§

August 7th. Lewis has sent a hunting-party
in search of the deserters, Moses Reed and La Liberté.
§

August 11th. The Captains mull
over the tumulus or mole

where the Omaha chief, Blackbird,
was buried

on his white war-horse.

§

August 18th. Reed brought back and forced

to run a gauntlet of ramrods
and switches. Boils and buboes. Haemorrhoids.

§

August 20th. Floyd dies of colic and melancholia.

§

August 25th. His spirit clambers up the holy

Mound of the Little People, to the moans
of its thousands of eighteen-inch-high demons.

§

October 14th. John Newman is sentenced to seventy-five
lashes for having uttered a mutinous oath.

§

October 25th. Though the sandstone bluffs and spurs
give way, for the most part, to sparsely-

wooden, deeply-fissured mesas
redolent of wormwood, of the artemisia’s

turpentine and camphor,
there’s still the occasional, delicately-chamfered

column of honey-or salmon-coloured querns
surmounted, as here, by an obsidian cornice.

Camphor and turpentine. Elk-slots. Bear-scats.
Drouillard and Shields, the scouts,

can see directly across the stately saraband
of the Missouri to the corresponding

scumble of mosques and minarets
and the three-hundred-odd Mandans and Minnetarees.