Buffalo Girls (19 page)

“You didn't die with him, though,” Calamity pointed out, as he was explaining his theory of leave-taking the night before.

“No, I haven't died with any general yet,” Bartle cheerfully admitted. “I haven't found one smart enough to throw in with.”

He managed to prolong the leave-taking until Jim Ragg was grinding his teeth—a crowd had gathered, for it was not every day that a party left Miles City to go perform for the Queen. Potato Creek Johnny planned to accompany them to the steamer, if not farther; several drunks became confused, thinking they were expected to go too. They stumbled around uncertainly, getting in everybody's way.

No Ears wore the splendid bright-yellow slicker he had finally selected, although it was a clear, breezy day.

Calamity had to be tied to her horse; she was so drunk and unhappy it was feared she might flop off any minute and hurt herself.

“I wish you'd change your mind and come, Dora,” she said several times. “I don't like to travel so far from you, or be gone so long.”

“Well, don't, then, who's pushing you?” Dora said in a shaky voice.

She stood by Calamity's horse, holding her hand—every time Calamity bent down to kiss her her tears showered Dora's face. Calamity cried so much and showered her so many times that Dora felt she ought to be wearing No Ears's new slicker. She felt trembly and more than a little unsettled herself. For a time she had been happy in Miles City. Blue's little accident had been a boon; they had had some of their sweetest times in the past winter. Not since the early years in Kansas had she felt so close to Blue, and it seemed he had felt it too. It seemed for a few weeks that they had come at last to the place they had supposed they would get in their first few months of love, when he was a brash young cowboy and she a pretty buffalo girl. It was what they had
talked of in Kansas; finally, in Montana, it happened, or seemed to. But then he had begun to feel like cowboying again, and had ridden off one morning as if their time together had been nothing—as if it were common.

Dora's heart took such a drop that morning that she didn't know if she would ever fully recover her feeling for Blue; now Martha Jane, the other pal of her youth and companion in the adventure of life, was going far away. Martha Jane was sober more and more rarely; what if she died of drink and never returned? They would both be gone, Martha Jane and Blue—what could she do then but get old and be alone?

Doosie was irritated—Bartle kept forgetting things. He trooped back through her kitchen, allowing drunks to follow him. She wanted the party to go—she had cooking to do and didn't welcome such interruptions.

Trix soon wore out her emotion. Now that it was settled that she wasn't going, she felt a good deal relieved. Old Bartle had too many bad habits, such as wearing his moccasins in bed or dribbling tobacco juice on the sheets. She much preferred Teat—he was respectful of her—and had begun to look forward to life in Belle Fourche. There might be some dandy fellows in Belle Fourche.

Skeedle walked off before the party was quite gone. She had made plans to get her fortune told that day by an old Spanish woman who lived in a little hut with her goose. The old woman usually gave her a good fortune—she saw riches in Skeedle's life, and the thought of riches was so pleasant that Skeedle could keep happy for a week or two just thinking about the old woman's predictions.

Finally everyone got tired of leave-taking. The drunks wandered off; a few fell down unconscious. Dora was overcome by her feelings and hurried upstairs to cry in private. Trix went inside to see if any dandy fellows were in the bar. Three cowboys came racing by—one of them saw a goat and took down his rope and roped it. He then proceeded to drag it around. By the time
Jim and Bartle, Potato Creek Johnny and No Ears finally walked out of town leading Calamity's horse—she had passed out and was sound asleep in the saddle—everyone had lost interest in the departure except the boy Teat, who sat alone on Dora's back porch and watched them leave. The five people were soon out of town, ever-diminishing ripples in the rippling prairie grass. They seemed to Teat like a little tribe. It made him feel lonely to see them disappear.

N
O
E
ARS DIDN'T LIKE THE GREAT PLAIN OF WATER THAT
they called the Atlantic Ocean. At first he had been pleased with the boat they were to make the passage on. He had not imagined that so large a boat could be found; he could not help thinking how much his friend Sits On The Water would have enjoyed a trip in such a great vessel.

Anchored at rest in the harbor in New York—a smoky town No Ears had no interest in—the boat seemed more than adequate to transport several villages to England or anywhere else touched by the great ocean. It was like a floating town, with many houses in it and a kind of small enclosed prairie below, where the animals could be kept and given hay. At first the animals were restive—No Ears supposed that to them entering the ship was too much like entering the stomach of a great fish—but once in their small prairie, with straw for grass, they soon settled down.

It was only after leaving the harbor and setting off across the restless, moving plain of water that No Ears came to see the sharp inadequacies of the boat. Once in the middle of the plain of water, the boat seemed tinier to him, in relation to the ocean, than wagons were in relation to the plains of grass. Also, though he knew that water moved and was powerful—after all, a flood had taken that experienced waterman Sits On The Water—he
had not imagined the immense power of the great ocean. The plains of grass seemed to move only when herds of horses, cattle, buffalo stampeded across them; but the plains of water moved always, with a strength greater than any strength he had ever imagined. He felt the movement even in his sleep in his little room. Men tired, animals tired, even the great winds tired and left the earth calm, but the ocean was stronger than men, animals, and wind put together; No Ears could not tell that the ocean ever tired, or ever rested.

