When Andrews awoke, Charley Hoge was already up and dressed; he huddled over the fire, adding twigs to the coals that had been kept overnight by the banking. Andrews lay for a moment in the comparative warmth of his bedroll, and watched his breath fog the air. Then he flung the blankets aside, and, shivering, got into his boots, which were stiff and hard from the cold. Without lacing them, he clumped over to the fire. The sun had not yet come over the mountain against which their camp was set; but on the opposite mountain, at the top, a mass of pine trees was lighted by the early sun; a patch of turning aspen flamed a deep gold in the green of the pines.
Miller and Schneider arose before Charley Hoge’s coffee began to boil. Miller beckoned to Andrews; the three men trudged out of their cover of trees onto the level valley, where a hundred yards away their hobbled horses were grazing. They led the animals back to the camp and saddled them before the coffee, the side meat, and the fried mush were ready.
“They ain’t moved much,” Miller said, pointing through the trees. Andrews saw the thin black line of the herd strung out around the bend of the valley. He drank his coffee hurriedly, scalding his mouth. Miller ate his breakfast calmly, slowly. After he finished, he went a little way into the forest and from a low branch selected a forked bough and chopped it off about two feet from the fork; with his knife, he trimmed the fork so that the two small branches protruded from the main branch about six inches; then he sharpened the thick base of the main branch. From his pile of goods beside his bedroll, he got his gun and unwrapped the oilskin which protected it from the night dampness. He inspected the gun carefully, and thrust it into the long holster attached to his saddle. The three men mounted their horses.
In the open valley, Miller pulled his horse up and spoke to the two men on either side of him. “We’ll go straight to them. Point your horses behind mine, and don’t let them swerve out. As long as we keep straight at them they won’t scare.”
Andrews rode behind Miller, his horse at a slow walk. His hands ached; he looked at his knuckles; the skin was stretched white across the bones. He relaxed his grip on the reins, and let his shoulders slump; he was breathing heavily.
By the time they had gone halfway across the width of the valley, the herd, slowly grazing, had rounded the bend. Miller led the two men up near the base of the mountain.
“We’ll have to go easy from here,” he said. “You never know how the wind will be blowing in these mountains. Tie your horses up; we’ll go on foot.”
Walking one behind the other with Miller in the lead, the men made their way around the blunt rocky base of the mountain. Miller halted suddenly, and held up one hand. Without turning his head, he spoke to those behind him in the normal tones of conversation: “They’re just ahead, not more than three hundred yards away. Go easy, now.” He squatted and ripped off a few blades of grass and with his hand held high let them fall to the ground. The wind carried the blades back toward him. He nodded. “Wind’s right.” He rose and went forward more slowly.
Andrews, carrying over one shoulder the bag containing Miller’s ammunition, shifted his burden; and as he shifted it, he saw a movement in the herd in front of him.
Again without turning his head, Miller said: “Just keep walking straight. As long as you don’t move out of the line, they won’t get scared.”
Now Andrews could see the herd clearly. Against the pale yellow-green of the grass, the dark umber of the buffalo stood out sharply, but merged into the deeper color of the pine forest on the steep mountainside behind them. Many of the buffalo were lying at ease upon the soft valley grass; those were mere humps, like dark rocks, without identity or shape. But a few stood at the edges of the herd, like sentinels; some were grazing lightly, and others stood unmoving, their huge furry heads slumped between their forelegs, which were so matted with long dark fur that their shapes could not be seen. One old bull carried thick scars on his sides and flanks that could be seen even at the distance where the three men walked; the bull stood some-what apart from the other animals; he faced the approaching men, his head lowered, his upward curving ebony horns shining in the sunlight, bright against the dark mop of hair that hung over his head. The bull did not move as they came nearer.
Miller paused again. “No need for all of us to go on. Fred, you wait here; Will, you follow me; we’ll have to try to skirt them. Buffalo always face downwind; can’t get a good shot from this angle.”
Schneider dropped to his knees and let himself down to a prone position; with his chin resting on his folded hands, he regarded the herd. Miller and Andrews cut to their left. They had walked about fifteen yards when Miller raised his hand, palm outward; Andrews halted.
“They’re beginning to stir,” Miller said. “Go easy.”
Many of the buffalo at the outer edges of the herd had got to their feet, raising themselves stiffly on their forelegs, and then upon their hind legs, wobbling for a moment until they had taken a few steps forward. The two men remained still.
“It’s the moving that stirs them up,” Miller said. “You could stand right in front of them all day and not bother them, if you could get there without moving.”
The two men began again their slow movement forward. When the herd showed another sign of restlessness, Miller dropped to his hands and knees; Andrews came up behind him, awkwardly dragging the sack of ammunition at his side.
When they were broadside to the herd and about a hundred and fifty yards away from it, they stopped. Miller stuck into the ground the forked branch he had been carrying, and rested his gun barrel on the fork. Andrews crawled up beside him.
Miller grinned at him. “Watch the way I do it, boy. You aim just a little behind the shoulder blade, and about two-thirds of the way down from the top of the hump; that is, if you’re shooting from behind, the way we are. This is the heart shot. It’s better to get them a little from the front, through the lights; that way, they don’t die so quick, but they don’t run so far after they’re shot. But with a wind, you take a chance, trying to get in front of them. Keep your eye on the big bull, the one with the scars all over him. His hide ain’t worth a damn, but he looks like the leader. You always try to pick out the leader of a herd and get him first. They ain’t apt to run so far without a leader.”
Andrews watched intently as Miller lined his gun upon the old bull. Both of Miller’s eyes were open along the sights of his gun barrel. The stock was tight against his cheek. The muscles of his right hand tensed; there was a heavy crrack of the rifle; the stock kicked back against Miller’s shoulder, and a small cloud of smoke drifted away from the mouth of the gun barrel.
