Tie My Bones to Her Back (4 page)

It was late autumn then, with inklings of sleet on the wind. Otto headed southwest from Fort Kearney after Vixen’s hoof had healed. He wanted to find good game country quickly so he could lay in a supply of meat for the winter and build a dugout within which to weather it. He found his country in the rolling grasslands along the Smoky Hill River in western Kansas, after a long and difficult journey across the Republican, Solomon, and Saline Rivers. It was just what he was looking for—a country black with buffalo.

The herds were still moving slowly south for the winter, but once they were gone he would have abundant blacktail deer, elk, and pronghorn antelope to hunt along the river bottom and in the brushy draws of the hills rolling up behind it. There were plenty of wild turkeys, partridge, and prairie chickens, while out on the grasslands flocked sicklebills, doughbirds, and upland plover. Otto wished he had brought a shotgun for the smaller game birds. The big Sharps would tear them up too badly if he shot them on the ground, and he much preferred wing shooting anyway.

He excavated a dugout on a south-facing slope well above the Smoky Hill’s high-water mark, roofing it over with a weave of hardhack poles, themselves covered with a layer of dirt and sod a foot and a half thick. He chopped wide, deep ditches around the soddy that would bleed rain and snowmelt downhill to the river. He had learned to do that in the Iron Brigade. Nothing was more uncomfortable than a wet camp in winter.

On the dugout’s back wall he built a hearth and chimney of stones carried up from the river, chinking them with clay from its bank. The clay hardened quickly to the heat of a fire. He extended his crude flue a couple of feet above the sod, then added two feet more of stone when he pondered the winter snows to come. Beside the fireplace he constructed a bunk of roughly squared timber. With a buffalo robe as a mattress, a flour sack stuffed with the curly black hair from the topknot, beard, and mane of a stub-horn bull as a pillow, his Army blankets and perhaps another brain-tanned robe to cover him, and the fireplace at his back, he knew he could survive the worst that a prairie winter might offer.

A rough-hewn table and stool completed his furnishings.

Downriver one day, hunting buffalo, he found an outcropping of sandstone. On his next visit to what he called the Quarry, Otto brought his pick and set to work “making little ones out of big ones,” as they said in the Army. He built a travois of popple poles, stretched a green buffalo hide over it, loaded it with flat slabs, and that evening laid a reasonably smooth floor within his dugout, complete with a sandstone “stoop” at the doorway so that he would not drag mud into the soddy with him every time it rained or snowed.

Ach ja, bin echt Deutsch,
he told himself with a wry grin. A true German . . . Everything clean and in order.

A buffalo hide served for his door. Hollowed stones from the river, filled with elk or buffalo tallow, were his lamps, cotton cords his candlewicks. A nearby blackjack oak stood him as a drying rack, and on it at all times hung strips of buffalo, elk, or deer meat, drying in the wind and sun, along with heavy, tapered cuts of buffalo “hump,” which, though delicious enough fresh, underwent an ambrosial metamorphosis when subjected to a few days of cool windy weather. Each piece was as long and thick as a grown man’s leg. As it crusted over, the fat-marbled meat aged evenly and sweetly. Otto could believe the tales he’d heard of mountain men devouring ten pounds of lightly charred hump at a single sitting, then loosening their belts and crying for more. Later he’d grown tired of it—too much of a good thing—like those indentured servants in New England he’d heard about who rebelled at being fed salmon at every meal and demanded that it be served no more than three times a week.

A small stable dug partway into the hillside just beside the soddy provided shelter from wind and weather for Vixen and Zeke, with a corral of popple saplings surrounding it. He did not peel the saplings. His animals would see to that, munching on the sweet bark as a person would nibble an apple. In the Niobrara country he had fed his horses through the grimmest part of the winter on shavings of popple bark. Otto could not allow Zeke and Vixen to graze tethered to picket pins or in hobbles at night for fear of the big gray lobo wolves that followed the buffalo herds. Their howling at first spooked the animals, setting them to rearing against their halters and whinnying in terror, Vixen more so than the old veteran Zeke. After Otto had shot a few of the wolves and left their hides nearby, moving them closer and closer to the corral over the course of the next few days, both horse and mule lost their native fear of wolf scent. Anyway, most of the wolves would soon be gone south with the shaggies.