He had certainly not expected to encounter such a force in the last years of his life; he spent all the daylight hours and several starlit nights sitting silently on deck, studying the mysterious waters. He knew that he could not learn much; he was too old to acquire the kinds of knowledge of the plains of water that he had had about the plains of grass. Still, he hoped to learn a little. Watching the birds was interesting; even when they had been on the ocean several days, the birds still flew around the boat, and when the cook threw scraps in the water the birds came in white swarms to catch the scraps before they could sink into the depths where the fish lived. Several times, just beneath the surface of the water, No Ears had observed a great many fish swimming together in immense herds. Cody told him that the fish traveled in schools—to No Ears it was just another word for herd.

It was a startling thing to see so many fish coursing through the great plain of water. No Ears had always supposed that the earth was mainly prairie, and that nowhere were there beasts as numerous as the great herds of buffalo that had traveled the prairies in his youth, indeed, for most of his life—until the whites had suddenly killed them all not long after the war they made with one another.

Unfortunately the whites had survived the war with one another, and had turned their need to kill upon the buffalo and upon his own people. It was a shock to his people and even to the whites themselves that all the buffalo had been killed in so short a time; but traveling on the ocean made No Ears realize that the
world was far larger than he had supposed and that the destruction of the buffalo, and even of his people, was a smaller thing than it seemed to those who only knew the plains.

Small children and even some grownups in his own tribe believed that the prairies had no end. He himself had believed at one time that the world was all prairie. But he had once gone west with some Blackfeet and come to the end of the prairie in that direction; and on this very trip, he had ridden off the prairies on a train and entered the region of trees, a closed-up region that he didn't like very much. It might be that the prairies were endless if one went north and south, but he had seen them end to the west and to the east, and was forced to conclude that the prairies did not make up quite as much of the world as his people thought.

After many days on the ocean, he was forced to think once again about the size of the world. Clearly it was far larger than anyone in his tribe realized; they reckoned in ignorance, which was not good. He decided that as soon as he got back from England he would journey to the Platte and try to visit as many people in the tribe as he could so as to inform them that they were mistaken about the prairies comprising the main part of the world. It now seemed as if most of the world was ocean—water that you could not drink. The sailors brought up bucketsful of seawater and used it to wash the deck. No Ears tasted a little and found it indeed very salty. Obviously the whole bottom of the ocean must be salt to make the water so salty. And yet it didn't bother the herds of fish, which meant that fish had powers he never suspected. Several times they ate fish that came out of the salty waters, and the meat of the fish did not taste salty, a very curious thing, for the flesh of even the largest deer would give some clues as to what the deer had been eating.

No Ears slept lightly during the trip. He did not dare risk sinking too deeply into sleep—if he did, the powerful ocean might suck out his soul as quickly as one sucked marrow out of a bone. Also, he was excited and nervous, and he wanted to spend as
much time on deck as he could; he might not get another opportunity to study the ocean, and he wanted to secure as much correct information as possible.

He had stopped worrying about the great fish that could swallow houses, when he saw the whale. The size of the boat had lulled him, for it was hardly credible that any fish could be large enough to threaten such a boat. Also, none of the herds of fish that swam around the boat contained individual fish of any size. A few were the length of his leg, but most were just fish, no different from those that swam in the Missouri or the Platte. He decided that the great fish was just a dream fish—the dream spirits sometimes like to frighten people with dream beasts of one kind and another.

It was dawn when he saw the whale, a gray sunless dawn when water and sky were the same color and hard to tell apart. No Ears had spent the night on deck and was a little sleepy when the dawn finally came. He had lost his fear of breathing the ocean and was resting calmly. At first, because he was a little tired, he did not see the whale. A sailor saw it and began to yell. The yelling meant nothing to No Ears, although he was afraid for a moment that the boat might be on fire. The sailor kept yelling, and soon people began to run out of their rooms. Then, in the haze, he saw the top of the water moving in a strange way—the water moved as if a giant mole were working just beneath it. The water kept moving, in the way the dirt moved when a mole was tunneling a few inches below the surface of the ground.

No Ears watched without alarm as the water moved in that curious way—he was still in his sleepy mood. But then the great whale broke the surface and he instantly ceased to be sleepy at all. He forgot for a moment that he was on the water; he felt that he was seeing the birth of a mountain. A group of little fish that had been swimming above the whale came up, too, and began to flop down his shiny sides. The seabirds got a few of them.

The great fish was so large that No Ears had to turn his head
to see it all. Its tail stuck past the end of the ship, large as a large tepee. To No Ears's shock, the immense fish, almost the color of the dawn, suddenly blew a great spume of water out of the top of its head. The water rose like the puzzling geysers that blew water into the air in the Shoshone country—fireholes, some called them. The firehole water was hot—No Ears could not tell whether the whale's water was also hot, but he immediately wondered if there could be a connection between the whale and the fireholes. Soon many of the people on the boat had run up on deck; they began to shoot guns at the whale. Calamity stood at the rail and shot at it with her Colt pistol. Cody and Texas Jack arrived but did not shoot. The mountain men came up with their rifles but were too amazed to shoot. Many sailors were shooting. The great fish paid no attention to any of it. Some of the bullets went wild and slapped the water; a few pecked at the whale, but the whale swam on.