Tie My Bones to Her Back (7 page)

J
ENNY DROVE THE
spring wagon behind the mules, Zeke and a more recently acquired animal named Zebulon. Otto said the mules seemed no older now than when he’d bought them. “That’s mules. Probably looked ancient when they were foaled.”

Vixen, his chestnut mare, trotted along behind the spring wagon, hitched to the tailgate by a braided rawhide lead shank. She was Jenny’s horse now. Otto had a new mount he’d bought in Dodge that morning, a tall, lightly dappled gray named Edgar. He rode ahead, swinging in wide sweeps from one side of the trail to the other, scouting the landscape. Jenny noticed that he never skylighted himself for more than a few moments on the crests of the rolling prairie swells, merely peeking over the tops to see what lay beyond. He always took his hat off before peeking.

“They’re out there,” he told her. “And they’ll see us before we see them. Count on it.”

“They,” of course, were the Hostiles, a term Otto seemed to use for all Indians except Tom Shields. Sometimes he called them “Mister Lo” or “Poor Lo,” which puzzled Jenny until he told her it was a sarcastic play on the phrase “Lo, the poor Indian!”—often quoted by the Eastern newspapers in their naive laments over the treatment Indians received at the hands of Westerners. Mister Lo had been making trouble lately, he said, burning out a road ranch between Dodge and Fort Hays to the north, killing four workers on the A., T. & S.F. just west of Granada, Colorado, the railroad’s current “head of track,” and only a week ago waylaying, murdering, scalping, and mutilating a solitary buffalo runner who had been transporting a load of hides back to Dodge along the well-traveled road from Camp Supply in the Indian Territory.

Before they’d left Dodge City that morning, Otto gave Jenny a “parting gift,” smiling sardonically as he handed it to her. It was a .50-caliber brass cartridge case plugged at the open end with a piece of cork. Within it reposed a glass vial filled with a viscous blue fluid. He showed her the vial, then replugged the case.

“This is the best I can offer you by way of an insurance policy,” he said. “It’s hydrocyanic acid. If you’re about to be captured by Poor Lo and his brothers, one sip of this is a far more certain means of escape than that last cartridge’ the dime novels talk about. They never tell you what happens if the last cartridge is a dud. But this works every time, instantly. All you need do is ‘bite the big bite.’”

Now she understood his ironic smile.

In German, “
Gift
” means poison.

Tom Shields brought up the rear with the Murphy hide wagon, which had been parked at Otto’s camp until Captain McKay found buffalo. It was drawn by eight spans of oxen. Tom’s pony, a pretty pinto mare, trotted behind, unleashed but never straying. The wagon wheels were seven feet tall and nine inches wide, which made for easier rolling in the prairie’s loose sand. Its bed and treads were made of iron, like those of the trailer it towed behind. Both were painted blue, as were the oxbows and yokes of the huge steers that pulled it. Tom Shields had decorated the sides of the bed, Indian-fashion, with the tails of many dead buffalo, and painted the horns of the oxen red. Fully loaded, wagon and trailer could carry up to five hundred sun-cured “flint” hides—six tons of them.

Captain McKay had the third wagon, another light one similar to Jenny’s, which Otto said could carry an additional thirty or forty hides. Each of the smaller wagons could carry a ton of dried hides apiece. Jenny did the arithmetic in her head as they rumbled slowly along. Let’s make it 580 hides at an average of $2.50 per hide. . . . That’s $1,450 a load—a small fortune.

She looked back at the hide wagon, which followed about fifty yards behind. Tom Shields was a
Halbblut
, Otto had told her—a half-breed. He was older than Jenny, but not much—maybe twenty or twenty-two. Tom told her he didn’t know when he’d been born. His mother, a white captive, had died when he was not yet a year old. His father was a Cheyenne named Oh-kóhm, which meant either Coyote or Little Wolf, Tom wasn’t sure which, but anyway, they were the same animal. He, too, was now dead, Tom added, avoiding her eyes. Having been raised and then orphaned among the Sa-sis-e-tas, as the Cheyennes called themselves, he had now cast his lot with his mother’s people.

Tom was a strong, wiry, rather handsome fellow, Jenny thought. His raven-black hair was cut short in the white man’s style. He had the long, slightly bowed legs of an Indian who has spent most of his life on horseback. He wore white man’s clothes—a tan, wide-brimmed hat, a hip-length drover’s coat of rough brown wool, and faded denim trousers. Only his feet, shod in calf-high moccasins, remained Indian. He tucked his trouser legs into the moccasins as if to show off their elaborate beadwork. Yet his eyes were a white man’s eyes, startling green, and he spoke good English, but grudgingly, as if from a reluctance to waste words unless spoken to.

