Buffalo Jump Blues (5 page)

T
heodore Thackery had a wheezy voice, a hard handshake, and that kind of bull-in-the-china-shop vigor that made you think of Theodore Roosevelt, once you'd heard his first name. He stood amid a scattering of quarter-round splits, stripped to his undershirt under a pegged sun, barrel-chested, sweating healthily, his thick biceps burned pink, swinging a double-bitted ax with a long handle. Harold thought he belonged to that bygone era of men who carved a living from the West with sharp edges, Swede saws, and buffalo rifles—men in that first wave of settlers who didn't let a bit of weather deter them and spelled the end of the wolves with their traps, the end of the bison with their bullets, and the end of Indian life as Harold's ancestors had known it.

Yes, he'd been the one to see the bison, seen them directly from his porch as he was getting ready to drive into town on an errand. Reported it first thing next morning. About an hour before dark, make that nine p.m. No doubt a splinter group from the herd that had taken refuge on a private ranch in the Hebgen Valley.

Harold asked how many he had observed.

“Sixteen. Seven cows, six with calf, three bulls. Yes sir.” When he nodded, his jowls shook. “Heard about what happened. You did what had to be done, I commend you for your prompt action.”

Harold nodded. “Only eleven went over the cliff. We can't account for the other five.”

“Nor can I. I only saw them the once.”

Harold wanted to know exactly where they were when he'd seen
them. Thackery stuck the ax in the chopping block and got a metal clipboard from his GMC pickup. The clipboard held several dozen copies of the same topographic map and he thumbed back a couple pages, explaining that the maps were for counting animals on the game range. He tapped the three red circles penned onto the map. The circles represented the locations in which he'd seen bison, and inside each circle he'd penned the number of animals observed in the spotting scope. Thackery said the cows and calves were in the biggest of the circles. The two smaller circles located the three bulls that were satellites of the main herd. All the bison were well up on the escarpment, the rising slope of open country above the cliffs.

“What's this mean?” Harold pointed to a blue circle at a much lower elevation, close to the cliff tops. The circle had a “2” in it and enclosed a question mark.

“I thought I saw a single down there, then I thought maybe two, but by the time I had the scope focused they were gone. Blue circle is a maybe.”

Harold nodded to himself. Something was tugging at the periphery of his thought. “So Theodore—”

“Thack.”

“Thack, was there anything unusual about the bison you saw?”

“You mean except for the fact they were there to begin with? The answer to that is no. They were grazing, milling a little. Most of the little red ones were lying down.” He shrugged. “Just being buffalo.”

Harold wondered out loud where the survivors had gone.

Thackery said he'd driven the entire game range with the quad but hadn't found any of them. He planned to drive down to the Avery Ranch in the Hebgen Valley where the herd had been in residence to see if the group had returned to it. It was twelve miles to the south, but twelve miles to bison wasn't a long distance.

“How would you know they were the same bison?”

“Head count. That herd had forty-four bison. You subtract the sixteen, that's twenty-eight. You add back the five survivors, that's
thirty-three. If I go down there and count thirty-three bison, that accounts for both the dead and the return. Now, if the numbers match, first thing I'd do is look for a cow with a broken horn, 'cause one of the ones I saw had a broken horn. I talked to the Intertribal agent doing the recovery and he said none of the ones that went over the cliff had a broken horn. So I'd know for sure then the number wasn't inflated due to other buffalo migrating out of the park.” Thackery nodded. His jowls seconded his conclusion.

Harold admired the man's thoroughness to detail and told him so.

“Numbers always tell the story,” he said. He had walked back to the yard, or rather he had charged without running, thick legs pumping, and pried the ax out of the chopping block.

“Huh!” he exclaimed loudly, and the round spilt in two. “Huh,” he said again, and there were two more pieces. He paused, leaned on the ax handle, and looked directly into Harold's eyes.

