The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  Charlie’s notion was that they might locate some small poor band and lavish presents on them until they put aside their lances and scalping knives and began to see the virtue of having traders around. Maybe the small bands could then influence the big bands. It was easy enough for Charlie to prance around his secure establishment on the Arkansas and develop theories such as that one; but it was quite another thing, as Willy and Kit could testify, to ride around in constant danger trying to locate this ideal small band.

  They had been scared enough just because of the overabundance of sign, but then they ran into Tom Fitzpatrick, on his way back from a trip to Mississippi, and Tom brought news of a bad new war chief, known as Wolf Eater from his habit of chasing down wolves and eating them in order to enhance his power. Wolf Eater had recently wiped out two small immigrant trains, leaving burned and mangled bodies here and there on the prairie.

  “He’s a bad un,” Tom assured them. “Whatever you do, don’t try to powwow with him.”

  “I have no intention of speaking to the man,” Kit told old Tom.

  It was worry about the Wolf Eater that had prompted them to leave the prairie and begin to traverse the badlands, on a day of light snow and cutting wind. In the distance a broadish, reddish river flowed east.

  “That’ll be the Rio Rojo, I guess,” Kit said. “What if it ain’t?” Willy asked. “Charlie’s going to want an accurate report.”

  “If he don’t trust me, let him come look for himself,” Kit replied hotly. The pickiness of Charles Bent was often hard to tolerate.

  “If it ain’t the Red, I suppose it could be the Prairie Dog Fork of the Brazos,” Kit allowed.

  “Whatever it is, it’s no place for a trading post,” Willy said. “You’d never get wagons through these gullies.”

  There was no disputing the fact that rocky gullies had a bad effect on wagon wheels.

  “There’s a big canyon around here somewhere,” Kit mentioned. “They say a million buffalo can graze in it without even being crowded.”

  “I suppose that would be an exaggeration,” Willy remarked.

  “What’s to stop us from having a look?” Kit argued.

  Willy thought he might as well humor the man. If he refused to let him visit the canyon he’d sulk all the way back to the Arkansas.

  “We can look, but I have no intention of going down in it,” Willy told him. “It would be easy to get boxed in by Indians in a hole in the ground like that.”

  The next day near dusk they found themselves looking down into the Palo Duro canyon—plenty of buffalo roamed the canyon floor, though considerably less than a million, as Willy was quick to point out.

  Kit, as usual, was reluctant to give ground. “I expect it’ll fill up in the spring, when the grass is better,” he said.

  They were near the west end of the canyon when they spotted two horsemen who had stopped near the rim and were looking down into the shadowy gorge. One of the horses was white.

  “I know that horse—it’s Greasy Lake’s,” Kit said at once. “He got that horse from the Partezon, that bad old Sioux, remember him?”

  “Never met him, which is why I’m now alive,” Willy replied.

  “Why, that other fellow is George Catlin—I’d swear it is,” Kit cried, excited. “He’s that fellow paints pictures of Indians. I was with him on the Yellowstone.”

  “Is the man a fool?” Willy inquired. “Who would want a picture of an Indian when there’s real Indians all over the place, waiting to scalp anybody they can catch?”

  “Why, easterners—the Indians there are rather tamed down,” George explained, when he and Willy had been introduced. “Most easterners today have never seen a fighting Indian, and never will.”

  “I’m surprised life is so boresome that they have to look at pictures,” Willy said, even as he edged closer to the painter’s easel, where a fine rendering of a buffalo was nearly completed. The only thing wrong with the rendering of the buffalo that Willy could see was that the animal was yellow.

  “Yes, yellow,” George admitted. “It’s a freak of coloration, I suppose. Greasy is mighty disappointed. He says the animal was born white but turned yellow before he could locate it.”

  Greasy Lake stood on the rim of the canyon, chanting—he looked wildly distraught.

  “Why would a buffalo turn yellow?” Kit wondered.

  “I don’t know, but it’s the only yellow buffalo I’ve ever seen—I thought I ought to paint it,” the painter said.

