The Way West (16 page)

MILLIONS, Evans thought, a meemillion of buffalo, buffalo to right and left and ahead and behind, hairing the country, closing the train in, hoofing up dust that hung low like a fog. A man wouldn't live long enough to count them even if he could count that high. And he couldn't parcel out the uproar that they made. Bulls bellowed and cows bawled and calves cried for their mas, and the voices joined in what was one big, dolesome roll.
   Unless he looked to the Red Buttes, rising bare and naked over his left shoulder, or to the lonesome drying-up ponds with their crusting of salt, Evans could almost believe that the earth was alive, broken out of a sudden like a setting of eggs, but in humps and horns and shaggy hair.
   The buffalo didn't run from the train, not much, but lagged away, made mulish maybe by their numbers or sore for want of grass, and glared after the wagons, and then went hunting for graze again, for they had picked the ground clean as a chicken except for clumps of high-growing sage that gave off the smell of camphor, or turpentine, where they'd trampled it.
   Evans said, "I would've called you a liar, Dick, if you'd told me."
   Before he answered, Dick slued around in the saddle, his eyes fixed on the train that was jolting along a half mile behind. "Plenty meat, all right."
   "The grass is just pinfeathers."
   "Well," Dick said, while for a minute the light played in his eyes, "you wanted buffler."
   "Damnedest country! Don't do nothin' by halves. Either there ain't a buffalo or there's nothin' but buffalo."
   "An' wolves."
   And wolves. Wolves traveling in packs like he-dogs after a she, bringing up the tail of the bands of buffalo, their eyes yellow and their tongues wet while they watched for a stray calf or a cripple or one too old to keep up. Off to the right a bunch of them swarmed over a cow that had mired in a salt sinkhole, feeding on her while she still tried to pull free. A couple of buzzards slanted down and slid to the ground close by.
   Buffalo and wolves, Evans thought, and grasshoppers with no grass to hop on and rib bones and skulls lying around, picked clean as a clean platter, and, here and there where the rocks broke through, a rattlesnake looped, his tail aquiver.
   Evans never had thought to set his eyes on such a sight as this. It was a wild, strong sight, a rich and powerful sight that awed a man and lifted him inside -the plains climbing into ridges where, once in a long while, trees stood spare and tough, the sky curved across, so blue it pained the eye, far things brought close and sharp as through a glass, and buffalo on all the land and the roll of their bellowings in all the air.
   Again he felt greatness, smallness and greatness both among such wild riches. And, seeing the train winding behind him, he thought with pride of it, of the onwardness of its people, of their stubborn, unthought-out yondering. It wasn't a thing for reason, this yondering, but for the heart, where secrets lay deep and mixed. Money? Land? New chances? Patriotism? All together they weren't enough. In the beginning, that is, they weren't enough, but as a man went on it came to him how wide and wealthy was his country, and the pride he had talked about at first became so real he lost the words for it.
   It was good, he thought, that they'd laid by two days at Laramie and fixed wagons and traded teams and bought supplies, though the trading was one-sided and the food high as a scared cat's back. Flour at forty dollars a barrel, and not so damn superfine at that! Still, they were better off, even mangy Hank McBee, whom Mack had trusted for the price of coffee and sugar and flour and the boot it took to make a trade of teams. Evans liked Mack for being generous, but still he knew he was foolish. The money was as good as lost.
   The train was a top train now, victualed and repaired and leaned down for travel. Stoves lay along the line from Laramie, and anvils and grindstones and pieces of furniture, thrown out as the wagons climbed the thick-dusted ridges or circled gullies cut by heavy water. This, Dick had said as if not saying much, was the roughest part of the trail east of the great pass.
   The train was better ordered other ways, more regular about time and the round of work, more knowing about stock. Wiser, too. Like with rifles. The men carried them loaded still, but not capped or primed, not since Botter by accident had shot a hole in Hig's pants and plowed a furrow in him. Hig had taken it good-natured, telling the men he could spare something behind but not a bit in front. Afterwards Evans had asked that the caps be left off and the priming undone until the need came, and everybody said it was a good idea, seeing as accidents could happen.
