Eli woke fully alert, certain he’d heard gunshots, something, anyway—but there was nothing. The night was still. Easing open the flap of the tent, he stuck his head outside and looked around. Nothing was moving in the camp. There was no one about. Even the horses, picketed along Calf Creek, were silent. He listened for as long as he could, until sleep took him again, and when he woke at first light McAnna was frying the greasy side-pork from the fort’s commissary and flipping pancakes. The men were up and moving, most of them, Sergeant Bayliss down on one knee by the creek, shaving, McNaney sitting off at the edge of camp on a little tumble of limestone, having his morning smoke. Two of the troopers were hunched at the fire with McAnna, drinking coffee. Gumfield, who kept mostly to himself, hadn’t emerged yet from the tent he shared with Bayliss and the soldiers. So far the weather had been good, with hard frosts at night and warming afternoons. They’d been in permanent camp on Calf Creek for a couple of days now, up on a good plateau that was flanked on the north by the Big Dry and on the south by the Little Dry—the highest country there was between the watersheds of the Yellowstone and Missouri. Promising hunting grounds, according to McNaney and his rancher friends, with ready access to rugged canyons and badlands, dry coulees, deep ravines, hiding places of all kinds.
So far, though, no sightings at all.
Ulysses sat cross-legged on an empty keg in front of the tent, Bible on his lap, while Hornaday crouched next to him, going through his plan for the day. Eli wasn’t sure why his father was the man Hornaday had chosen to trust and confide in, though it could be that he enjoyed the stimulation of a contrary opinion, which Ulysses could be counted on to offer.
“McNaney spoke last night with a couple of hands from the Cross Bar, who told him they came across a fresh trail south of here six, seven miles, at the head of the Calf. As many as eight animals, they said.”
“They’re sure it was buff?”
“I don’t know what they know, only what McNaney said they claim to know. Guess they were headed southwest, toward that rocky tit down there. Remember? We scouted that country. A lot of nice grassy land once you get past the butte. Smooth and rolling.”
“Did you say ‘rocky tit,’ Professor?”
“McNaney’s word for it.” Hornaday blushed. “Anyway, I got this story late—you heard him ride in. Ten-thirty, eleven. I say we head down there, all of us, and try to cover that whole area at the head of the Calf. Must be seven or eight miles up and down, maybe four across. What do you think?”
“I don’t think so.” Ulysses clasped his hands behind his head and made a big fan of his elbows. He stared up at the sky, a dull blue color now, more gray than blue, the last few stars blinking in the west, little pinholes there.
“Why not?” Hornaday tugged on his mustache. “We haven’t seen a thing, and now we have a spotting—well, a possible spotting.”
Ulysses reached out and broke off the top of a few strands of grass, rubbed them between his palms and tossed the seeds in the air. They drifted down in a westerly direction, pushed by a breeze from the east. “That’s why,” he said. “And look over there.” He pointed south and west, where a band of darkening clouds showed behind the buttes. “Rain by ten, I believe. Or sleet. They’ll be staying down in the draws. Probably down along the Porcupine. They were headed that way if the man was reading his signs right. Let’s do a couple of parties, one coming into the Porcupine from the top, from the north, the other from down along the east side, going in from the Cross Bar, or thereabouts, and heading upstream. We cover that whole creekbed, ride up the little washes and gullies and coulees that feed it, and meet someplace in the middle.”
Hornaday frowned. “Can’t say it smells much like rain to me.”
Ulysses stood from the keg and gestured toward the fire, where the men were plating up and filling their cups with McAnna’s coffee. He said, “If I’m going to hunt today, I need some of that mud.” As Eli followed his father to the fire for breakfast, Hornaday ambled down to join McNaney on his rock, in search of another opinion.
Twenty minutes later eight men, all but McAnna and Gumfield, were mounted and ready to ride, their horses blowing steam and cropping the frosted grass.
“We’re splitting up,” Hornaday announced. “East wind, and rain’s coming. Make sure you’ve got your ponchos.”
