Buffalo Girls Read online

  “I’ve never been to San Francisco, let ’em have it,” Jim Ragg said. Texas was another matter, but it seemed unlikely to him that the Chinese had captured Texas. If there was war in Texas, half the old men of the west would have rushed to the fight.

  “Even if there ain’t no news I miss Calamity, and I have seen enough of the Wind River to last me awhile,” Bartle said. “What’s your mood?”

  “Hungry, mainly,” Jim said.

  Darling Jane—

  Didn’t get far, Janey, I only come down the Tongue River a few miles. The older I get the harder it is to get started. Some days I just don’t want to move—there are times when it’s hard to see the point. You have your school and have to help your Daddy with the housework, I’m sure you are busy, Janey, people should be helpful, at your age especially.

  Now that the smallpox has died down I don’t guess I have any chores. Over in Deadwood when the smallpox hit they said I was the best nurse they had, the boys said they’d never forget me. Their shacks were miserable, some of them didn’t even have shacks, just tents and not real tents either, rags would be a better description. Ha, I wasn’t just the best nurse they had, I was the only nurse, nobody else would go near those dying boys—forty of them died anyway, I couldn’t save them. I ain’t a Doc, Janey all I could do was cook them soup and hold their hand—I hated to see those boys die, I have been gloomy ever since.

  I may tear this up, why should you read it? I feel I should be writing you about cheerful things, the prairie flowers or maybe pretty sights I’ve seen. It’s not wise to pass on painful memories, that smallpox up in Deadwood is painful to remember, nothing much worse has happened in my life. Wild Bill getting assassinated by the coward Jack McCall was worse and the Custer battle was worse, I lost many fine friends in the Custer battle. But that’s just quick death, it happens—the sickness in Deadwood was slow, I guess that’s why it seems worse.

  I should just get my mind off it, Janey. I should remember what ripping fun Jim and Bartle and me used to have hauling freight to the forts—they thought they were degraded, mountain men ain’t supposed to drive mules, but I loved driving them mules, I’d be driving them still if Custer hadn’t took a dislike of me, Mrs. Custer had no better opinion I’m afraid. I thought Custer was a vain fool and look what he did—hundreds of men died because of him, not just soldiers either, newspapermen only count the soldiers, but many Indians died too, you won’t find finer-looking boys than some of those Cheyenne, I love to see them ride.

  I was never able to get on the good side of a General, Janey—General Crook didn’t care for me either but at least he was polite, Sheridan wasn’t polite, he would have hung me right away if he could have found a regulation that allowed him to hang a woman for whooping and hollering.

  Janey I like to yell at times, why not? The Indians like to yell too, maybe that’s why I get along with Indians, who wants to just sit around and be quiet all the time?

  I am not much closer to Ragg and Bone today, ten miles maybe. I can do sixty miles a day if I get up and get started. Satan can’t figure out why we’re traveling so slow, sixty miles to him is an easy trot. The horse ain’t the problem, I’m the problem—if I’m feeling moody I’m hard to hurry. It used to drive Dora crazy, she’s feisty, on the move every minute, but I sort of turn into mud, that’s what I feel like, old thick mud. When Dora gets nervous Fred gets nervous, parrots are unusual that way—you wouldn’t think a bird would care how a person was, but Fred’s a bird with a nervous temperment. He used to sit on my arm pecking at a silver bracelet a Mexican gave me and saying “General Custer, General Custer.” Fred you’re going to say General Custer once too often and I’m going to strangle you, I told him once when I was in one of my mud moods. I guess he believed me, he went back to his perch.

  Of course Dora would throw me out if I strangled her parrot—I might do it anyway, I’m hard to predict, Janey, I have done worse things than that. Your mother has not always been able to be good—it’s hard if you have no one special to be good for.

  Your father Wild Bill was special, they had to wrestle me down and stuff me in jail to keep me from killing Jack McCall after he murdered Wild Bill, I had a good bowie knife then and I was going to cut his liver out and hang it on a tree. An Indian would do that to his enemy and Jack McCall was my enemy, I wanted revenge. Jack McCall was later hung, he’s lucky, he would have died harder if I’d been the one to kill him.

