They rode out that day at sun-up with a breeze behind them, the sky cloudless and light blue. Before crossing at the shallow ford north of town, they stopped to survey the country beyond the Yellowstone, rolling and dusty brown, buffalo grass as far as you could see, not a tree or bush in sight except for what grew along the riverbank and bluffs. No shade and nowhere to hide.
Eli turned in his saddle and looked over at his father next to him, sitting up straight on the big Appaloosa mare he’d chosen yesterday from the corral at Fort Keogh. When Ulysses glanced back and winked, Eli was reassured despite himself. Maybe this whole enterprise was going to turn out all right. Maybe his father would find the man he was looking for, and maybe the two of them would reach an understanding of some kind. Maybe it was a holy thing, after all, tracking down a man whose family you had killed. Maybe God was behind it, instead of plain craziness. Then again, probably not.
“Here we go,” Hornaday said, and looked around at the party he’d put together, including an escort of four soldiers from the fort, led by Sergeant Bayliss with his large belly and fat mustache. There was also the celebrated buffalo hunter McNaney, and of course Ulysses and Eli themselves—everyone lined up at the river’s edge, their animals nosing the water. Behind them, perched on the buckboard of a light wagon, was a butcher’s apprentice from Miles City, a boy not much older than Eli by the name of Gumfield, hired to serve as Hornaday’s assistant in matters concerning specimen collection. And finally a six-mule team pulling a month’s provisions, including a ton of oats for the animals, driven by a white-bearded veteran of the Mexican War, McAnna, who had also been hired to cook. Yesterday in a light rain they’d all gathered at the fort to pick up their wagons and teams, load their commissary stores, and choose firearms and horses—everything courtesy of the United States War Department.
Hornaday called out to the men, his voice striking an odd pitch: “Sergeant Bayliss wants us to gather up on the other side. He has a few words.”
Bayliss tipped a hand toward Hornaday as if to say You first, and Hornaday urged his black gelding into the water, which flowed shallow and quick here over polished gravel. Bayliss and his troopers followed after. Then at his father’s nod Eli touched his heels to the buckskin mare he was on and splashed into the current, the water soon rising to the boy’s knees, the cold catching the breath out of his lungs. He whipped the horse with his reins, and they surged up the bank to the top of the rise, where his father soon joined him.
“Will you look at that, Eli,” Ulysses said. “They built a regular highway for us.”
Winding north was a double-rutted trail that followed a dry creek marked by its alkaline bed, dull-green clutches of sage on either side. It rose, dipped, curved, and rose again, finally seeming to pass into the sky. Clumps of white bones were scattered everyplace.
“Sunday Creek Trail,” Hornaday said.
Eli swung around to watch the mule team huffing through the ford, the air cold enough this morning to make small clouds of their breathing. In his belly and lungs he felt the days ahead, stirring. He also felt Gumfield’s eyes on him and, glancing back, made out the boy’s sullen face from fifty yards off, calling to mind Herman Stroud somehow, the same short nose and slack mouth. Or maybe it was just the way he held his head up, like he was better than everybody else. In the corral at the fort yesterday, Gumfield had been quick to claim the sleek-boned Appaloosa mare. He barely got the saddle cinched, though, when Hornaday pulled him aside, whispered in his ear, and pointed to a light wagon, which an orderly was hitching to a cold-blooded gray. The boy’s face loosened and his shoulders fell. When he threw the Appaloosa’s reins on the ground, Hornaday said, “Pick those up,” which Gumfield did just in time for Ulysses to come along and take them from his hand.
Now on the north bank of the Yellowstone, Sergeant Bayliss climbed into the bed of Gumfield’s wagon as the expedition assembled around him. He took off his faded McClellan cap to reveal the gleaming pink dome of his head. Then he opened his long coat and rubbed his big stomach, grimacing. The set of his red-rimmed eyes was hard. “Something you all need to hear before we start out,” he said, lifting a hand. “There’s talk of Indians loose off the reservations and skulking around the country we’re headed for.” He aimed a fat thumb over his shoulder, north. “Crow, by my reckoning, or they could be Assiniboine for all we know, or Piegan—but out to make trouble, whoever they are. To cause what hell they can. The War Department has ordered a military escort for Doctor Hornaday, as you know, and I’m in charge of it. Are we clear on that?”
