by Gary Paulsen
When he was finished he stood over the graves and looked north. He could not see far. It was dark and even the glow from the fire only penetrated a few yards. But he looked north just the same, and thought, Somewhere up there and west a little arc my parents.
They would start in the morning when the light was good and Billy was all right. They would start then. It was still a long way and they had seen so many buried from wounds and accidents and cholera and just living, so many, and he hoped there would not be any more graves.
They would start in the morning.
TUCKET'S HOME
Francis Tucket lay quietly, the sun warming his back, and watched a small herd of buffalo below him in a depression on the prairie. There were only fifteen or twenty of them, mostly cows with some yearling calves. Two young bulls were sparring, tearing up the dirt and raising dust in great clouds.
He turned to look behind him, where ten-year-old Lottie watched their horses graze. Her litde brother, Billy, crouched beside her, making an arrow. Francis looked down at the buffalo. The sun was gentle on his back, the dust from the fight was drifting away on a soft breeze, and as Francis lay watching, he let his mind wander back over the trip since he and Lottie and Billy had left the Pueblo Indian village.
They'd stayed there a month so that Francis could recover from a snakebite. With the help of some of the Indians, Lottie had pulled him. through, while Billy had learned to hunt and shoot a bow and arrow with amazing skill. The village had been a peaceful place.
Now Francis shifted and scanned the horizon. Even in a quiet moment like this one, you had to be alert, ready for anything. They'd all learned that the hard way.
Francis Tucket had been separated from his family more than a year before, on his fourteenth birthday, when Pawnees kidnapped him from a wagon train. Jason Grimes, a one-armed mountain man, had helped him escape and taught him to survive. After they parted, Francis had found Lottie and Billy alone on the prairie, their father dead of cholera. They'd been members of a wagon train that abandoned them when their father became sick, for fear that he would infect others in the train. So the three had stuck together and headed west to the Oregon Trail to find Francis's family.
Lottie had proved to be the best organizer and camper Francis had ever seen, and Billy, now just shy of eight, had become a hunting and scouting machine of the first order. They'd been through some hair-raising adventures: Kidnapped by the Comanchero outlaw band. Storms. Snakebite. Ambushed by the murderous thieves Courtweiler and Dubs. The three had shared plenty, good and bad, and now they shared a secret—the ancient Spanish silver and gold they carried on the pack-horse. When they were being chased by the Co-mancheros Billy had stumbled upon the grave of a Spanish conquistador, buried with his armor, sword and plunder of centuries ago. Of course, gold and silver meant nothing out here in the wilderness. But someday, someday they'd find Francis's family and civilization, though they still had five hundred miles of rough country to cover alone.
Francis had feared there would be problems on this part of their journey, but it had turned out to be nothing more than a camping trip in a country so beautiful that Francis often had trouble believing it was real.
They had started in partial desert, country covered in mesquite and pinons, but it quickly gave way to mountains. Spring had come early and had stayed. Thick, green grass kept the horses well fed and happy; streams ran full of cold water and trout. Billy caught the fish easily, using a skill he'd learned from the Pueblos that required only a bit of line braided from horsehair, taken from the ponies’ tails, and a bent and sharpened piece of wire.
Francis had no trouble getting deer with his rifle, and Billy supplemented the venison and trout diet with rabbit and turkey and grouse he shot with his bow. Within a week they were all getting fat, and the packhorse nearly staggered with extra meat as they rode through grassy mountain meadows amid high mountain peaks still covered with snow.
But they hadn't seen any buffalo until they'd come to this rise and seen below them the small herd with the fighting bulls.
“Honestly, Francis, I don't see why we need more meat.” Lottie had crawled up alongside him. Billy, his arrow finished, was a hundred yards back, below the ridge, adjusting the makeshift packs on the horses. “We have so much now we can't carry it all.”
“Not so loud—if the wind shifts they'll hear us and run,” Francis whispered. “The reason is that we don't have buffalo meat. Besides that, they're fat and wc need the grease for our moccasins and leather and my rifle. So we're going to shoot a buffalo, all right?”
She nodded and became quiet and he studied the terrain around the herd to see how best to approach them for a shot. The buffalo were in a small basin with a scries of drainage gullies that fed in and out. Francis saw that the one that ran off to the east seemed to provide the best course. It was deep and wound back toward him in a big loop, with a smaller ditch he could use for access. He nodded and pointed with his chin.
“See that ditch off to the right?” He looked at Lottie, then back. “You go back with Billy, I'll make my way down there and—”
Suddenly, as if by magic, there was a burst of gray smoke below them from the edge of the gully that pointed toward the buffalo. Half an instant later Francis heard the crack of a rifle—they were so far away it took that long for the sound to reach them—and one of the cows watching the fighting bulls pitched forward and down onto her side.
“What …”
There was another puff of smoke. Another cow went down; then another shot, and another and another, coming so fast they were almost on top of each other, and each time, a cow would drop on her side and start kicking in death. Twelve shots. Twelve cows.
“Francis, somebody is shooting our buffalo!” Lottie punched his shoulder.
