Centennial (14 page)

The black bull did not raise his voice in triumph nor did he make any move to follow Rufous to demonstrate once and for all his supremacy. He seemed quite content to have resolved this particular challenge in this way. He, too, sensed that a more likely day would come, a day he could not escape, and that then the issue would be resolved.

As the rutting season progressed, only three bulls served the cows: the black leader, the bull with the slanted horn and the brown bull with heavy hair over his eyes. Each was challenged repeatedly by younger bulls; each sustained his prerogatives, and it seemed as if the summer would end with those three in ascendancy.

And then, as the mating season drew to a close, Rufous experienced antagonisms he had not felt before. No amount of charging cottonwood trees satisfied him, and wallowing gave him no release. So one bright morning he sought out an old wallow which he had known favorably before. It was a prairie-dog town, where the little squirrel-like animals had piled up much sand. Plodding his way to it, he thrust himself into the soft earth, ignoring the protests of the little animals as they watched their homes destroyed. He wallowed for a long time, till his hair was well filled with dust. Then he rose, urinated copiously and threw himself into it with a fierceness he had not shown before. Now when he got up, his body was well mudded and the matted hair about his head exuded a powerful scent.

With stolid determination he marched back to the herd, seeking whichever older bull was courting that day. It was the ugly brown bull. He was with a fine cow well along in heat, and had it not been for the arrival of Rufous, the two might soon have been mating.

This time Rufous did not waste his time staring into the eyes of his enemy. As soon as he arrived at the scene he lowered his head and charged at the brown bull, but his tactic was not successful because the little bull calf that had adopted him as its mother had caught the scent of the urine-covered body as it passed through the herd and now galloped up to suckle. This interrupted Rufous’ charge and allowed the brown bull to slash at him as his attack was aborted. A serious gash appeared on Rufous’ shoulder and blood began to spurt out.

This enraged him, and he vented his wrath on his would-be son. With a violent toss of his head he caught the persistent calf and threw it high into the air and some distance away. Without pausing to see where it fell or how, he rushed at the brown bull in such a way as to catch that defender with his head not fully prepared. There was an ugly shock, and the brown bull fell back.

Instantly Rufous leaped at him, boring in with his powerful horns until he struck the right hip of the brown bull. With a ripping sound he swept his horn along the hip, damaging his enemy severely.

This encouraged him, and he swarmed all over the brown bull, jabbing and thrusting and applying constant pressure. It was as if the brown bull were being attacked from all sides, and in time the pressures began to tell. He fell back farther, tried to mount one last counterattack, and failed. Knowing that defeat was inevitable, he backed off and left the area.

Lowing triumphantly Rufous took over the waiting cow and licked her coat. He was about to lead her into the cottonwoods when the little calf, recovered from its flight, returned to the strong smell of its supposed mother. Sidling up to Rufous, it again tried to nurse, but this time the victorious bull gently nosed him away. He had other matters on his mind.

For the rest of the year Rufous occasionally caught sight of the old brown bull moving along the outer edges of the herd, an embittered elder whose place had been permanently usurped. Never again would the old fellow mount a cow, for if he were to try, the younger bulls would challenge him, remembering that Rufous had humiliated him.

He was free to stay with the herd as long as he wished, and to feed with it and to play with the calves that other bulls sired, but he could have no part in the leadership and certainly no part in the breeding. Some old bulls elected to remain with the herd; many chose to wander off, a part of nothing, afraid of nothing, impregnable to attack, until the closing days when blinded sight and worn-down teeth and blunted horns made them vulnerable. Then wolves moved in. The slashing attacks were sustained, sometimes for three days, with a dozen wolves trying to cut down one stubborn old bull until he could fight no more and the fangs destroyed him.

It was now autumn, and the leader cow sensed that her charges ought to be congregating with the larger herd, so she led them northward, and as they moved ponderously, they merged with larger herds, and then with larger still. Bison seemed to be moving in from all directions until the prairie was black. They stretched to the horizon and blotted out the land, but still more came. They moved in accordance with no plan, but only in response to the ebb and flow which their ancestors had observed.

That spring, during the calving season, the herd to which Rufous belonged had contained only thirty-nine members. In summer, when it joined with another small herd, it numbered about a hundred. After the rutting season it grew to several thousand. And now, on the northern prairie, it contained nearly a million.

In such a congregation the little black bull with the faulty imprinting would have been destroyed had it not clung close to Rufous. It had no chance of locating its mother, for it could not remember her smell, but the strong odor of its adopted father was easy to identify, and the little fellow clung to him.

No matter how sorely Rufous abused his unwanted companion, the latter stayed close. Deprived of its mother’s milk, the little bull learned to depend upon grazing seven months before other calves his age, and whereas they clung to their mothers for protection, it developed a wildly independent nature. By the time snow fell it was willing to bang heads with any animal encountered. Having already survived one attack from wolves, it was not even afraid of them. As its hump matured, so its pugnacity grew; it was a tough little bull.

With Rufous it moved freely within the vast herd, sometimes under the leadership of their own cow, sometimes far from her on the edge of the mob. One day when the herd had begun to fragment into the usual smaller units for winter grazing, some hundred thousand bison moved south across the river, and it was fortunate that Rufous and the calf were not in the middle that day. The herd was feeding well west of the twin pillars, heading for the chalk cliff, now forty feet high, and if the bison had approached it normally, they would have separated into two segments, one going west to escape the cliff, the other east.

But on this day a pack of wolves set up a commotion on the eastern flank. This stampeded the bison in that area and they dashed forward. Others, seeing them on the move, joined the flight automatically, and before long a general panic set in until eighty or ninety thousand bison were in motion.

