Trail of Bones Read online

  DANGER BOY

  Trail of Bones

  Mark London Williams

  Danger Boy: Trail of Bones

  By Mark London Williams

  Copyright 2005 Mark London Williams

  All Rights Reserved

  Smashwords Edition

  Candlewick Press Edition 2005

  Cover by Michael Koelsch

  This one’s for Becky and Caitlin,

  the earliest members of my own

  “Corps of Discovery.”

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Prologue

  January 1805

  They shake the boy, call his name. “Eli! Eli!” They can’t tell yet if he’s still alive.

  The boy is poked, and prodded. When his eyes open a little, there’s a surge of relief. The boy was dreaming of lying in a sunny field, of waking to warmth and friendship. If the search party hadn’t come along, perhaps he’d keep dreaming forever, lying in the field of snow, where his rescuers found him.

  The search party is made up of explorers, U.S. Army captains, a shaman from a local Indian tribe — journeyers of every sort. Including a young Indian woman — not really all that much older than the boy — named Sacagawea.

  Sacagawea is married to a fur trapper, and has wandered around the plains and mountains a lot, and she’s pretty sure her wandering days aren’t over yet. She’s been across plains, and over mountains, and has always come through okay.

  She considers herself pretty lucky.

  She wonders if this young man considers himself pretty lucky. He must. What else would he be doing out here by himself?

  She knows the reasons they gave at the fort, when they were heading out to look for him: That he’d headed out for the Spirit Mound — a hill that was supposed to be haunted not only by spirits and phantoms, but lately, by a lizard who walked upright like a man. And even talked.

  Those were the whispered stories.

  And the boy was trying to get there, alone, on foot, the whispers went, to reach the lizard man. It was said they had some kind of connection.

  Sacagawea feels a small, growing connection to this young man, this Eli, since she was the first to find him.

  She was good at reading signs, good at picking up trails. When she heard there was a search party heading out, she insisted on being part of it. Her husband, the fur trapper, always more cautious than she, tried to forbid her from going. She was, after all, thick with child, ready to give birth very soon. And for a lot of men in her place and time, a pregnant woman wasn’t good luck at all — just the opposite.

  But her fur trapper husband also knew she was a better tracker than he was, so when word came that the boy had left on his own, with another snow storm coming, and she insisted on going, the forbiddance only lasted a few minutes.

  He was worried about the baby, but then again, how long would she really be gone? How far could the boy have gotten?

  Pretty far, as it turned out.

  He’d put together a direction from the Spirit Mound stories — many from the same young shaman who now helped look for him — and struck out to see his friend. For his part, the fur trapper agreed with most of the exploring party that stories about the walking, talking lizard man were nonsense. How could such a creature exist?

  But Sacagawea kept an open mind.

  She’d seen the boy around the fort, overheard his conversations a lot, and liked him. He seemed to be like she was, an outsider, a person from somewhere else, who found himself on a journey not of his own making, but who was a good traveler, anyway.

  “Wake up,” she said in her own tongue, to the near-frozen boy, as everyone stood around, watching his eyelids flutter, and his unfocused eyes trying to make sense of where he was. “Come back to us.”

  Instead, the boy closed his eyes again, and dreamt of the sunny field.

  Perhaps the same sunny field where President Jefferson and the others found him, last spring.

  “We found you now,” the Indian woman tells the boy. “You can come back to this world. You will be all right.”

  “Sacagawea?” The others stand around her, near where she found the boy, nestled by the crook of a storm-shattered tree. “Is he all right?”

  It’s the one named Lewis, who’s asking her. His partner, Clark, the co-leader of the explorers, stayed behind at the fort. Lewis shakes Eli a little, and gets a smile, but it’s a bit of a vacant smile, and the boy still doesn’t quite wake up.

  Sacagawea knows what it’s like to be in one place, and dream of another.

  She dreams of her own home, with her tribe the Shoshones. Dreams of the time before she was kidnapped as a girl, then sold to other tribes, or, in the case of her husband, Charbonneau, other men.

  Lately, she’s had this strong feeling that she might be seeing her home again, for the first time in years.

  Perhaps all the boy really wanted was to go home.

  “E — li?” she says, trying his name out loud.

  Her hand closed around the stone she wore next to her skin — the one that her brother, the chief’s son, had given her the day she was taken. A stone that was supposed to passed along from chief to chief, a talisman she now wore for luck, and protection.

  She’d had the rock with her ever since, on all her journeys. She knew the boy’s journey wasn’t supposed to end yet. He wasn’t supposed to stay asleep in the snow.

  “Come on, Eli!” Another man from the fort. Named Gass.

  “Stay. Here.” And North Wind Comes, the shaman-to-be from the Mandan people, neighbors of the very Hidatsas who sold her to Charbonneau. When you’ve been captured and sold, you know a little about the world. The stone — the jagged crystal — has warmed her, kept her steady through all the twists and turns. Sacagawea reaches for it now, under the folds of the skins and furs she wears.

  She clasps it, then lifts the leather strap from around her neck.