“I've spent half my adult life counting wildlife,” he said, “trying to figure out what the numbers say about population trends, range quality, effects of predation. It's part of the science of wildlife conservation. But bison, now that's a different story. The only number that matters is one. One bison on state or federal property is one too many to the cattlemen. The reason given for not allowing bison to roam on public land is brucellosis. Bison are a carrier and brucellosis makes cows abort their calves. You know all this.”

“I do.”

“Here's something you probably also know.” Thackery's eyes were alight with his passion. “What number am I thinking of when somebody asks me how many times bison have transmitted brucellosis to cattle in the state of Montana.”

“Zero,” Harold said.

“You have my point. We're fighting a bison war over a disease that bison do not transmit. That's what I call a hypocrisy. And here's how absurd the state's argument is. Say that bison did transmit the disease. If that was the case, the only possible vectors of that disease
would be pregnant cow bison. Why? Because brucellosis is transferred to cattle by cattle licking fetal afterbirth. Bull bison, heifer calves, cows that have already calved—no way they can transmit the disease. Biologically impossible. So that bull calf you found at the cliffs, it poses no danger whatsoever to livestock. Yet the state persists in perpetuating the myth that all bison pose a risk of disease. It's ludicrous.”

He shook his head. “If the livestock industry was really worried about disease, they would be worried about elk. Elk not only carry brucellosis, they are much more likely than bison to transmit the disease, because they mix with cattle on public and private lands at the same time cow elk are giving birth. But is anyone calling for elk to be quarantined or hazed back into Yellowstone Park? Shot on sight if they stray beyond arbitrary lines on a map?”

“No,” Harold said.

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“They bring in hunters.”

“That's right. And hunters bring in dollars. Elk hunting's a three-hundred-million-dollar business in Montana. If bison hunting garnered even a fraction of that, you can bet we'd be a bit more accommodating when it came to where they could set a hoof.”

He leaned forward, looked at Harold with his brow furrowed, his head cocked to the side.

“I'm a plainspoken man, Harold. More than that, I'm a man who believes wildlife management should be driven by the science, not by the politics. But science doesn't matter to the state of Montana, or to Yellowstone National Park, whose hands are equally bloody. When you work for a state agency, believing in science and speaking your mind is a combination that will get you fired every time.”

“Then how do you manage to keep your job?”

“I didn't. Didn't you know that?” He took a step back.

Harold shook his head.

“I was demoted last year. I was the FWP coordinator for forming
the interagency bison management plan, but apparently they were afraid I might insert a few words of sense into the document. I was given the choice of staying on here as a statistician. I can keep counting animals so long as I don't try to tell anyone what the numbers mean. I would have been fired outright if they hadn't been worried that I'd go to the press and make a stink. This way they can bury me in the boonies where there's no one to talk to but the animals.”

He jerked his chin, his jowls shook, and the light that had burned so brightly in his eyes dimmed. It took two seconds and Harold was looking at a different Theodore Thackery.

“You better go now before I get back up on my high horse,” Thackery said in a quiet voice. “I usually reserve my bluster for my better acquaintances.”

He stood another block and pulled the ax from the wood.

“I should touch up this blade. You have a very good day, and I thank you again for putting down those bison. I won't abide a man who lets an animal suffer.”

They shook hands and Harold saw that Thackery's jaw trembled with his emotion.

“I mean to go over there where you saw that herd and have a look around,” Harold said. “You're welcome to come with me. Another set of eyes might help.”

“I'd do that, certainly I would, wasn't for this damned malaria. You can't stand the light, that's one of the first symptoms of recurrence. I take it easy, I might stave it off.”

“How does a range manager in Montana come down with malaria?”

“You've heard of Doctors Without Borders? In my thirties I was a biologist without borders, trying to atone for the selfishness of my youth. I helped native people start fish farms in places like Sri Lanka until I got bit by the wrong mosquito. But I thank you for the invitation. Not a lot of people request the pleasure of my company these days.”

“I understand,” Harold said. But he didn't. If Thackery was worried about exerting, about bright conditions, what was he doing chopping wood under the eye of the sun?

