by Peter Bowen
The whole trip had been a puzzlement. My family was strangers, Sal seemed put in a snit by my mere presence, I was about half wild with one of them nameless fears when I began to think about the sheer numbers of white folks livin’ in each other’s pockets, and all in all I decided that I wouldn’t come back for a good long spell. The year 1877 was fast drawing to a close and good riddance. If I had knowed what 1878 was holding for me I’d have gone back to Oneida and taken up a good trade—house-painting or saddlemaking or such, but the only kind thing about the future is it ain’t happened yet. And that’s enough.
Jim Hill was stealing and lying to fund his railroad—he’d sent a brilliant young prospector/engineer name of Hamilton to the west, and the youngster had discovered Marias Pass, a railroad man’s dream—easy slopes up and down and lower than any other in the Northern Rockies. I took trains as far as what was to be Bismarck—though it is true that the last two hundred miles was on huffer-puffers, tenders for the track-laying crews.
Fort Buford was just as squalid as when I left. Well, a little better, because the clean white snow had covered over a lot of the trash and offal and Indians who had died of drink, and none of that would show until April, when the soldiers would have to police the muddy ground to keep typhoid fever away.
I collected my traps and possibles, bought overpriced supplies and a few hundred dollars of good trade goods, and took my little string of pack animals out into the Big White (in winter; in summer, the Big Dry. In winter the snow could drift eighty feet deep, leveling the land cut by an arroyo or coulee—if you wandered out in one you would sink like a rock into feathers. Slow, too—a few fractions of an inch a minute until you suffocated) and headed for the spot where I planned to join up with Buffalo Horn.
The winter of ’77–78 had come on hard and fast to the Northern Plains. Though the Yellowstone and the Missouri were still ice-free at Fort Buford (they join there) it wouldn’t be long until both rivers was shut fast and tight.
The Army was through with winter campaigns. They weren’t doing much in the way of Indian fighting, except down in the New Mexico Territory, where about ten thousand troops were trying to catch about two hundred Apaches, and having damn little luck. The Sioux and Cheyennes was broke, the Arapahoes and Blackfeet was being ravaged by smallpox. It was smallpox, syphilis, and trade whiskey done in the Horse Indians, not our gallant Army. Starvation helped, too.
My old friends the Crows had stayed pretty much away from the white man’s water-that-banishes-reason, but every other tribe from the Plains was represented in the ragged filthy mob of beggars camped outside the fort’s walls. You could buy a woman for as little as a shot of whiskey, kill her if you liked. It made me sick and it made me angry. I have always liked the Indians, liked the way that they treated their children and their way of looking at the world and the heavens. There were toddlers half naked and filthy, lice-ridden, and blind, their eyes covered with whitish clouded scars from gonorrhea.
The buffalo hunters was working up from the marginally milder southern Great Plains toward the north. A couple of Pennsylvania Germans had discovered a way to make good leather out of the hides—good leather meant hard and stiff, for shoes and trunks and such, not soft-tanned the Indian way—and there was hundreds if not thousands of hide hunters killing buffalo, as many as three hundred apiece in a single day, peeling the hides and cutting out the tongue, and leaving the rest to rot. The scavengers couldn’t near keep up with the tons of rotten meat.
Old Bill Sherman had remarked that to subdue the Plains tribes it was necessary only to kill the buffalo, and he was right. I had met Sherman several times. He had one of the strangest minds I have ever encountered. He was soft-spoken and courteous, and utterly ruthless. Most folks have heard the famous line “War is Hell” but very few know that the next sentence was “And wars are won and lost with the lives of human beings and no eloquence or rhetoric can make it less so.” He’d ground the Rebels to powder on the Tennessee and then burnt the South’s belly out with his march through Georgia, and had been seriously thought of as a Presidential candidate to succeed Grant. Sherman hated politicians and he would cheerfully have hanged every newspaperman in the country, but he did the bidding of both and chewed on his beard. He had the mangiest looking beard I ever saw, for a famous man, I mean.