   Even Indians didn't affright the people too much any more, or find them unprepared. Out from Laramie they'd met a bunch of ingoing Cheyennes, loaded with buffalo hides, and the company had rounded brisk into a fort while Dick went on to make palaver. A little tobacco and some beads and a red shirt and powder and ball had fixed things up, though afterwards the women got uneasy because squaws and their broods and some of the bucks kept peeking under the wagon covers, wanting to see and to finger the white plunder. Some of it they stole -a few knives and Davisworth's ax and an old rifle that belonged to Shields. Dick said any train would lose that much.
   Evans didn't take to himself much of the credit for the betterment, knowing the people would have learned no matter who was captain, but still he felt good about it, and pleased because the general spirit seemed so stout. Even Tadlock had got some of his brashness back, acting at the fort almost too much like his old self.
   Dick broke into Evans' thought, saying, "Fixin' to storm, west."
   Not till then had Evans paid any mind to the cloud that had risen low over the hills. "That the way storms come from here?"
   "Can't always tell. They used to say at Laramie that an east wind brought rain."
   In the silence that followed, Evans was aware again of the long bawling of the buffalo.
   "It ain't so far to good-enough water, if I remember right."
   "Meanin' we ought to camp early?"
   "I seen buffler thisaway clear to Laramie and to hell and gone beyond."
   "You don't like it, Dick?"
   "Puts me in mind of old times."
   "But you don't like it?"
   "One winter on the Powder the buffler was so thick we had to build fires to keep 'em off from camp. Lucky, I'm thinking, they didn't take it into their heads to run."
   "I get it. It's come to my mind, too, but mostly I been thinkin' about no grass and Indians bound to be about somewheres with the critters so many."
   "You never seen a buffler stampede, Lije."
   No, Evans thought, with the pinch of fear in him now that Dick had put words to what had been just a stray flutter. He never had seen a stampede, but with a storm making up and the levels and slopes dark with animals he could imagine it. He could feel himself waking at night to thunder in the ground. In his mind he could leap up, terror in him and the thought of Rebecca and Brownie and the rest, and lie helpless as in a bad dream while the thunder rolled up and he saw the first low-held heads and the pounding feet of it before it ran them over. "I don't like the notion of it."
   "But for the women and young'uns I wouldn't think anything of it," Dick said.
   "Wouldn't they shy off even from a train?"
   Dick waggled his head, not saying yes and not saying no, while he squinted to the west where the sun was maybe threequarters down from overhead.. He twisted half around again. "Cows look all right, and the horses."
   "Funny about them buffalo calves," Evans said, speaking what was second in his thoughts. "You wouldn't think they'd j'in up with us and foller tame cows."
   "Sometimes. Like I said, what you got to watch for is your own critters don't chase off with the buffler."
   "I got every man we can spare back there. Reckon I ought to be back myself, 'stead of scoutin' with you."
   "If we got salt enough, we could salt tonight to keep the cattle close."
   "Don't know as that would do it, they're so ganted up. Anyhow, looks like they'd get enough of this wild salt, the way it's patched around."
   "Pizens 'em. You know that."
   They didn't say more until they came to what the sun had left of a lake, each thinking the same thing, Evans supposed, while their eyes took in the herds and the west cloud swelling slow. The lake was just a skim of water, ringed wide around by the white crust, in which some old bones were half sunk. Dick got off his horse, anyhow, and crunched through the salt and dipped a finger in and tasted it and shook his head. "Pure pizen."
   "We'd best put out a flag then so's the train don't come too close," Evans said. "Them thirsty critters might make a break."
   They rode out from the water and tied a rag to a high clump of sage and watched to see that the lead teamster took notice. "I figured that lake was no good, but still maybe good enough in a pinch," Dick told Evans then. "Wasn't any wood for fires even so. Lake that won't grow anything but sage and greasewood, an' no willows or cotton trees, is always bad water."
