Buffalo Girls

by Larry McMurtry

  Finally everyone got tired of leave-taking. The drunks wandered off; a few fell down unconscious. Dora was overcome by her feelings and hurried upstairs to cry in private. Trix went inside to see if any dandy fellows were in the bar. Three cowboys came racing by—one of them saw a goat and took down his rope and roped it. He then proceeded to drag it around. By the time Jim and Bartle, Potato Creek Johnny and No Ears finally walked out of town leading Calamity’s horse—she had passed out and was sound asleep in the saddle—everyone had lost interest in the departure except the boy Teat, who sat alone on Dora’s back porch and watched them leave. The five people were soon out of town, ever-diminishing ripples in the rippling prairie grass. They seemed to Teat like a little tribe. It made him feel lonely to see them disappear.

  PART II

  1

  NO EARS DIDN’T LIKE THE GREAT PLAIN OF WATER THAT they called the Atlantic Ocean. At first he had been pleased with the boat they were to make the passage on. He had not imagined that so large a boat could be found; he could not help thinking how much his friend Sits On The Water would have enjoyed a trip in such a great vessel.

  Anchored at rest in the harbor in New York—a smoky town No Ears had no interest in—the boat seemed more than adequate to transport several villages to England or anywhere else touched by the great ocean. It was like a floating town, with many houses in it and a kind of small enclosed prairie below, where the animals could be kept and given hay. At first the animals were restive—No Ears supposed that to them entering the ship was too much like entering the stomach of a great fish—but once in their small prairie, with straw for grass, they soon settled down.

  It was only after leaving the harbor and setting off across the restless, moving plain of water that No Ears came to see the sharp inadequacies of the boat. Once in the middle of the plain of water, the boat seemed tinier to him, in relation to the ocean, than wagons were in relation to the plains of grass. Also, though he knew that water moved and was powerful—after all, a flood had taken that experienced waterman Sits On The Water—he had not imagined the immense power of the great ocean. The plains of grass seemed to move only when herds of horses, cattle, buffalo stampeded across them; but the plains of water moved always, with a strength greater than any strength he had ever imagined. He felt the movement even in his sleep in his little room. Men tired, animals tired, even the great winds tired and left the earth calm, but the ocean was stronger than men, animals, and wind put together; No Ears could not tell that the ocean ever tired, or ever rested.

  He had certainly not expected to encounter such a force in the last years of his life; he spent all the daylight hours and several starlit nights sitting silently on deck, studying the mysterious waters. He knew that he could not learn much; he was too old to acquire the kinds of knowledge of the plains of water that he had had about the plains of grass. Still, he hoped to learn a little. Watching the birds was interesting; even when they had been on the ocean several days, the birds still flew around the boat, and when the cook threw scraps in the water the birds came in white swarms to catch the scraps before they could sink into the depths where the fish lived. Several times, just beneath the surface of the water, No Ears had observed a great many fish swimming together in immense herds. Cody told him that the fish traveled in schools—to No Ears it was just another word for herd.

  It was a startling thing to see so many fish coursing through the great plain of water. No Ears had always supposed that the earth was mainly prairie, and that nowhere were there beasts as numerous as the great herds of buffalo that had traveled the prairies in his youth, indeed, for most of his life—until the whites had suddenly killed them all not long after the war they made with one another.

  Unfortunately the whites had survived the war with one another, and had turned their need to kill upon the buffalo and upon his own people. It was a shock to his people and even to the whites themselves that all the buffalo had been killed in so short a time; but traveling on the ocean made No Ears realize that the world was far larger than he had supposed and that the destruction of the buffalo, and even of his people, was a smaller thing than it seemed to those who only knew the plains.

  Small children and even some grownups in his own tribe believed that the prairies had no end. He himself had believed at one time that the world was all prairie. But he had once gone west with some Blackfeet and come to the end of the prairie in that direction; and on this very trip, he had ridden off the prairies on a train and entered the region of trees, a closed-up region that he didn’t like very much. It might be that the prairies were endless if one went north and south, but he had seen them end to the west and to the east, and was forced to conclude that the prairies did not make up quite as much of the world as his people thought.

  After many days on the ocean, he was forced to think once again about the size of the world. Clearly it was far larger than anyone in his tribe realized; they reckoned in ignorance, which was not good. He decided that as soon as he got back from England he would journey to the Platte and try to visit as many people in the tribe as he could so as to inform them that they were mistaken about the prairies comprising the main part of the world. It now seemed as if most of the world was ocean—water that you could not drink. The sailors brought up bucketsful of seawater and used it to wash the deck. No Ears tasted a little and found it indeed very salty. Obviously the whole bottom of the ocean must be salt to make the water so salty. And yet it didn’t bother the herds of fish, which meant that fish had powers he never suspected. Several times they ate fish that came out of the salty waters, and the meat of the fish did not taste salty, a very curious thing, for the flesh of even the largest deer would give some clues as to what the deer had been eating.

  No Ears slept lightly during the trip. He did not dare risk sinking too deeply into sleep—if he did, the powerful ocean might suck out his soul as quickly as one sucked marrow out of a bone. Also, he was excited and nervous, and he wanted to spend as much time on deck as he could; he might not get another opportunity to study the ocean, and he wanted to secure as much correct information as possible.

