Dead Man's Walk (31 page)

"No, if it was a wagon there'd be mules or horses," Gus said. "Or there'd be people. But there ain't no mules or horses, and I don't see the people." "It could just be a lump of dirt," Bigfoot said. "I've heard that out in New Mexico you'll find piles of dirt sticking up. I expect that's one of them." But when they were a mile or two closer, Gus saw the dot move. A lump of dirt might stick up, but it shouldn't move. He galloped ahead, anxious to be the one to identify whatever they were seeing, and he did identify it: it was a solitary buffalo bull.
"Well, there's meat, let's kill it," Bigfoot said, pulling his rifle.
Almost as he said it, the buffalo saw them coming and began a lumbering retreat. It seemed to be moving so slowly that Call was confident they would come up on it in a minute or two, but again appearances deceived him. The buffalo looked slow, but the horses they were riding were no faster. They had had thin grazing, and were gaunt and tired. Even at a dead run, they scarcely gained on the buffalo. They had to run the animal almost three miles to close within rifle range, and then it was a long rifle range. At thirty yards they all began to fire, and to reload and fire again, and yet again. But the buffalo didn't fall, stop, or even stagger. It just kept running at the same lumbering pace, on and on over the empty plain.
Three times the Rangers closed with the buffalo, whipping their tired horses to within twenty feet of it. They emptied their rifles at almost point-blank range several times, and they didn't miss. Gus could see the tufts of brown hair fly off when the heavy bullets hit. Yet the buffalo didn't fall, or even flinch. It just kept running, at the same steady pace.
"Boys, we better stop," Bigfoot said, after the third charge. "We're running our horses to death for nothing. That buffalo's got fifteen bullets in him, and he ain't even slowed down." "Why won't the goddamn animal fall?" Gus said, highly upset. He was angered by the perversity of the lone buffalo. By every law of the hunt, it should have fallen. Fifteen bullets ought to be enough to kill anything--even an elephant, even a whale. The buffalo wasn't very large. It ought to fall, and yet, perversely, it wouldn't. It seemed to him that everything in Texas was that way. Indians popped out of bare ground, or from the sides of hills, disguised as mountain goats. Snakes crawled in people's bedrolls, and thorns in the brush country were as poisonous as snakebites, once they got in you. It was all an aggravation, in his view. Back in Tennessee, beast and man were much better behaved.
But they weren't in Tennessee. They were on an empty plain, chasing a slow brown animal that should long since have been dead. Determined to kill it once and for all, Gus spurred his tired horse into a frantic burst of speed, and ran right up beside the buffalo. He fired, with his rifle barrel no more than a foot from the buffalo's heaving ribs, and yet the animal ran on. Gus drew rein--his horse was staggering--and fired again; the buffalo kept running.
"Whoa, now, whoa!" Bigfoot cautioned.
"We better give up--else we'll kill all our horses." Call tried a long shot, and thought he hit the buffalo right where its heart should be, but the buffalo merely lost a step or two and then resumed its heavy run.
"I expect it's a witch buf," Bigfoot said, dismounting to rest his tired horse.
"A what?" Gus asked. He had never heard of a witch buf.
"I expect the hump man put a spell on it," Bigfoot said. "It's got twenty-five bullets in it now--maybe thirty. If it wasn't a witch buf, we'd be eating its liver already.
"Indians can make spells," he added.
"They're a lot better at it than white folks. Buffalo Hump is a war chief, but he's got some powerful medicine men in the tribe.
I expect he sent this buffalo out here to make us use up all our ammunition." "Why, how would he do that?" Gus asked, startled by the concept.
"Praying and dancing," Bigfoot said. "That's how they do it." "I don't believe it," Call said. "We just ain't hit it good." "Hit it good, we shot it thirty times," Gus said.
"That don't mean we hit it good," Call said.
Just as he said it, Gus's horse collapsed.
He sank to the ground and rolled his eyes, his limbs trembling.
"Get him up! Get him up!" Bigfoot instructed. "Get him up! If we don't, he'll die." Gus began to jerk on the bridle rein, but the horse merely let him pull its head up.
Call grabbed its tail, and Bigfoot began to kick it and yell at it, but it did no good. The horse made no effort to regain its feet, and the three of them together could not lift it. When they tried, expending all their strength, the horse's legs splayed out beneath it--the moment they loosened their hold, the horse fell heavily.
"Let it go, it ain't gonna live," Bigfoot said. "We should have reined up sooner.
