Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  “Then be off with you,” Aubuchon said. He shook each of their hands and they thanked him and they went off to spend their morning stretching, pegging, and poisoning hides.

  ANOTHER DAY’S KILLING DONE, the work of flaying and butchering had begun. On the hot wind was the stench of decaying animal matter and the smell of new blood. Each man wore on his belt a flat leather scabbard with a ripping knife, butcher’s steel, and broad-­pointed skinning knife. The Gough brothers, the Miller brothers, Findley, and O’Malley—their wrists and forearms were as coils unsprung.

  On this day Elizabeth went out with the skinners while Aubuchon and the boys would collect the meat and the green hides and make as many trips as possible to bring them in.

  After the Gough brothers finished taking a hide she glanced at her watch to set the start time in her mind for the next one. She noted that when they moved they carried a butcher’s steel in one hand and knife in the other, swiping the steel as they walked, to sharpen it. They worked quickly while the carcass was still warm, the easier to take the hide. Ike grasped a foreleg and heaved it over, levering the buffalo onto its back. With his ripping knife Abel made a slit from under the jaw the length of the belly to the root of the tail. Ike pulled hard when Abel made his cut and the belly hide made a ripping sound as it opened to the ghostly whiteness beneath. While Ike made a slit around each ankle and cut down from the front hooves over the knee to the brisket, Abel made the same slits and cut down the hind legs to the tail.

  With each pause their steels came out and they vigorously swiped their blades two, three times to sharpen them. They cut the hide away from the rib cage, rocking the animal back forth until they were ready to roll it over and drag the hide from beneath. Then they folded in the legs and rolled it up head to tail into a bundle three feet wide. Ike tied a knot in their string and they moved on to their next one, their blades going snick, snick, snick on the steels.

  The animal they left behind was much smaller.

  Elizabeth glanced at her watch, fifteen minutes. She timed them again and again and they consistently took hides in fifteen to twenty minutes. She did the arithmetic. In a twelve-­hour day, that would be thirty-­five to fifty hides. Say at forty hides, that would be five dollars a day apiece for the brothers and for her, less their pay, there would be a hundred and ten dollars a day just from these two skinners. Could it possibly be? She took a notebook from her pocket and did the multiplying on paper. It was.

  Aubuchon and the butcher boys came in and began to open up the carcasses. The meat was cut into long, narrow strips and hung in festoons upon racks, where they dried in the sun. Chunks and shreds were taken, and the intestines collected, and these would become sausage. Some took the hump ribs, while others took hearts and livers—Aubuchon called them the petits morceaux—and wrapped them in canvas. Bones were to be chopped to pieces with axes for the marrow to enrich Aubuchon’s soups, to butter their bread, to add to the sausages. Aubuchon told the boys when you eat the animal you eat its life. You eat whatever it ate. You eat its blood and muscle. You eat its breath. You eat the grass and the earth. You eat the water.

  She moved up the wind to time the Miller brothers and then Findley and O’Malley. They were not as fast as the Gough brothers, but they were not that far behind. Maybe a bonus for bringing in the most hides would cause them to improve.

  The penman and his grandson worked side by side and unfortunately they were as if weak and lost. The grandson’s glasses kept slipping down his nose with his sweat and each time he set them right he managed to daub more grease and blood on his face until finally he took off his spectacles and folded them into a pocket sewed inside his shirt.

  She would have to take them off piecework and offer to pay them a wage. They could butcher and make sausage, tend the smokehouse, cook food for the men in the field, ferry hides and meat into camp.

  As the day went on, dark masses of clouds arose on the horizon. The men cursed the animal as they ripped it. They cursed the animal as they skinned it. Hats were pushed far on the backs of heads. Faces shined with grease and blood. In turns they stood and stretched their backs. They wiped their faces with their forearms. They uncurled their stiffened fingers and then grasped their knives again.