I made arrangements with a couple of teamsters, Reilly and Grogan, to follow along and pick up our peltries and cart them down to the pickup points along the Yellowstone. They come highly recommended—they would steal only the usual amount—and since they was paid piecework I didn’t give a damn how much they drank. One of the two was sober enough to sign the contract with me—his partner was suffering the deliriums off in a lean-to near the stables. A steady diet of trade whiskey made a man crazy at first and then made him dead.
“When we takes off,” says Reilly, blowin’ breath at me smelled like the Devil’s Privy, “Grogan will be shakin’ so bad he won’t be able to keep his hat on his head for the first few days, but he’ll be right after that.”
“Fine,” I says. “Just remember where I told you to go and how I mark my pelts. Won’t do you no good to try to sell my pelts—the housemen all know my mark.”
True enough. Oh, they could try to run them all the way up into Canada, through a few hundred miles of hostiles and strange country, but that weren’t worth the effort. I trusted the drunken bastards so much that either Buffalo Horn or me would check on them time to time anyway.
I left Fort Buford in the middle of the night, since that would put me at an odd place to camp when the sun come up. I skirted the mouth of the Big Horn proper and cast a wide circle looking for signs of Buffalo Horn. Our code is slashed willow tips, the cut ends pointing in the direction gone, the number of tips the days until returning. I followed along, until the tips numbered two, and I could see Buffalo Horn’s fire signs and knew he was somewhere fairly close by.
There wasn’t much snow on the ground yet. There was a crisp, wet, icy smell in the north wind, which told me it was snowing like blazes a hundred miles north. My weather sense told me it was going to get mean cold soon. About midafternoon I saw two sundogs appear, one on either side of the sun, and damn near as bright. I knew that meant that the temperature was going to fall like a rock through the air and stay at fifty below zero for a week or two. I commenced to look for a good place to hole up until the weather warmed and I could piss without sounding like a string of firecrackers.
I come up over a little rise and saw about twenty buffalo before me, pawing at the cured grass, hunkering their shoulders against a wind suddenly turned mean and cold. I looked to the north, and saw the wind that the Blackfeet call “Kas’sa’poo’intay,” a high, cold tide of snow-laden air, the grains of snow tiny as sugar pounded fine, and deadly. The white dust would come with your breath into your lungs and freeze the tissue—and three days later you’d be dead of gangrene pneumonia. I thought of Sally’s nice warm whorehouse and swore to bust myself in the chops for being so stupid if I lived through this.
I had two rifles with me—a 45-120 buffalo rifle good to over a thousand yards, and a little lever-action 35-40 to get camp meat with. It was still pretty warm out, maybe zero, so I hobbled my horses and sneaked over toward where the buffalo was. They had decided to stay and wasn’t spooky, more afraid of the north wind than they was of wolves. The wolves was runnin’ belly-low to the ground for their dens right now, and wouldn’t have stopped for a porterhouse steak if it was cooked right and left on the path in front of them. I rested my little 35–40 on a rock—setting my mittens on the ground—and drew a careful bead on a fat young cow about sixty yards away.
There is just two spots on a buffalo, shooting from the side, that will drop the critter for sure in its tracks—I didn’t have time to trail a bleeder just now. I squinted down the barrel and put the leaf of the front sight on the spot in the neck and squeezed the trigger.
The cow dropped—dead before she hit the ground, likely—and the others snorted
and took off and were over the hill in a minute. The wind was rising, and it had a nasty keening wail in it. I stood up and glanced behind me and there was six Indians around my horses and mules and every one of the six had a rifle, though out of politeness only one or two had their long guns pointed at something vital in me.
They was River Crows, and it was just my luck that they was from one of the far northwest bands I had never come in contact with, so they did what Crows do. The Crows are a peaceable people—hell, they’ll tell you so, and they told me now—and all that they do is rob you. No self-respecting Crow will kill a white man, and they wish all white men well. They hope, after they have peeled you down to the last layer, that you will return to the white men’s stores and get a fresh outfit and come back so they can peel you again. Third time they peel you, they admit you into the tribe because your mind’s broke and they feel sorry for you.
They left me a pocketknife and my pants and shirt and woolen vest. There I stood in my stocking feet watching them ride off, with a Blue Norther blowin’ down from Canada.
The last Crow rode my horse up to me and tossed my boots on the ground in front of me.
