Buffalo Girls (16 page)

Calamity sat at the table wearing her odd, distracted, lost look. No one Dora knew could look so lost—and Calamity was a big woman. When she looked that way it was a lot of lostness to cope with.

“Why should a Wild West show just have cowboys and Indians?” Bartle asked. “What would the west have been without saloons? Why not have a saloon in the show for the cowboys to whoop and holler in?”

“It would be too much trouble to haul a saloon to England,” Calamity said. “Billy says it will be trouble enough just getting the animals across the ocean.”

That was when No Ears learned that traveling to England meant crossing an ocean. It worried him slightly, for he knew that the hole in the sky where souls went was somewhere near an ocean.

Later, full of elk, the party dispersed. Calamity got drunk and fell asleep on the back porch in the warm sun. Bartle and Trix went upstairs. Teat helped Doosie clean up. Skeedle was engaged by a party of five surveyors—she was skilled at dealing with parties—and Dora went into the bar and played the piano for a while. An Italian musician who had been court-martialed out of the army for striking an officer had given her a few piano lessons years ago in Nebraska. She could play “Annie Laurie” and “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” and, when the mood struck her, she could provide a fair rendition of most of the popular ditties of the day.

Today she chose “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms.” Two of the surveyors, finished with their play in Skeedle's chambers, sat in the bar and wept. Soon Skeedle came down and listened, too. Dora was glad to see her; Skeedle was a woman of considerable poise. It was usually calming to have her near, especially if several morose surveyors were getting drunk and sobbing together as they sat listening to Dora play the piano. No doubt it reminded them of close times with their mothers and sisters. Everything except what occurred in the bedrooms seemed to remind them of close times with their mothers and sisters.

Watching the surveyors weep over a few bars of sentimental music had the effect of making Dora feel stony. She had had a
mother and sisters, too, but her close times with them had consisted of watching them die, one by one, on the Kansas plains, and then burying them. Her memories didn't make her weep; they just made her feel hard.

No Ears enjoyed listening to the music. When Dora struck a note particularly hard it seemed to him the note traveled directly into his head. Of course, in the saloon there was no wind—on the prairie the wind often snatched away sounds that might otherwise have made it into his head.

That night No Ears had the first of several dreams about the ocean. He knew he was in a dream when he saw the face of a friend of his called Sits On The Water, a Yankton Sioux he had hunted with frequently some thirty years before. Sits On The Water was fond of canoes; he also liked steamboats, flatboats, keel boats, and rafts. Anything that floated interested Sits On The Water, thus his name. Once he had killed a bear from a boat. The bear had happened to swim by, and Sits On The Water had killed it with a lance.

Sits On The Water had sometimes convinced No Ears to come into a boat with him, but No Ears had never liked sitting on the water and never enjoyed those boat rides. He didn't feel he could smell well while in a boat. Of course, near the shore, he could smell frogs, mud, mussels, rotting fish, muskrats, ducks, cranes, certain snakes, and other shore-hugging creatures; but in the middle of the great Missouri he could smell only whatever happened to be in the boat. He thought there might be a giant fish under the boat and it troubled him that he wouldn't be able to smell it if the fish grew angry and attacked. He imagined that the giant fish had the temperament of a hungry bear, and was consequently unable to enjoy boat rides after that.

His friend Sits On The Water had enjoyed one too many boat rides, finally. His canoe turned over one spring day right in the middle of the great Missouri when it was in flood. Sits On The Water had wanted to ride the flood, but the flood took him. His canoe was found many miles downstream, but his body was
never found. It was No Ears's view that the great bear-fish had swallowed Sits On The Water—in a way it served him right for spending too much time in boats.

Yet in No Ears's dream, Sits On The Water reappeared after an absence of many years and tried to persuade No Ears to come and ride in a boat on a river that was so wide No Ears could not see the far bank. No Ears was reluctant, but suddenly he was in the boat, and in it alone. Sits On The Water had vanished from the dream. No Ears was drifting in the boat and the river had become wider still—for now he could see neither shore. All he could see was a great plain of water as endless as the sky. The water and the sky became harder to tell apart, and finally impossible. Thinking he was breathing air. No Ears suddenly took a big breath of the river and began to drown. As he was breathing the river he saw a huge brown shape swimming toward him. He tried to swim away from the bear-fish, but though he wanted to swim fast, he seemed to swim more and more slowly.

When he woke up he spent the rest of the night thinking about his dream. It was the most ominous dream he had had for many years. The night before the Custer battle he had had a very bad dream also, but since then his dreams had been mostly good. He dismissed the bear-fish as being merely a spirit fish—if bear-fish had existed in the Missouri, some of the old people in his tribe would have known about it. Though they lived on the Platte, they often hunted on the Missouri and would have heard of such a dangerous fish.

The part of the dream he could not dismiss was the part about confusing the ocean and the sky; if the ocean was indeed as large as the sky, it seemed to No Ears that such a thing might happen, with very dangerous consequences for those who traveled on the ocean. They might begin to breathe the ocean, thinking it was the sky.

The next morning, when Calamity woke, he asked her how long it would be necessary to be on the ocean.

“Well, I hear it's a big ocean,” Calamity said. “I've never seen it myself.”

Bartle was sitting nearby, trying to sew up one of his moccasins. He had stepped on a knife someone had lost or discarded and had gashed the moccasin. As needlework was not his speciality, he was making a poor job of sewing it up.

“I have read somewhere that it's three thousand miles across the ocean,” he said. “It might be a little less, I guess.”