  When Michael returned from the next valley he turned the glasses and watched the skinners and butchers on the plain. There was an oppressive feeling in the atmosphere, the threat of weather. They saw it too. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  They were warned, but they would not relent and they labored on as if factory men. He watched them until a little before sundown and then bent his way homeward, returning to the camp on Wolf Creek. From the bluff he could see the glint of the water; the white peaks of the Sibley tents; the cowshed, smokehouse, brining pits, and cookhouse; the chickens scoured in the yard; and hundreds and hundreds of hides pegged into the banking along the creek and sprinkled with arsenic water. Hundreds were in the presses and hundreds more were already bundled.

  He settled himself back into the saddle and slowed the mare to a walk off the bluff. It was now a camp of buffalo hunters and the flesh smell of the abattoir was in the air.

  Aubuchon was back at his cook fire. John was raking the coals. He’d found another large soft-­shell turtle, of a hundred pounds or better, basking on the bank of the creek. He’d roast it in the shell and tonight there would be soup.

  Michael went down to the creek with a bucket and a bar of soap, Khyber following behind. He drew water and washed his hands and arms and the grime on his face. Before stooping to drink, he looked around. He scanned the high bank. Then he took Khyber into the water and washed her and scraped her dry and curried her and brushed her.

  At his tent he dragged his cot from the confines of his tent and into the cool evening and lay down. His was the long habit of wakefulness at night, but tonight he was all played out and would sleep. If anyone should come during the night, Khyber would know and give him warning.

  He slipped into his moccasins. Charlie came racing by with new belts of ammunition.

  “Where are you going so fast?” he called to the boy.

  “Aubuchon,” he said.

  “Who gave you that black eye?”

  “I fell down.”

  “Was it one of the Gough boys?”

  “I told you I fell down.”

  “Repeating a lie does not make it true.”

  “Leave it alone,” the boy said, and took up his run again.

  He lay down and Sabi climbed in beside him, but he could not sleep. He felt in the air the beginnings of something to come. He read awhile and then fell asleep, his head pillowed on the book. When Aubuchon called for dinner he opened his eyes to see Elizabeth looking down at him. There was twilight on the bluff, but it was almost dark beneath it and the skinners were not back yet.

  “Would you join us for dinner?” she asked.

  On the table was a white tablecloth and brass candlesticks. There was a small fire and there was every delicacy: tongues, brains, marrowbones, kidneys, venison, as well as turtle soup. Fifteen days since they’d begun the harvest and 1,650 buffalo were slaughtered for their hides and meat.

  “God was good to us today,” the reverend doctor said, holding aloft a glass of wine.

  “First rate, indeed,” Elizabeth said.

  She was still doing calculations in her mind, subtly moving her fingers the way some people do when they listen to music. The numbers were very good, near five thousand dollars less four hundred for the skinners, and they hadn’t been on the buffalo but two weeks and that tally did not include the butchering at three cents a pound, tongues at six dollars a dozen. A hundred pounds sold to the eastern markets was worth three dollars and would come to thousands. If only she had more men, economic autonomy would be hers. She felt inside herself the powerfully surging life of the times.

  “How goes the writing?” Elizabeth said.

  “You are writing?” Michael said.

  The reverend doctor explained he was writi
ng two books, one useful to the settler and the investor when the country opened up and a second one he called a new divinity.

  After soup and other delicacies, they ate heartily of the fat steaks and marrow bones. Then the men scraped the bowls of their pipes and filled them with tobacco. Elizabeth asked that Michael make her a cigarette. They lit their pipes, and Elizabeth her cigarette, and they sat back against the night waiting for the skinners, warm, drowsy, and tranquil.

  The blue smoke curled lazily, flattened, and floated east. Michael opened and closed his mouth to get his hearing back. Elizabeth looked up at the stars revealed in the waning twilight. The moon was low to the horizon and in the air overhead was the wheep sound of bat wings breaking the night silence.

  Charlie came running and then Aubuchon and John. Charlie was breathless, pointing down the creek into the darkness. Michael said something, but Elizabeth could not hear what it was.

