Without waiting for a reply, he turned again and walked toward the spring that trickled down some seventy-five yards beyond their camp. At the spring he removed his shirt; the blood from the buffalo was beginning to stiffen on his undershirt. As quickly as he could, he removed the rest of his clothing and stood in the late afternoon shadow, shivering in the cool air. From his chest to below his navel was the brownish red stain of buffalo blood; and in removing his clothing, his arms and hands had brushed against other parts of his body so that he was blotched with stains hued from a pale vermilion to a deep brownish crimson. He thrust his hands into the icy pool formed by the spring. The cold water clotted the blood, and for a moment he feared that he could not remove it from his skin. Then it floated away in solid tendrils; and he splashed water on his arms, his chest, and his stomach, gasping at the cold, straining his lungs to gather air against the repeated shocks of it.
When he had removed from his naked body the last flecks of blood he could see, he knelt on the ground and wrapped his arms around his body; he was shivering violently, and his skin had a faintly bluish cast. He took his clothing, article by article, and immersed it in the tiny pool; he scrubbed it as hard as he could, wringing each article out thoroughly and resubmerging it several times, until the water was muddied and tinged with a dirty red. Finally, with bits of fine gravel and soil gathered from the thin banks of the pool, he scrubbed at his blood-stained boots; but the blood and slime from the buffalo had entered into the pores of the leather and he could not scrub the stain away. He put the wet and wrinkled clothing back on and walked back to the camp. By this time it was nearly dark; and his clothing was stiff with the cold by the time he got to the campfire.
The buffalo had been dressed; the innards, the head, the hooves, and the lean bony sides had been dragged away from the campsite and scattered. On a spit over the fire, which was smoking and flaming higher than it should have been, was impaled a large chunk of the hump meat; beside the fire on a square of dirty canvas, in a dark irregular pile, was the rest of the meat. Andrews went up to the fire, and put his body against the heat; from the wrinkles of his clothing rose little wisps of steam. None of the men spoke to him; he did not look directly at them.
After a few moments, Charley Hoge took a small box from the canvas-covered cache and examined it by the light of the fire; Andrews saw that it contained a fine white powder. Charley Hoge went around the chimney rock toward the scattered remains of the buffalo, muttering to himself as he went.
“Charley’s out wolfing,” Miller said to no one. “I swear, he thinks a wolf is the devil himself.”
“Wolfing?” Andrews spoke without turning.
“You sprinkle strychnine over raw meat,” Miller said. “You keep it up a few days around a camp, you won’t have any trouble with wolves for a long time.”
Andrews turned so that his back received the heat of the campfire; when he turned, the front of his clothing immediately cooled and the still-wet cloth was icy on his skin.
“But that ain’t the reason Charley does it,” Miller said. “He looks at a dead wolf like it was the devil his self, killed.”
Schneider, squatting on his haunches, rose and stood beside Andrews, sniffing hungrily at the meat, which was beginning to blacken around the edges.
“Too big a piece,” Schneider said. “Won’t be done for an hour. A body gets a hunger, skinning all day; and he needs food if he’s going to skin all night.”
“It won’t be so bad, Fred,” Miller said. “There’s a moon, and we’ll get a little rest before the meat’s done.”
“It gets any colder,” Schneider said, “and we’ll be prying loose stiff hides.”
Charley Hoge came into sight around the chimney rock, which now loomed dark against the light sky. He carefully placed the box of strychnine back in its cache, dusted his hands off on his trouser legs, and inspected the buffalo roast. He nodded, and set the coffeepot on the edge of the fire, where some coals were beginning to glow dully. Soon the coffee was boiling; the aroma of the coffee and the rich odor of the meat dripping and falling into the fire blended and came across to the men who waited for their food. Miller smiled, Schneider cursed lazily, and Charley Hoge cackled to himself.
