Buffalo Girls

by Larry McMurtry

  “I guess she’s a woman and you oughta know,” Jim said. “I recall you were sweethearts once.”

  “If we was, I was drunk and slept through it,” Bartle said. “When was we ever sweethearts?”

  “On that first wagon trip, the one that flooded out at the Arkansas,” Jim said. “I seen the two of you sneaking off.”

  “Oh, that trip,” Bartle said. “We did sneak off, but all Calamity wanted was for me to teach her how to throw a knife. She didn’t own a gun at the time but she had a fairly good knife.”

  “Throw a knife?” Jim said, startled by the reply. “Why would you ever throw a knife?”

  “You wouldn’t,” Bartle said. “Not if you had good sense. Calamity claimed to have read some dime novel—a mountain man threw his knife at a grizzly and killed it. Or maybe it was an Indian chief he threw it at. I never read the book myself.”

  “I never accused you of reading,” Jim said.

  His mood seemed to be improving slightly, Bartle thought.

  “So you thought Calamity and me was in love, is that it?” he asked. “Is that why you’ve been sullen the last twenty-five years?”

  “No,” Jim said. “I had no objection to you being her sweetheart, except that you stopped paying attention to business. If you’d paid a little more attention we might not have flooded out.”

  Bartle snorted. “My god, Jim—I ain’t Moses,” he said. “I could have paid attention constantly and not stopped the Arkansas from flooding.”

  “How do you throw a knife?” Jim asked mildly, realizing that his criticism had no validity. It had been an unusually rainy spring that year, and a rainy spring was clearly not Bartle’s fault.

  “I don’t know,” Bartle said. “I never threw one.”

  “Then what’d you teach Calamity?”

  “Tracking, mostly,” Bartle said. “I taught her her tracks—what’s a fresh track, and what ain’t.”

  “I did think you were sweethearts, though,” Jim said. “Enough so you’d have no doubt that Calamity is a woman.”

  “Nope,” Bartle said. “She was quite standoffish, and still is. Once in a while she does dress like a woman now, but she didn’t on that trip, if you’ll remember. She wore pants the whole way.”

  “Still, she must be a woman,” Jim said. “Her name was Martha Jane. Nobody would name a boy Martha Jane.”

  “That’s a point,” Bartle admitted. “She’s still got that odd look, though.”

  The sun had been out, but it disappeared; a snow squall was moving toward them from the Black Hills. Dark clouds hid the tops of the mountains.

  “I’ve been thinking we ought to buy ourselves a couple of horses,” Jim said.

  Bartle felt gloomy, as he always did when the sun vanished. He didn’t mind snow as much as he minded clouds.

  “Horses to ride or horses to eat?” he asked, not particularly interested.

  “To ride—I don’t like to eat horse,” Jim said.

  “I don’t like to ride ’em any better than you like to eat them,” Bartle declared. “What’s wrong with just moving around on our own two feet, like we always have?”

  “My feet are getting tired, that’s what,” Jim said.

  Bartle could hardly believe his ears. Jim Ragg, who had been ready to rush over and strangle him not ten minutes earlier, had just said his feet were tired. Bartle did his best to conceal his surprise.

  “I ain’t as tall as you,” Jim reminded him. “This deep snow’s troublesome to wade in.”

  “Yep, that’s why snowshoes got invented,” Bartle said. “I’ve always considered the horse a large dangerous animal. I’d about as soon own a bear.”

  “You are contrary,” Jim said. “There’s nothing wrong with horses.”

  “There was something wrong with that one that fell on me in Santa Fe,” Bartle reminded him. “I guess you don’t remember that—I was only busted up for six months.”

  Jim remembered it, of course. Bartle had been showing off with some cowboys, and a stout young bronc fell with him, rolled on him, and gave him a good kick, to boot.

  “That came about from your showing off,” Jim reminded him. “There’s plenty of tame horses to be had.”

  “Aw, let’s just live on a riverboat during the winter,” Bartle suggested. “We could just drift along and watch it snow.”

  “You’d never agree to anything,” Jim said. “You never have. I can’t remember why I picked you for a compañero. Skinning beaver was the only thing you were ever good at, and you’ve probably forgotten how to do that.”

