Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

  “It’s the moving that stirs them up,” Miller said. “You could stand right in front of them all day and not bother them, if you could get there without moving.”

  The two men began again their slow movement forward. When the herd showed another sign of restlessness, Miller dropped to his hands and knees; Andrews came up behind him, awkwardly dragging the sack of ammunition at his side.

  When they were broadside to the herd and about a hundred and fifty yards away from it, they stopped. Miller stuck into the ground the forked branch he had been carrying, and rested his gun barrel on the fork. Andrews crawled up beside him.

  Miller grinned at him. “Watch the way I do it, boy. You aim just a little behind the shoulder blade, and about two-thirds of the way down from the top of the hump; that is, if you’re shooting from behind, the way we are. This is the heart shot. It’s better to get them a little from the front, through the lights; that way, they don’t die so quick, but they don’t run so far after they’re shot. But with a wind, you take a chance, trying to get in front of them. Keep your eye on the big bull, the one with the scars all over him. His hide ain’t worth a damn, but he looks like the leader. You always try to pick out the leader of a herd and get him first. They ain’t apt to run so far without a leader.”

  Andrews watched intently as Miller lined his gun upon the old bull. Both of Miller’s eyes were open along the sights of his gun barrel. The stock was tight against his cheek. The muscles of his right hand tensed; there was a heavy crrack of the rifle; the stock kicked back against Miller’s shoulder, and a small cloud of smoke drifted away from the mouth of the gun barrel.

  At the sound of the gun, the old bull jumped, as if startled by a sharp blow on his rump; without hurry, he began loping away from the men who lay on their bellies.

  “Damn,” Miller said.

  “You missed him,” Andrews said; there was amazement in his voice.

  Miller laughed shortly. “I didn’t miss him. That’s the trouble with heart-shot buffalo. They’ll go a hundred yards sometimes.”

  The other buffalo began to be aroused by the movement of their leader. Slowly at first, a few raised themselves on their thick forelegs; and then suddenly the herd was a dark mass of moving fur as it ran in the direction its leader had taken. In the closely packed herd, the humps of the animals bobbed rhythmically, almost liquidly; and the roar of the hooves came upon the two men who lay watching. Miller shouted something that Andrews could not distinguish in the noise.

  The buffalo passed their wounded leader, and ran beyond him some three hundred yards, where their running gradually spent itself, and where they stood, milling uneasily about. The old bull stood alone behind them, his massive head sunk below his hump; his tail twitched once or twice, and he shook his head. He turned around several times, as another animal might have done before sleeping, and finally stood facing the two men who were more than two hundred yards away from him. He took three steps toward them, and paused again. Then, stiffly, he fell on his side, his legs straight out from his belly. The legs jerked, and then he was still.

  Miller rose from his prone position and brushed the grass off the front of his clothing. “Well, we got the leader. They won’t run so far the next time.” He picked up his gun, his shooting stick, and a long wire-handled cleaning patch that he had laid beside him. “Want to go over and take a look?”

  “Won’t we scare the rest of them?”

  Miller shook his head. “They had their scare. They won’t be so spooky now.”

  They walked across the grass to where the dead buffalo lay. Miller glanced at it casually and scuffed its fur with the toe of his boot.

  “Ain’t worth skinning,” he said. “But you have to get the leader out of the way, if you’re going to do any good with the rest of them.”

  Andrews regarded the felled buffalo with some mixture of feeling. On the ground, unmoving, it no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before. And though the body made a huge dark mound on the earth, its size seemed somehow diminished. The shaggy black head was cocked a little to one side, held so by one horn that had fallen upon an unevenness of the ground; the other horn was broken at the tip. The small eyes, half-closed, but still brightly shining in the sun, stared gently ahead. The hooves were surprisingly small, almost delicate, cloven neatly like those of a calf; the thin ankles seemed incapable of having supported the weight of the great animal. The broad swelling side was covered with scars; some were so old that the fur had nearly covered them, but others were new, and shone flat and dark blue on the flesh. From one nostril, a drop of blood thickened in the sun, and dropped upon the grass.

