by Walter Kirn
He dropped the stick and thrust his arms straight up the way that winning TV athletes do but also in the manner of a sketch near the end of Little Red Elk's Thought Streams depicting his vision of the Thunder Chief, a minor springtime deity who modern Apostles didn't give much thought to but who my great-grandmother sewed into a sock doll that, with dyed pipe cleaners for its upraised arms and flakes of obsidian for eyes, had vigilantly guarded me in my crib.
“Shoshone braves, Shoshone squaws!” Eff Sr.'s arms stretched as high as they could go, pulling his pale wrists out of his coat sleeves. “My gratitude be upon you, and my greeting!”
That's when the whooping man gave his second whoop. Some other guests whistled or howled like wild dogs, but the guests who appeared the least startled and most comfortable—perhaps because they'd attended previous gatherings—slapped their knees, their left knees, with their left hands. In unison, and for what felt like a full minute.
My partner, sitting with Chipper across the circle, knew just what to do, somehow. But Chipper didn't. She used the wrong hand until he pushed it down and grabbed her other hand with his. By the time she'd mastered the rhythm and the motion, though, Eff Sr. had dropped his arms and lowered his eyebrows and was rolling his shoulders and loosening his neck. He let out a long, showy sigh, and then said this:
“Now aren't we all glad to have that crap over with!”
I laughed with the others. The joke was a relief. It helped me feel much better about things.
The speech became practical and businesslike, setting out the schedule of events, the times and locations of the meals, and the weather forecast for the weekend. Rain was expected tomorrow, an inconvenience but also, Eff Sr. said—still grinning, thankfully—a sign that the “Directorate of Firmaments” looked favorably on the assembly because the storms would ease a six-year drought.
Eff Sr. called his son out of the crowd then and had him stand at his left shoulder. Little Eff looked embarrassed and abashed. In the V of his open collar I saw a chain similar to the one Lance hung his cross from. Hadley, it seemed, had been right: he'd met the Lord. The man who'd brought them together wasn't here, though; I heard he'd been banned for maiming Eff Sr.'s pickup.
“The details on the safari,” said Eff Sr., “are all laid out in your orientation letters. This is a brand-new rite. It came to me. So: Are you ready for Freddy? Let's draw names. Errol, fetch the skin from Delbert there.”
The new foreman stepped out of the shadows behind the benches and passed Little Eff a grocery-bag-size sack fashioned from a coffee-colored hide so crudely tanned that it still bore tufts of fur. The son held it open for the father; the names were already inside it, apparently. I expected more introductory fuss and bluster, but instead the old man plunged his hand into the sack, picked out a slip of paper, and said crisply: “Rear Admiral Retired Barnaby T. Amundsen!”
The crowd scanned itself until a hand went up. Prepared by the formidable name and title to behold an imposing master of the high seas, I found the sharp-eared, slit-eyed, short admiral, who was also bald and had a paunch, piercingly disappointing.
The second hunter was a husky woman who stood up, bowed, and waved, then made two fists. From about two feet apart, she rammed the fists together like butting rams, provoking a burst of knee claps and a third whoop. The next hunter was Secretary Barry. His prominence at the assembly felt engineered and made me think the drawing might not be honest. The strenuous way Eff Sr. stirred his hand around before he withdrew the fourth name from the sack seemed laughably, transparently fraudulent. I sighed and shook my head and turned my hands up, thinking these gestures might flush out other skeptics. There had to be a few, but they didn't show themselves. Too shy or too scared. It exasperated me. I was twisting around to leave the circle when a voice from across the circle said, “I'm honored, sir.”
The hot little hiss of revulsion in my gut told me whose face I'd see when I looked back.
The fifth name didn't much matter after that.
The mother bison and their calves had been separated from the herd and driven by mounted ranch hands to a pasture on the ranch's southern border three miles away. Only bulls would be hunted. I counted twenty-one of them. According to Delbert's presentation at breakfast, the animals weighed a ton apiece, on average, and this was visible in the field by the depth to which their hooves had sunk in the soggy, churned-up turf. It had poured all night, and the trucks were mud-bound, too, burdened by the weight of all the spectators sitting in their cabs and on their hoods and standing in their beds. Waterproof field glasses had been distributed, but unless someone wanted to watch the bullets strike or note the precise locations of the entry wounds, they didn't seem necessary. The oblivious hump-shouldered targets were right there, so close to the trucks that when the wind picked up five minutes before the shooting was set to start a tiny tangled clump of coarse brain hair blew onto the front of my slicker. Standing next to me, Chipper got a little in her face.
