Dorothy no longer believed in Indians. Rather, she believed in the hopeless, flat, beardless faces wearing dirty white men's clothes, like her own. Dorothy wore britches and boots like a man.
The hill stayed silent as she walked through the secret places of the night. Dorothy wandered through the orchards of Squire Aiken. She did steal a peach and ate it in starlight. She headed east and then south in a great curve around to Pleasant Valley Cemetery. All the dead were lined up as straight and foursquare as they had been in life. There were no terrors for Dorothy in Pleasant Valley Cemetery. She knew most of the people in it. There was Wilbur and Mrs. Jewell; there were some of the Pillsburys and some of the older McCormacks and Allens. She picked wildflowers in the moonlight and left them on the graves. And walked on. She walked miles. Cemeteries and dark woods were better than her dreams.
And suddenly the road plunged down into a hollow, and Dorothy was at Pillsbury's Crossing.
The first time that Dorothy had gone to the Crossing was with the school, her first year in Kansas. It was America's Centennial, 1876, and she was how old? Six? They had come here to have a picnic.
Dorothy remembered the road, plunging down straight across the river. The river was only inches deep, flowing over a single, huge rock. The children had waded in the water, delighting in the cool shade of the hollow. Dorothy had felt ripples under her feet, in the stone, like the ripples water makes in sand. Was rock sand? It was, in a way. Teacher said so.
Teacher said a glacier had probably left the rock there. She said that a glacier was a river of ice, but that didn't make sense. Dorothy thought that perhaps a glacier was some great animal, carrying stones on its back.
The river swept on, in a huge bend, and suddenly slipped over the edge of the rock in a great horseshoe waterfall. It was confusing, because the water started to flow diagonally across the stone. Suddenly it was pouring over it, right next to the road and in the same direction as the road. The other children had yelled and shouted to each other. Dorothy had not liked the noise or the slashes of sunlight through the leaves. Little Dorothy had hidden under a cleft in the great rock itself, behind the waterfall. She watched the flowing screen of water that concealed her. She had heard Miss Francis shouting her name over and over, but Dorothy was in hiding and it simply had not occurred to her to reply. Gasping in panic, Miss Francis found her. "Dorothy!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you say something?"
Little Dorothy had not known why and could not explain. The next evening Miss Francis came to call for the first time, to have her first long talk with Emma Gulch about what to do with Dorothy.
Now it was night, and everywhere was a hiding place. Once again, Dorothy walked down the road toward the crossing of the waters.
It was very dark in the hollow, and she could only hear, rather than see, the river. She felt her way down a slope of stone toward the crossing.
And then, it seemed to her, she saw the glacier.
Something was stranded in the shallow, rippling water. It snorted a blast of air like a dragon and tried to raise its great head. It had huge hunched shoulders, and it thrashed in the water, pawing with its front legs, trying to stand, failing to stand.
Dazed with sleeplessness, Dorothy simply stood and watched. She waited until her eyes grew used to the dark, began to see things in the starlight that fell through the leaves.
There was a buffalo. A single buffalo alone. Here in Zeandale? There were no more buffalo in Zeandale. And buffalo moved in herds. They did not live alone.
The beast knew she was there. It held up its head, unmoving and watchful. There was a glint of moonlight on its living eyes and on its tiny horns. Dorothy seemed to feel the strain in its neck muscles. The buffalo snorted again and tried to thrash its way to its feet.
And then, the buffalo lay down its head in the waters of the Crossing.
And Dorothy understood. This was the last buffalo. It had come back home to die. Its home would have been the hills above Zeandale. Now those were pastures for cattle, ringed around with barbed wire.
The buffalo were becoming extinct. Like giant flying lizards, or dodos.
Dorothy could hear its breath, hoarse and panting. The beast was dangerous. Its head was huge and a single convulsion would knock her off her feet or tear her flesh. But Dorothy did not want to leave it. She did not want it to die alone, unnoticed. She did not feel that it wanted to be left alone.
She watched it from the shore, warily. It had stopped thrashing and its giant head lay still in the shallow water. She could feel its life draining away. Dorothy sat down on the stone and unlaced her boots and walked out onto the Crossing, toward the edge of the waterfall.
The water was cool, and she felt underfoot again the stone that was rippled like a sandbar. Dorothy walked as close to the beast as she dared.
Then she put her spirit into the buffalo. She felt the vast, exhausted bulk that had gone as immobile as stone; she felt the covering of wiry, curly hair caked with mud. She felt the tail wet and heavy, beyond flicking, floating in the shallow water. The buffalo was settling into the stone. Its huge pink tongue was lolling in the water.
Don't let me die alone, the buffalo seemed to say to her. Buffalo live together; we are taken by the wolves if we cannot keep up a march. If we lag behind, we are quickly torn away, but we do not understand loneliness. Don't leave me alone.
And Dorothy knelt close beside him and stroked his mighty head and the huge hump of his shoulders, and she felt how once he had been a king. No king should die unmourned. He went very still. Breath bubbled out of him in the water. His hide twitched.
Give me to the river, the buffalo said. Hide me away from men. I don't mind the coyote or the vulture; I don't mind the beetle or the muskrat. But I don't want men to get me. I don't want them to hang my brow and horns on their wall; I don't want my skin on their floor or on their backs. Let me go whole back into the earth.
Dorothy tended the king until he died. She stroked him until she was sure he was dead, until the chest no longer heaved with breath, until there was no bubbling in the water, until the flesh was still.
Then Dorothy tried to roll him over the edge. She was very strong and perhaps the current helped. She succeeded in half rolling the corpse of a bull buffalo up onto his haunches.
It was as though she had sparked something. The legs suddenly twitched. Yes! the muscles seemed to say, Yes! Dorothy heard the hooves scrabbling on the stone.
As though the buffalo had tried to leap into Heaven, the corpse launched itself into the air. It shivered its way over the edge of the rock, a moonlit sheen of water pouring over its shoulders. It fell over the horseshoe plunge, where Dorothy had once hidden herself.