Shortgrass Song

by Mike Blakely

  Smokey Wilson finally returned from the river, riding at a lope toward his companions. “It looks good for us,” he said, getting down from his horse. With his boot heel he drew a crooked line across a bare spot of ground. “This is the river,” he said. “There’s a bluff on the north side where you can see nearly the whole camp. They’ve got lodges set up all along the north bank.” He pointed at his map as he reported.

  “How many lodges?” Washita asked.

  “I counted sixteen, but it was pretty dark. I may have missed a few.”

  “How far from the camp is this bluff you’re talkin’ about?”

  “About a quarter mile. Easy range for the big guns. And there’s hardly a tree for cover between the bluff and the camp. All the thick timber’s on the south side of the river, along this bend.”

  “Where are their horses?”

  “Grazin’ in the canyons upstream, a good half mile off.”

  Washita chuckled bitterly and got down to draw his battle lines on Smokey’s map. First he put three dots where Smokey had said the bluff was. “Me and Smokey and Badger will get on this bluff where we can shoot down on their camp.” He drew triangles to represent the tepees. “We’ll take two guns each and a man to load ’em for us. Mort, you can load for me. Corley, you load for Badger, and Smith, you’ll load for Smokey. Bring some canteens to cool the barrels. We’ll have to shoot fast.”

  “What are the rest of us skinners gonna do?” George asked in a shaky voice.

  “You’ll charge the camp from the south at daybreak, push ’em out, and stir ’em up so we can pick off the braves with our buffalo guns. We’ll give each of you a revolver and a repeating rifle. Holcomb, your mount’s the best in camp. You’ll lead the charge.”

  Caleb felt the mettle of fear and pride surge through him.

  “Caleb’s my partner,” Seth blurted. “Let George load for Badger. I want to make the charge with Caleb.”

  Washita looked at George, who nodded in agreement, glad to get out of the charge. “All right,” Washita said. He drew Caleb’s line of attack in the map. “Holcomb, your skinners will sneak up on the camp from the south through these trees. At first light, charge across the river and into the camp. Drive ’em all to the north, then we’ll have at ’em with the Big Fifties in this open area between the camp and the bluff. Don’t let ’em get into the trees or we’ll lose ’em.”

  Caleb stared blankly at the map.

  “Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I’ll leave it up to you when to charge. Wait till you can see to shoot, but don’t wait for them to wake up. Remember, when they figure out where we are, they’ll try to pick us off of the bluff. I’m counting on your men to keep up a steady cross fire.”

  Caleb nodded, wondering how he had come to be trusted with the attack. Was it because he owned a good horse? Because he was a hard worker? Certainly it had nothing to do with him looking like a leader of men. He was just a skinner, a drifter, a left-handed guitar player. If he had stayed home, he would have seen none of this. But he couldn’t stay home. He didn’t belong there. It wasn’t his home. He had no home. What else could he have done? He just had to keep going.

  In an hour the hunters were in position on the bluff and Caleb was leading his squad of skinners toward the tree line. He reined his mount in when they passed the first few trees. “Let’s wait here till it gets lighter,” he whispered.

  “What for?” Seth asked.

  “I don’t want to get too close before it’s light enough to shoot. A dog might start barkin’, or the Indians might hear us comin’ and get away.”

  Seth sighed and looked at the sky. “When the last star dies out,” he said, “we’ll start sneakin’ through the trees until we see the lodges. Then we’ll charge.”

  “Good idea.”

  They watched the sky. When the light of the morning’s last surviving star had faded away, Caleb whispered his orders. “Spread out. Get about twenty yards abreast of each other, and ride at a walk through the trees. Stop when you see the tepees, and wait for me to give the signal to charge.”

  “And don’t forget what the son of a bitches did to poor old Elam,” Seth added.

  “All we have to do is keep ’em out of the trees,” Caleb said. “Herd ’em to the north.”

  The riders could barely see one another as they rode through the timber. Caleb thought they made a terrible amount of noise, stepping on limbs, kicking rocks, and raking past branches, but he hoped the sound of the river would cover their approach. The odor of smoke came to him, and he knew he was close. He pulled his revolver from the holster.

