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 come. For all of them.