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.”