Butcher's Crossing (23 page)

In the morning light Miller looked at the frosted valley and said:

“Their grass is playing out. They’ll be trying to get through the pass and down to the flat country. We’ll have to keep pushing them back.”

And they did. Each morning they met the buffalo in a frontal attack, and pushed them slowly back toward the sheer rise of mountains to the south. But their frontal assault was little more than a delaying tactic; during the night the buffalo grazed far beyond the point they had been turned back from the day before. On each succeeding day the main herd came closer and closer to the pass over which it had originally entered the high park.

And as the buffalo pressed dumbly, instinctively, out of the valley, the slaughter grew more and more intense. Already withdrawn and spare with words, Miller became with the passing days almost totally intent upon his kill; and even at night, in the camp, he no longer gave voice to his simplest needs—he gestured toward the coffeepot, he grunted when his name was spoken, and his directions to the rest of them became curt motions of hands and arms, jerks of the head, and guttural growlings deep in his throat. Each day he went after the buffalo with two guns; during the kill, he heated the barrels to that point just shy of burning them out.

Schneider and Andrews had to work more and more swiftly to skin the animals Miller left strewn upon the ground; almost never were they able to finish their skinning before sundown, so that nearly every morning they were up before dawn hacking tough skins from stiff buffalo. And during the day, as they sweated and hacked and pulled in a desperate effort to keep up with Miller, they could hear the sound of his rifle steadily and monotonously and insistently pounding at the silence, and pounding at their nerves until they were raw and bruised. At night, when the two of them rode wearily out of the valley to the small red-orange glow that marked their camp in the darkness, they found Miller slouched darkly and inertly before the fire; except for his eyes he was as still and lifeless as one of the buffalo he had killed. Miller had even stopped washing off his face the black powder that collected there during his firing; now the powder smoke seemed a permanent part of his skin, ingrained there, a black mask that defined the hot, glaring brilliance of his eyes.

Gradually the herd was worn down. Everywhere he looked Andrews saw the ground littered with naked corpses of buffalo, which sent up a rancid stench to which he had become so used that he hardly was aware of it; and the remaining herd wandered placidly among the ruins of their fellows, nibbling at grass flecked with their dry brown blood. With his awareness of the diminishing size of the herd, there came to Andrews the realization that he had not contemplated the day when the herd was finally reduced to nothing, when not a buffalo remained standing—for unlike Schneider he had known, without questioning or without knowing how he knew, that Miller would not willingly leave the valley so long as a single buffalo remained alive. He had measured time, and had reckoned the moment and place of their leaving, by the size of the herd, and not—as had Schneider—by numbered days that rolled meaninglessly one after another. He thought of packing the hides into the wagon, yoking the oxen, which were beginning to grow fat on inactivity and the rich mountain grass, to the wagon, and making their way back down the mountain, and across the wide plains, back to Butcher’s Crossing. He could not imagine what he thought of. With a mild shock, he realized that the world outside the wide flat winding park hemmed on all sides by sheer mountain, had faded away from him; he could not remember the mountain up which they had labored, or the expanse of plain over which they sweated and thirsted, or Butcher’s Crossing, which he had come into and left only a few weeks before. That world came to him fitfully and unclearly, as if hidden in a dream. He had been here in the high valley for all of that part of his life that mattered; and when he looked out upon it—its flatness, and its yellow-greenness, its high walls of mountain wooded with the deep green of pine in which ran the flaming red-gold of turning aspen, its jutting rock and hillock, all roofed with the intense blue of the airless sky—it seemed to him that the contours of the place flowed beneath his eyes, that his very gaze shaped what he saw, and in turn gave his own existence form and place. He could not think of himself outside of where he was.