At the sound of the gun, the old bull jumped, as if startled by a sharp blow on his rump; without hurry, he began loping away from the men who lay on their bellies.
“Damn,” Miller said.
“You missed him,” Andrews said; there was amazement in his voice.
Miller laughed shortly. “I didn’t miss him. That’s the trouble with heart-shot buffalo. They’ll go a hundred yards sometimes.”
The other buffalo began to be aroused by the movement of their leader. Slowly at first, a few raised themselves on their thick forelegs; and then suddenly the herd was a dark mass of moving fur as it ran in the direction its leader had taken. In the closely packed herd, the humps of the animals bobbed rhythmically, almost liquidly; and the roar of the hooves came upon the two men who lay watching. Miller shouted something that Andrews could not distinguish in the noise.
The buffalo passed their wounded leader, and ran beyond him some three hundred yards, where their running gradually spent itself, and where they stood, milling uneasily about. The old bull stood alone behind them, his massive head sunk below his hump; his tail twitched once or twice, and he shook his head. He turned around several times, as another animal might have done before sleeping, and finally stood facing the two men who were more than two hundred yards away from him. He took three steps toward them, and paused again. Then, stiffly, he fell on his side, his legs straight out from his belly. The legs jerked, and then he was still.
Miller rose from his prone position and brushed the grass off the front of his clothing. “Well, we got the leader. They won’t run so far the next time.” He picked up his gun, his shooting stick, and a long wire-handled cleaning patch that he had laid beside him. “Want to go over and take a look?”
“Won’t we scare the rest of them?”
Miller shook his head. “They had their scare. They won’t be so spooky now.”
They walked across the grass to where the dead buffalo lay. Miller glanced at it casually and scuffed its fur with the toe of his boot.
“Ain’t worth skinning,” he said. “But you have to get the leader out of the way, if you’re going to do any good with the rest of them.”
Andrews regarded the felled buffalo with some mixture of feeling. On the ground, unmoving, it no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before. And though the body made a huge dark mound on the earth, its size seemed somehow diminished. The shaggy black head was cocked a little to one side, held so by one horn that had fallen upon an unevenness of the ground; the other horn was broken at the tip. The small eyes, half-closed, but still brightly shining in the sun, stared gently ahead. The hooves were surprisingly small, almost delicate, cloven neatly like those of a calf; the thin ankles seemed incapable of having supported the weight of the great animal. The broad swelling side was covered with scars; some were so old that the fur had nearly covered them, but others were new, and shone flat and dark blue on the flesh. From one nostril, a drop of blood thickened in the sun, and dropped upon the grass.
“He wasn’t good for much longer anyway,” Miller said. “In another year he would have weakened, and been picked off by the wolves.” He spat on the grass beside the animal. “Buffalo never dies of old age. He’s either killed by a man or dragged down by a wolf.”
Andrews glanced across the body of the buffalo and saw the herd beyond. It had settled; a few of the animals were still milling about; but more of them were grazing or resting on the grass.
“We’ll give them a few minutes,” Miller said. “They’re still a mite skittish.”
They walked around the buffalo that Miller had killed and made their way in the direction of the herd. They walked slowly but with less caution than they had during their first approach. When they came within two hundred and fifty yards, Miller stopped and tore off a small handful of grass-blades; he held them up and let them fall. They fell slowly downward, scattering this way and that. Miller nodded in satisfaction.
“Wind’s died,” he said. “We can get on the other side, and run them back toward camp; less hauling of the skins that way.”
They made a wide circle, approached, and stopped a little more than a hundred yards away from the closely bunched herd. Andrews lay on his stomach beside Miller, who adjusted his Sharps rifle in the crotch of his shooting stick.
“Should get two or three this time, before they run,” he said.
He examined the disposition of the herd with some care for several minutes. More of the buffalo lowered themselves to the grass. Miller confined his attention to the buffalo milling around the edges of the herd. He leveled his rifle toward a large bull that seemed more active than the others, and squeezed gently on the trigger. At the noise of his shot, a few of the buffalo got to their feet; they all turned their heads in the direction from which the shot came; they seemed to stare at the little cloud of smoke that rose from the barrel of the gun and thinned in the still air. The bull gave a start forward and ran for a few steps, stopped, and turned to face the two men who lay on the ground. Blood dropped slowly from both nostrils, and then dropped more swiftly, until it came in two crimson streams. The buffalo that had begun to move away at the sound of the shot, seeing their new leader hesitate, stopped in wait for him.
“Got him through the lights,” Miller said. “Watch.” He reloaded his rifle as he spoke, and swung it around in search of the most active of the remaining buffalo.
As he spoke, the wounded bull swayed unsteadily, staggered, and with a heavy lurch fell sideways. Three smaller animals came up curiously to the fallen bull; for a few seconds they stared, and sniffed at the warm blood. One of them lifted its head and bawled, and started to trot away. Immediately, beside Andrews, another shot sounded; and the younger bull jumped, startled, ran a few feet, and paused, the blood streaming from its nostrils.
In quick succession, Miller shot three more buffalo. By the time he had shot the third, the entire herd was on its feet, milling about; but the animals did not run. They wandered about in a loose circle, bawling, looking for a leader to take them away.
“I’ve got them,” Miller whispered fiercely. “By God, they’re buffaloed!” He upended his sack of ammunition so that several dozen shells were quickly available to him. When he could reach them, Andrews collected the empty cartridges. After he had downed his sixth buffalo, Miller opened the breech of his rifle and swabbed out the powder-caked barrel with the cleaning patch tied on the end of the long stiff wire.
“Run back to the camp and get me a fresh rifle and some more cartridges,” he said to Andrews. “And bring a bucket of water.”
