“Billy Crowell. Good to have you boys signed on.”
Jonah waved the hire-on slip in the air. “Believe me, mister—it’s damn good to have a job like this!”
From far away, they looked like a black brown growth on the prairie. Up this close, as Jonah belly-crawled to the crest of a low rise beside Artus Moser, the buffalo looked all the bigger than he could remember. Then he recalled he had never been this near a buffalo, much less a whole herd.
“Maybe it’s just the size of the head on the critter,” Jonah whispered to his cousin, who was dragging the extra pouch containing an additional powder horn and cast balls.
They had spent the better part of the previous afternoon heating bar lead and pouring it into hand-held ball molds. Each of the .62-caliber balls weighed a lot in Jonah’s pouch, along with powder horn and caps. And Artus was dragging another shoulder pouch full of them up the slope on his belly beside Jonah.
Once the pair had picked a place to begin, and if they were careful, the camp foreman instructed them yesterday, the Southern boys would be able to stay right where they were until they dropped ten buffalo. If they weren’t careful and failed to read the wind, the rest of the herd would likely spook and take off.
“If that happens,” the foreman had explained with that aggravating smile, “then you two have to hightail it back to your wagon and trail that herd until they decide to stop and graze. Ten buffalo a day. You bring in more— there’s a bonus for you come the end of the month.”
“Crowell told us,” Hook had said, with his own wolfish grin.
“What … what happens—we don’t bring in ten?” Moser asked suspiciously.
“Then, boys—I get to fire you.”
Jonah remembered now how Artus had stared at him while the foreman walked off. Hook vowed, “Don’t you worry none, cousin. We’ll drop our ten, and more.”
Moser had looked like he wanted to believe, especially now that they were bellied down in the dirt and summer-dried grasses of this Kansas hill country, gazing down on a herd that blackened several acres to the south.
While most of the other hunters had pushed due west from line camp before sunrise that first morning, Hook and Moser had decided they would try their first day’s luck by pointing their wagon where no one else was headed. The air grew hotter with every hour the springless, rattling wagon had lurched and bounced over the rough prairie dotted with flat buffalo chips quickly dried beneath the relentless sun. And eventually as that single white eye rose to midsky, the pair began to suffer the torture of stinging buffalo gnats.
Tiny, red-hot, troublesome insects that sneaked in underneath their eyes and into their ears, swirling around in their nostrils and finding every square inch of exposed flesh. They were both so busy swatting gnats and swiping sweat that they were upon the herd before they knew it.
“Them critters are cursed with dim eyes and dull wits to match.” Hook repeated what he had told Moser the night before. “Bridger and Sweete—you remember me talking about them, don’t you?”
“You talk about ’em all the time since we left home,” Moser grumped.
“Well, them two taught me about buffalo—”
“I know damned well you ain’t never shot one yourself.”
Jonah’s eyes narrowed at his cousin. “Well, we’re about to take care of that right now, Artus. Best get your skinning knives honed on them stones we bought you back to Abilene.”
“That’s all I did last night whilst you was casting balls. These knives honed so sharp they’ll slit a flea’s leg up the long way.”
“All right,” Jonah replied, smiling briefly before it went the way of the stiff, hot breeze. “I’m fixing to have me some fun now. And fixing to put you to work for your pay.”
“My share’s fifty dollars a month—right?”
“You’ll work for it too,” Jonah said. “Just remember what I told you Shadrach Sweete taught me: buffalo may got the brains of a flea—but when they get riled, they are a mighty enemy. Shad always said, ‘They get their size and their surprising speed coming at you—all rolled into one deadly punch.’”
He jammed the pair of crossed sticks into the soil and laid the long-barrel of the half-stock muzzle loader into the vee. Bringing the hammer back to half cock, Jonah took a brass cap from his pouch and seated it on the nipple. He dragged the heavy hammer back to full cock and pulled on the back of the rifle’s two triggers, thereby setting the front trigger to respond to a hair’s touch.
“Wait a minute,” Moser whispered, touching his cousin on the shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just want to look at ’em a minute. I ain’t like you. I never seen anything like this before.”
This was as close to an eternal mystery as anything would ever be, but no man would likely know just how many buffalo there were in those four great herds blanketing the Great Plains at the time the Civil War whimpered to a close. There would be those who would later estimate the number at more than seventy-five million spread from the Canadian border to the southern reaches of Texas: the northern, the Republican, the Arkansas, and the Texas herds.
“There just ain’t no way for us to count ’em, Jonah. Like the fish in the sea.”
“You ever seen the sea, Artus?”
“That neither.”
“Well, cousin—to me there’s but one way to count buffalo. And that’s when we have ten of ’em on the ground. Then we know we keep our jobs and made our money for another day.”
Moser clucked. “I ’member something my mama said from the Bible she was always reading to me, words I think on looking out on all these beasts.” He cleared his throat in preparation, then spoke as if in a new voice, “‘Behold, for they are like the locusts of Egypt come to trouble the pharaoh.’”
As his cousin quoted scripture in that foreign voice filled with distant thunder, Jonah turned to Moser, a little wonder mixed with admiration on his bushy, sharply chiseled face. “You said those words like a true Bible-thumper, Artus. Sure you don’t want to pass a collection plate instead of skinning buffalo?”
Moser appeared a bit embarrassed, his eyes misting as he gazed back at the herd while it slowly shifted like a rolling black sea through the notch in the low hills. “I figure on skinning buffalo, Jonah. Always do what I set out to do.”
Hook nestled his cheek along the riflestock. “So do I, cousin. We need us the money.”
“You figure to stay here in Kansas a long time shooting buffalo?”
“Only as long as it takes to get us a small poke, cousin.”
“Then we get back to looking for your family?”
“Now you shut up for a while so Jonah here can get his mind on killing a buffalo down there.”
As he started to relax his breathing, Hook brought the front blade down on the nearest of the beasts. He set the blade back in the notch on the buckhorn rear sight and let half his breath out, held and moved his finger to the rear trigger.
With it set, he inched his finger to the front trigger. The rifle went off, shoving back against his shoulder so hard it surprised him. The cross-sighting sticks fell as the smoke rolled away.
“Damn, you missed him,” Moser said. “Fell short, Jonah.”
“Short?” he asked in that cursing tone as he dragged the rifle back, went to his knees, and blew down the barrel. Yanking up the powder horn, he poured a charger full of the black grains down the muzzle, followed by a ball seated on a greased linen patch that he drove home with the long hickory ramrod.
With the hammer at half cock, Jonah dug in his pouch for another cap and pressed it atop the nipple. “How far short, cousin?”
“From here, I’d have to say not more’n twenty foot where it kicked up dust.”
“Damn lucky, ain’t we?”
“How’s that, Jonah?”
Hook scrunched his belly down into the grass, spread his legs apart for a steadier hold, and closed one eye. “Lucky that shot didn’t spook that buffalo, or the whole damned herd.”
“I s’pose so, not knowing buffalo the way you do.”
The roar of the rifle surprised them both.