  The snow squall engulfed them; the plains vanished and the campfire began to spit, as swirling flakes fell into it.

  “You wouldn’t get weather like this in Arizona,” Bartle said. “Maybe we ought to go help the old Gray Fox.” That was the Indians’ name for General Crook.

  “You can—I ain’t,” Jim said. “Crook has been short with me once too often. If I had to vote for him or Geronimo for President I’d vote for Geronimo.”

  “You’re full of surprises today,” Bartle said. “I never heard you express an interest in who was President before. Have you ever voted?”

  “No, but I’d vote if Crook were running,” Bartle said. “I’d vote against him.”

  “Well, we could still go to Arizona,” Bartle said. “We wouldn’t have to work for Crook. We could work for Geronimo. Crook would hang us if he caught us, but if he can’t catch an Apache I doubt he could catch us.”

  “I don’t know how we’d fare in the heat,” Jim said.

  It was curious, but over the last several years he and Bartle had become more and more popular with the Indians and less and less popular with the soldiers. They had been at the great encampment on the Little Bighorn only the day before the battle, the guests of He Dog, the Ogalala chief. Gall himself had sat with them, and offered them meat; of course, with such sponsorship, none of the young braves dared lay a hand on them.

  There were more Indians there that day than the two mountain men had ever imagined would gather anywhere; in their thirty years in the west they had probably not seen, in the aggregate, that many Indians. They themselves left the camp in a leisurely way, never imagining that the Seventh Cavalry, or any general in command of soldiers in the west, would be so suicidal as to attack such a camp.

  Had they encountered Custer—or Reno, Terry, Gibbon, or any of the advancing soldiers—they would of course have pointed out that death awaited them on the Little Bighorn, and would have advised any and all to turn around and skedaddle. But they didn’t see anyone, not even the Crow scouts, and gave little thought to conflict until they wandered back toward the encampment and heard the death songs.

  The Indians were leaving then, such a mass of ponies and people in motion that it seemed the great plain itself was moving. Cheyenne, Shoshone, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Miniconjou, and the many divisions of the Sioux; Ogalala, Brulé, Teton, Yankton, Santee. Bartle and Jim sat on a low bluff and watched: the plains were covered all morning with the flow of the great exodus.

  Watching the departure of the Indian peoples from the valley of the Little Bighorn that day was the most impressive and the most moving thing Bartle Bone had witnessed in thirty years in the west. Jim Ragg felt it, too. What they had stumbled on when they turned back that morning was the last act of a great drama. Jim had never seen a play above the level of a medicine show, but he knew that what he was watching was as great as any play.

  “We’ll never see nothing like this again,” he said to Bartle. “Not in our lifetime.”

  “Nobody will,” Bartle said. “It would be worth dying to see it.”

  But they hadn’t died, and later, when they had gone on up the valley and walked through the chopped-up bodies of the veterans of the Seventh, the carnage had been anticlimactic. They had seen massacres before—smaller ones, admittedly, but the character of massacre varied little. What they had seen earlier—the Indian peoples making the plains move—was a rarer and a greater thing.

&nbs
p; “Remember that leaving, Bartle?” Jim asked. Whatever they had been talking about—whether Calamity was really a woman, whether Crook would finally catch Geronimo—left his mind when he remembered the Little Bighorn.

  Bartle Bone nodded. He would always remember that leaving.

  “That was a glory, wasn’t it?” he said.

  8

  NO EARS WOKE CALAMITY OUT OF THE BEST SLEEP SHE HAD had in days. It seemed she always slept better when she was on her way to Dora’s. Once she got to Dora’s she could let down her guard, but letting down her guard was not wise out in the country.

  “I don’t want breakfast, leave me alone,” she told No Ears.

  “I think we better go on to town,” No Ears said. “I think a white wind is coming.”

  That got Calamity’s attention—by a white wind No Ears meant a particular kind of blizzard, one that brought with it billions of particles of dry snow. The wind might blow for three days, swirling the snow so densely that it became impossible to see. The white wind confused everything. The best scouts refused to move in a white wind. Cattle moved: they fell off cliffs, piled up in the bottoms of gullies or creeks. Even in town the white winds made life dangerous. Drunks got lost and froze in the street. A man might try to walk to a barn or outbuilding and not be seen again until the snows melted in the spring, when his body would be discovered.