Andrews crawled on his hands and knees in a straight line away from Miller. After several minutes, he looked back over his shoulder; he got to his feet and trotted in a wide circle around the herd. When he turned around the bend in the valley, he saw Schneider sitting with his back propped against a rock, his hat pulled low over his eyes. At the sound of Andrews’s approach, Schneider pushed his hat back and looked up at him.
“Miller has them buffaloed,” Andrews said, panting. “They just stand there and let him shoot them. They don’t even run.”
“God damn it,” Schneider said quietly. “He’s got a stand. I was afraid of it. Sounded like the shots was coming too regular and close.”
From the distance, they heard the sound of a shot; it was faint and inoffensive where they heard it.
“They just stand there,” Andrews said again.
Schneider pulled his hat over his eyes and leaned against his rock. “You better hope they run pretty soon. Else we’ll be working all night.”
Andrews went toward the horses, which were standing close together, their heads erect and their ears pitched forward at the sound of Miller’s gunfire. He got on his own horse, and set it at a gallop across the valley to their camp.
At his approach, Charley Hoge looked up from his work; he had spent the morning of the other men’s absence felling a number of slender aspens and dragging them to the scattered trees at the edge of their camp.
“Give me a hand with some of these poles,” Charley called to him as he dismounted. “Trying to set up a corral for the livestock.”
“Miller’s got a stand of buffalo,” Andrews said. “He wants a fresh rifle and some cartridges. And some water.”
“’I God,” Charley Hoge said. “His name be praised.” He dropped the aspen pole that with the crook of his bad arm he had half lifted up across the trunk of a pine, and scurried toward the canvas-covered store of goods near the rock chimney. “How many head?”
“Two hundred fifty, three hundred. Maybe more.”
“’I God,” Charley Hoge said. “If they don’t scatter, it’ll be as big a stand as he ever had.” From the covered framework of pine boughs, Charley Hoge pulled an ancient rifle whose stock was nicked and stained and split at one point, the split being closed by tightly wound wire. “This here’s just an old Ballard—nothing like the Sharps—but it’s a Fifty, and he can use it enough to cool his good gun off. And here’s some shells, two boxes—all we got. With what he filled last night, ought to be enough.”
Andrews took the gun and the shells, in his haste and nervousness dropping a box of the latter. “And some water,” Andrews said, stopping to retrieve the box of shells.
Charley Hoge nodded and went across the spring, where he filled a small wooden keg. Handing it to Andrews, he said: “Get a little of this warm before you use it on a rifle barrel; or don’t let the barrel get too hot. Cold water on a real hot barrel can ruin it mighty quick.”
Andrews, mounted on his horse, nodded. He clasped the keg to his chest with one arm, and reined the horse away from the camp. He pointed his horse toward the sound of the gunfire, which still came faintly across the long flat valley, and let the horse have its head; his arms tightly clasped the water keg and the spare rifle, and he held the reins loosely in one hand. He pulled his horse to a halt near the bend of the valley where Schneider was still dozing, and dismounted awkwardly, nearly dropping the keg of water in his descent. He wrapped the reins about a small tree and made his way in a wide half-circle around the valley bend to where Miller, enveloped now in a light gray haze of gunsmoke, lay on the ground and fired every two or three minutes into the milling herd of buffalo. Andrews crawled up beside him, carrying the water keg with one arm and sliding the rifle over the slick grass with his other hand, which supported him.
“How many of them have you got?” Andrews asked.
Miller did not answer; he turned upon him wide, black-rimmed eyes that stared at, through him, blankly, as if he did not exist. Miller grabbed the extra rifle, and thrust the Sharps into Andrews’s hands; Andrews took it by the stock and the barrel, and immediately dropped it. The barrel was painfully hot.
“Clean her out,” Miller said in a flat, grating voice. He thrust the cleaning rod toward him. “She’s getting caked inside.”
Careful not to touch the metal of the barrel, Andrews broke the rifle and inserted the cleaning patch into the mouth of the barrel.
“Not that way,” Miller told him in a flat voice. “You’ll foul the firing pin. Sop your patch in water, and go through the breech.”
Andrews opened the keg of water and got the tufted end of the cleaning rod wet. When he inserted the rod into the breech of the barrel the hot metal hissed, and the drops of water that got on the outside of the barrel danced for a moment on the blued metal and disappeared. He waited for a few moments, and reinserted the patch. Drops of smoke-blackened water dripped from the end of the barrel. After cleaning the fouled gun, he took a handkerchief from his pocket, dipped it into the still-cool spring water, and ran it over the outside of the barrel until the gun was cool. Then he handed it back to Miller.
Miller shot, and reloaded, and shot, and loaded again. The acrid haze of gunsmoke thickened around them; Andrews coughed and breathed heavily and put his face near the ground where the smoke was thinner. When he lifted his head he could see the ground in front of him littered with the mounded corpses of buffalo, and the remaining herd—apparently little diminished—circling almost mechanically now, in a kind of dumb rhythm, as if impelled by the regular explosions of Miller’s guns. The sound of the guns firing deafened him; between shots, his ears throbbed dully, and he waited, tense in the pounding silence, almost dreading the next shot which would shatter his deafness with a quick burst of sound nearly like pain.
Gradually the herd, in its milling, moved away from them; as it moved, the two men crawled toward it, a few yards at a time, maintaining their relative position to the circling buffalo. For a few minutes, beyond the heavy cloud of gunsmoke, they could breathe easily; but soon another haze formed and they were breathing heavily and coughing again.