Eli rode with his father and Hornaday and one of the troopers from Fort Keogh, a young private with bushy side-whiskers and a habit of blinking in a flutter whenever he spoke. His name was Moffit. The other group was made up of McNaney, Sergeant Bayliss, and the other two privates. Eli’s party rode straight down across the high plateau and into the broken ground, the badlands, where the horses had to step with care and at times be led by the reins, their riders on foot in front of them. By the time the sun was a hand’s width above the horizon, they’d dropped into the valley of the Porcupine, moving toward a rendezvous with the others. They saw antelope, hares the size of small coyotes, and a longhorn steer badly lost, with the Cross Bar branded on its rump. But no buffalo—and Hornaday voiced his fear that reports he’d gotten had been trumped up.
“Could have moved on west,” Ulysses said. “More likely, taken by the cowboys. It’s hard to resist a chance at the old king, now that he’s all but gone.”
By noon they’d ridden some seven miles, according to Hornaday’s calculations, two to reach the Porcupine and another five along its channel, sometimes following a dry ravine or coulee for half a mile or so, up to higher ground, for a chance to glass the distance. No signs of anything worth shooting at. It had been raining ice for an hour, and the horses were slick and blowing, the riders wet clear through, despite their ponchos.
After a cold lunch of beans and biscuits in an old growth of wild chokecherry trees, they headed south again and finally at three o’clock met up with the party of Bayliss and McNaney, the lot of them in a state of high excitement. The sleet had tailed off and the skies were starting to clear.
“Nine, we saw nine, and drove them this way.” It was McNaney talking. “Ain’t you seen anything at all?”
Hornaday urged his big mare up the bank of the ravine and across a short flatland to a high, broad hill topped with rock, with McNaney, Ulysses, and Eli following after and then the rest of them, all dismounting finally and climbing the last stretch to a tumble of limestone piled up like an ancient cabin fallen in on itself. Hornaday glassed the entire country, 360 degrees, moving clockwise and humming a tune Eli had heard before, a march that brought to mind the traveling circus with its brass band that came to Sloan’s Crossing when he was small. Hornaday swiveled the other way now, counterclockwise, a methodical sweep, stopping every few seconds and backing up, before moving again, humming all the while.
From below, McNaney called out, “What do you see, damn it.”
Hornaday had stopped moving, stopped humming. He’d found something off to the north and watched hard, his face like stone. Eli heard him suck in his breath, as though he’d been hit by a smell and was trying to place it.
“What?” Ulysses said.
Hornaday lowered the glasses and looked around, a smile broadening his face before he caught himself and put the mask back on—the scientist and curator, the man of purpose. “The cowboys were right,” he said, and he held up an open hand, all five fingers, clenched them into a fist and then showed four. Nine animals. He handed the glasses to McNaney, who stepped up onto the rock table in Hornaday’s place, for a look. Then Ulysses. When it was Eli’s turn, he found with his father’s help the gentle swale at the head of a small ravine—and the nine animals lying there regal and shaggy in the dusty green sage.
“We must’ve been riding too close to the valley floor, and missed them,” Ulysses said. “There’s no high perch to make a stand, not that I can see. But I believe we can get up on them through the ravine.” He turned to McNaney. “What do you think?”
McNaney nodded.
They climbed down off the rocks and made their plan, which wasn’t complicated: Retrace the main channel of the Porcupine to the mouth of the ravine, follow it southwest, single file, to its head, then make a full-on charge, with any luck surprising the beasts.
Eli rode toward the rear of the file, with two of the troopers from Fort Keogh behind him—privates Moffit and Williams—and everybody else ahead. The Spencer he left in its scabbard, a round in its chamber. He wondered how this would go, trying to shoot from the saddle. He’d fired the gun only three times, twice at the fort when it was issued to him, and then again on the first day, when he shot the antelope. He knew the recoil was strong enough to throw him off balance, but trying to hold the barrel steady while mounted on a galloping horse besides—it didn’t seem possible.
