Shortgrass Song (51 page)

“I'm shot!” Seth shouted as he jumped from the animal with a carbine in his hand.

The Indians had made a stand with the few weapons they owned. Caleb turned Powder River broadside and returned their fire. An arrow struck Seth's dead horse. The rest of the skinners rode up, increasing the resistance, and the warriors began to fall back. Seth crawled behind his dead horse and aimed at the fleeing Comanche.

The woman rose again, and Caleb saw her face. He knew her. She aimed the rifle as he stared in horror. Seth fired, and she crumpled behind the bushes. Then the naked boy rose with the gun, shooting it from the hip. The barrel swept across the line of white men. Caleb shouldered his Winchester, aimed at the boy, but froze. He recognized something in the dark skin, the frightened face. The boy's hair didn't grow long like an Indian's. It was curly, cropped short.

He watched the line of the rifle barrel become a point as the boy levered another round into it. He was too young for war. Caleb closed his eyes and jerked his trigger. He heard another rifle shoot. When he opened his eyes the boy was gone.

The screaming voices faded. Smoke tainted the air. The Indians had escaped into a canyon upstream.

“How bad are you shot?” Caleb asked, riding next to Seth's dead mount.

“Missed the bone,” he said, holding his bleeding leg. “Got my horse in the lights, I guess.”

Caleb jumped down. “Get on Powder River. I'll ride behind you if we have to make a run.”

Seth stepped into the stirrup with his good leg, wincing with pain as he swung the wounded limb over. “I don't think they'll come back. They're whipped pretty bad. Let's go look at that squaw I killed. She was fixin' to shoot me.” He reined the gelding toward the bodies.

Caleb followed and stood over the dead woman. She looked so old. It couldn't be her, he thought. Snake Woman was younger than Buster. This bent and wrinkled squaw looked like a great-grandmother. He grasped her lower jaw and opened her mouth.

“What in hell are you doin'?” Seth said from the back of the horse.

“She ain't got no tongue.” The sickness rose in him again, but he choked it back.

Seth shrugged. “That little kid looks like he's got colored blood. I don't know which one of us it was that shot him, but it was just in time to save your brains from flyin' out the back of your head. He looked like he had a bead on you.”

“It was you that shot him,” Caleb said. “I missed him clean.”

“Really? Damn, I just took a wild shot.”

The eyes of young Medicine Horse were open and staring at nothing. He had Buster's features from the square jaw to the high forehead. A single bullet hole was centered in his chest.

“I missed him, I know I did,” Caleb insisted. How could he tell Buster? What would he say? “It was you that shot him, Seth.” He should have stayed in Colorado to live with Buster, instead of coming to Texas to kill his son. Why did he ever leave? Was it that bad at home? Right now he couldn't remember. He couldn't call to mind what had caused him to drift.

They heard shots in the distance upriver. Washita and Smokey were riding down from the bluff, shouting. A rumble came from the canyon, muffling screams of the Indians, and a hundred horses burst onto the flats.

“Trap the horses against the bluff!” Washita Jack shouted, riding into the squad of skinners. “Badger and Mort went around to stampede 'em through the Indians. Load your guns and kill 'em!”

“Kill the horses?”

“Yes, kill every damn one of 'em.”

The skinners yelped like Comanche and spread out to herd the Indian ponies against the bluff. Seth sat on Powder River, feeling the pain of his bullet wound more sharply now. Caleb stood by him …

“How bad is that leg?” Washita asked.

“It's just a hole,” Seth said. “Missed the bone.”

“You're lucky you decided to charge with your partner instead of load for Badger,” Washita said, looking up at the bluff.

“George?”

“Yeah, George. Some buck got off a lucky shot and hit him square in the head. I think it was a buffalo gun. Probably Elam's. It would have been you if you hadn't chose to stick with your partner and make the charge.”

“Maybe,” Seth said. “You never know.”

The rifles had started firing into the herd of Indian horses, and Caleb looked at the ground between his feet. He was sick with the squeals of wounded horses, the death of George, and the killing of Buster's flesh and blood.

“What happened to the cross fire?” Washita asked.

