Lord Grizzly, Second Edition (9 page)

Jim held still.

“Sonny,” Hugh continued, waggling his old hoar head, “Jim, lad, even if I don't always see sign with these old eyes no more, this young nose of mine dips in for me. After this, around me, wait up until my nose says for us to go ahead.”

Jim said, “I'm obliged to you, Hugh. You saved my life. And I'm mighty sorry for pokin' ahead too far.”

“Don't thank me. Thank your horse. Lucky for ee she was a fast critter with plenty of bottom and not just an ordinary stayer. Ae.” Hugh heaved up a snort. “Lad, when I was a sull young'un like you, an' still had some green to lose—”

Fitz growled, “Oh come now, Hugh. Don't rub it in. Jim heard you the first time.”

Hugh next gave Fitz a close look. “As for ee, Fitz, the sooner ye get rid of that spook Pepper the better. She may be able to smell some but she's turned old maid on ye. She'll carry ye to your grave yet.”

Fitz said nothing. His turndown mouth deepened into a scowl.

They sat resting awhile, men and horses, getting their breath back. Salty smells radiated from sweated horsehair. Botflies buzzed around and under the horses' bellies.

Presently Hugh heaved a sigh. “All right. Guess we've blowed enough. Let's try again. With the major right behind, them Rees won't show again, I'm thinkin'.”

With his arms Hugh wigwagged sign language to the major's oncoming party, telling them everything was all right. Then Hugh turned his horse about. “Hep-ah, Ol' Blue, let's make meat. And, lads, look sharp and shoot sharp is the word.” Riding along, Old Hugh loaded his horse pistol again.

Some four miles farther on, riding up out of Glad Valley and about to descend one of the forks of Black Horse Creek, with Thunder Butte and its long evening shadow on their left and behind them, they got their chance to make meat.

Fitz spotted them first—tanbrown movement across the fork. He held up his hand and all three hauled up short on their ponies.

“Where?” Hugh asked.

Fitz pointed.

About a mile away, in a wide low meadow of green sweetgrass, was a herd of buffalo. Light tan cows and red calves, nose down, grazed along peacefully in the center of the herd. Heavy, bulky, tanbrown bulls formed the outer rim, and one or another of them between bites kept looking up. From where the men sat, the buffaloes had the look of critters with an extra robe thrown across the shoulder.

“Buffler! And seal fat too,” Hugh said softly. “About a thousand of ‘em.”

The boy Jim was cautious this time. “Them white varmints movin' around outside them, they ain't decoy wolves, red devils again?”

Hugh studied a moment. “No. Them's just white wolf waitin' around for stray calf or downed old bull.”

“Ye sure now?”

“See them cow swallows flittin' around overhead? That's sure sign there's no red niggers about.”

From underneath his wolfskin cap, Hugh studied the herd some more. Old Blue breathed evenly between his legs. “Lads, this is gonna be as slick as peeled onions. We'll ride down through that draw on the left there and come up through them plum bushes and be close enough to pull a hair out of their ear before they know we're around. And mind, no bulls. Nothin' but young fat cow now.”

All three made preparations. They popped a handful of lead balls into their mouths, pulled powder horn around handy in front, jammed horse pistols in belts for easy grabbing; and then, flintlock rifle checked, set out, trotting along easily against the soft west wind and through the draw off to the left.

The moment they emerged from the plum bushes, Hugh shouted, “Hep-ah, lads! At ‘em and may we all make centershots!”

Old Blue had hunted buffalo before. The Sioux had trained him right. With little or no guiding, Old Blue broke through the ring of shaggy tanbrown and brownblack bulls and was into the center of the herd before the cows and calves knew what was up. Old Blue sidled up alongside a startled cow. She lifted up black nose and black eyes with a snort; then dug her hooves in and began to heave her bulk away from Hugh and his horse. Her shaggy brown hump bounded just under Hugh's right elbow. Hugh aimed for a spot just behind the left foreleg, directly over the heart, where the fur was worn off a little by the action of the leg. He fired. The sound of the shot was almost lost in the sudden great uproar of pounding hooves and bellowing monsters all around. The cow bucked up; ran on a few steps; vomited a deep red spurt of blood; and crashed heavily to the ground.

The entire thousand went into motion. Yellow dust burst up; became a pale gray ascending cloud. Red calves bawled; tan cows lowed; tanbrown bulls bellowed.

