Days Without End

CHAPTER TWO

ALL THIS TO SAY, we joined up together. Well, our old business has gone bust just from what nature does naturally to the body. Soon after training we were being hiked out across the Oregon trail towards California. It was supposed to be weeks and weeks of riding and then turn left at some place I forget, otherwise you would find yourself in Oregon. It was supposed to be and it was. Lots of dilapidated Indians in Missouri as we rode through, they were even riding the rivers, moving about a great deal anyhows, some of them travelling to get their government annuities maybe, even as far as up Canada way. Sad, dirty-looking people. And plenty of New Englanders heading west, maybe a few Scandinavians, but mostly Americans, upping sticks and off they’d go. You kept away from the Mormons heading into Utah, you couldn’t trust those mad boys. They had the devil’s rep. If you fight them you got to kill them, our sergeant said, but I don’t know if he ever did. Then you had the desert that wasn’t really a desert. Lots of bones of pilgrims’ cattle though, and now and then along the way, a piano thrown out from a wagon, or a cupboard, as the oxen weakened at their task. Drought was the worst thing there. It was a mighty queer thing to see a black piano in the half-true desert.

Hey, John Cole, what in the name of tarnation that piano doing there in the dust?

Must be looking for a saloon, he says.

Man, we were laughing. The sergeant gave us his black look, but the major ignored us, he was probably thinking about that desert. Where’s the water going to come from in a few days, when the water-bottles are empty? We were hoping he had a map, something marked there, we hoped he had. People had been coming through there for a few years now, they said the trail was widening all the time, a mile-wide dirty mark on the prairie, every time army came through they noticed. Half of our company were crusty older men, we wondered they could still ride, some of them. It’s hard on the bollocks, and the lower back, God damn it. But how else were they to live? You rode or you died. It was always a dangerous route. One of the young men like us, that was the aforementioned Watchorn, the last year had seen wagons spread out in their hundreds, and he saw a great herd of buffalo stampede right across them, hundreds of wagoners trampled and killed. That time we were passing, he reckoned the buffalo were keeping away, he didn’t know why. They didn’t like this class of humans maybe. Never seemed to mind the Indians much. White boys were noisy smelly sonsabitches maybe, Watchorn opined. And all their whiny, caterwauling, snot-nosed kids going out to California, or up to Oregon. But all the same, said Trooper Watchorn, yep, I do wants a parcel of kids myself someday. He reckoned he would like fourteen, like his ma. He was a Catholic man, rare in America outside the Irish, but then, he was Irish, or his pa had been, in the long ago. So he said. Watchorn had a fine face, a beautiful face, he looked like a president on a coin, but he was awful damn small, maybe five foot and one measly inch, on a horse it made no odds, he just rode on a short stirrup, that worked well. He was an exceptionally agreeable man, yes, indeed.

We were out there, on the longer grass then, nearer the mountains, just passing along. We were going into someplace to get our close orders. The major knew already though, John Cole said, because he had heard him talking in the night. As for night, we slept on the ground just as we were, our uniforms stinking, the pickets guarding the horses, the horses muttering all through the small hours, talking to God as John Cole said. He couldn’t make that lingo out. It was going to be a week of riding yet, us three hundred souls, and now our scouts came in, two Shawnee lads with their sign language as good as words, and told us they’d seen buffalo seven miles to the north-east, so we were going to choose a party tomorrow to go north and try and kill a few. If I was not the best shot of three hundred I was a liar. I don’t know why, I never shot a gun till training. You got a beady eye, said the drill sergeant. I could soon shoot a hare dead, centre of the head, a hundred feet, no trouble. Better not starve before we go to do our work. We knew in our hearts our work was to be Indians. People in California wanted rid of them. Wanted them routed out. Troopers couldn’t take the bounty legal-wise of course but someone high up had agreed to help. There was two dollars per scalp for a civilian, for God’s sake. It was a funny way to earn your card-money. Volunteers were going out and shoot maybe sixty bucks and bring the bodies in.

The major said he liked Indians well enough, he couldn’t see the harm in those Diggers, so called. They’re not the same as the Indians on the plains, he said. Diggers didn’t even have horses, he said, and this time of year you could find them all in one place praying. The major had a melancholy sort of look when he said this, like he had said too darn much, or maybe knew too much. I was looking at him. The sergeant, his name was Wellington, snorted through his dusty nostrils. Goddamn Injuns, we’ll show ’em, he said, all to himself nearly, grinning, as if he were among pals, which he was not. No one could prize a man with a tongue like a bolus of knives. He hated the Irish, said the English were stupid, the Germans worse. Where the hell was he from? John Cole wanted to know. Little village, he said, you never heard of it. Did he say Detroit? We didn’t know what that sergeant was saying half the time, because he kind of laughed when he talked, except when he was giving orders, then all was clear enough. Forward! Advance! Slacken off! Dismount! It made our Irish, English and German ears sore.

