Butcher's Crossing (24 page)

“You got a rifle, Charley?” Andrews asked.

Charley Hoge turned nervously. He nodded and drew a small rifle from beneath the clip seat. “It’s just your little varmint rifle,” he said as he handed it to him, “but it’ll turn them.”

Andrews took the rifle and rode toward the side of the mountain. He pointed his horse in the direction that the buffalo would come from, and waited. He looked across the valley; Miller had stationed himself in the center, and he leaned forward on his horse toward the herds that none of them could see. Beyond Miller, small in the distance, Schneider slouched on his horse as if he were asleep. Andrews turned again to the south and listened for the pounding of hooves which would mark the run of a herd.

He heard nothing save the soft whistling of the wind around his ears, which were beginning to tingle from the coolness. The southern reaches of the valley were softening in a faint mist that was coming down from the mountains; the small cloud that had earlier hovered quietly above the southern peaks now extended over the boxed end of the valley; the underside of the cloud was a dirty gray, above which the sunlit white vapor twisted and coiled upon itself before a thrusting wind that was not felt on the ground here in the valley.

A heavy rumble shook the earth; Andrews’s horse started backward, its ears flattened about the sides of its head. For an instant Andrews searched the upper air about the southern mountains, thinking that he had heard the sound of thunder; but the rumbling persisted beneath him. Directly in front of him, in the distance, a faint cloud of dust arose, and blew away as soon as it had arisen. Then suddenly, out of the shadow, onto that part of the valley still flooded in sunlight, the buffalo emerged. They ran with incredible swiftness, not in a straight line toward him, but in swift swerves and turns, as if they evaded invisible obstacles suddenly thrust before them; and they swerved and turned as if the entire herd of thirty or forty buffalo were one animal with one mind, a single will—no animal straggled or turned in a direction that was counter to the movement of the others.

For several moments Andrews sat motionless and stiff on his horse; he had an impulse to turn, to flee the oncoming herd. He could not believe that a few shots from the small varmint rifle that he cradled in his right arm could be heard or even felt by a force that came onward with such speed and strength and will; he could not believe they could be turned. He twisted in the saddle, moving his neck stiffly so that he could see Miller. Miller sat still, watching him; after a moment Miller shouted something that was drowned in the deepening rumble of the buffalo’s stampede, and pointed toward them, motioning with his hand and arm as if he were throwing stones at them.

Andrews dug his heels into his horse’s sides; the horse went forward a few steps and then halted, drawing back on its haunches. In a kind of desperation and fear, Andrews dug his heels again into the heaving sides of his mount, and beat with his rifle butt upon the quivering haunches. The horse leaped forward, almost upsetting him; it galloped for a moment wildly, throwing its head against the bit that Andrews held too tightly; then, soothed by its own motion, it steadied and ran easily forward toward the herd. The wind slapped into Andrews’s face and swept tears from his eyes. For an instant he could not see where he was going.

Then his vision cleared. The buffalo were less than three hundred yards away from him, swerving and turning erratically, but heading toward him. He pulled his horse to a halt and flung his rifle to his shoulder; the stock was cold against his cheek. He fired once into the midst of the rushing herd; he barely heard the rifle shot above the thunder of hooves. He fired again. A buffalo stumbled and fell, but the others came around it, flowed over it like tumbling water. He fired again, and again. Suddenly, the herd swerved to his left, cutting across the valley toward Miller. Andrews heeled his horse and ran alongside the fleeing herd, firing into its rushing mass. Gradually the herd turned, until it was running with unabated speed back in the direction from which it had come.

Andrews pulled his horse to a stop; panting, he looked after the running herd and listened to the diminishing roar of pounding hooves. Then, upon that sound, faintly, came another similar to it. He looked across the valley. Another herd, slightly smaller than the first, sped across the flat land toward Schneider. He watched as Schneider fired into it, followed it as it swerved, and turned it back.

In all, the three of them turned back six rushes of the buffalo. When at last no sound of running hooves broke the silence, and after they had waited for many minutes in anticipation of another rush, Miller beckoned them to ride toward him in the center of the valley.

