Bless the Beasts & Children

by Glendon Swarthout

  The young visitors waited, too. It was a vivid morning. Sun glanced from metal. The high, dry air was crystalline with suspense.

  Then men, women, and children murmured. Down the lane bobbed three brown, four-legged shapes, three toy animals in the distance. Lingering at the little pond to drink, they were driven on into the open ground by other horsemen, waving hats and shouting.

  They paused together, a bull and two cows, fullgrown, confronting the barricade of vehicles and humans. Curious, they tossed their heads. These were semidomesticated buffalo, from four to ten years old. Born on this preserve, fear of men had been bred out of them. Inoculated against disease, they were prime. Fed hay when winter snows covered their browse, they followed a feed truck about like sheep. They had never known the arrow or the lance, the lightning or the fire which crazed their ancestors over cliffs and into swollen rivers, nor had they known, until yesterday, the sound and implication of a gun.

  Now the range between the young woman on the tarpaulin and the three buffalo was less than a hundred yards. She raised the rifle, notching it between her knees, and sighted on the bull. She fired. Dust exploded on the hillside beyond the fence and the three animals exploded into a headlong run toward the main gate. Their speed was incredible. Turned near the gate by riders who galloped after them, they stampeded around the ranchhouse and into the killing ground again, where other horsemen barred their way.

  Ashamed of her marksmanship, the young woman buried her face in her hands. Under her shirt, taut over the shoulders, her body quivered. But as the animals gathered again, stamping, winded by their run, she lifted her head, sighted, and fired. Dust flew from the bull's hide. He leaped straight up, clearing the ground with all four hooves, and dropping, was hit a second time and a third. Still he did not go down. He was massive, he was beautiful, he stood as though made of marble to adorn and fill a fountain of the Renaissance. He lowered head and horns in resignation, extended a thick gray tongue, and suddenly, luridly, from his open mouth a gush of liquid crimson issued, and as he breathed, bubbles of crimson formed about his nostrils, dilating, glazed in sunlight, until they burst in froth. At this first offering of blood a long sigh went up from men and women and children waiting, a tremulous amen of pleasure.

  The young woman fired two more rounds into the bull. He toppled. Applause spattered. Horns honked. Weapon high in victory, she sprang to her feet. Her cheeks were bright with tears. Her face was inspired by a discovery almost carnal.

  A grayhaired man in his sixties, a physician, it was said, took her place on the tarpaulin immediately, and knelt, and sighted. For the two cows seemed to present themselves as targets. They stood beside the bull as though in sorrow, nosing his hump and head and snuffing an odor alien to them. The physician fired. He hit the larger cow in the belly. Her legs stiffened. Arching her tail, she evacuated her bowels. He fired again and she went down, only to rise to meet another bullet. Twice she fell, twice she lurched upright, shaking her head, hide twitching. But she did not bleed. When she foundered at last, her four legs doubled and extended for several minutes as though she were running lying down, running from death in life.

  The remaining animal ran for her life, around the barricade of vehicles, horsemen in pursuit, past the skinning shed, circling the ranchhouse to be opposed by other horsemen, who harried her again to the killing ground.

  The third shooter was called. A boy of fourteen or fifteen threw himself clumsily into the prone position on the canvas. There were shouts of advice—to fire away, to hit 'er in the ear, to hold his water and take his time.

  The boy's rifle seemed as long as he was. It wavered on the prop of his forearms. And he was overeager, firing before properly sighted. He missed, and terrorized, the cow plunged away to race a second complete circuit of the ranchhouse. Driven again to a place near the carcasses of bull and cow, she was entirely winded. Her head sagged, her eyes bulged, her tongue lolled from her mouth to touch the ground. The boy fired. Her hindquarters folded under her, so that she sat up on rigid forelegs. It unnerved the boy. He began to fire round after round. At the impact of the fifth, miraculously the animal heaved herself up and lunging for the wire fence behind her, tried to leap it. She crashed on top and bore it half down under her bulk, forelegs on one side and hind on the other, crabbing, helpless as some sea mammal caught high and dry by a tide, snorting agony as the boy, reloading, put bullets into her until blood was pumped in gouts from her ears and mouth and from beneath her tail.