Caleb looked up. “We all ran out of shells at the same time.”

Washita smirked. “Next time you'll know better. Anyway, y'all fought well for greenhorns, and we slaughtered a mess of 'em. After we burn their lodges and shoot their horses, it'll be a hard winter for the ones that lived.”

Ten Indians were found dead under the bluff. Only two were women, and one a child, although four of the warriors killed were scarcely older than boys. Washita estimated that the Indians had probably carried away another dozen casualties. On the battleground, among the carcasses of Indian ponies and the corpses of Comanche, Smokey Dean Wilson found Elam Joiner's buffalo gun in the death grip of a Comanche brave.

*   *   *

They fought the battle all over again around the campfire that night. The victors grunted sadly over the loss of George but burst into fits of laughter as Seth told his version, drunk as he was on wound-numbing whiskey.

For once, Caleb didn't mind another storyteller stealing his thunder. He felt strangely out of place among the celebrants. He tried to shovel all the credit over to Seth. “If he hadn't killed that squaw and that boy at the end of the fight, one of them would have shot one of us for sure. And wounded in the leg, too.”

But Caleb was forced to share in the glory. He had, after all, led the charge on the camp and fired the first shot of the battle. As he lay under the starry sky that night, the whole bloody scene played before his eyes again. He had to keep telling himself the Indians deserved it for what they had done to Elam.

There were guards posted, but he couldn't get to sleep for worry about Indians attacking in the night. When he imagined them coming, he saw Snake Woman leading them, impossible though it was. He finally dozed off and dreamed of dying horses.

They took George's body back to the South Wichita camp the next day for burial. They didn't intend to leave him on the Pease, where the Indians could dig him up and do what they had done to Elam.

When the party finally got back to the business of hides, Washita Jack decided he would make one of the skinners a hunter. With Elam gone, and Frost freighting hides, and the skinners becoming more efficient all the time, the party was in need of another sure shot. To determine which skinner would get the promotion, he proposed a shooting contest.

He had Mort cut circles of buffalo hide the size of dinner plates, one for each skinner, and staked them against a hill four hundred paces away. After each round of shooting, he rode to look at the targets. The skinners who missed their marks remained skinners. The ones who punctured their hide circles stayed in the contest for another round.

After only three rounds, the field had narrowed to two.

“Either way, it's gonna break up our partnership,” Caleb said.

“Oh, I don't know,” Seth replied. “Maybe we'll both miss.”

Caleb laughed as he slid a fresh cartridge into the breech of the Sharps rifle. “I know you better than to think you'd miss on purpose for my sake. I wouldn't do it for you. I want to get out of the skinnin' business too bad. Grippin' that knife all day is ruinin' my touch on the guitar strings.”

“It's ruinin' my touch for tits,” Seth said, “and I ain't talkin' about milkin' no cows.” He sank awkwardly to the ground, still favoring his wounded leg, and rested his rifle barrel on the tripod he had made of stiff willow switches bound with rawhide.

The muzzles licked the prairie air with quick black tongues. Washita rode back from the targets and announced that Caleb Holcomb was the camp's new hunter. He was given Elam's Sharps rifle to kill with.

Seth shook his hand. “Good shootin', partner. Now, just remember. We want all neck shots, and don't get greedy. Don't do like some hide hunters that don't know when to quit.”

“I'll make you a deal,” Caleb said. “If I kill more than you can skin in a day, I'll skin the leftovers myself.”

SIXTY

For hours he had listened to Badger Burton's guns rumble two miles away. The sound carried sharp through the crisp air of autumn on the plains. Badger used two guns so he could shoot one while the other cooled, and kill twice as fast. He had fired three shots for every one of Caleb's, and Caleb had already put fifteen buffalo on the ground. It sounded as if Badger had finally found his stand.

Caleb could see thousands of buffalo from his position in a clump of bushes under a ridge. The herd he had in range upwind consisted of only about a hundred animals, but across the far wrinkles in the prairie, he could see scores of black masses moving against the dead brown grass.