After a while Andrews began to perceive a rhythm in Miller’s slaughter. First, with a deliberate slow movement that was a tightening of the arm muscles, a steadying of his head, and a slow squeeze of his hand, Miller would fire his rifle; then quickly he would eject the still-smoking cartridge and reload; he would study the animal he had shot, and if he saw that it was cleanly hit, his eyes would search among the circling herd for a buffalo that seemed particularly restless; after a few seconds, the wounded animal would stagger and crash to the ground; and then he would shoot again. The whole business seemed to Andrews like a dance, a thunderous minuet created by the wildness that surrounded it.
Once during the stand, several hours after Miller had felled the first of the buffalo, Schneider crawled up behind them and called Miller’s name. Miller gave no sign that he heard. Schneider called again, more loudly, and Miller jerked his head slightly toward him; but still he did not answer.
“Give it up,” Schneider said. “You got seventy or eighty of them already. That’s more than enough to keep Mr. Andrews and me busy half the night.”
“No,” Miller said.
“You got a good stand already,” Schneider said. “All right. You don’t have to—”
Miller’s hand tightened, and a shot boomed over Schneider’s words.
“Mr. Andrews here won’t be much help; you know that,” Schneider said, after the echoes of the gunshot had drifted away. “No need to keep on shooting more than we’ll be able to skin.”
“We’ll skin all we shoot, Fred,” Miller said. “No matter if I shoot from now till tomorrow.”
“God damn it!” Schneider said. “I ain’t going to skin no stiff buff.”
Miller reloaded his gun, and swung it around restlessly on the shooting stick. “I’ll help you with the skinning, if need be. But help you or not, you’ll skin them, Fred. You’ll skin them hot or cold, loose or hard. You’ll skin them if they’re bloated, or you’ll skin them if they’re froze. You’ll skin them if you have to pry the hides loose with a crowbar. Now shut up, and get away from here; you’ll make me miss a shot.”
“God damn it!” Schneider said. He pounded the earth with his fist. “All right,” he said, raising himself up to a crouching position. “Keep them as long as you can. But I ain’t going to—”
“Fred,” Miller said quietly, “when you crawl away from here, crawl away quiet. If these buffalo spook, I’ll shoot you.”
For a moment Schneider remained in his low crouch. Then he shook his head, dropped to his knees, and crawled away from the two men in a straight line, muttering to himself. Miller’s hand tightened, his finger squeezed, and a shot cracked in the thudding quietness.
It was the middle of the afternoon before the stand was broken.
The original herd had been diminished by two-thirds or more. In a long irregular swath that extended beyond the herd for nearly a mile, the ground was littered with the dark mounds of dead buffalo. Andrews’s knees were raw from crawling after Miller, as they made their way yard by yard in slow pursuit of the southward list of the circling herd. His eyes burned from blinking against the gunsmoke, and his lungs pained him from breathing it; his head throbbed from the sound of gunfire, and upon the palm of one hand blisters were beginning to form from his handling of the hot barrels. For the last hour he had clenched his teeth against any expression of the pain his body felt.
But as the pain of his body increased, his mind seemed to detach itself from the pain, to rise above it, so that he could see himself and Miller more clearly than he had before. During the last hour of the stand he came to see Miller as a mechanism, an automaton, moved by the moving herd; and he came to see Miller’s destruction of the buffalo, not as a lust for blood or a lust for the hides or a lust for what the hides would bring, or even at last the blind lust of fury that toiled darkly within him—he came to see the destruction as a cold, mindless response to the life in which Miller had immersed himself. And he looked upon himself, crawling dumbly after Miller upon the flat bed of the valley, picking up the empty cartridges that he spent, tugging the water keg, husbanding the rifle, cleaning it, offering it to Miller when he needed it—he looked upon himself, and did not know who he was, or where he went.
Miller’s rifle cracked; a young cow, hardly more than a calf, stumbled, got to its feet, and ran erratically out of the circling herd.
“Damn it,” Miller said without emotion. “A leg shot. That will do it.”
While he was speaking, he was reloading; he got another shot off at the wounded buffalo; but it was too late. On the second shot, the cow wheeled and ran into the milling herd. The circle broken, the herd halted and was still for a moment. Then a young bull broke away, and the herd followed, the mass of animals pouring out of their own wide circle like water from a spout, until Miller and Andrews could see only a thin dark stream of bobbing humps thudding away from them down the winding bed of the valley.
The two men stood erect. Andrews stretched his cramped muscles, and almost cried aloud in pain as he straightened his back.
“I thought about it,” Miller said, speaking away from Andrews toward the dwindling herd. “I thought about what would happen if I didn’t get a clean shot. So I didn’t get a clean shot. I broke a leg. If I hadn’t thought about it, I could have got the whole herd.” He turned to Andrews; his eyes were wide and blank, the pupils unfocused and swimming in the whites. The unbearded skin of his face was black with the ash of gunpowder, and his beard was caked with it. “The whole herd,” he said again; and his eyes focused upon Andrews and he smiled a little with the corners of his mouth.
“Was it a big stand?” Will Andrews asked.
“I never had a bigger,” Miller said. “Let’s count them down.”
The two men began to walk back down the valley, following the loose, spread-out trail of felled buffalo. Andrews was able to keep the numbers straight in his mind until he had counted nearly thirty; but his attention was dissipated by the sheer quantity of the dead beasts, and the numbers he repeated to himself spread in his mind and whirled as in a pool; and he gave up his effort to count. Dazedly he walked beside Miller as they threaded their way among the buffalo, some of which had fallen so close together that their bodies touched. One bull had dropped so that its huge head rested upon the side of another buffalo; the head seemed to watch them as they approached, the dark blank shining eyes regarding them disinterestedly, then staring beyond them as they passed. The hot cloudless sun beat down upon them as they plodded over the thick spongy grass, and the heat raised from the dead animals a rank odor of must and wildness; the smooth swishing sound that their boots made in the tall grass intensified the silence around them; the dull pulsations in Andrews’s head began to subside, and after the acrid smell of gunpowder, the strong odor of the buffalo was almost welcome. He hitched the empty water keg to a more comfortable position on his shoulder, and strode erect beside Miller.