A minute later he said good-bye to Thackery's back and heard the “huh” as the blade split the block. People weren't always your notion of what they'd be, and Harold had liked the man more than he'd expected to. But even before he'd put the truck into gear, his mind changed directions to focus on the tableau of open land above the cliffs, where a question mark had been circled in blue ink.

T
he first rock cairn was a hundred yards above the tops of the cliffs, which Harold had gained easily if painfully through a rift choked with thornbushes. From the top, the land rose in a gentle roll to the base of the mountain range, relatively open ground, the rocky soil grown up in fescue, bearded wheatgrass, and fragrant tangles of sage. This was where Thackery had seen the bison, and turning to face north, Harold could just make out the tiny box of the game ranger's cabin. Raising his binoculars, he caught a glint from that direction and wondered if it was Thackery looking back at him through the same spotting scope with which he'd observed the herd. If so, it was a natural behavior, and Harold dismissed any possible significance. He sat back on his heels, plucked a stem of grass, and ran his thumbnail to remove the seeds. He stuck the stem between two lower teeth and picked thorns from his arms, licking the thin lines of blood like a cat, as he considered the cairn. It wasn't actually a cairn that he was looking at, he concluded. Rather, a cairn was what it had been before being dismantled, for the rocks were scattered over several square yards.

Walking in expanding circles, Harold found where each stone had been pried from the earth. One of the depressions was more than one hundred feet away. Someone had gathered the rocks at no little discomfort, for they were heavy, a few more than half buried, and it would have taken serious effort to pry them up and carry them. He could see the circle of flattened grass where they had been stacked together. Why had the cairn then been dismantled and the rocks
either tossed or rolled aside? Harold had to think that someone had not wanted other people to know about it.

Now that he knew what to look for, it didn't take long to find the remains of other cairns. The first he'd found was one of a pair set some seventy yards apart, with another pair some distance down the slope, set a little closer together, and yet a third pair no more than forty yards apart and not too far above the tops of the cliffs. Standing above the topmost pair of cairns, Harold's eyes drew imaginary lines through the cairns from top to bottom. The two lines formed a funnel.

Harold felt a shiver in his bloodstream. The cairns confirmed what he'd suspected even before talking with John Rain in His Face. The herd's panic had not been caused by predators. Nor had it been caused by fireworks or lightning strike. It had been triggered by men, by hunters engaged in a reenactment of an ancient ritual.

From his vantage he could picture it, the drivers starting the bison's flight between lanes formed by the cairns, their scent drifting down to disturb the herd, the hunters behind the rocks standing and whooping to keep strays from breaking out on the flanks, the thunder of the hooves, then the bones cracking as they plunged over the cliffs, their impacts echoes of the fallen from centuries past.

But why? And why this place? And why leave the wounded to die? Harold's ancestors would have finished them off with spears and arrows while women immediately went to work stripping the skins. They would make bowls from the head caps, spoons from horns, tobacco pouches from bladders, fill the empty stomachs with food and place hot rocks inside to boil stews. No part of the animal would have been wasted.

A patch of color that contrasted with the summer grasses caught his eye, and Harold, curious, walked over for a closer look. It was a badger hole. The escarpment was full of badger holes, but this was the only one he'd seen that had been recently dug, the light-colored earth excavated by powerful forearms and claws. The badger had
been Harold's grandfather's totem animal and Harold admired its courage and ferocity. He smiled, then the smile was gone and he squatted for a closer look.

The partial print of a boot was clearly visible in the overturned earth. It was a heel mark, made by a sole with an air-bob tread. Air bobs were fragile compared to Vibram-type soles, and Harold noted a space in the print where one of the bobs had torn off and didn't register. He placed a finger against the edge of the track. The nap or grain of the soil that stood on end when the heel came down, making a crisply outlined imprint, had begun to crumble inward, softening the outline. Harold estimated the track to be two days old, which put it in the time frame for the buffalo drive. Of course it could have been made by someone unassociated with the hunt, but Harold thought the odds of that were slim. He photographed the print with his cell phone and made a few measurements, penning the width and length on a dollar bill and marking the position of the missing air bob. Then he picked another stem of grass as his eyes focused inward.