On their twenty-fifth day in the mountains they arose late. For the last several days, the slaughter had been going more slowly; the great herd, after more than three weeks, seemed to have begun to realize the presence of their killers and to have started dumbly to prepare against them; they began to break up into a number of very small herds; seldom was Miller able to get more than twelve or fourteen buffalo at a stand, and much time was wasted in traveling from one herd to another. But the earlier sense of urgency was gone; the herd of some five thousand animals was now less than three hundred. Upon these remaining three hundred, Miller closed in—slowly, inexorably—as if more intensely savoring the slaughter of each animal as the size of the herd diminished. On the twenty-fifth day they arose without hurry; and after they had taken breakfast they even sat around the fire for several moments letting their coffee cool in their tin cups. Though they could not see it through the thick forest of pines behind them, the sun rose over the eastern range of mountains; through the trees it sent diffused mists of light that gathered on their cups, softening their hard outlines and making them glow in the semishade. The sky was a deep thin blue, cloudless and intense; crevices and hollows on the broad plain and in the sides of the mountain sent up nearly invisible mists which could be seen only as they softened the edges of rock and tree they surrounded. The day warmed, and promised heat.

After finishing their coffee, they loitered around the camp while Charley Hoge led the oxen out of the aspen-pole corral and yoked them to the empty wagon. For several days hides had been drying where Andrews and Schneider had pegged them; it was time for them to be gathered and stacked.

Schneider scratched his beard, which was tangled and matted like wet straw, and stretched his arms lazily. “Going to be a hot day,” he said, pointing to the clear sky. “Probably won’t even get a rain.” He turned to Miller. “How many of the buff do you think’s left? Couple of hundred?”

Miller nodded, and cleared his throat.

Schneider continued: “Think we’ll be able to clean them up in three or four more days?”

Miller turned to him, as if only then aware that he had spoken. He said gruffly: “Three or four more days should do it, Fred.”

“God damn,” Schneider said happily. “I don’t know whether I can last that long.” He punched Andrews on the arm. “What about you, boy? Think you can wait?”

Andrews grinned. “Sure,” he said.

“A pocketful of money, and all the eats and women you can hold,” Schneider said. “By God, that’s living.”

Miller moved impatiently. “Come on,” he said. “Charley’s got the team yoked. Let’s get moving.”

The four men moved slowly from the camp area. Miller rode ahead of the wagon; Andrews and Schneider wound their reins about their saddle horns and let their horses amble easily behind it. The oxen, made lazy and irritable by their inactivity, did not pull well together; the morning silence was broken by Charley Hoge’s half-articulated, shouted curses.

Within half an hour the little procession had arrived at where the first buffalo had been killed and skinned more than three weeks before. The meat on the corpses had dried to a flintlike hardness; here and there the flesh had been torn away by the wolves before they had been killed or driven away by Charley Hoge’s strychnine; where the flesh was torn, the bones were white and shining, as if they had been polished. Andrews looked ahead of him into the valley; everywhere he looked he saw the mounded bodies. By next summer, he knew, the flesh would be eaten away by vultures or rotted away by the elements; he tried to imagine what the valley would look like, spread about with the white bones. He shivered a little, though the sun was hot.

Soon the wagon was so thickly surrounded by corpses that Charley Hoge was unable to point it in a straight direction; he had to walk beside the lead team, guiding it among the bodies. Even so, the huge wooden wheels now and then passed over an outthrust leg of a buffalo, causing the wagon to sway. The increasing heat of the day intensified the always present stench of rotting flesh; the oxen shied away from it, lowing discontentedly and tossing their heads so wildly that Charley Hoge had to stand many feet away from them.

When they had made their slow way to where a wide space was covered with pegged-out skins and fresh corpses, Andrews and Schneider got down from their horses. They tied large handkerchiefs about the lower parts of their faces, so that they could work without being disturbed by the horde of small black flies that buzzed about the rank meat.

“It’s going to be hot working,” Schneider said. “Look at that sun.”

Above the eastern trees, the sun was a fiery mass at which Andrews could not look directly; unhindered by mist or cloud, it burned upon them, instantly drying the sweat that it pulled from their faces and hands. Andrews let his eyes wander about the sky; the cool blueness soothed them from the burning they had from his brief glance toward the sun. To the south, a small white cloud had formed; it hung quiet and tiny just above the rise of the mountains.

“Let’s get going,” Andrews said, kicking at a small peg that held a skin flat against the earth. “It doesn’t look like it’ll get any cooler.”