Like me, she hadn't planned to watch the hunt and had come on behalf of Elder Stark. At least she said so. I doubted she really liked him; I think she was just intrigued by his attention, perhaps because her looks weren't pleasant at all but decidedly, painfully the opposite, beginning with her thinning, patchy hair that was already gray at twenty-six. They'd stayed up late together, huddled all alone on a log bench beside a still-glowing log end in the fire circle. To keep her there even after it started drizzling, he must have been acting very brave, however, because the pasty, fretful, sweating wretch who crawled back into the tepee after midnight would not have been appealing to any female, no matter how homely or starved for courtly words.
“When you've cocked it,” he said, sitting hunched up on his cot, clawing his knees and curling his anxious toes, “when you've pulled back the part with the spring, behind the barrel . . . ?”
“It's called the hammer. That's the hammer.”
He wiped a damp hand across a damper forehead. “Then do you have to go ahead and shoot? Can you wait? Will the thing, the hammer, stay in place?”
“It will if you don't touch it and don't flinch.”
“Because when the hammer goes down it hits the . . .”
“Round. It pushes in the primer on the round. The primer ignites the powder. It turns to gas. The sudden, explosive pressure of the gas is what propels—”
“I know how bullets work.”
“You have to give your turn to someone else. It's not a choice. It's what you have to do.”
He covered his watering eyes with a damp hand and pressed his extended thumb against his temple. The hand started squeezing. Its knuckle points went white. He'd reached the edge of agony, it looked like, and was preparing to remove his face.
“They picked your name from a bag. They didn't ask you. It's not your job or your duty. It was chance. Give your turn to someone who can shoot.”
Still blind, and squeezing harder, he said, “I asked. I was there at lunch today when Eff Sr. decided to pick the secretary—there's an important business deal involved; permission to build a petroleum refinery—and I'd already talked to Chipper at the airport and thought about what a nice couple we might make if I could just show her, or prove to her, or demonstrate . . . I asked, understand? I asked a great big favor. He wanted to give my spot to Ambrose Dixon. Ambrose Dixon, the mayor of California.”
I made an expression I knew he couldn't see but felt confident he'd sense. You are one of the world's immortal fools, my friend, and your foolishness will be carried by the Four Winds around the world and back to you. Perpetually. Forever.
“The mayor of part of California.”
I stood with loyal Chipper and watched my partner step out of an idling Suburban. I craved some sign that my hours of late-night coaching and numerous drawings of rifles and their parts had not only calmed his flustered mind but stabilized his trembling hands. I felt responsible for his performance. It needn't be impressive, only harmless. He walked with the admiral past the men on horseback c
harged with keeping the herd in order and stepped up behind him onto the shooting platform: a truck trailer normally used for hauling machinery that had been parked in the meadow for two days now so that the bison—drawn there by a salt lick, a water tank, and quantities of hay—would, in Delbert's words, “feel cozy with it.”
My partner's sturdy, wide stance encouraged me, and so did the studious angle of his head as Eff Sr. removed the Sharps rifle from its case, performed a diligent safety check (chamber empty, barrel unobstructed, trigger and hammer operating properly), and presented it to Secretary Barry, who kept its muzzle pointing correctly upward and shed an aura of competence and knowledge. In such a sure, commanding grasp, a gun posed no more danger than a toothbrush. I felt I'd been mistaken about the man, as we're often mistaken about those who chafe us. Viewed through the Seeress's “Lens of Perfection,” the chilly curtness I'd condemned him for became a laudable measured prudence.
“Tell me when I can turn back around,” said Chipper.
The shot came only seconds later—a brisk and echoless report that told me no second shot would be required. Gently, delicately, almost prayerfully, the bison kneeled down on its strangely spindly forelegs, then abruptly toppled sideways and lay still, showing the onlookers one curved black horn and a ragged flank of matted fur that was thick toward the neck but sparser toward the tail. I saw no hole, no gore. Because Delbert had warned against a head shot that might be deflected or blunted by the dense skull, I assumed the bullet had hit the heart or lungs. I told Chipper she could look again. The kill was as clean as anyone could have hoped.
