by Peter Bowen
“Wherever they sold ya that goddamned mask a Luther Kelly go take it back, he’s a lots uglier and they orter give a bottle of stink out with the mask they want to fool his friends.”
Buffalo squinted hard at Lucretia, who was laughing into the back of her hand.
“Pretty lady,” he said. “Them men your momma warned you about? He’s it. He’s all of ’em.”
“My wife,” I said, for the first time.
Buffalo went from comic to courtly so fast I couldn’t see the damn blur. He bowed to Lucretia and offered her his arm and said, “Let us go somewheres quiet and never mind him. I’ll call the sheriff my own self.”
We took Buffalo up to our suite and sent for drinks and seegars. We talked of old friends, Washakie finally dying, when it was sure he’d outlive us all, this and that.
“Buffalo here has been trying to cross buffalo with cattle for thirty years. Soon as he can get a live calf out of it he’s in business.”
“That’s about right,” said Buffalo. “I don’t like giving up. It means having to think of something new to do.”
I asked what he was doin’ here, and he said he was a consultant. I asked what he was doin’ with a job the name of which he probably can’t even spell, and dressed like a dustmop for it at that.
There was a knock at the door and when I opened it the manager came in, oozing oil, and said, “You are needed, Mr. Jones.”
Buffalo motioned for us to come and we follered along, tramping the full length of the downstairs and out the back, where I heard the sounds a boar grizzly makes when it wants to eat the world.
Buffalo took a lantern and walked out to the dark. A huge bear hung by one foot from a Douglas fir well bent—I thought that Buffalo had set the record for size on snares. A steel cable hung down and the bear hung from it, clawing the air and time to time curling up and biting the cable.
“They needed a discouragement consultant,” said Buffalo, peeling off his coat. He picked up a ten-foot lodgepole with a whittled grip and walked over to the bear and proceeded to beat on it like the damn thing was a dirty rug and Easter was next Sunday.
Buffalo pounded on that thousand-pound critter for a good long time and the bear’s growls were getting thinner and not near so convincing. Then they flat turned to bawls.
Buffalo stepped over to the fir and pulled on something and the bear slid down to earth. The cable come off the foot. The bear sat up.
“And don’t come back ya son of a bitch!” yelled Buffalo, running at the bear and waving the club.
The grizzly gave a squeal of pure terror and run as fast as it could go, off into the night.
“You just got to know how to talk to ’em,” said Buffalo, with his hands spread wide. “It’s easy, if you just know how to talk to ’em.”
23
TEETHADORE WASN’T PLANNING on a great long hunt—just two weeks. Hardly time to render even a single species extinct, but the cares of office weighed on him and how would it look if he was up here shooting the last of the mountain boomers and the Swiss invaded us or something?
I waved to Lucretia and she waved back and Buffalo Jones stood behind her looking innocent—he was a gent and she would have a good time. There was much yet to see on day rides wasn’t all covered with sandwich wrappers and beer bottles. There’s a funny thing Americans do: they think if it’s beautiful throwing garbage on it makes it even purtier.
Teethadore had a camp set up big enough for a cavalry division including a Professor of Taxidermy who would tenderly care for the heads and hides of them things Teddy and his fellers shot. There was a feller named Burroughs who was a “naturalist” who shot everything that flew, hopped, crawled, scratched, whistled, tweeted, growled, roared, or just sat there picking at itself.
We were to leave in the morning, all animal matter in miles having been done right in. Teddy seemed happy to see me, clapped me on the back and said he’d brung me a present.
My eyes narrowed some.
He’d had this made up custom, he said.
Cold drops of sweat poured down my spine.
So he hands me a package all fancy wrapped says “Tiffany” on it and I looked it over careful trying to spot the trigger that would set off the bomb that would leave me hairless and without eyelashes for months. Didn’t seem to be one. I opened the package, pointing as much of it as I could at Teddy and inside wrapped in black velvet was a custom hunting knife in a silver sheath looked a lot like something you’d give a Bulgarian field marshal in gratitude over having lost only half the army ’fore he got to the war.
