Tie My Bones to Her Back

by Robert F. Jones

  Jenny had noticed Otto’s shotgun case lying in the tent. Maybe she’d mosey out through the grasslands beyond the alkali flat and try for a few prairie hens. They would make a nice change from buffalo for the men. She could hear Raleigh and Otto shooting now, not more than a mile or two from camp, it sounded. The chance of Hostiles nearby was remote, Raleigh had said. But Tom insisted on coming with her anyway on her bird hunt, just to be on the safe side.

  It was a fine morning, crisp and bright, and beyond the alkali flat the prairie seemed to roll on forever. Small birds sang and flittered through the swaying grass. An animal she recognized as a badger shuffled away on short, bowed legs. It was paler than the badgers she’d seen in Wisconsin, with an upturned snout and small, beady black eyes, dirty white stripes down its sides. She thought that badgers came out only at dusk, and perhaps that was true in populous Wisconsin, where the beast was hunted mercilessly for its stiff, thick bristles, which were used to make shaving brushes, but apparently on the Buffalo Range, where they had little contact with men, they roamed around in daylight as well.

  Well, they would learn better.

  “Why didn’t you shoot it?” Tom Shields asked.

  “What for?” she said. “You can’t eat them.”

  He laughed, puzzled, and shook his head. Apparently her way of thinking was as indecipherable to Tom as his was to her.

  “Indians eat ‘em,” he said finally. “At least the Sa-sis-e-tas do. They’re not bad. But the badger is very powerful, too, very wise. You can use him as a looking glass, to see the future.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Well, if a war party comes across a badger they’ll kill it and take its guts out, then lay it on its back in a bed of white sage. The blood pools up inside there, you know, and come morning, they go by the badger and look at their reflection in the blood. If they see themselves white-haired and wrinkled, they’ll live to be old. If they see themselves skinny and pale, they’re going to die from some sickness. If they’re going to die in this raid, their eyes will be closed. If they’re going to be scalped, their heads will be bald and bloody. You know, like that.”

  “Did you ever try it?”

  He looked at her and smiled a little, then nodded.

  “Well, what did you see, Tom?”

  He laughed and would not tell her, and they walked on.

  “THERE THEY ARE,” Tom said quietly, crouching suddenly beside her. She followed suit.

  “Where? What?”

  “Wikis” he said. “Birds. You stay here, I’ll sneak around behind them and make them come to you.”

  He disappeared on his belly into the grass, quiet as a housecat. She waited. She could hear rustling ahead of her, then saw some movement—quick forms like elongated chickens, barred brown and white, scuttling through the dense stems. She cocked the double hammers of the shotgun. She thought of shooting into the flock while it was still on the ground, but realized she might hit Tom where he crawled somewhere behind them. Then the birds rose with a loud, slurred rattle of wings, pouring toward her low and fast over the waving seed tops. She stood and swung with the lead bird, leaning into the weight of the gun the way her brother had taught her with partridges back home, swinging on with the leader until he was abreast of her, then she pulled the forward trigger. The gun bucked tight against her shoulder—that pleasant solid thump she’d grown to enjoy, clear down to her toes. She continued to swing around through the billowing white smoke, the momentum of the heavy barrels carrying her around smoothly, following two birds close together toward the rear of the flock. Fired again as they went away . . .

  Tom whooped. It was the same whoop she’d heard when he killed the Shoshone horse thieves.

  “You shoot good!” he said. He came toward her with a wide, happy, white man’s smile. “Two shots, four birds! I never seen a woman shoot so good.” He held two of them aloft, then stooped to pick up the remaining pair. “I can’t shoot ‘em that good, not when they’re flying.”

  “The shot pattern must have spread just right,” she said, pleased at his praise. “I only fired at two. But Otto taught me how to swing with them, and he must have taught me well. Up north, you know.”

  Tom carried the gun on the way into camp. He killed two more prairie hens, but only as they were running on the ground ahead of them. Back at the tent, he cleaned the gun while Jenny plucked and drew the birds. She hung them head down in the shade of a giant gnarled cottonwood. Remembering the magpies, she covered the grouse with burlap sacking. Tom ate some cold hump and hardtack, swallowed the last of the morning’s coffee, then hitched up the ox team and rolled out to help with the day’s skinning.