  43

  . . . the ignorant Kiowas merely made rude sounds.

  THE TRIP TO THE CANYON had been arduous, the weather bitter. Along the way they had been harassed by a band of surly Kiowas, who were not much impressed by Greasy Lake’s credentials as a prophet. What they were impressed by was the white horse he rode. When Greasy explained to them that the white horse had been given him by the Partezon, the greatest of all Sioux warriors, the ignorant Kiowas merely made rude sounds. They had never heard of any Partezon. George Catlin saved the day by showing them portraits of some of the Kiowa chiefs he had painted at the great convening. The paintings startled the Kiowas very much—the fact that a white man was carrying around likenesses of their own chiefs disturbed them. Here was magic—possibly negative magic. They decided they had better go find Wolf Eater and tell him about this magic. Wolf Eater had refused to go to the great convening. He did not like talking to white soldiers.

  “I’d be happy to paint Chief Wolf Eater, if he’d care to pay us a visit,” George told the Kiowas, before they left.

  Greasy Lake chided George for this invitation. Wolf Eater’s only use for white men was to kill them. Inviting him to visit had not been wise.

  George took these strictures with a grain of salt. Most savages he had painted in his years in the West had been volatile fellows who posed some danger—and yet usually their vanity had been his protection. Somehow the ceremonial nature of the sitting had exerted a taming quality that George had begun to find a little boring. The closest he had come to recording native life at its bloodiest were not portraits at all but sketches he had done of the Mandan torture ceremonies, and a few grisly buffalo hunts. In the torture ceremonies young men were suspended from the lodge poles by cords strung through their pectorals. There, in the faces of the old men watching, he felt he had seen real savagery, rituals absolutely pagan in their character. He considered these sketches the crown of his dangerous work, and yet he could not neglect the portraits, because it was the portraits that gained him entry to the torture lodges.

  The closer the two men got to the canyon where the white buffalo was supposed to be, the more convinced Greasy Lake became that the old woman had been telling them lies. Old people left to die sometimes sought final amusements, such as sending prophets off on wild-goose chases.

  Still, seeing the great canyon would be worth it, even if no white buffalo appeared. Great canyons were important places in themselves—it was from the floor of these canyons that the People had emerged from the earth on the back of the Great Turtle that had brought them into the light.

  The first shock came when the two of them ran into a small band of Kickapoos who informed them that they themselves, not the Comanches, had found the white buffalo when it was just a calf. Naturally they were overjoyed to see the white buffalo, a great gift from the spirits. They soon caught it and tamed it. They band was very small—only two of their women could still bear children, and yet once the white buffalo came, three other women immediately got with child, and the older men made several successful hunts. It seemed the band might be saved.

  But then a bad thing happened, a thing that caused the whole band to lose much of its optimism. The white buffalo grew into a yearling, and when it did, not only did it not stay white, but it turned yellow, the unluckiest color of all. The whiteness of the buffalo calf had only been a temporary miracle, one that allowed the little band to increase by a few promising babies. They assumed the yellow buffalo was still changing and would soon become
a normal brown buffalo.

  But the yellow buffalo did not become normal and brown. It remained yellow. The little band had no prophet, no wise man. They had once had a prophet but he developed a disease of the bowels and quickly wasted away.

  The yellow buffalo, as tame as a dog, stayed with the band. Some argued for killing it but others insisted that would be a mistake. Occasionally the yellow buffalo ran off with some wild buffalo for a few days, but it always came back.

  George Catlin and Greasy Lake happened on the yellow buffalo before they met the Kickapoos who were its keepers. George considered it a fine curiosity, a freak of coloration that sometimes occurred in this or that species. He knew it was something that would interest his rival, Mr. Audubon, who was preparing a book on the quadrupeds of America. George felt happy to have stolen a march on his rival—he did several sketches and would have liked to continue to do them had Greasy Lake not become so upset. It was not easy to make out exactly why the prophet was so disturbed—he seemed to see the yellow buffalo as somehow connected to doom.