They’d gone a mile or so when the crack of a gunshot caused Eli to rein up and spin around in his saddle. One of the privates, Moffit, was lowering his gun, smoke trailing from its barrel. He shrugged, Oh well, and managed a weak smile as he shoved the rifle back in its boot. The other trooper, Williams, was urging his horse to the top of the ravine, in the direction of Moffit’s shot. Ahead, Hornaday and Bayliss had wheeled around and were heading back at a full gallop, flying past Eli and reining up on either side of Moffit, whose smile had fled. The trooper’s eyes were all aflutter.
“Are you dimwitted, man?” Hornaday asked. “You think we’re on some kind of a turkey shoot here? What’s wrong with you?”
“A redskin, I think I saw one. On the ridge.” He pointed to the right, due west, toward the red willow at the top of the ravine. Williams was up there now, off his horse and holding the front brim of his hat with both hands, scanning the distance.
“You think?” Bayliss said.
“I think so, yes. Sitting his horse up there.”
“And so you fired on him,” Hornaday said.
“I couldn’t tell what he might do, sir.”
Ulysses rode up, his brow knotted, and listened as Hornaday filled him in. “I thought the wars were over,” he said.
Hornaday aimed a finger at Bayliss. “Tell your man to ride on back. I don’t want him along today.”
“He’s just watching out for us. And he’s only a kid.” Bayliss rubbed his belly and turned to Private Williams, who was back down off the ridge and reining in his big white horse. “What’ve you got?” he asked him.
“Saw a bunch of antelopes skedaddling.” He glanced at his friend Moffitt with a pained, flat smile. “That’s it.”
“All right then.” Sergeant Bayliss turned to Moffit and waved a hand to the north. “You’re done for the day. Go on, get.”
“Yes, sir.” Moffitt kicked his horse, which turned its head and swiped at the soldier’s knee before starting off at a trot in the direction of camp.
The ravine widened, rising into grass and sage, and by the time all seven riders emerged from the cut, the small herd was on the move, drifting in a southwesterly direction across the rolling tableland. McNaney, Ulysses, and Hornaday unbooted their rifles and galloped after them, Eli and the rest following behind. When the gap had closed to forty or fifty yards, the buffaloes started running in earnest, no longer nine of them but only eight, their bodies surprisingly narrow as viewed from behind, slicing this way and that, moving as one being, their heads tucked low, shoulders thrusting.
The roar of hooves against the earth and the motion of their surging bodies, and also the smell of them—a mix of rank cow and dead grass—was nearly enough to unhorse a man. Eli couldn’t bring himself to unboot his rifle, let alone free both hands to take a shot. Up ahead, though, a gun boomed, and a small yellow cow broke from the herd in a stuttering, stumbling run, one of the riders pulling up and swerving to stay with it. Below him, Eli’s mare hesitated. There was a break in its cadence, a tremor, and he snapped the reins like a whip, afraid of losing ground. “Come on!” he yelled. And then in front of him a horse went down, its rider tossed in the air, the animal tumbling and rolling, and Eli’s mare pivoted and leaped sideways, nearly going down itself. He hauled back on the reins and managed to turn the mare, the world quieting as the chase moved on without him. Eli saw for the first time the pocked ground they were on, holes everywhere, and there was his father, lying on his back, the lathered gelding on its knees beside him.
Ulysses rolled over and sat up. He examined himself, rocked his head to one side then the other. “Will you look at this,” he said. “Damn prairie dogs.”
“Didn’t seem to slow the buff down much.” Eli was off his mare now and he gave his father a hand up. “You still in one piece?”
“I’m not the one that put my foot in a hole.” Ulysses bent to run his hands over the legs of the big gelding, which jerked to its feet, snorting and blowing. “I think he came through it,” Ulysses said.
Off to the south the hunt had disappeared over the rise, only Hornaday and McNaney having stayed with it. But here, scattered over two hundred yards, Eli saw two riders off their mounts and walking, picking their steps through the prairie dog town. A quarter-mile west and north, yet another man, still mounted—it looked like Bayliss—lifted his rifle and drew down on a yellow cow that stood facing him. The barrel jumped. Then a brief silence before the report reached them.
“Is that the sergeant?” Ulysses asked. “We better go and see what he’s got.”