Instinctively, remembering his revulsion earlier at the sight and odor of the buffalo, Andrews turned away from the rich smells; but he realized suddenly that they struck him pleasantly. He hungered for the food that was being prepared. For the first time since he had returned from his cold bath at the spring, he turned and looked at the other men.
He said sheepishly: “I guess I didn’t do so good, dressing the buffalo.”
Schneider laughed. “You tossed everything you had, Mr. Andrews.”
“It’s happened before,” Miller said. “I’ve seen people do worse.”
The moon, nearly full, edged over the eastern range; as the fire died, its pale bluish light spread through the trees and touched the surfaces of their clothing, so that the deep red glow cast by the coals was touched by the cold pale light where the two colors met on their bodies. They sat in silence until the moon was wholly visible through the trees. Miller measured the angle of the moon, and told Charley Hoge to take the meat, done or not, off the spit. Charley Hoge sliced great chunks of the half-done roast onto their plates. Miller and Schneider picked the meat up in their hands and tore at it with their teeth, holding it sometimes in their mouths while they snapped their fingers from the heat. Andrews sliced his meat with one of his skinning knives; the meat was tough but juicy, and it had the flavor of strong, undercooked beef. The men washed it down with gulps of scalding bitter coffee.
Andrews ate only a part of the meat that Charley Hoge had given him. He put his plate and cup down beside the fire, and lay back on his bedroll, which he pulled up near the fire, and watched the other men wordlessly gorge themselves on the meat and coffee. They finished what Charley Hoge had given them, and ate more. Charley Hoge, himself, ate almost delicately from a thin slice of the roast which he cut into very small pieces. He washed down the small bites he took with frequent sips of coffee that he had strongly laced with whisky. After Miller and Schneider had finished the last bit of the hump roast, Miller reached for Charley Hoge’s jug, took a long swallow, and passed the jug to Schneider, who turned the jug up and let the liquor gurgle long in his throat; he swallowed several times before he handed the jug to Andrews, who held the mouth of the jug against his closed lips for several seconds before taking a small, cautious swallow.
Schneider sighed, stretched, and lay on his back before the fire. He spoke from deep in his throat, his voice a soft, slow growl: “A belly full of buffalo meat, and a good drink of whisky. All a body would need now is a woman.”
“There ain’t no sin in buffalo meat nor corn whisky,” said Charley Hoge. “But a woman, now. That’s a temptation of the flesh.”
Schneider yawned, and stretched again on the ground. “Remember that little whore back in Butcher’s Crossing?” He looked at Andrews. “What was her name?”
“Francine,” Andrews said.
“Yeah, Francine. My God, that was a pretty whore. Wasn’t she kind of heated up for you, Mr. Andrews?”
Andrews swallowed, and looked into the fire. “I didn’t notice that she was.”
Schneider laughed. “Don’t tell me you didn’t get into that. My God, the way she kept looking at you, you could have had it for damn near nothing—or nothing, come to think of it. She said she wasn’t working....How was it, Mr. Andrews? Was it pretty good?”
“Leave it be, Fred,” Miller said quietly.
“I want to know how it was,” Schneider said. He raised himself on one elbow; his round face, red in the dull glow of the coals, peered at Andrews; there was a fixed, tight smile on his face. “All soft and white,” he said hoarsely, and licked his lips. “What did you do? Tell me what—”
“That’s enough, Fred,” Miller said sharply.
Schneider looked at Miller angrily. “What’s the matter? I got a right
to talk, ain’t I?”
“You know it’s no good thinking about women out here,” Miller said. “Thinking about what you can’t have will drive you off your feed.”
“Jezebels,” Charley Hoge said, pouring another cup of whisky, which he warmed with a bit of coffee. “The work of the devil.”
“What you don’t think about,” Miller said, “you don’t miss. Come on. Let’s get after those hides while we have some good light.”
Schneider got up and shook himself as an animal might after having been immersed in water. He laughed, clearing his throat. “Hell,” he said, “I was just having me some fun with Mr. Andrews. I know how to handle myself.”
