Butcher's Crossing (22 page)

Once again, in the darkness, his hand came from beneath the covers and moved across his face, sought out the cold, rough bulge of his forehead, followed the nose, went across the chapped lips, and rubbed against the thick beard, searching for his features. When sleep came upon him his hand was still resting on his face.

The days grew shorter; and the green grass of the flat mountain park began to yellow in the cool nights. After the first day the men spent in the valley, it rained nearly every afternoon, so that they soon got in the habit of leaving their work at about three and lying about the camp under a tarpaulin stretched from the high sides of the wagon and pegged into the ground. They talked little during these moments of rest; they listened to the light irregular patter of the rain, broken by the sheltering pines, as it dropped on the canvas tarpaulin; and they watched beneath the high belly of the wagon the small rain. Sometimes it was misty and gray like a heavy fog that nearly obscured the opposite rise of tree-grown mountain; and sometimes it was bright and silvery, as the drops, caught by the sun, flashed like tiny needles from the sky into the soft earth. After the rain, which seldom lasted for an hour, they would resume their chase and slaughter of the buffalo, working usually until late in the evening.

Deeper and deeper into the valley the herd was pushed, until Andrews, Miller, and Schneider were rising in the morning before the sun appeared so that they could get in a good day; by the middle of the first week they had to ride more than an hour to get to the main herd.

“We’ll chase them once clean to the end of the valley,” Miller said when Schneider complained of their long rides. “And then we’ll chase them back up this way. If we keep them going back and forth, they’ll break up in little herds, and we won’t be able to get at them so easy.”

Every two or three days Charley Hoge hitched the oxen to the wagon and followed the trail of the slaughter, which was marked by a bunched irregular line of stretched skins. Andrews and Schneider, and sometimes Miller, went with him; and as the wagon moved slowly along, the three men flung the stiff flintskins into the wagon. When all the skins were picked up, the wagon returned them to the main camp, where they were again tossed from the wagon upon the ground. Then the men stacked them one upon another, as high as they could reach. When a stack was between seven and eight feet in height, green thongs, stripped from the skin of a freshly killed buffalo, were passed through the cuts on the leg-skins of the top and bottom hides, and pulled tight and tied. Each stack contained between seventy-five and ninety hides, and each was so heavy that it took the combined strength of the four to boost it under the shelter of the trees.

At the skinning, Will Andrews’s skill slowly increased. His hands toughened and became sure; his knives lost their new brightness, and with use they cut more surely so that soon he was able to skin one buffalo to Schneider’s two. The stench of the buffalo, the feel of the warm meat on his hands, and the sight of clotted blood came to have less and less impact upon his senses. Shortly he came to the task of skinning almost like an automaton, hardly aware of what he did as he shucked the hide from an inert beast and pegged it to the ground. He was able to ride through a mass of skinned buffalo covered black with feeding insects, and hardly be aware of the stench that rose in the heat from the rotting flesh.

Occasionally he accompanied Miller in his stalking, though Schneider habitually stayed behind and rested, waiting for enough animals to be slaughtered for the skinning to begin. As he went with him, Andrews came to be less and less concerned with Miller’s slaughter of the beasts as such; he came to notice the strategy that Miller employed at keeping the buffalo confined to a reasonable area, and at keeping the felled animals in such a pattern that they might be easily and economically skinned.

Once Miller allowed Andrews to take his rifle and attempt a stand. Lying on the ground on his stomach, as he had so often seen Miller do, Andrews chose his buffalo and caught him cleanly through the lungs. He killed three more before he shot badly and the small herd dispersed. When it was over he let Miller go ahead while he remained on his stomach, toying with the empty cartridges he had used, trying to fix the feelings he had had at the kill. He looked at the four buffalo that lay nearly two hundred yards away from him; his shoulder tingled from the heavy recoil of the Sharps rifle. He could feel nothing else. Some grass-blades worked their way into his shirt front and tickled his skin. He got up, brushed the grass away, and walked slowly away from where he had lain, away from Miller, and went to where Schneider lay on the grass, near where their horses were tethered to one of the pines that stood down from the mountainside, slightly into the valley. He sat down beside Schneider; he did not speak; the two men waited until the sound of Miller’s rifle became faint. Then they followed the trail of dead buffalo, skinning as they went.

