
Clark gave him a worried look and a smile as brittle and strained as his own. Clark backed out of the tent. “You might wish to rouse yourself, as the men have coffee and some freshly caught fish. Today we will face the Devil’s Race Grounds. A fine way to test the mettle of our boats and our men this early on.”
Meriwether knew about the dangerous rapids in the river. “Sounds as exciting as a wild hog race.” Now he managed to chuckle normally.
After washing himself in the river, drinking a cup of middling Virginian coffee and eating excellent fried cakes with his pan-fried fish, he felt more up to the day. His disturbing dream was no more than that, a thing contrived of the day’s exhaustion and the night’s fancy. Even though he’d long dreamed of turning into a flying reptile and even though he’d encountered a real dragon, it neither meant that the two were related, nor that the dragon’s voice in his mind was real.
Now that the expedition was under way and as more days passed from the attack in St. Louis, he began to think he had dreamed the dragon’s voice all along. As he watched the men pick up the campsite and pack things once more in their designated places in the keelboat, Meriwether thought that the attacking dragon had done him a favor. Surely, the beast was the very catalyst for the entire expedition he now led. He was dousing the campfire when Clark clapped him on the back. “Ready to face the river rapids, my friend? The Devil’s Race Course is aptly named, or so I hear.”
Meriwether responded with a nervous chuckle. “Despite my dog’s name, which was his name when I acquired him, I am no seaman—nor even a boatman. I shall follow the banks, while you do your charting on the boat.”
Clark seemed up to the task. When he’d first joined the party, the captain had a pale complexion from living mostly indoors, but now he had a reddish tan from spending every day outdoors. The tan made the wrinkles of mirth at the corner of his eyes more obvious. “Not much to chart yet. You taking the dog with you?” Was that concern in his eyes and voice? Concern for Meriwether or the dog? Though the dog strayed a little to harass unfamiliar wildlife or to explore the land around them, Seaman always returned to his side.
Was Clark afraid for Meriwether? Or of him?
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “Seaman shall protect me from any devil in that race.”
Dearest Julia,
We have just survived a very bad stretch of river called the Devil’s Race, and I don’t mind telling you we had a hard time of it.
The current sets against some projecting rocks for a good half mile on the side of the river, and the water was so swift and so strong that it wheeled the boat around and broke the tow rope, nearly oversetting the boat. It took everyone on the upper side getting out and lifting the boat up so the sand washed out from beneath it.
By the third time the boat wheeled around, we managed to get a strong rope tied to her stern and by means of strong swimmers, we towed her ashore, where we then pulled her over the soft sand, by means of pulleys, thereby giving up—quite—on the Devil’s Race!
Before you fret, none of us was in any danger, and may this be quite the worst we face from the mighty river, though in my heart I know it won’t be. Captain Lewis met us at the shore, alarmed, but he doesn’t trust the waters, being a woodsman.
Since I have a few moments’ respite to write, I thought you might wish to learn of this little adventure, which will be quite forgot in the course of our further travels. I want you to know how exciting our days were while you sat in your schoolroom, sewing samplers.
Yours, faithfully,
William Clark
—Letter from William Clark to Julia Hancock,
May 24, 1804
The boat was back in the water, and Meriwether made his way through the leafy shrubs along the bank of the river. For a change, Clark walked beside him. As his companion had said before, there wasn’t much to chart as of yet, and perhaps the captain had experienced quite as much of water as he could stand for a day.
The two friends walked side by side in silence, with Seaman now and again bounding back to sniff at them, as though to make sure they were still themselves, before crashing through the forest undergrowth again.
Once or twice, Meriwether heard Seaman bark, and then a scurrying, a pattering, sometimes a squeak. He didn’t know if the Newfoundland was actually pursuing prey, but he doubted it. The dog had eaten more than his share of breakfast, in addition to begging some of the dried meat the men had eaten after their travails in the water.