“You can have these back,” he says, in sign lingo. “We don’t have anybody with feet that big.” He gave me a cheerful grin and followed the others.
I figured I had about one chance in ten of making it through the cold spell that even now was arriving. I commenced to skinning the cow out with my pocketknife. It took me nearly an hour and time I had the cow’s hide peeled it was getting near dark and the wind was howling like the Furies. The wolves were howling from the doors of their dens and the coyotes’ cries sounded like farewell speeches from old sopranos.
I dragged the stiffening hide over to a clump of sagebrush that would screen out maybe ten percent of the wind and I rolled up in the buffalo hide, hair side in, as tight as I could. My hands was too cold to use the flint and steel I still had, and anyway I was too far from wood to keep any size of a fire going. I buried my face in the woolly fur and went to sleep.
The Blue Northers, when they first come, don’t blow along the ground like the wind before a summer thunderstorm. The howling is high overhead. Then the Blue Northers’ bellies creep closer, and it sounds like an approaching army firing on occasion at skirmishers. Trees with water in them freeze and go CRACK. The reports woke me back up. I had a double layer of fur and hide, plus my clothing and boots. The reports stopped, and me and the fleas and the odd tick all went to sleep.
I woke up several hours or days later. Something was tugging at my improvised bedroll. I tried to move, and reached for the rifle that wasn’t there anyway. My arm went about a good sixteenth of an inch. The god damned buffalo hide was frozen steel-hard. I had a wolf or two gnawing at the scraps of meat on the hide whilst the rest of the pack was tucking into the buffalo cow.
Jaysus, Kelly, I thought. I entertained myself for a while calling myself names, though there really wasn’t much else that I could have done. I couldn’t even hear much of what was going on outside, I was so tightly wrapped.
Yellowstone Kelly, I says to myself, Legendary Great Buffalo Crepe of the Northern Plains. Died with dignity as a side dish at a wolves’ banquet.
I couldn’t have been getting enough air, for I managed to go to sleep again.
15
MY BLADDER WOKE ME, as full as it felt like getting. I twitched and wriggled, and got about as much freedom of movement as I would have had if I had been dipped in thick varnish. By straining my neck and rolling my left eye damn near out of the socket, I could see a tiny patch of light. So I had slept through a long winter night. Then something tapped on my hide—not my own personal hide, the buffalo robe I was rolled up in. I had no idea who it was, but as it didn’t sound like wolf fangs, who or whatever it was was just fine by me. I just wanted to piss once before I died.
Taptaptaptaptaptap. What with the buffalo hair in my ears and the wool scarf I had wrapped round my head like a granny with a toothache, I could feel much better than I could hear. There was a faint tearing sound, and the grip of the buffalo robe relaxed a tiny bit. Now that hope had returned, my bladder commenced to throb.
Taptaptaptaptaptaptap. Someone was using a knife or a hatchet to cut the frozen hide. The hide gripping my head and ears relaxed, and I heard a snatch of song. Sung with a thick Bannock accent.
Oooooooh, the elders of the village,
they was too old to firk,
So they sat around the table
and they had a circle jerk,
’Twas the finest ball that Kirremuir
had had or ever been,
Hip hip hurrah
and pass the brandy o-ver.
It was Buffalo Horn, of course, reciting from memory one of the hundreds of verses to that wretched ballad he’d got off the titled drunks he’d been nursemaiding (along with Texas Jack, who drew no sober breath once out of sight of the white settlements). Old Horn had a marvelous ear for languages, rather like a parrot—no idea what the noises meant, and happy to repeat them.
Horn kicked me over—he wasn’t overlavish with the sympathy, you see—and commenced to hack away at the other side of my crepe de bison. He had a cheerful disregard for whatever parts of mine should chance to be commingled with the buffalo’s, the bastard. Presently the hide parted, sort of like a great hairy clamshell, and I was able to blink at the fierce light and wince at the fierce cold.
I didn’t so much as thank him, and wasn’t even fully to my feet when I began clawing at my flies to drag out my pecker and piss. It was still fifty below, and the yellow stream sounded like a tubercular Gatling gun—it literally tinkled on the frozen grass like glass shards on a stone floor.