  Over the impending ceremony he had night sweats for weeks. He lost no weight, however, because he ate to compensate. You could buy or borrow a canned speech, but his father, Sid, insisted on writing one himself, with help from his writers—then put it off until so late that Sammy had insufficient time to memorize. The morning of bar mitzvah came. They left the townhouse on Sixty-Fourth Street for the synagogue. Six hundred people were waiting, more than half of them Sid's big-name show-biz friends. There would be a thousand in the Hotel Taft for the feasting that night, which would cost Sid, he was avid to reveal, ten G's. Sammy read in Hebrew from the Torah and Haftarah and the rabbi made a few remarks of welcome. Then, dressed in a new suit, Sammy took his place at the lectern and began. "My dear rabbi, wonderful parents, family, and friends. On this, the most important day of my life, I have been honored by your presence. And as I look ahead to my manhood, I will cherish your good wishes and fine thoughts. You have given me the strength, the support, the support…" He forgot. He could remember nothing. He went wet all over. His father's face was livid. His mother bowed her head. Instinctively Sammy did one of his father's jokes about the two Gentiles vacationing at Miami Beach. There was no laughter at the punchline. In extremity he rushed on, beginning the one about the Jew who stowed away aboard the Mayflower before Sid Shecker reached him.

  What the young visitors had happened upon was the second day of the annual three-day "hunt" staged and supervised by the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Of the sixty million buffalo estimated to range the American West a century ago, there remained but a few thousand now, surviving in small herds which were confined to preserves and managed either by the various states or by the federal government. To maintain a scientific ratio between the natural increase in numbers of animals and the limited areas available for their exclusive habitat, it was necessary to "thin" or "harvest" each herd periodically. The two herds in Arizona, one on the Kaibab, north of the Grand Canyon, and this one, near Flagstaff, were reduced in alternate years from 250 to approximately 150 "head" of healthy, calf-producing cows and sufficient bulls. Ninety were being harvested this summer, thirty a day for three days, by Arizona sportsmen.

  It was not called a "hunt." The hunters were referred to as "shooters." There were invariably more shooters than buffalo to satisfy them. Several hundred applied by mail each year for a permit, enclosing a check for forty dollars. A drawing was held, and the first ninety applications drawn were granted permits and divided into three groups, one for each day. The lucky ones were instructed where and when to report and informed that, while most of the meat would be distributed among the kitchens of state institutions, for their forty dollars they would be allowed to keep for personal use the head, hide, a forequarter, and the heart and liver of their kill. On the day appointed, the permit holders' names were called in the order in which they had been drawn. Three animals were released from the pens each half hour, and the shooting began.

  On this day, the second, the first three buffalo were now dead. After the shooters had walked out to admire their trophies, the carcasses were hoisted into the bed of a pickup with a tripod winch, driven to the skinning shed, hoisted again by means of windup winches and cables attached to rear ankles, and three teams of rubber-aproned skinners went to work with knives and electric saws. By this time another shooter was ready on the tarpaulin, the horsemen were positioned, and three more head were shouted from the pens.

  To kill thirty buffalo required between six and seven hours. At that close range, a single ro
und in the ear would have ended an animal as instantly and humanely as cattle were destroyed by packing companies, but male or female, old or young, skilled marksmen or weekend shotgunners, strange things happened to Americans when they attempted to fix in their sights the most American of all species. Shooting from less than a hundred yards at enormous stationary targets, firing heavy .30-06 and .30-30 caliber weapons, they were somehow emotionally or psychically incapable of killing well.

  They gutshot.

  They blasted horns from heads.

  They blinded.

  They crippled, shattering hocks and fetlocks.

  They bled buffalo to death before striking a vital organ.

  They enfiladed the killing ground with fire as pitiless as it was futile.