They all converged on Bayliss and the little cow, which was bleeding out in the grass. Bayliss was having trouble with his horse—it reared and shrieked, eyeballs rolling in its head.
“Some don’t like the blood smell.” This from the young private, Williams.
“Or the smell of buff,” Ulysses said.
Bayliss got the skittish roan back on all four legs and walked it off twenty paces to picket it. Then he came back and joined the circle that had formed around the little cow, a yearling from the look of it, maybe three hundred pounds, wet.
“You try for smallest one you could find?” Ulysses asked him.
“Go hang yourself. Least I stayed on my damn horse. You, now, I’d say you’ve become a danger to the government’s animals.”
Williams was sent to the main channel of the Porcupine to intercept Gumfield and his wagon for transport of the cow back to camp. Ulysses and Eli gutted and skinned the animal, careful to keep the head on, according to Hornaday’s directions. Eli tried to imagine how the creature would look after being stuffed and mounted and put on display in Washington. Not impressive, he thought, not after he’d ridden alongside that running herd. The animal was bony, clumsily shaped, ugly, and Eli saw in his mind the people in their clean, pressed clothes walking right past it, not giving it a second look.
When they’d finished their work, they rode for camp, leaving Bayliss and the other private, Jensen, to wait for Gumfield. Late as the hour was, the decision was made to let McNaney and Hornaday return on their own time, and to send out a wagon for their kill in the morning, if necessary.
That night the men—back in their permanent camp at Calf Creek—ate their fill of roasted backstrap and sampled the tender tongue, which McAnna boiled in salted water. Around the fire they speculated on the whereabouts of Hornaday and McNaney, wondering if they’d chased the herd clear down to the Yellowstone. The air was cooling fast, no wind to signal a change, and it was only after they’d decided the hunters must be spending the night out there, might as well turn in, that a man’s voice—or two men, singing—pricked at their ears, one voice low and terribly off key, the other higher and almost sweet-sounding:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea,
My Bonnie lies over the ocean, oh bring back my Bonnie to me.
A few minutes later two faces appeared at the edge of the firelight, their mouths moving around the words of the song. McNaney, it turned out, was the one who could actually sing. Moffit was dispatched to tend their horses and McAnna loaded up plates for them as everyone waited for the story. Eli had never seen Hornaday so relaxed, his eyes sparkling like quartz. He might have been drunk, except he was steady as a post. McNaney for his part was all smiles as he took his food and burrowed into it, but Hornaday was more interested in talking than eating.
They had stayed with the herd for a good six miles, he explained, shooting a couple of cows on the run, when one of the bulls, the largest, broke off from the rest and headed for a coulee. “This was the one I had my eye on the whole time, a regular monster, and I could hear him breathing like a leaky bellows. But my horse was getting rugged too, and I figured I better get a shot off while I could.”
So he’d reined in, jumped down, thrown his rifle over the top of the saddle to steady himself, and popped off a shot, then popped off one more, the old bull running almost straight away from him. The animal didn’t flinch, not right off—but after a dozen or so strides it turned fast like a deer, stumbled, turned back again, then stopped short and stood there. After a minute or two, maybe longer, the old bull went down to his knees, gracefully, then gave up and laid himself out on the ground.
“I stepped it off. A hundred and twenty paces. Shot the old boy on a dead run. Bullet entered the vent, and I figure it took out his lungs or heart, possibly both on the way through. And you should see the horns on him—like scythes. I’m telling you, he’ll go two thousand pounds, and five and a half feet at the shoulder. And he’s got the longest beard you’ve ever seen. He’s the one I came out here for, boys. After this, everything’s gravy.”
The men sat quiet for a moment. The lenses of Hornaday’s spectacles flashed and glimmered in the firelight. Then Bayliss rose from across the fire, circled around and extended his hand. Hornaday stood up and took it.
“Congratulations, Professor. I wasn’t altogether sure you had it in you.”