Through the sudden explosion of dust, Hugh spotted another likely fat young cow. Even as he thought of it, Old Blue seemed to read his mind and headed for her. In full gallop Old Hugh grabbed his flintlock by the barrel end, poured in a charge of powder from the horn, with a quick puert of lips popped a wet ball into the powder-acrid barrel hole, rammed the ball home by hitting the gunstock on the saddle, leveled and fired before the ball could roll out again—and dropped the second cow. Vaguely he heard the other boys firing too, dull little pops against the louder uproar of thundering hooves and bawling calves and bellowing bulls and hoarse, desperate running-animal grunting.

Firing on the run and loading on the run, on the dead gallop, with Old Blue quickly shying away after each shot, Hugh chased through the stampeding herd of brown monsters. The little arteries down Hugh's big Scotch nose wriggled red.

Hugh forgot himself, forgot he had a game leg, forgot he'd ever loved, forgot he'd ever killed Rees or any other kind of red devil, forgot he'd ever been a buccaneer killing Spanish merchantmen, forgot he was the papa of two boys back in Lancaster, forgot he'd ever deserted the boys because of their rip of a mother, forgot all, forgot he was Hugh even, forgot both Old Hugh and Young Hugh, was lost in the glorious roaring chase, killing killing killing—all of it a glorious bloodletting and a complete forgetting.

The thousand monsters moved out of the green sweetgrass meadow en masse, climbed up a slope toward dry, hard, stonestudded ground. Yellow dust continued to stive up everywhere, choking the nose and mouth, blinding the eye. Old Blue coughed, almost tossing Hugh out of the saddle. Hugh coughed, until he thought his lungs would come up. It was all a misty yellow sea moving uphill, moving incredibly swift. The rippling humping buffalo backs scudded past like clots of brown seadrift.

It wasn't long before Old Blue had chased through the entire thousand and got in among some young bulls. Here it became rough going. The young bulls ran side by side, tight, great woolly shoulders bounding and bruising together, their little ridiculous catlike tails whipping and circling and switching spasmodically. Hugh had to shoot his way out. The first bull Hugh hit made a lunge for Old Blue and the horse was hard put to it to avoid the black hooking horns. But at last Hugh made it and he pulled out to one side and on a little rise hauled Old Blue up short.

Meantime Fitz had a run of good shooting too, and got through the herd, and wound up on the other side of it.

But Jim, like Hugh, losing himself in the roaring sport of it, and having fine luck on his shots, once again got reckless. When it came time to break off, he made the mistake of cutting across the path of the last of the herd rather than easing out of it, and, despite the marvelous agility of his sorrel mare Maggie, had an old bull catch her, hooking a black horn into Maggie's belly just ahead of her back legs, deep into her milk bag, heaving her up and tossing Jim off into the air.

Jim hit the earth with a thud; rolled over on his belly; lay still while the last of the herd thundered over and past him.

Maggie screamed. In the wink of an eye her bowels boiled out of her gored belly, writhing out of her like mad pink snakes. One loop of her intestines hung down to the ground and on her third bound away from the old bull one of her rear hooves caught in it. Still screaming, she began to gallop off, with every bound tearing out her guts little by little, slowly unraveling herself. She ran until there was no more, her bowels dragging behind her like coils of fat hawser rope, and then she made one last leap for the moon, and dropped. Dead.

The buffalo herd thundered away, over the hill, down another valley, and then over another ridge, out of sight and sound both.

In the silence that followed, dust settling all around, Hugh looked across at Fitz and Fitz at Hugh. Then both looked at the prostrate form of companyero Jim and at his fallen cap and at the gutted unraveled mare.

Hugh moved first. He was off his pony in a quick twist and limped over to Jim and squatted beside him. “Ye all right, lad?” Hugh asked anxiously, cupping Jim's blunt blond face in his square hands, stroking back Jim's auburn hair.

Jim awoke, his blue eyes exactly the color of the sky above. Jim sat up slowly. He looked at Hugh, then at Fitz, then at the fallen buffalo. “Whaugh! Look at them dead buffler on the ground. Like bees after a beein'.”

Hugh laughed. He looked at Fitz. “I reckon the lad's all right at that.”

Fitz smiled too, his face lighting up stunningly for a moment.

“Where's Maggie?” Jim said next. He looked around. And then saw her, lying on her side some ways off. Jim paled. His breath came out in a slow expiring “Ohhh.”

