The Last Handful of Clover - Book 2: Gifts Both Light and Dark

2.10 Drouillard

May, 1810

"Drouillard, I cain't pretend to understand you, not one bit," Chouteau said, as he tied the last of the day's furs into a bundle. "I mean, just look at you. Here you sit, as much a white man as me, and yet you make excuses for the Blackfoots. You know they'd skin you as soon as look at you, right?"

George Drouillard regarded his friend, who had accompanied him on two years of fur trading expeditions into the heart of Montana. "I'm not as white as you, Chouteau. You forget I'm half redskin."

"Yup, and I'm a quarter. My grand pop was Mic Mac. But no matter. Either way, we're both white enough." Chouteau sheathed his knife and hoisted the bundle of furs onto the sled. Drouillard didn't answer, but continued working on the trap in the firelight, replacing the broken pin of the dog post. He looked up at the last glimmer of daylight, reflecting on the spring melt.

In the North, the snows lingered into May. And in this high country, it was still piled deep around the heavy pinions, especially on the southern slopes, and in the deeper parts of the woods. It gave the air a freshness that Drouillard loved. Although the cold air that settled in these valleys overnight ensured that they'd be sleeping under their buffalo robes.

"One thing I know, George, is that you're certainly as ornery as any half-breed. Maybe that's your problem."

"Well, if half of me is ornery, you're probably right. It's the red side," Drouillard said, tossing the repaired trap onto a pile they'd set out in the morning. "But these past few years, I guess I've seen too much to be proud of the white side. Too many deaths. Too many lies."

"You're talking about Lewis and Clarke, ain't ya?" Chouteau said, sinking heavily onto a fallen log they used to reflect the heat of the fire.

"No, not just," Drouillard said. He hoped his tone would convey to his friend that this conversation had grown tiresome. He'd have preferred nothing more than just roasting the rest of their beaver tails over the fire and enjoying the night air in silence.

"Well, like it or not, friend, the white race is here to stay," the younger man said, not taking the hint.

Drouillard didn't respond. He liked Chouteau, and he was an agreeable companion on these long trapping expeditions. He could set a beaver trap faster and with a trigger more sensitive than any man he'd ever met. And his heart was good, unlike so many other white men he had known in his thirty-four years. He had probably already told this man too much about the dark hatred that had been growing in his heart for the past decade.

George Drouillard was the son of a French-Canadian father and a Shawnee mother, and at the age of twenty-eight, he had been recruited by Merriwether Lewis to be part of the Lewis and Clark expedition. His reputation as a hunter and interpreter was well deserved, and he served the expedition with honor. But in his long travels with the explorers, he couldn't help but see what the white men were doing to the Indian populations they encountered. At first, he too had dismissed the tribes as savages, but he soon came to see them as exemplars of dignity and strength, under relentless assault by forces they could not understand or control.

After the expeditions returned, he found himself on his own with a growing heaviness in his heart. Not knowing what else to do with his life, he returned to the West, intent on finding some peace in the wilderness. Eventually, he ended up working with the Missouri Fur Company under the infamous Manuel Lisa. The company allowed him to spend as much time as he would like alone, or with only a single companion. He found that the only way to quell the heaviness of his heart, and blunt the memories of what he had helped the white man do in his early years, was to escape into the deep, dark wilderness. Both the wilderness of the great northern mountains, but also the wilderness within himself.