At night the men were so exhausted that they hardly spoke. They wolfed the food that Charley Hoge prepared for them, drained the great smoked coffeepot, and fell exhausted upon their bedrolls. In their increasing exhaustion, to which Miller drove them with his inexorable pursuit, their food and their sleep came to be the only things that had much meaning for them. Once Schneider, desiring a change of food, went into the woods and managed to shoot a small doe; another time Charley Hoge rode across the valley to the small lake where the buffalo watered and returned with a dozen fat foot-long trout. But they ate only a small part of the venison, and the taste of the trout was flat and unsatisfying; they returned to their steady diet of rich, strong buffalo meat.

Every day Schneider cut the liver from one of the slain buffalo; at the evening meal, almost ritually, the liver was divided into roughly equal portions and passed among them. Andrews learned that the taking of the raw liver was not an ostentation on the part of the three older men. Miller explained to him that unless one did so, one got what he called the “buff sickness,” which was a breaking out of the skin in large, ulcerous sores, often accompanied by fever and general weakness. After learning this, Andrews forced himself to take a bit of the liver every evening; he did not find the taste of it pleasant, but in his tiredness the faintly warm and rotten taste and the slick fiberless texture did not seem to matter much.

After a week in the valley, there were ten thonged stacks of hides set close together in a small grove of pines, and still Andrews could see no real diminution of the herds that grazed placidly on the flat bed of the valley.

The days slid one into another, marked by evening exhaustion and morning soreness; as it had earlier, on their overland voyage when they searched for water, time again seemed to Andrews to hold itself apart from the passing of the days. Alone in the great valley high in the mountains the four men, rather than being brought close together by their isolation, were thrust apart, so that each of them tended more and more to go his own way and fall upon his own resources. Seldom did they talk at night; and when they did, their words were directed to some specific business concerned with the hunt.

In Miller especially Andrews perceived this withdrawal. Always a man whose words were few and direct, he became increasingly silent. At evening, in the camp, he was by turns restless, his eyes going frequently from the camp to across the valley, as if he were trying to fix the buffalo herd and command it even though he could not see it; and indifferent, almost sullen, staring lethargically into the campfire, often not answering for minutes after his name was spoken or a question was asked of him. Only during the hunt, or when he was helping Andrews and Schneider with the skinning, was he alert; and even that alertness seemed to Andrews somehow unnaturally intense. He came to have an image of Miller that persisted even when Miller was not in his sight; he saw Miller’s face, black and dull with powder smoke, his white teeth clenched behind his stretched-out leathery lips, and his eyes, black and shining in their whites, surrounded by a flaming red line of irritated lids. Sometimes this image of Miller came into his mind at night, in his dreams; and more than once he came awake with a start and thrust himself upward out of his bedroll, and found that he was breathing quickly, shallowly, as if in fright, as the sharp image of those eyes upon him dulled and faded and died in the darkness around him. Once he dreamed that he was some kind of animal who was being pursued; he felt a relentless presence that chased him from cover to cover, and at last penned him in a corner of blackness from which there was no retreat; before he awoke in fear, or at a dreamed explosion of violence, he thought he caught a glimpse of those eyes burning at him from the darkness.

A week passed, and another; the stacks of hides beside their camp grew in number. Both Schneider and Charley Hoge became increasingly restless, though the latter did not give direct voice to his restlessness. But Andrews saw it in the looks that Charley Hoge gave to the sky in the afternoon when it clouded for the rain that Andrews and Schneider had grown to expect and welcome; he saw it in Charley Hoge’s increased drinking—the empty whisky crocks grew in number almost as fast as did the ricks of buffalo hides; and he saw it also at night when, against the growing cold, Charley Hoge built the fire to a roaring furnace that drove the rest of them away and covered himself when he bedded down with a pressing number of buffalo hides that he had managed to soften by soaking them in a thick soup of water and wood ash.

One evening, near the end of their second week, while they were taking their late evening meal, Schneider took from his plate a half-eaten buffalo steak and threw it in the fire, where it sizzled and curled and threw up a quantity of dark smoke.

