A footstep sounded behind her. Turning, she saw it was Tom. He stood there staring at her, his face impassive, and for a moment she felt a tingle of fear.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not my enemy.”
“How could you do this?” she snapped, angry that he had seen her fear.
“They’d have done the same to me,” he said. “To all of us, if they’d had the chance. They were brave boys. Especially that one.” He pointed to an emasculated body whose head stood eyeless on a nearby rock. “Even with a bullet in him he came at me with his knife. I had to club him down with the rifle butt.” He swung the Springfield to show her. “He was still alive when I took his hair, his eyes open, looking up into mine. He knew he was finished, but he smiled. He never cried out. He never begged for mercy, even when my knife went into his heart. He was a man. By-and-by, if I ever get back to my people, I’ll tell them this story. I shall dedicate the Scalp Dance to his memory.”
THEY REACHED THE rendezvous shortly before noon. McKay wasn’t there, but his hides were. He had left them, neatly baled and covered with a tarpaulin, beneath a lightning-blasted cotton-wood where Otto and Raleigh had made their camp most of last spring.
“How come he left the hides behind, unguarded?” Jenny asked.
“Well,” Otto said, “he’d probably killed all the shootable buffalo in the immediate vicinity and thought it best to hunt on elsewhere, to make the most of his time. He couldn’t carry all these hides in that light wagon he’s driving, so he left them here until we arrived with the big ox wagon. He knew Tom and I would be coming soon. And there’s not much danger of the hides being stolen. All of us hide men in these parts know one another. We’re friends. Honor among thieves, and all that.”
Under the tarp was a note in the captain’s spidery Rebel scrawl.
Am running buff on down toward the cimaron You know the alkaly flat near where Gramm was kilt We campt ther a short wile last winter? Look for my outfit thare. Go to the sound of the guns Thers others down this way. Wright Moores crew B. Dickson Wm Tilman Mastersons Billy Og. Ile borow a extra skinner from them til you com. Hurry! RFMcK. pS Hope you got us a good sheff i’m sick of my own dern cooking!
Good, Otto thought. There’ll be plenty of rifles if the Hostiles come looking for trouble. Old Raleigh. No wonder the South lost the war. Most of Lee’s officers couldn’t spell to save their souls, much less write a clear battle order.
They pounded south for an hour, two hours more. The country was all creosote bush and dust. Odd-shaped clouds boiled over the plain. The wind had died a slow death through the morning, working gradually toward the west, then a bit north of west. A great blue-black cloudbank that looked like a range of mountains reared slowly behind them. At the top of a swell, Otto reined in. He signaled the wagons to halt. He wanted silence, no squeaking wheels. He looked to the south and listened.
There it was. The sporadic thud of buffalo rifles, far off through a yellowish haze of dust that thickened to tan on the horizon. Within the haze he could make out a blurred snaky line, vague, almost ephemeral, that would be the Cimarron River . . .
At the base of the rise, Tom Shields had dismounted from the hide wagon and knelt with his face near the ground.
“Listening for buffalo?” Jenny asked him.
“No, looking,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Come over here, I’ll show you.”
She climbed down and walked to where he knelt in the dry grass. He pointed to a dull black tumblebug that stood rigid in the turf, its quivering antennae angled forward.
“Buffalo beetle,” Tom Shields said. “Where he points, that’s where the buffalo are. I don’t know, maybe he feels them through his feet or those twig things on his nose. But when he finds them, he goes over there. He and his tribe. To make balls out of the buffalo’s shit, you know? Whenever you see an Indian climb off his pony and put his face sideways to the ground, he’s not listening, he’s asking this fella for directions.”
THEY FOUND THE alkali flat easily. Otto would never forget it. A hunter named Tobe Graham and his crew—two skinners and a cook—had been slaughtered here last winter by Comanches. The Comanches had tied Graham and his men alive and naked to the wheels of a wagon and built a fire at their feet, feeding it with flint hides and corncob-sized chunks of tallow. But not before scalping them. Graham was from Chicago, where he’d been a streetcar conductor. He had a wife and half a dozen children and couldn’t support them with what he earned on the cars. At least not in any comfort. His wife, he said, had prayed and pleaded with him not to leave her for the Buffalo Range, she couldn’t stand it all alone with the babies in that cold, cruel city.