  Jenny saw that the water in the washtub was steaming now. Big, fat bubbles seethed and sucked as they rolled from the bottom. She poured in some soap flakes, then threw the foul clothing after them. She stirred the noxious stew with a long, broad spear of cottonwood. Left it to boil. Her greased pans of dough were ready and she put them in the glowing oven. She sat back by the fire, humming to herself, satisfied with the morning. Let the wash cook for a while, then I’ll start scrubbing. This afternoon I’ll do the pie.

  For an instant she had an image of her class at the academy, parsing Latin phrases as Dr. Williams looked on, frowning. Et ego in Arcadia . . .

  She laughed out loud.

  Indeed she was there.

  OTTO AND RALEIGH rode in just shy of sunset. Jenny had water on the boil, ready to clean their rifles. Her apple pie stood cooling near the fire. Raleigh bent down to whuffle up the sweet steam rising from its crisp brown crust.

  “Unless my nose deceives me, that ain’t no dried apple pie,” he said, winking at Otto. “You know the old ditty we used to recite in the Yadkin?”

  You can spit in my ears

  And tell me lies,

  But don’t give me none

  Of your dried apple pies!

  He turned to Jenny with his wide smile and dropped to one knee.

  “Miss Dousmann, will you marry me?”

  “You’d better ask me first,” Otto said, unsmiling.

  Raleigh laughed. “Now why would I want to marry you, old Black Hat?”

  The wagon followed soon after. Tom and Milo Sykes saw to the horses, then began stretching and pegging the hides. Jenny helped them. When she lifted the first limp, rolled-up hide from the wagonbed, her knees nearly buckled. It must have weighed sixty or seventy pounds. She stiffened her spine and carried on. When she finished half an hour later, her back was sore. It’s not quite like hanging out the wash, she thought. She went to the fire, where her birds were roasting in a slow oven. The hens were stuffed with crumbled hardtack, onion, and wild Mexican plums Tom had found growing near the spring. Her baking had turned out nicely. On the dropped tailgate of the spring wagon she had tin plates, spoons, and forks arrayed, along with a crock of salted buffalo tallow, a plate of hard rolls, and a loaf of bread with which to mop up the gravy, five tin cups (clean for a change), a full, steaming coffeepot, and two flower-patterned china bowls she had brought from home, one filled with sugar, the other with salt. There were no napkins. To make up for that shortcoming, she had picked some blackfoot daisies and purple prairie asters near the spring, arranging them neatly in an empty Mason jar.

  “Quite a picnic,” Raleigh said, coming up behind her with Otto and the skinners. “If it all eats as good as it smells, you’ll have done us proud, Miss Black Hat.”

  They helped themselves and dug in. Ten minutes later all her day’s work was undone. What remained of it were gnawed chicken bones, bread crumbs, grease spots, and a pile of dirty dishes. Milo Sykes belched, sprawled on an elbow in the grass, and began picking his teeth with the point of a boning knife. Otto loosened his belt a notch, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand, and sighed heavily. Tom Shields, who had hunkered on his haunches away from the firelight as he ate, rose and slipped quietly into the darkness after scraping his plate into the coals. Raleigh lay against a wagon wheel, feet to the fire, a
nd sipped a mug of coffee, watching the stars pop into being.

  Jenny gathered up the plates and went to wash them. They heard her rattling and splashing at the tub behind them, singing some German ditty.

  “Scarce thirty hides between us in a whole damn day,” Raleigh said. “It don’t shine, old son.”

  Otto grunted.

  “Let’s go down to the Yarner,” Raleigh said.

  Otto looked over at Jenny. He looked down at his feet. He grunted noncommittally once again.

  “What’s that mean, yea or nay?”

  “I don’t like it, Cap. Not with a woman along. Especially when she’s my own flesh and blood.”

  “We can’t make money up here. Face it, Black Hat, this here now herd is finished. Shot out.”

  “He’s right,” Sykes said. “But they’re thick as fleas on a spotted pup ‘twix the Cimarron and the Lodge Pole.” Lodge Pole was another name for the Washita River, where the 7th Cavalry had wiped out a village of Cheyennes five years earlier.

  “We’ve never been there,” Otto said. “We don’t know the country.”

