Buffalo Jump Blues (2 page)

M
artha Ettinger stood on the riverbank, looking across to the cliffs where she'd heard the last shot.

“That's all he had with him, five rounds,” Robin Cowdry said.

Martha placed her hands on her hips and drummed the grips of her revolver. Harold should have waited for her, but if he'd waited, he wouldn't be Harold.

“I can't hear anything,” she said.

“He must have got them all.”

Martha shook her head. This was going to make news. Bison were a hot-button issue in Montana, had been ever since the herds started migrating out of Yellowstone Park more than two decades before, hazed back by cowboys and helicopters, or shot after crossing the border. To a degree the animals were pawns in a controversy that went beyond animal control and was in fact cultural warfare, everyone in on the act, from the cattle ranchers who couldn't say the word “bison” without spitting to buffalo hippies who'd take a bullet for them, from Native Americans who wanted to bring herds back to the reservations to the urban electorate who'd like to see them roam freely on public lands. Even the governor was caught between the rock that was the livestock industry and the hard place that was public sentiment for this icon of the West that only a century ago had stood at the brink of extinction.

“Harold thought this was part of that Hebgen herd,” Cowdry said. “The ones that came out of the park.”

“Mmm.”

He might as well have been talking to a river stone.

“Here they come,” Martha said.

She'd seen the skiff pull out of the cove, Peachy hard at the oars. Harold wasn't sitting in the bow seat from which a fisherman would cast, but looked to be kneeling on the boat's bottom. Caught in the current, the skiff swept downriver at an angle, Peachy working it into the near bank some forty yards below the landing. He hopped out in his waders, taking the bow line to haul it upstream. Harold stayed where he was, Martha now seeing that he was bending over and his head was down. She felt a flutter in her blood and subconsciously brought two fingers to the artery in her throat.

“What's that in the bottom of the boat?” Cowdry had pulled on his waders and was stepping into the river to help Peachy with the skiff. The girl, Dorry, stepped up beside Martha and reached for her hand. Her mouth was white with powdered sugar from the donut Martha had given her.

“Look,” she said. “Look.” She let go of Martha's hand and jumped on a rock to gain a higher vantage. “Look, Sheriff, he's got a buffalo!”

Harold had stepped out of the boat into thigh-deep water, his back to the bank. When he turned around, the bison calf was bleating against his chest. The veins on his biceps stood out from the strain of lifting it. He sloshed to shore and stepped onto the bank.

Martha started to speak, but there was something behind Harold's half smile that gave her pause.

“Did that snakebit calf pull through?” he said. He set the bison down so that the girl could pet it with her sticky fingers.

Martha gave him a look. “No, I gave her mouth-to-nose until Jeff Svenson showed, but she was too far gone.”

“What happened to the carcass?”

“Skinned and hanging. Why, do you want some veal? Personally, I'm a little put off by meat pumped with poison.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last night.”
Last night when you didn't come over
. That part went unsaid.

Martha caught the amused look Peachy Morris was giving them. The last time Peachy had heard Martha talking with Harold about something and what they were really talking about was something else, he'd told them to get a room.

She looked hard at the fishing guide. He rolled up a stick of gum and put it in his mouth, wiped the grin off his face.

“What did you do with the skin?” Harold asked.

The shoe dropped as Martha shook her head.

“Hun-ah,” she said. “It isn't going to happen.”

Harold knelt down beside the little red bison, which had quieted down while the girl had her arm around it, but was now bleating incessantly.

“Hey, little fella,” Harold said. He lifted his eyes to Martha, who mouthed the word “No.”

“Meet your new mother,” Harold said.

—

It took some finagling. You couldn't just put a bison into the bed of a truck unattended. Somebody would have to hold it while the other drove, and Harold took the honor, climbing into the bed. After introducing the bison to the Angus cow that had lost her calf, presuming that went smoothly and there was no guarantee it would, they'd drive back to pick up the Cherokee, which Peachy Morris and Robin Cowdry agreed to shuttle downriver to Ennis after their float.

