by Lin Enger
Eli, recalling the day his father stood up in church and pointed at the elders sitting red-faced in the pews beside their wives, reached over and touched his elbow, took hold of it and gave it a squeeze.
“But my son here is telling me to shut up,” Ulysses said.
“Maybe the boy’s got more sense than you have.”
“We can hope so.”
Bayliss nearly smiled. He looked around at the group, kneading his belly as if it were hurting him. He squinted his little eyes. “Let’s move out, then. Unless you’re all wanting to stay here and debate the state of the world.”
For a good share of the morning Eli and Ulysses rode at the front next to Hornaday, the two men carrying on a lively talk, both certain of their own ideas and therefore butting heads on occasion. The curator had cowboy clothes on, sheepskin chaps and a wide-brimmed hat in place of the bowler he’d worn earlier. With a thick cigar clenched in his teeth, he held forth like a politician, going on at length about the bison, its fitness for the climate and resistance to disease, its ability to move great distances with no water at all. Ulysses for his part told stories of the great herds still roaming the territories during the Indian wars, entire landscapes covered in black and moving like a single creature, clouds of their dust filling the sky.
“It’s awful hard to describe. If you never saw it, there’s no possible way you could understand. No matter how much you’ve read or studied. It was like fish in the ocean. Great schools of them. Uncountable.”
“Of course I understand,” Hornaday said, indignant. “Only human beings could have accomplished their demise.”
“The railroads. Commercial hunters.”
“And the Indians too,” Hornaday added.
“Are you lucid, man?” Ulysses made a full circle in the air with his arm. His voice dropped to a near whisper, as if to make Hornaday listen harder to what he said. “You mean to tell me the Indians could have hunted out the herds on their own? I don’t believe it. Not in a thousand years.”
Eli didn’t stick around for the argument, but turned his mare and trotted back past Bayliss and McNaney, past Gumfield on his buckboard who gave him a dark stare, past the last two troopers and, finally, the big, six-mule wagon, on top of which old McAnna sat cockeyed, half-grinning inside his beard and eyes closed, drifting through some reverie. Eli let the clank and squeak of the train recede ahead of him and sat his mare for a time, looking off in the direction from which they’d come, south, the ground receding in rolling hills toward the Yellowstone, which was long out of sight. He didn’t know what to make of the argument between his father and Mr. Hornaday, but after seeing Slovin’s pile in Miles City and now the litter of bones out here, he wished he’d had the chance to see this country years ago, before the slaughter.
He was about to turn back when he spotted something moving against the grayish brown of the buffalo grass. It was down in the dry streambed a hundred yards off, and his first thought was Indians. He tried to make out the figure of a man or horse, but instead the slender shape of an antelope firmed up around its white face, and Eli without deliberating dismounted and drew from his scabbard the rifle he was issued at Fort Keogh, a .50-caliber Spencer, same as the one he gave Two Blood as part of the payment for the Smoot’s. He chambered a round, flattened himself against the ground, and put the open sights on the front shoulder of the antelope, which as if to offer itself up, had turned to one side. He squeezed off a careful shot, the sound filling up the whole dome of the sky, making it seem for an instant like a space contained and finite. Then silence again, followed in turn by the high shouts of men barking like prairie dogs.
“What in the hell?”
It was Bayliss, shouting over the sound of hoofbeats. He was coming straight on, as if to run Eli into the ground, but then pulled up short and swung himself free and clear to his feet. He stood spraddle-legged on the ocher dirt, one hand on the butt of his holstered Colt. “What in the living tarnation are you shootin’ at, boy?”
Eli, still lying flat, pointed south, but there was nothing there to see. The antelope had sprung away at the blast, and by the time the barrel came to rest, Eli saw only its tail and springing rear legs disappearing into sagebrush.
“You take a shot at Sitting Bull?”