Andrews and Schneider rode up to Miller quietly, letting their horses walk so that they could hear a warning if the buffalo decided to charge again. Miller was looking across the valley, squinting at where the buffalo had run.

“We got them,” Miller said. “They won’t try to break out again like that.”

A tremor of elation that he could not understand went through Andrews. “I never thought anything like that was possible,” he said to Miller. “It was almost as if they were doing it together, as if they’d planned it.” It seemed to him that he had not really thought of the buffalo before. He had skinned them by the hundreds, he had killed a few; he had eaten of their flesh, he had smelled their stench, he had been immersed in their blood; but he had not thought of them before as he was thinking of them now. “Do they do things like that very often?”

Miller shook his head. “You might as well not try to figure them out; you can’t tell what they might do. I’ve been hunting them for twenty years and I don’t know. I’ve seen them run clean over a bluff, and pile up a hundred deep in a canyon—thousands of them, for no reason at all that a man could see. I’ve seen them spooked by a crow, and I’ve seen men walk right in the middle of a herd without them moving an inch. You think about what they’re going to do, and you get yourself in trouble; all a man can do is not think about them, just plow into them, kill them when he can, and not try to figure anything out.” As he spoke, Miller did not look at Andrews; his eyes were on the valley, which was still now, and empty, save for the trampled bodies of the buffalo they had killed. He took a deep breath and turned to Schneider. “Well, Fred, we got us some cool weather anyhow. It won’t be so bad working, now.”

“Wait a minute,” Schneider said. His eyes were fixed on nothing; he held his head as if he were listening.

“You hear them again?” Miller asked.

Schneider motioned with his hand for quiet; he sat in his saddle for a few minutes more, still listening; he sniffed twice at the air.

“What is it?” Miller asked.

Schneider turned to him slowly. “Let’s get out of here.” His voice was quiet.

Miller frowned, and blinked. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Schneider said. “But something is. Something don’t feel right to me.”

Miller snorted. “You’re spooked easier than a buffalo. Come on. We got half a day in front of us. They’ll quiet down in a while and I can get a good number before it’s dark.”

“Listen,” Schneider said.

The three men sat in their saddles, quiet, listening for something they did not know. The wind had died, but a slight chill remained in the air. They heard only silence; no breeze rustled through the pines, no bird called. One of their horses snorted; someone moved in the saddle, and there came the thin sound of leather creaking. To break the silence, Miller slapped his leg; he turned to Schneider and said loudly:

“What the hell—”

But he did not continue. He was silenced by Schneider’s outstretched arm and hand and finger, which seemed to point at nothing. Puzzled, Andrews looked from one of them to another; and then his gaze halted in the air between them. Out of the air, large and soft and slow, like a falling feather, drifted a single snowflake. As he watched, he saw another, and another.

A grin broke out on his face, and a nervous bubble of laughter came up in his throat.

“Why, it’s snowing,” he said, laughing, looking again from one of them to the other. “Did you ever think this morning that—”

His voice died in his throat. Neither Miller nor Schneider looked at him, and neither gave any sign that they knew he had spoken. Their faces were tense and strained at the thickening sky from which the snow was falling more and more rapidly. Andrews looked quickly at Charley Hoge, who was sitting motionless some yards from the others on his high wagon seat. Charley Hoge’s face was raised upward, and his arms were clasped together over his chest; his eyes rolled wildly, but he did not move his head or unclasp his arms.

“Let’s go,” Miller said quietly, still looking at the sky. “We might just make it before it gets too bad.”

He pulled his horse around and rode a few steps up to Charley Hoge. He leaned from the saddle and shook Charley Hoge roughly by the shoulder.

“Let’s haul, Charley.”

For a moment, Charley Hoge did not seem to know Miller’s presence; and when he turned to face him, he did not appear to recognize the large black-bearded face, which was beginning to glisten from the melting snowflakes. Then his eyes focused, and he spoke in a trembling voice:

“You said it would be all right.” His voice gained strength, became accusing: “You said we’d make it out before the snows came.”

“It’s all right, Charley,” Miller said. “We got plenty of time.”