  “There’s something moving,” he repeated. He stood so quickly he knocked over his chair.

  “Who are those fellows?” Elizabeth asked of the shadowy figures.

  “Don’t stand there,” Michael called out, his hand on the grips of his revolver. “Come into the light where I can see you.”

  They came as if from the dusky twilight. They were half-­starved, half-­naked wretches. There were four of them. One man wore cast-­off military from the last war. Another wore a coarse blanket tied with string at the neck and holes cut through for his arms. They carried stout wooden shafts with spear points fashioned from kitchen knives and scythe blades.

  “You come in now where I can see you,” Michael shouted. “Step into the light.”

  They were led by a tall, slender man not yet in the middle of age. His face indicated a refined and sensitive nature. His forehead was high and narrow. His mouth was large and against his black skin his teeth were white and straight. When he spoke his voice was quiet and impressive. He alone wore a pair of heavy cowhide shoes.

  “Who are you?” Elizabeth said.

  “I am Pastor Starling,” he said, “and these men are Elijah, Gideon, and Henry Ward Beecher, members of my congregation.”

  Elizabeth stepped forward. She took Pastor Starling’s hand into her own and said she was happy to meet him. She turned to Aubuchon and asked him to fill the boiler again and make another pot of coffee, and if there was pie, could they have some of that also?

  PASTOR STARLING HAD BROUGHT his people four hundred miles from the piney woods of Arkansas, bound for Kansas to have a better future. They’d come through the Indian Territory. They came through an impenetrable belt of forest, matted and tangled with undergrowth, shinneries of scrub oak, blackjack, post oak, sumac, bracken, and fern.

  In the days after the war, being black and free was a crime. Pastor Starling told them how he was preaching on a Sunday when men wearing masks interrupted his service. The masked men tied him to a tree and severely whipped him before his gathered congregation. They salted and brined his wounds and he was charged with sedition and incitement to riot. To pay the cost of incarceration, he was transported deep into the pine forest to work the isolated turpentine farms with other men, women, and children. Each man was responsible for boxing ten thousand trees spread over a hundred acres. They worked twelve-­hour days and their sentences seemed never to expire.

  One day they awoke to find that the overseer had been killed in his sleep. Dense smoke poured from the fire heating the furnace, but the stiller and his wife were nowhere to be found. Neither were the men who guarded them. In the warden’s house was a safe with the door swung open and paper strewn across the floor, and in the huge open cauldron they found the stiller and his wife floating on top.

  Escaping was punishable by death, but so too were thievery and murder. So they filled their socks with all the pepper they could find to keep off the bloodhounds and the patrollers. They used saltpeter and turpentine. They dragged the skins of whatever animal they shot or trapped to cover their scent and they all traveled west, every man, woman, and child. As their oxen withered and failed they were butchered for food until they were down to one with a dislocated hip. It was here they’d come to a halt.

  The lid on the boiler rattled with the heat and Aubuchon began pouring cups of coffee. The wolfer came in from the shadows, his rifle in the crook of his arm.

  “Where are the rest of your people?” Elizabeth said.

  “Our people are back a ways,” Pastor Starling said, with a nod to the east.

  “How many more are there?” Michael said.

  “Some of our men and your men lay side by side with their bayonets through one another,” Elijah said to Michael.

  The wolfer stepped forward and explained to Elizabeth that Starling’s people had been scavenging meat. Some were made sick by the strychnine set out for the wolves and some of them died.

  “Hunger will break through a stone wall,” Henry Ward Beecher said. The man was bent and wiry and looked nearly a hundred years old.

  “Will you work?” Elizabeth said.

  “We would,” Pastor Starling said. If it ever crossed his mind that his people were there first and by the hunter’s code owned the hunting rights, he did not say.

  “I only want men whose hearts are in the work. I hire all my labor at a good rate.”