Saddles creaked, and Eli’s mare tossed her head.
Bayliss turned to Hornaday. “Anything you want to toss in?”
“I’m happy for the escort,” Hornaday said, “which the Secretary of War has offered as a precaution. But he assured me, in person, that there’s no cause for worry.”
“The Secretary’s back in Washington, last I heard,” Bayliss snapped.
Hornaday smiled. “You’re right about that, Sergeant. And I’m not a doctor, by the way.”
“My error. Now like I was saying, these reports are coming from up in the breaks and coulees, and all along the Divide. Renegades doing who knows what, and nobody can say how many there might be. I have it from Ned Phillips at the Cross Bar Ranch that one of his range hands is unaccounted for. The man was supposed to come in last week and never showed. Not to mention cattle losses steady as the wind. So I’m telling you right now, all of you—stick close till we make our permanent camp. That clear?”
Eli looked around at the men, none of them looking surprised, though in fact he’d heard no talk until now about Indian troubles. He wondered if Hornaday had been playing it down. He glanced at his father, whose eyes were scanning the hills ahead.
“And no running off and chasing after meat,” Bayliss added. “If you see the buff you’re after, well then, my boys go with you. Understand? Otherwise, why the hell have you got us along on this chase? Which, by the way, is a waste of grain and good animals, if you ask me. The herds have been gone from this country since eighty-four.”
Hornaday laughed, but his eyes glittered hard behind his spectacles. “Respectfully, Sergeant, your man, Ned Phillips? It’s on his word we’re heading to the Big Dry. He’s the one who spotted the animals. Or I should say, his men did.”
“Spotted them back in June, sir. A small herd is what they saw, a dozen at most. Tell me, do you think our red friends didn’t get wind of that? Of course they did. You think they haven’t had themselves a good hunt? Course they have.”
Hornaday smiled. “I guess we’ll find out.”
“That’s it, then,” Bayliss said, and put his hat back on, squeezing it tight over the crown of his bald skull and yanking the small brim down for shade. “Any questions?”
“What makes you think Crow?” Ulysses asked him.
Bayliss looked up, his small eyes widening. “Does it matter?”
“Why not Cheyenne?”
“Indian expert, are you?”
“Enough to know the Crow stay home mostly, and have for a long time. Enough to know the Assiniboine are pretty well under control, with that big fort up there. But the Cheyenne—” Ulysses shook his head. “They’ve still got a taste for meat, and they’ve figured out the government shipments aren’t something you can set your clocks to. What are they supposed to do—sit around and wait, like a bunch of old women?”
Eli, recalling the day his father stood up in church and pointed at the elders sitting red-faced in the pews beside their wives, reached over and touched his elbow, took hold of it and gave it a squeeze.
“But my son here is telling me to shut up,” Ulysses said.
“Maybe the boy’s got more sense than you have.”
“We can hope so.”
Bayliss nearly smiled. He looked around at the group, kneading his belly as if it were hurting him. He squinted his little eyes. “Let’s move out, then. Unless you’re all wanting to stay here and debate the state of the world.”
For a good share of the morning Eli and Ulysses rode at the front next to Hornaday, the two men carrying on a lively talk, both certain of their own ideas and therefore butting heads on occasion. The curator had cowboy clothes on, sheepskin chaps and a wide-brimmed hat in place of the bowler he’d worn earlier. With a thick cigar clenched in his teeth, he held forth like a politician, going on at length about the bison, its fitness for the climate and resistance to disease, its ability to move great distances with no water at all. Ulysses for his part told stories of the great herds still roaming the territories during the Indian wars, entire landscapes covered in black and moving like a single creature, clouds of their dust filling the sky.
“It’s awful hard to describe. If you never saw it, there’s no possible way you could understand. No matter how much you’ve read or studied. It was like fish in the ocean. Great schools of them. Uncountable.”
