Butcher's Crossing (12 page)

“Look here,” Miller said again. He pointed to the skull, which lay directly before the open oval front of the rib cage. The skull was narrow and flat, curiously small before the huge skeleton, which at its largest point reached slightly higher than Andrews’s waist. Two short horns curved up from the skull, and a wisp of dried fur clung to the flat top of the skull.

“This carcass ain’t more than two years old,” Miller said. “It’s still got a stink to it.”

Andrews sniffed; there was the faint rank odor of dried and crumbling flesh. He nodded, and did not speak.

“This here fellow was a big one,” Miller said. “Must have been near two thousand pound. You don’t see them around here that big very often.”

Andrews tried to visualize the animal from the remains that rested stilly on the prairie grass; he called to his memory the engravings that he had seen in books. But that uncertain memory and the real bones would not merge; he could not imagine the animal as it had been.

Miller kicked at one of the broad ribs; it snapped from the spine and fell softly in the grass. He looked at Andrews and moved his arm in a broad gesture to the country around them. “There was a time, in the days of the big kills, when you could look a mile in any direction and see the bones piled up. Five, six years ago, we’d have been riding through bones from Pawnee Fork clean to the end of the Smoky Hill. This is what the Kansas hunt has come to.” He kicked again, contemptuously, at another rib. “And these won’t be here long. Some dirt farmer will run across these and load them in a wagon and cart them off for fertilizer. Though there ain’t enough here to hardly bother with.”

“Fertilizer?” Andrews asked.

Miller nodded. “Buffalo’s a curious critter; there ain’t a part of him you can’t use for something.” He walked the length of the skeleton, bent, and picked up the broad bone of a hind leg; he swung it in the air as if it were a club. “The Indians used these bones for everything from needles to war clubs—knives so sharp they could split you wide open. They’d glue pieces of the bone together with pieces of horn for their bows, and use another piece, whittled down, for an arrowhead. I’ve seen necklaces carved so pretty out of little pieces of this, you’d think they was made in St. Louis. Toys for the little ones, combs for the squaws’ hair-all out of this here bone. Fertilizer.” He shook his head, and swung the bone again, flung it away from him; it sailed high in the air; catching the sun, it fell in the soft grass, bounced once, and was still.

Behind them a horse snorted; Schneider had ridden up near them.

“Let’s get going,” he said. “We’ll see plenty of bones before we’re through with this trip—leastways, if there’s the kind of herd up in them mountains that there’s supposed to be.”

“Sure,” Miller said. “This is just a little pile anyway.”

The wagon came near them; in the hot noon air, Charley Hoge’s voice raised quaveringly; he sang that God was his strong salvation, that he feared no foe, nor darkness nor temptation; he stood firm in the fight, with God at his right hand. For a moment the three men listened to the tortured voice urging its message upon the empty land; then they pushed their horses before the wagon and resumed their slow course across the country.

The signs of the buffalo became more frequent; several times they passed over packed trails left by great herds that went down to the river for water, and once they came upon a huge saucerlike depression, nearly six feet in depth at its deepest point and over forty feet across; grass grew to the very edge of this shallow pit, but in the pit itself the earth had been worked to a fine dust. This, Miller explained to Andrews, was a buffalo wallow, where the great beasts found relief from the insects and lice that plagued them by rolling about in the dust. No buffalo had been there for a long time; Miller pointed out that there were no buffalo chips about and that the grass around the pit was green and uncropped.

Once they saw the dead body of a buffalo cow. It lay stiffly on its side in the thick green grass; its belly was distended, and a foul stench of decaying flesh spread from it. At the approach of the men, two vultures that had been tearing at the flesh rose slowly and awkwardly into the air, and circled high above their carrion. Miller and Andrews rode near the carcass and dismounted. Upon the still, awkward shape the fur was a dull umber roughed to black in spots; Andrews started to go nearer, but the stench halted him. His stomach tightened; he pulled back, and circled the beast so that the wind carried the full force of the odor away from him.