  After a moment’s pause, Pastor Starling inquired how much she was offering and she wondered how many times in his life he’d had the opportunity to ask. She told him the same as the other men, plus all the meat they could eat as well as rations of corn, coffee, flour, and sugar, which she would provide.

  “For your kitchen,” she said, “there will be hot biscuit and corn cake.”

  “We will hold up to your opinion,” Henry Ward Beecher said.

  “White men sit pretty heavy, they do,” Elijah said.

  “White men are lazy,” Henry Ward Beecher said with a mischievous smile, and they all laughed at this.

  “I think it good wages,” Elijah said, though he’d never received a wage in his life.

  “It’s a very good wage,” the reverend doctor said, announcing his name and stepping in to shake hands with Pastor Starling and the others. “I can vouch for it, as well as the honesty of this woman.”

  “You are?” Pastor Starling said.

  “Methodist.”

  “Yes, I am too,” Pastor Starling said. He stepped forward and said to the reverend doctor something private that made him laugh.

  Pastor Starling stepped back and turned to Elizabeth.

  “The last days we have shared a pot of mush and it is now gone. Might we receive in advance a bushel of corn to parch?”

  “Of course you can,” she said. “There is a hand mill bolted to the side of the provision wagon in case you want to grind any of it. There’s meat and beans just baked. Do you have sufficient blankets?”

  “We do,” Pastor Starling said.

  Elizabeth turned to Aubuchon and said, “Please dig up the bean pot from its bake hole and prepare it for transport. Send with them sausage and a roast and draw five blankets for their use.”

  The men and boys came off the bluff, their long day in the field over. The wagons were filled with the last of the hides they’d stretch and peg in the morning. They were tired and hungry and needed to tend to the animals. They carried their bloody knotted strings and wanted their tallies recorded in Mrs. Coughlin’s ledger book so they could add today to their total and dream how they’d spend it.

  Their voices could be heard over the creak of the wheels and the tramp of the oxen.

  “We cut a big hog in the ass today,” Ike Gough was saying.

  “Another day, another dollar,” Story Miller said.

  Michael told Charlie to run and tell them to wait before they came down the path. Pastor Starling took out a large silver hunting watch.

  “And what time would you expect us?” Pastor Starling said.

  “Do you work on the Sabbath? I believe it is the Sabbath tomorrow,” Elizabeth said.

 
Pastor Starling turned to the other men and they conferred for a moment before he turned back to Elizabeth.

  “We do if there is work,” Pastor Starling said.

  “The men usually gather to go out late morning. Does that suit you?”

  “Yes, it suits us just fine.”

  “I will loan you a wagon and a team and as many sets of knives as you can make use of. You will bring me your count every day.”

  “I will.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, and this was followed by another round of handshakes. As they were to depart, Pastor Starling turned to Elizabeth one last time.

  “When the time comes, you will pay us what we are owed?” he said.

  “There will be profit for you and for myself.”

  “You have your own camp?” Michael said.

  “We wish to remain separate.”

  “Then I will trust you to keep to yourselves.”

  The men could be held back no longer. They were coming down the path. They were tired and blood-­sotted. The thighs of their trousers shined with grease in the pattern of wiping hands and knives. Michael went up the path to meet them.

  “That’s a good lot of niggers,” Ike Gough said when Michael stopped them.

  “What’s the confabulation?” Story Miller asked, jutting out his chin.

  “New men hired,” Michael said, and the news shocked them.

  “We worked our guts out today and for what?” Temple Miller said.

  “Your own hook,” Michael said, and he kept them there until Elizabeth finished her business with Pastor Starling and his people.

  “There ain’t enough hides to go around,” Story Miller said.

  “I believe the Negroes will do as much work as it is possible for any white man to do, Mr. Gough. It is your choice whether to stay or leave. Either way, I will be going forward with these new men,” Elizabeth said.

  “We will work with them, but we will not eat with them,” Findley said.

  “They prefer to keep their own camp,” Elizabeth said.

  “How are we to sleep with those savages at our backs?” O’Malley asked, turning to Findley.