by Win Blevins
He said thanks, in his mind, to his father, who taught him to shoot and left him this good Pennsylvania rifle. He rested The Celt against a bump on the trunk of a cottonwood, held his sights steady on the brisket of the biggest bull, a brute with one horn. When he was sure, he fired.
One Horn ran off. So did the others. Damn.
He ran after One Horn. All three were headed directly into the wind, which would take them across the creek upstream….
He saw that the beast’s gait was faltering. One Horn stopped. The other two rumbled on. Then Sam’s bull stumbled awkwardly after them.
He had to take the chance. Reloading as he moved, he ran after One Horn.
The bull slowed down and stopped. Its sides were heaving. When it started to walk again, Sam fired.
The brute sank to one knee, rose, teetered to within a dozen steps of the trees, pitched forward, and flopped onto one side.
Relieved, Sam ran up to him and cut his throat open, letting the life blood spill in the dust.
The light was fading fast. He needed to get this bull butchered out, and needed a fire. He decided the fire was the more urgent need—keep the wolves and prairie wolves off the meat. The butchering could mostly wait.
He gathered wood and built a small fire near the bull. Then he opened him up and got the innards out—that would keep the meat better.
By the light of the fire he cut off some hump ribs and roasted them on his wiping stick over the flames. That would be enough butchering for tonight, when he couldn’t see. He might need to stay awake and keep the fire going.
When he woke up, the fire was dead, probably even cold, from the look of it. No wolves or coyotes. He sat up. Something wasn’t right.
Then he saw something queer. Dawn was breaking in the east, and there was another dawn, very red, in the northwest.
He tried to take this in. He breathed deep. The wind was warm and stifling.
What’s wrong?
He heard a distant rumbling, like thunder. But the sky was cloudless. He stared to the northwest.
He coughed. Now he realized. The air was acrid with smoke.
Fire. It was a fire to the northwest. The glow was actually flame, flame from the far northwestern to the far northern horizon.
He checked the wind. Northwest to southeast, straight toward him.
Fear spasmed in Sam’s gullet.
He’d heard about prairie fires, the way they raged through the dry grasses, driving the game in front of them, outrunning everything, laying waste to miles and miles of grassland. But he’d never seen one. He quaked at the thought.
On the northwestern horizon the entire earth was lit with flame, fed by the brown, midsummer stems and blades. Half the heavens, it seemed, danced in the lurid light.
He looked around. By the half moon he could see buttes to climb, above the flaming grasses, but none was within running distance, not even close.
The river. He thought about its arc. It was four or five miles away. He saw himself running among the coyotes, the wolves, the rabbits, the deer, a bear, perhaps even last night’s two bulls, running, running ahead of the scorching breath toward the delicious, hide-saving wet and cool of the river.
He thought of the speed of the wind-whipped inferno. He peered into the darkness and saw only shadows. The animals must be making their tortured sprints down wind, dying out there, run down from behind.
I’d never outrun the flames.
Here comes my death.
This wild card, this completely unexpected …
But, said his father’s voice, death is never unexpected …
The creek. I’ll lie down in the creek.
He grabbed The Celt and jammed it under the buffalo carcass, in case he survived. He stumbled through the dark grove and plowed into the water. Damn! Ankle deep. He hadn’t paid any attention when he camped last night—then the depth meant nothing to him.
He splashed up and down the stream, looking for a hole that would be deep enough. He couldn’t find one. Ankle deep everywhere, or less, as far as he could tell in the half light.
He tripped and fell to his knees. That gave him an idea. He rolled in the water and got everything he could wet, deer hide and human hide.
He gazed to the northwest, trembling now. Not much time.
No, he made up his mind. He would find the deepest spot nearby in this creek and dip himself well down into it.
I will survive. I will survive. Yes, by God, I will.
He made that a solemn promise to himself.
The fire struck the creek a couple of hundred yards upstream, hitting like a clap of a huge hand. The tops of the trees erupted into flame.