  A festive atmosphere developed. The hunt became at once a school picnic, a revival meeting, a civic barbecue, a patriotic ceremony, and a carnival of slaughter. Every sense of sight, hearing, smell, and decency was overwhelmed. The pure air, rent by explosion and echo, grew foul with powder. Victory horns bugled. Car radios brayed music and commercials. Cenotaphs of beer cans were erected. Children romped about to glean the bullet casings. Electric saws screamed through bone and the floor of the skinning shed ran red.

  Dripping, still warm, forequarters were brought to the refrigerator trucks. The thickness of hump steaks was specified. Deposits on lockers were made.

  Beyond the meat, nothing was wasted. Heads were to be mounted, hooves made into ashtrays, tails into fly-whisks, hides into auto robes. A distinctive coin purse, it was learned, could be fashioned from the scrotum of a bull.

  And one by one, driven to exhaustion, trapped by fence and horses and bewilderment, under an immaculate sky the mythic creatures died. They died not in mercy, not in the majesty which was their due, but as the least of life, accursed of nature. They died in the dust of insult and the spittle of lead.

  There was more here than profaned the eye or ear or nose or heart. There was more here than mere destruction. The American soul itself was involved, its anthropology.

  We are born with buffalo blood upon our hands. In the prehistory of us all, the atavistic beasts appear. They graze the plains of our subconscious, they trample through our sleep, and in our dreams we cry out our damnation. We know what we have done, we violent people. We know that no species was created to exterminate another, and the sight of their remnant stirs in us the most profound lust, the most undying hatred, the most inexpiable guilt. A living buffalo mocks us. It has no place or purpose. It is a misbegotten child, a monster with which we cannot live and which we cannot live without. Therefore we slay, and slay again, for while a single buffalo remains, the sin of our fathers, and hence our own, is imperfect. But the slaughter of the buffalo is part of something larger. It is as though the land of Canaan into which we were led was too divine, and until we have done it every violence, until we have despoiled and murdered and dirtied every blessing, until we have erased every reminder of our original rape, until we have washed our hands of the blood of every lamb in the blood of every other, we shall be unappeased. It is as though we are too proud to be beholden to Him. We cannot bear the goodness of God.

  12

  From infancy, Stephen and Billy Lally were contestants for the affection of their parents. Like lapdogs they barked and begged for tidbits tossed now to one, now fingerfed to the other. If one sibling learned a trick, such as regression, and was rewarded, the other learned to do a different trick. This is what the Lally brothers got for Christmas when Stephen was eleven, Billy nine: identical toy tanks and supporting armament; identical space suits and helmets; identical arrays of indoor and outdoor games; identical spincast rods and reels; identical cowboy costumes complete with six-shooters, hats, and boots; identical portable record players; identical swim fins and snorkels; identical assortments of Dinky toy sports cars; identical extra equipment for their identical electric trains; and identical racing bikes, except that one was red, one gold. Then their father and mother went off to an eggnog party. Stephen got the red bike but wanted the gold. Billy would not trade. On his parents' return, Stephen had a temper tantrum, screaming and rocking and butting his head against the wall. To console him, his mother promised to exchange the red bike for a gold and his father flew the family to Aspen to ski. After that, their parents left them with the butler, the maids, the chauffeur, the cook, and a governess, to winter in Morocco.

  After the first buffalo had been killed, they told Wheaties they were ready to go, they had seen enough. After the second, they insisted. After the third, they implored. He laughed at them. In a pig's ear he'd go. It was their idea, not his. They'd talked him into driving them all over Coconino County to see some real buffalo, it was the only chance they'd ever have—well, he had, they had, and if they didn't like it, they could lump it. He did. He thought it about the best thing he'd ever bumped into, better than a three-ring circus, and he intended to stay till every damn one of those buff was full of lead and skinned.

  At the noon break they were unable to eat. Wheaties gobbled the stale food leftover from the camp-out.

  Not until midafternoon and the last animal had gone down in beer and agony did they start for Box Canyon Boys Camp. They refused to sit in the cab with their junior counselor. The six rode in the truck bed, huddled speechless and grayfaced among the rolled sleeping bags. The journey seemed endless to them, through Flagstaff and Jerome and over Mingus Mountain and finally, as they paused for a stoplight by the courthouse in Prescott, Lally 2, the youngest, broke the seal of nausea.