“Stay down.” Francis watched the basin below. The buffalo had not run but were moving in confused circles. “And quiet—be quiet and let's see what's going on.” Twelve shots in perhaps twenty seconds. No man on earth could load and fire a muzzle-loading rifle thirty-six times a minute. There had to be more than one man hiding in the gully. Francis looked to the rear and waved to Billy—who had heard the shooting—to stay where he was with the horses.
“There!” Lottie whispered. “There they are.”
Francis couldn't believe his eyes. A tall, thin man in a full dark suit came out of the gully, followed by three other men in tan suits, all wearing strange-looking round helmets. The man in the dark suit carried nothing, but the other three had two rifles each and were festooned with powder horns and belts and ramrods.
“Why, Francis, he's a fancy man.” Lottie snorted. “What's a fancy man doing way out here?”
“Killing buffalo, the way it looks.” Francis studied them a moment, wondered if there was danger there, decided there could not be and shrugged. “They seem harmless. Let's go down and see why they needed to shoot a dozen buffalo.”
Francis and Lottie walked back to Billy and mounted up. As they rode down, Francis explained what they had seen to Billy.
The rest of the herd had fled with the approach of the four men, and Francis stopped in front of the man in the dark suit, who was leaning—Francis had to work to keep himself from staring—on a silver-headed cane. Behind the man with the cane, Francis could sec yet another man in a tan uniform back in the gully, who had been hidden before. He was holding five horses and two pack mules.
“Oh, I say.” The man in the suit spoke in a strange accent. “This is smashing, absolutely smashing. “What luck. Well have guests for dinner! Do say you'll join us, won't you? We're going to have a mountain of fresh tongue….”
“My name is Francis, this is Lottie and the boy back there is named Billy.”
“Oh, do forgive me. My name is Bentley. William James Bentley the Fourth, actually. And these men are my servants.”
Francis nodded, speechless. Billy heeled his horse forward until it was next to Francis. He had become incredibly accurate with his bow—had indeed once helped
to save Francis and Lottie from Courtwciler and Dubs. Now Billy sat with the bow across his lap, an arrow nocked to the string.
“He talks funny,” Billy said to Francis. “Sort of like them others we had to shoot …”
Francis nodded at Bentley. “You do have a kind of … accent—”
“I'm English,” Bentley said, interrupting. “We're from England on a grand adventure before I take over the estate from my parents.”
“A grand adventure …” For a second images jolted through Francis's mind. Jason Grimes scalping Braid, Comancheros, the Mexican War; himself being held captive by Pawnee, freezing, being shot at, snakcbit. Shooting and burying people.
“Why, yes. Your Oregon Trail is quite the thing in England. Stories of the trail and the wilderness abound. We came over last year and wintered in Independence, where we also outfitted, although I brought my own rifles. They were made by a superb gunsmith named Drills. Then we started west with pack mules….”
This man, thought Francis, actually talks more than Lottie.
“And made rather good time, what with this absolutely capital early spring and all the grass for the livestock, much better time than we would have made pulling wagons …”
Francis held up his hand. “Please, just a min-ute.
“Let him talk, Francis,” Lottie said. “His voice is pretty, like a bird.”
Francis shook his head. “Do you have a guide?”
“Why?” Bentley shrugged. “One simply travels west.”
Francis sighed. He was hoping for a guide to tell him how far north they had to go to hit the trail. “You mean you've come all this way with no guide?”
“Assuredly. Although we may have missed some of the more noteworthy aspects of the journey without proper guidance. Wc have not, for instance, seen any red Indians. One would like to see some red Indians. Are they, for instance, really red?”
Francis thought hack again to Braid, to the Comancheros. Oh my yes, let us see some red Indians.
He pulled his thinking back to the present. “You shot twelve buffalo.”
“Quite. My men reloaded for me so that I could just keep firing. Splendid, what? Mind you, it's not as good as back in the grass prairie. We had a day when wc shot seventy-two of the great beasts. It was capital, simply capital.”
“Why?” Francis couldn't help himself. “What did you do with them?”
“Took the tongues, of course. We dried some and pickled some and ate some fresh. It's the very best meat, tongue.”
Billy couldn't stand it. “All the rest was left to rot?”
Bentley shrugged. “There are millions of them.”
We have to get away from this man, Francis thought. He's friendly enough but he stinks of death. Just that—death.
“You will join us for dinner, won't you?” Bentlcy asked again.
Francis shook his head. “I'm sorry but we have to keep riding.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lottie throw him a sharp look but for once she remained quiet. “We have to get north and west to Oregon before fall. But if you don't mind, I would like to get some hump meat and grease off one of those buffalo you killed.”
“Of course, of course. My men will help you, and you can even take some tongue if you wish.”
“No, just back meat and grease. You don't have to help, it will just take a minute.”
Francis moved to a young cow. He would not have shot her himself—she was just over a year old and too young to kill—but since she was dead anyway and he knew the meat would be tender, he decided to use her. He cut down the center of the back and took out the hump and the tenderloins that ran down both sides of the backbone. He also removed the skin from both sides—Lottie helped him while Billy held the horses—-and then rolled the cow over and cut her belly open and took several long strips of belly fat. The whole operation didn't take fifteen minutes. The meat was rolled in the green hide and packed on the packhorsc.