Eli pushed up and got to his feet. The whole party had turned and was advancing on him now, posthaste. He couldn’t help but see the smirk on Gumfield’s face. His father’s head was cocked as he waited for an explanation. Same for Hornaday. Eli went to his mare and threw himself on its back and dug in his heels. Before pulling the trigger, he’d marked the spot, just like his father taught him—in this case a little alkaline triangle beside a tuft of olive sage. He rode straight to it and jumped to the ground and bent to look for blood, which he found straight off, a spot the size of his thumbnail on the gray-white soil. Then another, two paces west of the first, this one elongated, a stripe as long as a table knife. He remounted and rode up out of the dry creekbed, then reined in to scan the country. When he dismounted again, whispering into the mare’s ear, it was because of the tracks he found, clear prints in the dirt, and the trail of blood. The animal itself was lying in a slight depression, in what looked like a sleeping groove, its eyes glazing already in the sun, no movement at the rib cage, dead as dead.
Within minutes Eli had bled it and gutted it and tied its legs to a picket rope, and was pulling it back north toward the cluster of men, off their horses now and standing about on the side of a hill. He imagined their faces bright at the prospect of fresh meat for lunch, but riding up he found himself looking into the small, unhappy eyes of Bayliss. His arms were crossed in front of his chest. The others had drawn away from him, all except for Ulysses, who was crouched within arm’s reach of the man and chewing on a strand of grass. From the buckboard of the light wagon Gumfield looked on.
“Didn’t you hear what I said this morning?” Bayliss asked.
Eli cleared his throat. “I heard you.”
“I said, stay close.”
“I was at the rear, behind everybody else. And I didn’t go far.” Eli turned and pointed down the streambed. “It didn’t run more than a hundred yards.”
“Out of sight, though, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t I say no chasing after meat?”
Eli’s instinct was to argue with the man, though he knew that was a bad idea. He glanced at his father, whose face was blank, eyes dark. What the hell, Eli thought, and he said, “This is a hunting party, isn’t it?”
“If and when we find something to shoot at, yes. Until then—until we make permanent camp, like I said—we’ll exercise caution. We don’t want to draw undue attention to ourselves, which is prudent, considering.”
Still in his crouch, the strand of grass clenched in his teeth, Ulysses said, “It could be you’re overstating the general threat.”
Bayliss turned. “The general threat, as you put it, happens to rest on my shoulders and not yours, Mr. Pope. I have rank here.”
Ulysses stood up. Eli could tell he was angry by the steady gaze of his eyes and the way his lips were flattened and drawn tight, like a line of fencing wire. His hands were loose at his sides. Bayliss took a step back. Ulysses said, “I mustered out in sixty-nine. That’s a long time ago, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about rank.”
Hornaday came forward and put himself between the two men, who both towered over him. He took the stub of cigar from his mouth and blew a pair of perfect smoke rings in the still air. He said, “I respect your sense of duty, Sergeant, though I have to remind you that Mr. Pope is in my employ. And Mr. Pope, I want you to hear this. Until we reach the hunting grounds and establish our camp there, it’s your obligation to defer to Bayliss in all matters regarding security. As we all must. Which means, Eli”—Hornaday turned—“that next time you have an antelope in your sights, you better ask before you squeeze your finger.”
“Yes, sir,” Eli said.
“Mr. Hornaday, if he had asked
first, we’d be nooning up meatless,” Ulysses said, nodding at the two privates who had already skinned the animal and were cutting strips of flesh from the carcass. McAnna in the meantime had built a fire, which was popping and smoking on green willow branches.
Hornaday looked from Ulysses to Bayliss and back again. He said, “We need to have an understanding here.”
“We have an understanding,” Ulysses said, though his gaze remained steady on Bayliss, who didn’t speak.
“All right then?” Hornaday asked.
“All right,” Bayliss muttered, and he walked off toward a small outcrop of rocks, kicking up dust with his boots.