Martha looked at the girl, sitting under a frayed straw hat on the stern seat of the skiff. They'd had to pry her arms from the bison's neck and tears had tracked down her cheeks, beading up on top of her sunscreen. But she'd bucked up when Martha told her she could visit the calf, a lie of a certain color.

“Don't let her play with the siren,” Martha said, as she pushed the
driftboat off the ramp. “You know how birds attack a boat when you hit the siren.”

“I won't let her touch it.” Peachy pulled at the oars, winking at Martha, going along.

“And remember the ejector seat. Whatever you do, don't touch the red button.”

Peachy curled his fingers underneath the rowing platform. “It's right under my thumb here.”

“Ejector seat!” the girl said. Her eyes grew big. “You don't have no ejector seat. Do you?”

“Pitch you right into the water if you don't behave,” Peachy said.

“Nah. He doesn't have an ejector seat, does he, Uncle Robin?”

Martha waved good-bye as the driftboat swept away down the river, Robin Cowdry already false casting his fly line.

She turned back to the truck. Harold had climbed into the bed and was sitting with his arms around the little bison. “Ejector seat, huh? I didn't know you were so good with kids.”

“You forget I raised two of them.”

Harold jabbed his chin, a
Look over my shoulder
gesture. “I knew we waited around, they'd finally show,” he said.

“Who?”

“Drake. I can smell him from here.”

Martha looked up the access road. Harold was right. A truck was coming, it rattled down the grade, a horse-and-cattle emblem identifying as a DOL vehicle—Montana Department of Livestock.

“Harold, this doesn't have to get personal.”

“Maybe if your eyes are blue.”

“Well, my eyes are blue, so just let me do the talking. Okay?”

It was Drake, Francis Lucien Drake, though everyone just called him Drake. He stepped out of the truck in parts, everything about him big, pushing his hat back on a high forehead, hitching his jeans, shaking his head when he saw the bison calf. He stuck a hand-rolled cigarette into the corner of his mouth and worked it without lighting it.

“You cavorting with livestock now, Harold? Getting yourself some of that barn candy?” A smile on his face, or rather a deliberate pulling back of his lips, exposing tombstone teeth stained by nicotine. He had a whorl of creases in his chin that constantly shifted, as if worms churned under the stubble.

Another man, shorter, swarthy, had climbed from the cab. He kicked caked mud from his boots against a big truck tire with a dragon-tooth tread. Carhartts head to cuff, old cracked boots. A gunfighter mustache gone salt-and-pepper. Martha knew him, had to wait a second to recall the name.

“Calvin,” she said.

“Sheriff.”

She made the introduction to Harold, who knew Calvin Barr only by his reputation as a wolfer for Animal Damage Control. Barr spoke out of the side of his mouth to say hello, his eyebrows, wiry and black, running together as he frowned at the calf. He came forward in a bowlegged walk and rubbed the head of the bison.

“Little red bull calf,” he said. His voice had sandpaper in it.

“I see somebody's been crawling the stock of his rifle,” Harold said.

“You'd think I learned the lesson.” Barr tapped the upper arch of his right orbital bone, where dozens of half-moon scars, caused by the steel rim of a rifle scope, showed white through a forest of eyebrow hair.

“What kind of gun recoils so hard the scope cuts you?”

“Forty-five ninety Sharps original with a Malcolm's six-power. But it's my own durned fault. If I kept my cheek back where it belongs, the scope wouldn't jump back far enough to kiss me.”

Martha had led Drake away from the truck. Harold could see them standing by the river, Martha with her hands on her hips, Drake shaking his head.

“Just so we're clear,” Harold said. “He points the finger, you pull the trigger?”

Barr tilted his head as if considering. “That would be the job description,” he said.

“I heard the wolf lovers called you Killer Barr.”

The man nodded. “That wasn't fair. I made it my business to know if I was shooting a guilty party. A lot of livestock deaths are blamed on predators when it's rancher neglect, blue tongue . . .” He shrugged. “Teeth don't have a thing to do with it sometimes.”