Hornaday grinned at that and stayed on his feet to shake hands with the rest of them, Eli included, then retreated to the canvas supply shelter and came back with a small cask, gallon-size, and hoisted it above his head. “Toss out your coffee, men,” he said, provoking a low cheer. Or more like a collective sigh. Some threw their coffee hissing into the fire, while others spilled it on the ground between their feet. Bayliss tossed his over his shoulder. Eli wasn’t sure what to do, whether this moment included him at all—he’d never tasted whiskey. But his father nodded at him, and so he emptied his cup in the grass.
Everyone waited until the last man had been served, until Hornaday raised his own cup in a toast: “To all of you,” he said. “And to the American bison, may it live forever.”
At first it was just the buzzing heat that burned all the way down to Eli’s stomach, seeping into his chest and arms, and tingling into his fingers. But after a few more swallows there was something different about the men around him—they were quieter, duller somehow—and about his own place among them, as if he’d been removed from the fire and hovered nearby, just outside the circle of light. By the time Hornaday came around with his cask a second time, Eli was watching and listening from a place so far outside himself he wondered whether any of the others could even see him any longer. Ulysses waved Hornaday on by. “Enough,” he said, and took the cup from Eli’s hand and filled it with the dark mash from the bottom of the coffee pot.
“Drink that down, you’ll feel better.”
Eli sat for the rest of the evening amused but removed from the talk around him, and later remembered only a general low noise and the image of Hornaday loping around on all fours, disappearing into the darkness then galloping back into sight, spectacles askew on his face, rear-end higher than his shoulders, cavorting like some creature from the jungle. And next thing he knew it was morning, and he was being shaken awake by his father.
“Wake up, come on. We’ve got to go after Hornaday’s bull.”
It required Eli’s focused concentration to throw off the blanket, get to his feet, and marshall the energy to put on his clothes and boots and coat. By the time he’d saddled the mare, though, the dense matter was lifting and clearing from his brain.
“How you feeling there?” his father asked.
“Good, I think.”
“Glad to hear it. I feel like the devil got inside my head and kicked his way out. Last time I drink any of that man’s whiskey.”
With Gumfield following in his wagon, they rode south across the high, frost-covered plateau, not following the course of the Porcupine this time but going as the crow flies, over the rolling tableland, through the prairie dog town, and then past a few high buttes on their right, Hornaday riding up front with Ulysses, Eli following after, Bayliss and Williams at the rear. By midmorning Eli rode asleep, one hand planted behind him on the mare’s wide back. Then, before he realized what was happening, Hornaday was off his horse and running on foot toward a blackened mound ahead of them. The man took off his hat and dropped it next to his feet. He folded his hands on top of his balding head.
Eli and the others swung off their mounts.
“Damnation. Sons of bitches.” Tears stood out in Hornaday’s eyes. The bull he’d killed had been skinned and its carcass ransacked at the hump and back for the best cuts of meat. The head was intact, but the horns were broken off, and heavy stripes of red and yellow paint were smeared across the nose and forehead. Tied to the base of one of the broken horns was a piece of red flannel. Hornaday pointed at it.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“A message,” Ulysses said: “‘Leave us alone.’”
“Savages,” Hornaday said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Oh, they know what they’re doing. You can be sure they’ve been following the same herd.”
Hornaday raised a fist. “I’d hunt them down if I could,” he said.
“They’ve been hunted down for less.”
His face crooked, Hornaday stared up at Ulysses. “Whose side are you on?” he asked.
“They want us to leave, that’s all. Can you blame them?”
“By God I’ll blame them if I want to, it’s my right.” He picked up his hat and slapped it back on his head. “And look what they got for it. A couple day’s worth of meat.”
“They got your attention, Professor.”
Hornaday drew himself to full height, which brought him up to the tip of Ulysses’s nose. Eli saw the man’s chin ticking, his lips tightening against his teeth, his eyes hardening behind the heavy lenses. “You can stop calling me that,” he said.
“Professor?”
“If you don’t respect me, that’s your business,” Hornaday said, voice shaking. “But remember, you are still working for me.”
“My apologies.”