“I’m getting damned sick of buffalo meat,” he said, and for a long moment afterward was silent, brooding at the fire until the steak was a black, twisted ash that dulled the red coals upon which it lay. “Damn sick of it,” he said again.

Charley Hoge sloshed his coffee and whisky in his tin cup, inspected it for a second, and drank it, his thin gray-fur-covered neck twisting as he swallowed. Miller looked at Schneider dully and then returned his gaze to the fire.

“God damn it, didn’t you hear me?” Schneider shouted, to any or all of them.

Miller turned slowly. “You said you were getting tired of buffalo meat,” he said. “Charley will cook up a batch of beans tomorrow.”

“I don’t want no more beans, and I don’t want no sowbelly, and I don’t want no more sour biscuits,” Schneider said. “I want some greens, and some potatoes; and I want me a woman.”

No one spoke. In the fire a green knot exploded and sent a shower of sparks in the air; they floated in the darkness and the men brushed them off their clothes as they settled.

Schneider said more quietly: “We been here two weeks now; that’s four days longer than we was supposed to be. And the hunting’s been good. We got more hides now than we can load back. What say let’s pack out of here tomorrow?”

Miller looked at him as if he were a stranger. “You ain’t serious, are you, Fred?”

“You’re damn right I am,” Schneider said. “Look. Charley’s ready to go back; ain’t you, Charley?” Charley Hoge did not look at him; he quickly poured some more coffee into his cup, and filled it to the brim with whisky. “It’s getting on into fall,” Schneider continued, his eyes still on Charley Hoge. “Nights are getting cold. You can’t tell what kind of weather you’re going to get, this time of year.”

Miller shifted, and brought his intense gaze directly upon Schneider. “Leave Charley alone,” he said quietly.

“All right,” Schneider said. “But just tell me. Even if we do stay around here, how are we going to load all the hides back?”

“The hides?” Miller said, his face for a moment blank. “The hides?...We’ll load what we can, leave the others; we can come back in the spring and pack them out. That’s what we said we’d do, back in Butcher’s Crossing.”

“You mean we’re going to stay here till you’ve wiped out this whole herd?”

Miller nodded. “We’re going to stay.”

“You’re crazy,” Schneider said.

“It’ll take another ten days,” Miller said. “Two more weeks at the outside. We’ll have plenty of time before the weather turns.”

“The whole god damned herd,” Schneider said, and shook his head wonderingly. “You’re crazy. What are you trying to do? You can’t kill every god damned buffalo in the whole god damned country.”

Miller’s eyes glazed over for a moment, and he stared toward Schneider as if he were not there. Then the film slid from his eyes, he blinked, and turned his face toward the fire.

“It won’t do no good to talk about it, Fred. This is my party, and my mind’s made up.”

“All right, god damn it,” Schneider said. “It’s on your head. Just remember that.”

Miller nodded distantly, as if he were no longer interested in anything that Schneider might want to say.

Angrily Schneider gathered his bedroll and started to walk away from the campfire. Then he dropped it and came back.

“Just one more thing,” he said sullenly.

Miller looked up absently. “Yes?”

“We been gone from Butcher’s Crossing now just a little over a month.”

Miller waited. “Yes?” he said again.

“A little over a month,” Schneider said again. “I want my pay.”

“What?” Miller said. His face was puzzled for a moment.

“My pay,” Schneider said. “Sixty dollars.”

Miller frowned, and then he grinned. “You thinking of spending it right soon?”

“Never mind that,” Schneider said. “You just give me my pay, like we agreed.”

“All right,” Miller said. He turned to Andrews. “Mr. Andrews, will you give Mr. Schneider his sixty dollars?”

Andrews opened his shirt front and took some bills from his money belt. He counted out sixty dollars, and handed the money to Schneider. Schneider took the money, and went to the fire, knelt, and carefully counted it. Then he thrust the bills into a pocket and went to where he had dropped his bedroll. He picked it up and went out of sight into the darkness. The three men around the fire heard the snapping of branches and the rustle of pine needles and cloth as Schneider put his bedroll down. They listened until they heard the regular sound of his breath, and then his angry snoring. They did not speak. Soon they, too, bedded down for the night. When they woke in the morning a thin rind of frost crusted the grass that lay on the valley bed.