Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Well, blast me if they don’t start coatin’ them old, dead bones with plaster, just like a sawbones would do if I busted an arm. Hatcher sees I’m kind of starin’ like, so he says, “We don’t want them to break either on the way to the train or going east on it. They can’t grow back together again, you know.” He’s just about readin’ my mind. No wonder he’s such a blamed good poker player.

  Jake hasn’t even got off his horse. He shifts his chaw, spits, and says, “Let’s get huntin’, if we’re gonna get huntin’. “

  “Yeah,” Clancy says. So I mount up and the three of us, we ride on out of that camp. When we’re out of earshot, Clancy grins and says, “And if we take a little longer to find meat than we reckoned, well, at three dollars a day, who’s gonna complain?”

  “You got that right,” Jake says, and spits again.

  Twenty years ago, you ride around in this part of the country and you’d fall over buffalo, there was that many of ’em. They’re a lot thinner on the ground nowadays, what with repeatin’ rifles and all. Truth is, I wasn’t lookin’ to come onto a trail. Pronghorn, I figured, ’d be about the best we can do.

  But I’d just stuck a cigar in my mouth late that afternoon when blast me if we don’t come across a buffalo track runnin’ east, and a fresh one, too. Jake looks at Clancy, Clancy looks at me. “If we take it kind of easy,” I say finally, “we won’t catch up to ’em tonight. We’ll worry about ’em again come mornin’. “

  “I purely like the way you think, Joe,” Clancy says.

  So we make ourselves a little fire and gnaw on some jerked beef and hard bread. I brew up a pot of coffee, we all drink some, then we draw straws for who gets first watch. I get the short one, worse luck for me. But what with Indians and outlaws and all, you don’t have somebody up at night and you’ll wake up with an extra eyehole right in the middle of your forehead.

  I wake Clancy and go to bed. When Clancy wakes Jake, he’s loud enough so he wakes me, too, but not for long. Next thing that wakes me is the sun. We eat some more bread, pour down some more coffee, and off we go.

  The buffalo, they haven’t been gallivantin’ around in the night time either, so we know pretty soon we’re gainin’ on ’em. Up ahead we see the cloud of dust the herd is raisin’. I peer toward the cloud, tryin’ to make out critters through that dust. I just about think I can when the goddamnedest thing happens. I don’t hardly know how to put it into words.

  One minute I’m ridin’ along without a care in the world but for tryin’ to spot buffalo, the next I’m so dizzy I almost fall off my horse. He snorts, too, like he don’t like what’s goin’ on either, and damn near stumbles, which doesn’t make stayin’ in the saddle any easier. Jake cusses and Clancy yells, so I’m not the only one who feels somethin’ peculiar.

  The dizzies go away after a few seconds, thank you Jesus. I guess they do for Clancy, too, ’cause he says, “That was right strange.”

  And it gets stranger, let me tell you. My horse puts his head down to snatch a bite to eat. Everybody knows what Wyoming prairie’s like—sagebrush and tumbleweed and grass, all of it dry and yellow by the time August rolls around. Well, may God strike me dead if my horse isn’t chewin’ on ferns like you’d see if you was by a streambank up in the mountains somewheres, and them just as fresh and green and pretty as ever you’d hope to find.

  Not far away is a kind of plant like I never seen before. You take a palm tree—you know, one of those funny ones they have down near the Mexican border, looks like a feather duster for a giant—and forget about the trunk, just have the leaves comin’ out of a knobby thing down low to the ground, and you’ll get the idea.

  Well, I could go on a while longer, on account of there’s a lot more funny plants around, but I reckon you’d think I was just makin’ it up, so I’ll leave well enough alone. It was purely perplexin’, I tell you that. Like I said, Jake, he’s done a deal o’ driftin’, so I turn to him and say, “Did you ever see the like?”

  “Not even close,” he answers. Just then a lizard scurries out from under one fern and over to another. I’m not talkin’ about some little fence lizard or horny toad, mind you; this critter’s big as my arm and half again as thick.

  When Jake sees it, I thought he was gonna swallow his chaw. That’s always worth a laugh, watchin’ a fellow puke up his guts, but he kept it where it belongs. He spits again, and says, “Let’s us head on outa here.” Nobody argues with him, no sirree.