Then something sad but fascinating happened. Instead of running off, the other bulls left their spread-out feeding spots and gathered near the dead one. The largest bull lumbered right up beside him, lowered its head, and shoveled at his belly as though he were trying to raise him to his feet. A second bull joined the effort, and then a third. Over them all a froth of buzzing insects darkened the air. The bull was down for good.
“That wasn't as bad as I thought,” said Chipper.
“No.”
“One way or another, they have to die.”
The Ford front-end loader I'd seen yesterday moved in beside the carcass with its bucket down. The other bulls backed off a ways as the operator and a helper secured double chains around the beast's hind legs and anchored the chain to the center of the bucket. The operator leaped up into the cab, drew back a lever, and elevated the bucket until the bull hung a foot above the ground. The loader chugged off in reverse. The carcass twirled. The loader stopped maybe sixty yards away where a man with a knife stood ready to slit the belly. Chipper said she couldn't watch, but I did, and as the man stabbed the knife in, I saw her peek.
The colorful guts, enough to fill three wheelbarrows, sloshed onto the ground in one tremendous load. It was pyramid shaped, but then it spread and sprawled. I felt hungry insects whisking past my cheeks.
Back at the platform, my partner had the gun now. I'd thought he'd shoot last, I didn't know why. He held the rifle sideways. Wrong. All wrong. I think someone mentioned it to him—his head jerked up. The gun almost fell. His face looked terrible. Eff Sr. pointed a disapproving finger, Secretary Barry crossed his arms, and my partner, now pointing the barrel at his own feet, sagged at the knees, recovered, stiffened, and then began to shake so horribly I feared he'd vomit in the truck bed.
“Mason! Mason! Mason!” Louder each time.
“I think he really needs you,” Chipper whispered.
There are times when the senses turn inward and one's actions unfold in a realm so far away from this one that afterward the mind cannot account for the passage of the body through space and time. I found myself on the platform where I'd been summoned, but whether I'd walked there or flew there I couldn't be sure. Who were all these somber, frowning men speaking to me so intently and deliberately? And what was this weight in my hands—smooth wood, cool metal—and this sweet, fragrant lubricant on my warm palms?
The fattest man, also the youngest, said, “It's yours,” and stepped away to give me room for something. I heard him say to someone else, “He's good. He's much, much better than I am. He deserves this.”
I'd seen how easy it could be. I'd seen how quickly it could all be over. And one way or another, they had to die. They carried this knowledge with them, it appeared, which was why they rarely hurried. I'd dug up two of their skulls once as a boy, scratching the tip of my spade against white bone in a crumbling soft brown stream bank. My father told me the college in Missoula had scientists who could estimate their age, but my mother, who was setting off for Riverbright to do some filing and typing for the hierarchy, suggested she take them with her, or just one of them, and ask the Seeress what she thought. She returned that evening with the answer: “Possibly much older than they appear.” She'd also said illness had killed them, not violence.
“That's your animal,” Eff Sr. said. He hovered behind my left shoulder, with leathery breath. “The boys cut it loose for you. Don't dawdle. Go.”
“Just go,” said my partner from my other side. “You're holding things up. Just pick your spot and shoot.” Freed from all his burdens, freed from fear, suddenly he knew everything again.
It had to die sometime, and perhaps quite soon, but I would not walk away the man who'd killed it. This wasn't a refusal, but a vision; a vivid picture from the Thonic plane of a feeding male buffalo with a cracked right horn—the one in my sights, this specific creature—standing in another, lusher meadow in front of a different, steeper mountain. The time was the future, though maybe just later that day. The sun had slipped down to four or five o'clock and the mud had dried and cracked. The beast still lived. I hadn't interfered. And I couldn't, because what would be already was.
But I could kill something else. I thought of this. Nothing ruled it out. A person, maybe. Clobbered by ammunition of this high caliber, he wouldn't even suffer. And if I lived out the time allotted me in adherence to the Wisdom—enacting my story suddenly by suddenly, desisting from comparison, never pitting the rough against the smooth or the bright against the dull, discerning perfection, beholding the coconut—I might not have to suffer much myself.