Hugh helped Jim to his feet. “Lad, goin' against the tide never was good sailin'.”

Jim picked up his fallen fur cap; clapped the dust out of it against his leg; pigeon-toed over to where Maggie lay. He looked down at her ruptured sorrel belly; at her dirtied pink bowels; at the gathering cloud of green bottleflies.

Jim said finally, “There's no fixin' her, is there?”

Hugh said, “No. Though I've seen some stitched up again with buckskin whangs.”

“Did they live?”

“As good as new.”

Jim stood looking down at Maggie with sad grayblue eyes.

Hugh said, “Jim, lad, come now. ‘Tis no time for funeral orations this late in the day. We've got cow down. So we'd best hurry.” Hugh looked back to where a pack of dun-colored coyote and white wolves were fighting over the carcass of the very first cow he'd dropped. “Some of them sneak varmints are already helpin' themselves to the best meat.”

They tied Ol' Blue and Fitz's Pepper to a nearby bush. Both horses were uneasy. They snorted at the smell of salty blood in the air; snorted at the whizzing biting noseflies.

Working swiftly, knives alternately flashing and dripping blood, Hugh and the boys skinned and butchered the cows right where they fell, on their bellies, four legs spread out to keep them upright. The cows were some five feet in height at the hump, some ten feet long from nose to tailtip. Hugh made a transverse slit across the nape of the neck and sliced off the bristly boss and laid it to one side. The boss was of the size of a man's head and it rose out of the neck just to the rear of the shoulder. Then Hugh made a cut in the bristly hide along the top of the backbone, starting at the boss and running over the hump and then down to the back to the tail. The boys, one on each side, pulled the hide outward and downward until it lay out on the grass to either side of the naked pink carcass. They cut away only the choice parts of the animal: the fleece or thin flesh covering the ribs, the broad back-fat extending from the shoulders to the tail, the belly fleece, the side ribs, the thigh marrowbones, the tongue, the tenderloin, and the hump ribs. To get the hump ribs, Hugh and the boys made a mallet out of the lower joint of one of the forelegs and broke them out using a skinning knife as a chisel. Hugh also opened the belly and cut out the boudins, the rich, smelly small intestines tight with green chyme.

The smell of blood and flesh made Hugh so hungry he couldn't resist cutting himself a nibble of liver. He salted it with a touch of gall and tossed it down.

“I see ye're throwin' it cold,” Jim said, also helping himself to some of the liver. “Though I favor it with salt.” Jim pricked the cow's bladder and let a sprinkle of urine whistle over his bit of liver.

“Yessiree,” Hugh said, between chews on the spongy flesh. “Meat's meat, browned or not.” Hugh brandished his knife. “Whaugh! Now that I've had some buffler meat, I feel a heap better and ready for huggin'.”

Turkey buzzards began circling overhead. Sometimes one or another of the wolves, sitting on its haunches in a circle around the men just out of rifleshot, sometimes one of the wolves would get up and run about, whining, whisking his brush around in a fierce nervous manner. Occasionally a coyote got in the way of a nervous wolf and the wolf would snap ferociously at him, clicking his teeth.

The three men finished carving up the fallen cows just as the sun set on the far undulating horizon. The valley was suddenly levelful of shadows.

At about the same time, the rest of Major Henry's party appeared over the east hills.

Hugh wigwagged for help. And presently two men came galloping toward them with four pack horses. The two men and the boys loaded the choice meat onto the horses, left the remainder of the red ruins, by far the greater part of the animal—the hams, the shoulders, the side ribs, the head—to the wolves and the coyotes and the buzzards.

That night the mountain men made camp in a patch of deep sweetgrass near Big Meadow Creek.

Hugh and Jim and Fitz were assigned the detail of unloading the pack horses and unsaddling the riding ponies.

The moment the tamed mustangs were free of their burdens, they ran for the sand along the creek and rolled in it, snorting, four legs up playfully like big dogs gamboling, over on one side and then over on the other, sometimes balancing delicately on curved sharp backbone, deliciously grinding wet shoulder, then arched back, then volving rump into the rough, though giving, creamy sand. They whinnied in sheer delight. At last, rubbed until every nerve end had had its gratification, they rose to their feet, first up on their forelegs, then on rear legs, and shook themselves like dogs after a soaking, sand flying in all directions like drops of water. Then they ran for water in the creek and began sipping.