Miller grinned at him. “Kind of strong, ain’t it?” Still grinning, he went past Andrews and squatted down beside the buffalo, examining it carefully. “Just a little cow,” he said. “Whoever shot her, missed the lights; more than likely, this one just plain bled to death. Probably left behind by the main herd.” He kicked at the stiff, extended lower leg. The flesh thudded dully, and there was a light ripping sound as if a piece of stiff cloth had been torn. “Ain’t been dead more than a week; it’s a wonder there’s any meat left.” He shook his head, turned, and walked back to his horse, which had shied away from the odor. When Miller approached, the horse’s ears flattened and it leaned backward away from him; but Miller spoke soothingly and the horse stilled, though the muscles around its forelegs were tense and trembling. Miller and Andrews mounted and rode past the wagon and past Schneider, who had taken no notice of their stopping. The odor of the rotting buffalo clung in Miller’s clothes, and even after he had gone ahead of Andrews, occasionally a light breeze would bring the odor back and cause Andrews to pull his hand across his nostrils and his mouth, as if something unclean had touched them.

Once, also, they saw a small herd; and again it was Miller who pointed it out to Andrews. The herd was little more than clustered specks of blackness in the light green of the prairie; Andrews could make out no shape or movement, though he strained his eyes against the bright afternoon sun and raised himself high in the saddle.

“It’s just a little herd,” Miller said. “The hunters around here have cut them all up into little herds.”

The three of them—Andrews, Miller, and Schneider—were riding abreast. Schneider said impartially, to no one: “A body has sometimes got to be satisfied with a little herd. If that’s the way they run, that’s the way a body has got to cut them.”

Miller, his eyes still straining at the distant herd, said: “I can recollect the day when you never saw a herd less than a thousand head, and even that was just a little bunch.” He swept his arm in a wide half-circle. “I’ve stood at a place like this and looked out, and all I could see was black—fifty, seventy-five, a hundred thousand head of buffalo, moving over the grass. Packed so tight you could walk on their backs, walk all day, and never touch the ground. Now all you see is stragglers, like them out there. And grown men hunt for them.” He spat on the ground.

Again Schneider addressed the air: “If all you got is stragglers, then you hunt for stragglers. I ain’t got my hopes up any longer for much more.”

“Where we’re going,” Miller said, “you’ll see them like we used to in the old days.”

“Maybe so,” Schneider said. “But I ain’t got my hopes up too high.”

From the wagon behind them came the high crackle of Charley Hoge’s voice. “Just a little bitty herd. You never saw nothing that little in the old days. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

At the sound of Charley Hoge’s voice, the three men had turned; they listened him out; when he finished, they turned again; but they could no longer find the tiny smudge of black in the expanse of the prairie. Miller went on ahead, and Schneider and Andrews dropped back; none of them spoke again of what they had seen.

Such interruptions of their journey were few. Twice on the trail they passed small parties going in their direction. One of these parties consisted of a man, his wife, and three small children. Grimed with dust, their faces drawn and sullen with weariness, the woman and children huddled in a small wagon pulled by four mules and did not speak; the man, eager to talk and almost breathless in his eagerness, informed them that he had driven all the way from Ohio where he had lost his farm, and that he planned to join a brother who had a small business in California; he had begun the journey with a group of other wagons, but the lameness of one of his mules had so slowed his progress that he was now nearly two weeks behind the main party, and he had little hope of ever catching up. Miller examined the lame mule, and advised the man to swing up to Fort Wallace, where he could rest his team, and wait for another wagon train to come through. The man hesitated, and Miller told him curtly that the mule could not make it farther than Fort Wallace, and that he was a fool to continue on the trail alone. The man shook his head stubbornly. Miller said nothing more; he motioned to Andrews and Schneider, and the party pulled around the man and woman and the children and went ahead. Late in the evening the dust from the small mule-drawn wagon could be seen in the distance, far behind them. Miller shook his head.

“They’ll never make it. That mule ain’t good for two more days.” He spat on the ground. “They should of turned off where I told them.”

The other party they passed was a larger one of five men on horseback; these men were silent and suspicious. Reluctantly, they informed Miller that they were on their way to Colorado where they had an interest in an undeveloped mining claim, which they intended to work. They refused Charley Hoge’s invitation to join them for supper, and they waited in a group for Miller’s party to pass. Late that night, after Miller, Andrews, Schneider, and Hoge had bedded down, they heard the muffled clop of hooves circling around and passing them.