  We ride on about a quarter mile maybe, then the dizzies hit me again. This time, though, they’re not so bad as they was before. My horse missteps, but I jerk his head up and he’s all right, too. When I look down, the prairie’s back to bein’ the prairie, just like it ought to.

  Jake and Clancy, they see that, too. Clancy says, “Next time I drink in the Rebel Yell, I’m gonna watch the barkeep closer. I think maybe he put locoweed in my whiskey.”

  “We all saw the same thing, Clancy,” I tell him. Then I stop and think—how do I know that’s so? So I say, “The ferns and funny kind of squashed-down palm and that big fat lizard—”

  When I talk about the lizard, Jake spits again, so I know he seen it. Clancy nods, too. I tell you true, I’m right relieved. I wouldn’t want to think I made that stuff up out of my own head.

  We ride on after the buffalo. They’d gained some on us—I guess we spent a while gawpin’ after we got dizzy the first time. Pretty soon, though, we come close enough to ’em to really start pickin’ ’em out one by one. We ride closer, lookin’ ’em over. Finally we’re within a couple hundred yards, and nobody’s sayin’ a thing. I got to know if Jake and Clancy see the same thing I do. I just got to, so I say, “Boys, ain’t one of them buffalo green?”

  Clancy, he ups and crosses himself and shouts out, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints be praised, I’m not the only one!” He must be plumb shook up—first time I ever heard him sound like an Irishman. Jake spits twice and nods, so I figure he sees it, too.

  We don’t none of us say anything again for a while, but we don’t need to, either. We’re all makin’ for that green buffalo. The closer we come, the older it looks. I start to figure the green’s some kind of nasty mange, on account of it don’t look to have any hair anywhere, just the bare hide. That makes me want to forget about killin’ it—the stuff might be catchin’. Then I figure I better kill it, so it can’t spread the sickness to the rest of the herd, or to the cattle the ranchers run hereabouts.

  And then I get a look at its horns. They’re bigger’n any I’ve ever seen on a buffalo, the ones above its eyes, I mean. But on top of those—no, not on top, in front—oh, hell, you know what I mean—it had another horn, a third one, right on its snout. I’m not makin’ that up, so help me. Never seen one like that before nor since. Never seen a green one before nor since, either, come to that.

  The regular buffalo, it’s like they don’t know what to make of the green one any more’n me and Clancy and Jake do. There’s considerable pushin’ and snortin’ and shovin’. Some of the bigger bulls, they jostle the green buffalo pretty hard. He jostles right back, too. He’s as big as any of ’em, bigger if you count his tail, which you ought to do, ’cause it’s bigger and fatter than a buffalo tail has any business bein’. A buffalo he jostles stayed jostled, if you know what I mean. Those horns have a lot to do with that—he pretty near outdoes the rest of the herd put together with ’em.

  Those horns! I mean, you’d have to be a natural born fool not to want to kill somethin’ with horns as fine as that. I swing up my rifle to my shoulder and fire off a round. Jake and Clancy, they’re still right with me, so I don’t know to this day if I fired first.

  The buffalo, they commence to bellowin’, the way buffalo do when you shoot at ’em, and they run like a freight train comin’ down out of the Rockies with its brakes gone. I see dust puff up on the green buffalo’s flank, so I know we hit him, but he don’t go down. Sometimes buffalo, they’re purely hard to kill.

  Kill? Hell, far as I can tell,
the green one isn’t even fazed. He runs right along with the rest of the herd. The three of us are gallopin’ alongside ’em. I chiefly hope my horse don’t stick his foot in a prairie dog hole. If he does, he breaks his own fool neck and mine along with it.

  The chase goes on longer than you’d think, because the green one stays in the middle of the herd for a while. Usually in a hunt like that you take whatever critter you can get. Me, Jake, and Clancy, though, we all want him. If we can’t get a clear shot at him, we let the others go.

  Finally, when I’m startin’ to wonder who has more wind, the herd or our horses, the green buffalo commences to drop a little behind the rest. We start shootin’ again soon as we see the chance. I reckon we miss a few times, too, or maybe more’n a few. You try aimin’ from a runnin’ horse at a runnin’ buffalo, my friend, before you laugh at us for it.