Toward evening a bank of purple clouds massed in the west, swallowing the red sun. By McAnna’s estimate they’d gone eighteen miles, easily the farthest Eli had ever ridden a horse in a single day, and he could feel every mile in his back and legs and ass. He was not at all sure he’d be able to climb back on in the morning but was looking forward to it all the same. As the men made their first camp, glancing up now and then to watch the thunderheads build, McNaney, who’d been scouting ahead, came riding back at full gallop.
“Indians,” he said. “Two of them, mounted. Up there a mile or so.” He pointed northwest, toward an elevation topped with a small crown of rock.
“Moving which way? What are they doing?” Bayliss asked.
“Just settin’ their horses is all. Watching us, carbines on their lap.”
“They make any sign?”
“Nope.”
“Just two of them?”
“That’s all I saw.”
“We better go have a little parley then. You”—Bayliss pointed at Ulysses—“Come with me.”
As the two rode off together, Eli got started on the fire for supper, the job he’d been assigned by Hornaday. All afternoon he’d been collecting deadfall—willow, dogwood, the occasional stunted juniper, anything burnable—and tossing it up into the wagons. Now as the old cook mixed up corn biscuits, beans, and antelope stew, Eli lit the kindling and built a steady flame. There was enough flow in the creek for the horses now, and they’d been turned loose to water themselves before being rubbed down, fed from the store of oats, and picketed.
By the time Ulysses and Bayliss rode back into camp an hour later, all the tents were pitched and everybody was sitting around the fire, their plates empty, drinking coffee brewed with creekwater too brackish to boil clean.
“Lost them,” Bayliss said. “But found nothing to say there’s more than just the two. Scavengers, likely. We’ll have to keep an eye out.”
“See any buff?” Hornaday asked.
“Don’t you think we’d tell you?” Bayliss handed off his horse to one of the troopers and accepted a plate of food.
That night clouds moved in like giants with bulbous heads and massive shoulders, like the Danish gods in the stories his mother used to tell him. Storm gods, she called them. Eli watched through the front of the tent as they changed shape, growing into beasts with terrible noses, eyes swirling as they searched for a place to spend their fury.
“We’re going to have a gully washer,” Ulysses said.
But the storm passed on by, saving itself for the buttes to the east. Unable to sleep, Eli crawled out of the tent he shared with his father and watched the exhibition of lightning, each flash beginning at the center of heaven and following a complex geometry to earth, again and again, the booms jarring the ground before they arrived as thunder in the air. Later, Eli dreamed of home and his father standing in the yard, smoking, his mother at the kitchen window saying, Where is he, I don’t see him, though in fact he wasn’t twenty feet away in full sight. When Eli pointed him out to her, she gripped the neck of her dress with both fists and ripped it open. And in that moment, at the sound of cloth tearing, he woke up, aware of his father leaving the tent, brushing past the canvas flaps. Eli checked his impulse to call out and instead grabbed in the dark for his pants and boots, shirt and coat, and moved quickly toward the horses, picketed a hundred paces or so to the south. He could just make out his father’s long shape and also that of the horses against the darkness.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
“Just a little scouting trip.”
Eli ran quietly back to the tent for his bridle, and when he came back Ulysses was waiting for him.
“You’re going after them, aren’t you.”
“No need to come along,” his father said.
“I’m coming. But we should bring our rifles.”
“No,” Ulysses said.
They led their animals north for a quarter of a mile, then mounted up and rode bareback at a fast walk, hunched in their coats against the cold air, down through a dry coulee and then up along a narrow divide that angled northwest. They stopped at the top of a hill, from which they could see, beneath a break in the clouds, a declining landscape of canyons and gullies and hoodoos. It looked like a place where the skin of the earth had come loose, torn away by some coarse hand to expose another world, the close edge of it marked by a stone spire.
“They’re down in there?” Eli asked.
“Bayliss and I came this far but couldn’t tell if they went straight on or broke off to the north on high ground. As we turned around to leave, though, I caught sight of a smoke line. Down there, yes.” Ulysses pointed ahead. “Bayliss didn’t see it.”