They swept forward irresistibly, overriding anything that came within their path. If a bison stumbled and fell, he was crushed to death by hammering hoofs, and any calf separated even momentarily from its mother was either killed or forever lost.

The center of the stampeding herd drove directly for the chalk cliff, and as the lead animals approached and saw the precipitous drop ahead, they tried to stop, but this they were powerless to do, for the animals surging behind kept coming and forced the first rank over the cliff. Most of them perished in the fall, but those that didn’t were soon crushed by succeeding waves of bison as they too plunged over the edge.

The bison on the flanks, of course, easily made their way around the cliff and suffered no fatalities except those few that fell beneath the pounding hoofs. But at the center more than twelve hundred perished and wolves did not have to bother trailing the herd for stragglers.

Rufous and the bull calf were on the left flank that day, and when panic struck they galloped easily to safety on the plains below the cliff. The little bull enjoyed the wild excitement of the chase so much that thereafter he roamed with Rufous, and when their herd reassembled under the leadership of their determined cow, the two moved eastward to the twin pillars, where the self-orphaned bull grew into a stalwart animal.

He had a raffish disposition, and at the age of nineteen months, when he was well formed, with sturdy horns growing out of his jet-black head, he was already seeking adventure. One day he limped back to the herd, badly cut up: his rear left leg was shredded above the ankle; his face was gashed; and his right flank was scored by sharp teeth. When Rufous and the other bulls gathered about him to smell whatever mementos there were of the disaster, they could tell that the blood on his right horn was not his. Sniffing more closely, they detected the smell of wolf, and next morning three of them, wandering east of the twin pillars, came upon a scene of carnage, with three wolves lying dead beside some low bushes which had been broken and trampled.

It had been a notable triumph, but thereafter the young bull would be lame in his left rear leg. He did not limp badly, but when he dug in for a charge against his fellow bulls he favored that leg, and when the charge came, there was a noticeable drag to the left. This did not deter him from fighting with everyone in the herd. Once he even challenged the lead cow when she was leading them north, but she gave him two swift jabs with her horn, indicating that she intended to accept no nonsense from brash young bulls.

He liked best the autumn, when the massive herd coalesced north of the two rivers. In western America two distinct kinds of bison had always existed, wood bison that kept to the hills, and plains bison. The latter were divided into two herds, the northern and the southern, and the land around the twin pillars marked the dividing line. This was because the southern herd usually stayed below the South Platte, while the northern herd stayed above the North Platte. The neutral land between the two rivers was sometimes occupied by a million or two bison from either herd, but they rarely stayed long.

In these years the northern herd, had it ever assembled at one spot, which it did not, would have numbered about thirty-five million animals; the southern herd, twenty-five million. Even such partial concentrations as gathered along the North Platte could number into the two or three millions, and for them to cross the river might require three days. They darkened the prairies; when they moved, the sky was gray with rising dust; they were magnificent and in the whole region at this time they had no enemy except the lurking wolf. They were masters of creation, a force of such magnitude that it could never be diminished, a stable community whose laws were so sound and whose behavior was so reasonable that it could reproduce itself perpetually.

It was this herd, more vast than the eye of a bison could contemplate, that the tough bull loved, for when he was a part of it they seemed to grow larger. If the herd broke into a gallop for some unexplained reason, he longed to be at the very heart of it, going where it led, thundering his hoofs, pulled this way or that by the timeless instinct of the herd. Sometimes, at such moments of wild movement, he bellowed for sheer joy.

He found pleasure in milling around the center, fighting whatever young bulls cared to engage him. The fact that he limped deluded other bulls into thinking that here was an easy enemy, and in the first years he was often challenged, always to the dismay of those who did the challenging. For he was not only strong and canny; he could also be downright mean, with sly tricks that other bulls had not learned. It was usual, when two bulls found contact in their first violent charge, for them to remain locked, their great foreheads touching, their back legs pumping in a contest of brute strength. But with a weak leg this jet-black bull knew that he must always lose that battle, so when his stupid and stolid adversary dug in for a traditional contest, he feinted forward, made enough contact to fix his opponent in position, then slid to the side, raking his foe with his sharp right horn.

He startled many bulls in this way, but he himself was also badly scarred in the brawling. Two ribs had already been broken and the tip of his left horn had been knocked off. He bore many scars in addition to the wolf bites, yet he loved the smell of combat when the vast herd assembled.

But when the excitement bred by the giant herd died down, in some mysterious manner the smaller herd of the twin pillars reestablished itself: the lead cow for that year reasserted her dominance and even fractious bulls like the jet-black one fell in line and willingly took up the trek south to their own familiar territory. Then he marched with Rufous, and the two, the younger now as hefty as the older, formed as handsome a pair as even the great master herd could have provided.

Bison had short memories, if any, and the younger bull no longer looked upon the older as his stay in life; indeed, that ridiculous passage in the young one’s maturing had been forgotten. To him Rufous was merely the commanding bull of the herd, the one who had not yet been defeated during the rutting season. And here was where the trouble started, for when the jet-black bull was six years old he determined to possess cows of his own; to do otherwise would be ridiculous. And this placed him athwart the prerogatives of Rufous.

That spring the half-lame bull started to train for the extra-rigorous battles he knew lay ahead. He tested his horns against cottonwood trees and bellowed for hours at a time down by the river. He wallowed a good deal and sought fights with younger bulls. With great intensity he watched the three or four older bulls that commanded the cows, and especially he kept his eye on Rufous. It seemed to him that the old tyrant was losing his power.

During the calving season the young bull continued shadow-fighting with trees and galloping suddenly along the edge of the feeding ground, then stopping with dust-raising sharpness, thrusting his horns this way and that. He now ceased any playing around with younger bulls, for he knew that more serious matters were at hand.