  I guess such talk will shock you, Janey, I’m sorry, I have not had the advantage of living in a nice town like Springfield, thank God you’re growing up in a civilized place. Out here the day never passes without someone threatening to cut out someone’s liver and hang it on a tree—and it’s not just all talk, people do it, not just Indians either. Jim Ragg has killed three men, all friends—he’s terrible when he drinks, everyone with any sense leaves when Jim starts drinking. The three he killed were too drunk to think or they would have left too.

  Bartle is the exception, Jim has never tried to kill Bartle that I remember, I hope Bartle is too smart to let Jim kill him—that would be a terrible thing.

  This letter is not exactly about the prairie flowers, is it? I meant to be more cheerful, it was remembering the smallpox that set me on the downward path. I may just throw this letter away. Goodnight in any case.

  Your mother,

  Martha Jane

  2

  NO EARS SAT BEHIND A LARGE SAGE BUSH, WATCHING SEVEN cranes wade in the small creek. The cranes had arrived in the dark. Because he had no ears, the old man had felt, rather than heard, their arrival. Their great wings disturbed the air sufficiently to wake him from his light sleep.

  The fact that it had been dark when the cranes arrived made No Ears suspicious. The cranes had shown bad manners, in his view. In the first place, they belonged in the Platte River, not a small creek in Wyoming. No Ears, an Ogalala, had lived by the Platte River most of his life; he had seen the cranes come in their thousands, year after year, to rest in the wide river.

  No Ears had little patience with bad manners, whether in bird or beast. He liked things to behave as they should, and the caprice of the cranes annoyed him. Crazy Woman Creek was not the Platte. What did these cranes think they were doing, straying into such a creek? Even worse, they had arrived at night, a very unmannerly thing. In his more than eighty years, No Ears could not remember seeing birds behave so badly, and he considered marching down to the creek to inform them of his disapproval.

  What kept him silent behind his sage bush was the suspicion that the cranes’ arrival had something to do with him. It was well known that cranes were spirit messengers. All cranes were thought to have the ability to travel to the spirit place, and the seven cranes in Crazy Woman Creek were not ordinary cranes of the sort so common in the sandhills to the east. These were the great cranes that whooped—some considered that they spoke the language of souls, seducing tired spirits from people’s bodies and taking them away through a hole in the sky.

  The hole in the sky was said to be far to the south, near the shores of an ocean whose waters were always warm.

  No Ears had never seen an ocean and had little interest in seeing one, but he had a keen interest in the hole in the sky—namely, an interest in seeing that his own soul didn’t get snatched by a crane and carried away forever, through the hole.

  No Ears thought well of the spirit world; he just wasn’t ready to visit it, and it annoyed him that the seven cranes had come to tempt his soul. They were large birds—even the smallest of them could have stepped across the trickle of the creek in a single stride. Such birds could easily carry several souls, which were light things, as easily blown away as thistledown.

  He wanted to stand up, march down to the creek, and tell the birds they had made a mistake. He wasn’t through with his soul, wasn’t ready to die. He had seen many men die—some had feared it, but many hadn’t; many had died calmly, almost indifferently. From watching these many passings, No Ears had concluded that he just did
n’t want to die—calmly, indifferently, fearfully, or any other way.

  He wanted to confront the cranes and make that fact known to them, but he knew it could be risky. He was old; his soul was very light. What if it floated out of his body for a moment? One of the cranes might snatch it as if it were a frog or a small water snake, and then carry it south through the hole in the sky. Even if he shot the crane his soul might still float away.

  It was too large a risk, No Ears concluded. He had better just stay behind his bush. The arrival of the seven cranes was too suspicious. There was nothing worth their time in the immediate vicinity, except his soul. He might challenge them and scare them off, but there were seven of them. He felt outnumbered—so he sat, annoyed that birds would behave so badly, and galled that the soul’s attachment to the body was such an undependable thing.