The blaze catapulted toward him, leaping high in pyromaniac ecstasy. It was as if the world as he knew it was melting away, being transformed into a demonic pyre before his eyes. Geysers of fire gushed upward, and streams of flaming embers roared up to the skies. Sparks fled downwind, swirling spindrift. Torches of branches burst off trunks and raged to the ground. Strange flowers of bonfire bloomed, burst to full flower, and died.
He shook his head hard—hell, I’m getting mesmerized. He looked around desperately. My God!—nothing, nothing, nothing deep enough to save a human hide.
Done for.
He heard a mewling behind him, toward the dead bull.
Pay it no mind!
Mewling and yipping. Something was scratching at the carcass.
A coyote pup, for God’s sake. Mother was probably gone downwind, trying to save herself. Pup fussing around the belly slit, like trying to get in with …
Wild hope shot up in him. Sweet Jesus. Maybe …
No, I’ll be roasted whole!
Hell, it’s my only chance!
He sprinted to the carcass. He slipped on the innards he’d pulled out and fell onto one knee and elbow, landing on the pup’s paw. The pup squealed and started to run. He seized it. He jerked open the great slit he cut in the belly and looked into the maw.
He hesitated.
He felt for The Celt under the carcass and left the rifle there. He felt the wet hair of the upward side of his head suddenly get hot, damn hot. He grabbed it, burned his hand, and dived inside.
He realized he had the pup clutched to his breast, like he was going to nurse it. The pup pissed on him. He laughed wildly. Both of them crouched inside a dead buffalo, Sam in fetal position, cowering for safety.
He came into a darkness…. it was strange beyond strange. Beyond words, beyond thoughts.
Then he realized—my knees are burning. They were outside.
He rolled over, clutching the pup. The poor thing whimpered.
In seconds his back and butt were scorching, or maybe boiling.
He rolled over again.
His knees burned.
He screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed. The pup yipped, and the yips meant terror.
Soon he wondered if he was screaming at the pain or at the darkness inside the bull. He had always heard that men should not descend to beasthood—We’re expected to be something more.
I am a beast. I am a coyote. I am a buffalo.
I am become bestial, baptized in blood and slime and goo and piss.
I will rise out of this carcass reborn as a man-buffalo.
He kept very, very still. Maybe death would tiptoe by.
I am reborn. I am a man-buffalo.
Chapter Sixteen
After a while he noticed that, though his knees hurt terribly, the pain wasn’t new. It was old. The pup hovered quietly, quivering.
He poked a hand between the great flaps of buffalo hide.
The tops of the trees were burning, but not raging.
He let the flaps close, retreated back into his buffalo-belly cave, and closed his eyes.
After a few minutes he stuck his hand out again.
The tops of the trees were smoldering. Branches on the ground were turning to embers. The fire had eaten and raged on.
He retreated a final time.
How would I live if I was a buffalo? Breathe, drink, eat, piss, shit, look for food, keep clear of enemies, mount the cows, play with the calves.
What would I be?
Just what I am.
He petted the pup. He had the impression it was asleep.
He didn’t know, later, whether they had stayed in the bloody, mucous-smeared carcass for five minutes or five hours. When they came out, the ground was still alive with burning fragments. His knees felt scalded. His back felt scalded. His throat raged at him, he supposed from smoke going down. He limped to the creek, occasionally jumping off a hotfoot he gave himself, knelt in the water, and rolled in on his back. He stroked water onto the pup’s fur. Holding the pup out of the creek, he rolled onto his face and chest, then flipped again onto his back. The pup fell into the stream, rolled, and lapped.
The two of them, creek and pup, taught Sam the meaning of the word blessing.
The sun rose on a vast desolation, burned black and ashen gray, with a thousand plumes of smoke where the earth still smoldered.