He remembered how he had missed them when they were gone. Their singing had lulled him to sleep during those first nights alone on the Smoky Hill River, while he was still adjusting to the solitude. He had never been alone this long. At home there’d always been Mutti and Vati, then Jenny growing up. In the Army there were his tentmates, messmates, marching comrades. On the hunting trips up north, he had brought Jenny—mainly for her company, he realized, though it had been enjoyable teaching her how to shoot, how to skin and butcher and cook what they had killed together. Now he had only himself for company, and until he realized what was bothering him, the loneliness had been hard to bear.

Vixen and Zeke were some comfort, but it was the wolves that really saved him. Their voices, combed by wind and grasses as they echoed through the empty hills, sounded to him like some alien choir—remote and ancient, untranslatable, like the Gregorian chants he’d heard one Sunday morning in Fredericksburg while walking past a church where the Catholics were burying their dead.

Late one night, awakened by wolf howls and the panic of his beasts, he had taken his rifle and gone into the hills determined to find them. He stalked quietly into the wind toward their chorus. The moon was just rising, and by its cold light he saw them outlined in silver on the crest of a ridge. Half a dozen at least, maybe more in the shadows. He lay on his belly for a long while, watching them circle, sit, scuffle with one another, raise their muzzles to the moon and sing their baleful song. Then he elevated the sights to 350 yards and proceeded to kill them. He dropped three before the rest ran away. When he went up to skin them, he found that the largest wolf was still alive—a scarred and grizzled male, taken through the shoulders, who stared up at Otto with slanting yellow eyes. Otto stepped back quickly. The wolf’s gaze was like a match to his heart. The wolf was unafraid. Otto cocked the hammer of the Sharps and finished him.

After taking their hides, Otto dragged the skinned carcasses down the riverbank. By the next morning, nothing remained of them but splintered bones. The rest had disappeared into the bellies of their kinfolk. That helped somewhat to ease his sense of guilt.

There were catamounts in the hills along the river, too. Otto saw their signs on the mudbars and heard their occasional screams at night, loud and shrill as a woman in terror. But the big cats never ventured near his camp. He wished he had a few dogs to run the panthers with, and for companionship through the long nights. Panther meat was good, light as veal. He’d eaten it that winter on the Niobrara.

Each morning he rode out to hunt and to explore the country. He wrapped burlap sacks around his calves for leggings, securing them with wraps of rawhide. The bottomland was thick with ripgut cordgrass and sunflowers, ten feet high, wind-dried now as winter came on. It was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead, even on horseback. The rattle of the sunflowers in the constant wind and the sudden spatter of their falling seeds unnerved him at first, as did the unexpected flush of migrant birds feeding in the brakes—warblers and goldfinches, sparrows, blackbirds, and jays. War nerves, Otto thought. With me forever, I guess. How silly, expecting any movement to explode into screaming Secesh . . .

In places, though, the buffalo and elk had beaten a labyrinth of trails through the sunflowers. He and Vixen rode the trails slowly, always hunting into the wind. Sometimes they came face-to-face with buffalo at a bend in the trail. Most of them fled instantly, spinning on their spindly legs and crashing away with the speed of cavalry ponies. But Vixen was quick off the mark and in a few jumps was alongside, allowing him a heart-lung shot behind the shaggy’s shoulder. He learned how to drop them when he was on foot, too, as they were going away. The surest shot was low down in the flank, so that the bullet raked forward through the paunch, striking the heart. Almost as good but not as certain was a ball placed behind the huge, bucketing head, in line with the base of its horns, which would pierce the brain for an instant kill. A ton of buffalo made quite a thud.

Twice he had killed charging bulls at close range with shots to the forehead. He suspected that the buffalo’s small brain sat very high in its head and split open a skull to confirm his guess. He was correct.

Vixen proved staunch. She never flinched when he shot, always stood her ground, rock steady. She was a good pony, he’d known it from the start.

The simple routines of his life pleased him profoundly. Returning from the hunt, he would clean his rifle: pour scalding water through the barrel first, swab out lands and grooves with a wiping stick, using a swatch of buffalo hair for his patch, then scrub the gummy black-powder residue of the day’s shooting off the dropping breechblock, before reassembling the Sharps and brushing it with a fine, clear oil he had extracted by boiling down the plucked carcass of an eagle. Next he pegged out the day’s hides, stretching them taut, flesh side up, to dry in the wind and sun. In four days they were hard as flint. Then he turned them hair side to the sky and sprinkled the wool with a dilute mixture of water and arsenic. This discouraged the big gray moths that laid their eggs in the hides.