   They rode for an hour longer, pushing buffalo out to the sides of the line of travel almost as a farmer might push his pastured stock. There was no end to them, just no by-God end to them, no end to cows and calves and fighting bulls and dust that gritted in the teeth and noise that tired the ear. Once Evans asked, "What's this place we're headed to?"
   Dick answered, "Hell, Lije, I do' know. The mountain men didn't put names to ought but beaver streams and the Tetons and a hole or two."
   Evans shut his mouth, deciding Dick didn't want to talk, and watched the cloud ahead. It was full and ugly, but it seemed to have held up, as if uncertain where to go. While he looked, a bolt of lightning tore it.
   Dick rose in his stirrups and pointed. "I'm thinkin' that's it."
   Through the dust, beyond a white sinkhole, over the backs of buffalo, Evans could make out a winding fringe of growth.
   Riding to it, he thought: a no-name place, seen now and soon to be camped by and soon after left behind, if they were lucky; a place like dozens of others -campsites and crossings and hills and hollows- all the way back to Independence. It was hard for him to put them in order, hard even to remember where they had camped night before last and the night before that. The spots were lost in a stream of days that stretched back to forever. They were scrambled in the miles, mixed on the long plain of the Platte, confused in the hills west of Laramie. Kaw, Big Blue, Little Blue, Platte, Ash Hollow, Courthouse Rock, Horse Creek, Laramie, Big Spring, Deer Creek, North Platte crossing -and what were the places in between? Scott's Bluffs, Brady's Island, the Wakarusa where, a lifetime ago, he already had the feeling he was getting far from home. The no-name points, the nameless miles along the river, the cut where an axletree broke, the campgrounds bare as a bone. He could dig them out of memory, one and then another, but what filled this back part of his mind was the day-after-day roll of wheels, the dust, the heat and wind and rain and mud and chill, and the Turleys turning back and Martin crying for grace. His life before seemed like another life. All he ever had done was poke a team or explore the trail or push cattle along. The only way he ever faced was west.
   And it was good. It was all fine and dandy, except that uneasiness lay on him now.
A few buffalo stood in the spring water or around it, stragglers from the bands that had come to drink and cool off and had cropped the banks down to the quick and now were moving off, on the hunt for grass. If bawling would find it, or pawing, they'd have full bellies before morning.
   Dick let go of his looped reins and looked to the cap on the nipple of his rifle. "Might as well drop a cow or two, while they're close." He rode slowly, giving Evans time to cap his own gun, then kicked his horse into a gallop.
   The buffalo stood quiet for a minute, dim-witted and waiting, and turned and broke into their clumsy run, the ones in the water wrenching out of it and getting away last. Dick broke his cow down not ten yards from the spring. Evans was slower, but his shot was good. The cow hunched up as if drawn together from the middle and tried to get lined out again and fell on her side kicking. They had hardly fallen before a couple of wolves showed up, winking hungry from over a little rise.
   Evans bled the cows, and he and Dick stepped back to have a look at the spring, trailing their horses after them. Dick set to work charging his rifle, watching the wolves meantime to see they didn't make bold with the meat. The herds of buffalo coming and going had churned the water and so fouled it that Evans said, "It ain't fit to drink, Dick."
   "It's wet."
   "Might as well drink from a cow."
   "It'll clear some. There's a fair amount of water runnin'."
   "I bet it'll grow hair on a man, if it don't kill him."
   "Shoo," Dick said, sliding his wiping stick in place, "I drunk out of wallows so thick they wouldn't pour."
   "I ain't sayin' you ain't right, but it pret' near makes me wish we'd took the left-hand road by the river."
   "Same thing there. With such a galore of buffler about you can't get away from mud and sand and buffler doin's. This here's sweet water. There's no pizen in a buffler, Lije."
   Dick studied the lay of the land, so's to know how to draw his circle, and as the train came up he mounted his horse and led the lead wagon around, ending up, as always, with a perfect ring.
   Evans had stepped back by the cows so the wolves wouldn't come to them. It would be a broody night, he thought, black and broody, sounding to wolf howls and buffalo bawls if to nothing more. The sun was sliding into the swollen edge of cloud, making a dark fire there.