  But we make some hits, too. The green buffalo slows down some more, then comes to a stop. Blood’s runnin’ down his side in little red streams. His flanks heave like he can’t get enough air. His head hangs down the way they do when they’re hurt too bad to go on much farther. When he opens his mouth to pant, he drools pink. There’s pink froth around his nostrils, too, so he must’ve been bleedin’ in the lungs.

  When they stop like that, the kill’s easy. You gauge by the hump where to put the next shot right through the heart. But the green buffalo, even his hump isn’t right, and he’s got a bony frill, I guess you’d call it, that runs up from his neck over the fore part of his back. Growin’ something that unnatural must’ve been a torment to him, so I’d say he’s lucky we come along to put him out of his misery.

  I ride up close to do what needs doin’. I guess the best I can where his heart is, take dead aim, and squeeze the trigger. I have guessed better, indeed I have. When the bullet hits him, the green buffalo lifts up that big old head of his and out comes a noise like a locomotive with a busted boiler. Then he wheels round and runs right at me.

  He’s bigger and meaner’n any longhorn you ever seen. I shoot at him again, but you got to be lucky with a head shot on a buffalo, hit him in the eye or somethin’ like that. Otherwise the slug’ll just bounce off his skull. That’s just what happens here, too. I rowel my horse for all I’m worth. He springs forward like you wouldn’t believe, and the buffalo can’t quite shift fast enough to spike me with his horn.

  He lets out that squealin’ bellow again, tries to change the way he’s goin’ so he can make another run at me. All the while, though, Jake and Clancy keep on pumpin’ bullets into him. He takes so many, I reckon when we butcher him he’ll be as full o’ lead as a shotgunned mallard.

  I turn around to shoot some more, too, but this time I see it really isn’t needful. That last charge of his took all the strength he has left in him. He wobbles like a drunk goin’ out of the Rebel Yell, then kind of folds up on himself and falls over. He heaves out another breath or two, then he’s finally done.

  “Thought he was gonna use you for a pincushion there, Joe,” Clancy says.

  “You’re not the only one,” I tell him. “I thought he was through. When he came at me, I like to’ve pissed myself.”

  “Don’t blame you a bit.”

  Jake says, “Let’s cut him up.” Jake, he takes care of what needs doin’ first and worries about everything else afterwards.

  I climb down from my horse, tether him to a clump of sagebrush that sticks up higher above the ground than anything else thereabouts. Then I pull out a knife and walk up to the green buffalo. I’m ready to run like hell, I tell you. After that last scare, I figure he might just be shammin’.

  But he’s not, not this time. The one eye I can see doesn’t blink. It just stares up at the sky. Flies have already started walking along the tracks of blood on his flank. One ambles down into a bullet hole, comes back out a second later and starts wipin’ its little thread of a neck with its legs the way they do.

  I take out my knife, give the green buffalo a poke. The mange or whatever it is has the hide all rough and scaly, but it’s not any thicker than the usual run of buffalo hide. You have to put some arm into what you’re doin’, but you can cut yourself a good slice.

  Once they see I’m not trampled, Jake and Clancy give me a hand with the butchering. We hack off steaks and chops and roasts till we’ve got as much as we can carry with our pack horse and tied behind us. It’s not as easy as it ought to be. Instead of havin’ the ribs stop at what’d be the bottom of a man’s chest, they keep right on going, down to the critter’s hipbones—that green buffalo isn’t normal any which way. We’re bloody to the elbows and dead beat by afternoon, but we get the job finished.

  By the time we’re done, the buzzards are already circlin’ overhead, waitin’ for their share. Soon as we take off, I figure they’ll argue it out with the coyotes. Before too long, even the bones’ll be gone. That’s the way the world is. If it wasn’t like that, we’d all be ass-deep in bones, and then what would ornery professors like Hatcher’s Marsh and Cope do for fun?

  We ride on back the way we came. Followin’ our own tracks is the easiest way to get on back to Hatcher’s camp. It’s gettin’ close to sundown when Clancy says, “Ain’t this about the place where we all got dizzy?”

  I look around. He’s right. But there’s no ferns there now, no funny plants that look like squashed feather dusters. Just prairie, lots of it. Clancy points. “Look, there’s our tracks, right?”