“Jesus,” I said, picking it up, “is there a poodle and a yacht to go with this thing?”
Teethadore was hurt. He always took his rifles and shotguns down to Tiffany’s to have fancy engraving and such put on ’em. He’d take an eight-pound shotgun in and triple the weight and wonder why he shot under everything flew past.
“I appreciate your efforts, Kelly,” said Teddy.
“Ain’t made any yet,” I pointed out. “Now what poor critter minding its own business up there are you set on exterminating?”
“Hunting is manly and puts us in touch with our forebears.”
“Your forebears would have starved or fallen off cliffs,” I said. “Ain’t none of you survived till they invented eyeglasses.”
I was getting dangerous, and he knew it. I knew a lot more about Kettle Hill and the glorious Rough Riders than he’d like let out. There was about two dozen newsmen running about, eager for a good quote.
“Ah, a word, Luther,” says Teethadore, walking away from the scribbling leeches. “I have perhaps treated you unfairly from time to time. You need have no fear of further requests upon the part of the government. Prior to coming here I burned all the records ... but, you son of a bitch, if you set me up with the reporters I’ll rewrite the records from memory and have you off to Ougadgeedutphu to study tribal warfare.”
“Fair enough,” I says.
“I wish to shoot a mountain goat,” said Teddy.
“Why?” I said. “I got you three.”
I shot them for him, truth to tell. The hardest part of being a guide is keeping your sights on the critter and pulling the trigger the same time the dude pulls his. It’s a gift, you have to be born with it.
“The taxidermist was incompetent. Moths have wreaked havoc with my trophies.”
Hard for me to understand how a feller can get so Shakespearean over a couple of bug-chewed goat heads, but Teddy was larger than life, which to me means just a freak of nature.
In the morning we set out with a pack train would’ve done about right for an expedition to conquer Mexico. There was six hunters and then cooks and wranglers and the goddamned journalists coming along behind like gulls behind a sardine boat.
There was two other guides, young pups who looked at me half awed and half belligerent. Second night out I dragged them off to a nice remote rock where we drank whiskey and wondered how many of these here mighty hunters we could bump off cliffs or leave as diversions to charging grizzlies. They was good boys, and we sort of mapped out our hunting.
I took Teethadore and a British feller named Plumley up high for goats. Goat hunting is easy. They are never attacked from above and are sure there ain’t anything up there. So you get above them and roll a rock down and they will be in your lap in seconds. For us old farts this meant a lot of puffing and hauling to get us up top. Plumley looked like an eggplant with white sideburns and Teddy’s grin was sort of frozen in pain. We snuck to the edge and looked down. There was about thirty head of goat down there.
“When we stop gasping and can see some I’ll lever a rock over and then you fellers stand ready. They’ll come over the top in a goatly wave.”
“Grim country here,” said Plumley. “Never seen anything like it.”
He was used to potting tame grouse on the piss-flat moors of Scotland.
In a few minutes we had quit heaving, had some breath back, and our eyes didn’t have dancing blurs on the
m. I tipped a big chunk of rock up on the edge, nodded, and sent it on over.
It weighed a couple hundred pounds, and it made one hell of a crash first time it hit and skidded, and then it went dead into a big spur way the hell down with the goats and sort of exploded. There was chips flying every which way, and I saw six goats fold up and fall to their deaths, casualties of flying bits of rock. The others started up as quick as they could and were bounding from hoofhold to hoofhold, I swear the damn things could get all four feet on a postage stamp.
The Anglo-American Union saw to their artillery, and I stepped back out of the line of fire and line of goat.
The goats busted over the top like popcorn jumping out a pan, and Teethadore and Plumley blazed away and they hit not one hair on one goat.
This awesome marksmanship caused me to grin wide like a shark. Teethadore was about ready to jump on over—I wouldn’t have stopped him—and Plumley was looking at his rifle with deep distaste.
