The Sergeant believed me to be a degenerate.
From that awful moment through our final days on the trail as we rode to Fort Arroyo, the Sergeant kept his distance from me. It no longer mattered whether he was or was not my soldier, I had lost him forever. I learned what a grievous thing it is when a dream dies. To save myself pain, I erased the name “Wager Swayne” from my mind. From then on I was as insensible to my surroundings as a box turtle. I recorded the passing landscape but stopped feeling as if I was in it. The wondrous sights we rode through might have been paintings hanging on a wall.
I saw an ocean of beeves. Ranch owners who’d gone off to fight for the Confederate cause had turned their herds loose and those horned beasts had whiled the intervening years away mounting and being mounted and proliferating beyond anyone’s power to imagine. Cowboys, black and Mexican, worked gathering up the beasts and putting their bosses’ brands on the ones they got to first. We bought up all the beef we could eat.
One day, we found ourselves at the edge of a cliff that dropped a thousand feet down to the Pecos River. We had to ride a couple days north to find a crossing. On the other side those bountiful beeves were no more and we were back to beans. Even our salt pork was gone by then.
Near the end of that long ride, we topped a rise and saw a sight so wondrous that, for a moment, it overcame my sadness at losing the Sergeant’s regard, for, as far as the eye could see, buffalo covered the rolling plain. We’d seen herds before, but they’d always been far off in the distance. This was different. The entire world below looked to be carpeted with a wooly brown rug.
Lem was the first to break the stunned silence. “I heard they was good eating.”
I nodded, having no comment to make one way or another.
“Seems we ought to try and pot a few,” he said. “I’m about to perish from the dry wilts eating all them beans.”
“You know how to pot a buffalo?” I asked, not entirely sneery for Lem had revealed himself to be a man of a number of hidden skills.
“No, do you?”
“No.”
We gazed at the massive horned beasts and Lem asked, “You scared?”
“I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared by an owl. Or buffalo, neither,” I answered. I was a lot of things, but scared was not on my current list of afflictions. Lem got permission from the Sergeant and a few of us headed down the slope.
As impressive as a carpet of buffalo seen from afar was, coming up to a shifting wall of those spindly legged animals stretching for miles in either direction left us speechless. The sight panicked Caldwell and he took a shot. The herd was beyond the Spencer’s range and all he accomplished was to send the beasts fleeing with a pounding of hooves so thunderous it shook the ground beneath us.
Caring not whether I lived or died, it was no great feat of courage for me to spur Bunny on and we charged after the fleeing herd. In spite of her comical appearance, Bunny had the heart of a warhorse and, ears flapping, she tore after the creatures. The great beasts looked like boulders fleeing upon clattering sticks. We entered the cloud of dust they’d raised and were blanketed by a choking red haze that made both seeing and breathing close to impossible.
My heart started up again and kicked into higher and higher gears the closer we came to that stampeding herd whose smallest member could of laid me out simply by veering into my path. Of an instant, a fierce joy filled up all the places inside that had been stomped flat by hurt and humiliation. I plunged in and Bunny took over like she’d been trained to it. An old bull walled its eyes until the whites showed vivid against the black that outlined them. He flung his head side to side and a lasso of buffalo slobbers flew from his mouth and nose. I drew my carbine and fired four times. He dropped.
Hungry as the men were for something besides beans, they made over me lavishly that night as they ate their fill of fresh meat. I noted that Vikers partook, but it was Allbright I studied. Seeking the darkness to relieve myself, I ventured far beyond the light of the dozen or so campfires the troop had built, one for each mess unit. At the head of that string, Allbright sat with Corporal Masters and the rest of his seconds in command. Lem had delivered a hefty cut of the hump to them and it was sizzling on a spit over the fire. The men sawed at it with their sabers. Masters hacked a hunk off onto his mess kit and took it to Allbright.
I watched the Sergeant eat, and imagined that I was sitting beside him. I wondered if he knew that I was the one’d brought his supper down. I crept away wishing I was riding through that red haze again with every thought blasted out of my head. I wandered alone through the desert until near everyone had turned in. Lem, though, was still awake when I returned to our lonely campsite. He grinned when I approached.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he answered. “Just this.” He patted a pile of oddments resting atop my bedsack. Among them were a box of matches, a twist of paper containing a quid of tobacco, two stamps, a sliver of soap, two dried apples, and a dozen pecans.
“What’s all this?”
“Some of the boys brung it by as a thank-you for the fresh meat.”
“Is that so?” I said, examining each of the articles, before cradling the pecans in my hands. “Anyone in particular?”
“Fernie, Milton Favor. The Georgia boys. A few others.”
“Oh. What about the pecans? Who they from?”
“Couldn’t say. Quite a few contributed this and that.”
I held the pecans and believed what I wanted to believe.