Hornaday breathed in and out, blowing hard, as if trying to bring something up from his lungs. Then he turned and walked back to his horse. Mounted, he pointed at Gumfield still sitting on his buckboard. “Quarter it out and haul it back,” he said. “I’ll have Williams stay and help. Make sure you don’t damage any of the bones.”
“Mr. Hornaday,” Ulysses said. “Can I have your permission to leave and try to parley with the Indians?”
“What for?”
“Doesn’t make much sense, does it, everybody chasing after the same animals? I could try to explain what we’re doing.”
“They wouldn’t understand. They’re not capable.”
“I might be able to strike a bargain.”
Hornaday seemed unsure, lifting a hand and crooking an index finger under his nose. He shook his head.
“I’ve had dealings with the Cheyenne. Give me a chance.”
“Do you speak their language?”
“Enough to get by.”
“Fine, then.” He hauled around on the reins and headed back toward camp, his big black horse picking its way over loose ground.
Ulysses swung up on his saddle and turned the gelding in the other direction toward a high butte that widened at the top, like an anvil. Eli headed after him on the buckskin mare. When they were out of earshot of Gumfield and Williams, he asked, “How are we going to track them over this ground?”
His father pulled up and pointed ahead. “See that?”
“The butte?”
“No, closer. That scrub line. See how it runs down into the coulee?”
A hundred and fifty or two hundred yards off, a faint line of green darkened as it fell away into a cut.
“We get down into that ravine, down along the stream, and I think we’ll find their tracks. If we surprised them this morning, and I’ll bet that’s what happened, they had to find the closest place to disappear.”
The grass was longer in the coulee, the ground softer, and they crisscrossed the width of it three times, angling downstream on foot, leading their horses as they searched for signs. Eli had been praying for this chance ever since the night of the storm. Not that he was looking forward to the confrontation, or the meeting, or whatever it was going to be—if, in fact, they found their man at all. In truth he was afraid, but he wanted to have it over with. He wanted to see what would happen. He wanted his father to be satisfied. As a little boy, when he ate too many of the rich cookies his mother made with butter, or stuffed himself with the ice cream his father made in the wintertime, he always suffered for his pleasure, his stomach doing a slow, terrible turn. His practice, in those moments, had been to get up at the first trace of discomfort, go outside in the backyard, and stick a finger down his throat. He was never one to wait it out, in the hope he might be spared—because he knew better. Just like he knew now from the look in his father’s eyes that Ulysses was getting no rest from the need that drove him.
From down beneath a stunted cottonwood, Ulysses called out, “Here,” and motioned for Eli to join him. “What do you think?” he asked.
Eli saw hoofprints in the gray-brown soil, several of them, not as large as the prints of their own animals. Indian ponies. Moving ahead they found more, and by the time they reached damp ground nearer the stream, the tracks were plentiful and clear. Three ponies, as best they could tell, moving farther into the draw, northwest, at a fast walk or easy trot. The cut narrowed and deepened as they went, filling with scrub cedar and greasewood, the stream flowing faster now, more than just a trickle.
“This is a tributary of Taylor Creek, or I think it is. We’re angling more to the west now, and Taylor dumps into the Missouri.”
“What if this gets us killed?” Eli said.
Ulysses reined in the gelding. He said, “We don’t even know it’s him.”
“Then what are we doing?”
His father looked over, showing a flash of tooth. “You’re right.”
Eli said, “You don’t care if you die, do you?”
His father looked at him for a long moment. “Eli, it’s time you ride on back. You have nothing more to prove.”
“You think I’m trying to prove something? It’s not about proving. We’re not enough for you—Mom, Danny, me.” And hearing it come off his own tongue like that, it sounded like the truth.
Ulysses urged the gelding ahead but then reconsidered and reined in, letting Eli ride up alongside him again. “That’s what I kept telling myself—what you just said. I kept thinking, ‘Look at what you’ve got—a wife you love, and two sons. Nothing else matters.’ But you know what? I was wrong. Because no matter what he has, there are things a man can’t leave behind, things beyond him. There’s right and wrong, Eli, and I think what I’m doing is right—I don’t know how else to say it. God help me.”
“What about me?”
