Tie My Bones to Her Back (19 page)

“Now get inside the buffalo, where its innards were.”

“Da drinnen?”

Steam continued to boil from the gaping stomach walls, carrying with it the hot, strong, sickly-sweet stench of blood. She could see more blood pooled deep in the bottom of the cavity.

“Ja schnell, sonst frierst du
.”

She stared blankly up at him.

“You must, Jennchen,” he said more gently. “If you don’t, you’ll surely freeze to death.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll stay close to the body; the hair will keep me warm enough, and I’m out of the goddamned wind.”

“Shoot Vixen. I can fit inside her, and you in the buffalo.”

“We’ll need her when the storm blows over. With redskins hunting us, we wouldn’t stand a chance afoot. Don’t worry about me, I’ll lie up against the buffalo’s side; it’ll keep me out of the wind and warm enough when the snow drifts over.”

“Take this shirt, anyway,” Jenny said. “It’s your old one, good warm wool.” She pulled it off, shook the snow from it, and handed it to him. Otto cut the buffalo liver in two and gave Jenny her portion. Then she crawled into the hot, rank carcass. It was like descending into a steaming red cavern, a sudden gateway to hell. At once she was soaked in blood, hot, slippery on her bare hands and face, sticky in her hair. She gagged involuntarily, gulping for air. But at least I’m finally warm, she thought, and with that realization her body began to relax.

Otto pushed the body cavity closed as tightly as he could, sat against the buffalo cow’s warm belly, and stuck his booted feet under the gut pile for whatever warmth it could afford. He sliced off more liver, chewed it, and swallowed.

He had cinched Vixen to the dead cow’s horns. He couldn’t bring himself to shoot the mare, he had known that all along. Zeke had been bad enough. Now he got up, untied the mare, and led her down the draw, around a corner where he had noticed a small stand of blackjack oaks growing. The trees provided a lee beneath the bank. He knotted her reins to a lower branch, unsaddled her, took the horse blanket off her back and folded it over his arm, patted Vixen on the rump, and hiked back up to the dead buffalo. He hunkered in the lee, out of the wind, pulled the wool shirt up over his ears and face, threw the saddle blanket over his back and shoulders, wrapped it tightly, tucked his hands into his crotch, and tried not to shiver.

Already, he noticed, the blood on his wrists was frozen.

The wind howled like a pack of white buffalo wolves. He settled back and waited for morning . . .

14

T
HE STORM BLEW
out by noon of the following day. As the wind died, the temperature dropped below freezing. From the draws where cottonwoods grew came sharp explosions as the sap in their trunks expanded and split the boles at their weakest places.

Tom and his Elk Soldiers had found a deep, hard-packed drift on the lee slope of a swale and with knives and rifle butts had excavated a snow cave for themselves. Crazy for Horses had cut some poles from a clump of Osage orange saplings and spent much of the night making two pairs of snowshoes from the limber wood. He bent the poles into circles, tied them with rawhide thongs sliced from his apishamore, and webbed them with more of the leather. Walks like Badger’s shoulder wound was ugly but would not kill him. The big bullet had nicked a bone but passed completely through the right shoulder, so that Tom could poke a stick in one end and feel nothing until it emerged from the other side. Walks felt something, all right, but did not complain. Cut Ear built a fire of tinder he kept in a parfleche bag, feeding it with small sticks of wind-brittle Osage orange, then later with buffalo chips he’d dug out of the snow and dried beside the fire. The ceiling of the snow cave glazed over from the fire’s heat and reflected it back on the Elk Soldiers. They ate pemmican and talked and smoked from Crazy’s red pipe. It was warm. Tom slept.

J
ENNY WAS WARM
, too, at least far warmer than she had been outside the buffalo. After a while she no longer gagged on the bites of raw liver and tallow she sliced and chewed. Nor could she smell the rank blood reek that had nauseated her at first. She worried about Otto, out there in the cold, until at last she, too, fell asleep.

