Butcher's Crossing (11 page)

“Buffalo,” Miller said. “This is their watering place. They come across here—” he pointed to the plain, “in a straight line, and spread out at the river. No reason for it. I’ve seen a thousand buffalo lined up in ruts like this, one behind another, waiting for water.”

Along the trail they saw no other signs of the buffalo that day, though Miller remarked that they were getting into buffalo country. The sun whitened the western sky and threw its heat against their movement. Their horses bowed their heads and stumbled on the flat land, their sleek coats shining with sweat; the oxen plodded before the wagon, their breathing heavy and labored. Andrews pulled his hat down to shade his face, and bent his head so that he saw only the horse’s curved black mane, the dark brown pommel of his saddle, and the yellow land moving jerkily beneath him. He was soaked with sweat, and the flesh of his thighs and buttocks was raw from its chafing against the saddle. He shifted his position until the shifting offered him no relief, and then he tethered his horse on the tailgate of the wagon and clambered upon the spring seat beside Charley Hoge. But the hard wood of the seat pained him more than the saddle, and the dust from the oxen’s hooves choked him and made his eyes burn; he had to sit rigid and tense upon the narrow board to hold himself erect against the slow swaying of the wagon. Soon, with a few words to Charley Hoge, who had not spoken to him, he got off the wagon and once again resumed his shifting position in his saddle. For the rest of the afternoon he rode in a kind of pain that approached numbness but never achieved it.

When the sun descended beyond the vast curve of the horizon, reddening the sky and the land, the animals lifted their heads and went forward more swiftly. Miller, who had ridden all day ahead of the party, turned and shouted to Charley Hoge:

“Whip them up! They can stand it, now the day’s turned cool. We need to make another five miles before we set camp.”

For the first time since early in the morning, the sharp crack of Charley Hoge’s whip sounded above the creaking of the wagon and the thud of the oxen’s hooves. The men stirred their horses to a fast walk that occasionally broke into a slow jarring trot.

After the sun went down the darkness came swiftly; and still the group moved forward. The moon rose thinly behind them; it seemed to Andrews that their motion carried them nowhere, that they were agitated painfully upon a small dim plateau that moved beneath them as they had the illusion of going forward. In the near darkness, he grasped the horn of his saddle and raised himself up by pressing his unsteady feet upon the stirrups.

About two hours later, Miller, a vague shape that seemed a part of the animal he rode, halted and shouted back to them in a voice clear and sharp in the darkness:

“Pull her up at that clump of willows, Charley. We camp here.”

Andrews went cautiously toward Miller, holding his reins tightly against the movement of his horse. Dark against the lesser darkness, the brush of the river bank sprang up before him. He tried to remove one foot from a stirrup to dismount but his leg was so stiff and numb that he was unable to do so. Finally he reached down and grasped the stirrup by its strap and tugged until he could feel the stirrup swing free. Then he threw the weight of his body to one side and half fell from his horse; he supported himself for a few moments on the ground by holding hard to his saddle.

“Rough day?” The voice was low but close to his ear. He turned; Miller’s broad white face hung in the darkness.

Andrews swallowed and nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“It takes some getting used to,” Miller said. “A couple days’ riding, then you’ll be all right.” He untied Andrews’s bedroll from behind his saddle and gave the horse a heavy slap on the rump. “We’ll bed down in that little draw on the other side of the willows. Think you can manage now?”

Andrews nodded and took the bedroll from him. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m all right.” He walked unsteadily in the direction that Miller had indicated, though he could see nothing beyond the dark clump of the willow. Dim shapes moved around him, and he realized that Charley Hoge had already unyoked the oxen and they were crashing their way to the river. He heard the sound of a shovel pushing into earth and grating on rock, and saw the glint of moonlight on the blade as it was turned. He went nearer; Charley Hoge was digging a small pit. With his good hand he held the handle of the shovel, while with one foot he thrust the blade into the ground; then, bending over, he cradled the handle in the bend of his other arm and levered the shovel up, spilling the earth beside the pit he was digging. Andrews dropped his bedroll to the ground and sat upon it, his arms thrust between his legs, his fingers curled loosely on the ground.