They had not traveled far from the civilized areas around St. Louis, so Meriwether doubted they’d encounter any creature exotic enough to be stuffed and mounted for shipment back to the wizard Franklin. He let Seaman run at will with his puppy energy.
Once, Seaman treed some animal and stretched himself with front paws on the tree trunk, barking loudly, until Meriwether and Clark caught up with him. Meriwether snapped his fingers, and Seaman came back, with a longing glance back at the tree, as though asking for help to corral whatever prey he had treed.
“What do you think he has up there?” Clark asked.
“Likely a squirrel,” Meriwether said, peering into the welter of leaves and seeing nothing. “He’s very fond of treeing them, as I found before we ever left St. Louis.”
They walked onward in silent companionship until Clark suddenly put his hand on Meriwether’s arm, squeezing hard. With his free hand, he put a finger to his lips, commanding silence.
Meriwether stopped and listened. Slowly, he felt his hair standing on end.
It wasn’t so much what he heard as what he didn’t hear. The whole forest around them had gone silent, the emptiness punctured only by the muted sound of the river, which itself seemed distant and muffled. They couldn’t hear the voices of the men, though they were certainly still nearby. And they heard no other sounds. Birds, squirrels, and insects had all gone eerily silent.
As if a predator were about.
Meriwether glanced at Seaman to find that the big dog had also gone very quiet, looking expectantly at his master.
Clark lowered his finger, and cautiously the two slowly stepped forward. Meriwether had been in tense wilderness situations before. He had walked through portions of dense woods in Virginia, where everything fell still and the very light seemed dimmed and faint, then a hundred paces on, the normal life and sound of the forest resumed. Here, he didn’t expect a bear to come careening out of the undergrowth or a cougar to crash down from a thick branch overhead. This was another type of silence, he thought.
Here, the more he and Clark walked forward, the more the light seemed to dim and darken, even though he could see clearly. It was more as though some quality of cheer or joy had been extracted from the surroundings, until the trees and river, the mossy forest floor seemed cheerless, stark, like a painting of something lifeless and inflexible.
The path along the river had always passed a line of cliffs cut by the river itself, which pressed closer to the water, narrowing the viable area for them to walk. Now they felt increasingly hemmed in by river and rocks. The trees had no purchase, and the underbrush became little more than the occasional shrunken shrub.
Meriwether glanced up and saw a glimpse of wing against the clear blue sky, something very like what he’d seen a year before, when Benjamin Franklin had fought the dragon. The sight captivated him.
He heard Clark shout, “Good God, Lewis, where are you going?” Seaman howled, like a dog lamenting the loss of a friend.
And he suddenly realized he was climbing the bluff, as if in a daze. He caught himself, shouted back something that likely made no sense—but how could it make sense? He was pursuing a giant winged creature, a dragon that seemed to be taunting him and had been doing so ever since the fiery encounter in St. Louis.
He kept climbing up the rough sandstone bluff face, grabbing treacherous handholds that crumbled in his grip. Pine needles, moss, and dried leaves added extra hazards, and his boot slipped from a foothold. Occasionally, he even needed to jab and brace himself with his knife.
He passed a shallow cave alcove and recalled the report of a local fur trapper about a place called Tavern Cave, a deep overhang in a prominent bluff called Tavern Rock, which had served as a resting place for weary travelers, even for storing provisions.
Above, he kept catching glimpses of the angular wings in the sky. That drove Meriwether to greater exertion, but as he climbed higher, the sound of beating wings became elusive, the sight itself nothing more than a blur in the sky. He blinked his burning eyes and was sure he heard the beating-rug sound again, clearly saw an extended hooked claw and a scaled, fang-filled muzzle. All of which seemed mingled with a sound, or a feeling, of laughter in his mind.
The rush of beating wings sounded like a disturbed flock of sparrows or ducks.
Out of the sky rushed a black cloud of birds, a murder of crows that swooped around Meriwether in multitudinous attack. As he found a stable place in the rocky bluff, clutching for his balance, the black birds flung themselves at him, pecking at his hands, smashing into him, until all he heard was a tumult of cawing, all he felt was bird beaks stabbing at him, drawing blood.