  “He wasn’t good for much longer anyway,” Miller said. “In another year he would have weakened, and been picked off by the wolves.” He spat on the grass beside the animal. “Buffalo never dies of old age. He’s either killed by a man or dragged down by a wolf.”

  Andrews glanced across the body of the buffalo and saw the herd beyond. It had settled; a few of the animals were still milling about; but more of them were grazing or resting on the grass.

  “We’ll give them a few minutes,” Miller said. “They’re still a mite skittish.”

  They walked around the buffalo that Miller had killed and made their way in the direction of the herd. They walked slowly but with less caution than they had during their first approach. When they came within two hundred and fifty yards, Miller stopped and tore off a small handful of grass-blades; he held them up and let them fall. They fell slowly downward, scattering this way and that. Miller nodded in satisfaction.

  “Wind’s died,” he said. “We can get on the other side, and run them back toward camp; less hauling of the skins that way.”

  They made a wide circle, approached, and stopped a little more than a hundred yards away from the closely bunched herd. Andrews lay on his stomach beside Miller, who adjusted his Sharps rifle in the crotch of his shooting stick.

  “Should get two or three this time, before they run,” he said.

  He examined the disposition of the herd with some care for several minutes. More of the buffalo lowered themselves to the grass. Miller confined his attention to the buffalo milling around the edges of the herd. He leveled his rifle toward a large bull that seemed more active than the others, and squeezed gently on the trigger. At the noise of his shot, a few of the buffalo got to their feet; they all turned their heads in the direction from which the shot came; they seemed to stare at the little cloud of smoke that rose from the barrel of the gun and thinned in the still air. The bull gave a start forward and ran for a few steps, stopped, and turned to face the two men who lay on the ground. Blood dropped slowly from both nostrils, and then dropped more swiftly, until it came in two crimson streams. The buffalo that had begun to move away at the sound of the shot, seeing their new leader hesitate, stopped in wait for him.

  “Got him through the lights,” Miller said. “Watch.” He reloaded his rifle as he spoke, and swung it around in search of the most active of the remaining buffalo.

  As he spoke, the wounded bull swayed unsteadily, staggered, and with a heavy lurch fell sideways. Three smaller animals came up curiously to the fallen bull; for a few seconds they stared, and sniffed at the warm blood. One of them lifted its head and bawled, and started to trot away. Immediately, beside Andrews, another shot sounded; and the younger bull jumped, startled, ran a few feet, and paused, the blood streaming from its nostrils.

  In quick succession, Miller shot three more buffalo. By the time he had shot the third, the entire herd was on its feet, milling about; but the animals did not run. They wandered about in a loose circle, bawling, looking for a leader to take them away.

  “I’ve got them,” Miller whispered fiercely. “By God, they’re buffaloed!” He upended his sack of ammunition so that several dozen shells were quickly available to him. When he could reach them, Andrews collected the empty cartridges. After he had downed his sixth buffalo, Miller opened the
breech of his rifle and swabbed out the powder-caked barrel with the cleaning patch tied on the end of the long stiff wire.

  “Run back to the camp and get me a fresh rifle and some more cartridges,” he said to Andrews. “And bring a bucket of water.”

  Andrews crawled on his hands and knees in a straight line away from Miller. After several minutes, he looked back over his shoulder; he got to his feet and trotted in a wide circle around the herd. When he turned around the bend in the valley, he saw Schneider sitting with his back propped against a rock, his hat pulled low over his eyes. At the sound of Andrews’s approach, Schneider pushed his hat back and looked up at him.

  “Miller has them buffaloed,” Andrews said, panting. “They just stand there and let him shoot them. They don’t even run.”

  “God damn it,” Schneider said quietly. “He’s got a stand. I was afraid of it. Sounded like the shots was coming too regular and close.”

  From the distance, they heard the sound of a shot; it was faint and inoffensive where they heard it.

  “They just stand there,” Andrews said again.

  Schneider pulled his hat over his eyes and leaned against his rock. “You better hope they run pretty soon. Else we’ll be working all night.”

  Andrews went toward the horses, which were standing close together, their heads erect and their ears pitched forward at the sound of Miller’s gunfire. He got on his own horse, and set it at a gallop across the valley to their camp.