So far, the country they passed through was as bleak as Otto said it would be, no trees save a few dusty, discouraged cottonwoods, post oaks, and box elders along the rare watercourses, but the rest of it just grass, grass, and more grass, running off to the horizon in undulating waves. You could see the wind working its way from southwest to northeast, over the grassland, like wind over water. The wind never let up. She could feel her skin turning to leather under its constant push. It was a warm, dry wind right now, smelling of dust and distance. When it worked to the northwest, Otto said, it would smell of rock and snow from the faraway mountains.

The sky overhead was huge, far broader than in hilly Wisconsin. Its size made Jenny feel like a mouse being watched by an invisible hawk. Tall, shape-shifting clouds sailed across it, swift as the freight schooners she’d seen plying Lake Michigan from Green Bay to Milwaukee to Chicago. Once, she looked up to spot a buzzard circling high on tilted wings, far to the west. When she searched for it again, a minute or two later, it was almost directly overhead—blown downwind that fast without a flap of its pinions.

The prairie seemed empty of life. Only buffalo skeletons dwelt here, as yet uncollected by the bone pickers from Dodge. Once she saw a small flock of prairie chickens skitter across the trail ahead of them, and later, in the distance, so faint and far that at first she took it for a mirage, a band of pale-tan deerlike animals that must be antelope. But they turned immediately at the sight of the wagons and fled, their white rumps flashing as bright as heliographs. After them loped some animals that looked like gray dogs, but bigger and heavier, with huge heads and jaws. These must be the infamous buffalo wolves Otto talked about, the lobos. Fallen on hard times, now that the buffalo had been killed off hereabouts. It struck her that the wolves, nearly out of provender, were not unlike the nation itself, with the Panic raging. True Americans, these lobos.

Otto had said that the distance to Crooked Creek and their rendezvous with Captain McKay was only some thirty miles from Dodge City, half a day’s ride for a man on a swift pony. But it would take them longer. The oxen were slow. They could have made better time staying on the Camp Supply road, but Otto was fearful of Indian attack. Hostiles. She thought again of the poison he’d given her. She could never “bite the big bite,” as he put it. What would the Indians—Mister Lo—do with her if indeed she was cornered? She was young and not bad-looking. He wouldn’t tomahawk her or scalp her or torture her, he did that only to old women and men of fighting age. Didn’t he? The young, especially those of the feminine gland, Mister Lo took captive. He would rape her probably, but rape wasn’t fatal, and perhaps he’d then claim her for a bride. It happened, you read about it all the time. It had happened to Tom’s mother. What killed her, anyway? Probably pneumonia or smallpox or something even worse; the sanitation in their camps was said to be dreadful.

She reached into her blouse to withdraw the poison capsule from between her breasts, where, lacking a reticule, she’d placed it for safekeeping. In the sunlight she saw that the brass was tinged with verdigris. She threw the horrid package away into the prairie grass, not looking to see where it fell.

Whatever happened, she could never bring herself to use it. Jenny Dousmann would be no martyr to virginity.

T
HAT FIRST NIGHT
they stopped to make camp with an hour of daylight left. Otto led the wagons to a shallow coulee he knew not far off the trail. Here they would be out of the wind, with water close at hand. A seep spring flowed year round at the head of the coulee. After they had unhitched the horses, mules, and oxen, Tom and Otto rubbed them down with gunny sacks while Jenny filled two camp kettles with spring water. Then they led the animals to water. Tom gathered dried buffalo chips from the surrounding grass and started a small, nearly smokeless cookfire. There was no firewood to speak of, just saltbush, prickly pear, and a scrubby chokecherry or two growing along the seep as it ran down the coulee to disappear in the sand.

“Perhaps there is some good to this slaughter of the buffalo, after all,” Otto said. “If they were still here in their millions, our pleasant little spring would be a stinking bog filled with their dung, the grass trampled and cropped so short that our stock couldn’t feed.”

He laughed, slid his new Sharps from its leather case in the smaller wagon, and threw a loaded belt of cartridges over his shoulder.

“I saw some prongbucks a while ago,” he said. “Maybe I can kill one for supper, spare us eating bully beef.”