  He had stopped worrying about the great fish that could swallow houses, when he saw the whale. The size of the boat had lulled him, for it was hardly credible that any fish could be large enough to threaten such a boat. Also, none of the herds of fish that swam around the boat contained individual fish of any size. A few were the length of his leg, but most were just fish, no different from those that swam in the Missouri or the Platte. He decided that the great fish was just a dream fish—the dream spirits sometimes like to frighten people with dream beasts of one kind and another.

  It was dawn when he saw the whale, a gray sunless dawn when water and sky were the same color and hard to tell apart. No Ears had spent the night on deck and was a little sleepy when the dawn finally came. He had lost his fear of breathing the ocean and was resting calmly. At first, because he was a little tired, he did not see the whale. A sailor saw it and began to yell. The yelling meant nothing to No Ears, although he was afraid for a moment that the boat might be on fire. The sailor kept yelling, and soon people began to run out of their rooms. Then, in the haze, he saw the top of the water moving in a strange way—the water moved as if a giant mole were working just beneath it. The water kept moving, in the way the dirt moved when a mole was tunneling a few inches below the surface of the ground.

  No Ears watched without alarm as the water moved in that curious way—he was still in his sleepy mood. But then the great whale broke the surface and he instantly ceased to be sleepy at all. He forgot for a moment that he was on the water; he felt that he was seeing the birth of a mountain. A group of little fish that had been swimming above the whale came up, too, and began to flop down his shiny sides. The seabirds got a few of them.

  The great fish was so large that No Ears had to turn his head to see it all. Its tail stuck past the end of the ship, large as a large tepee. To No Ears’s shock, the immense fish, almost the color of
the dawn, suddenly blew a great spume of water out of the top of its head. The water rose like the puzzling geysers that blew water into the air in the Shoshone country—fireholes, some called them. The firehole water was hot—No Ears could not tell whether the whale’s water was also hot, but he immediately wondered if there could be a connection between the whale and the fireholes. Soon many of the people on the boat had run up on deck; they began to shoot guns at the whale. Calamity stood at the rail and shot at it with her Colt pistol. Cody and Texas Jack arrived but did not shoot. The mountain men came up with their rifles but were too amazed to shoot. Many sailors were shooting. The great fish paid no attention to any of it. Some of the bullets went wild and slapped the water; a few pecked at the whale, but the whale swam on.

  No Ears was irritated by all the shooting—it was obvious that only a cannon could affect such a fish, and no one had a cannon. He felt that the shooting was likely only to anger the whale, in which case it might smash up the boat and swallow them all. It was silly, the urge people had always to be shooting. It should be obvious that such a great fish must be allowed to swim in peace.

  Foolish members of his own tribe sometimes shot arrows at bears that should have been left alone, and were eaten as a consequence. He himself felt that shooting was very much the wrong approach to this whale. The best thing to do might be to throw a few cattle overboard, or even a horse, if they could spare one. The whale might take the animals and leave them alone.

  Fortunately the whale left them alone anyway. Once he calmed sufficiently to react sensibly, No Ears realized that the whale was actually a good distance from the boat—it was only its immense size that made it look close. It needn’t worry about the pecking bullets, and it didn’t. It merely swam away. When it was several miles away, No Ears saw its great tail flash as it dived.

  “If a fish that big tried to come up the Missouri, there would be no Missouri, I guess,” Bartle said. “It’d splash all the water out.”

  “I wish these idiots would stop shooting,” Jim Ragg said. “What do they think they’re shooting at? The whale’s probably five miles under water by now.”

  Calamity was still firing her pistol in the direction of the whale, but once she took her last shot she came over to them and sat down.

  “Well, that was excitement,” she said.

  Jim Ragg glowered at the sailors, several of whom were resolutely firing in the direction of the vanished whale.

  “What do they think they’re shooting at, the ocean?” he asked.

  “They’re just boys, Jim,” Calamity said. “They just like to shoot their guns.”

  “If they’d kept quiet we might have got a better look at it,” Jim said. “I despise wasteful gunplay.”

  “Despise them if you want,” Bartle said. “I expect they’ll shoot until they run out of ammunition.”

  Calamity sat by No Ears and reloaded her pistol. “I hope I can shoot as good as Annie by the time we get to England, otherwise I’ll get fired,” she said.

  Every day Annie Oakley stood on deck and had her servant throw clay pigeons out over the water. She shot them with a shotgun; at times the weather had been rough, but no one had seen Annie miss. The sailors and many of the cowboys and Indians who were expected to perform stood around and watched, hoping to see Annie miss—but Annie didn’t miss.

  “They might be trick clay pigeons,” Bartle suggested. “Maybe they’re just built to fall apart when you throw them.”

  Annie had been cool to him—in fact, she was cool to everybody—which made Bartle reluctant to admit that she could shoot so brilliantly. She was a neat, pretty woman who soon collected a boatload of admirers, but did not appear to be interested in any of them. All she was interested in was shooting. Such single-mindedness annoyed Bartle; and some of her more stylish admirers, such as Texas Jack Omohundro, found it irksome too. Texas Jack owned an interest in the show and regularly tried to outdress Billy Cody, though he rarely succeeded.