  "How many's still left?"

  They knew what he meant.

  "Thirty," Teft said. "For tomorrow."

  "Where do they keep 'em?"

  "Down in those pens," Shecker said.

  They went on to camp, into the sighing ponderosa and the whoopdedo of the other boys, but they had nothing to say to anyone, they kept to themselves. After unloading the truck they went directly to the corral to care for their horses, currying them and feeding them and talking to them and dallying until the supper gong clanged. It was as though they could not abide the company of humans.

  Lawrence Teft, III, was the loudest tooth-grinder of the lot. Cotton listened to him many a night, surprised he did not abrade them from their sockets, wondering what savage inner strife the habit manifested. Teft cried out much, too, in his sleep, the protestations vehement and garbled. When he was twelve he stole his mothers purse. It wasn't money, he had a liberal allowance. He could or would give no reason. Last year, when he was thirteen, he went one night for a jaunt in his father's Imperial, driving from Mamaroneck to White Plains, where, at an interchange on the Westchester Expressway, he collided with two other cars. Again he could or would not explain his motive, standing mute, hands in pockets, smiling that oblique, tilted smile. His father paid the damages and was at pains to see that his cars were thereafter garaged without keys. Two months later Lawrence Teft, III, hotwired and stole a neighbor's car. When it ran out of gas in Queens, he stole another. The police picked him up in a third car on the New Jersey Turnpike near Elizabeth at noon the next day. He was booked for speeding, reckless driving, driving without a license, and grand theft, vehicle, the latter charge reduced to joy-riding. To unravel the escapade and keep it out of the newspapers and juvenile courts required three weeks and considerable expense, but his father was a general partner in an investment house in Wall Street.

  No sooner had they finished supper, forcing food down, and stepped out of the chow cabin, when Goodenow puked. Later, until lights out, they wandered alone among the pines, strangers to each other, ashamed of themselves and of their kind.

  It had been five minutes of eleven by his wrist when Cotton woke from his bad dream. Listening for radios, counting four, not five, and finding the sleeping bag under the bed unoccupied, he roused the Bedwetters with the news that Lally 2 was gone.

  13

  They wallowed.

  For a stricken minute more in the blood and mud they tried to stand,
gagging, and to assist the helpless Goodenow. Finally, hauling him by a wrist, they were able to crawl to dry sand and get him on his feet and stagger from the killing ground to the small pond, where they flopped and rubbed hands underwater, making cups of them and splashing filth from their chins and scrubbing it from knees and elbows.

  They sat another minute, their hands and faces dripping. Nothing stirred about the ranchhouse or among the vehicles and tents. The next day's shooters slept well. From far out on the preserve an eerie requiem went up, and they got goosebumps. It was coyotes, howling soul.

  Cotton started them along the fenced lane down which the meat was shooed from the pens, but moving slowly, almost reluctantly. It was well after three in the a.m.

  The Bedwetters had never had a real plan, only a simple objective: no matter who, no matter what, to free from the pens the thirty animals doomed to die in the morning. But the fact was, none of them knew what the "pens" were. They had assumed some kind of enclosure like a corral, with a gate which had only to be opened. It could not be this gate, they realized, approaching the end of the lane. That would merely let the herd onto the killing ground, where it could be mowed down. There must be another gate, on the far side of the pens, through which they had been rounded up before the hunt. Opening that one would free them to scatter again over the range, reprieved from execution for two years. But finding that gate, and getting the prisoners through it, they now recognized, might be about as easy as playing ice hockey in hell.

  They groped for the gate. They stopped dead in their tracks. They heard it, smelled it, felt it. They were in the presence of great beasts.

  It was very dark. They could see nothing between the bars. But they heard snortings and stompings and in their nostrils was an odor rank and fierce and primal and suddenly, with a rumble and roar, something the size of a dinosaur came at them and a hot breath slapped their faces and they tumbled backward, barking shins and dropping the head and horns and tripping over the .22. One of the bulls had rushed them.