It would have been no small undertaking getting the hunters to the area. The execution of the drive would have demanded planning and organization, not to mention that the men would need prior knowledge that the herd was on the escarpment. Improbably, all of this had happened within a mile of the highway that ran the length of the Madison Valley. Yet no one, with the exception of Theodore Thackery, had reported seeing anything.

Harold itched at an old scab on his elbow. He had climbed far above the lip of the cliffs and wondered if he could get a bar on his cell phone, and if so, if he should call Martha. She wouldn't want to be left out of the loop if he was right about the pishkun, and it would help get him back into her good graces, their relationship always seeming to be tested, at least in a professional sense.

He got through and without going into detail told her why she might want to meet him at the boat landing at the Palisades. He listened to her objection, which was expected and only halfhearted.

“I know you're the sheriff,” he told her. “But I'm not so sure you have anything better to do . . . An hour, then.”

He saw his face reflected in the blank screen of the phone and gave a wry smile before holstering it. He hiked down the slope toward the top of the cliffs, thinking that he had the answer to the question marks in those blue circles on the map.

—

Martha Ettinger crooked two fingers and itched them along the line of her jaw.

“Pishkun, huh?” She stepped down from the Jeep Cherokee and looked up at the cliffs. “And you have a gut feeling something bad happened.”

“There's a reason why they didn't finish off the buffalo,” Harold said. “I'll show you when we get across.”

“If that's the way you want to play it, then let's wader up.”

She refused Harold's offer of his hand as they began to cross the river, but had to cave when they reached a braid where the current swirled deeper. They got past the tricky part and slogged to the bank to peel off their waders. Above them, the slope rose sharply before reaching the base of the cliffs, the layered rock appearing to glow in the low eye of the sun. Harold led her upriver, Martha wrinkling her nose at the stench of the gut piles. He raised his binoculars, nodded to himself, and handed the glasses over.

“When I talked to Thackery,” he said, “I started thinking about something my grandfather told me about running the buffalo, that in a big drive there would be hunters wearing buffalo robes stationed at the top of the cliffs. The idea was that they would bleat like calves, and the cows would hear them and try to round up the strays. That way, you could get the herd moving in the right direction before the drivers started pushing them from above. The hunters at the lower end were called runners. Once the herd panicked and the stampede was on, their job was to run ahead of the buffalo,
lead them right up to the lip, and then at the last second throw themselves behind rocks or take cover in cracks in the cliff. That's what I think Thackery saw. What he thought were two buffalo separated from the main herd were the runners working into position, wearing robes so that from a distance they looked like buffalo. Do you follow me?”

“I'm still looking for what it is I'm supposed to be seeing.”

“Focus about four feet down from the lip, what looks like a spike. And a couple feet below it, another. There's a line of them. They're climbing pitons, if I'm not mistaken. You drive them into cracks in the rock and attach carabiners to the holes to pass your rope through, to anchor you when you're climbing.”

“I don't need you to tell me what a piton is. Yeah, I got 'em. They blend into the rock color.”

“That's why we didn't spot them before. Okay, now look twenty feet to the right. There's a second line of pitons. I'm thinking there were two runners and this is how they avoided being trampled. They tied ropes onto rocks on the top and threaded them through the carabiners, so they could lower down, pull themselves into the underhang where they'd be safe from the buffalo falling.”

“You think this or you know it?”

“I found the two rocks the ropes were tied to. There were fibers adhering to the surface. I think they'll check out.”

“So your theory is that after the buffalo fell, the runners would climb the rest of the way to the bottom, retrieve their bows and arrows or whatever other weapons they'd stashed there, and dust off any animals that were still alive.”

“I think that was the intention.”

Martha nodded as she lowered the glasses. “So why didn't they?” she said. “Finish them off.”

“Something went wrong. It made them lose their appetite for it.”

“What's that hangy thingy on the third piton on the left side?”

“That's the reason they lost their appetite.”

