When he meets her, his wife is sitting beside a lake. She isn’t doing work of any kind, and the strange sight of a woman who is not busy makes him think she doesn’t have a man. He skips stones into the water as they talk. Her husband has abandoned her. She is deciding what to do.
He asks, Do you want a new husband?
He has already made a buffalo-leather phallus he thinks might fool a wife, but his wife is no fool. She is, like him, a loud laugher, a brawler. Their first night, she grabs the counterfeit cock from his grasp, laughs at its wishful size. Before he can stop her, she’s pulled up his shirt to laugh at his breasts. He holds her down and finds a way to press and rub against her that gives them both pleasure.
She joins him, traveling and prophesying. She tells someone about the buffalo-hide phallus and soon everyone knows. Gone-to-the-Spirits suspects her of sleeping with other men and beats her, though she denies straying. She doesn’t want anything to do with a cock, she insists. Hasn’t she made that clear?
They wind up at Astoria, on the Oregon coast.
In their journals, the Astorian traders note the arrival of a husband and wife, dressed like Plains Indians in leather robes and moccasins and leggings. The husband speaks English and French, a little Cree and a little Algonquin, other native languages too, but none of the coastal dialects. He dazzles the Astorians by drawing an accurate map of the rivers and mountains to the east. If any man comes near his wife, he grows menacing, will even draw his knife. He gambles. He can’t hold his drink. He learns the coastal dialects.
David Thompson shows up at some point. Bless my boots, he says. If it isn’t Madame Boisverd.
The Astorians scratch their heads, wonder how they hadn’t seen it. Gone-to-the-Spirits twitches his hand toward his knife, but really he is pleased to have met this white man again, to have the chance to show him he is no longer in his power.
July 1811. They all decide to go up the Columbia River. Thompson is making his way back to Canada; the Astorians plan to erect a trading post in the interior; Gone-to-the-Spirits offers his services as a guide.
One day, as the party travels up the river, they find four men waiting for them with seven huge salmon to trade. The lower jaws of the fish have been run through with poles that rest on the men’s shoulders; their tails brush the ground. Is it true, these men ask David Thompson, casting dark looks at Gone-to-the-Spirits, that you are bringing smallpox? And also giants to bury our camps and villages?
No, says Thompson. No, no, no. Certainly not.
In his journal, Thompson writes: I told them not to be alarmed, for the white Men who had arrived had not brought the Small Pox, and the Natives were strong to live, and…such as it was in the day of your grandfathers it is now, and will continue the same for your grandsons.
But nothing will be the same for their grandsons.
At some point, the party splits. Thompson heads north, telling the story of the berdache as he goes—a surefire anecdote, always a hit. The Astorians continue east, Gone-to-the-Spirits and Mrs. Gone-to-the-Spirits accompanying them. Thanks to optimistic prophecies, the Gone-to-the-Spirits household has grown to include twenty-six horses heaped with goods. One evening the Gone-to-the-Spiritses ride off without a word of farewell and, for a time, go unremarked upon by white men.
* * *
—
When he reemerges, Gone-to-the-Spirits has acquired a new wife but lost the twenty-six horses, starts showing up around the Flathead trading post near Missoula. He appears in the journals of the white men there as Bundosh. Or Bowdash. He comes with groups of Kootenai to trade furs and get liquor, which makes him noisy. For pay, he’ll translate the Flathead and Blackfoot languages.
There’s a story: Gone-to-the-Spirits was traveling with a band of warriors. At river crossings, he always dallied behind, and another man grew suspicious and hid in the trees to watch him undress, saw Gone-to-the-Spirits had breasts and no cock, though he claimed to have been fully transformed into a man. Gone-to-the-Spirits, naked in the water, caught sight of the spy and crouched down, concealing himself. Later, when they came to Lake Pend Oreille, the chief said the warriors could pick new names if they wanted, since their raids had been unsuccessful and they needed something to shake off the malaise.
I will be Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, said Gone-to-the-Spirits, trying to make the best of a bad situation.
You sit, but you’re no grizzly, said the spy. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly drew his knife but was driven off before any blood was spilled.
He becomes an unlikely peace messenger, running among the tribes, translating. Berdaches are natural go-betweens, not too much any one thing. （Two-spirits, they’re sometimes called now.）