  “Tom does,” Raleigh said. “He’s got Southern Cheyenne kin in those parts. And Sykes was down that way in ‘68 with Custer, weren’t you, Milo?”

  “Right down on the Lodge Pole,” Sykes said, nodding. “In Black Kettle’s very camp. November it was, just like now, only colder: we rode through ‘em at dawn with the whole damn regimental band playing, b’God. ‘Gary Owen,’ can you believe it? Lifted some hair that day, b’God.” He spat in the fire. “Them Dog Soldiers won’t be bothering us no more.”

  “B’God,” Otto said.

  Raleigh laughed, then said, “Aw, Black Hat, your sister will be safe. Tom knows the lingo, Milo knows the country, and you and I know how to shoot. Hellfire, I’ll look after your sister myself, her personal bodyguard, with your say-so, of course. I’ll vouch for her safety, on my honor as an officer and a gentleman.” He winked, then continued more seriously. “If anything happens to her, you can lift my own hair and I won’t even whimper.”

  Otto laughed and shook his head. “No, thanks. Some redskin will lift it first.”

  He rose and stretched. “But you’re right, there’s no money to be made hereabouts. And we’re here to make money. Okay, let’s do it. Tomorrow we’ll find someone to take our hides back to Dodge, or failing that, we’ll cache ‘em. Then on to the Yarner it is.”

  8

  THE WAGONS ROLLED at noon. They hauled the hides over to Wright Mooar’s camp a mile or so to the west and left them with that trustworthy Vermonter. Mooar said he thought that Charlie Rath might be down to the Cimarron soon with a wagon train to buy hides on the spot and agreed to sell theirs to the trader along with his own. “Soon as Charlie shows and I sell our hides,” Mooar said, “I’ll be headin’ down Texas way myself. Probably a few other outfits will come along. Ayuh. More of us the better.”

  From the way Tom and Raleigh spoke of him, Jenny had expected Mooar to be a crusty, grizzled old-timer. Instead, she saw a young, blond-bearded, sour-mouthed fellow with close-set, pale-blue eyes, stingy with his speech, a veteran of the Buffalo Range though only in his twenties. Not much older than Tom. He never even looked at Jenny.

  “Mooar wandered West in the late sixties like so many of us,” Otto told her as they headed down to the Cimarron crossing. “Worked the wheat harvest in Illinois at first, carpentered a bit, I guess, later chopped firewood in Kansas over by Walnut Creek, south of Hays. He and his partner sold to the Army for two dollars a cord, about what I got up in Omaha. Then they switched to buffalo, shooting meat for the Eastern market at three cents a pound.”

  He laughed.

  “Doesn’t sound like much, does it?” he said. “But I did it, too, on a smaller scale. It adds up. There’s lots of meat on a buffalo—a big bull will weigh nearly a ton, a cow about six or seven hundred pounds. Cows taste better, more tender. The saddles alone, hump and tenderloins, weigh up to two hundred pounds apiece. We were earning $90 or $100 a day, when you average it out. Hell of a lot more than for firewood, and a lot less work.”

  There was no market for the raw, untanned hides back then, Otto said, though some fellows traded with the Indians for their soft, brain-tanned robes, laboriously scrubbed and thumped and worked up by squaws. These elegant robes brought from eight to sixteen dollars apiece in the cities back East. The Indians would trade a dozen robes for a pint or two of rotgut whiskey. This whiskey, of course, had been diluted by half with creek water, then fired up with ample doses of paregoric and red pepper.

  “The tanneries back East said raw buffalo hide was too thick and spongy to make good leather. So we usually left the skins on the prairie, or sold the butchered meat unskinned to middlemen at the railheads. We’d chop a buff in half lengthwise after gutting it, sling the halves on the train just that way, hair and all. But market hunting’s a seasonal trade. In the spring and summer the buff are out of condition and the meat tastes awful.

  “All that changed in the spring of ‘71. A hide dealer in Kansas City named DuBois sent out circulars all across the range, offering to buy flint hides for good money, any time of the year. He’d found some tanners in Germany who had a process for making good leather out of them. Lobenstein in Leavenworth jumped on the bandwagon right away, along with a slew of other dealers, and the big-time killing began. Wright Mooar sent some hides to his brother John, in New York, and he found takers, too. Suddenly everyone wanted buffalo hides—for everything from leather drive belts in factories to saddles and harnesses and furniture upholstery. I hear the swells in New York and Philadelphia even paper the walls of their parlors with it.”