“Bugger all,” said Plumley. I thought it a fair assessment.
I heard the three paced shots of trouble. Someone was hurt down there and any in hearing were honorbound to come to his aid.
“We’d best get down,” I said. I started, leaving them to pick along behind as best they could. All I had by way of guns was a Colt, I wasn’t going to treat Teddy as kindly as I had long ago.
Going down a mountain is easy, if you haven’t a pack on—with a pack it’s harder than going up—so I hopped and let gravity speed me along and when I got clear down to the base of the mountain I turned right toward the long high cliff the goats had been on.
I hadn’t heard any more shots so I wasn’t sure where the trouble was. Then I saw a circle of men up front and I come up to them to find I had committed manslaughter. A newspaperman I had found particularly obnoxious had been hit by a dead goat traveling at a fast speed, and the goat drove the scribbler into the ground sort of like a tent stake and up to the knees at that. The goat then sort of flattened the feller every which way. The mess sort of looked like a big strawberry shortcake with a dollop of hairy whipped cream on top.
“His editor will never believe this,” someone said. A pretty good epitaph for a newspaperman, I thought.
Someone fat and breathless come running down the trail from the cliff, screaming that there was another one. We left the past-help newsie and went on to find yet another murder-by-goat which had been made at a sharp angle, so all was left was a wide red smear amid the scattered pencils.
These here reporters were going to be closed-coffin jobs, for sure. I wondered if I had picked off any others. (I hadn’t had such a soul-satisfying day since Moses took to the weeds.)
Teethadore and Plumley wheezed into the disaster area, and Teddy was perspiring like a longshoreman and blind from the water on his glasses. Teddy walked right up on top of the goat which was on top of the reporter and pulled off his glasses and asked questions while the blood stuck to his boots.
I folded my arms and looked. Damn, the great have a dignity unmatched by us mere mortals, I remember thinking, I hope he gets stuck there.
Plumley harrumphed for a while and then he pointed out to TR that he might better stand somewheres else and make his speech as he didn’t look so very good where he was. Teddy squelched off to one side and put on his glasses and glared at the mess. How dare this son of a bitch commit such an unpleasantness! On one of TR’s hunts! The nerve of the bastard, probably went to Yale! And here he was dead and TR couldn’t even rescue him!
I was polishing my fingernails. Unarmed man drops rock off cliff, killing six mountain goats and two reporters, while the rulers of All the World That Matters blaze away, missing all.
A couple camp tenders come with some tarps and began rolling the reporter and his goat up—it would take a trained anatomist to separate the two—and behind them come some packers who was trying to keep straight faces while they loaded up the mules they was leading.
Everybody but me took their hats off while the mules with the goo went by. Since I had managed this I sort of thought it would be ill-mannered to start showing respect I didn’t feel.
“There’s still four trophy goats up there,” I said to TR.
He sent some of the younger packers after them.
Teddy spent the afternoon expressing deepest sympathy for the families of the departed. I spent the afternoon whittling and chuckling, for it sure don’t take much to amuse me.
That evening Teethadore allowed as how he would like to find one of them most fearsome carnivores, the grizzly bear. I had noticed some fresh sign down toward the little river, of a huge boar with a broke claw on his right hind foot, which was probably infected and paining him.
The bear come into camp about midnight that night, and the horses and mules went berserk out of terror and knocked down the pole corral and pulled up the picket stakes. I had my .405 Winchester and I racked six slugs into that bear before he went down. At fifty-odd, I was slowing down some and it occurred to me that many more of these situations and there’d be the one I wasn’t equal to.
Poor Teddy had run out in his Union suit to shoot the bear, but when he went through the tent flap his glasses got knocked off and all he could do was beller cuss words and grope around for them. A couple other folks in the tent run right over him and his dignity was low enough now to go through a door without opening it.
