Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

  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.

  In the morning light Miller looked at the frosted valley and said:

  “Their grass is playing out. They’ll be trying to get through the pass and down to the flat country. We’ll have to keep pushing them back.”

  And they did. Each morning they met the buffalo in a frontal attack, and pushed them slowly back toward the sheer rise of mountains to the south. But their frontal assault was little more than a delaying tactic; during the night the buffalo grazed far beyond the point they had been turned back from the day before. On each succeeding day the main herd came closer and closer to the pass over which it had originally entered the high park.

&
nbsp; And as the buffalo pressed dumbly, instinctively, out of the valley, the slaughter grew more and more intense. Already withdrawn and spare with words, Miller became with the passing days almost totally intent upon his kill; and even at night, in the camp, he no longer gave voice to his simplest needs—he gestured toward the coffeepot, he grunted when his name was spoken, and his directions to the rest of them became curt motions of hands and arms, jerks of the head, and guttural growlings deep in his throat. Each day he went after the buffalo with two guns; during the kill, he heated the barrels to that point just shy of burning them out.

  Schneider and Andrews had to work more and more swiftly to skin the animals Miller left strewn upon the ground; almost never were they able to finish their skinning before sundown, so that nearly every morning they were up before dawn hacking tough skins from stiff buffalo. And during the day, as they sweated and hacked and pulled in a desperate effort to keep up with Miller, they could hear the sound of his rifle steadily and monotonously and insistently pounding at the silence, and pounding at their nerves until they were raw and bruised. At night, when the two of them rode wearily out of the valley to the small red-orange glow that marked their camp in the darkness, they found Miller slouched darkly and inertly before the fire; except for his eyes he was as still and lifeless as one of the buffalo he had killed. Miller had even stopped washing off his face the black powder that collected there during his firing; now the powder smoke seemed a permanent part of his skin, ingrained there, a black mask that defined the hot, glaring brilliance of his eyes.

  Gradually the herd was worn down. Everywhere he looked Andrews saw the ground littered with naked corpses of buffalo, which sent up a rancid stench to which he had become so used that he hardly was aware of it; and the remaining herd wandered placidly among the ruins of their fellows, nibbling at grass flecked with their dry brown blood. With his awareness of the diminishing size of the herd, there came to Andrews the realization that he had not contemplated the day when the herd was finally reduced to nothing, when not a buffalo remained standing—for unlike Schneider he had known, without questioning or without knowing how he knew, that Miller would not willingly leave the valley so long as a single buffalo remained alive. He had measured time, and had reckoned the moment and place of their leaving, by the size of the herd, and not—as had Schneider—by numbered days that rolled meaninglessly one after another. He thought of packing the hides into the wagon, yoking the oxen, which were beginning to grow fat on inactivity and the rich mountain grass, to the wagon, and making their way back down the mountain, and across the wide plains, back to Butcher’s Crossing. He could not imagine what he thought of. With a mild shock, he realized that the world outside the wide flat winding park hemmed on all sides by sheer mountain, had faded away from him; he could not remember the mountain up which they had labored, or the expanse of plain over which they sweated and thirsted, or Butcher’s Crossing, which he had come into and left only a few weeks before. That world came to him fitfully and unclearly, as if hidden in a dream. He had been here in the high valley for all of that part of his life that mattered; and when he looked out upon it—its flatness, and its yellow-greenness, its high walls of mountain wooded with the deep green of pine in which ran the flaming red-gold of turning aspen, its jutting rock and hillock, all roofed with the intense blue of the airless sky—it seemed to him that the contours of the place flowed beneath his eyes, that his very gaze shaped what he saw, and in turn gave his own existence form and place. He could not think of himself outside of where he was.

  On their twenty-fifth day in the mountains they arose late. For the last several days, the slaughter had been going more slowly; the great herd, after more than three weeks, seemed to have begun to realize the presence of their killers and to have started dumbly to prepare against them; they began to break up into a number of very small herds; seldom was Miller able to get more than twelve or fourteen buffalo at a stand, and much time was wasted in traveling from one herd to another. But the earlier sense of urgency was gone; the herd of some five thousand animals was now less than three hundred. Upon these remaining three hundred, Miller closed in—slowly, inexorably—as if more intensely savoring the slaughter of each animal as the size of the herd diminished. On the twenty-fifth day they arose without hurry; and after they had taken breakfast they even sat around the fire for several moments letting their coffee cool in their tin cups. Though they could not see it through the thick forest of pines behind them, the sun rose over the eastern range of mountains; through the trees it sent diffused mists of light that gathered on their cups, softening their hard outlines and making them glow in the semishade. The sky was a deep thin blue, cloudless and intense; crevices and hollows on the broad plain and in the sides of the mountain sent up nearly invisible mists which could be seen only as they softened the edges of rock and tree they surrounded. The day warmed, and promised heat.