After a few moments, Charley Hoge stopped his digging and went away into the darkness, returning with a bundle of twigs and small branches. He dropped them into the pit and struck a match, which flamed fretfully in the darkness, and thrust the match among the small twigs. Soon the fire was burning brightly, leaping up into the darkness. Not until then did Andrews notice Schneider lounging across from him on the other side of the fire. Schneider grinned at him once, sardonically, his face flickering in the flame-light; then he lay back on his bedroll and pulled his hat over his face.

For the next hour or two, in his exhaustion, Andrews was only vaguely aware of what happened around him. Charley Hoge came in and out of his sight, feeding the fire; Miller came up near him, spread out his bedroll, and lay upon it, his gaze directed at the fire; Andrews dozed. He came awake with a start at the aroma of brewing coffee, and looked about him with a sudden bewilderment; for a moment all he could see was the small glowing patch of coals in front of him, which sent an intense heat against his face and arms. Then he was aware of the bulky figures of Schneider and Miller standing near the pit; painfully he raised himself from the bedroll and joined them. In silence the men drank their coffee and ate the scalding beans and side pork that Charley Hoge had prepared. Andrews found himself eating wolfishly, in great gulps, though he was not aware of any hunger. The men scraped the large pot clean of the food, and sopped the liquid in their tin plates with crumbs of dried biscuit. They drained the blackened coffee-pot to the dregs, and sat on their bedrolls with their hot coffee, sipping slowly, while Charley Hoge carried the utensils down to the river.

Without removing his shoes, Andrews folded his bedroll over him and lay on the ground. Mosquitoes buzzed about his face, but he did not brush them away. Just before he went to sleep, he heard in the distance the sound of horses’ hooves and the faint squeal of rapidly turning wagon wheels; the far sound of a man’s voice shouting indistinguishable words rose above the other noises. Andrews lifted himself on an elbow.

Miller’s voice came to him, very close, out of the darkness. “Buffalo hunters. Probably one of McDonald’s outfits.” His voice was edged with contempt. “They’re going too fast; can’t have many hides.”

The sounds faded into the distance. For a while, Andrews remained on his elbow, his eyes straining in the direction that the sounds had come from. Then his arm tired and he lay down and slept almost immediately.

The great plain swayed beneath them as they went steadily westward. The rich buffalo grass, upon which their animals fattened even during the arduous journey, changed its color throughout the day; in the morning, in the pinkish rays of the early sun, it was nearly gray; later, in the yellow light of the midmorning sun, it was a brilliant green; at noon it took on a bluish cast; in the afternoon, in the intensity of the sun, at a distance, the blades lost their individual character and through the green showed a distinct cast of yellow, so that when a light breeze whipped across, a living color seemed to run through the grass, to disappear and reappear from moment to moment. In the evening after the sun had gone down, the grass took on a purplish hue as if it absorbed all the light from the sky and would not give it back.

After their first day’s journey, the country lost some of its flatness; it rolled out gently before them, and they traveled from soft hollow to soft rise, as if they were tiny chips blown upon the frozen surface of a great sea.

Upon the surface of this sea, among the slow hollows and crests, Will Andrews found himself less and less conscious of any movement forward. During the first few days of the journey he had been so torn with the raw agony of movement that each forward step his mount took cut itself upon his nerves and upon his mind. But the pain dulled after the first days, and a kind of numbness took its place; he felt no sensation of his buttocks upon the saddle, and his legs might have been of wood, so stiffly and without feeling did they set about the sides of his horse. It was during this numbness that he lost the awareness of any progression forward. The horse beneath him took him from hollow to crest, yet it seemed to him that the land rather than the horse moved beneath him like a great treadmill, revealing in its movement only another part of itself.

Day by day the numbness crept upon him until at last the numbness seemed to be himself. He felt himself to be like the land, without identity or shape; sometimes one of the men would look at him, look through him, as if he did not exist; and he had to shake his head sharply and move an arm or a leg and glance at it to assure himself that he was visible.