Once, where the trail skirted close to the river, they came upon a wide bluff, from the side of which had been excavated a series of crude dugouts. On the flat hard earth in front of the dugouts several brown, naked children were playing; behind the children, near the openings of the dugouts, squatted half a dozen Indians; the women were shapeless in the blankets they held about them despite the heat, and the men were old and wizened. As the group passed, the children ceased their play and looked at them with dark, liquid eyes; Miller waved, but none of the Indians gave any sign of response.

“River Indians,” Miller said contemptuously. “They live on catfish and jack rabbits. They ain’t worth shooting anymore.”

But as their journey progressed such interruptions came to seem more and more unreal to Andrews. The reality of their journey lay in the routine detail of bedding down at night, arising in the morning, drinking black coffee from hot tin cups, packing bedrolls upon gradually wearying horses, the monotonous and numbing movement over the prairie that never changed its aspect, the watering of the horses and oxen at noon, the eating of hard biscuit and dried fruit, the resumption of the journey, the fumbling setting up of camp in the darkness, the tasteless quantities of beans and bacon gulped savagely in the flickering darkness, the coffee again, and the bedding down. This came to be a ritual, more and more meaningless as it was repeated, but a ritual which nevertheless gave his life the only shape it now had. It seemed to him that he moved forward laboriously, inch by inch, over the space of the vast prairie; but it seemed that he did not move through time at all, that rather time moved with him, an invisible cloud that hovered about him and clung to him as he went forward.

The passing of time showed itself in the faces of the three men who rode with him and in the changes he perceived within himself. Day by day he felt the skin of his face hardening in the weather; the stubble of hair on the lower part of his face became smooth as his skin roughened, and the backs of his hands reddened and then browned and darkened in the sun. He felt a leanness and a hardness creep upon his body; he thought at times that he was moving into a new body, or into a real body that had lain hidden beneath layers of unreal softness and whiteness and smoothness.

The change that he saw in the others was less meaningful to him, and less extreme. Miller’s heavy, evenly shaped beard thickened on his face and began to curl at the extreme ends; but the change was more readily apparent in the way he sat his saddle, in his stride upon the ground, and in the look of his eyes that gazed on the opening prairie. An ease, a familiarity, a naturalness began to replace the stiff and formal attitude that Andrews had first encountered in Butcher’s Crossing. He sat his saddle as if he were a natural extension of the animal he rode; he walked in such a way that it appeared his very movement was caressing the contours of the ground; and his gaze upon the prairie seemed to Andrews as open and free and limitless as the land that occasioned his regard.

Schneider’s face seemed to recede and hide in the slowly growing beard that bristled like straw upon his darkening skin. Day by day Schneider withdrew into himself; he spoke to the others less frequently, and in his riding he appeared to be almost attempting to disassociate himself from them: he looked always in a direction that was away from them, and at night he ate his food silently, turned sideways from the campfire, and bedded down and was asleep long before the others.

Of them all, Charley Hoge showed the least change. His gray beard bristled a bit more fully, and his skin reddened but did not brown in the weather; he looked about him impartially, slyly, and spoke abruptly and without cause to all of them, expecting no answer. When the trail was level, he took out his worn and tattered Bible and thumbed through its pages, his weak gray eyes squinting through the dust. At regular intervals throughout the day he reached beneath the wagon seat and drew out a loosely corked bottle of whisky; he pulled the cork out with his yellowed teeth, dropped it into his lap, and took long noisy swallows. Then, in his high, thin, quavering voice he sang a hymn that floated faintly through the dust and died in the ears of the three men who rode before him.

On the sixth day of their traveling, they came to the end of the Smoky Hill Trail.

The dark green line of trees and brush that they had followed all the way from Butcher’s Crossing turned in a slow curve to the south. The four men, who came upon the turning in the midmorning of their sixth day of journey, halted and gazed for some moments at the course of the Smoky Hill River. From where they halted, the land dropped off so that in the distance, through the brush and trees of the banks, they could see the slow-moving water. In the distance it lost its muddy green hue; the sunlight silvered its surface, and it appeared to them clear and cool. The three men brought their horses close together; the oxen turned their heads toward the river and moaned softly; Charley Hoge called them to a halt, and set the brake handle of the wagon; he jumped off the spring seat, clambered from the wagon, and walked briskly over to where the others waited. He looked up at Miller.