“Of course I understand,” Hornaday said, indignant. “Only human beings could have accomplished their demise.”
“The railroads. Commercial hunters.”
“And the Indians too,” Hornaday added.
“Are you lucid, man?” Ulysses made a full circle in the air with his arm. His voice dropped to a near whisper, as if to make Hornaday listen harder to what he said. “You mean to tell me the Indians could have hunted out the herds on their own? I don’t believe it. Not in a thousand years.”
Eli didn’t stick around for the argument, but turned his mare and trotted back past Bayliss and McNaney, past Gumfield on his buckboard who gave him a dark stare, past the last two troopers and, finally, the big, six-mule wagon, on top of which old McAnna sat cockeyed, half-grinning inside his beard and eyes closed, drifting through some reverie. Eli let the clank and squeak of the train recede ahead of him and sat his mare for a time, looking off in the direction from which they’d come, south, the ground receding in rolling hills toward the Yellowstone, which was long out of sight. He didn’t know what to make of the argument between his father and Mr. Hornaday, but after seeing Slovin’s pile in Miles City and now the litter of bones out here, he wished he’d had the chance to see this country years ago, before the slaughter.
He was about to turn back when he spotted something moving against the grayish brown of the buffalo grass. It was down in the dry streambed a hundred yards off, and his first thought was Indians. He tried to make out the figure of a man or horse, but instead the slender shape of an antelope firmed up around its white face, and Eli without deliberating dismounted and drew from his scabbard the rifle he was issued at Fort Keogh, a .50-caliber Spencer, same as the one he gave Two Blood as part of the payment for the Smoot’s. He chambered a round, flattened himself against the ground, and put the open sights on the front shoulder of the antelope, which as if to offer itself up, had turned to one side. He squeezed off a careful shot, the sound filling up the whole dome of the sky, making it seem for an instant like a space contained and finite. Then silence again, followed in turn by the high shouts of men barking like prairie dogs.
“What in the hell?”
It was Bayliss, shouting over the sound of hoofbeats. He was coming straight on, as if to run Eli into the ground, but then pulled up short and swung himself free and clear to his feet. He stood spraddle-legged on the ocher dirt, one hand on the butt of his holstered Colt. “What in the living tarnation are you shootin’ at, boy?”
Eli, still lying flat, pointed south, but there was nothing there to see. The antelope had sprung away at the blast, and by the time the barrel came to rest, Eli saw only its tail and springing rear legs disappearing into sagebrush.
“You take a shot at Sitting Bull?”
Eli pushed up and got to his feet. The whole party had turned and was advancing on him now, posthaste. He couldn’t help but see the smirk on Gumfield’s face. His father’s head was cocked as he waited for an explanation. Same for Hornaday. Eli went to his mare and threw himself on its back and dug in his heels. Before pulling the trigger, he’d marked the spot, just like his father taught him—in this case a little alkaline triangle beside a tuft of olive sage. He rode straight to it and jumped to the ground and bent to look for blood, which he found straight off, a spot the size of his thumbnail on the gray-white soil. Then another, two paces west of the first, this one elongated, a stripe as long as a table knife. He remounted and rode up out of the dry creekbed, then reined in to scan the country. When he dismounted again, whispering into the mare’s ear, it was because of the tracks he found, clear prints in the dirt, and the trail of blood. The animal itself was lying in a slight depression, in what looked like a sleeping groove, its eyes glazing already in the sun, no movement at the rib cage, dead as dead.
Within minutes Eli had bled it and gutted it and tied its legs to a picket rope, and was pulling it back north toward the cluster of men, off their horses now and standing about on the side of a hill. He imagined their faces bright at the prospect of fresh meat for lunch, but riding up he found himself looking into the small, unhappy eyes of Bayliss. His arms were crossed in front of his chest. The others had drawn away from him, all except for Ulysses, who was crouched within arm’s reach of the man and chewing on a strand of grass. From the buckboard of the light wagon Gumfield looked on.
“Didn’t you hear what I said this morning?” Bayliss asked.