“God help you, too.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Look, son, that first night down by the Yellowstone I did my best to explain it all. I didn’t mislead you. I told you what I was doing, and you know how it stands. You’re a man now, or you had better be, and I’m not going to tell you what to do anymore. You’ll have to make a choice. Just you.”
“I already have.”
“Then live with it.” Ulysses turned away and nudged the gelding with his heels.
They rode on, descending, the cedars getting fuller and taller as they went, though not by much, the stream wider, the tracks easy enough to follow. There wasn’t any use, Eli knew, in wishing his father were different than what he was, no use in wishing that he himself hadn’t joined this party.
“What do you know about him?” Eli asked.
“Magpie? What I told you already—how he lost his family at the Washita, then fought at the Little Bighorn eight years later. He spent a year with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, too, touring all through the states. Still, nobody I’ve talked to out here admits to knowing him, or even knowing about him, except for the old woman. I was starting to wonder if he was real.”
“He might have given the newspaperman a false name,” Eli suggested.
“He could have, yes.”
“Do you think he knows you’re looking for him?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
They followed the trail until dusk, until the stream emptied into a larger creek that flowed northwest toward the Missouri. Soon, however, the horse tracks disappeared into the gravel bottom of the creekbed and didn’t come out again.
“They might have doubled back and climbed up out of here,” Ulysses said. “Maybe they’re up on top and making time.”
“But we would’ve seen tracks coming out, wouldn’t we?”
His father pulled up on his reins. “Damn it. We’ve been on this side of the creek for what, a mile now? We haven’t kept track of the other side.”
They turned their horses and headed back toward the place they lost the trail, but now the sun was low, the light failing badly, and there was little point searching in the dark when they weren’t sure which way to go—upstream, downstream, or out of the valley entirely.
“We’ll have to sleep on it,” Ulysses said. “Figure things out in the morning.”
The night was cloudless, and from the high country above them the cold came down hard, as if poured from a pitcher. At least there was no threat of rain in the air. Or sleet. Or snow. For supper they ate biscuits and cold bacon, and afterward they wrapped up in their bedrolls, spreading on top of themselves a buffalo robe Hornaday had brought from Fort Keogh.
“You smell that?” Ulysses asked, once they’d settled in. He sat up halfway, propping himself on his elbows. He turned his face downstream, the direction from which a breeze was blowing in.
Eli didn’t want to move and sacrifice any warmth, but he lifted his nose free of the robe and took a breath. Woodsmoke was what he got, just a hint of it—but then something else, too, that pricked his jaw and made his mouth water. Roasting meat.
“About a mile away, maybe two,” Ulysses said. He laughed. “They’re feasting on Hornaday’s old bull. “You know what they say. Once you’ve had real meat, beef never tastes quite the same again.”
They got up out of their bedrolls, dressed, and led their horses downstream half a mile at least, the smell of roasting meat growing stronger as they walked. It was full dark now, and cold. Eli knew his father had come too far and lived through too many bad nights and bloody dreams to chance losing the man now, and as they picked their way along the creek, his stomach turned over on itself.
“We’re not going in there tonight, are we?” Eli whispered. He was ashamed of his voice, which sounded thin and frightened.
“No,” his father said.
Eli had the sensation of a giant hand hovering over him, malign or friendly, he couldn’t tell which, and his impulse was to turn around and go back, put an end to this craziness.
They picketed their horses well short of the camp and moved ahead on foot. It was situated some hundred paces above the stream on a flat rise, with a rock wall to the west and a few scraggly cedars to the north. A lean-to of cedar branches opened to the creekside. Near the water’s edge their horses were hobbled and grazing. From downwind, hunched inside a tight clutch of willows, Eli and his father saw three men at the fire.
“You think he’s there?” Eli whispered. “You think it’s him?”
“I don’t know. But we don’t want to surprise anybody tonight, that’s for sure. We’ll go back upstream a little ways and sleep near the horses. Then come back in the morning, first thing.”
“And just walk right up? Say hello?”
“That’s exactly what we do,” his father said. “No circus tricks, nothing clever. Now what do you say we try to get some rest.”