  I nod. Sure enough, those are our outbound tracks. Jake spits. Clancy rides on a few more feet. I walk my horse up after him. He keeps pointin’ down to the ground. All at once he says, “There!”

  I see what he’s pointin’ at, too. Right at the spot where he said “There!” our tracks just up and disappear. It’s not like the wind blew dust over ’em. It’s like they never, ever happened. “That’s queer, all right,” I say. Jake nods.

  Clancy looks west, points again, this time toward the horizon. “We came from that way, right?” he says. He knows he’s right, and doesn’t wait for an answer. He walks his horse real slow and easy westward, lookin’ down every foot of the way. After a quarter mile or so, maybe a tad more, he rides a little ways south, then a little ways north, like a dog castin’ about for a scent. Finally he says, “Ha!”

  I’m right with him. He’s picked up our outbound tracks again. He rides back east just a few feet and goes “Ha!” one more time, and then, “Goddamn!” I say “Goddamn!” myself, on account of he’s found the other side of where our tracks disappear. It’s like we didn’t ride over the stretch between, the stretch with the ferns and all the other stuff that had no call bein’ in the Wyoming prairie.

  “Hell with it,” Jake says. “Let’s cook some of this here buffalo meat. We don’t stop and cook it pretty soon, I’ll eat it raw.” Comin’ out of Jake, that’s a speech.

  So we stop, we get a fire goin’, and we carve off chunks of meat and toast ’em on sticks over the flames. Before long, my mouth gets to waterin’ so hard I can’t wait any more. I blow and I blow and I blow on my chunk, then I sink my teeth in.

  I’ve had buffalo a good many times. It’s not that far from beef, a little leaner, a little tougher, a little gamier. This green buffalo—not that his meat was green, you understand, or the buzzards and coyotes would’ve been welcome to it—he doesn’t taste like any buffalo I ever ate before. But he’s a long way from bad.

  Clancy says what I’m thinkin’: “Reminds me more of dark-meat chicken than any proper buffalo.” Jake doesn’t say anything. He just ups and cuts himself off another piece.

  We ride out again next mornin’, and have as peaceful a trip as you please back to Hatcher’s camp. We get there late afternoon, and everyone’s right glad to see us, and to see the meat we’ve fetched. Hatcher’s boys, they cook some of it and start smokin’ the rest so as it’ll keep.

  I wait for Clancy or Jake to come out with the story of the green buffalo, and I guess they wait for me, too, but nobody ends up tellin’ it. I like a tall tale as well as the ne
xt fellow, but usually a tall tale, you know the one who’s tellin’ it is yarnin’. Speakin’ not a word but the truth and having it taken for a tall tale, that’ll just ruin your day.

  Tall tale or no, though, the meat’s still good. Me and Clancy and Jake, we sit down around a fire and fill ourselves up again. I’m at the teeth-pickin’ stage when Hatcher comes over. He’s chewin’ on a roasted buffalo rib. While he pays us off, some of his boys start laughin’ over by his wagon.

  “What’s funny?” I ask him.

  “I picked up my mail in Lusk, along with supplies,” Hatcher answers. “O. C. Marsh sent me a copy of Punch with a cartoon of himself in it.”

  “Punch? What’s Punch?”

  “It’s a British comic magazine. It has a picture of Marsh as a circus ringmaster. He’s standing on a Triceratops skull—doubtless one of the ones we’ve excavated hereabouts—and putting a whole troupe of dinosaur skeletons through their paces, as if they were so many trained bears or lions or elephants. Would you like to have a look?” He uses the rib bone to point back where the magazine is.

  I think it over, then shake my head. “I thank you kindly, Mr. Hatcher, but I’ll take a miss on that. You’re the one knows about these here dinosaur things, not me.”

  “However you like, Joe. I thank you for the tasty meat you brought back.” By now, he’s gnawed everything off of that bone, so he tosses it on the ground. Then he reaches into his waistcoat pocket, comes out with a deck of cards. “Care for a little game to make the time go by?”

  “I’ll pass on that, too, Mr. Hatcher,” I tell him. He’s just tryin’ to skin me out of the wages he paid so next time he needs me, he can give me the same money again. I’m wise to that one, I am. So are Clancy and Jake, when he tries it on them. We may not know these dinosaurs, but we’re nobody’s fools.

  The Maltese Elephant