Eli cleared his throat. “I heard you.”
“I said, stay close.”
“I was at the rear, behind everybody else. And I didn’t go far.” Eli turned and pointed down the streambed. “It didn’t run more than a hundred yards.”
“Out of sight, though, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t I say no chasing after meat?”
Eli’s instinct was to argue with the man, though he knew that was a bad idea. He glanced at his father, whose face was blank, eyes dark. What the hell, Eli thought, and he said, “This is a hunting party, isn’t it?”
“If and when we find something to shoot at, yes. Until then—until we make permanent camp, like I said—we’ll exercise caution. We don’t want to draw undue attention to ourselves, which is prudent, considering.”
Still in his crouch, the strand of grass clenched in his teeth, Ulysses said, “It could be you’re overstating the general threat.”
Bayliss turned. “The general threat, as you put it, happens to rest on my shoulders and not yours, Mr. Pope. I have rank here.”
Ulysses stood up. Eli could tell he was angry by the steady gaze of his eyes and the way his lips were flattened and drawn tight, like a line of fencing wire. His hands were loose at his sides. Bayliss took a step back. Ulysses said, “I mustered out in sixty-nine. That’s a long time ago, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about rank.”
Hornaday came forward and put himself between the two men, who both towered over him. He took the stub of cigar from his mouth and blew a pair of perfect smoke rings in the still air. He said, “I respect your sense of duty, Sergeant, though I have to remind you that Mr. Pope is in my employ. And Mr. Pope, I want you to hear this. Until we reach the hunting grounds and establish our camp there, it’s your obligation to defer to Bayliss in all matters regarding security. As we all must. Which means, Eli”—Hornaday turned—“that next time you have an antelope in your sights, you better ask before you squeeze your finger.”
“Yes, sir,” Eli said.
“Mr. Hornaday, if he had asked first, we’d be nooning up meatless,” Ulysses said, nodding at the two privates who had already skinned the animal and were cutting strips of flesh from the carcass. McAnna in the meantime had built a fire, which was popping and smoking on green willow branches.
Hornaday looked from Ulysses to Bayliss and back again. He said, “We need to have an understanding here.”
“We have an understanding,” Ulysses said, though his gaze remained steady on Bayliss, who didn’t speak.
“All right then?” Hornaday asked.
“All right,” Bayliss muttered, and he walked off toward a small outcrop of rocks, kicking up dust with his boots.
Toward evening a bank of purple clouds massed in the west, swallowing the red sun. By McAnna’s estimate they’d gone eighteen miles, easily the farthest Eli had ever ridden a horse in a single day, and he could feel every mile in his back and legs and ass. He was not at all sure he’d be able to climb back on in the morning but was looking forward to it all the same. As the men made their first camp, glancing up now and then to watch the thunderheads build, McNaney, who’d been scouting ahead, came riding back at full gallop.
“Indians,” he said. “Two of them, mounted. Up there a mile or so.” He pointed northwest, toward an elevation topped with a small crown of rock.
“Moving which way? What are they doing?” Bayliss asked.
“Just settin’ their horses is all. Watching us, carbines on their lap.”
“They make any sign?”
“Nope.”
“Just two of them?”
“That’s all I saw.”
“We better go have a little parley then. You”—Bayliss pointed at Ulysses—“Come with me.”
As the two rode off together, Eli got started on the fire for supper, the job he’d been assigned by Hornaday. All afternoon he’d been collecting deadfall—willow, dogwood, the occasional stunted juniper, anything burnable—and tossing it up into the wagons. Now as the old cook mixed up corn biscuits, beans, and antelope stew, Eli lit the kindling and built a steady flame. There was enough flow in the creek for the horses now, and they’d been turned loose to water themselves before being rubbed down, fed from the store of oats, and picketed.
By the time Ulysses and Bayliss rode back into camp an hour later, all the tents were pitched and everybody was sitting around the fire, their plates empty, drinking coffee brewed with creekwater too brackish to boil clean.
“Lost them,” Bayliss said. “But found nothing to say there’s more than just the two. Scavengers, likely. We’ll have to keep an eye out.”