  He laughed again, shaking his head. They were into the stink now. Dead buffalo lay all around them, on the hillsides and in the muddy wallows, some still pink, others going black or green with rot. Vultures on the carcasses bated at them as the wagons passed, hissing and flaring their wings. Tendrils of intestine festooned their hooked beaks. Bluebottle flies hummed everywhere. Coyotes slunk away, and a pack of fat lobos lolled on a nearby ridge, sated.

  “You’re seeing the results today. Buffalo hammered year round, all ages and sizes of them, anywhere they run. They’re gone from the Republican clear down to the Cimarron, and now we’re going South to do the same to the Texas herd. It’s worse than the war. In the war at least we buried the dead. The whole West is a Schlachthof’, a slaughterhouse. But more wasteful by far than a slaughterhouse. Nobody gets to eat the meat.”

  “Why don’t you quit?”

  He looked at her, his eyes sadder than she’d ever seen them.

  “What else could I do?”

  “Farm. Open a shop somewhere. A business, you have money enough now to start one. Or maybe study the law, or go to Deutschland and practice medicine. Get married to some nice girl and raise a family, like most people do!”

  “I’m not cut out for that kind of life, Jennchen.”

  No, she thought sadly, you’re schwach—a weakling, like Vati. Brave only against nature and other men. Soft, though, when it comes to complex things. More meaningful things. A household. A woman who loves you. Children, no matter how foolish they seem. Ach, men—you cannot endure!

  Yet you mourn for the buffalo, when any fool can plainly see that they’re doomed.

  “Vati didn’t have to kill himself,” she said abruptly. “So what if the bank took the farm? We could have moved back to Milwaukee, where he certainly could have written for the German newspapers again. I could have found work, too. It would have been enough. He let the bank beat him, he let it kill him.”

  Otto stared at her. “Jennchen . . .”

  She halted the mules, handed Otto the reins, unhitched Vixen from the lead shank, and mounted the pony.

  “You drive,” she said. “I want to ride for a while.”

  She chucked the mare into a canter, on past Sykes’s wagon and up toward McKay, who pranced ahead of the column on his tall, fiery-eyed stallion.

  THEIR WAY FROM Mooar�
��s camp to the new hunting ground led now through bur oak and sage, over loose wet soil deposited by the river. Through it the Cimarron swung red with the line storm’s runoff, roiling upon itself in glutinous coils. Filthy clots of foam skittered crazily across its surface, driven this way and that by the wind. They forded the river with difficulty. The hide wagon bogged twice in quicksand. The men had to unhitch the mules from the lighter wagons and add them to the ox teams to pull it free. Jenny watched from a bluff on the far bank, the Henry resting crosswise on her pommel. She had braided her hair. A kerchief knotted in pirate fashion covered the top of her head clear down to her eyebrows. Her lips were dry, cracked, and bleeding from the wind. Raleigh was up to his chest in the rushing water, his clothing plastered against his taut muscles, blond hair wet and wild.

  The country rose slowly as they climbed away from the river, heading southwest along an old wagon track grown over with prickly pear and bunchgrass. When the wagon track suddenly stopped, she and Raleigh swung out in circles. They found a few pieces of burned wood half buried in the drifting sand. The partial rim of a wagon wheel protruded from a dune. Raleigh dismounted and kicked at the soil. He turned up a bone, a large one, then another. A few big yellow teeth, immensely long.

  “Mule or horse, one,” he said. “This is about as far as they got.” He looked around in the distance. Nothing but prairie. Jenny hoped he wouldn’t dig further. He might turn up human bones as well. He kicked over one of the charred boards and wrenched something from it, held it up for her to see. A rusty iron arrowhead, broken off short on the shaft.

  “Arapaho,” Tom said when they rode back to show it to him. “Pockmark People.” He cupped his hand and tapped the center of his chest with the fingertips. “See the binding?” He pointed to the translucent leathery wraps that secured the arrowhead to the shaft. “They use rattlesnake gut, supposed to be more deadly, you know?”

  “How old?”

  “From the rust, maybe two years, or less. Hard to say. More if it’s been dry down here.”