We'll be lucky if we all three don't die." The buffalo had run on for another five hundred yards or so, and stopped. It had not fallen, but at least it had stopped. Gus felt a fury building; now, thanks to the aggravating buffalo, his horse was dying. He would have to walk to Santa Fe.
"I'll kill it if I have to beat it to death," he said, grabbing his rifle and his bullet pouch.
"If it's a witch buf, you won't kill it--it will kill you," Bigfoot said. "Best thing to do with a witch buffalo is leave it alone." "He don't listen when he's mad," Call said. He unstrapped Gus's bedroll from the dying horse, and brought it with him. Gus was striding on ahead, determined to walk straight up to the wounded buffalo and blow its brains out. He didn't believe an Indian could pray and dance and keep a buffalo from dying. Bigfoot could believe such foolery if he wanted to.
Yet, when he approached the buffalo, the animal turned and snorted. It lowered its head and pawed the ground. There was a bloody froth running out of its nose, but otherwise there was no evidence that the thirty bullets had weakened it seriously. It not only wasn't dead, it was showing fight.
Gus knelt and carefully put a bullet right where he thought the buffalo's heart would be. He was only twenty yards away. He couldn't miss from such a distance. He fired again, a little higher, but with the same lack of result.
"Leave it be--we've wasted enough ammunition," Bigfoot said. "We need to save some of it for the Mexicans." "At this rate we'll never see a Mexican," Call remarked.
He was losing his belief in their ability to find their way across the plain. It was too vast, and they had no map. Bigfoot admitted that he really didn't know where the New Mexican settlements were, or how far ahead they might be.
Before Call could say more, Gus threw his rifle down and pulled his knife.
"It's a weak gun--the bullets must not be going in far enough," Gus said. "I'll kill the goddamn thing with this knife, if that's all that will do it." When he rushed the buffalo and began to stab it in the side, the beast made no attempt to run or fight. It merely stood there, its head down, blowing the bloody froth out of its nostrils.
"By God, he's going to finish it, let's help him," Bigfoot said, drawing his own knife. Soon he had joined Gus, and was stabbing at the buffalo's throat. Call thought their behaviour was crazy. There were only three of them; they couldn't eat that much of the buffalo even if they killed it. But for Bigfoot and Gus, the animal had become a kind of test. The two men could think of nothing but killing the one animal.
Unless they could kill it, they wouldn't be able to go on. The settlements would never be reached unless they could kill the buffalo.
Call drew his knife and approached the animal from the other side. It had a short, thick neck, but he knew the big vein had to be somewhere in it; if he could cut the big vein the buffalo would eventually die, no matter how much praying and dancing the Comanches had done over it.
He stabbed and drew blood and so did Gus and Bigfoot--they stabbed until their arms were tired of lifting their knives, until they were all three covered with blood. Finally, red and panting from their efforts, they all three gave up. They stood a foot from the buffalo, completely exhausted, unable to kill it.
As a last effort, Call drew his pistol, stuck it against the buffalo's head just below the ear, and fired. The buffalo took one step forward and sank to its knees. All three men stepped back, thinking the animal would roll over, but it didn't. Its head sank and it died, still on its knees.
"If only there was a creek--I'd like to wash," Gus said. He had never liked the smell of blood and was shocked to find himself covered with it, in a place where there was no possibility of washing.
They all sank down on the prairie grass and rested, too tired to cut up their trophy.
"How do Indians ever kill them?" Call asked, looking at the buffalo. It seemed to be merely resting, its head on its knees.
"Why, with arrows--how else?" Bigfoot asked.
Call said nothing, but once again he felt a sense of trespass. It had taken three men, with rifles, pistols, and knives, an hour to kill one beast; yet, Indians did it with arrows alone --he had watched them kill several on the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.
"All buffalo ain't this hard," Bigfoot assured them. "I've never seen one this hard." "Dern, I wish I could wash," Gus said.
Bigfoot Wallace took only the buffalo's tongue and liver. The tongue he put in his saddlebag, after sprinkling it with salt; the liver he sliced and ate raw, first dripping a drop or two of fluid from the buffalo's gallbladder on the slices of meat.
"A little gall makes it tasty," he said, offering the meat to Call and Gus.
Call ate three or four bites, Gus only one, which he soon quickly spat out.
"Can't we cook it?" he asked. "I'm hungry, but not hungry enough to digest raw meat." "You'll be that hungry tomorrow, unless we're lucky," Bigfoot said.