  When No Ears was ten, his people were traveling on the Red River of the North and had gotten into a fight with some French traders. The traders, better armed, shot all the Indians and cut their ears off. No Ears was shot, but didn’t die. He woke to discover that his people were dead and that he had no ears. An old blind woman was the only other person spared. The traders had hit her in the head and left it at that. No Ears led the old woman across the prairie, back to the Platte.

  Lack of ears was a severe handicap to No Ears in his youth. Warriors laughed at him and refused to let him fight with them. Girls wouldn’t have him. At fifteen he killed a wolf, took its ears, and persuaded a daughter of the old woman he had saved to sew the wolf’s ears to his head. This effort earned him a certain respect, but in the end it failed. One night while he slept a dog tore one of the wolf’s ears loose. Fleas by the hundreds collected in the other ear—finally, maddened by the fleas, he tore that ear off too. Part of his scalp came with it.

  He never again attempted to acquire ears, though for many years he continued to miss them and for a time was haunted by stories of a Yaqui medicine man, somewhere in Mexico, who had medicines that could make missing body parts grow back. No Ears contemplated trying to find the Yaqui, but something always came up, and he never went.

  After some fifty summers had passed, by which time No Ears had buried four wives, outlived all but a few of his own people, and survived many close brushes with death, he became comfortable with his handicap and even proud of it. He could hear, of course, but only in a whistly and erratic way; what he excelled at was smelling. Year by year, his capacity to smell had become more and more refined, finally becoming so keen that it brought him renown throughout the west. He could smell buffalo and he could smell rain. He could sniff a woman’s belly and tell if she were fertile, and he could smell babies in the womb within a few days of their conception.

  Above all, he could smell death. It was No Ears who walked into camp, a hundred miles from the Little Bighorn, and informed General Crook of the Custer massacre. Bodies rotted quickly in the hot June sun—the smell of hundreds of dead had reached him on the wind. General Crook believed him, too; few men doubted No Ears’s nose.

  Another thing that worried him about the cranes was that he couldn’t smell them—they stood in the water on their long, stemlike legs, as neutral as air.

  Also, it was No Ears’s belief that death resided in the north. The hole in the sky was supposed to be in the south, but in his view that was only a trick to divert the victim’s attention. The seven cranes had come from the north, a sure sign, to No Ears’s way of thinking, that they had come on a spirit mission.

  Carefully No Ears sniffed his hands. He had often wondered if he would be able to smell himself die, and the presence of the cranes made the question urgent. If his spirit had begun a quiet withdrawal, his flesh would soon begin to smell empty. He had often noticed an empty smell in the extremities of the dying, a sign that the blood was leaving with the spirit. No Ears sniffed his hands carefully and was relieved that they smelled fine. It indicated to him that his soul had no interest in leaving with the cranes.

  Then a sound slapped the air. The startled cranes lifted their wings and began their slow, awkward climb into the air. Six struggled skyward and flapped off to the east, but one lay kicking in the stream.

  Jim Ragg and Bartle Bone came walking up Crazy Woman Creek toward the dying bird.

  “Whoopee, crane for breakfast,” Bartle said. He had a bowie knife in his hand. When he came to the crane he stood astraddle of the small stream, grabbed the struggling bird’s neck, and whacked its head off.

  “This is a big bird,” he remarked. “It takes a damn good knife to make that clean a cut on a bird this size.”

  Held up, the crane was almost as tall as Bartle, though not quite, Bartle being a shade over six feet tall. In his youth the older mountain men had called him Tall Boy and had assigned him the deeper beaver ponds. Jim Ragg, stumpy by contrast, could barely have kept his nose above water in some of the ponds where Bartle trapped.

  Jim Ragg set down his gun and blanket and began to look for firewood. He had shot the crane in the head so as to spoil as little meat as possible, but Bartle whacked the bird’s head off without commenting on the shot. Bartle could have shot at the crane for a week and not managed to hit it in the head; it was typical that he would compliment his own knife rather than the shot. Bartle liked to be the best at everything, but in fact was only an average shot. Brilliant shots made by others were always ignored.

  Jim scanned the barren plain and didn’t see much firewood, but both men saw No Ears squatting behind a sage bush fifty or sixty yards away.