—

On top of the cliffs, Harold showed Martha the rocks. The coarse fibers of nylon showed plainly where friction had shaved them from the ropes—purple and red fibers adhered to one rock, yellow and blue to another. He edged to the lip of the cliff and peered down at the line of pitons, Martha hanging back.

“I got a thing about heights,” she said.

“That's okay. Just get down on your stomach and crawl to the edge here. I'll hold your legs.”

Her “All right” wasn't enthusiastic, but she elbowed up to the lip and peered down at the pitons.

It looked like a dead snake more than anything else, and she uttered, “Sweet Mother of Mary,” as the realization of what it could be occurred to her. But it wasn't until Harold managed to pass a loop of cord over the end that dangled from the piton, cinch it tight, and pull it up that her suspicion was confirmed.

He swung the purplish-gray coil out toward her. “You get a couple feet of intestine ripped out of your gut, you pretty much lose interest in hunting buffalo.”

“Get that thing out of my face,” she said.

Harold lowered the coil onto a bare rock.

Martha patted her pockets. “I didn't think to bring an evidence bag.”

“My sister fixed me a ham sandwich. I could fold it into the bag. A little mustard wouldn't hurt it.”

“Wilkerson would have a heart attack.”

“CSIs only care if there's a crime committed.”

“Is there?”

“That's the question. Want to hear the theory I came up with while I waited for you to drive up here?”

“No, Harold.”

“No?”

“No means yes. It's called irony. Jesus, you're as clueless as Walt.”

“Look who got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

Yes, and all by myself because you were already up and brewing tea,
she could have said, and almost did before catching herself.

“Well, the first thing is he fell, odds are,” Harold said. “You've got hooves sounding behind you, the earth shaking, shit happens. The hunters may have only spotted the bison a few hours before, so you have to figure there wasn't a lot of practice involved. They got the pitons in place, tied off the ropes, and that may have been about it. So one of the runners miscalculates, he gets stuck on the piton. After that it would be damned difficult to climb back up, and I don't think he did, because there'd be bloodstains on the rocks here. So he either fell or managed to lower himself the rest of the way to the bottom with the rope.”

“You think he could still be alive?” Martha shook her head.

“It's not impossible. Remember that bow hunter who fell out of his stand at Headwaters and got caught on one of the those climbing steps you screw into the tree? He pulled a ribbon of intestine out of his abdomen ten feet to the ground, climbed back
up
to the stand to unhook himself, then stuffed some mud and leaves to hold it in place while he drove himself to the hospital.

“No, I think that one would have stayed with me.”

“Maybe you were on vacation. Anyway, one way to find out.”

“We should have called in Katie and her dog.”

“Not necessary. Man dragging his innards is going to leave a trail you can follow with a head cold.”

—

The blood on the apron of scree below the cliffs had dried to a rusty color. Darker globules pooled between rocks were still soft in the middle. Blood rubies, Harold called them. Wordlessly, for Harold never spoke on trail, they followed a very light splattering of blood drops shaped like tears, the tails pointing to direction of travel.
Harold had picked up a stick and tapped at the ground ahead of him, indicating bloodstains on grass stems and the occasional snotlike streak of something livery. The trail led through a tangle of brush where the man had evidently fallen, smears of blood painting the ground and the brush smashed down as if a pig had wallowed. From this point the blood trail turned to contour the slope into a stand of limber pines, the blood drops overlapping each other to form a thin, intermittent stream.

Martha, three steps behind, walked up to tap Harold's shoulder. “How's he still on his feet?”

Harold frowned as Martha blushed inwardly at the extraneous nature of the question.
Shut up,
she told herself.
Just shut up.

They were now well out of the zone where the bison had fallen, the trail leading into an area that nobody had bothered to search. Martha had a sinking sensation she'd felt on other searches, when you knew in your heart it was time to call in the cadaver dogs. Ahead was a great slab of rock shaped like a grand piano with its lid propped open. A spruce cone had fallen into a crack in the rock and grown into a small sapling shaped like a Christmas tree. A smear of blood showed where the man had crawled along the base of this rock, past the tree, until he reached the overhang on the far side, where his spirit had mercifully departed his body.