“She’s just a little wee lass, from near Belfast,” he had told Otto. But Graham had promised her it would be only for the winter, no more, no more, and when he got home they’d be rich as lords. Five bucks a hide for shaggies . . .
Raleigh had pitched his big white canvas Union Army supply tent, purchased last fall from the sutler’s store at Fort Dodge, under a stand of cottonwoods half a mile from the alkali flat. Buffalo hides lay pegged out all around it. Tom Shields wheeled the big wagon in a tight circle and parked beneath the trees. Jenny reined in beside him. They set about unloading gear, racing against the coming storm. Already they could hear a sullen cannonade on the horizon and see ragged, dirty-white whorls of storm wind careering along the tops of the blue-black thunder-heads, and occasional flashes of lightning.
Raleigh rode in before sunset, just as they finished.
“Huzzah, the late arrivals!” he bellowed. “Whatever become of that far-famed Dutch punctuality? We’ve killed all the shaggies in these parts, so you might as well pack up and get back to town, old hoss.”
His white teeth gleamed within a dry, dusty, wind-burned face. Jenny watched him from the mouth of the tent. He had a wide smile, and eyes that crinkled around the edges as he grinned.
Raleigh swung down from his horse—a tall sorrel stallion—and turned it over to Tom Shields for unsaddling, along with his buffalo rifle. He walked across to Otto, still smiling widely. He was shorter than Otto, but of a heavier build, with wide shoulders and a deep chest. He wore an unfringed doeskin hunting shirt and bandoliers across his chest, tightly fitting sky-blue cavalry trousers striped yellow down the sides, knee-high black boots, and a blue bandanna knotted loosely around his throat. The blue matched his eyes, Jenny thought. His dusty hat was cocked back on his forehead. A sheath on his belt held two long-bladed skinning knives and a sharpening steel. She noticed that dried blood caked his hands and wrists, disappearing up his forearms into his shirtsleeves.
“Where’s the other wagon?” Otto asked.
“Should be right behind me,” Raleigh said. “I hired a spare skinner from Billy Ogg’s crew. Milo Sykes—you know him from up on the Pawnee Fork.”
As if on cue, Sykes and the wagon rattled out of the sunset, the mules in a stiff-legged canter. “Racing to Beat the Storm ,” Raleigh said. “Make a nice study for Currier & Ives.” Tom ran over to help unload the fresh hides. They would have to be protected from the rain.
Raleigh McKay turned toward the tent and noticed Jenny for the first time. He nodded gravely and doffed his hat to reveal an unruly mop of wavy blond hair burnished almost red in places.
“Well, I see you took my note to heart and hired us a real live professional to be our chief cook and bottle washer.”
“More than that,” Otto said. “Pending your approval, she’s a full partner in this enterprise—my sister, Miss Jenny Dousmann.”
Raleigh wiped his fingers carefully on his shirt, took Jenny’s hand, and kissed her fingertips lightly. He smiled into her eyes. It was a formal gesture, but his eyes belied it.
“Most pleased and honored to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”
“If it’s all right with you,” Otto told McKay, “I figured we’d cut my sister in for a quarter of what we earn on each wagonload of hides, less the skinners’ pa
y. You and I will split the remainder, fifty-fifty.”
“Sounds fair enough,” McKay said, smiling. “Though the mere presence of such a charming feminine soul in our rude camp is of course beyond price.”
A great rattling boom of thunder exploded above and around them.
“Here she comes,” Raleigh said, looking skyward. “A right gullywasher, I’d guess. We better be getting inside . . .”
Then he sniffed himself, looked over apologetically at Jenny, and smiled once again.
“Or maybe not. I’m afraid, at the moment, I don’t quite rival the prairie rose for fragrance.”
A cold rush of wind enveloped them. Then the rain swept down in a gray roaring blur that obscured the world from horizon to horizon. As Jenny peered out from beneath the canvas, she saw Raleigh McKay barefoot and shirtless cavorting in the slashing rain, his cavalry britches plastered to his legs, scrubbing himself with a bar of fancy store-bought soap and whooping a joyous rebel yell. He applied the suds most assiduously to his hair—of which he seemed inordinately proud, Jenny thought.