“How far does a boat go in a day?” No Ears inquired.

“You've seen steamboats,” Bartle said. “The Missouri's thick with them. Why don't you go clock one?”

“Why don't you ask Trix to sew up that moccasin, if you like her so much,” Calamity said. “Or else ask a squaw.”

“I'm afraid of squaws,” Bartle admitted.

“For what reason?” Calamity asked.

“For the same reason that I'm afraid of you,” Bartle said. “You're unreasonable, and so are the majority of squaws. They may kiss you, but if they don't they're just as likely to cut out your gizzard. I'd rather have a hole in my shoe than lose my gizzard.”

No Ears felt a little peevish. It was hard to get precise information from Calamity, or Bartle, or white people in general. Even those whose lives had been in danger many times were content to be vague about vital matters on which one's life could depend.

In fairness, he had to admit that many of his own people were also often vague about important facts, such as how far a gun would shoot or how quickly a man could drown if the banks of a river were too far away to swim to. It was because they failed to collect precise information about life-threatening matters that so many people, white and red, were no longer alive.

No Ears prided himself on finding out well in advance what he needed to know. It was because he was so diligent in gathering information that he was still alive. Almost all the people he had
known in his youth, Indian or white, had been less diligent, and were dead.

He was very curious about the ocean—if the ocean was anywhere near three thousand miles wide, then it was a force to be reckoned with, a force as powerful as the sky, or the moon, or the storm. He wanted to know more about the ocean so as to be prepared, but Miles City proved to be a poor place in which to acquire precise information. Not shy, No Ears went up and down the street asking anyone he met if he knew anything about the ocean, but for most of the day he drew a blank.

Potato Creek Johnny, who had wandered into town a day or two previously, exhausted, half-starved, and lacking in either gold or silver, made a typical response when No Ears asked him.

“No, I ain't seen an ocean and I ain't interested either,” Johnny replied. “If there was gold in one you'd have to drown to get it, and that's an unwelcome prospect.”

Johnny devoted what little energy he had left to attempts to talk Skeedle into doing him favors on credit.

“It would take a whole gold mine for you to catch up with what you owe me already,” Skeedle remarked. She liked Johnny well enough but was skeptical of his ability to locate gold. Besides, the survey team was still in town and her leisure was limited.

No Ears found out so little about the ocean that he was considering making a preliminary trip to it for purposes of inspection, when he happened to inquire of a blacksmith named Maggs. Mr. Maggs had grown up in Galveston and knew more about oceans than the rest of the population of Miles City put together. He had sailed the seven seas, and was on his way from San Francisco to the Great Lakes to run a steamer when his ambition deserted him. Since then he had lived in Miles City, being a blacksmith. He missed his old calling, though, and promptly told No Ears a great many things about the sea.

“I would allow three weeks to get to England,” Mr. Maggs said. “It's good swimming water, but you can't drink it.”

That startled No Ears, and his astonishment grew when the blacksmith informed him that all the oceans were salt. No Ears repeated this amazing news to several people, all of whom agreed with the blacksmith. The one thing the local humans seemed to know about the ocean was that the water was salt, and not drinkable.

This news caused No Ears so much concern that he began to regret having promised to go on the trip. First there was the danger of confusing the water with the sky; then there was the equally troubling danger of not being able to secure good drinking water.

A boat was only so big, and Cody seemed to be planning to take many animals. If the planning was not done well, it could mean a thirsty trip. It might be necessary to kill the animals for their blood—on badly planned trips in his youth, No Ears had had to drink the blood of animals to keep from dying of thirst. Though it had saved him, it had been unpleasant, a thing he would rather not do again. Seeing the Queen might be interesting, but if she was only a small queen seeing her might not make up for the hazards of the trip.

Another unfortunate fact he discovered about the trip was that Sitting Bull would be along. Sitting Bull was not a pleasant man. Once he had surprised No Ears when he was drunk and tried to blow smoke into his head through his open ear holes, a very rude thing to do. Also, Sitting Bull was crazy about women and had the advantage of fame; if there were any young women in England, Sitting Bull would soon marry them all.

But the irritation of having to put up with Sitting Bull was minor compared to his concerns about the dangers of the ocean—dangers everyone but himself seemed to be taking much too lightly.

One night he had an idea. Jim Ragg had returned in the night from his scouting trip in the Bull Mountains. As neither Bartle nor Calamity was up, he presented his ideas to Jim.

“I believe we should ride around the ocean,” he told Jim. “If
we start soon we should be able to ride around it in plenty of time. We could ride a train if you want to. They are much faster than boats.”

“You can't ride around the ocean,” Jim informed him. “It goes to the top of the world.” He was not quite certain of that information, but it seemed to him he had heard it.

“There's oceans in both directions,” he added. “The Pacific is on one side of the country, and the Atlantic is on the other. We're using the Atlantic—England's just on the other side of it, I believe.”

Jim realized that he did not know a great deal about oceans and did not much blame No Ears for looking dissatisfied with the sparse information he had given him. But getting the group to England was Bill Cody's job—it was
his
Wild West show.

No Ears walked off into the prairies and sat in the grass all day, thinking about the information he had just received. The knowledge that there were oceans to east and west was troubling news. In his experience great bodies of water had a tendency to run over and cause floods. The floods he had witnessed interrupted many lives, including the life of his friend Sits On The Water. Perhaps being on a big boat was not such a bad idea after all. It might be that there they would have the best chance of not having their lives interrupted.

That night No Ears dreamed of the ocean again, but this time it was a better dream because he remembered only to breathe the sky.