Buffalo Girls (22 page)

Oh, Janey, of course I want to talk to your father—it has been so many years. But I am scared. What if he has forgotten me? What a big disappointment that would be. If I do it I am going to ask Bartle to come, I would feel safer.

I asked Bartle if he wanted to converse with any dead people, he said yes, General Custer, he wanted to ask why he had been such a fool as to fight five thousand Indians with two hundred men. If I was Bartle I'd try to think of someone friendlier than General Custer to talk to—I reminded him that most of the dead people we know are friendlier than Custer. We could ask Wind River Bill what caused him to disappear. When last seen he was
perfectly healthy, camping on the Tongue River, there has been no sign of him since, I guess it has been ten years.

You could not call England a sunny country, unless you wanted to lie. The sunshine is scarce here, it drizzles like it used to back in Missouri when I was a girl. The Jubilee starts in three days, I believe there is going to be a mighty grand celebration, yesterday the bagpipers arrived. The sound scared the horses to death, it also alarmed the Indians and some of the cowboys, you should have seen them grab their guns.

But it was just bagpipers from Scotland. Some Africans arrived too. They are half-naked and carry spears. There are other wild-looking groups from all the parts of the world the Queen rules over. Virtually all of them are armed, this camp is filling up with violent groups. There are even a few elephants. No Ears has spent a good deal of time studying the elephants, he thinks they are important beasts but not in the class with the whale. No Ears was very impressed with that whale, he thinks no creature can compare with it. I was a little tipsy when the whale showed up, to me it was just a big fish.

We better get this Jubilee started, Janey, if all of us wild ones from the Queen's dominions sit around here armed to the teeth war is likely to break out, she'll have a massacre to celebrate instead of a Jubilee. Some of the Africans look like competent fighters. Even Sitting Bull thinks so—he has been introduced to several great chiefs, Zulus I think, I could be wrong. Sitting Bull behaves himself with these Africans. Old Sitting Bull does not want to get stomped by an elephant, I don't blame him.

I am still thinking about the seance, Janey, I don't know if I want to talk to the dead. I will be dead soon enough—not anytime soon Janey, don't be alarmed. It's just that we'll all be dead soon enough. I might save my conversation until then.

Your mother,
Martha Jane

A
T FIRST
J
IM SUPPOSED THAT HE WAS BEING MADE THE BUTT
of a joke—or at least that Bartle was trying to trick him when he came running up claiming to have found beaver in London. Jim had been watching some skinny men with turbans feeding the elephants when Bartle jumped out of a buggy and came running across the park.

Naturally Jim was startled—it had been several years since he'd seen Bartle look so excited. For a moment he feared there might have been a killing. Everyone's nerves were on edge, waiting for the Jubilee to start—it would not be surprising if a killing resulted. Calamity was in an erratic state, up one day and down the next; she might well have shot someone in a saloon.

So when Bartle came out with his news, Jim didn't believe it.

“It's true,” Bartle insisted. “They've got at least twenty beaver, maybe more.”

“In the middle of a city?” Jim said. “Have you been to the opium den, or are you just drunk?”

“No, they're beaver from Canada, just like the ones you want to catch,” Bartle said. “They've got them in a big pond. There's some muskrats, too.”

“Well, I don't doubt the muskrats,” Jim said. “You'll see muskrats anywhere.”

“I guess you'd sneer at Moses!” Bartle said, exasperated with
Jim's skepticism. “They call the place a zoo. It's as if old Noah unloaded his ark right there—there's every kind of creature you've ever heard of and plenty that you haven't.”

No Ears was standing nearby; he found the information interesting.

“Where do the beaver live?” he asked.

“In a beaver house, just as if they were in the Tetons or anyplace,” Bartle said.

Jim didn't really believe it, and No Ears had his doubts, but Bartle certainly believed it, and Bartle should know a beaver when he saw one. Jim decided he might as well see for himself. He asked No Ears to come with them. If they got lost, as was certainly possible in a confusing city such as London, three heads might be better than two, even if one of the heads was earless.

Jim felt dull, as he had for most of the trip. Certainly London was an unusual place, and he was being treated well—still, he felt dull. Bartle scampered about, seeing the city, but Jim mostly stayed with the show, reminiscing with the cowboys or some of the older Indians, particularly Two Hawks, a Brule Sioux almost as old as No Ears. Two Hawks knew more particulars about the Custer battle than anyone Jim had yet encountered. It was an odd thing to admit, but after nearly forty years of hiding from Indians or living in fear of Indians, Indians were turning out to be the only people left he could trust.

He didn't really believe there were any beaver in London—it was just another of Bartle's jokes. Bartle was drunk most of the time, and was incapable of the truth even when he was sober. It was so foggy when they got to the big park that at first Jim merely concentrated on keeping his bearings. They had scarcely stepped out of the bus when a man on a large bicycle nearly ran into them; he had a little horn on his bicycle that squawked rather like a goose, and he squawked it at them impatiently, as if they had no right to be there.

“Dern, this fog's solid,” Bartle said. “I have never seen such a
place for fog—one minute you can see where you're going, and the next minute you can't.”

The damp, cottony fog hovered near the ground. No Ears couldn't see much, but he could smell a great deal, and what he smelled startled him. He had long since developed a kind of index of animal smells, keen enough to alert him in case he was approached by an unfriendly animal, such as a bear, on a dark night. What startled him was that the smells coming to him through the cottony fog were not contained in his index at all. Clearly there were animals around, but they were not animals he was familiar with.

No Ears felt rather alarmed—for one thing, he smelled large birds, and ever since the great cranes had come and lurked around him waiting to snatch his soul, he had not been comfortable around large birds. The fact that he could not see the birds made the matter more chancy.

