The Marcher Lord (Over Guard) (18 page)

The herd’s motions were always incomprehensible, especially from their extremely limited vantage. Ian
saw that the core of the herd was thickest and most bent on moving, being responsible for the main migration line. That left the rest of the herd, which constituted the incomprehensible part. A couple hundred ongoing dramas were what he decided it amounted to. That all of the long buffalo had the distinctive horn patterns, all joined together into one solid mounting of bone on each individual, made it trickier to try and sort out the males from the females. But the more he studied them, the more obvious the younger, kinetic bulls were from the older females and most especially the enormous mature bulls. Fortunately, the herd’s pace was slowing somewhat, and it seemed as though it would be a perpetual sort of slingshot as the core herd was always having to drag along the rest.

The situation was favorable, and they were inching closer to the outer bits of the
herd. Even as the next few minutes of crouched moving passed, the very rear stragglers grew nearer, and then one, and then another were alongside Ian and then between him and the other two rangers. This definitely didn’t put Ian at ease, but after a few moments of inspection, he concluded that they were just a pair of old females having trouble keeping up. He veered off even farther away from them, thinking that they wouldn’t hear him, or much of anything else with how loud they were panting. Hopefully, their peripheral vision wasn’t all that astute either.

A sudden clap up ahead startled
Ian, and he held still, the metal of his rifle sweaty against his hands as another flurry of sounds and disturbances followed. Pursing his lips, Ian raised himself a bit, then quickly came back down. He tried again for a little longer, enough to see a massive bull, pitch black with maturity and rippling with long-held success, come charging out from deeper inside the herd, and in the process banging against another couple of buffalo and producing that slapping sound of tough, taunt hide against hide. Ian didn’t immediately see the source of this outburst until the bull swung itself around again, creating a clearing around itself as the other buffalos gave him ample berth and hurried past.

“That’s him,” Ian whispered as he lunged forward, sacrificing some of his
cover for speed. He knew that was the bull the lord would be pursuing, more because that was the one Ian would shoot for than anything else.

The
other offending buffalo turned out to be large as well, but relatively naïve looking next to the older bull. Not that it was next to it. It was moving back and forth some ways off, its head never daring to turn from the older bull as it was jostled by the other exiting buffalos. As Ian watched, slowing a bit as he neared where Lord Wester and Will were slowly creeping toward it, the younger bull hesitantly lowered its head. As if not quite able to take that seriously, the older bull shook its head up in the air and lifted its front feet off the ground, letting them slam down into the dirt once, twice, three—

Ian could feel the faint writhing of the ground in his knees as he finished priming on the cartridge he had loaded. Readying another and one more in his pockets, he followed his captain’s advice and opened up his
Allen’s focusing bay wide open. It would severely limit his range and also his accuracy somewhat, but he’d need the power if he ever wanted to punch anything larger than a pinhole through that kind of hide or—

I
t began so fast he nearly missed it. The dominant bull stopped his expressions of disapproval and lowered his head to the ground for the briefest moment like the other bull still patiently was. Then there was motion, mostly from the older bull, so much so that Ian winced as he also rose and sprinted forward.

The collision occurred, tremendous dealings of mass and energy, the older bull nearly coming up over the younger one, and then
came a desperate moment of wrangling, the older bull wrenching the other off to the side, pushing it away—

And then it was over.

But no, Ian thought as he reached a good position and dropped to one knee, his rifle tracking along the line of buffalos that would have seen him already if they weren’t still reacting to the confrontation, because the next one was already underway.

Out of the corner of his eye
, he saw Lord Wester rising and well into the midst of aiming. An angry jump-click came at Ian’s wrist to stay down—or something to that affect, it wasn’t one he’d memorized—no doubt very angrily from Captain Marsden.

Then as
Ian was busy aiming, a rousing crack echoed out over the plain from them, chasing after the sharp line of energy that stabbed at the largest bull.

Circumstances as they were, it was a brilliant shot mildly confounded by the animal jerking at the last moment
. The animal’s movement turned what would have been a classic field guide shot, right through the ribs that were just behind the front shoulders, into one that clipped the back of the bull’s shoulder bones. Ian got something of a good glimpse of the effect, and had to firmly affirm the margrave’s rifle as one of the most powerful he’d ever seen. Still, while the external view was impressive, it was obvious that the massive bone structure of the buffalo had considerably blunted the damage.

Ian shouted something nondescript without planning to as he kept moving closer, keeping his rifle on the bull but watching as the herd reacted. There was suddenly a lot more noise, but
even at that he heard the margrave snap his spent cartridge out from the receiver and as he reached for the next. Risking a moment, Ian glanced to his yeoman and checked the others’ positions. He grimaced, changing his aim as a chorus of bulls pinpointed where they were and made threatening calls at them. But he had to wait, just a little longer—

The wounded bull had fallen to the ground, but somehow, incredibly, pulled itself to
its feet, bellowing in pain and wrenching its head about.

“Come on, come
on,” Ian whispered, turning his rifle back to it, sighting down the barrel of what now seemed to be his rather timid-looking Allen, “I would trade a lot for a Brown Bess right about—”

The bull, evidently catching sight of them,
bellowed again with a more focused purpose, and put its head down as it turned and began to lop at them the best it could.

“Please, God,” Ian said as he rose to his feet and instinctively angled to his right, before sense dictated he stop for the better shot.
The bull gained speed toward the margrave, most of its head an impenetrable wall of horn that—

A
strategic crack and wrench of light shot out from the margrave that arched low and directly into the bull’s path, and the next moment it was finally collapsing to the dirt some short distance away.