And the numbness extended to his perception of the others who rode with him on the empty plain. Sometimes in his weariness he looked at them without recognition, seeing but the crudest shapes of men. At such times he knew them only by the positions they occupied. As at the beginning of the journey, Miller rode ahead and Andrews and Schneider formed the base of a triangle behind him. Often, as the group approached out of a hollow a slight rise of land, Miller, no longer outlined against the horizon, seemed to merge into the earth, a figure that accommodated itself to the color and contour of the land upon which it rode. After the first day’s journey, Miller spoke very little, as if hardly aware of the men who rode with him. Like an animal, he sniffed at the land, turning his head this way and that at sounds or scents unperceived by the others; sometimes he lifted his head in the air and did not move for long moments, as if waiting for a sign that did not come.

Beside Andrews, but across from him by thirty feet or more, rode Schneider. His broad hat pulled low over his eyes and his stiff hair bristling beneath his hat like a bundle of weathered straw, he slumped in his saddle. Sometimes his eyes were closed and he swayed in the saddle, dozing; at other times, awake, he stared sullenly at a spot between his horse’s ears. Occasionally he took a chew of tobacco from a square black plug that he kept in his breast pocket, and spat contemptuously at the ground as if at something that had offended him. Seldom did he look at any of the others, and he did not speak unless it was necessary.

Behind the men on horses, Charley Hoge rode high on the clip seat of the wagon. Covered by the light dust that the horses and the oxen lifted and through which he passed, Charley Hoge held his head erect, his eyes raised above the oxen and the men before him. Sometimes he called out to them in a thin, mocking, cheerful voice; sometimes he hummed tunelessly to himself, keeping time with the stump of his right wrist; and sometimes his toneless voice cracked into a quavering hymn that jarred the hearing of all three men, who turned and looked back upon Charley Hoge’s oblivious, contorted face with the open mouth and squinted eyes that saw none of them. At night, after the men were fed and the animals hobbled, Charley Hoge would open his worn and filthy Bible and mouth silently to himself by the dying light of the campfire.

On their fourth day out of Butcher’s Crossing, for the second time Andrews saw the sign of buffalo.

It was Miller who made him see it. The group had come out of one of the interminable hollows that rolled through the Kansas plains; Miller, on top of the small rise, halted his horse and beckoned. Andrews rode up beside him.

“Look out yonder,” Miller said, and lifted his arm.

Andrews followed the direction that Miller indicated. At first he could see only the rolling land that he had seen before; then, in the distance, his gaze settled upon a patch of white that gleamed in the late morning sun. At the distance from which he regarded it the patch had no shape, and barely had the substance to make itself visible in the blue-green grass that surrounded it. He turned back to Miller. “What is it?” he asked.

Miller grinned. “Let’s ride over and get a closer look.”

They let their horses go in an easy lope across the ground; Schneider came more slowly behind them, while Charley Hoge turned the ox team slightly so that he followed, far behind them, in the same direction.

As they drew nearer to the spot Miller had indicated, Andrews began to see that it was more than a patch of white; whatever it was spread over a relatively large area of ground, as if strewn there carelessly by a huge, inhuman hand. Near the area Miller pulled his horse up abruptly and dismounted, winding the reins around the saddle horn so that the horse’s neck was arched downward. Andrews did the same, and walked up beside Miller, who stood unmoving, looking out over the scattered area.

“What is it?” Andrews asked again.

“Bones,” Miller said, and grinned at him once more. “Buffalo bones.”

They walked closer. In the short prairie grass, the bones gleamed whitely, half-submerged in the blue-green grass, which had grown up around them. Andrews walked among the bones, careful not to disturb them, peering curiously as he passed.

“Small kill,” Miller said. “Must not have been more than thirty or forty. Fairly recent, too. Look here.”

Andrews went to him. Miller stood before a skeleton that was almost intact. From the curving, notched spine, which showed upon its top regular indentations of a grayish color, depended the broad-bowed blades of the rib cage. The rib bones were very broad and sweeping at the front, but nearer the flanks of the animal they sharply decreased in breadth and length; near the flank, the ribs were only nubs of white held to the spinal column by dried cords of sinew and gristle. Two broad flanges of bone at the end of the spine nestled in the grass; trailing behind these flanges, flat in the grass, were the two wide and sharply tapering bones of the rear legs. Andrews walked around the skeleton, which lay upright on what had once been its belly, peering closely at it; but he did not touch it.