  At first George thought he was merely predicting their doom, but then it emerged that the doom he had in mind was considerably more general.

  The minute he saw the yellow buffalo Greasy Lake began to tremble—the oldest stories, the ones he himself was supposed to guard, all insisted that the coming of a yellow beast meant that the Ending was near. Seeing the buffalo was thus a cruel disappointment. Out of a white beast might have grown new hope; but from a yellow beast they could expect only decay and sickness, a trailing off, a diminishment into ever smaller and more hopeless bands, such as the little band of Kickapoos they soon met.

  Seeing the yellow buffalo made Greasy Lake realize that the old Partezon had been right: the time of the People was coming to an end. Soon the women of the tribes would become barren, the warriors would lose their strength of arm, the old men would begin to forget the stories; then the game would gain mastery over the hunters, the ducks and geese would learn to elude snares, and even rabbits would disappear. Soon, in a few more generations, there would be no People at all; the circle would be broken, the stories would end.

  George Catlin was prepared to admit that the yellow buffalo was ugly—but then, normal brown buffalo were not beautiful, and not smart, either. In the north the tribes would sometimes get them running so mindlessly that they would pour off cliffs, killing and crippling themselves in a mass of bellowing froth as the Indians waded in, hacking and stabbing until the last beast was dead, by which time the hackers would be covered with blood.

  This buffalo, though a rather disgusting color, was at least a novelty. George could not understand why Greasy Lake was taking on so.

  “I can’t make out what’s upset you so,” George confessed. “I know you were counting on finding a white buffalo but I’m afraid that ugly fellow is as close as we’re going to come. It’s just a yellow animal with a rather peculiar coloration—it’s not the end of the world.”

  Greasy Lake knew that his friend George meant well. George was kind, if not terribly bright.

  He failed to understand that for the People the arrival of the yellow buffalo meant exactly that: the End of the world.

  44

  . . . a flock of wild turkeys, bursting from their roost . . .

  IT WAS A FLOCK OF WILD TURKEYS, bursting from their roost, that caused the mare to stumble. Jim had been easing down a steep shaley ridge, his eye on two buffalo grazing in the flats about a mile away. He was being careful because the wind was acting as if it might shift. The company was almost out of meat, and here was meat, and Jim wanted to make sure of it. The capricious wind was not helping. He didn’t see the turkeys and neither did the mare, who shied violently when the gobblers rose above them, their big wings almost brushing Jim’s head.

  The mare stumbled and went to her knees—Jim, trying to protect his rifle, attempted to jump clear but didn’t quite make it. He hit with his left arm twisted under him—he suspected the arm was broken but didn’t mean to allow the injury to distract him from what he had come to do, which was make meat. The buffalo were still placidly grazing. Jim dropped them both; butchering them with only one useful hand proved awkward in the extreme, but he took enough to feed the company—once his arm was set and splinted he could return for the rest of the meat. He felt sure that Father Geoff could set the arm—he could be back for the rest of the meat before the wolves and coyotes did too much damage.

  The accident had occurred not much past dawn, which was why the turkeys were still on their roost. It was a chill, sleety day. Jim pushed the mare—he wanted to get his arm set and return to the two carcasses as soon as possible.

  He had been pushing the company eastward as fast as he could—he still hoped to strike an immigrant train and perhaps join forces. But he was in unknown country—the first necessity was to keep the company fed. None of them had managed to put the recent deaths behind them—they were too low-spirited to travel as briskly as Jim would have liked them to. Indian sign was everywhere; Jim considered it almost a miracle that they hadn’t been harassed.

  Jim thought every day of Monty, so young and so innocent. Bad as the cholera had been, Jim knew that worse could happen. If they got through the Comanche country with no more losses they could consider themselves lucky.

  It irked him that he had broken his arm because of turkeys, but then it was often the absurd and unexpected that led to injury.