“See any buff?” Hornaday asked.
“Don’t you think we’d tell you?” Bayliss handed off his horse to one of the troopers and accepted a plate of food.
That night clouds moved in like giants with bulbous heads and massive shoulders, like the Danish gods in the stories his mother used to tell him. Storm gods, she called them. Eli watched through the front of the tent as they changed shape, growing into beasts with terrible noses, eyes swirling as they searched for a place to spend their fury.
“We’re going to have a gully washer,” Ulysses said.
But the storm passed on by, saving itself for the buttes to the east. Unable to sleep, Eli crawled out of the tent he shared with his father and watched the exhibition of lightning, each flash beginning at the center of heaven and following a complex geometry to earth, again and again, the booms jarring the ground before they arrived as thunder in the air. Later, Eli dreamed of home and his father standing in the yard, smoking, his mother at the kitchen window saying, Where is he, I don’t see him, though in fact he wasn’t twenty feet away in full sight. When Eli pointed him out to her, she gripped the neck of her dress with both fists and ripped it open. And in that moment, at the sound of cloth tearing, he woke up, aware of his father leaving the tent, brushing past the canvas flaps. Eli checked his impulse to call out and instead grabbed in the dark for his pants and boots, shirt and coat, and moved quickly toward the horses, picketed a hundred paces or so to the south. He could just make out his father’s long shape and also that of the horses against the darkness.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
“Just a little scouting trip.”
Eli ran quietly back to the tent for his bridle, and when he came back Ulysses was waiting for him.
“You’re going after them, aren’t you.”
“No need to come along,” his father said.
“I’m coming. But we should bring our rifles.”
“No,” Ulysses said.
They led their animals north for a quarter of a mile, then mounted up and rode bareback at a fast walk, hunched in their coats against the cold air, down through a dry coulee and then up along a narrow divide that angled northwest. They stopped at the top of a hill, from which they could see, beneath a break in the clouds, a declining landscape of canyons and gullies and hoodoos. It looked like a place where the skin of the earth had come loose, torn away by some coarse hand to expose another world, the close edge of it marked by a stone spire.
“They’re down in there?” Eli asked.
“Bayliss and I came this far but couldn’t tell if they went straight on or broke off to the north on high ground. As we turned around to leave, though, I caught sight of a smoke line. Down there, yes.” Ulysses pointed ahead. “Bayliss didn’t see it.”
The ground changed beneath them now, the iron shoes of their horses crunching and grinding on loose rock, and Eli sensed the mare’s hesitation as she picked her steps carefully, rolling her neck this way and that, lifting her nose to smell the air. They came around the side of a rock face and then down another decline, this one steeper, Eli leaning back but sliding forward onto the mare’s thick mane, nothing to do about it. And then he smelled something, camp smoke, and his father swung off the Appaloosa and crouched on one knee. He lifted something close to his face.
“It’s cold, they’ve been gone awhile,” he said.
“Do we go after them?”
“It’s too late. And it’s going to storm again. There’ll be another chance.”
As Ulysses spoke, the clouds filled in above them and the world closed down. Eli’s mare trembled as if struck by a cold wind, and from the west came a quiet rumble, like a man clearing his throat in the next room.
“Let’s go, come on,” Ulysses said, mounting up. “It’s going to get slick in a hurry down here.”
They swung around and headed back, Eli in front this time—though every minute or so he pulled up to make sure his father was still there, saying, “You coming?”
“Just let her go, Eli. She’ll take you.”
The climb was steep, though, and it was no easy thing staying on, saddleless, especially when the icy rain came, which it did. Eli flattened himself on the horse’s wide back, one fist twisted into her mane, the other gripping the reins, as the mare scrambled for purchase in the loose rock. Then a flash of brilliant light poured through a rip in the sky and all was momentarily visible, including the spire of rock Eli remembered from before, the monument marking the edge of this broken ground. Beneath him the mare, as if jarred into some new understanding of her purpose, began running hard, all out, the earth flattening here, the ground stable again, and Eli hanging tight like a monkey on a circus horse.