  “Would you be willing to join us for breakfast, or do you prefer just to sit out there and smell yourself?” Bartle yelled.

  Of course No Ears expected to be asked to breakfast. He had known the mountain men since they were youths and had helped them on many occasions when they were less experienced and might not have survived. He had lingered behind the bush merely to enjoy a moment of relief at the departure of the cranes—the birds’ behavior had shocked him badly.

  He stood up and started toward the creek, but before he had taken three steps Bartle yelled at him again.

  “Bring some of that bush with you,” Bartle yelled. “There ain’t much wood around here.”

  No Ears ignored this order, as he did most orders. This was another instance of how a handicap could be useful. He could actually hear fairly well but was careful to leave the impression that his hearing was hopelessly damaged. Pretending not to hear always worked better with men than with women. When women gave an order they didn’t care if you could hear it or not, they just wanted it obeyed.

  “I wish you’d brought the bush,” Bartle said, when No Ears walked up. “Cranes are tasty, but not if you’re eating them raw.”

  “I saw some wood yesterday,” No Ears remarked. “It is not too far from here. We could take the bird where the wood is and cook it there. I would have brought the wood with me but I didn’t know anyone was in Wyoming.”

  “How far is the wood?” Jim asked. “How far and which direction? We ain’t very interested in traveling south.”

  “That wood is north of here,” No Ears said. “It would not take long to get there if we were riding horses.”

  “I don’t notice any horses,” Bartle said.

  “No, I don’t either,” No Ears said. “I don’t think there are any around in this part of the country. If there were we could smell them.”

  “How far’s the wood if we walk?” Jim Ragg asked, anxious to know whether the wood was within a feasible distance. Once Bartle and No Ears got a conversation started, securing practical information became extremely hard.

  No Ears began to have doubts about when he had actually seen the wood. It seemed to him that he had seen it the day before, but he knew that his mind had begun to jump around, like a frog or a grasshopper. Perhaps he had seen the wood ten years ago, or even twenty. The wood had been part of a wagon that had fallen to pieces, and it lay in a little gully not far from Crazy Woman Creek.

  “If we walk we will be there before we pis
s the next time,” No Ears said. “It is about that far, if it is there.”

  “Oh, if it’s there,” Bartle said. “I’m not walking two hours on the strength of an if.”

  “Me neither,” Jim Ragg said, gutting the crane.

  “Excuse me, I’ll go cut off some of that bush,” No Ears said.

  Darling Jane—

  At this rate I’ll be a year older before I get south of the Bighorns, Satan is disgusted. If he could he’d take up with somebody who covers ground a little faster.

  What slowed me up today was three nervous soldiers, not one of them full-grown men. They didn’t used to let boys that young soldier out here, but now that they think they’ve got the Indians whipped it’s anything goes—I guess they’ll be signing up little girls next, so watch out Janey, don’t be tricked.

  The three boys were hauling some goods over to the Crow agency, they had never been there before and were afraid they’d get lost. I told them they might miss the agency but it would be hard to miss the Crow, they’re everywhere, they’ll be helping you unload the wagon before you can even get stopped.

  It’s not getting lost these boys had on their minds, Janey, it’s the Cheyenne. There’s only a few Cheyenne now but they have a big reputation, they’ve earned it too. These boys don’t know their Indians either, they seem to think old Crazy Horse might ride up and scalp them, I mentioned that he was a Sioux, but it did no good. I think some sergeant has been teasing them, telling them Crazy Horse is still alive. I don’t know why grown men think it is such fun to scare boys.

  The upshot was that I rode over to the Rosebud with them and pointed them on their way, they were sorry to see me go, they all miss their mothers I imagine. Since I had traveled that far out of my way I thought I might as well go visit my friend Mrs. Elkshoulders. She talked a blue streak, mostly in Cheyenne, I didn’t understand half of it but she is a loyal friend. When Dora DuFran was all but dead Mrs. Elkshoulders come all the way to Miles City with her ointments and herbs and Dora pulled through, without Mrs. Elk as I call her, Dora would be gone.