"I'd just rather cook it," Gus said, again--it was clear from Bigfoot's manner that he regarded the request as absurdly fastidious.
"I guess if you want to burn your clothes you might get fire enough to singe a slice or two," Bigfoot said--he gestured toward the empty plain around them. Nowhere within the reach of their eyes was there a plant, a bush, a tree that would yield even a stick of firewood. The plain was not entirely level, but it was entirely bare.
"What a goddamn place this is," Gus said. "A man has to tote his own firewood, or else make do with raw meat." "No, there's buffalo chips, if you want to hunt for them," Bigfoot said. "I've cooked many a liver over buffalo chips, but there ain't many buffalo out this way. I don't feel like walking ten miles to gather enough chips to keep you happy." As they rode away from the dead buffalo, they saw two wolves trotting toward it. The wolves were a long way away, but the fact that there were two living creatures in sight on the plain was reassuring, particularly to Gus. He had been more comfortable in a troop of Rangers than he was with only Call and Bigfoot for company. They were just three human dots on the encircling plain.
Bigfoot watched the wolves with interest.
Wolves had to have water, just as did men and women.
The wolves didn't look lank, either--there must be water within a few miles, if only they knew which way to ride.
"Wolves and coyotes ain't far from being dogs," he observed. "You'll always get coyotes hanging around a camp--they like people--or at least they like to eat our leavings. The Colonel ought to catch him a coyote pup or two and raise them to hunt for him. It'd take the place of that big dog you dropped." Call thought they were all likely to die of starvation. It was gallant of Bigfoot to speculate about the Colonel and his pets when they were in such a desperate situation. The Colonel was in the same situation, only worse --he had the whole troop to think of; he ought to be worrying about keeping the men from starving, not on replacing his big Irish dog.
They rode all night; they had no water at all. They didn't ride fast, but they rode steadily. When dawn flamed up, along the great horizon to the east, they stopped to rest.
Bigfoot offered the two of them slices of buffalo tongue. Call ate several bites, but Gus declined, in favor of horse meat.
"I can't reconcile myself to eating a tongue," he said. "My ma would not approve.
She raised me to be careful about what foods I stuff in my mouth." Call wondered briefly what his own mother had been like--he had only one cloudy memory of her, sitting on the seat of a wagon; in fact, he was not even sure that the woman he remembered had been his mother. The woman might have been his aunt--in any case, his mother had given him no instruction in the matter of food.
During the day's long, slow ride, the pangs of hunger were soon rendered insignificant beside the pangs of thirst. They had had no water for a day and a half. Bigfoot told them that if they found no water by the next morning, they would have to kill a horse and drink what was in its bladder. He instructed them to cut small strips of leather from their saddle strings and chew on them, to produce saliva flow. It was a stratagem that worked for awhile. As they chewed the leather, they felt less thirsty. But the trick had a limit. By evening, their saliva had long since dried up. Their tongues were so swollen it had become hard to close their lips. One of the worst elements of the agony of thirst was the thought of all the water they had wasted during the days of rain and times of plenty.
"I'd give three months wages to be crossing the Brazos right now," Gus said. "I expect I could drink about half of it." "Would you give up the gal in the general store for a drink?" Bigfoot asked. "Now that's the test." He winked at Call when he said it.
"I could drink half a river," Gus repeated. He thought the question about Clara impertinent under the circumstances, and did not intend to answer it. If he starved to death he intended, at least, to spend his last thoughts on Clara.
The next morning, the sorrel horse that Gus and Call had both been riding refused to move.
The sorrel's eyes were wide and strange, and he did not respond either to blows or to commands.
"No use to kick him or yell at him, he's done for," Bigfoot said, walking up to the horse. Before Gus or Call could so much as blink, he drew his pistol and shot the horse.
The sorrel dropped, and before he had stopped twitching Bigfoot had his knife out, working to remove the bladder. He worked carefully, so as not to nick it, and soon lifted it out, a pale sac with a little liquid in it.
"I won't drink that," Gus said, at once.
The mere sight of the pale, slimy bladder caused his stomach to feel uneasy.
"It's the only liquid we got," Bigfoot reminded him. "We'll all die if we don't drink it." He lifted up the bladder carefully, and drank from it as he would from a wineskin. Call took it next, hesitating a moment before putting it to his mouth. He knew he wouldn't survive another waterless day. His swollen tongue was raw, from scraping against his teeth. Quickly he shut his eyes, and swallowed a few mouthfuls. The urine had more smell than taste. Once he judged he had had his share, he handed the bladder to Gus.