Schneider was waiting for them where the long swath of buffalo ended. He sat on the mounded side of a large bull; his feet barely reached the ground. Behind him, their horses grazed quietly, their reins knotted loosely together and trailing.
“How many?” Schneider asked sadly.
“A hundred and thirty-five,” Miller said.
Schneider nodded somberly. “About what I figured.” He slid off the side of the buffalo and picked up his case of skinning knives, which he had put on the ground beside the felled bull. “Might as well get started,” he said to Andrews; “we got a long afternoon and a long night ahead of us.” He turned to Miller. “You going to help?”
For a moment, Miller did not answer. His arms hung long at his sides, his shoulders drooped, and there was on his face an expression of emptiness; his mouth hung slightly open, and his head swung from side to side as he gazed upon the receding field of dead buffalo. He swung his body around to Schneider.
“What?” he asked dully.
“You going to help?”
Miller brought his hands up, chest-high, and opened them. The forefinger of his right hand was puffed and swollen and curved inward toward his palm; slowly he straightened it. Across the palm of his left hand a long narrow blister, pale against the grained blackness of the surrounding flesh, extended diagonally from the base of the forefinger to the heel of the palm near the wrist. Miller flexed his hands and grinned, standing erect.
“Let’s get started,” he said.
Schneider beckoned to Andrews. “Get your knives, and come with me.”
Andrews followed him to a young bull; the two men knelt together before it.
“You just watch me,” Schneider said.
He selected a long curving blade and grasped it firmly in his right hand. With his left hand he pushed back the heavy collar of fur around the buffalo’s neck; with his other hand he made a small slit in the hide, and drew his knife swiftly from the throat across the belly. The hide parted neatly with a faint ripping sound. With a stubbier knife, he cut around the bag that held the testicles, cut through the cords that held them and the limp penis to the flesh; he separated the testicles, which were the size of small crab-apples, from the other parts of the bag, and tossed them to one side; then he slit the few remaining inches of hide to the anal opening.
“I always save the balls,” he said. “They make mighty good eating, and they put starch in your pecker. Unless they come off an old bull. Then you better just stay away from them.”
With still another knife, Schneider cut around the neck of the animal, beginning at that point where he had made the belly slit and lifting the huge head up and supporting it on one knee so that he could cut completely around the throat. Then he slit around each of the ankles, and ripped down the inside of each leg until his knife met the first cut down the belly. He loosened the skin around each ankle until he could get a handhold on the hide, and then he shucked the hide off the leg until it lay in loose folds upon the side of the buffalo. After he had laid the skin back on each leg, he loosened the hide just above the hump until he could gather a loose handful of it. Upon this, he knotted a thin rope that he got from his saddlebag; the other end he tied to his saddle horn. He got in the saddle, and backed his horse up. The hide peeled off the buffalo as the horse backed; the heavy muscles of the bull quivered and jerked as the hide was shucked off.
“And that’s all there is to it,” Schneider said, getting down from his horse. He untied the rope from the bullhide. “Then you spread it out flat on the ground to dry. Fur side up, so it won’t dry out too fast.”
Andrews estimated that it had taken Schneider a little over five minutes to complete the job of skinning. He looked at the buffalo. Without its hide, it seemed much smaller; yellowish white layers of fat thinned upon the smooth blue twists of muscle; here and there, where flesh had come off with the skin, dark clots of blood lay on the flesh. The head, with its ruff of fur and its long beard beneath the chin, appeared monstrously large. Andrews looked away.
“Think you can do it?” Schneider asked.
Andrews nodded.
“Don’t try to hurry it,” Schneider said. “And don’t pick an old bull; stick to the young light ones at first.”
Andrews selected a bull about the same size as the one Schneider had skinned. As he approached it, it seemed to him that he shrank inside his clothes, which were suddenly stiff upon him. Gingerly he pulled from his case a knife similar to the one Schneider had used, and forced his hands to go through the motions he had seen a few moments before. The hide, apparently so soft on the belly, offered a surprising resistance to his knife; he forced it, and felt it sink into the hide and deeper into the flesh of the animal. Unable to draw the knife in the smooth easy sweep that he had observed Schneider use, he hacked an irregular cut across the belly. He could not make his hands touch the testicles of the buffalo; instead he cut carefully around the bag on both sides.
By the time he had slit the hide on the legs and around the throat, he was sweating. He pulled at the hide on one of the legs, but his hands slipped; with his knife, he loosened the flesh from the hide and pulled again. The hide came from the leg with large chunks of flesh hanging upon it. He managed to get enough hide gathered at the hump to take the knot of his rope, but when he backed his horse up to pull it loose, the knot slipped, and the horse almost sat back on its haunches. He pulled a bit more of the hide loose and knotted the rope more firmly. The horse pulled again. The hide ripped from the flesh, half spinning the buffalo around; he backed his horse up, and the hide split, coming off the side of the buffalo and carrying with it huge hunks of meat.
Andrews looked helplessly at the ruined hide. After a moment, he turned to seek out Schneider, who was busily engaged some hundred feet away ripping at the belly of a large bull. Andrews counted six carcasses that Schneider had stripped during the time of his own work with a single one. Schneider looked in his direction, but he did not pause in his work. He knotted his rope about the hide, backed his horse up, and spread the shucked skin on the grass. Then he walked over to where Andrews waited. He looked at the ruined hide that still was attached to the rump of the buffalo.
“You didn’t get a clean pull,” he said. “And you didn’t cut even around the neck. If you cut too deep, you get into the meat, and that part pulls loose too easy. Might as well give this one up.”