So what happens next day was me and John Cole and Watchorn himself and also a nice sonofabitch called Pearl, we went up with the scouts to find that herd. We came into marshy ground first but the Shawnee boys knew the path through and we weaved along it content enough. Cook had put some of his cooked sparrows in our stomachs. We were after something bigger. Shawnees, seem to remember one of them was called Birdsong, as it happens, cool-minded, timber-skinned boys they were, giving themselves the old information in their own lingo, had done up their prayer bags the night before. Kinda lucky charms they liked to put together in an old bag made from the scrotum of a buffalo. They were lashed to their ponies’ necks now, they rode without saddles. Long before we had news of it, they were going slower, they knew something was close, they brought us about a mile sideways so we could start to work in up the wind. There was a big low sickle-shaped hill before us, covered in a dark grass, and the country there was quiet and almost windless, except for a sound you were guessing might be the sound of the sea. There was no sea thereabouts, we knew. Then we breasted the hill, it was giving a horizon of maybe four miles, and I drew in my breath, amazed, because right down below us was a herd of maybe two or three thousand buffalo. They musta taken a vow of silence that morning. Shawnees now were putting their ponies into a polite trotting, and ourselves likewise, we were to go down as close to the buffalo as we could without stirring them. Maybe buffalo isn’t the smartest chicken in the coop. We had the wind in our faces such as it was. We knew as soon as they felt us there was going to be fireworks. Sure enough, the nearest dozen must of felt us. They started to stumble forward all of a sudden, nearly falling down. We must have smelled like death to them. We hoped we did. Birdsong kicked forward and we kicked forward, John Cole was a beautiful rider, he streaked through the Indians and fled after the biggest cow he could spot. I had a line on a big cow too, must have been that we preferred the cow meat. Then the land dipped again, the near buffalo had set everything moving, it was ten thousand hooves then drumming the hard earth and the whole cavalcade pouring down into the declivity. Seemed to swallow them, every last one, then the ground rose in front of us, and there they were again, the flood of buffalo, like a big boil of black molasses in a skillet, surging up. Goddamn blackberries they were as black as. My cow had taken a wild run to the right, she was gearing herself to go through her comrades, I don’t know if an angel hadn’t given her a message I was on her tail. You gotta treat a buffalo like a killer, like a rattlesnake on legs, she wants to kill you before you kill her. She wants to lure you on too, and then she wants to suddenly run sideways at you, knock down your horse in full flight and then come back before Saturday and stamp you to death. You never want to fall to the ground on a buffalo hunt, if I can just instruct you in that. My cow won’t act out of character, but I got to get myself in close, get a shot into her head as best I can, it’s no easy task to keep your rifle raised and ready, when your horse was seeming to be an aficionado of every goddamn rabbit hole out there. He better keep his footing. Maybe we are moving at thirty, forty miles an hour now, maybe we are sheeting along like the wind, maybe the herd is making a noise like a great storm coming down from the mountains, but my heart was up and I couldn’t care what happened unless I could get my bullet into her. Blooms in my head the picture of the troopers roasting her and cutting great steaks out of her. The blood running down the meat. Well, I am caterwauling now, and I see the other Shawnee now nameless in my memory, he is riding down a most splendid bull, he is sitting back on his pony Indian style, and he is shooting arrows into the bull, who is only a raging roaring mass of meat and hair. That sight vanishes in a vanishing second. My own task is at hand. Sure enough, she makes a brilliant-minded lunge sideways at me, just as I think I am steady to strike. But my horse isn’t the first time out against buffalo, and he skips to the right, like a good dancer, and now we have drawn a bead on that cow, and I fire, and the lovely orange flame shoots the bullet forth, and the burning black steel is absorbed into her shoulder. That girl is all shoulder. We burn along the grasses together, the herd seems to take a violent turn left, as if to escape her approaching fate, I fire again, I fire again, then I see her right haunch sort of dip down, just a half a foot, well, glory be to God, that’s the good sign, my heart swells, my pride explodes in my breast, down, down she goes, a blaze of dust and power, and she takes fifteen feet to reach a stop. Must have pierced her heart. That’s a dead buffalo. Then I got to keep riding, riding away out right, or the herd might swing back and kill me. Then I am galloping, galloping, and hollering, and hallooing, gone berserk, and I guess nearly crying for joy. Was there ever such excitement as that. And now I am a quarter mile off, and my horse is just busted, but I think I smell his sense of victory too, and I wheel about, and take a watching stand on a short run of hill. And my horse is breaking his chest trying to breathe, and it is very glorious and crazy the feeling. And then the herd has passed on, how quickly it utterly vanishes across the horizon, but me and John Cole and Birdsong have killed six, and they are left behind like the dead after a battle, the long grasses all flattened like the fur on a mangy dog, and Birdsong laughing, I can see him, and John Cole being a devotee of silences sort of laughing without laughing, without even a smile, funny old dog that he is, and in the next while we know we will kneel to the task of skinning and we’ll take the best meat off the bones, and lash it to our horses in huge wet slabs, and leave the enormous heads to moulder there, so noble in their aspect, so astonishing, so that God Himself might marvel at them. Our knives flashed through. Birdsong cut the best. He made a sign to tell me, laughing, this is women’s work. Strong women if so, I signed, best as I knew. This was a big joke for Birdsong. He’s roaring, Man, I guess he’s thinking, these stupid whitemen. Maybe we are. The knives opened the flesh like they were painting paintings of a new country, sheer plains of dark land, with the red rivers bursting their banks everywhere, till we were sloshing in God knows what and the dry earth was suddenly turned to noisy mud. The Shawnees ate the lights raw. Their mouths were sinkholes of dark blood.

Only Trooper Pearl looked sad as a sad baby not to have killed. But he got the first cut around the fires that night, the raw meat spitting and blackening in the flames. The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds. The Shawnees singing in their own camp all night till at last Sergeant Wellington rose up from his blanket and was desirous to shoot them.