Jenny watched him out of sight, heading back the way they had come. Then she, too, went to the wagon and removed her Henry from where it lay wrapped in some sacking.

The Henry was a slim, beautiful, lever-action rifle with an oiled walnut stock and a steel-blue octagon barrel. On its brass receiver a previous owner had engraved a melodramatic etching of a frontiersman shooting two Hostiles. About a dozen more Indians lay dead in the background. One of them reached an arm skyward as if to touch it one last time. Poor Lo! On the other side was a scene of a mighty stag’s death leap at the sting of the fatal shot, its long-tined antlers laid back in graceful agony, with the same bold frontiersman standing off at a distance in the forest primeval, his rifle at his shoulder, dribbling gunsmoke.

In the wagonbed Jenny found the box of .44-caliber rimfire bullets for the Henry. She began pushing the flat-tipped rounds through the loading gate on the forward right-hand side of the receiver, as Otto had showed her. They made a snicking sound going in. Tom Shields looked up from where he was feeding buffalo chips to the fire, saw the rifle, and smiled widely—the first genuinely joyous smile Jenny had seen on his face so far. A white man’s smile.

“You got you a Yellow Boy,” he said.

“Yellow Boy?”

“Yah, that’s what we—ah, the Indians—call that make of rifle, for the brass frame, you know?”

It gleamed like gold in the low sunlight.

He got up and walked over to her, still smiling.

“My father had one, not as good as this, though. You had to fill your cartridges from the top end of the tube, not by sliding them into the receiver there. You had to tilt the barrel up to drop the bullets in, and that wasn’t good in a fight. Someone might see your hand in the air and shoot it off. But it was a fine rifle anyhow, you could shoot it nearly all day before you had to reload. My father got it up by . . .”

He stopped, suddenly shy again, and looked away. This was the longest speech Jenny had heard him utter since they’d met. He had a pleasant voice when he was happy about something, the harshness gone, and his eyes sparked pure green delight.

“Where did he get it?” she asked, not wanting him to stop talking.

“Well, up north there in the Big Horn country, near the Pineys and what we, uh, they call Crow Standing Creek.” He still couldn’t meet her eyes.

“In the Fetterman Fight, you know?” he explained.

She didn’t. She would ask Otto about it later. For the moment she just nodded and gave up trying to draw Tom Shields out further. He’d fallen back into his customary watchful silence.

“I’m going to hunt down this gulch a ways,” she said to his back as he went over to the fire. “Maybe I’ll see something to shoot for the pot.”

He turned to look at her. “Watch out for. . . stuff,” he said, his brow furrowing.

“What, snakes?” She laughed.

“Yah,” he said, his eyes popping wide, surprised but dead serious. “Snakes.” He made a sinuous move with his wrist at waist height, his hand extending slowly, fingers and thumb touched together to represent a snake’s head. She would later learn that this gesture was Plains Indian sign language for the Snake tribe, traditional enemies of the Cheyenne. Right now, though, it was just another indication of Tom’s odd behavior.

S
HE WALKED DOWN
the coulee in the rapidly fading twilight, past the horses and mules grazing knee-deep in bluestem on their picket lines, past the oxen lying farther on, boxlike, chewing their cuds. The oxen were free to roam, but they wouldn’t wander far. The herd’s leader, a phlegmatic old bullock, would not let them, Otto had said. She stopped near the oxen to pull the forward hem of her ankle-length skirt up between her legs and tuck it into the back of her belt, converting her skirt into a baggy culotte for easier going.

She began to hunt as Otto had taught her in the Wisconsin woods, walking a few quiet steps, then pausing for an equal length of time to scan the country around her. Carefully, slowly, watching for the least flicker of an ear or tail, the subtlest hint of an animal silhouette hidden in the maze of grass. Slowly, slowly . . .

As she eased her way around the gentle slope of a rise, something sprang away from her, startlingly swift, right from under her feet.

A jackrabbit.

She had the rifle to her shoulder in a flash, following the bouncing hare along the gun barrel, and hit the trigger.

Nothing happened.

She’d forgotten to cock the hammer.

She did so now, feeling her cheeks burn with shame. Then she reconsidered: if she tripped and fell, the rifle at full cock might go off, scaring away all the game in the country. She eased the hammer back down to half-cock, holding it with her thumb as her forefinger released the trigger. She would remember to cock it next time. Some Diana she was proving to be. Thank God, no one was watching. She pressed on, her knee-length boots—the ones she’d worn to muck out the barn at home—admirably silent in the dry prairie grass.