Andrews nodded, loosened the knot around the hide, and approached another buffalo. He made his cuts more carefully this time; but when he tried to shuck the hide, again the hide split away as it had done before. Tears of rage came to his eyes.
Schneider came up to him again.
“Look,” he said, not unkindly, “I don’t have time to fool with you today. If Miller and I don’t get these hides off in a few hours, these buffs will be stiff as boards. Why don’t you drag a calf back to camp and dress it down? We need some meat, anyhow; and you can work on the carcass, get the feel of it. I’ll help you fix up a rig.”
Not trusting himself to speak, Andrews nodded; he felt a hot, irrational hatred for Schneider welling up in his throat.
Schneider selected a young cow, hardly more than a calf, and looped a rope around its chin and neck; he pulled the rope short, and knotted it around Andrews’s saddle horn, so that with the pull of the horse the head of the buffalo did not drag on the ground.
“You’ll have to walk your horse back,” Schneider said. “He’ll have enough to do dragging this cow.”
Andrews nodded again, not looking at Schneider. He pulled the reins, and the horse leaned forward, its hooves slipping in the turf; but the carcass of the young buffalo slid a little, and the horse gained its footing and began to strain its way across the valley. Andrews plodded tiredly before the horse, loosely pulling it forward by the reins.
By the time he got back to the camp, the sun had gone behind the western range of mountains; there was a chill in the air that went through his clothing and touched his sweaty skin. Charley Hoge trotted out from the camp to meet him.
“How many?” Charley Hoge called.
“Miller counted a hundred and thirty-five,” Andrews said.
“’I God,” Charley Hoge said. “A big one.”
Near the camp, Andrews halted his horse and untied the rope from the saddle horn.
“Nice little calf you got,” Charley Hoge said. “Make good eating. You going to dress her down, or you want me to?”
“I’ll dress her,” Andrews said. But he made no movement. He stood looking at the calf, whose open transparent eyes were filmed over blankly with a layer of dust.
After a moment, Charley Hoge said: “I’ll help you fix up a scaffold.”
The two men went to the area where earlier Charley Hoge had been working on the corral for the livestock. The corral, roughly hexagonal in shape, had been completed; but there were still a few long aspen poles lying about. Charley Hoge pointed out three of equal length and they dragged them back to where the buffalo calf lay. They pounded the ends of the poles into the ground, and arranged them in the form of a tripod. Andrews mounted his horse, and lashed the poles together at the top. Charley Hoge threw the rope, which was still attached to the calf’s head, over the top of the tripod, and Andrews tied the loose end to his saddle horn. He backed his horse up until the calf was suspended, its hooves barely brushing the short grass. Charley Hoge held the rope until Andrews returned to the tripod and secured the rope firmly to the top, so that the buffalo would not drop.
The buffalo hung; they surveyed it for a moment without speaking. Charley Hoge went back to his campfire; Andrews stood before the hung calf. In the distance, across the valley, he saw a movement; it was Schneider and Miller returning. Their horses went in a swift walk across the valley bed. Andrews took a deep breath, and put his knife carefully to the exposed belly of the calf.
He worked more slowly this time. After he had made the cuts in the belly, around the throat, and around the ankles, he carefully peeled the hide back so that it hung loosely down the sides of the animal. Then, reaching high above the hump, he ripped the hide from the back. It came off smoothly, with only a few small chunks of the flesh adhering to it. With his knife he scraped the largest of these chunks off, and spread the skin on the grass, flesh side downward, as he had seen Schneider do. While he stood back, looking down at his hide, Miller and Schneider rode up beside him and dismounted.
Miller, his face streaked with the black residue of powder smoke and smears of brownish-red blood, looked at him dully for a moment, and then looked at the hide spread on the ground. He turned and shambled unsteadily toward the campsite.
“Looks like a clean job,” Schneider said, walking around the hide. “You won’t have no trouble. Course, it’s easier when your carcass is hanging.”
“How did you and Miller do?” Andrews asked.
“We didn’t get halfway through. We’ll be working most of the night.”
“I wish I could help,” Andrews said.
Schneider walked over to the skinned calf and slapped the naked rump of it. “Nice fat little calf. She’ll make good eating.”
Andrews went to the calf and knelt; he fumbled among the knives in his case. He raised his head to Schneider, but he did not look at him.
“What do I do?” he asked.
“What?”
“What do I do first? I’ve never dressed an animal before.”
“My God,” Schneider said quietly. “I keep forgetting. Well, first you better de-gut her. Then I’ll tell you how to cut her up.”
Charley Hoge and Miller came around the tall chimney rock and leaned against it, watching. Andrews hesitated for a moment, then stood up. He pushed the point of his knife against the breastbone of the calf, and poked until he found the softness of the stomach. He clenched his teeth, and pushed the knife in the flesh, and drew the knife downward. The heavy, coiled blue-and-white guts, thicker than his forearm, spilled out from the clean edge of the cut. Andrews closed his eyes, and pulled the knife downward as quickly as he could. As he straightened up, he felt something warm on his shirtfront; a gush of dark, half-clotted blood had dropped from the opened cavity. It spilled upon his shirt and dripped down upon the front of his trousers. He jumped backward. His quick movement sent the calf rocking slowly on the rope, and made the thick entrails slowly emerge from the widening cut. With a heavy, liquid, sliding thud they spilled upon the ground; like something alive, the edge of the mass slid toward Andrews and covered the tops of his shoes.
Schneider laughed loudly, slapping his leg. “Cut her loose!” he shouted. “Cut her loose before she crawls all over you!”