When morning come and the bear was all laid out where I’d knocked him down the reporters were on him like terns on a dead whale. Clambering up top and looking at the claws and the fangs, they were damaging the coat. I didn’t care much one way or another, and I took great pleasure in asking Teethadore what His Lordship’s pleasure was in the way of animals for the middle of the coming night.
Teddy grated out how he would like to shoot a trophy grizzly and I said that it was impossible, this was the last one, all the ones left were about the size of Jack Russell terriers and he’d have to be content to own a trophy could fit comfortable in a washtub.
Teddy stomped off and Sir Beresford Plumley come and he was to prove himself a gentleman.
“Mr. Kelly,” he said, “is it possible this trip could become even more ridiculous and fatal?”
“Dead certainty,” I says. “Teethadore drags disaster behind him like a skunk does stink.”
“Thought so,” says Plumley. “Believe I’ll repair to the lodge and stay there.”
The old bird saddled a horse right smart and rode off, and I knew that I would miss him. Grains of horse sense was uncommon hard to find round here to begin with.
Teddy held a press conference with his booted foot on the bear’s head, never actually saying he’d shot it, but his outthrust jaw was taken at face value. I sat and leaned against a tree, snickering.
The afternoon had turned off with storm clouds and the smell of snow blowing down off the Pitchstone Plateau, a good time to be out hunting for the snow would worry the game down from up high.
Teddy and I went out about three in the afternoon, taking a back trail I knew up to a saddle that was a pass from four different drainages over. Game would be moving through it like a white sale day at Marshall Field’s, and if we were upwind in the right place we could pick and choose.
We hobbled and tied the horses and walked the last mile, taking up a stand in some jumbled rocks that looked down on the game trails. We sat still as rocks our own selves and the game started moving right away. There was elk in bunches, and deer in their ones and threes and once a fat black bear which Teddy scoffed at as an unworthy opponent. Then the game was still and I nudged Teddy when I saw a flash in the trees and a great boar silvertip stalked out and stood for a moment on top. He must have got the scent of us so diluted he couldn’t tell where we were or which way to go to avoid us. He stood up on his hind legs and sniffed and Teddy fired, blowing off the bear’s lower jaw. The animal bellered in pain and rage and Teddy shot again and again without coming near him. All I had was the Colt and to tell the truth it wasn’t a lot of use to me at t
hat moment.
Teddy wanted to run to the horses and set out, but I stopped him, saying that we’d leave him to stiffen and bleed. An hour later we went down and the horses went plumb crazy at all the bear scent, or so I thought. Well, they should have because the bear had only gone off into a screen of lodgepole and he come out, armed plenty good with those claws and mad as hell. We shot and ran and the horses bucked and I fell off, with the Colt in my hand and I scrambled up atop a big boulder and when the bear would make a lunge up I’d try to shoot down his throat and finally I hit the spine.
That bear took more killing than any other I ever saw.
I come down off the boulder and slumped against it and had a relaxing time breathing for a while, and I enjoyed the very act of it because for a moment there I thought maybe I wouldn’t be doing it much longer.
Teethadore was furious. He’d made a bad shot and his guide had to finish the critter off, he’d blown off the jaw and so it was worthless for a rug for the floors of Sagamore Hill, and Teddy hadn’t gotten his way which always did put him in a black pet.
“You know,” I said, “it’d be safer you just went back to the capital and moved your janissaries around the globe and left this to me. Just leave me a list and I’ll fill it.”
He came on over, trying to control his wrath and not doing too well. I hoped to give him a fit of the apoplexy.
“You are the most insolent and insubordinate son of a bitch I have ever ...”
“Miles says the same thing,” I said. Teddy and General Miles hated each other with black hatred, for there was only one knob at the very top and they both meant to have it. Teddy was newly the President but Miles was the General of the Army, and Miles didn’t think much of Teethadore’s tactical genius.
“You wouldn’t ...” said TR, remembering that I knew all about Kettle Hill and Santiago.
“Depends,” I said.
We left the bear for the skinners and went to our horses who were shaking like wet dogs with fear, and walked them around and got on ’em and headed for the main camp.