The ground changed beneath them now, the iron shoes of their horses crunching and grinding on loose rock, and Eli sensed the mare’s hesitation as she picked her steps carefully, rolling her neck this way and that, lifting her nose to smell the air. They came around the side of a rock face and then down another decline, this one steeper, Eli leaning back but sliding forward onto the mare’s thick mane, nothing to do about it. And then he smelled something, camp smoke, and his father swung off the Appaloosa and crouched on one knee. He lifted something close to his face.
“It’s cold, they’ve been gone awhile,” he said.
“Do we go after them?”
“It’s too late. And it’s going to storm again. There’ll be another chance.”
As Ulysses spoke, the clouds filled in above them and the world closed down. Eli’s mare trembled as if struck by a cold wind, and from the west came a quiet rumble, like a man clearing his throat in the next room.
“Let’s go, come on,” Ulysses said, mounting up. “It’s going to get slick in a hurry down here.”
They swung around and headed back, Eli in front this time—though every minute or so he pulled up to make sure his father was still there, saying, “You coming?”
“Just let her go, Eli. She’ll take you.”
The climb was steep, though, and it was no easy thing staying on, saddleless, especially when the icy rain came, which it did. Eli flattened himself on the horse’s wide back, one fist twisted into her mane, the other gripping the reins, as the mare scrambled for purchase in the loose rock. Then a flash of brilliant light poured through a rip in the sky and all was momentarily visible, including the spire of rock Eli remembered from before, the monument marking the edge of this broken ground. Beneath him the mare, as if jarred into some new understanding of her purpose, began running hard, all out, the earth flattening here, the ground stable again, and Eli hanging tight like a monkey on a circus horse.
Side by side with Ulysses in the raucous storm, Eli was aware again of his anger. What did his father think he was doing, chasing after this man? How did he imagine it was going to turn out? What did he expect, a clap on the shoulder? A clean conscience? And what would he tell the man if he ever found him? I’m the one who shot your son—your whole family is dead because of me. It was hard to imagine it moving toward anything but calamity. His father might as well be some figure out of the Bible, one of the mad prophets—except none of those men, touched as they were, would have been so foolish as to offer himself up to those he had wronged.
The rain was steady as they rode along a ridge between two creeks, dry before but flowing now, and when Ulysses e
ased close and tapped him on the shoulder, Eli refused to look over at him.
“Hold up, something’s wrong,” his father said, and slid down off the mare. Eli reined in and turned to watch him lift the Appaloosa’s left rear leg.
“What?”
“Busted a shoe back there. Split the hoof, too.” With his picket pin he pried off the broken shoe and tossed it away. “We’ll have to walk,” he said.
“You will,” Eli told him.
The rain was modest but steady, and most of the lightning stayed off to the south, punishing the country down around the Yellowstone, line after crooked line, sometimes four or five strikes in the same instant, as if there were no end to what the sky could give or the earth receive, as if all the light in heaven were being channeled through a few small punctures in the clouds.
By the time they got back to camp the storm had passed, the eastern hills just visible beneath pinking clouds. The men were up but silent, shaking out wet blankets and packs, rubbing down their horses. There was a fire crackling and smoking, the damp wood hissing like a pile of snakes. Bayliss and Hornaday stood next to it, watching Ulysses and Eli come on.
“She ran off when the noise started, yanked her pin and lit out,” Ulysses said, nodding toward the Appaloosa. “Chased her three, four miles, at least. And then she threw a shoe on the way back, in loose rocks.”
“Thought it was you that run off on us,” Bayliss said.
“And what would I do that for?”
Bayliss said, “You got to admit they’re nice horses. Top quality.” He aimed his stubbled chin at Ulysses, looking down along his weatherworn nose like a judge and rubbing his fat belly.
Ulysses looked right at him. “I never stole a thing in my life, and I’m too old to start up now.”
Hornaday blew into his hands. “We got a little anxious, that’s all,” he said. His cowboy hat, which looked new yesterday, was dented and stained and pulled down low on his ears against the damp cold.
“Anxious, shit.” Bayliss turned and stalked off.