Andrews swallowed the heavy saliva that spurted in his mouth. With his left hand he followed the thick slimy main gut up through the body cavity; he watched his forearm disappear into the wet warmth of the body. When his left hand came upon the end of the gut, he reached his other hand with the knife up beside it, and sliced blindly, awkwardly at the tough tube. The rotten smell of the buffalo’s half-digested food billowed out; he held his breath, and hacked more desperately with his knife. The tube parted, and the entrails spilled down, gathering in the lower part of the body. With both arms, he scooped the guts out of the cavity until he could find the other attachment; he cut it away and tore the insides from the calf with desperate scooping motions, until they spread in a heavy mass on the ground around his feet. He stepped back, pale, breathing heavily through his opened mouth; his arms and hands, held out from his body, dripping with blood, were trembling.
Miller, still leaning against the chimney rock, called to Schneider: “Let’s have some of that liver, Fred.”
Schneider nodded, and took a few steps to the swinging carcass. With one hand he steadied it, and with the other reached into the open cavity. He jerked his arm; his hand came out carrying a large piece of brownish purple meat. With a few quick strokes of his knife, he sliced it in two, and tossed the larger of the pieces across to Miller. He caught the liver in the scoop of his two hands, and clutched it to his chest so that it would not slide out of his grasp. Then he lifted it to his mouth, and took a large bite from it; the dark blood oozed from the meat, ran down the sides of his chin, and dropped to the ground. Schneider grinned and took a bite from his piece. Still grinning, chewing slowly, his lips dark red from the meat, he extended the meat toward Andrews.
“Want a chew?” he asked, and laughed.
Andrews felt the bitterness rise in his throat; his stomach contracted in a sudden spasm, and the muscles of his throat pulled together, choking him. He turned and ran a few paces from the men, leaned against a tree, doubled over, and retched. After a few moments, he turned to them.
“You finish it up,” he called to them. “I’ve had enough.”
Without waiting for a reply, he turned again and walked toward the spring that trickled down some seventy-five yards beyond their camp. At the spring he removed his shirt; the blood from the buffalo was beginning to stiffen on his undershirt. As quickly as he could, he removed the rest of his clothing and stood in the late afternoon shadow, shivering in the cool air. From his chest to below his navel was the brownish red stain of buffalo blood; and in removing his clothing, his arms and hands had brushed against other parts of his body so that he was blotched with stains hued from a pale vermilion to a deep brownish crimson. He thrust his hands into the icy pool formed by the spring. The cold water clotted the blood, and for a moment he feared that he could not remove it from his skin. Then it floated away in solid tendrils; and he splashed water on his arms, his chest, and his stomach, gasping at the cold, straining his lungs to gather air against the repeated shocks of it.
When he had removed from his naked body the last flecks of blood he could see, he knelt on the ground and wrapped his arms around his body; he was shivering violently, and his skin had a faintly bluish cast. He took his clothing, article by article, and immersed it in the tiny pool; he scrubbed it as hard as he could, wringing each article out thoroughly and resubmerging it several times, until the water was muddied and tinged with a dirty red. Finally, with bits of fine gravel and soil gathered from the thin banks of the pool, he scrubbed at his blood-stained boots; but the blood and slime from the buffalo had entered into the pores of the leather and he could not scrub the stain away. He put the wet and wrinkled clothing back on and walked back to the camp. By this time it was nearly dark; and his clothing was stiff with the cold by the time he got to the campfire.
The buffalo had been dressed; the innards, the head, the hooves, and the lean bony sides had been dragged away from the campsite and scattered. On a spit over the fire, which was smoking and flaming higher than it should have been, was impaled a large chunk of the hump meat; beside the fire on a square of dirty canvas, in a dark irregular pile, was the rest of the meat. Andrews went up to the fire, and put his body against the heat; from the wrinkles of his clothing rose little wisps of steam. None of the men spoke to him; he did not look directly at them.
After a few moments, Charley Hoge took a small box from the canvas-covered cache and examined it by the light of the fire; Andrews saw that it contained a fine white powder. Charley Hoge went around the chimney rock toward the scattered remains of the buffalo, muttering to himself as he went.
“Charley’s out wolfing,” Miller said to no one. “I swear, he thinks a wolf is the devil himself.”
“Wolfing?” Andrews spoke without turning.
“You sprinkle strychnine over raw meat,” Miller said. “You keep it up a few days around a camp, you won’t have any trouble with wolves for a long time.”
Andrews turned so that his back received the heat of the campfire; when he turned, the front of his clothing immediately cooled and the still-wet cloth was icy on his skin.
“But that ain’t the reason Charley does it,” Miller said. “He looks at a dead wolf like it was the devil his self, killed.”
Schneider, squatting on his haunches, rose and stood beside Andrews, sniffing hungrily at the meat, which was beginning to blacken around the edges.
“Too big a piece,” Schneider said. “Won’t be done for an hour. A body gets a hunger, skinning all day; and he needs food if he’s going to skin all night.”
“It won’t be so bad, Fred,” Miller said. “There’s a moon, and we’ll get a little rest before the meat’s done.”
“It gets any colder,” Schneider said, “and we’ll be prying loose stiff hides.”
Charley Hoge came into sight around the chimney rock, which now loomed dark against the light sky. He carefully placed the box of strychnine back in its cache, dusted his hands off on his trouser legs, and inspected the buffalo roast. He nodded, and set the coffeepot on the edge of the fire, where some coals were beginning to glow dully. Soon the coffee was boiling; the aroma of the coffee and the rich odor of the meat dripping and falling into the fire blended and came across to the men who waited for their food. Miller smiled, Schneider cursed lazily, and Charley Hoge cackled to himself.
Instinctively, remembering his revulsion earlier at the sight and odor of the buffalo, Andrews turned away from the rich smells; but he realized suddenly that they struck him pleasantly. He hungered for the food that was being prepared. For the first time since he had returned from his cold bath at the spring, he turned and looked at the other men.