  Spotting the first lodges through the trees, he stopped to take in the lay of the land ahead. The river was running swift, but the riffles told him it was shallow all the way across. Nothing stirred in the camp. Not even the dogs knew attackers were near. Beyond the bristling peaks of the lodges, the dark bluff loomed. He could barely see the three hunters there, kneeling behind their rifle rests, their loaders ready with the spare guns. He looked to both sides along the tree line to find Seth and the other skinners waiting. There was no use in putting it off any longer. He nodded and spurred Powder River.

  The six bloody young men charged from the trees, jumped a small cutbank, and splashed into the river. Seth released a blood-curdling scream and Caleb fired the first shot through the peak of a tepee.

  The camp came alive like a shaken hive of bees as the revolvers fired into it. Washita’s plan worked horribly well. Every Indian that ran from the lodges turned north, away from the river. The openings of the tepees faced south, so the squad of skinners could see almost every Comanche who came out. Bullets punctured the cured hides all around the tent flaps.

  The skinners halted between the river and the camp and pulled carbines from their saddle scabbards. Caleb saw blood on the ground but didn’t know who had been hit. He could hear the cries of babies, the screams of women, the shouts of warriors. “Go through the camp!” he said to his men. “Spread out.”

  They moved slowly among the tepees, taking wild shots at fleeing figures in blankets. As far as Caleb knew, the Indians hadn’t returned a single shot. Then a bullet cracked a lodge pole behind his head. He saw a brave with a repeater standing between two lodges. He turned Powder River and shouldered his carbine, but the warrior already had a bead drawn on him. A buffalo gun boomed on the bluff and the warrior jerked forward, bits flying from him.

  Screams and shouts trebled as the Indians milled in terror. The hunters had waited patiently until almost the entire band was in the open flats under the bluff. Now they rifled balls of lead mercilessly down on the Comanche.

  Caleb rode toward the dead warrior to keep the other braves away from the repeater on the ground. Halfway there, two small figures darted into the open. A shriveled woman with long shocks of hair pulled a naked, dark-skinned boy by the arm as they ran. She stooped, grabbed the rifle by the barrel, dragged it away. Caleb aimed but couldn’t fire. Something in the woman’s gait struck a deep chord of terror in him.

  They had swept the camp of Indians and were raking them with a reckless cross fire. The Comanche were caught in the flats between the buffalo guns and the repeaters of the skinners. Few of the braves had had time to load their weapons. As the carnage mounted, the riflemen emptied their magazines and retired behind tepees to reload. The cross fire wilted, and Caleb knew he should have told his men to stagger their fire to maintain a constant barrage. The few Indians who were fighting back now turned their guns on the bluffs.

  Clumsily, Caleb shifted rounds from his cartridge belt to the loading port of his Winchester, trying at the same time to hold Powder River behind a Comanche lodge. He glanced toward the flats, then at his men.

  “They’re tryin’ to move upstream!” Seth shouted. “Come on, Caleb, let’s turn ’em back toward the bluff!”

  Looking between the tepees, he saw the Indians scrambling to his left, running low behind bushes, carrying dead and wounded. He turne
d Powder River and trotted behind the last row of lodges standing between him and the Indians. As he rode, he caught glimpses of the scrawny woman with the rifle, leading the naked boy by the arm. Some old, inexplicable disgust rose in him. The guns roared like cannons from the bluff.

  “Hurry up!” Seth shouted.

  He spurred the gelding to a lope, trying to flank the Indians and herd them like cattle back under the Big Fifties. Suddenly a barrage of gunfire erupted from the bushes, and Seth’s horse went down.

  “I’m shot!” Seth shouted as he jumped from the animal with a carbine in his hand.

  The Indians had made a stand with the few weapons they owned. Caleb turned Powder River broadside and returned their fire. An arrow struck Seth’s dead horse. The rest of the skinners rode up, increasing the resistance, and the warriors began to fall back. Seth crawled behind his dead horse and aimed at the fleeing Comanche.