He inspected The Celt. The barrel, ramrod, lock, and trigger were fine. The butt was scorched. In fact, the brass plate was warped from the heat. Then he noticed. The plate was partly melted and discolored. Something had burned white hot right next to it, which was why his knees hurt so much. The engraved letters “Celt” were smeared, but the Celtic love knots were intact.
Sam walked out across the land carrying the pup, drawn into fascination. Everywhere scorched carcasses were strewn, rabbits, wolves, deer, and a hundred more commonplace species. Sam felt like the crows, when they came to feast, would make the landscape less lonely.
His wounds were bothersome but not terrible. Huge blisters on his knees and shins, his lower back and butt. If they didn’t putrefy, he’d be fine.
He walked back to the grove, which was no camp, and set the pup down. “What am I going to do with you?” The pup was a boy, he saw. It went to the carcass and began to tear off small bits of meat with its tiny teeth. Sam smiled. Little pup was probably sucking just a moon ago.
He knelt down at the buffalo and set to work listlessly on the butchering. For once he didn’t even give a damn about eating. It didn’t seem right. This bull saved their lives. Still, meat was meat. That’s how the pup saw it.
Sam went to work harder. He had only eight balls left, and now two mouths to feed.
The fat between hide and flesh had been softened, but the meat itself was unchanged. He cut the thick fat into small pieces and fed them to the pup by hand. All day he butchered, and fed, and then began to eat, and butchered.
That evening he said to the pup, “What are you going to do? I’m not your mother.” He looked around at the vast, ashen prairie. The mother was probably a smoldering carcass out there, no longer a mother, or even a creature, just a thing.
He fed the pup by hand, and they drank from the creek side by side.
“You’re my friend. I’m not gonna let you go.” Somehow, in fact, he felt brotherly toward the pup. He thought of Coy, the little brother he knew too briefly.
The next morning everything had quit smoking. He broke blackened branches off trees that had once been alive, built a fire, and set to drying the buffalo meat. He probably spent five days at a job that needed three. He dawdled with the pup. He chatted with it. Told it stories about when he was a kid, stories he’d never been able to tell Owen. The pup acted attached to him, like it had lost one parent and found another. He wondered if he could train it. He supposed so. If not, it would be a nuisance, maybe even a hazard. But he wanted the pup. Except for the pup, he found it hard to care about anything. He looked around at the world, nothing green, everything death-blasted, and he felt limp, lethargic. Except for the pup. He named it Coy. Finally, on a morning no different from any other, he shouldered his possible sack, full of all the jerked meat he could carry. He whistled at Coy.
Coy cocked his head at the odd sound.
Sam set out, and Coy trotted along.
In two days he saw a big river flowing in from the south. “That looks good,” he told Coy, “real good.” Diah Smith had said that if this was the Platte, the maps of Captain Long showed that its south fork flowed in, just as big as the north fork. His memory was that Diah sketched in the south fork about halfway between the mountains and the Missouri. Though he couldn’t read the names of the rivers and mountains, Sam remembered well enough where those squiggly lines went. Still, he didn’t mention any of this to Coy. No sense getting the pup’s hopes up. Nor did he want to begin to think, for the sake of his own peace of mind, that they might be halfway to civilization.
At the forks he took two days of rest. He spent the time training Coy, using slivers of jerked meat. They were partners now. Coy hadn’t shown the least inclination to wander, but walked within a few steps of Sam all day, and slept next to him at night, sometimes even cuddled against him.
First Sam taught the pup to sit, which was simple enough. Except that the command to sit down was “charge.” Figured he’d have some fun with other fellows. “Now if he sits when I say ‘charge,’” he would tell them, “how do you know, if I say ‘roll over,’ he won’t attack?” They would get a chuckle out of that one.
Then he taught Coy to stand on his hind legs and take meat from between Sam’s fingers. Then to jump a little and get the meat. Then to jump high and get it.
This wasn’t hard. He’d watched his dad train a dog but had never done it himself. Turned out a coyote learned the same way as a dog.