“Sure,” Miller said. “Let’s get going.”
The two men walked away from the campfire to where their horses were tethered at a tree. Just before they went beyond the dim circle of light cast by the campfire, Schneider turned and grinned at Andrews.
“But the first thing I’m going to do when we get back to Butcher’s Crossing is hire myself a little German girl for a couple of days. If you get in too much of a hurry, Mr. Andrews, you might just have to pull me off.”
Andrews waited until he heard the two men ride away, and watched as they loped across the pale bed of the valley, until their dark bobbing shapes merged into the darker rise of the western range of mountains. Then he slid into his bedroll and closed his eyes; he listened for a long while as Charley Hoge cleaned the utensils he had used for cooking, and tidied the camp. After a while there was silence. In the darkness Andrews ran his hand over his face; it was rough and strange to his touch; the beard, which he was constantly surprised to feel upon his face, distracted his hands and made his features unfamiliar to him; he wondered how he looked; he wondered if Francine would recognize him if she could see him now.
Since the night when he had gone up to her room in Butcher’s Crossing, he had not let himself think of her. But with Schneider’s mention of her name earlier in the evening, thoughts of her flooded upon him; he was not able to keep her image away. He saw her as he had seen her in those last moments in her room before he had turned and fled; seeing her in his mind, he turned restlessly upon his rough bed.
Why had he run away? From where had come that deadness inside him that made him know he must run away? He remembered the sickness in the pit of his stomach, the revulsion which had followed hard upon the vital rush of his blood as he had seen her stand naked and swaying slowly, as if suspended by his own desire, before him.
In the moment before sleep came upon him, he made a tenuous connection between his turning away from Francine that night in Butcher’s Crossing, and his turning away from the gutted buffalo earlier in the day, here in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.
Once again, in the darkness, his hand came from beneath the covers and moved across his face, sought out the cold, rough bulge of his forehead, followed the nose, went across the chapped lips, and rubbed against the thick beard, searching for his features. When sleep came upon him his hand was still resting on his face.
VI
The days grew shorter; and the green grass of the flat mountain park began to yellow in the cool nights. After the first day the men spent in the valley, it rained nearly every afternoon, so that they soon got in the habit of leaving their work at about three and lying about the camp under a tarpaulin stretched from the high sides of the wagon and pegged into the ground. They talked little during these moments of rest; they listened to the light irregular patter of the rain, broken by the sheltering pines, as it dropped on the canvas tarpaulin; and they watched beneath the high belly of the wagon the small rain. Sometimes it was misty and gray like a heavy fog that nearly obscured the opposite rise of tree-grown mountain; and sometimes it was bright and silvery, as the drops, caught by the sun, flashed like tiny needles from the sky into the soft earth. After the rain, which seldom lasted for an hour, they would resume their chase and slaughter of the buffalo, working usually until late in the evening.
Deeper and deeper into the valley the herd was pushed, until Andrews, Miller, and Schneider were rising in the morning before the sun appeared so that they could get in a good day; by the middle of the first week they had to ride more than an hour to get to the main herd.
“We’ll chase them once clean to the end of the valley,” Miller said when Schneider complained of their long rides. “And then we’ll chase them back up this way. If we keep them going back and forth, they’ll break up in little herds, and we won’t be able to get at them so easy.”
Every two or three days Charley Hoge hitched the oxen to the wagon and followed the trail of the slaughter, which was marked by a bunched irregular line of stretched skins. Andrews and Schneider, and sometimes Miller, went with him; and as the wagon moved slowly along, the three men flung the stiff flintskins into the wagon. When all the skins were picked up, the wagon returned them to the main camp, where they were again tossed from the wagon upon the ground. Then the men stacked them one upon another, as high as they could reach. When a stack was between seven and eight feet in height, green thongs, stripped from the skin of a freshly killed buffalo, were passed through the cuts on the leg-skins of the top and bottom hides, and pulled tight and tied. Each stack contained between seventy-five and ninety hides, and each was so heavy that it took the combined strength of the four to boost it under the shelter of the trees.
