The sun hung a fuzzy ball in the sky, the landscape seemed to shimmer. Annabel looked off into the distance. There was only dust at first. A moving cloud of dust. Rising. As though the earth itself were ascending heavenward. And then what seemed to be the timber moving. Her mouth fell open. Those were buffalo out there.
Thousands and thousands of them.
They stretched from horizon to horizon. Where her first glimpse less than a week ago had been somewhat akin to looking at a drawing in a book — five of them grazing motionless — this now, this population, struck her dumb with terror and disbelief. She had never before seen so many living things in one place or under one sky, neither humans collected in a circus tent in Bristol, nor horses or cows in pasture, nor even bees swarming or ants skittering when she poked at a hill with a stick, nor anything on God’s green earth as multitudinous as these buffalo now that darkened the plains.
They came galloping down from the hills and through the ravines toward the river, chattering among themselves to raise a din that sounded less than choirly, the thunder of their hoofs rolling like drumbeats to accompany their own disharmony. Brown they were, so brown as to be black, moving out of the shimmering haze so that it seemed their very motion caused the ground to quake and shift them out of focus, dust and haze and motion combining to create an ocean swell of furry humped flesh and flying hoofs. Minerva’s eyes popped wide open soon as she heard that distant murmur like a crowd of people mumbling stead of what were only shaggy beasts nudging and nattering as they rushed for the bank of the river. Even Bonnie Sue, who Annabel was of a mind to ask, “Excuse me, are you dead?” stirred enough to look off toward where the entire universe was in rolling motion.
Bobbo raised his rifle. Its crack sounded thin and sharp on the air. Smoke rose from the barrel in a wisp darker than the moody sky, rushing away on the wind. A beast toppled and skidded into the dirt, and Bobbo’s exultant cry carried away as swiftly as the dissipating smoke.
They ignored the parts Timothy had told them were relished by Indians, usually eaten while the beast was being butchered and the organs still fresh. Timothy had witnessed virtual orgies, he’d said, braves smashing in the skulls of slaughtered cows or bulls to get at the succulent brains inside, slashing open bellies to scoop out blood with their cupped hands. Kidneys, eyes, testicles, and snouts, hoofs of unborn calves, udders warm with milk, livers, tongues — all were delicacies. Said he’d once enjoyed a raw pudding of liver and brains, still steaming, offered to him by his father-in-law in a bowl made of ribs cut from the slain buffalo. Enough to have made Annabel want to throw up. Never told them how to skin one, though, so they just went about butchering it the same way they’d have butchered a deer back home.
Bobbo cut off the balls and then slit the jugular and let the blood drain out. He cut a ring all the way around each of the hind legs, and then sliced both legs up to the crotch and peeled off the hide and did the same with the front legs, where he made his cuts up to the massive chest. He was sweating long before he finished peeling all four legs, and was beginning to think there was an easier way of doing this. He’d have to ask somebody when they got to Fort Laramie, but meanwhile the carcass and the job were spread out there on the ground in front of him.
The shaggy beast must’ve weighed fifteen hundred pounds at least; took the whole family to roll him over so Bobbo could make his cut from belly to chest. He realized he’d never get the hide off in one piece, so they rolled the animal over again, and Bobbo made another cut from the neck over the hump to the tail. The bull was on the ground on his belly now, his legs spread and already peeled, looking like somebody’d taken off his black wool stockings but left on his black fur coat. Bobbo surmised by now that there’d been no need for peeling the legs at all, but he’d already done that, so there was no use fretting over it. With Hadley’s help, he pulled and sliced and yanked both halves of the hide loose from the animal and then Hadley chopped off the head with an ax, just behind the ears, same as he would have a deer.
This was no dainty little deer they were carving up here, though. It was instead a beast could feed a regiment, and they became speculative butchers on the spot, chopping the animal up the middle with the ax and then quartering it, and seeking out what they thought were the choicest cuts, Minerva hovering and advising, telling them to save this or that organ till to all intents and purposes they were keeping for food all the Indians themselves might have kept, save the eyeballs and the other balls Bobbo’d cut off first. Minerva even had them keep for marrow the leg bones Bobbo had meticulously exposed when he’d still thought he was dealing with a doe or a buck, and she asked him now to rescue whatever blood he could from spilling onto the ground; said it would make a good rich gravy later on.
There were buffalo chips everywhere, scattered among the bright yellow sunflowers. They made their fire, and fed it with the dried and weathered dung, and then put up steaks to fry, three inches thick. Hadley lifted his cup and said, “God bless this land of ours, God bless it.”
On a hill some three hundred feet above where they sat around the fire and raised their cups and echoed Hadley’s toast, partially hidden by a conical peak sculpted by wind and rain, an Indian watched them.
The scout was called Otaktay.
He was one of the braves in a Dakota war party of four. The organizer and leader of the party was an eighteen-year-old named Teetonkah. He was the oldest of the four; the youngest was only sixteen. Teetonkah had still been a small boy many years before when during the Moon of the Duck Eggs, a Pawnee war party attacked his village and captured half a dozen Dakota women, who, it was rumored, later caused the smallpox epidemic in the Pawnee nation, killing countless numbers of their children. Teetonkah had been on many war parties since that time; raids were constant, the war between the tribes was incessant.
When he decided to organize this war party, he did so because he wished to gain more honor for himself by capturing Pawnee horses. And Pawnee women. He liked Pawnee women. His first experience had been with a Pawnee woman captured by his uncle. Teetonkah had taken her fiercely and proudly. She had whimpered beneath his assault. There were now four Pawnee women in the village, and he found all of them more comely than any of the women in his own tribe. He wished to own a Pawnee woman of his own. Perhaps two. Horses as well. A dozen horses perhaps, and three or four Pawnee women.
He sat at the fire now and listened in astonishment to Otaktay’s report. Otaktay had removed the white scouting cloths from his head and shoulders, and was sitting on his haunches to the right of Teetonkah, who was his cousin. In the first quarter of the Moon of Moulting Feathers, Teetonkah had invited him and two others to his tipi. He told them first that he knew them all to be courageous and venturesome and that he trusted each of them well. He then went on to explain that at the time of the Wood-Cracking Moon last year, a band of Pawnee raiders had stolen from his older sister Talutah a pony she had dearly loved, and she had been crying over the theft since that winter past, and this made Teetonkah’s heart very bad. He wished now to ride out against the Pawnee and find their horses where they were and take them away as they had taken Talutah’s.
He said this was an auspicious time for such a raid since it was at this very moon a year before that the tribe had attacked the Pawnee in vast numbers and taken many scalps and many horses. Teetonkah asked his cousin and his friends to join him now in this quest that would heal his sister’s broken heart. He wished as well to capture some Pawnee women, whose skills were surely being wasted planting seeds when there were strong Dakota braves eager to plant within them seeds of quite another sort. All the young men laughed. They had all sampled the treasures of Teetonkah’s uncle’s captured Pawnee maid.