Charley Hoge’s voice rose: “I said I didn’t want to come. I told you—”

“Charley!” Miller’s voice cracked. And then he said more softly: “We’re just wasting time. Get your team headed back to camp.”

Charley Hoge looked at Miller, his mouth working, but moving upon words that did not become sound. Then he reached behind him and took from its clip the long bull-whip, the braided leather of which trailed from the heavy butt. He whistled it over the ears of the lead team, in his fright letting the tip come too low, and drawing blood from the ear of the right lead ox. The ox threw his head around wildly and jumped forward, pulling the surprised weight of the other animals; for a moment the team floundered, each member pulling in a different direction. Then they settled together and pulled steadily. Charley Hoge cracked his whip again and the team broke into a lumbering run; he made no effort to guide the animals among the corpses of the buffalo. The wagon wheels, passing over the bodies, pitched the wagon wildly about. Stiff hides slithered off and fell to the ground; no one paused to retrieve them.

The three men on horseback rode close to the wagon; they had to pull back on their reins to keep the animals from bolting and running ahead. Within a few minutes the air was white with snow; dimly, on either side, they could see the veiled green of the mountainside; but they could not see ahead to their camp. The shadowy pine trees on either side of them guided their movement upon the flat bed of the valley. Andrews squinted ahead toward their camp, but all he could see was snow, the flakes circling and slowly falling, one against another and another and another; in his riding, they came at him, and if he looked at them, his head whirled as they did and he became dizzy. He fixed his eyes upon the moving wagon and saw the snow unfocused, a general haze that surrounded him and isolated him from the others, though he could see them dimly as they rode. His bare hands, holding the reins and clutching his saddle horn as his horse trotted and loped unevenly among the corpses of the buffalo, reddened in the cold; he tried to thrust one of them in a pocket of his trousers, but the rough stiff cloth was so painful that he removed his hand and kept it in the open.

After the first few minutes the ground was covered white with snow; the wagon wheels, cutting easily through it, left thin parallel ribbons of darkness behind them. Andrews glanced back; within seconds after the wheels cut the snow, the shallow ruts began to fill and only a few feet behind them were whitened so that he could not tell where they had been; despite their movement and the pitching of the wagon, he had the feeling that they were going nowhere, that they were caught on a vast treadmill that heaved them up but did not carry them forward.

The breeze that had died when the first snowflakes began to fall came up again; it swirled the snow about them, whipping it into their faces, causing them to squint their eyes against its force. Andrews’s jaws began to ache; he realized that for some moments he had been clenching his teeth together with all the strength he had; his lips, drawn back over his teeth in an aimless snarl, smarted and pained him as the cold pushed against the tiny cracks and rawness there. He relaxed his jaws and dropped his head, hunching his shoulders against the cold which drove through the thin clothing upon his flesh. He looped the reins about his saddle horn and grasped it with both hands, letting his horse find its own way.

The wind grew stronger and the snow came in thick flurries. For an instant Andrews lost sight of the wagon and of the other men; a numb, vague panic made him lift his head; somewhere to his left he heard, above the whistle of the wind, the creak and thump of the wagon wheels. He pulled his horse in the direction of the sound, and after a moment saw the heavy shape of the wagon careening over the littered ground and dimly saw the hunched figure of Charley Hoge swaying on the high clip seat, lashing the thick air with his bull-whip; softly, muffled by the snow and drowned by the wind, its wet crack sounded.

And still the wind increased. It howled over the mountains and blew the snow into stinging pellets; in great sheets, it lifted the snow off the ground and spread it again; it thrust the fine white freezing powder into the crevices of their clothing where it melted from their bodies’ warmth; and it hardened the moisture so that their clothing hung heavy and stiff upon them and gathered the cold to their flesh. Andrews clutched his saddle horn more firmly; there was no sensation in his hands. He removed one hand stiffly from the horn and flexed it, and beat it against the side of his leg until it began to throb painfully; then he did the same with the other hand. By then the first had grown numb again. A small pile of snow gathered in his saddle in the sharp V formed by his legs.