Side by side with Ulysses in the raucous storm, Eli was aware again of his anger. What did his father think he was doing, chasing after this man? How did he imagine it was going to turn out? What did he expect, a clap on the shoulder? A clean conscience? And what would he tell the man if he ever found him? I’m the one who shot your son—your whole family is dead because of me. It was hard to imagine it moving toward anything but calamity. His father might as well be some figure out of the Bible, one of the mad prophets—except none of those men, touched as they were, would have been so foolish as to offer himself up to those he had wronged.
The rain was steady as they rode along a ridge between two creeks, dry before but flowing now, and when Ulysses eased close and tapped him on the shoulder, Eli refused to look over at him.
“Hold up, something’s wrong,” his father said, and slid down off the mare. Eli reined in and turned to watch him lift the Appaloosa’s left rear leg.
“What?”
“Busted a shoe back there. Split the hoof, too.” With his picket pin he pried off the broken shoe and tossed it away. “We’ll have to walk,” he said.
“You will,” Eli told him.
The rain was modest but steady, and most of the lightning stayed off to the south, punishing the country down around the Yellowstone, line after crooked line, sometimes four or five strikes in the same instant, as if there were no end to what the sky could give or the earth receive, as if all the light in heaven were being channeled through a few small punctures in the clouds.
By the time they got back to camp the storm had passed, the eastern hills just visible beneath pinking clouds. The men were up but silent, shaking out wet blankets and packs, rubbing down their horses. There was a fire crackling and smoking, the damp wood hissing like a pile of snakes. Bayliss and Hornaday stood next to it, watching Ulysses and Eli come on.
“She ran off when the noise started, yanked her pin and lit out,” Ulysses said, nodding toward the Appaloosa. “Chased her three, four miles, at least. And then she threw a shoe on the way back, in loose rocks.”
“Thought it was you that run off on us,” Bayliss said.
“And what would I do that for?”
Bayliss said, “You got to admit they’re nice horses. Top quality.” He aimed his stubbled chin at Ulysses, looking down along his weatherworn nose like a judge and rubbing his fat belly.
Ulysses looked right at him. “I never stole a thing in my life, and I’m too old to start up now.”
Hornaday blew into his hands. “We got a little anxious, that’s all,” he said. His cowboy hat, which looked new yesterday, was dented and stained and pulled down low on his ears against the damp cold.
“Anxious, shit.” Bayliss turned and stalked off.
“The man’s in a foul mood,” Hornaday said.
The storm gave way to full sun, and by eight o’clock, after a breakfast of corn mush and bacon from the fort, they were moving again, Ulysses on one of the extra saddle horses, a roan gelding this time, the Appaloosa mare tied off behind the mule team at the rear of the column. For an hour or so the night’s rain rose as steam from the ground, and when it finally burned off, the day started warming. Eli was aware of Gumfield on the light wagon and the way he kept looking over, a sneer on his face. About noon Eli rode up alongside him.
“Have you got some kind of a problem?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“I was thinking you must have something to say, the way you keeping craning your neck at me. And of course being stuck on this wagon, and probably too shy to call out.”
“I call out when I want to call out,” Gumfield said.
“What’s on your mind? I’m tired of your eyes.”
Ahead, Ulysses sat the roan gelding, waiting for Eli to catch up.
“Go on ahead,” Eli called to him.
Ulysses glanced from his son to the other boy and then clicked his tongue and went on. There was only one rider behind Eli, one of the privates from Fort Keogh, keeping pace with McAnna and the six-mule team, a good hundred yards back.
“What is it?” Eli asked. “You got a corncob stuck up your backside?”
“You think you’re clever, don’t you. The both of you.”
“Clever?”
“Trying to make off with the horses like that. Your animals didn’t run off like you say. I woke up before the storm hit, and seen you leaving.”
“You’ve got eyes like an owl, then, seeing in the pitch dark.”
“Well I seen somebody down by the horses. And then you’re gone this morning.”
