Dead Man's Walk

Yet, when he approached the buffalo, the animal turned and snorted. It lowered its head and pawed the ground. There was a bloody froth running out of its nose, but otherwise there was no evidence that the thirty bullets had weakened it seriously. It not only wasn’t dead, it was showing fight.

Gus knelt and carefully put a bullet right where he thought the buffalo’s heart would be. He was only twenty yards away. He couldn’t miss from such a distance. He fired again, a little higher, but with the same lack of result.

“Leave it be—we’ve wasted enough ammunition,” Bigfoot said. “We need to save some of it for the Mexicans.”

“At this rate we’ll never see a Mexican,” Call remarked.

He was losing his belief in their ability to find their way across the plain. It was too vast, and they had no map. Bigfoot admitted that he really didn’t know where the New Mexican settlements were, or how far ahead they might be.

Before Call could say more, Gus threw his rifle down and pulled his knife.

“It’s a weak gun—the bullets must not be going in far enough,” Gus said. “I’ll kill the goddamn thing with this knife, if that’s all that will do it.”

When he rushed the buffalo and began to stab it in the side, the beast made no attempt to run or fight. It merely stood there, its head down, blowing the bloody froth out of its nostrils.

“By God, he’s going to finish it, let’s help him,” Bigfoot said, drawing his own knife. Soon he had joined Gus, and was stabbing at the buffalo’s throat. Call thought their behaviour was crazy. There were only three of them; they couldn’t eat that much of the buffalo even if they killed it. But for Bigfoot and Gus, the animal had become a kind of test. The two men could think of nothing but killing the one animal. Unless they could kill it, they wouldn’t be able to go on. The settlements would never be reached unless they could kill the buffalo.

Call drew his knife and approached the animal from the other side. It had a short, thick neck, but he knew the big vein had to be somewhere in it; if he could cut the big vein the buffalo would eventually die, no matter how much praying and dancing the Comanches had done over it.

He stabbed and drew blood and so did Gus and Bigfoot—they stabbed until their arms were tired of lifting their knives, until they were all three covered with blood. Finally, red and panting from their efforts, they all three gave up. They stood a foot from the buffalo, completely exhausted, unable to kill it.

As a last effort, Call drew his pistol, stuck it against the buffalo’s head just below the ear, and fired. The buffalo took one step forward and sank to its knees. All three men stepped back, thinking the animal would roll over, but it didn’t. Its head sank and it died, still on its knees.

“If only there was a creek—I’d like to wash,” Gus said. He had never liked the smell of blood and was shocked to find himself covered with it, in a place where there was no possibility of washing.

They all sank down on the prairie grass and rested, too tired to cut up their trophy.

“How do Indians ever kill them?” Call asked, looking at the buffalo. It seemed to be merely resting, its head on its knees.

“Why, with arrows—how else?” Bigfoot asked.

Call said nothing, but once again he felt a sense of trespass. It had taken three men, with rifles, pistols, and knives, an hour to kill one beast; yet, Indians did it with arrows alone—he had watched them kill several on the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.

“All buffalo ain’t this hard,” Bigfoot assured them. “I’ve never seen one this hard.”

“Dern, I wish I could wash,” Gus said.

BIGFOOT WALLACE TOOK ONLY the buffalo’s tongue and liver. The tongue he put in his saddlebag, after sprinkling it with salt; the liver he sliced and ate raw, first dripping a drop or two of fluid from the buffalo’s gallbladder on the slices of meat.

“A little gall makes it tasty,” he said, offering the meat to Call and Gus.

Call ate three or four bites, Gus only one, which he soon quickly spat out.

“Can’t we cook it?” he asked. “I’m hungry, but not hungry enough to digest raw meat.”

“You’ll be that hungry tomorrow, unless we’re lucky,” Bigfoot said.

“I’d just rather cook it,” Gus said, again—it was clear from Bigfoot’s manner that he regarded the request as absurdly fastidious.

“I guess if you want to burn your clothes you might get fire enough to singe a slice or two,” Bigfoot said—he gestured toward the empty plain around them. Nowhere within the reach of their eyes was there a plant, a bush, a tree that would yield even a stick of firewood. The plain was not entirely level, but it was entirely bare.

“What a goddamn place this is,” Gus said. “A man has to tote his own firewood, or else make do with raw meat.”

“No, there’s buffalo chips, if you want to hunt for them,” Bigfoot said. “I’ve cooked many a liver over buffalo chips, but there ain’t many buffalo out this way. I don’t feel like walking ten miles to gather enough chips to keep you happy.”

As they rode away from the dead buffalo, they saw two wolves trotting toward it. The wolves were a long way away, but the fact that there were two living creatures in sight on the plain was reassuring, particularly to Gus. He had been more comfortable in a troop of Rangers than he was with only Call and Bigfoot for company. They were just three human dots on the encircling plain.

Bigfoot watched the wolves with interest. Wolves had to have water, just as did men and women. The wolves didn’t look lank, either—there must be water within a few miles, if only they knew which way to ride.

“Wolves and coyotes ain’t far from being dogs,” he observed. “You’ll always get coyotes hanging around a camp—they like people —or at least they like to eat our leavings. The Colonel ought to catch him a coyote pup or two and raise them to hunt for him. It’d take the place of that big dog you dropped.”

Call thought they were all likely to die of starvation. It was gallant of Bigfoot to speculate about the Colonel and his pets when they were in such a desperate situation. The Colonel was in the same situation, only worse—he had the whole troop to think of; he ought to be worrying about keeping the men from starving, not on replacing his big Irish dog.

They rode all night; they had no water at all. They didn’t ride fast, but they rode steadily. When dawn flamed up, along the great horizon to the east, they stopped to rest. Bigfoot offered the two of them slices of buffalo tongue. Call ate several bites, but Gus declined, in favor of horse meat.

“I can’t reconcile myself to eating a tongue,” he said. “My ma would not approve. She raised me to be careful about what foods I stuff in my mouth.”

Call wondered briefly what his own mother had been like—he had only one cloudy memory of her, sitting on the seat of a wagon;in fact, he was not even sure that the woman he remembered had been his mother. The woman might have been his aunt—in any case, his mother had given him no instruction in the matter of food.

During the day’s long, slow ride, the pangs of hunger were soon rendered insignificant beside the pangs of thirst. They had had no water for a day and a half. Bigfoot told them that if they found no water by the next morning, they would have to kill a horse and drink what was in its bladder. He instructed them to cut small strips of leather from their saddle strings and chew on them, to produce saliva flow. It was a stratagem that worked for awhile. As they chewed the leather, they felt less thirsty. But the trick had a limit. By evening, their saliva had long since dried up. Their tongues were so swollen it had become hard to close their lips. One of the worst elements of the agony of thirst was the thought of all the water they had wasted during the days of rain and times of plenty.