He leaned against a small bank of dirt cut vertically in the hill by autumn rains. The Sharps rifle lay across his lap, breech open, cooling. As the herd milled, he kept his eyes on the cows that sniffed the blood of their dead sisters. One of them would probably turn from the herd in a few seconds.

Badger sent another blast echoing across the wide valley of the South Wichita.

Touching the barrel of his .50-caliber Sharps, Caleb found it cool enough to take another round. He slipped a cartridge from his belt and slid it into the breech. He eased the barrel onto the forked prop stick he had driven into the ground two hours before and scooted an inch to his left to get a line on the most agitated of the blood-sniffing cows. In a moment she lifted her nose to the air and set out on a walk to the east. Another cow followed her, and another.

He already had the distance figured at three hundred twenty yards. The wind was quartering from the north-east but wasn't stiff enough to affect the flight of the bullet. The downhill slope made some difference, but he had it figured, too, from the previous kills. He took a wisp of air into his lungs, inflating his slumped body to the proper height, changing the angle of the barrel on the rifle rest just enough to cover the base of the bison's neck with the sights. He started a slow, deliberate squeeze on Elam's hair trigger until the block fell and set off the eruption.

The cow's legs buckled, and she hit the ground dead. Caleb recovered from the jolt of the rifle butt in time to see her legs flail loosely as she rolled over. Her followers stopped stupidly in their tracks as the black cloud lifted. The hunter opened the breech and tossed another smoking shell onto his pile of brass.

His ears were ringing despite the tufts of cotton stuck in them. He woke up some mornings with his ears ringing. There were nights when he could barely hear himself change chords on the guitar. As a hunter he worried more about losing his hearing than he had worried about losing his dexterity as a skinner. But the veteran hunters told him the ringing would pass a few days after the season, so he continued to kill.

He had seen a day-old stand one morning at dawn. The skinners had harvested the hides and scavengers had ripped out the entrails. As he looked eastward, the morning sunlight had shone into the gutted cavities of two dozen carcasses, their red rib cages glowing like curved sheets of stained glass. He could not calculate the tons of meat he caused to go wasted.

Another shot rumbled from Badger's stand.

The tune to “Buffalo Gals” ran through his head. He longed to get ahold of a fiddle somewhere, string it left-handed, and start learning all over again. He was approaching his old proficiency on the guitar, but only a fiddle could do justice to a tune like “Buffalo Gals.”

Oh, she danced all night with a hole in her stockin'

And her knees kept a-knockin'

And her heels kept a-rockin.

She danced all night with a hole in her stockin',

Oh, she danced by the light of the moon.

He wondered how Mort would dance to fiddle music. Almost every night the camp rustler staked a hide down by the fire and challenged all comers to outjig him. None was animated enough to succeed. He imagined Mort could well-nigh clog holes in a flint hide to fiddle music.

Badger fired again, splitting the quiet with pulses of echoing gunfire.

*   *   *

When he had killed twenty-two head of bison, Caleb heard a sound behind him and looked back to see Badger crawling on his belly, over the ridge, and down toward the bushes.

“How's your stand holdin' up?” he whispered, sliding in next to Caleb.

“Good. They're tame as a bunch of old milk cows today.”

“They're charmed. It happens to 'em sometime. I killed sixty-three on my stand. Today's my day to make a hundred.” He spread a tripod of steel rods in front of him.

“I'm about done,” Caleb said. “I don't think the skinners can finish much more than I've killed already.”

Badger snorted disdainfully. “It shows that you ain't been huntin' long. If you'd been at it long as I have, you'd know to shoot all you can when you can. Tomorrow these thousands of shaggies might hightail it for God knows where. Then the damn skinners would cuss you and me both for not shootin' more when we had the chance.”

They argued until Badger agreed to stop at a hundred kills. Caleb soaked a rag with water and ran it through the gun barrels with a ramrod so Badger could reach his tally faster, allowing the skinners to start sooner.

Badger used a Sharps Big Fifty and a Springfield Army Model Forty-five. His hands held either rifle with the steady quality of earth, and his eyes rivaled the eagle's. To Badger Burton, picking off buffalo inside of four hundred yards was like spearing pickles from a jar with a pocketknife.