  Then she presses the stone into the boy’s hands. His fingers are really cold, almost too cold to move, but she gets them to shut around the stone, too, and puts her own hands around his.

  “Sacagawea, we need to get him back.” It’s Charbonneau, talking to her in that slightly alarmed way he has around her, especially when she’s following her own decisions.

  “Wait,” she says, to all of them, again speaking in the Shoshone she hasn’t used in far too long.

  For a moment, it seems the boy might fall asleep again, and Sacagawea knows that would be bad, to let him return to slumber in the cold like this. Even dreaming of sunny fields wouldn’t help.

  But this time his eyelids stay open and the eyes beneath them glisten, and come into focus at last.

  “Th-th-thank you,” he says at last, through chattering teeth, the warmth coming now not from his dreams, but from the rock in his hand.

  Sacagawea gives him a little smile, then nods.

  The boy will be all right.

  She feels a little kick inside her stomach.

  There are other journeys yet to com
e. For all of them.

  Chapter One

  Eli: Big Muddy

  May 1804

  “Well, he’s certainly not a giant.”

  “And he ain’t no Indian, either. I don’t think.”

  “What shall we do with him, Mr. Jefferson?”

  All this talking. It makes my head hurt. It’s like the time I fell asleep on the couch at my parents’ house during a party, and I still remember hearing the phrase brain universe as I was being picked up off the sofa and put to bed.

  I was five and I thought of colossal-sized brains until the time I found out it was spelled “brane,” and meant something else entirely, about the way the whole universe —and maybe the universes around it, or next to it — are designed.

  The design of my own universe used to be better: There was no jarring time travel, no vanished parents, no talking dinosaurs to explain.

  Well, wait. Not that I want the dinosaur to go away.

  It feels sunny and bright above me…hot. And cold and damp underneath me.

  I’m sweating and I’m rolling around in mud and my own “brain universe”— the one in my head— is aching. I think I’m sick.

  But everyone around me is still talking.

  “I am not ‘Mr. Jefferson,’ while I am on this trip, Mr. Howard. I am not ‘Mr. President.’ I am not in charge, and I am not even officially here. Captain Lewis and Captain Clark are in command. I am merely an interested citizen, here to pursue a little science, and to wish them well.”

  I’d better open my eyes and find out who’s sounding like some kind of English teacher.

  Not English teachers, as it turns out. Cowboys.

  Or maybe not cowboys, exactly. Daniel Boone… sorts of guys. In scuffed buckskins and leather jackets and raccoon caps and floppy wide hats that look almost like sombreros.

  Along with a few other guys in soldier clothes that look like they came from a production of The Nutcracker, dressed in long blue coats and boots, bearing guns with pointy bayonets.

  One of those guys is taller than the others. He’s not quite dressed like a soldier — but he still looks like something from an old painting. With pants that don’t go all the way down and stockings and shoes with big buckles. He has a notebook, instead of a gun, and red hair pulled back in a little ponytail. Hair like one of the hippies I’ve seen in the history books.

  I’d look around, but my “brain universe” —and all the other parts of my head — feel like they weigh a ton.

  I turn my neck a little and can see some horses and knapsacks and wooden wagons and long rifles in saddle holsters or dangling from the arms of some of the men.

  Thea and Clyne aren’t here.

  I hope they made it out of the Fifth Dimension. I hope they’re okay.

  I can hear a river nearby. I guess that explains the mud.

  “Mr. Floyd! Have your men tend to the keelboat and mind how they load the crates! We can’t afford to lose any provisions before we’ve even begun!”

  Whoever’s speaking now has dark hair and dark eyes that you can’t see all the way into.

  All these boats and provisions and guns. Maybe it’s some kind of war party, or patrol. Or expedition.

  I try to sit up again, to say something. But my mouth feels like some of the sun and the mud are at war in there, too. Only a gurgling sound comes out.

  “Aye-aye, Cap’n Lewis, I’ll go down and give them what for.” It’s one of the cowboy-looking men, in smelly leather, with a stubbly beard and a kind of Civil War costume hat. He leans in and touches my forehead. “The boy seems awful hot.”

  The man takes a canteen, a leather canteen, from around his shoulder, and pours a few drops of water on my face.

  I realize how thirsty I am.

  I try to ask for more, but suddenly, I realize what this feeling is: it’s like the moment you come out of a dream, but aren’t fully awake, and some part of you knows you’re not sleeping anymore, but your body isn’t ready to start taking any orders yet, either.

  Though I wonder, since I travel through time with a talking dinosaur and a girl who’s well over a thousand years old, if I’m even in the coming-out-of-a-dream stage at all.

  “Let me see him.” A taller man with no hat, leans over the stubble-beard guy, and stares right at me, then opens my eye real wide with his finger and thumb.

  “Ow!”

  That came out clear enough.

  “Least it ain’t yellow fever. You American? Or you just lost?”

  He’s the first one to ask me a direct question.

  “I’m—“ Before I can find out whether I’m up to speaking a complete sentence, I’m cut off.

  “Thank you, York. And you too, Mr. Floyd. That will be enough for now.”