  Calamity and No Ears were out of food. They had parted from the mountain men in a hurry and had forgotten to take their fair share of elk. No Ears scarcely ate, but Calamity had a healthy appetite. She often wished there were some prosperous Indians nearby, because prosperous Indians knew how to feast. She could remember feasts that went on all day in the rich villages of the Sioux.

  But in this case there were no Indians nearby. The day before, Calamity had had an easy shot at an antelope but shot high. The antelope stood looking at her so steadily that it unnerved her. “Look off while I’m killing you!” she wanted to say, but then she missed by three feet.

  “I should have let you take the shot,” she said to No Ears later, feeling guilty. She felt she had let No Ears down, although he had not uttered a word of censure. She hated to shoot with a man looking, even if the man was a kind old Indian who wouldn’t think of criticizing her. In earlier years she had argued for her right to take a shot, and, if the situation wasn’t critical, Jim and Bartle would sometimes humor her; nine times out of ten she proceeded to miss, which was embarrassing. Her eyesight would waver, she’d lose the front sight of the rifle and finally grow nervous and shoot anyway, hoping to get lucky—which she rarely did.

  “Well, you ain’t no Annie Oakley,” Bartle would sometimes say dryly as a deer or an antelope scampered away.

  “I’ve seen you miss—you ain’t no Annie Oakley neither!” Calamity reminded him, but she was embarrassed, anyway.

  Annie Oakley was a prodigy. How many men or women did they think could shoot like Annie?

  But the fact was, she and No Ears were meatless, and the prospect of spending three days meatless and also fireless—you didn’t dare leave the camp to gather firewood—was enough to get her moving.

  Even so, it was Satan who found the town. No Ears settled himself behind the saddle and held onto her and they raced, Cody running beside them, but they were still some distance from Miles City when the snow began to swirl up from under Satan’s belly like steam. It rose higher, swirling so densely that she couldn’t see Satan’s head; she couldn’t see the saddle horn, much less Cody or the road. It was terrifying—a white blindness so total that Calamity wanted to shut her eyes. She did shut them but immediately grew afraid. They had been racing beside the river. What if Satan accidently veered onto the ice and they went through? She felt she would prefer almost any death to a blind, icy drowning. She had seen corpses pulled from the ice, terror frozen on their faces.

  Time and place were both lost in the white wind.

  “Are you still there?” Calamity tried to ask, disturbed for a moment by the thought that No Ears might have fallen off. No Ears didn’t answer, and she felt silly. How could a man without ears hear anything in such a situation? Reaching down, she felt his hands around her waist and was reassured.

  Satan had been galloping; as the storm thickened he slowed to a trot, then to a walk. Calamity gave up thinking; she just rode. After a time it seemed to her that Satan was walking very slowly—perhaps he was on the ice. Then she realized he wasn’t moving at all; he had stopped. With the snow blowing past them so constantly she had not noticed when he stopped.

  She felt No Ears slide off the horse and had a moment of panic. Was the old man going to leave her? Where were they? Then she felt his hand on her leg—he was going to pull her off. For a moment Calamity didn’t trust this—at least she was in the saddle, where she knew where she was. If she dismounted, in a second she could be lost, entirely lost.

  No Ears tugged insistently and Calamity continued to grip the saddle horn in a death grip—it was her one point of location. But her reason struggled with the panic and fought it down. No Ears had saved her from a white wind once before. He had led her into Fort Fetterman at the end of a rope. He knew more than she did; she had better trust him. She swung off the horse and Satan vanished. Oh, no, we’re lost, she thought, but No Ears clutched her coat. She took a step and her toe hit something that felt wooden. She kicked and felt it again. There seemed to be a shape in the snow. Suddenly a box of light opened just ahead of her. A shadow crossed the box; two hands grabbed her and pulled her into the tunnel of light.

  “You beat all, out in this weather—nobody but you would be out in this weather!” a voice said, a little crossly. It took Calamity a moment to place the voice: her ears were too full of the sound of wind.

  “Doosie?” she said.