The sandstone and moss against his hands and under the heels of his boots slipped and gave way. He caught a glimpse of the gorge below, the rocky shore, the river current. He scrambled desperately, and finally he stabbed the point of his hunting knife into the soft face of the cliff, digging deep into the leaf mulch and loose sand—but it was more than just finding purchase. He held on with something magical, a force that stabilized him…or maybe with the knife he had broken some kind of spell.
Suddenly the attacking birds were gone—flitting off in a raucous, chittering swarm and dispersing back over the forests. The elusive dragon overhead had slipped away from the sky. Finding himself in a precarious position on the bluff, Meriwether suddenly saw clearly again. Holding on, he drew a deep, shuddering breath and grabbed onto the rock with his other hand, keeping his knife in place.
He’d thought he was dead.
“Lewis!” Clark shouted frantically from far below, and he called back words that he hoped were reassuring. The shallow opening to Tavern Rock Cave was in front of him, and seeking refuge he crawled more than climbed into it. Shaking, he sat on the ledge, aware of the cool, somber shadows around him. But the oppressive silence that had smothered him lifted suddenly, leaving him tired, raw, but alive.
He tried to collect his thoughts. There had been a dragon, that terrible presence hunting him. He was sure of it, even though he had seen only deceptive glimpses, not any clear view of the monster. At the same time, he had felt the evil laughter in his mind, and he was doubly sure the dragon had indeed been there.
Which brought him to the ravens attacking in great numbers. Had they even been real? After leaving Virginia, Meriwether had noticed more and more ravens as he moved west, great black flocks as ubiquitous as the doves that supposedly crowded plazas in old Europe, according to the histories (or legends) he had read. But this was different. He looked at his hands and found myriad little wounds, spots of blood from sharp puncturing beaks, as though he’d been poked repeatedly with nails. He found claw scratches, too, as if he’d plunged his hands repeatedly into a spinney.
So the birds had been real after all.
He took another deep breath to calm himself, and heard a succession of scuffling sounds, heavy breathing. Fearing some other monster, he leaned over the lip of the cave overhang to see Captain Clark scrambling up the bluff the same way Meriwether had come. “What’s gotten into you, man? Are you all right?” he asked when he pulled himself up to sit on the ledge beside Meriwether.
“Yes, I do believe I am,” Meriwether said. “I’m not sure I trust my own senses. When I began to climb, what did you see?”
“A devil of a thing.” Clark put his fingers to the ridges above his eyes, to emphasize his recollection. “I swear I saw something flying high above this rock, though it was never clear—a very large, bright bird? And then suddenly there were ravens, a great many ravens covering you.”
“Yes,” Meriwether said, “attacking me.” He extended his hand to show Clark the numerous small but bleeding wounds. “They tried to make me fall.”
“How did you get rid of them?”
“I don’t know. I struck the rock with my knife and it…somehow it broke the spell. They all flew away.”
Clark remained quiet for a long moment. “Walking along the river, as we approached this cliff, it seemed to me that we were entering some strange place. The sunlight dimmed, not darkening like night, but a place where light was…filtered. Like walking into a sack, with the light and sound receding and becoming fainter.”
“Yes,” Meriwether said, reassured. “Exactly as I felt.” So many times in his life, in struggling with his great melancholic fits, he had found that he often perceived the world differently from others. At least he and Clark had seen the same thing along the mysterious river.
Clark scraped his hand down the stubble on his face. Though they were both military men, since this was a privately funded voyage of exploration, without military discipline, they had decided to forego the effort of shaving every single morning. “The first night when we stopped in Saint Charles, I heard that this cave here was something more than just a sheltered place for travelers. The local natives considered it a magical place. Apparently, if you look on the walls inside, there are some very fine drawings within, from time before anyone can remember. Drawings of magic. And now, after the Sundering, maybe that magic really does hold.”
“You suggest that I did indeed encounter a spell?” Meriwether said. “And that my knife dispelled it. The iron in the blade?”