  The man with the dark piercing eyes waves the two of them away. I notice his buckskin jacket is a lot cleaner than the other ones — like maybe his really did come from a costume shop.

  “I’m Eli Sands.” The words were kind of croaked out, but like the ow, you could hear them.

  “Well, young Master Sands. Then allow me to introduce myself. I am Captain Meriwether Lewis. Down on the boats somewhere is Captain William Clark. We are setting out on a journey that is probably foolhardy or maybe even suicidal. Perhaps you are foolhardy, as well, to be out here all alone. Or perhaps you are some kind of omen.” He follows the word omen with a tiny little smile.

  The red-headed hippie in the costume comes closer, too, staring at me the way a doctor or dentist might do it.

  “Never mind reading the will of heaven, Captain Lewis. Perhaps there’s a simpler explanation. Perhaps the boy is an incognitum.” He laughs, so maybe it’s a joke, but I feel like my own brain universe is about to explode. An incog-what?

  “And this,” Lewis says, nodding toward the ponytailed redhead, “is Mr. Thomas Jefferson.”

  Thomas Jefferson? Wasn’t he—?

  “Mr. President! Sir!” A really sweaty man pushes his way next to Jefferson His Nutcracker clothes are more torn up, and he wears a couple extra pistols strapped to his body. “Maybe he’s a French or British, spy, sir! Maybe the Spanish sent him!”

  “Then they’re doing a fairly poor job of sneaking up on us, Mr. Howard. And wasn’t it your idea that we shall not refer to me as president while we’re on this little jaunt?”

  The pistol-wearer’s eyes bulge a little more. “Yes, Mr. President. Sorry, sir. This should remain a secret mission.”

  “This is kind of a big group to be called ‘secret.’” It’s York. I can hear other voices, and the noise of horses and work. He’s right— there seem to be a lot of people here.

  “We’re not taking advice from some darky slave!” Mr. Howard snaps back.

  Darky slave? York is black, it’s true. But what kind of awful words —

  Where am I? When is this?

  “Stand down, Mr. Howard,” Jefferson says.

  “But he just contradicted—“

  “I said, ‘Stand down.’ Stop shouting at the less fortunate. I’m sure this journey shall stay secret. After all, it’s not as if news of the president’s travels can fly through thin air.”

  It’s time for me to shake out all the grogginess and find out where I am.

  “Um, sir—“

  Instead, I throw up. One of those empty-stomach throw-ups that are sometimes the worse.

  “The boy’s sick.”

  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that time travel is easy.

  “Maybe we better take him to St. Louis,” the one named Floyd says.

  “Portents and omens, sir,” Lewis says to Jefferson.

  “Let us take him to my camp, first,” Jefferson says. “ It’s closer, and Sally can look after him.”

  I don’t want to be looked after. I just want to go home.

  I’m handed a rag for my mouth.

  “Drink this.” Floyd holds out some kind of wooden cup. He decides to help me and tips the liquid into my lips.

  Whatever it is — medicine? — it stings and b
urns, and I start coughing, so thanks to being “helped,” I never get the word no out of my mouth, as in “No, I don’t want to go, I want to stay here and look for my friends—”

  But now I’m being led away, my arm around Floyd’s shoulder, and he’s taking me toward some kind of wooden wagon.

  “Up here, little friend.”

  I’m still not sure where I am, but I’ll take the ride, so I let him help me up.

  I climb on, and in the rear of the wagon, I see a blanket in the corner that’s been thrown over some stuff, so I take it and pull it off.

  There’s a giant bone underneath it.

  Like a dinosaur bone.

  Like a bigger-than-Clyne dinosaur bone.

  I’m shivering, but I don’t put the blanket on.

  “Master Sands?” Two men are walkin toward the wagon. At least I hope it’s two — maybe I’m seeing double. It looks like Jefferson has split into two separate lanky red-headed men.

  Except the other one doesn’t have a ponytail.

  “Are you brothers?” I finally manage to croak out.

  Jefferson laughs and turns to the other guy. “Sometimes, Captain Clark, you’d think we were the only two red-haired men in creation, the way people keep asking that. No, young sir,”— and now he’s looking at me again— “this is Captain William Clark, the other leader of this noble, somewhat secret, perhaps misbegotten, expedition. You should put the blanket on, Master Sands. I’m sure the bony remains of the incognitum won’t miss it.”

  “Before you return to camp, Mr. President, here’s the other find you inquired about — the strange hat we found by the riverbank.” Clark lifts a sword — a sword! (but it’s smaller than Excalibur, and obviously someone besides King Arthur and Thea can hold this one)— and hanging off the tip is my Seals cap.

  I grab for the cap without thinking. Without the ship, it’s my only chance to get home, and maybe to find my friends.

  “Perhaps it belongs to the boy?” Clark asks. Yeah, perhaps it does.

  Jefferson takes it from the sword tip to look at it, then drops it as if he’s been burned. He squats down to study it. “I should hope not. He’d scald himself. You have found the first scientific anomaly of your long journey, Mr. Clark. An entirely different kind of incognitum — a mysterious type of half hat, with lettering on it.” he says, pointing to the overlapping S and F.