He said sheepishly: “I guess I didn’t do so good, dressing the buffalo.”
Schneider laughed. “You tossed everything you had, Mr. Andrews.”
“It’s happened before,” Miller said. “I’ve seen people do worse.”
The moon, nearly full, edged over the eastern range; as the fire died, its pale bluish light spread through the trees and touched the surfaces of their clothing, so that the deep red glow cast by the coals was touched by the cold pale light where the two colors met on their bodies. They sat in silence until the moon was wholly visible through the trees. Miller measured the angle of the moon, and told Charley Hoge to take the meat, done or not, off the spit. Charley Hoge sliced great chunks of the half-done roast onto their plates. Miller and Schneider picked the meat up in their hands and tore at it with their teeth, holding it sometimes in their mouths while they snapped their fingers from the heat. Andrews sliced his meat with one of his skinning knives; the meat was tough but juicy, and it had the flavor of strong, undercooked beef. The men washed it down with gulps of scalding bitter coffee.
Andrews ate only a part of the meat that Charley Hoge had given him. He put his plate and cup down beside the fire, and lay back on his bedroll, which he pulled up near the fire, and watched the other men wordlessly gorge themselves on the meat and coffee. They finished what Charley Hoge had given them, and ate more. Charley Hoge, himself, ate almost delicately from a thin slice of the roast which he cut into very small pieces. He washed down the small bites he took with frequent sips of coffee that he had strongly laced with whisky. After Miller and Schneider had finished the last bit of the hump roast, Miller reached for Charley Hoge’s jug, took a long swallow, and passed the jug to Schneider, who turned the jug up and let the liquor gurgle long in his throat; he swallowed several times before he handed the jug to Andrews, who held the mouth of the jug against his closed lips for several seconds before taking a small, cautious swallow.
Schneider sighed, stretched, and lay on his back before the fire. He spoke from deep in his throat, his voice a soft, slow growl: “A belly full of buffalo meat, and a good drink of whisky. All a body would need now is a woman.”
“There ain’t no sin in buffalo meat nor corn whisky,” said Charley Hoge. “But a woman, now. That’s a temptation of the flesh.”
Schneider yawned, and stretched again on the ground. “Remember that little whore back in Butcher’s Crossing?” He looked at Andrews. “What was her name?”
“Francine,” Andrews said.
“Yeah, Francine. My God, that was a pretty whore. Wasn’t she kind of heated up for you, Mr. Andrews?”
Andrews swallowed, and looked into the fire. “I didn’t notice that she was.”
Schneider laughed. “Don’t tell me you didn’t get into that. My God, the way she kept looking at you, you could have had it for damn near nothing—or nothing, come to think of it. She said she wasn’t working....How was it, Mr. Andrews? Was it pretty good?”
“Leave it be, Fred,” Miller said quietly.
“I want to know how it was,” Schneider said. He raised himself on one elbow; his round face, red in the dull glow of the coals, peered at Andrews; there was a fixed, tight smile on his face. “All soft and white,” he said hoarsely, and licked his lips. “What did you do? Tell me what—”
“That’s enough, Fred,” Miller said sharply.
Schneider looked at Miller angrily. “What’s the matter? I got a right to talk, ain’t I?”
“You know it’s no good thinking about women out here,” Miller said. “Thinking about what you can’t have will drive you off your feed.”
“Jezebels,” Charley Hoge said, pouring another cup of whisky, which he warmed with a bit of coffee. “The work of the devil.”
“What you don’t think about,” Miller said, “you don’t miss. Come on. Let’s get after those hides while we have some good light.”
Schneider got up and shook himself as an animal might after having been immersed in water. He laughed, clearing his throat. “Hell,” he said, “I was just having me some fun with Mr. Andrews. I know how to handle myself.”
“Sure,” Miller said. “Let’s get going.”
The two men walked away from the campfire to where their horses were tethered at a tree. Just before they went beyond the dim circle of light cast by the campfire, Schneider turned and grinned at Andrews.
“But the first thing I’m going to do when we get back to Butcher’s Crossing is hire myself a little German girl for a couple of days. If you get in too much of a hurry, Mr. Andrews, you might just have to pull me off.”
Andrews waited until he heard the two men ride away, and watched as they loped across the pale bed of the valley, until their dark bobbing shapes merged into the darker rise of the western range of mountains. Then he slid into his bedroll and closed his eyes; he listened for a long while as Charley Hoge cleaned the utensils he had used for cooking, and tidied the camp. After a while there was silence. In the darkness Andrews ran his hand over his face; it was rough and strange to his touch; the beard, which he was constantly surprised to feel upon his face, distracted his hands and made his features unfamiliar to him; he wondered how he looked; he wondered if Francine would recognize him if she could see him now.
Since the night when he had gone up to her room in Butcher’s Crossing, he had not let himself think of her. But with Schneider’s mention of her name earlier in the evening, thoughts of her flooded upon him; he was not able to keep her image away. He saw her as he had seen her in those last moments in her room before he had turned and fled; seeing her in his mind, he turned restlessly upon his rough bed.
Why had he run away? From where had come that deadness inside him that made him know he must run away? He remembered the sickness in the pit of his stomach, the revulsion which had followed hard upon the vital rush of his blood as he had seen her stand naked and swaying slowly, as if suspended by his own desire, before him.
In the moment before sleep came upon him, he made a tenuous connection between his turning away from Francine that night in Butcher’s Crossing, and his turning away from the gutted buffalo earlier in the day, here in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.
Once again, in the darkness, his hand came from beneath the covers and moved across his face, sought out the cold, rough bulge of his forehead, followed the nose, went across the chapped lips, and rubbed against the thick beard, searching for his features. When sleep came upon him his hand was still resting on his face.