A little more than a mile away, a slight dark movement was visible among the low mounds of corpses; a small herd was grazing quietly and moving slowly toward them. Miller abruptly reined his horse away from the three men who were busy loading the hides, and galloped toward the herd.

As the men worked, Charley Hoge led the oxen between them, so that neither would have to take more than a few steps to fling his hides upon the wagon bed. Shortly after Miller rode off, Andrews and Schneider heard the distant boom of his rifle; they lifted their heads and stood for a few moments listening. Then they resumed their work, unpegging and tossing the hides into the moving wagon more slowly, in rhythm with the booming sound of Miller’s rifle. When the sound ceased, they paused in their work and sat on the ground, breathing heavily.

“Don’t sound like we’re going to have to do much skinning today,” Schneider panted, pointing in the direction of Miller’s firing. “Sounds like he only got twelve or fourteen so far.”

Andrews nodded and lay back in a half-reclining position, resting his body on his elbows and forearms; he removed the large red bandana from his lower face so that his flesh might have the coolness of a faint breeze that had come up during their rest. The throbbing of his head gradually subsided as the breeze became stronger and cooled him. After about fifteen minutes, Miller’s rifle sounded again.

“He found another little herd,” Schneider said, rising to his feet. “We might as well try to keep up with him.”

But as they worked, they noticed that the rifle shots no longer came with the same regularity, marking a rhythm by which they could kick the stakes, raise the hides, and sail them onto the wagon. Several shots came briefly spaced, in a sharp flurry; there was a silence of several minutes; then another brief flurry of shots. Andrews and Schneider looked at each other in puzzlement.

“It don’t sound right,” Schneider said. “Maybe they’re getting skittish.”

The closely-spaced shots were followed by the brief sharp thunder of pounding hooves; in the distance could be seen a light cloud of dust raised by the running buffalo. The men heard another burst of rifle fire, and they saw the cloud of dust turn and go away from them, back into the depths of the valley. A few minutes later they heard another faint rumbling of hooves, and saw another cloud of dust rise at a different spot some distance east of the earlier stampede. And again they heard the brief, close explosions of Miller’s rifle, and saw the dust cloud veer and go back beyond the point from which it had begun.

“Miller’s got himself some trouble,” Schneider said. “Something’s got into them buff.”

In the minutes that the men had been standing still, listening to the gunshots and watching the dust trails, the burning heat had lessened perceptibly. A thin haze had come between them and the sun, and the breeze from the south had grown stronger.

“Come on,” Andrews said. “Let’s get these hides loaded while we’ve got a breeze.”

Schneider lifted his hand. “Wait.” Charley Hoge had left the oxen, and now stood near Schneider and Andrews. The rapid drumming of a running horse came to them; among the scattered flayed bodies of the buffalo Miller appeared, galloping toward them. When he came near the standing men, he pulled his horse so abruptly to a halt that it reared, its forehooves for a moment pawing the air.

“They’re trying to get out of the valley,” Miller’s voice came in a croaking rasp. “They’ve broke up in ten or twelve little herds, and I can’t turn them back fast enough; I need some help.”

Schneider blew his nose contemptuously. “Hell,” he said wearily, “let them go. There are only a couple of hundred of them left.”

Miller did not look at Schneider. “Will, you get on your horse and wait over there.” He pointed west to a spot two or three hundred yards from the side of the mountain. “Fred, you ride over there—” He pointed in the opposite direction, to the east. “I’ll stay in the middle.” He spoke to both Andrews and Schneider. “If a herd comes in your direction, head it off; all you have to do is shoot into it two or three times. It’ll turn.”

Schneider shook his head. “It’s no good. If they’re broke up in little herds, we can’t turn them all back.”

“They won’t all come at once,” Miller said. “They’ll come two or three at a time. We can turn them back.”

“But what’s the use?” said Schneider, his voice almost a wail. “What the hell’s the use? It ain’t going to kill you to let a few of them get away.”

“Hurry it up,” said Miller. “They’re liable to start any minute.”

Schneider raised his hands to the air, shrugged his shoulders, and went to his horse; Miller spurred toward the middle of the valley. Andrews mounted his horse, started to ride in the direction that Miller had pointed to him, and then rode up to the wagon to which Charley Hoge had returned.