“No, it wasn't fair. You're just a man caught in the middle, doing his job. My problem's with the law that has you do it. 'Bout an hour ago I shot five bison that fell off the cliff. That's where I found this little fella. Don't know how he survived the fall.”

“Must have fallen on top of one of the others, reduced the impact.”

“Maybe.”

“Had to be hard, what you did.”

“Shooting them was an act of mercy. Seeing them suffer, that was hard. How many have you killed?”

“Bison?” The man took the question seriously, ran his eyebrows together as he considered. “I'd say three hundred plus since I contracted to DOL. They stray out of the park, out of the buffer zone, I get the call.”

“You ever think about not answering the phone?”

Barr seemed to think about that question, too. “There's a way I look at it,” he said. “If it isn't me, then they get somebody else. Then maybe the bullets don't go where they're supposed to and somebody has to clean up the mess, like you did yonder.”

“You're the reluctant executioner who makes sure the job is done humanely.”

“Buffalo take a lot of killing.” Barr rubbed the hairy back of his hand against the bison calf's forehead.

“Those bison this morning,” Harold prompted. “If they hadn't fallen off the cliff, you were going to kill them anyway, am I right?”

“I won't lie to you. As soon as they crossed onto the public land, the department had the green light.”

“You'd have shot this calf along with the rest.”

“That's the policy. You want to get all of them. You don't want to leave one that has the unacceptable behavior ingrained, because it will lead others back to the same place.”

“Unweaned calf do that?”

“It's policy to cull them all.”

“‘Cull.' That's an interesting word. I saw some cowboys cull a herd of thirty up out of Gardiner once, enough blood to cover a football field. One cow was dragging her guts on the ground, little calf like this one following her.”

The calf was bawling again and Harold rubbed its head.

“What are you thinking to do?” Barr said.

“Sheriff has a cow lost its calf. We'll wrap this little guy in the skin and hope she accepts him.”

Barr nodded. “I heard of that being done, but never heard of it take. Worth a shot. I say good luck to you.”

Martha and Drake were coming back, Drake making a tisking sound with his tongue as he shook his head.

“Harold, you know I can't let you have that calf.”

“Not my calf to give. This is a wild, free-ranging bison,” Harold said.

“There ain't no such animal, no sir.”

“Times are changing, Drake. The buffalo are coming back, just like the wolf did. It's people like you the clock's ticking down on.”

“You're wrong about that, but that's not the issue. This calf hasn't gone through quarantine and it could be spreading disease to cattle.”

“You mean brucellosis. That's bullshit and you know it.”

“My job is to remove bison that have strayed beyond the zone of tolerance, which this herd clearly had. Plus you're violating state law pertaining to possession of wildlife.”

Harold looked at Martha, who didn't return his glance. He looked at Barr, who had stepped away from the truck. It had become an old-fashioned western, two men in a dusty street.

“‘Pertaining,' huh? You must have learned a new word, Drake.”

Drake pulled at his cigarette. “We'll wait until you're gone to do our duty, that makes a difference to you.”

“No, I'll be taking him with me.”

The man nodded, showed his teeth in a gray smile, as if that was the response he'd expected.

“Then I'll have to write you up to the supervisor. Someone will be knocking. Probably be me.”

“We'll have the TV crew on call. World can see you for what you are. Tell you what, though, it comes to that, I'll rub your smile in buffalo manure for the camera. Rest of your life, first thing people will think when they see your face is how an Indian stuffed your mouth with shit.”

Drake stared at him, his eyes squinted up in folds of flesh. The worms in his chin crawled and crawled. He spat the butt and ground it under his heel.

“We're done here, Calvin. Let's go before I do something I regret.”

“Anytime, anywhere,” Harold said.

Drake took a half step forward to find Ettinger blocking the way.

“You want to do something about this, go through your channels,” she said to Drake. “But once the calf is on private property, you'll have to get a court order to have it removed.”

“Not according to interagency statute, not if I deem it an imminent threat to livestock or property.” He shrugged. “But maybe I won't have to take him. Sometimes, animals just disappear. It's a fact of nature.”