  “I think that was a very old fish,” No Ears remarked. Seeing the whale seemed to him to be the most extraordinary event of his long life, and he deeply regretted having so few of his own people along to discuss it with—the white people were too shallow even to appreciate what an extraordinary event they had just witnessed. Of course there were around a hundred Indians on board the boat, but most of them were too young to be serious about things of real importance. Red Shirt, for example, had shown no better sense than the sailors; he, too, had emptied his Winchester at the whale.

  As for Sitting Bull, he was so indifferent to everything except his own fame that he rarely even came on deck, preferring to sit in the boat’s saloon and squeeze white women when they asked for autographs. Most of the white women on the boat had already been squeezed several times, and had more Sitting Bull autographs than they could use.

  “I wonder if that was the First Fish,” No Ears said. It was so large and looked so old that it could well be the First Fish—it might even be the first beast of any kind. Whether a fish could be considered a beast was a question too subtle for him to discuss with white people; he resolved that if he got anywhere near his home again he would try to find some old people from his tribe and discuss the whale with them. The thought that he might have seen the First Fish was so exciting that he began to wish the trip was over so he could carry the information to where it was needed, that is, to his people. Old people were always interested in information that bore upon the great question of when the world began, and what means the spirits used to create it. It seemed to No Ears that the great fish he had just seen might be as old as the world itself; it might have been only a minnow when the world began. If the whale was indeed the oldest fish, all the fish in the ocean or in the world might be his children. It was thought by some old people he had talked to on his trip with the Blackfoot that the first beasts were both male and female and each could make its own young. Perhaps the great whale fish he had just seen was the grandfather of all the fish in the world.

  To No Ears that was a tremendously exciting thought, far too exciting in its implications to be shared with white people—they had quickly lost interest in the whale, once it went under the water. Soon Martha Jane and the mountain men went off to eat breakfast, after which they would sit inside all day and play cards. No Ears was glad when they left. He did not want to be bothered with white people’s conversation when he was trying to think about such complex matters as the nature of the First Fish, or the beginning of the world. It occurred to him that perhaps souls didn’t go into a hole in the sky, after all; perhaps they went into the sea, to the depths where the great fish lived.

  While he was thinking about that, Red Shirt came over and wanted to be admired and flattered. Cody had had some fine white leggings made for all the Indians and had also bought Red Shirt: a splendid bandanna in St. Louis; now Red Shirt required constant attention of a sort No Ears was in no mood to give. There would be no living with Red Shirt’s vanity if the white photographers took his picture many more times.

  No Ears brusquely sent Red Shirt away, only to see Sitting Bull coming on deck wrapped in his messy blankets. Sitting Bull stood at the rail a long time, staring at the water. He looked annoyed—probably he had expected the whale to wait for his arrival. He frowned at the water, trying to make the whale hurry on back so he could have a look at it. Sitting Bull had always frowned at the world that way, trying to bend the world to his will. For that reason No Ears had always considered Sitting Bull slightly ridiculous. The great whale was not some dog of Sitting Bull’s, a creature who could be summoned with a frown. A man as intelligent and powerful as Sitting Bull ought to have learned such things, but Sitting Bull still frowned if things didn’t behave exactly as he wished them to.

  After frowning at the water for a while, Sitting Bull came over to No Ears. No Ears tried to make it obvious by his demeanor that he was thinking and would rather not be interrupted, but Sitting Bull interrupted him anyway.

  “Where is the big fish?” he
asked. “I thought it was here, but I don’t see it.”

  “It was the great whale,” No Ears informed him. “He went back to his home.”

  Sitting Bull knew No Ears didn’t like him but he didn’t care. He only wanted women to like him. “If I thought he’d like to eat an old man like you I’d throw you in the sea,” Sitting Bull said. “Then when he came back to eat you I’d get a good look at him.”

  “You should have come upstairs a little sooner,” No Ears said. “The whale visited us but people shot at him and he decided he would rather go home.”

  He ignored Sitting Bull’s insult. Sitting Bull always sprinkled his conversations with insults; if you responded to them he might go on talking for several hours, bragging on himself.

  “Give me your slicker and I will trade you these blankets,” Sitting Bull said. He had been admiring No Ears’s slicker and had decided he wanted it for himself.

  No Ears didn’t answer. His slicker was one of his proudest possessions, and also one of his most useful. Spray from great waves often splashed over the deck but his slicker kept him perfectly dry. Only his face sometimes got a little wet. It was only another of Sitting Bull’s insults—Sitting Bull knew he would not be such a fool as to trade a fine slicker for his smelly blankets. It was easy enough to buy blankets in any town.

  Sitting Bull’s eyes flashed angrily when it became apparent that No Ears had no intention of handing over his slicker. That was no surprise—he was given to terrible angers when he didn’t get his way. But many sailors were around, getting ready to wash the decks. Sitting Bull was not likely to kill him with a lot of sailors looking, although of course he might—the man had no interest at all in what white people thought.