  When he returned to camp, Tasmin took the injury harder than anyone. A belief in Jim’s invulner-ability was one of the convictions that kept her going. By the time he reached camp with the buffalo meat he seemed feverish to her. Piet and Father Geoffrin quickly set the arm and made an excellent splint. Tasmin sat with the twins. She knew rationally that a broken arm was not a serious injury, but she still couldn’t help worrying.

  “It was just some gobble birds scared his horse,” Petal reminded her, giving her mother a friendly pat on the knee.

  Tasmin had just recovered a measure of calm when she saw Jim saddling the mare. She rushed over and felt his forehead. He still felt feverish.

  “Now where are you going?” she asked. “Back to get the rest of that buffalo meat,” Jim told her. “We can’t afford to lose it—we’ll soon be starving, if we do.”

  Tasmin knew he was right, and yet she had become increasingly anxious whenever Jim was out of camp for very long.

  “I just worry so,” she admitted. “I wish there was someone else who could go.”

  “There ain’t,” he said, speaking tolerantly. He himself was anxious now, on his hunts. The country was too dangerous—too much bad could happen, and quickly. Shy Petey worried Jim a lot. It wouldn’t take much, by way of an illness, to carry Petey off. And yet he had to go: there was no one else capable of bringing in the meat. Corporal Dominguin seemed competent but he and the other Mexicans needed to stand guard.

  “It’s not that far—the meat,” he told Tasmin.

  “I’ll be back quick, if I can keep from breaking my other arm.”

  He meant it as a joke, but a shadow of worry crossed her countenance. After what had happened on the Rio Grande nothing seemed like a joke anymore.

  “Jimmy, you’re feverish,” she told him.

  Jim knew it was true. He had always been prone to fevers. When they were high he sometimes hallucinated, even dreamed that he was back with Preacher Cockerell. He knew he was a little fever-ish—and yet the fact that he might sicken made the recovery of the meat even more vital. He was taking a packhorse. He meant to bring back enough meat to keep them all fed if he was ill for a day or two.

  Tasmin suddenly flung herself into his arms. She hated feeling so cowardly but since the deaths she couldn’t help it. She felt scared for her children most of the time.

  “This is an endless nightmare now,” she told Jim. “We’re nowhere—there’s no safety. The Indians could come anytime. A blizzard could come. Just hurry—please hurry—we’ve a better chance when you’re here.”

 
; “The sooner I leave, the sooner I’ll get back,” Jim told her. He could find no adequate words of reassurance. Everything Tasmin had just said was true. And yet they had to have the meat. All he could do was promise to be as quick as possible.

  When he left, Tasmin sat down by Father Geoff. The priest put his arm around her.

  “He’s always come back,” Father Geoff reminded her. “He wants to fill our larder—nothing wrong with that. I wish you wouldn’t worry so much. It’s making you thin.”

  “Shut up, Geoff. Just shut up,” Tasmin said.

  45

  . . . everyone noticed that she was subdued.

  I WAS NEVER Monty’s only mother,” Tasmin reminded Mary. “He always had two. When I was too weak from my labor even to lift him, Little Onion held him to my breast. She helped him take his first milk, and she closed his eyes when he died. Not a day in his short life but that she loved him.”

  They had been discussing Little Onion’s changed demeanor. Though still as efficient as ever, quickly attending to the necessary chores, she was no longer cheerful. Her liveliness had brightened camp life on many a lowering day— now everyone noticed that she was subdued. Even Lord Berrybender noticed. Cook was very troubled. Since the death of Eliza, Cook had begun to feel old. There were mornings when she felt herself failing; always, from the moment of waking, Cook had been resolutely on the move; yet now she wasn’t. There were mornings when she could hardly force herself to throw off her blankets. Little Onion had always taken a keen interest in cooking—little by little Cook was teaching the girl her skills. It was a relief to think that there would be someone competent to feed the company if she herself fell by, as she put it. Yet now Little Onion ate little and had lost interest in the preparation of food, though she still kept an eye out for edibles as they traveled.