Clark made a face. “I hate to speak of things I don’t know, and I know very little about magic, my friend, but I understand some of the native magics are not capable of withstanding the touch of metal. Metal is foreign to them, never smelted or worked by the tribes of this region, which makes it powerful against anything based on this uncharted land. That is why we find such a trade in our knives and guns, for they carry the ability to fight magic.”
Meriwether didn’t know what to believe. In the Virginia of his upbringing, magic, like science, was a force known to few, controlled by few, established within boundaries. The magics of the eastern native tribes were no great threat to the colonizers, and he knew that the people had little to fear from their rituals and shamanistic fits.
But this was the unexplored west, untamed, and the magical occurrences out here might well be more powerful in unimaginable ways.
And that is why the wizard Franklin found it so important to send us out here.
He and Clark turned to the inspect the interior of the cave. It was a shallow alcove hollowed out of the bluff, showing signs of human occupation, from a pile of ashes and half-burnt branches on the floor near the front and soot smears on the wall and ground. Tiny colorful beads were scattered in the scuffed debris, as well as a thin leather thong, snapped in half, possibly a moccasin tie, cast into a corner.
As their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the walls came alive with drawings and symbols. The figures were simple, if colorful, shining with ochre and other pigments. Here and there, the sandstone had been incised and the pigments bit deep, seeming to glow from the rock.
The first scenes depicted hunts: human figures hunted large animals, the likes of which Meriwether had never seen anywhere in the Americas. He remembered an old book of his father’s, left to his mother after the man’s death, and oft perused by the young Meriwether. He would dream of the world lost to them after the Sundering, places that had disappeared beyond a magical barrier, including the continent of Africa. In that book, he had seen a large creature with a stocky body and a pendulous nose, called an elephant. The creature drawn on the cave wall looked similar, but much hairier, and it dwarfed the natives hunting it, apparently the size of a covered wagon. Another drawing showed an ungainly, long-legged creature with humps.
The hunting scenes extended from the ceiling of the cavern to the floor, but other depictions showed various rituals, one of which made him gasp. It showed a human figure swamped by ravens. Clark called his attention to other creatures: doglike animals that walked on two legs, and an ominous-looking man with antlers on his head.
As the complex mural continued, they saw the appearance of white men, as distinguished by tall hats, as well as horses. Pictures showed battles between the natives and white men. Guns, the flare of fire. And then…
And then on the far right of the cavern, a single figure had been sketched life size, its head lost near the cavern ceiling, its feet on the floor. It was a man, but not quite human. Broad-shouldered and sturdy, with muscular arms, strong legs. From the sketch he could not tell whether its breeches and tunic were of European or native manufacture. The features were hidden behind magic enigmatic symbols, curlicues and wedges. Meriwether could not interpret them.
The extended right hand of the figure unleashed a flock of ravens. His left hand, partly closed, held a tribe of natives. Creatures frolicked at his feet. But seizing Meriwether’s attention were the angular wings that sprouted from his shoulders.
“What an odd creature,” Clark mused. “Some sort of demon?”
“I think those are dragon wings,” Meriwether said, despising himself as his voice cracked. He disguised it by clearing his throat. “Like the dragon that Franklin fought in St. Louis.”
Clark bent down to look at the animals massed around the figure’s feet “What are these?”
Meriwether bent to study the elephant creatures, camels, buffalo, and…and words failed him. Taller than even the hairy elephant, he saw creatures of fang and claw, one standing on its back legs.
Clark’s voice grew quiet. “I certainly hope, my dear friend, that the creatures represented here are but a fanciful outgrowth of some savage’s imagination.”
Meriwether had a sudden cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He’d met the ravens, and he’d met the dragon, and he did not doubt that he’d meet the other horrors this demonic winged figure could summon. The mural on the wall felt like a threat rather than a story.
From the foot of the cliff, Seaman was barking, and Meriwether clambered down to calm the dog. But there was a cold presentiment in his soul.