  At his approach, Charley Hoge looked up from his work; he had spent the morning of the other men’s absence felling a number of slender aspens and dragging them to the scattered trees at the edge of their camp.

  “Give me a hand with some of these poles,” Charley called to him as he dismounted. “Trying to set up a corral for the livestock.”

  “Miller’s got a stand of buffalo,” Andrews said. “He wants a fresh rifle and some cartridges. And some water.”

  “’I God,” Charley Hoge said. “His name be praised.” He dropped the aspen pole that with the crook of his bad arm he had half lifted up across the trunk of a pine, and scurried toward the canvas-covered store of goods near the rock chimney. “How many head?”

  “Two hundred fifty, three hundred. Maybe more.”

  “’I God,” Charley Hoge said. “If they don’t scatter, it’ll be as big a stand as he ever had.” From the covered framework of pine boughs, Charley Hoge pulled an ancient rifle whose stock was nicked and stained and split at one point, the split being closed by tightly wound wire. “This here’s just an old Ballard—nothing like the Sharps—but it’s a Fifty, and he can use it enough to cool his good gun off. And here’s some shells, two boxes—all we got. With what he filled last night, ought to be enough.”

  Andrews took the gun and the shells, in his haste and nervousness dropping a box of the latter. “And some water,” Andrews said, stopping to retrieve the box of shells.

  Charley Hoge nodded and went across the spring, where he filled a small wooden keg. Handing it to Andrews, he said: “Get a little of this warm before you use it on a rifle barrel; or don’t let the barrel get too hot. Cold water on a real hot barrel can ruin it mighty quick.”

  Andrews, mounted on his horse, nodded. He clasped the keg to his chest with one arm, and reined the horse away from the camp. He pointed his horse toward the sound of the gunfire, which still came faintly across the long flat valley, and let the horse have its head; his arms tightly clasped the water keg and the spare rifle, and he held the reins loosely in one hand. He pulled his horse to a halt near the bend of the valley where Schneider was still dozing, and dismounted awkwardly, nearly dropping the keg of water in his descent. He wrapped the reins about a small tree and made his way in a wide half-circle around the valley bend to where Miller, enveloped now in a light gray haze of gunsmoke, lay on the ground and fired every two or three minutes into the milling herd of buffalo. Andrews crawled up beside him, carrying the water keg with one arm and sliding the rifle over the slick grass with his other hand, which supported him.

  “How many of them have you got?” Andrews asked.

  Miller did not answer; he turned upon him wide, black-rimmed eyes that stared at, through him, blankly, as if he did not exist. Miller grabbed the extra rifle, and thrust the Sharps into Andrews’s hands; Andrews took it by the stock and the barrel, and immediately dropped it. The barrel was painfully hot.

  “Clean her out,” Miller said in a flat, grating voice. He thrust the cleaning rod toward him. “She’s getting caked inside.”

  Careful not to touch the metal of the barrel, Andrews broke the rifle and inserted the cleaning patch into the mouth of the barrel.

  “Not that way,” Miller told him in a flat voice. “You’ll foul the firing pin. Sop your patch in water, and go through the breech.”

  Andrews opened the keg of water and got the tufted end of the cleaning rod wet. When he inserted the rod into the breech of the barrel the hot metal hissed, and the drops of water that got on the outside of the barrel danced for a moment on the blued metal and disappeared. He waited for a few moments, and reinserted the patch. Drops of smoke-blackened water dripped from the end of the barrel. After cleaning the fouled gun, he took a handkerchief from his pocket, dipped it into the still-cool spring water, and ran it over the outside of the barrel until the gun was cool. Then he handed it back to Miller.

  Miller shot, and reloaded, and shot, and loaded again. The acrid haze of gunsmoke thickened around them; Andrews coughed and breathed heavily and put his face near the ground where the smoke was thinner. When he lifted his head he could see the ground in front of him littered with the mounded corpses of buffalo, and the remaining herd—apparently little diminished—circling almost mechanically now, in a kind of dumb rhythm, as if impelled by the regular explosions of Miller’s guns. The sound of the guns firing deafened him; between shots, his ears throbbed dully, and he waited, tense in the pounding silence, almost dreading the next shot which would shatter his deafness with a quick burst of sound nearly like pain.