“Ah, Kelly,” says the Bannock son-of-a-bitch, “I shall long enjoy telling this tale around the fires of my people and to the English hunters, who will then give me good tips. Henh!” All of this was much muffled by the wolf-fur ruff on his heavy buffalo coat. He took it off and handed it to me.
“We must go, before we both freeze,” he says, and sets off at a slow trot—it’s fatal to breathe deeply in weather this cold. I followed, already shivering like a wet dog. My pecker burned like it was scalded.
Buffalo Horn had made a good camp in a coulee about a mile from where I damn near met my doom, a lean-to covered with brush and green hides, with a good supply of dry wood and parfleches of pemmican hanging from the poles that held up the roof. He built the fire up in a hurry and I got out of my duds and into some clean dry things he had. This damn weather will murder you with your own sweat and breath.
“The wolves had almost gnawed through the hide over your butt,” says Buffalo Horn, “Haw, haw, haw.”
“Don’t take much to amuse you, does it?” I says. “And I am much obliged all of the same. You got any coffee?”
He nodded and plopped an enamelware coffeepot on the coals. I was still shivering, but the cold was lessening in me and my bones didn’t feel like they was made of ice any more.
We hunkered down for the next three days, playing dice and an Indian game of mumblety-peg, and when those diversions palled we mended gear or told lies.
The cold snap lifted gradually, warmer air from the west came and things began to move on the land again. When we heard the screech of a Canada jay we knew it was time to have a look about.
Buffalo Horn had left his ponies in a little dingle out of the wind, where there was good cured grass and some brush to hole up in. They was covered with rimes of ice and had long icicles hanging from their lips—their mouths were chapped and bloody, but they were alive.
It took the rest of the day for us to tend the horses and such—it was close on the longest darknesses of the year—and it was still chilly enough so I had no notions of going after the Crows in the dark.
“There were six of them and there are two of us, Kelly,” says Buffalo Horn, as we munched our pemmican that evening. “Do you think we can kill them?”
“They are already dead,” I says. “And I’l
l bet not over three miles from here.”
Horn grunted and went back to his meal, and drank about a quart of boiling hot coffee, and went to sleep. If tomorrow was a battle, it was a good day to die in, and if not, a good day to live in. Like I said, I have always admired the Indians, and how they look at things.
The next day we circled wide and found some faint traces of the Crow trail. Didn’t need them, as it turned out; from the hillock behind our lean-to we could have seen the birds gathering—magpies and ravens and kites. We rode cautious-like toward the Crow camp. Two big loafer wolves was staggering around the camp, almost dead of the strychnine in the Indians.
I always carried a couple of bottles of trade whiskey laced with strychnine stuck innocent-like in my possible sacks, for occasions such as happened with the Crows a few days ago. The Crows had got a camp together and celebrated, passing the filthy mixture rapidly around. Only one of them was outside the lean-to—and not a pretty sight. The birds had mostly pecked his face off, and died of the meal, I might add. We gathered up my traps and threw the bird-pecked Crow in with the other five and piled brush on the lot and set fire to the whole mess. I didn’t feel any too good about what had happened and I damn sure didn’t want another Crow party puzzling out the story, as they have long memories and once annoyed are too damn single-minded for my taste.
Horn thought it all a great joke. He made up a long song recounting my splendid treacheries, to sing for his people when he returned, a wealthy and respected warrior and trader.
Buffalo Horn was a good friend, too, and I had saved his hair once or twice, so he expanded the story and made it just preposterous enough so that it wouldn’t be believed, if it should be sung, say, in the lodges of the Crows.
16
THE TRUTH OF THE matter is that wolfing just isn’t very interesting. We poisoned and skinned out nearly three thousand, and had about eighty Canada lynx (caught them with baited traps) and a few odds and ends of marten and sable. The wolves had multiplied something fierce with the slaughter of the buffalo, and since the hide hunters left them all of the meat it was a free lunch for old lobo. Buffalo Horn and me took the valuable peltries (everything but the wolves) down to Fort Buford, and left the baled wolf pelts for Reilly and Grogan to sledge out however they wanted to. I wouldn’t advance them any money, just gave them some modest credit at Salomonsen’s General Store in Fort Buford.