  The woman rose again, and Caleb saw her face. He knew her. She aimed the rifle as he stared in horror. Seth fired, and she crumpled behind the bushes. Then the naked boy rose with the gun, shooting it from the hip. The barrel swept across the line of white men. Caleb shouldered his Winchester, aimed at the boy, but froze. He recognized something in the dark skin, the frightened face. The boy’s hair didn’t grow long like an Indian’s. It was curly, cropped short.

  He watched the line of the rifle barrel become a point as the boy levered another round into it. He was too young for war. Caleb closed his eyes and jerked his trigger. He heard another rifle shoot. When he opened his eyes the boy was gone.

  The screaming voices faded. Smoke tainted the air. The Indians had escaped into a canyon upstream.

  “How bad are you shot?” Caleb asked, riding next to Seth’s dead mount.

  “Missed the bone,” he said, holding his bleeding leg. “Got my horse in the lights, I guess.”

  Caleb jumped down. “Get on Powder River. I’ll ride behind you if we have to make a run.”

  Seth stepped into the stirrup with his good leg, wincing with pain as he swung the wounded limb over. “I don’t think they’ll come back. They’re whipped pretty bad. Let’s go look at that squaw I killed. She was fixin’ to shoot me.” He reined the gelding toward the bodies.

  Caleb followed and stood over the dead woman. She looked so old. It couldn’t be her, he thought. Snake Woman was younger than Buster. This bent and wrinkled squaw looked like a great-grandmother. He grasped her lower jaw and opened her mouth.

  “What in hell are you doin’?” Seth said from the back of the horse.

  “She ain’t got no tongue.” The sickness rose in him again, but he choked it back.

  Seth shrugged. “That little kid looks like he’s got colored blood. I don’t know which one of us it was that shot him, but it was just in time to save your brains from flyin’ out the back of your head. He looked like he had a bead on you.”

  “It was you that shot him,” Caleb said. “I missed him clean.”

  “Really? Damn, I just took a wild shot.”

  The eyes of young Medicine Horse were open and staring at nothing. He had Buster’s features from the square jaw to the high forehead. A single bullet hole was centered in his chest.

  “I missed him, I know I did,” Caleb insisted. How could he tell Buster? What would he say? “It was you that shot him, Seth.” He should have stayed in Colorado to live with Buster, instead of coming to Texas to kill his son. Why did he ever leave? Was it that bad at home? Right now he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t call to mind what had caused him to drift.

  They heard shots in the distance upriver. Washita and Smokey were riding down from the bluff, shouting. A rumble came from the canyon, muffling screams of the Indians, and a hundred horses burst onto the flats.

  “Trap the horses against the bluff!” Washita Jack shouted, riding into the squad of skinners. “Badger and Mort went around to stampede ’em through the Indians. Load your guns and kill ’em!”

  “Kill the horses?”

  “Yes, kill every damn one of ’em.”

  The skinners yelped like Comanche and spread out to herd the Indian ponies against the bluff. Seth sat on Powder River, feeling the pain of his bullet wound more sharply now. Caleb stood by him …

  “How bad is that leg?” Washita asked.

  “It’s just a hole,” Seth said. “Missed the bone.”

  “You’re lucky you decided to charge with your partner instead of load for Badger,” Washita said, looking up at the bluff.

  “George?”

  “Yeah, George. Some buck got off a lucky shot and hit him square in the head. I think it was a buffalo gun. Probably Elam’s. It would have been you if you hadn’t chose to stick with your partner and make the charge.”

  “Maybe,” Seth said. “You never know.”

  The rifles had started firing into the herd of Indian horses, and Caleb looked at the ground between his feet. He was sick with the squeals of wounded horses, the death of George, and the killing of Buster’s flesh and blood.

  “What happened to the cross fire?” Washita asked.

  Caleb looked up. “We all ran out of shells at the same time.”

  Washita smirked. “Next time you’ll know better. Anyway, y’all fought well for greenhorns, and we slaughtered a mess of ’em. After we burn their lodges and shoot their horses, it’ll be a hard winter for the ones that lived.”