  Gradually the herd, in its milling, moved away from them; as it moved, the two men crawled toward it, a few yards at a time, maintaining their relative position to the circling buffalo. For a few minutes, beyond the heavy cloud of gunsmoke, they could breathe easily; but soon another haze formed and they were breathing heavily and coughing again.

  After a while Andrews began to perceive a rhythm in Miller’s slaughter. First, with a deliberate slow movement that was a tightening of the arm muscles, a steadying of his head, and a slow squeeze of his hand, Miller would fire his rifle; then quickly he would eject the still-smoking cartridge and reload; he would study the animal he had shot, and if he saw that it was cleanly hit, his eyes would search among the circling herd for a buffalo that seemed particularly restless; after a few seconds, the wounded animal would stagger and crash to the ground; and then he would shoot again. The whole business seemed to Andrews like a dance, a thunderous minuet created by the wildness that surrounded it.

  Once during the stand, several hours after Miller had felled the first of the buffalo, Schneider crawled up behind them and called Miller’s name. Miller gave no sign that he heard. Schneider called again, more loudly, and Miller jerked his head slightly toward him; but still he did not answer.

  “Give it up,” Schneider said. “You got seventy or eighty of them already. That’s more than enough to keep Mr. Andrews and me busy half the night.”

  “No,” Miller said.

  “You got a good stand already,” Schneider said. “All right. You don’t have to—”

  Miller’s hand tightened, and a shot boomed over Schneider’s words.

  “Mr. Andrews here won’t be much help; you know that,” Schneider said, after the echoes of the gunshot had drifted away. “No need to keep on shooting more than we’ll be able to skin.”

  “We’ll skin all we shoot, Fred,” Miller said. “No matter if I shoot from now till tomorrow.”

  “God damn it!” Schneider
said. “I ain’t going to skin no stiff buff.”

  Miller reloaded his gun, and swung it around restlessly on the shooting stick. “I’ll help you with the skinning, if need be. But help you or not, you’ll skin them, Fred. You’ll skin them hot or cold, loose or hard. You’ll skin them if they’re bloated, or you’ll skin them if they’re froze. You’ll skin them if you have to pry the hides loose with a crowbar. Now shut up, and get away from here; you’ll make me miss a shot.”

  “God damn it!” Schneider said. He pounded the earth with his fist. “All right,” he said, raising himself up to a crouching position. “Keep them as long as you can. But I ain’t going to—”

  “Fred,” Miller said quietly, “when you crawl away from here, crawl away quiet. If these buffalo spook, I’ll shoot you.”

  For a moment Schneider remained in his low crouch. Then he shook his head, dropped to his knees, and crawled away from the two men in a straight line, muttering to himself. Miller’s hand tightened, his finger squeezed, and a shot cracked in the thudding quietness.

  It was the middle of the afternoon before the stand was broken.

  The original herd had been diminished by two-thirds or more. In a long irregular swath that extended beyond the herd for nearly a mile, the ground was littered with the dark mounds of dead buffalo. Andrews’s knees were raw from crawling after Miller, as they made their way yard by yard in slow pursuit of the southward list of the circling herd. His eyes burned from blinking against the gunsmoke, and his lungs pained him from breathing it; his head throbbed from the sound of gunfire, and upon the palm of one hand blisters were beginning to form from his handling of the hot barrels. For the last hour he had clenched his teeth against any expression of the pain his body felt.

  But as the pain of his body increased, his mind seemed to detach itself from the pain, to rise above it, so that he could see himself and Miller more clearly than he had before. During the last hour of the stand he came to see Miller as a mechanism, an automaton, moved by the moving herd; and he came to see Miller’s destruction of the buffalo, not as a lust for blood or a lust for the hides or a lust for what the hides would bring, or even at last the blind lust of fury that toiled darkly within him—he came to see the destruction as a cold, mindless response to the life in which Miller had immersed himself. And he looked upon himself, crawling dumbly after Miller upon the flat bed of the valley, picking up the empty cartridges that he spent, tugging the water keg, husbanding the rifle, cleaning it, offering it to Miller when he needed it—he looked upon himself, and did not know who he was, or where he went.