“You're wrecking the safari. Damn you, Mason. Give it here! I'm feeling better. Let—”
If I'd cocked the hammer, as I must have or what took place next might never have occurred (“The habit of wishing backward from facts to likelihoods . . .”), I don't remember when I did so, or with what intention. Lately, I've thought I meant to fire wild, but not long ago I was equally convinced that the cocking, if it happened, was the first stage in a plan to force Eff Sr., my partner, and the other hunters to line up before me on the platform and bow one by one and plead their sorry cases, which I would inform them afterward I lacked the standing to adjudicate but did feel qualified to laugh at.
When the rifle discharged, the sulfurous hot fumes jetted straight up my nostrils and cleared my sinuses. I felt gravity claim the gun as I let go of it. I heard no screams, no panicked bustle, nothing; it seemed as though my ears were stuffed with wool. But other senses and faculties intensified. The mathematical wizard lurking in the brain who, in emergencies, calculates such things, such as the number of strides of a particular length that will let you reach the straying toddler before the oncoming mail van runs it over, computed trajectories and velocities and instantly steered my eyes to the black quarter horse rearing up under its rider, Delbert, who was sitting cockeyed in the saddle, madly jerking and swinging his spurred left boot. The horse returned to earth with planted feet and was still for a moment before it arched its back and, with one magnificent twisting buck, somersaulted Delbert into the air. The boot stayed in the stirrup.
A roaring shout from Eff Sr. unplugged my ears. His next shout, unleashed just inches from my shoulder, temporarily deafened me again. The snorting, jerking horse had bounded across the meadow and into the center of a triangle whose corners were made up of three bull bison. The jaws of their otherwise motionle
ss raised heads went on grinding and pulverizing hay as they rather placidly observed the horse's distressed display. The crisis seemed over, though. Delbert had dragged himself over to a pickup and sat with his back against a tire. He rolled up his left pants leg. The sock was red.
The horse continued to kick and jump around, but the bulls looked untroubled. They held their ground and stared.
I turned and, for the first time since our tussle, laid eyes on Elder Stark. A bristling Eff Sr. thumped his heaving rib cage with a stiffly pointed index finger, backed him up a step toward the platform's edge. The admiral and Secretary Barry stood protectively at the old man's sides.
“You have defiled a historic western firearm, you miserable moronic lousy shit. You've crapped on the fucking ghost of Teddy Roosevelt. You had better pray that goddamn gun isn't fucking permanently . . .”
My tearful, nodding partner understood. He turned and gazed down off the platform at the rifle. It lay in a puddle three or four feet off, its legendary barrel under water. Two deep intersecting scratches marred its stock. My partner crouched, swung one leg down off the platform, and hopped onto the ground to save the treasure.
Just then, the black quarter horse flailed in such a way that the boot—still wedged in the stirrup, by some miracle—flew loose and struck a bison on the neck. I was watching because I couldn't watch my partner. His humiliation was just too grievous. I'd hungered to see him laid low for quite some time by then, but around three that morning, in the tepee, toward the end of the grueling shooting lesson, while I was slowly bending his right-hand trigger finger to demonstrate the smooth motions of a good rifleman, pity seized me and all hard feelings melted. He'd despoiled himself, not the Truth, not Bluff, not me. None of those were his to ruin. Most pitiful of all, though, was his notion that he'd mesmerized Eff Sr. and looted his safe of some fraction of its gold without having given fair value in return. He'd traded away almost all he had to trade.
A boot in the neck to a creature of that magnitude—and to one whose reaction to his brother's slaughter had been to go on calmly chewing its cud after nudging the vast carcass with its nose and confirming that, yes, my companion's dead—shouldn't have been much of an annoyance. Then again, I'm not a buffalo. Perhaps the tiny, glancing blow brought back memories of larger insults that its species had absorbed over the centuries. Being stampeded over cliffs, for instance, or being cut down by the hundreds and the thousands by rifles aimed from the windows of tourist trains. I've done some reading since that day, and bison, I've learned, have certain grounds for anger.