When she finally awoke, stiff from her cramped position and with shards of horrid but fast-fading nightmares still bucking through her mind, the wind seemed to have gone silent. She called out to Otto. Silence. She called again, louder, and tried to push open the cow’s belly. She couldn’t do it. The carcass was frozen shut. Panic . . . she had to get out. She could see sunlight, blazing white, through a few small crevices in the slit. She drew the skinning knife with difficulty from where she’d stuck it between two ribs and inserted the point in one of the crevices. She used it as a pry bar. She got to her knees, agony in the restricted space, and pushed upward on the rib cage with her shoulders and back, still prying with the knife. Then the knife blade cracked off near the haft. The steel was too cold, too brittle. Her breath caught in her throat and for a horrible moment she couldn’t inhale. Her heart hammered wildly.

She inhaled.

Sei ruhig, Madl
, she thought. Calm yourself, girl! Take a slow, deep breath. And
think!

T
HREE RAVENS IN
ragged formation flapped over the ocean of snow. Their sharp eyes searched for breakfast. Instinct told the birds that many animals must have died in the blizzard. It was only a matter of finding them under the white blanket, a rump or hoof or horn poking out, and they would begin feeding.

Tom had been watching them for twenty minutes now as he and Crazy resumed their hunt on snowshoes for Otto. The snow was blinding and both Elk Soldiers had smeared soot from the fire on their cheekbones and eyelids. We look like raccoons, Tom thought. One of the ravens suddenly swerved in midair, croaking to its partners. They all peeled off and dove for something at the bottom of a draw. Crazy grunted as he watched them. “Over there,” Tom said. Crazy smiled. They slogged through snow that came halfway up their shins even with the big bear-paw webs on their feet.

As they neared the draw, they saw the hoofprints of a horse leading into it, almost filled now with blowing snow, and then the fresher hoofprints of two horses leading out and to the south. A man on horseback had gone down into the draw and fetched out a horse that had been hidden there. Tom reached into the bottom of one of the holes the horses had left in the snow and felt carefully around the hoofprint. The animals had worn iron shoes. White-spider ponies. The tracks had been made no earlier than two or three hours ago, just about an hour after first light.

Tom and Crazy paused at the lip of the draw and studied it carefully. Tom saw the carcass of a buffalo cow three-quarters buried in the snow. That’s what the ravens had seen. The meat-eater birds were perched now in some oaks a short distance down the draw, where the horses had emerged earlier. That’s where the second horse must have been hidden. Tom’s eyes shifted back to the buffalo carcass. It seemed to him that the dead buffalo was moving. Crazy saw it, too. His eyes widened.

The sun had been beating down on the black buffalo hide for a couple of hours now, with ever-increasing heat. The frozen buffalo was out of the wind and the reflective snow had helped the sun to thaw it. Tom and Crazy watched the buffalo’s ribs heave, once, twice, three times. They heard an icy, crackling sound. The buffalo cow’s belly split open. A human figure, armored in blood-red ice, stepped out. Staggered, reeled around, stretched its arms. The human pulled a cap from its head. Long yellow hair cascaded to the human’s shoulder, and it shook its head, breathing deeply through its wide, bloody mouth.

“E-hyoph-sta,” Crazy said in a trembling voice. “Yellow-Haired Woman.”

“Jenny,” Tom said. She looked up.

“S
O YOU FOUND
her horse,” Milo said. “What about the bitch herself?”

Raleigh leaned over and backhanded Milo across the mouth. “Goddamnit, I told you not to call her that, you cracker piece of shit!” He pulled the Whitney from his belt and thumbed back the hammer.

Milo shut up. He spit a mouthful of blood into the fire, took another swallow of whiskey, and sulked. The barrel was running low. Raleigh let down the hammer and reholstered the pistol. He was glad to see that the Georgian had at least made a fresh pot of coffee. He poured himself a cup, drew half an inch of bourbon into it, and slumped by the fire. He had hunted for Jenny since noon the previous day, more than twenty-four hours of arctic cold and howling wind and near-blindness, stopping only briefly to sleep huddled beside his horse in a hollow under the buffalo robes he’d brought along in anticipation of saving her from the storm.