Tom was shirtless now, too, lugging a barrel of molasses to the tent, the rain pelting his hard tan chest and shoulders. He had white, mouth-shaped scars on his ribs—old arrow wounds? How dark he was. How pale, almost marble-smooth, was Raleigh McKay.
She wished she could join them in their dance, peel off her stale, sticky clothing and pirouette naked and clean beside them in the downpour.
7
THE LINE STORM blew through after dark. McKay and Otto walked out to survey the damage. Stars had broken clear, spread cryptically across the night sky in a great frozen matrix—here comes Orion slouching toward the zenith. Prairie wolves yipped up at the moon from the east. The drying hides lay sodden between their pegs. Gray moths swarmed, flapping damply in the gloom. Fresh arsenic was indicated. The cavvy had weathered the storm in good fashion, as always. Indeed, the horses and mules, even the drowsy-eyed oxen, looked cleaner and sprightlier than they had before it struck.
It hadn’t been much of a supper. Cold hump steak. Cold beans. Stale ship’s biscuit. Impossible to start a fire. The buffalo chips slumped in a soggy pile beside the tent, Jenny grim-faced with frustration. She must have had such plans, Otto thought.
“Keep away from my sister,” he said to McKay.
“Why, I’ve got no designs on her, hoss.”
“Like hell you don’t. You may not know it now, though. I’ve never seen men alone—in war or peace—who didn’t have designs on the first woman they saw, once they’d been in the field a few weeks.”
They walked out onto the prairie. Not a fire in sight.
“Any sign of Mister Lo?”
“Not for a while,” Raleigh said.
“We had some Snakes up the line. Tom took care of them.”
“He’s a good ‘un.”
“Too bloody, though, too much the savage.”
“You know the Cheyenne. Just like Bill Sherman. Make war so terrible that no one wants to fight you.” Raleigh laughed. “Old Bill, he sure showed all us Southrun folks—from Georgia to the sea. The whole damn nation, for that matter. ‘War is hell.’ As you Yankees are only too glad to remind us.”
They walked on.
“What are the buff doing?”
“Not much. Thinner on the ground than I hoped they’d be, just like last winter. Maybe we’ve shot ‘em out in these parts, like the do-gooders back East say we have. I came on a herd last week, thought they might be the vanguard, as of yore, but they blew right through with nothing followin’ along behind. Not all that many of ‘em, really. Headin’ to join their kinfolk across the Red. All noses pointin’ southwest for Texas—the Yarner. There’s still plenty of shaggies down that way, for sure.”
The “Yarner” was what Texicans called the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain of the Texas Panhandle. Southerners like Raleigh were damned if they’d wrap their tongues around foreign words.
“But Texas is way across the Dead Line,” Otto said. “The government says we can’t hunt them down there. The Army will stop us.”
“No, it won’t, old son.”
Raleigh turned in the darkness and smiled at Otto. His teeth looked luminous in the brittle light of the stars.
“Wright Mooar and John Webb went down below the Cimarron to the Yarner this summer, or early fall, it might of been. They went right across the Dead Line, through the Indian Territory, and clear to the North Fork of the Canadian, then west across Wolf Creek. Nary a soldier boy interfered with ‘em. They saw buff like in the old days. There’s another whole herd down there, big anyways as the Republican River herd we’ve been killin’ these past few years. By treaty it’s Lo’s herd, I guess, but what the hell. The Medicine Lodge Treaty’s goin’ to get broken just like all the rest of ‘em. Mooar and Webb went back up to Kansas and talked to Colonel Dodge at the fort. Asked him straight out, they did, asked what’d happen if the bluelegs caught buffalo runners south of the Deadline. The Colonel, he just looked out the window. Said, ‘Boys, if I was huntin’ buffalo, I’d hunt where the buffalo are.’”
He slapped Otto on the shoulder. “How do you like that, Black Hat?”