The last trick, for now, was to jump really high and snatch a stick from Sam’s hand. Then he gave Coy some meat and a lot of head-rubbing as a reward.
Finally they started downstream. They were running short on meat. Sam thought, Coy and I could roam around forever if I had enough lead balls, but I don’t.
The Indian made his own weapons, didn’t need a manufacturing system to get food. The white man did. In a way, that need was Sam’s last tie to civilization.
They walked and walked. They talked as they went. They played, and kicked up their heels. Coy was good company.
They had made a sort of camp on a sandy beach along the river and were playing fetch when the four Indians stood up in the bushes.
Sam stopped, fetch stick cocked to throw.
The biggest, oldest Indian motioned for him to come there. Another one grabbed his rifle where it lay across his possible sack, and the sack too.
He wished he knew what tribe they were.
Coy didn’t like them. He barked, and the hair stood up on his neck. The Indians laughed.
They took Sam’s pistol. They took his shot pouch. They took his knife. They took every valuable he had, except his hair.
Then they put him second in line and began to lope. Luckily, Coy kept up, whining all the while. After about a mile they came to a creek, and a sizable village spread out along the banks.
They led him to a big lodge, evidently the council lodge. Coy didn’t get to come in. Before long a white hair came and sat behind the center fire. A half dozen big bellies sat near him, and they put Sam on the white hair’s left.
None of his belongings came into the lodge, and Sam figured they were goners. Without a gun he couldn’t survive.
He wished to the devil he knew what tribe this was. They didn’t look like Crows, so he didn’t dare risk his Crow words.
“The elder,” said the man on Sam’s left in accented English, “is Raven. I am Third Wing, and I will … make his words into English for you, and yours into Pawnee.”
Sam was careful not to let his face show surprise at the English. Or the shiver he felt at these people being Pawnee. Except for their cousins the Rees, they had the worst reputation on the plains.
“I am called Sam,” he said. “I came to this country with my companions, the beaver hunters.”
One of the men who captured Sam said something, and everyone looked at Sam with the greatest curiosity.
Raven spoke and Third Wing translated. “They wan
t to see your coyote pup do his tricks.” Third Wing was a beefy fellow with a pie face, but he had a wild gleam in his eye.
Everyone trooped outside. “I need a few bits of meat.” Third Wing nodded and spoke to a woman who was watching. In moments meat appeared.
In short order Sam got Coy to sit, stand on his hind legs, and leap to his hand to grab a stick.
Exclamations. Sam could imagine what they were saying, Medicine Dog. Carefully, he kept his face grave.
Back inside they smoked a pipe, and Sam began to get a glimmer of hope. When it was done, he told Third Wing, “I come in friendship. I got separated from my friends. I’m going back to the big house on the Missouri” (he hoped they knew about the fort). “I’m sorry—normally I would have brought presents for my Pawnee friends, but the presents are with the other beaver hunters. When these men come to village, they will give you many presents on my behalf.”
As Third Wing rendered this message in Pawnee, the Indians listened impassively. Then the discussion of his fate began. Third Wing, sitting right next to Sam, spoke first and at length in Pawnee, signing to Sam what he was saying. He liked Sam. Sam was his friend. He wanted Sam to be safe in this village.
None of the others signed what they said. From the tone Sam was sure they didn’t like him, not one bit. They were probably discussing how to torture and kill him. Did they want to let him run for his life against all their young men (as happened to old Colter)? Did they want to tie him up and burn him nice and slow from the toenails up?
No telling. All he could do was what he’d heard was the only way to go—put on a nonchalant face, pretending that whatever they decided was all the same to Sam Morgan.
He wondered where Coy was.
Finally, the council disbanded. “Come with me,” said Third Wing. The rest left without meeting Sam’s eyes. For the first time Sam wondered about the peculiar name. What kind of man would be named Third Wing, and what would a third wing be for?