He’d resumed the search at first light. When his sorrel horse suddenly threw up its head to the north wind and whinnied, and he heard Vixen whinny back, his heart had soared. He gave the sorrel its head and the horse led him to the mare. He couldn’t see much, from snowblindness. His eyes felt full of gravel. He found Vixen but not Jenny. He called her name, bellowed it into the dying wind, but heard no answer. He’d dug through the drifts around the blackjack oak stand, searching for her. Found nothing. He didn’t see the dead buffalo cow only a hundred yards up the draw, or the long hump beside it that was Otto, buried under a blanket of cold white snow.

Was she dead? Somewhere out there on the prairie, under three feet of snow, waiting for the spring thaw to reveal her to the waiting ravens and coyotes? All his fault if she was. For drinking too much, for losing his temper, for not apologizing to her right off like a gentleman would of if he’d got carried away like that, and then . . . later. He couldn’t believe what he’d done. His mind shied away from the word. But he’d lost his head when he saw Tom with her. He should have . . . What?

Of course it was understandable—she was in shock, having just learned that Black Hat was dead. Her brother. Her only living relative. Tom was probably just trying to comfort her. What does a half-breed know of gentlemanly behavior? He must figure he’s all white, anyway. Might not even know that it’s wrong for the lesser races to comfort the white man. Or woman. But Raleigh knew that he himself was an even worse offender of the proprieties. An officer and a rapist. He was no better than this white-trash Georgia cracker feeding booze into his fat-lipped, knuckle-cracked mouth and wincing at the sting. How could he have let Sykes even touch her? He should have shot the bastard, and shot himself as well. He had to get out of this godawful place.

“Grab your gear and load the wagon,” he ordered in his best Southern officer’s voice. “Strike the tent and pack it. All the camp gear, too. Get the mules and hitch ’em up.”

“Where we goin’, Cap’n?”

“Over east to Camp Supply. Now hump your sad excuse for a butt or I’ll put a pistol ball through ye.”

“What about the other wagon? And the rest of these hides?”

“Fuck ’em. We’ll come back for the wagon in the spring. The hides can rot along with the stinkers they came from.”

_____

T
OM AND JENNY
spent that night with the Elk Soldiers in the snow cave. Crazy had found Otto buried in the snow beside the buffalo. He was still alive. Just barely. Tom built a fire beside the carcass and placed Otto near it, rolled him in the saddle blanket, and, after skinning the cow, wrapped the stiff hide, hair side down, over that. Then Tom and Crazy built a travois and pulled Otto back to the snow cave, with Jenny following in the trail they had broken. Jenny made hot broth from pemmican and chips of fresh buffalo meat hacked from the icy carcass of the cow. She fed it slowly to Otto until his eyes came back into focus. His hands and feet were badly frozen.

The next day they pushed north, across deeply drifted prairie. They pulled Otto on the travois behind a pony. There were plenty of ponies. The Indians still had the horses they’d taken from the hunters they’d killed. Jenny rode one of them. Tom said that someone, a white man, had stolen Vixen during the night. Probably Raleigh, she thought. Milo was too yellow to have gone out into the blizzard after her. But Raleigh would do it, for revenge. If the storm didn’t kill her, he probably figured, then leaving her afoot on the snow-covered prairie would finish the job.

She had to reach Fort Dodge as quickly as possible. Maybe the post surgeon could save Otto’s hands and feet. She was worried about gangrene. Already his toes and fingers were going dark. If they hurried, maybe something could still be done. And she had to report Raleigh McKay to the authorities for attempted murder. Horse theft as well.

Don’t be silly, she told herself. They won’t do a damned thing. What could she prove, anyway? She had only Tom’s word for it, and even he hadn’t seen the thief. What if Vixen had just broke loose and drifted off in the storm? And would a U.S. marshal or an Army officer believe the word of a half-breed Cheyenne?

T
HEY REACHED
F
ORT
Dodge two days later, having made good time north of the Arkansas River, where the snow hadn’t fallen. The three Cheyennes had left them, riding on to the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas on some mysterious mission of their own. After Jenny explained their situation, the officer of the day escorted her to Colonel Dodge’s quarters.