“I like it fine,” Otto said. “I just have to wonder how old Satanta’s going to like it. Or Quanah or Tall Bull or Whirlwind, for that matter. There’s Apaches and Kiowas, Comanches and Cheyennes and Arapahos galore down there, all on the prod, not to mention the so-called Civilized Tribes. If we start on their buff, it’ll be hell to pay and the pitch not hot.”
“You worry too much, old son. What the hell, we’re here to make money, aren’t we?”
AT DAWN MCKAY and Otto caught their horses and rode out to kill buffalo. The horses puffed smoke as they trotted away and a thick hoarfrost rimed the prairie. Milo Sykes, a wiry, sourmouthed Georgian with muddy eyes, rode after them in the skinner’s wagon. Deep pockmarks on his cheeks gave his face the texture of a walnut. A strange old coon, Otto thought. Skinny as a skeeter hawk, his chin hobnobbing with the tip of his pointy nose, Milo always walked or rode with his head bent forward, looking at the ground. When he spoke, which was rarely, his voice had a high, dry, whining quality, like fingernails on slate.
Tom Shields stayed in camp to poison and repeg the damp hides and help Jenny through her first morning. The sun rose white in the east, promising a fair day. Jenny straggled out of the tent and collected what dry sticks she could from under the cottonwoods. Not many.
A number of trees had been snapped off at their boles by last night’s storm. She went to the tent and found the ax. She began splitting spear-shaped slabs of heartwood from the cottonwood stumps, carrying them back to the tent in her apron. She kindled a fire with her few dry twigs and quickly piled thin slivers of heartwood upon the flames. In a short while she had a good blaze crackling. The heat of the fire felt good. She clapped her hands and said, “Juch-he!” A whoop of triumph.
“My mother used to say that.”
She turned and found Tom Shields behind her. He was smiling his nice smile again.
“Well then,” Jenny said brightly, “she must have been German! Kannst du Deutsch, Tom?”
“Oh no, just a bit. Nur a bissel? I understand it better than I talk it. She used to speak that lingo to me when I was very small. Before she died, you know.”
“You can’t have been that young, if you remember some of it.”
“Well, I was little then,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. “You remember a lot from when you’re little.” He turned and walked away to busy himself with the hides. Jenny wondered what had set him off this time. Perhaps his mother had died when he was older than he said. Maybe it was too painful for him to think about her and that’s why he pretended he couldn’t speak German. Perhaps she’s still alive and he’s afraid that if the Army finds out, they’ll go and rescue her . . .
Two magpies swooped down from the cottonwoods and began squabbling over a chunk of buffalo suet she had placed by the fire. They leaped in the air in a flurry of white wing pa
tches and struck at each other like gamecocks, screaming indignantly. She ran to shoo them off, but they’d ruined the suet anyway. She threw the battle-scarred remnant after them. Who knew what those filthy beaks had been into last—probably a rotting buffalo carcass. She placed a fresh piece in the sunlight, next to the fire, and covered it with a large curl of cottonwood bark. That should keep the pirates off. She was softening the suet to make dough. It would be saleratus bread, because she hadn’t had a chance last night to mix up a batch of sourdough. She had brought along from Wisconsin the family “barm,” which Mutti said dated back to the dawn of time, there in the Old Country, perhaps (Vati added sarcastically) to the days of the Nibelungs. Jenny carried the fabled starter West in a patented Mason jar, a big one. But today she would merely bake bread and hard rolls, and perhaps a pie with some of the fresh apples she’d bought before they left Dodge.
But what for meat? The antelope was finished and she was sure that Raleigh and Sykes were tired of buffalo hump.
After setting her dough to rise and rigging the sheet-metal reflector oven to heat over the fire, she tidied up the tent, then placed a tub of water beside the oven to heat. Tom showed her where a spring lay hidden in the jumbled rocks near camp, so she needn’t use the water they’d brought along in barrels. She found a lopsided square of hard, dry, homemade soap, took her vegetable grater from the big wooden crate that contained the cooking utensils, and grated the soap into flakes, catching them in an empty hardtack box. She would wash the men’s clothes later. She liked washing. The smell of it, the soft feel of hot soapy water. Her mother had hated washing clothes. Perhaps she would, too, in time.
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 7