At the skinning, Will Andrews’s skill slowly increased. His hands toughened and became sure; his knives lost their new brightness, and with use they cut more surely so that soon he was able to skin one buffalo to Schneider’s two. The stench of the buffalo, the feel of the warm meat on his hands, and the sight of clotted blood came to have less and less impact upon his senses. Shortly he came to the task of skinning almost like an automaton, hardly aware of what he did as he shucked the hide from an inert beast and pegged it to the ground. He was able to ride through a mass of skinned buffalo covered black with feeding insects, and hardly be aware of the stench that rose in the heat from the rotting flesh.
Occasionally he accompanied Miller in his stalking, though Schneider habitually stayed behind and rested, waiting for enough animals to be slaughtered for the skinning to begin. As he went with him, Andrews came to be less and less concerned with Miller’s slaughter of the beasts as such; he came to notice the strategy that Miller employed at keeping the buffalo confined to a reasonable area, and at keeping the felled animals in such a pattern that they might be easily and economically skinned.
Once Miller allowed Andrews to take his rifle and attempt a stand. Lying on the ground on his stomach, as he had so often seen Miller do, Andrews chose his buffalo and caught him cleanly through the lungs. He killed three more before he shot badly and the small herd dispersed. When it was over he let Miller go ahead while he remained on his stomach, toying with the empty cartridges he had used, trying to fix the feelings he had had at the kill. He looked at the four buffalo that lay nearly two hundred yards away from him; his shoulder tingled from the heavy recoil of the Sharps rifle. He could feel nothing else. Some grass-blades worked their way into his shirt front and tickled his skin. He got up, brushed the grass away, and walked slowly away from where he had lain, away from Miller, and went to where Schneider lay on the grass, near where their horses were tethered to one of the pines that stood down from the mountainside, slightly into the valley. He sat down beside Schneider; he did not speak; the two
men waited until the sound of Miller’s rifle became faint. Then they followed the trail of dead buffalo, skinning as they went.
At night the men were so exhausted that they hardly spoke. They wolfed the food that Charley Hoge prepared for them, drained the great smoked coffeepot, and fell exhausted upon their bedrolls. In their increasing exhaustion, to which Miller drove them with his inexorable pursuit, their food and their sleep came to be the only things that had much meaning for them. Once Schneider, desiring a change of food, went into the woods and managed to shoot a small doe; another time Charley Hoge rode across the valley to the small lake where the buffalo watered and returned with a dozen fat foot-long trout. But they ate only a small part of the venison, and the taste of the trout was flat and unsatisfying; they returned to their steady diet of rich, strong buffalo meat.
Every day Schneider cut the liver from one of the slain buffalo; at the evening meal, almost ritually, the liver was divided into roughly equal portions and passed among them. Andrews learned that the taking of the raw liver was not an ostentation on the part of the three older men. Miller explained to him that unless one did so, one got what he called the “buff sickness,” which was a breaking out of the skin in large, ulcerous sores, often accompanied by fever and general weakness. After learning this, Andrews forced himself to take a bit of the liver every evening; he did not find the taste of it pleasant, but in his tiredness the faintly warm and rotten taste and the slick fiberless texture did not seem to matter much.
After a week in the valley, there were ten thonged stacks of hides set close together in a small grove of pines, and still Andrews could see no real diminution of the herds that grazed placidly on the flat bed of the valley.
The days slid one into another, marked by evening exhaustion and morning soreness; as it had earlier, on their overland voyage when they searched for water, time again seemed to Andrews to hold itself apart from the passing of the days. Alone in the great valley high in the mountains the four men, rather than being brought close together by their isolation, were thrust apart, so that each of them tended more and more to go his own way and fall upon his own resources. Seldom did they talk at night; and when they did, their words were directed to some specific business concerned with the hunt.