Ian turned, fortunately enough
, because another, smaller bull was following after the downed bull from the right, and Ian instinctively shot along its shoulder line. In answer to his curiosity, Ian found that his Allen rifle’s volume and the timbre of its report were noticeably deeper with the magnum choke. Even with all that, however, the shot wasn’t ideal by any means, as the bull was moving fast enough that the shot ended up striking it through its haunches.

“
Man alive,” Ian said, frustrated at himself as he snapped out the cartridge and fumbled with sweaty hands at the next one waiting on his rifle rack. He forced himself to slow down as he nearly dropped it.

People were
shouting, and as he finished reloading and looked up, he saw Captain Marsden drop the bull Ian had wounded with an easy shot.

The bulk of the herd was fleeing more to the
north than directly away from them, but there seemed to be some difficulty somewhere as it wasn’t a fast or coherent exit. The herd had done a remarkable job in tightening together, however. Most of what Ian could see now was a tightly pressed wall of dark hides. That left the spattering of bulls, none of them really approaching the size of the margrave’s bull, but there were more than plenty to make up for that. Most of them half-trailed after the herd, half-watched their party.

Ian continued moving
to his charge, the margrave having dropped to one knee in the grass while carefully watching the movements. Doing the same and attempting to sort out the potentially bolder bulls, Ian checked his yeoman to ensure that Corporal Hanley and Rory were coming this way. In his free time, Ian made his way just behind Lord Wester and toward Captain Marsden as fast as he could maintain watch of the volatile line of bulls as well.

“Keep steady,” Captain Marsden was repeatedly calling in their direction as he reloaded.

Ian didn’t really know what that meant in their present context, but he quickly closed the gap between them as a trio of spritely bulls made motions at the captain. As Ian joined his superior, his attention and rifle aimed squarely at the bulls, which mostly faltered and half-jogged in the general direction of the herd.

Let them go,
Ian thought, wishing now that they’d more clearly laid out just how many bulls they were going for. He would have thought a great deal more—as many as they could shoot, but now that they came to it, he realized the great danger in reloading in front of so many.

“Watch the left,” the captain yelled to him as though he were angry, “I’ll have another in that bunch.”

Ian didn’t have much reference to know just what bunch Captain Marsden was indicating until he had his rifle raised into a particularly thicker clump of mostly retreating bulls.

Ian was shaking his head as he held his rifle roughly
at the middle of the leftmost wing of bulls near them, his eyes trying to gauge all of the subtle movements. The prevailing consensus among the herd seemed to be retreat, right up until the captain’s rifle gave its searing crack.

The yeeling caws of the buffalo
s suddenly changed in pitch and intensity, a good deal of them whirling and flipping their heads around from where they had been exiting. Even as he listened, Ian heard the difference in their tones, like an angry parliament rippling in protest.

It came fast, the bulls surging at them in uneven bits, the situation completely changed.
Suddenly there was coherence, an agreement in purpose as the row of bulls straight ahead of them charged at the captain and even into each other as they went. The little motions, the small jitters Ian had seen before abruptly made sense as they jostled their bodies close together, their horns, ungainly and independent only moments ago, now to his amazement were quickly locked together, forming an intricately solid barrier of thick and deadly bone that they lowered near the ground as they came. The makeshift ram ran imperfect in only a few small areas where instinct and design didn’t have time to straighten it out.

He saw then, in the moment he took to
categorize the shift of events, that a total of two lines of the bulls were formed and charging at them. The largest, main line was coming straight at their company. The second line was somewhat smaller, coming in diagonally at their left.

Ian nearly fired a shot at the few bulls coming from
their left, but decided he needed it. Getting ready to move, he shifted his aim to the main, larger row of the two that was coming at the captain and margrave near him. The margrave let off a shot that brought one down on the right as Captain Marsden hurried to reload. Ian looked long enough to see Will pulling at Lord Wester. Then the two were turning and running from the oncoming charge, the margrave still tugging at his cartridge.

They were never going to make it.

A
nd Ian could see Corporal Hanley and Rory rushing to them from the right with their rifles raised.

T
hey would never be able to stop it.

Ian looked back at the two lines of bulls
—

There
.

Ian turned his rifle a bit and put an angled shot into the lower reaches of
the rightmost bulls of the line coming straight at them. Immediately pulling his eyes away after the shot was off so that he didn’t see the extent of its success, he threw his rifle to the ground and sprinted forward—

Sprinting toward the gap between the oncoming lines.

Of things external he
only remembered the gap between the lines, brief and closing as it was. It was odd that he would be unable to see either the heavy mass crashing toward what was now his immediate right or the smaller but slightly closer row to his left, both intent on trampling what wasn’t immediately gorged.

There was pulling, straining in his lungs, but more in his arms and the tops of his legs as he struggled to push, to run faster than he could at the gap, the heat terrible on his face and his pulse wonderful in its pace.

Timing, the moment he couldn’t see but feel, the duration of one second, two seconds, three—

Not enough
, he couldn’t make it through the gap running.

H
e lowered himself and leaped forward, his arms and the ground out in front of him.

For a moment nothing held him, and then there
was grass yielding underneath him and then hard dirt, things pricking and prodding up into his hands. Then a tremendous impact clapped behind him, even as he surged forward on his hands and knees, before grabbing his lapse of faculties. He rose back to his feet to run another handful of yards before whirling to see what he had missed—or rather what had missed him.