Francis remounted his own horse and stopped in front of Bentley. He felt he should say something to the Englishman. It was a pure miracle the man and his servants had managed to come this far without running into hostile Indians or, worse, scavengers who worked the trail, preying on travelers the way Courtweiler and Dubs had done.
“Mr. Bentley, don't go much more south. If you go too far that way, you will run into the Comancheros.”
“Oh, are they red Indians?”
Francis nodded. “There are some Indians with them but mostly they are plain mean and will kill you for your shoes, let alone those pretty rifles. You should head back north and hook up with a wagon train. There's safety in numbers.”
Bentley smiled and held out his hand to shake. “Well, I thank you for the advice, my boy, but there are five of us and as you can see we are heavily armed. I don't think we need to fear.”
Francis shook his head. “Mr. Bentley …” Then he realized it would do no good to say more, so he shook hands with Bentley and nudged his horse and rode away.
“Within a hundred yards Billy had moved well off to the side and ahead, scouting, and Lottie had pulled her horse and the packhorsc, which she trailed, up alongside Francis.
“I think we could have stayed for food, though to be honest I don't think I would much favor tongue, but he talked so pretty, Francis, I could have listened to him for hours and hours and maybe he would have cooked something other than tongue if we'd asked him nice enough and maybe he even had potatoes. Oh, Francis, wouldn't a potato taste wonderful? I swear, I haven't had a potato in so long I've forgotten what they taste like….”
And she went on and on, but Francis could not shake the smell of death that had heen on “Bentley, and he heeled his pony to a faster walk.
The farther they could get from Bentley the better.
“I saw dust.” Billy came in from the right side, where he had been riding in a parallel line about a mile away. He urged his pony into a lope until he was next to Francis and Lottie. It was late afternoon and his horse was sweating from the heat.
“How far off?” They had come two days since meeting Bentley, and Francis still felt too close to the hunter. He could not help thinking that Bentley would draw something had to himself, and Francis did not want to be around when it happened.
“I'm not sure. I don't know distances.”
“If you're walking a horse, how long would you have to walk to get to the dust?”
Billy frowned, thinking. “Maybe an hour …”
Three miles, perhaps four. “Where are they?”
“Off to the side, moving the same way wc arc, heading north.”
“How big is the dust cloud?”
Another frown. “Hard to tell. Maybe the same as three or four buffalo might make walking— more than wc make but not a whole lot either.”
“What do you think?” This came from Lottie.
But Francis was still intent upon Billy: “How fast arc they moving?”
“They came up even with us at a pretty good clip, then they seemed to let up and are holding, the same as us.”
“Are they Comancheros?” Lottie looked grim. “Could it be them?”
Francis shook his head. “I don't think so. They usually move in big groups. This seems like a smaller bunch: four, five men at the most.” He looked back at their own trail. If Billy can see their dust maybe they can see ours, he thought. But they had been moving largely through grassy meadows where there was no dust, and the other group—whoever they were—were farther east, in the foothills of The mountains where there was less grass and more dry dirt.
“What do we do?” Lottie peered eastward, trying to see the dust.
“Nothing right now. It might even be Bentlcy and his men taking my advice and going north. We'll wait until dark and I'll sneak over and see who they arc.”
“I'll go too,” Billy said.
“Not this time. I need you here Co keep an eye on tilings with Lottie.”
“But I'm good at sneaking….”
“I know. But one is enough fo
r this kind of work. I'm going on foot and you can help keep the horses here.”
Billy frowned but at last nodded. “All right, but I don't like it.”
“It's for the best, Billy,” Lottie added.
And in a terrible way, that proved to be right.
∗∗∗
THERE WAS A SLIVER of moon, no clouds and a sky packed with stars—enough light so that Francis could see just shadows and shapes.
“No fire tonight,” he told Lottie. “Eat some of the venison jerky cold.”
She nodded. Billy was near the horses, sulking.
“You watch out for snakes,” she said. Francis had been bitten by a rattler while trying to sneak up on a Pueblo village and it had nearly killed him.
Francis nodded, checked his rifle to make certain the cap was firmly seated on the nipple and set off in an easy shuffle. He would have preferred taking a horse, but it would whinny when it smelled the other horses and give him away.
The country was rolling hills, but they were small and well rounded, so the going was easy. He could have made good time but he opted for caution. Instead of making for the strange camp in a straight line he looped slightly north and moved slowly, stopping often to listen and watch the shadows.
When he had walked about three miles, he caught a flicker of light. He stopped and watched it until he knew it was a campfire. It was more than a mile away and he could tell that whoever it was who'd made it had no concept of caution. The fire was huge, and showers of sparks leaped into the air as whole logs were tossed onto the blaze.
Bcndcy, Francis thought. It must be him. Still, he had to be sure, and keeping a low profile, he worked his way closer until he was no more than thirty yards from them. He crouched in a small ditch and watched.