After supper—usually hump steaks, flour gravy, beans, bannock bread, and coffee—he reloaded cartridges. It was a soothing ritual, rather like prayer in its rote repetition. He removed the expended primer, inserted a fresh one, filled each brass case nearly to the top with gunpowder, slammed the butt end of the cartridge on the tabletop to settle the powder grains, thumbed in a cardboard wad, added a pinch of powder on top of that, wrapped a small, carefully cut trapezoid of high-bond notepaper around the bullet and seated it. Paper-wrapped bullets kept the lands and grooves of the rifle barrel from fouling with lead, and the high-grade paper burned completely when the shell was fired. No tiny, smoldering surprises waiting to go off with a bang if a leaking cartridge entered the breech.

These chores completed, Otto usually ate a few slices of dried fruit for roughage and took another cup of coffee as a nightcap. Regularity in the field was important. A costive comrade in the 2nd Wisconsin, Phineas Babcock, had learned that to his momentary but eternal regret: squatting overlong to relieve himself one lovely fall day in the cornrows off the Sharpsburg Turnpike, he had been shot dead by a Confederate rifleman.

Otto’s last task before rolling into his blankets of an evening was to apply a fresh coat of buffalo tallow to his boots, then set them near the fire so the grease would soak into the leather overnight. He slept too soundly for war dreams to awaken him.

All told, it was a good life up there on the Smoky Hill River. He saw no reason why it couldn’t last forever. The buffalo were infinite in number, and it was from the buffalo that all else followed—ease and abundance for every living creature on the Buffalo Range, from the lobo wolf and the Indian to the coyote, the eagle and the raven, even down to such creatures as the lineback louse, buffalo gnat, and the myriad fleas that thrived, like the others, on the blood of their shaggy host. Songbirds built their nests of buffalo wool, as he’d seen on the Niobrara. Harvest mice and kangaroo rats lined their nurseries with it. The buffalo wallows, scrubbed out when the huge beasts rolled in the dust of prairie-dog towns to scratch their humped backs, later filled with water and thus afforded drink to antelope, elk, blacktail, lobo, coyote, badger, swift fox, and even the drymouthed two-legged pilgrim. The flooded wallows served as convenient way stops for the ducks and geese and cranes and herons that twice a year traversed the skies of the Great West. Buffalo birds—magpies, merles, redwings, and cowbirds—snapped up insects kicked out of the grass by the hooves of the migrating herds, picked lice and flies off the buffalo’s back in summer, and warmed their toes in its wool in freezing weather. Otto had seen a dozen cowbirds perched in a row on a single bull’s back, as on the ridgepole of a slowly ambulating barn. It was the buffalo in its millions that kept the prairie fertile and growing, by cropping the curly buffalo grass back to its roots and enriching the soil with dung. Otto was farmer enough to see that. The only thing that could threaten the ageless rhythms of the Buffalo Range was civilization. But these badlands were too poor, too dry for farming, as many homesteaders had learned to their sorrow. And high plains winters were too severe to support cattle without costly supplementary feeding. What’s more, the Great West—thank God—was too remote from the cities of the East to ever attract industry. At least in the opinion of Eastern editorial writers.

_____

T
HE DOOR BANGED
open behind Otto, and the conductor stepped onto the rear platform of the train, a portly, prunefaced man.

“Did I get your ticket?”

Otto showed him the punched stub. Took another drag on his cheroot.

“Kind of chilly back here, ain’t it?” the conductor said, reluctant to return to his duties.

“I’m used to it.”

The conductor studied Otto’s face and attire. “You one of them Westerners, hey?”

“Of late,” Otto said.

“Too bleak a country for me,” the conductor said. He pulled a big silver watch from his vest pocket and consulted it with an air of self-importance. “Well, you’ll be back in it right quick now. We’re almost to the river.”

Otto stared at him, silent, and then turned his back on the man. A moment later he heard the door slam shut. Too many people back East, he thought, and all of them want to make conversation. Yet he had to admit that there were times on the Smoky Hill when he’d found himself longing for the sound of a human voice.