  After finishing their coffee, they loitered around the camp while Charley Hoge led the oxen out of the aspen-pole corral and yoked them to the empty wagon. For several days hides had been drying where Andrews and Schneider had pegged them; it was time for them to be gathered and stacked.

  Schneider scratched his beard, which was tangled and matted like wet straw, and stretched his arms lazily. “Going to be a hot day,” he said, pointing to the clear sky. “Probably won’t even get a rain.” He turned to Miller. “How many of the buff do you think’s left? Couple of hundred?”

  Miller nodded, and cleared his throat.

  Schneider continued: “Think we’ll be able to clean them up in three or four more days?”

  Miller turned to him, as if only then aware that he had spoken. He said gruffly: “Three or four more days should do it, Fred.”

  “God damn,” Schneider said happily. “I don’t know whether I can last that long.” He punched Andrews on the arm. “What about you, boy? Think you can wait?”

  Andrews grinned. “Sure,” he said.

  “A pocketful of money, and all the eats and women you can hold,” Schneider said. “By God, that’s living.”

  Miller moved impatiently. “Come on,” he said. “Charley’s got the team yoked. Let’s get moving.”

  The four men moved slowly from the camp area. Miller rode ahead of the wagon; Andrews and Schneider wound their reins about their saddle horns and let their horses amble easily behind it. The oxen, made lazy and irritable by their inactivity, did not pull well together; the morning silence was broken by Charley Hoge’s half-articulated, shouted curses.

  Within half an hour the little procession had arrived at where the first buffalo had been killed and skinned more than three weeks before. The meat on the corpses had dried to a flintlike hardness; here and there the flesh had been torn away by the wolves before they had been killed or driven away by Charley Hoge’s strychnine; where the flesh was torn, the bones were white and shining, as if they had been polished. Andrews looked ahead of him into the valley; everywhere he looked he saw the mounded bodies. By next summer, he knew, the flesh would be eaten away by vultures or rotted away by the elements; he tried to imagine what the valley would look like, spread about with the white bones. He shivered a little, though the sun was hot.

  Soon the wagon was so thickly surrounded by corpses that Charley Hoge was unable to point it in a straight direction; he had to walk beside the lead team, guiding it among the bodies. Even so, the huge wooden wheels now and then passed over an outthrust leg of a buffalo, causing the wagon to sway. The increasing heat of the day intensified the always present stench of rotting flesh; the oxen shied away from it, lowing discontentedly and tossing their heads so wildly that Charley Hoge had to stand many feet away from them.

  When they had made their slow way to where a wide space was covered with pegged-out skins and fresh corpses, Andrews and Schneider got down from their horses. They tied large handkerchiefs about the lower parts of their faces, so that they could work without being disturbed by the horde of small black flies that buzzed a
bout the rank meat.

  “It’s going to be hot working,” Schneider said. “Look at that sun.”

  Above the eastern trees, the sun was a fiery mass at which Andrews could not look directly; unhindered by mist or cloud, it burned upon them, instantly drying the sweat that it pulled from their faces and hands. Andrews let his eyes wander about the sky; the cool blueness soothed them from the burning they had from his brief glance toward the sun. To the south, a small white cloud had formed; it hung quiet and tiny just above the rise of the mountains.

  “Let’s get going,” Andrews said, kicking at a small peg that held a skin flat against the earth. “It doesn’t look like it’ll get any cooler.”

  A little more than a mile away, a slight dark movement was visible among the low mounds of corpses; a small herd was grazing quietly and moving slowly toward them. Miller abruptly reined his horse away from the three men who were busy loading the hides, and galloped toward the herd.

  As the men worked, Charley Hoge led the oxen between them, so that neither would have to take more than a few steps to fling his hides upon the wagon bed. Shortly after Miller rode off, Andrews and Schneider heard the distant boom of his rifle; they lifted their heads and stood for a few moments listening. Then they resumed their work, unpegging and tossing the hides into the moving wagon more slowly, in rhythm with the booming sound of Miller’s rifle. When the sound ceased, they paused in their work and sat on the ground, breathing heavily.

  “Don’t sound like we’re going to have to do much skinning today,” Schneider panted, pointing in the direction of Miller’s firing. “Sounds like he only got twelve or fourteen so far.”