The High Divide (20 page)

Storm Gods

T
hey 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?”