“You saw somebody, but didn’t get yourself up out of your bedroll and go check? That tells me you’re either lazy or a chickenshit. One of the two.”
The young man glowered at him from his seat on the buckboard, his blunt nose, hanging mouth, and sharp teeth giving him the look of a rodent. Eli knew he might feel sorry for Gumfield except for the anger still burning in his stomach against his father and the entire mess.
“You’re telling me you think we tried to steal those horses?” he asked.
“I’m looking out for Mr. Hornaday. He hired me to be his assistant, and that’s what I’m doing. We can’t be losing our animals.”
“You think we tried to steal them.”
“Setting out in the night like you did? Yes, I saw you.”
“Did you tell Hornaday what you think you saw?”
“No, but I mean to. He should know what you’re in it for.”
“Get down off your wagon, Gumfield.”
“I don’t have to do nothing you tell me.” The young man gave the gray pull-horse a slap with the reins to speed it along.
Eli rode up close alongside and grabbed hold of the hame and brought the wagon to a stop. He jumped off the buckskin mare and stood in place, holding both horses. “Get down off there, right now,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I want you to say it to my face. Unless you didn’t mean it.”
“I meant it.”
“Are you getting down, or do I have to come up?”
Gumfield set the hand brake. Then he stepped down, stumbling as he came, the toe of his boot catching on the toolbox.
When he was back on his feet, Eli told him, “Say it again.”
The boy turned to watch the six-mule team come on, white showing on all sides of his green irises. “What are you, deaf?” he asked.
“Pretty much, yes,” Eli said. “Come on, let’s hear it.”
Looking down at his feet, Gumfield uttered the words quietly and without resolve: “You and your old man meant to steal them horses.”
Eli hadn’t forgotten the promise he made to his mother—no more fights—and he knew that hurting the boy was going to leave him with the same hollow, sick feeling he always got from eating too much brown sugar at Goldman’s store. All the same he put a fist in Gumfield’s stomach, hit him hard, and when the boy doubled over, slammed his right hand against Gumfield’s left ear, sending him like a maul-struck beef to the ground, where he curled up tight, his breath coming fast and hard. The big wagon was rolling by now, and Eli nodded at old McAnna, who glanced down at Gumfield quivering in the grass and then looked away.
Eli waited until the boy peeked up from the crook of an elbow. Then he said, “Tell me what you think now. You still believe we tried making off with those horses?”
Gumfield shook his head. He hadn’t managed to catch his breath yet.
“You don’t know the first thing about my father, and if you did, you’d stay as far away from him as you could. Do you hear me? You’d never look at him again. Now listen—if I see you talking to Mr. Hornaday, I’m coming after you. And next time I’ll hurt you.”
The boy rolled over and sat up. He nodded, rubbing his face with both hands.
“Say something,” Eli told him.
“I won’t talk to him,” Gumfield said. “I promise you.”
“All right then.” He left him there on the ground next to the wagon and swung back up on the buckskin mare and touched her with his heels.
•••
ELI COULDN’T LOOK FORWARD into the next span of days to see what they would bring. He couldn’t know there would be no further sightings of Indians, and no buffalo-spottings either—not soon anyway. On the second evening out of Miles City, McNaney would take a mule deer that made the mistake of standing too long on a rise three hundred yards west of camp. On the third day out, they would pass beneath the red buttes, one pointed and the other squared off, before entering the valley of the Little Dry, which flowed north to the Big, which in turn emptied into the Missouri. On the fourth day they’d swing west and follow the Big Dry’s broken course toward its beginnings in the high country, where the Phillips men had reported seeing the herd of some two dozen. From the night of the storm until the fifth day, when they’d make permanent camp on Calf Creek, not an hour would go by that Eli didn’t catch some movement at the edge of his sight, some shadow or scrub tree, some piece of rock that made him think, There they are. By that point he would have given up all hope of his father coming to his senses, and yet for reasons unclear to him, after having given Gumfield the what-for, Eli would begin to see his father’s obsessions as his own—the prospect of finding Magpie no longer a frightening thing, but instead a desire that brought purpose to his days.