  It was Doosie; then Trix and Skeedle and the Ree boy they called Teat crowded around her. They got her out of the buffalo coat and sat her in a chair in the warm kitchen of the Hotel Hope. Calamity knew she was there, she could see she was there—No Ears, undisturbed but hungry, was already eating a bowl of Doosie’s famous moose-shank soup. She herself didn’t feel present enough to eat, though, or present enough to talk. It seemed she had left herself outside in the ghost-making wind. She felt so sure she was going into her ghost-life that a new panic took her: perhaps she had gone! Doosie and Trix and Skeedle didn’t realize they were dealing with a ghost. They were all fussing over her, pulling her coat off, sweeping the snow off her coat with a broom, bringing her towels, talking, exclaiming, interfering, busy live people who didn’t seem to notice or care that the body they were fussing over had been emptied out, blown out, left vacant. Calamity wished they would understand that.

  Then there was Dora.

  “Leave her be a minute, she’s still scared,” Dora said. She pulled up a chair and took Calamity’s hand.

  “Martha Jane, you’re safe,” Dora said.

  Calamity began to weep. It was not true that she was a ghost. Dora DuFran, her friend, had arrived just in time to save her. Dora hugged her as she cried.

  9

  TEAT ONLY HAD TWO HOPES IN LIFE: TO MARRY TRIX, AND to go with Mr. Cody and be in his Wild West show. Neither would be easy to achieve, he knew. Trix was the most popular whore at the Hotel Hope; though he had reason to believe that Trix was fond of him, it was rare that he got to spend much time with her.

  Mr. Cody had been friendly on a number of occasions, and had even tipped him once for fetching his cigars from the buggy on a day when it was raining, but that was not the same as being asked to be in his show. Teat worried every day that Mr. Cody and Dr. Ramses would get up and ride out of Miles City without taking him with them, in which case he would be down to one hope.

  In the meantime, while waiting for his hopes to come true, Teat had been assigned to Calamity, who had yet to recover her spirits after her desperate ride in the blizzard. She had become ill, and rarely got out of bed. Many times Teat saw her weep, though she seemed, from what he could see, to be undamaged. Some p
eople got their feet frozen off in blizzards, or even their hands, but Calamity still had her hands and feet.

  Hearing the lady weep made Teat want to go away. He wished that Trix would immediately agree to marry him, and that Mr. Cody would take them both someplace they could be happy far from Montana.

  It was clear to Teat that no one in Montana was able to be happy. The feeling the men brought with them into the Hotel Hope was a feeling of sadness, and that was also the feeling of most of the women who lived there; it was the feeling, as far as he could tell, of most of the people who lived in the town.

  Miss Dora, the kindest person Teat knew, was herself unhappy unless Mr. Blue was visiting, and he wasn’t visiting very often. Skeedle’s children had died; she would cry whenever she thought of them. Doosie had long been parted from her family and was mainly in a low mood—so low, some days, that she would forget to cook. The thin whore named Ginny rarely felt well and almost never smiled.

  Trix was much the most cheerful person at the hotel, which was one reason Teat had determined to marry her. He himself needed a lot of help staying happy, and Trix was the only one who tried to help him in his efforts.

  “Teat, go outside and dig a hole or something,” Trix would say, if she found him looking gloomy. “What does a cute boy like you have to be gloomy about?”

  Teat took Trix’s words to be command; he went outside and attempted to dig a hole in the icy ground, but Miss Dora looked out the window and saw him. In a minute she came to the back steps and informed him that Trix had only been teasing. “It’s the wrong season for hole-digging,” Dora said, amused by the boy’s literalness.

  Teat’s family had been wiped out in a pointless skirmish around the time of the battle of the Rosebud. He showed up in town with a trader who claimed to have gotten him from the Crows. He was an appealing boy: Dora had liked his looks and persuaded the trader to leave him with her. He had been with her now for six years and was a good worker, though a little small for his age—he must have been at least fourteen. At some stage, too little food or too much misery had affected his physical development, though not his brain. He had learned to read English almost without help, and when there was nothing to do could always be found in the kitchen, reading stories to Doosie out of the magazines Dora took. Everyone liked the boy.