  Ten Indians were found dead under the bluff. Only two were women, and one a child, although four of the warriors killed were scarcely older than boys. Washita estimated that the Indians had probably carried away another dozen casualties. On the battleground, among the carcasses of Indian ponies and the corpses of Comanche, Smokey Dean Wilson found Elam Joiner’s buffalo gun in the death grip of a Comanche brave.

  * * *

  They fought the battle all over again around the campfire that night. The victors grunted sadly over the loss of George but burst into fits of laughter as Seth told his version, drunk as he was on wound-numbing whiskey.

  For once, Caleb didn’t mind another storyteller stealing his thunder. He felt strangely out of place among the celebrants. He tried to shovel all the credit over to Seth. “If he hadn’t killed that squaw and that boy at the end of the fight, one of them would have shot one of us for sure. And wounded in the leg, too.”

  But Caleb was forced to share in the glory. He had, after all, led the charge on the camp and fired the first shot of the battle. As he lay under the starry sky that night, the whole bloody scene played before his eyes again. He had to keep telling himself the Indians deserved it for what they had done to Elam.

  There were guards posted, but he couldn’t get to sleep for worry about Indians attacking in the night. When he imagined them coming, he saw Snake Woman leading them, impossible though it was. He finally dozed off and dreamed of dying horses.

  They took George’s body back to the South Wichita camp the next day for burial. They didn’t intend to leave him on the Pease, where the Indians could dig him up and do what they had done to Elam.

  When the party finally got back to the business of hides, Washita Jack decided he would make one of the skinners a hunter. With Elam gone, and Frost freighting hides, and the skinners becoming more efficient all the time, the party was in need of another sure shot. To determine which skinner would get the promotion, he proposed a shooting contest.

  He had Mort cut circles of buffalo hide the size of dinner plates, one for each skinner, and staked them against a hill four hundred paces away. After each round of shooting, he rode to look at the targets. The skinners who missed their marks remained skinners. The ones who punctured their hide circles stayed in the contest for another round.

  After only three rounds, the field had narrowed to two.

  “Either way, it’s gonna break up our partnership,” Caleb said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Seth replied. “Maybe we’ll both miss.”

  Caleb laughed as he slid a fresh cartridge into the breech of the Sharps rifle. “I k
now you better than to think you’d miss on purpose for my sake. I wouldn’t do it for you. I want to get out of the skinnin’ business too bad. Grippin’ that knife all day is ruinin’ my touch on the guitar strings.”

  “It’s ruinin’ my touch for tits,” Seth said, “and I ain’t talkin’ about milkin’ no cows.” He sank awkwardly to the ground, still favoring his wounded leg, and rested his rifle barrel on the tripod he had made of stiff willow switches bound with rawhide.

  The muzzles licked the prairie air with quick black tongues. Washita rode back from the targets and announced that Caleb Holcomb was the camp’s new hunter. He was given Elam’s Sharps rifle to kill with.

  Seth shook his hand. “Good shootin’, partner. Now, just remember. We want all neck shots, and don’t get greedy. Don’t do like some hide hunters that don’t know when to quit.”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Caleb said. “If I kill more than you can skin in a day, I’ll skin the leftovers myself.”

  SIXTY

  For hours he had listened to Badger Burton’s guns rumble two miles away. The sound carried sharp through the crisp air of autumn on the plains. Badger used two guns so he could shoot one while the other cooled, and kill twice as fast. He had fired three shots for every one of Caleb’s, and Caleb had already put fifteen buffalo on the ground. It sounded as if Badger had finally found his stand.

  Caleb could see thousands of buffalo from his position in a clump of bushes under a ridge. The herd he had in range upwind consisted of only about a hundred animals, but across the far wrinkles in the prairie, he could see scores of black masses moving against the dead brown grass.

  He leaned against a small bank of dirt cut vertically in the hill by autumn rains. The Sharps rifle lay across his lap, breech open, cooling. As the herd milled, he kept his eyes on the cows that sniffed the blood of their dead sisters. One of them would probably turn from the herd in a few seconds.

  Badger sent another blast echoing across the wide valley of the South Wichita.