Jim Ragg felt a little disgusted with himself for having let Bartle lead him astray so easily. As far as he was concerned, the fog explained everything. Everyone knew what an encouragement fog was to people with too much imagination. If you stared into a fog too long you would see whatever you wanted to see, or more commonly, whatever you
didn't
want to see. Even experienced frontiersmen had been known to empty their guns into a fog, convinced that they saw Indians sneaking up. Once, on the Red River of the North, he and Bartle had seen a heavy river fog produce complete panic in a crew of keel-boaters, who, of all people, should have understood the distracting properties of fog. One keelboater looked into the fog too hard, thought he saw an Indian; soon every man in the boat was firing wildly. When the fog cleared, all that was there was the waving grass.

Bartle, no doubt drunk, had seen a muskrat slide into a ditch and had proceeded to conjure up beaver. But now they were there, trapped in the fog, and there was nothing for it but to try and find their way back to the encampment.

The three men inched along, taking care to stay together. For several minutes they saw nothing. No Ears felt particularly unhappy with the fog; it was so dense that his soul might well leave without his even noticing it. The mountain men, only a yard away, might not notice either.

Then they all heard a snuffle, a little to their left. Bartle put out his hand and felt a fence. The snuffle had sounded somewhat cowlike; on the other hand it had not sounded like a normal cow.

“Don't worry, boys,” Bartle said. “There's a fence between us and it.”

“It has a powerful smell,” No Ears said. “It smells worse than dead muskrats.”

“Well, it's just that musk-ox,” Bartle said. “I seen it yesterday. They've got it in with another smelly creature.”

No Ears noticed that the fog was rising. He could see the mountain men's legs—then, farther along the path, he could see several pairs of hurrying legs, belonging, he supposed, to English people who were so accustomed to the fog that they knew how to walk through it without harm. A stream of sunlight slanted down, making a white band in the smoky fog. He could vaguely see two beasts standing very close to them. The beast that stood closest and smelled the worst seemed to be composed almost entirely of hair. It had two thick, curving horns, but otherwise was entirely covered with thick, smelly hair—it did not even seem to have eyes. It merely lived inside its hair. Beside it stood a smaller beast, also very hairy. To No Ears's astonishment, a boy appeared beside the two beasts; the boy began to pull hay out of a cart. He dumped the hay in front of the two beasts, who ignored it. The boy scratched the smaller beast's back, but the beast paid no attention.

“Hey, what sort of buffalo are these?” Bartle asked the boy. “And which way to the beaver, may I ask?”

The boy was so surprised at the sight of them that he almost ran away. He had not expected to see two mountain men and an old Indian without ears staring at him while he did his work.

“This is our musk-ox and our yak,” he said nervously, once he had recovered from his surprise.

Jim Ragg studied the musk-ox closely. He thought it would be a task to kill it; both the horns and the hair looked capable of stopping a bullet. The other animal looked about as dumb as a buffalo, if more heavily padded.

“What about the beaver?” Bartle asked again. “My
compañero
here ain't convinced you've got any beaver.”

“Oh, we've got 'em, but I wish we didn't,” the boy said. “I don't like to get near 'em, because of those big teeth. They bite right through wood—I don't want one of them biting through me.”

Jim was startled. The boy knew what a beaver looked like, obviously. Maybe there were beaver in the park—but what an odd place to find them, with the streets of London just a few strides away.

No Ears had a scare. Across the path from where they stood, he saw a large pink bird standing on one leg. The bird was almost as large as the great cranes, but the great cranes were gray and this bird was pink. While he watched, the bird put down his other leg and walked into what remained of the fog. No Ears was glad the bird had chosen to leave; still, a large pink bird was a disquieting thing to encounter. He began to wish he had stayed in camp and watched the elephants.

“Keep going, them beaver are to the left, you kind of curve around once you pass the hippo,” the boy said.

Jim picked up the pace immediately—the fog was breaking and there was no longer much danger of getting lost. No Ears stopped dead when he saw the hippo. At first it looked like a beast made of mud—very ugly. The English seemed to have made an effort to collect ugly beasts—the musk-ox and the yak had been fairly ugly, though not as ugly as the muddy hippo, which he took to be a kind of mud pig.

Bartle enjoyed the hippo and stopped with No Ears to watch it for a bit. Jim Ragg hurried on. The path curved, as the boy said it
would; even before he saw the beaver he heard a sound he had not heard in many years: the slap of a beaver's tail on water. A little fog still drifted across the surface of the pond when he heard the beaver slap the water; it was a sound he had first heard on the Platte as a boy of sixteen; it was the sound that had called him on, deeper and deeper into the west, to the Missouri and then the Yellowstone, all the way to the dangerous Bitterroot; then it became a sound he heard less and less often as the beaver vanished from the Bitterroot and the Tongue, from the golden Madison valley, from Wyoming, from Colorado; the last time he had heard the beaver's slap was high in the Medicine Bow forest more than ten years before. He had listened for it in vain ever since—but here it was, at last!

As he walked down to the pond a fat, shiny beaver, floating on its back, looked up at him, unafraid; through the lifting fog he saw a large beaver house as impressive as any on the Platte or any other stream.

“Beaver,” he said aloud, startling a woman who walked past under an umbrella.

When Bartle and No Ears tired of the hippopotamus and walked on along the path, they saw Jim Ragg sitting on the grass by the pool, watching the prime Canadian beaver swim around. Occasionally, just for the sport of it, one would slap the water with its tail.

Bartle stopped a discreet distance away—his old
compañero
would probably just feel embarrassed if they approached him at such a time. After all, a long search had ended—best just to leave the man alone.