Titus gently tapped the lock of the rifle to assure that a portion of the pan’s grains slipped through the touchhole where they would ignite the coarser powder packed behind the .54-caliber lead ball.
Should he stand or sit or lie for this first shot he would make at the bull grazing contentedly down the slope? And as quickly he decided he would sit, knees bent, elbows locked within his legs to steady the long-barreled, heavy, iron-mounted rifle.
Now he pulled the graceful curve of the hammer all the way back to full-cock. Bass quickly licked the pad of his right thumb before running the thumb across the sharp, knapped edge of the huge gray flint that lay imprisoned within the screw jaws of the hammer. He brought the thumb away and inspected it, finding a thin, telltale black line of powder flash he had just wiped off the flint. Better that this be no misfire because of powder residue built up on the knapped surface.
Then, as he nestled the full curvature of the butt plate into the crook of his shoulder, Bass let out a sigh.
“Easy now, Titus,” he whispered barely under his breath, aware that he was growing all the more anxious with every pounding beat of his heart.
He hadn’t felt this way but few times before—and they all came with being close to a warm and scented woman. Even his first back in Boone County. Amy Whistler had been a woman in all respects, he recalled fondly. Not taking herself a husband as early as most girls did on the frontier, she had instead waited for young Titus Bass, pressing him to complete his schooling before he took up the plow to work that portion of the family lands that Titus’s father would turn over to his firstborn son. But she was like Marissa Guthrie, who came to trouble his life a few years later, quickly becoming the one woman he felt he could truly love with all his heart—in the end both women had sought to tie him to the soil when what he wanted most was to wander.
If either had shown any interest in his way of life rather than their fathers’, he likely would have asked one or the other to join him in venturing west. But with both Titus knew better. Neither young woman would have taken to this dangerous, challenging existence the way he had. Truth was, neither woman was daring enough, nor was either of them the sort to take that grave risk this frontier required of all who ventured beyond the pale. Simply put, he had long ago realized that both Amy and Marissa were not the sort to leap into the unknown as he had.
Taking on a woman was pure foolishness, he had determined some time back. To do so was to lash oneself to a single place, to imprison oneself with the land and young’uns and all the shoulds it would take to near suffocate a man. Better that he was alone, he reminded himself now, angrily. Far, far better was it to be here without some woman’s whining cant constantly at his ear.
Slowly he brought the brass front blade down onto the back of the yearling’s front shoulder—suddenly realizing he had no idea where to aim on such an animal. Then quickly Titus convinced himself he would aim as he would at any four-legged: the heart and lights were in there, close behind the leg, after all.
With the front blade held near the midline of the young bull, Bass brought that brass blade down into the crescent of the buckhorn rear sight. Then raised his sight picture even higher on the animal since he was shooting downslope. With the pad of his index finger he gently pulled on the rear trigger, setting the front trigger to something less than a hair’s response. Then he began squeezing while he held his breath—
The rifle shoved itself back into his shoulder, surprising him as the muzzle spat fire. In that fraction of a moment before the pan and muzzle smoke obscured his view, Bass saw the small puff of dust erupt from the blackish hide—meaning the lead ball had struck the yearling high on the rib cage, above midline.
Quickly he rolled onto his knees, yanking the rifle’s muzzle to his lips to blow down the long barrel as he watched the animal sidestep and thrash its head a few times … then it went back to eating after it had attempted to lick at its side, that long pink tongue darting out against the backdrop of that dark, shaggy coat. It lazily cropped a few more mouthfuls of the tall grass while Titus poured down a measured charge of powder, then sank the ball home within its nest of a greased patch with the long hickory ramrod. Quickly he flipped back the graceful goosenecked hammer, popping forward the frizzen before he sprinkled in more of the priming powder.
Down came the frizzen over the pan, his thumb continuing on back to pull the hammer to full-cock as he brought the rifle up to his shoulder, settling back on his rump.
“By damn, I’ll hold this lady lower on you this time,” he muttered, laying the brass blade down into the notch filed in the bottom of the buckhorn rear sight.
Just at the bull’s midline the second bullet struck the young buffalo—causing him to sidestep again with a grunt, twisting his massive, furry head to the side to inspect his hide where that second ball had made another dusty eruption.
“Shit,” he grumbled as he rocked to his knees and began the reloading process once more, angry with himself for muffing that second shot. It had been too long for him to remember the last time he had needed two shots to drop some game, much less three.
Maybe it was the angle of his shot, he decided as he held once more on the dark creature still standing below him at the base of the slope, grazing as if those half-inch lead balls had been no more than tormenting mosquitoes slapping him.
This time Titus determined he would hold low, down on the brisket behind the front leg, and squeezed the trigger.
With a shudder the yearling sidled a bit, then collapsed of a sudden, his legs gone out from under him as if all four of them had been cut at the same moment.
“Damn you anyway,” Titus mumbled as he rocked back onto his knees, reloading quickly, keeping his eyes on the fallen beast while he did so.
Other buffalo grazing nearby now meandered up to give their fallen comrade a sniff or two, and a few even licked at the bloody hide before they moseyed on off to resume their feeding. While some raised their shiny black noses into the air to measure the wind for some scent of danger, most took little notice of the two-legged creature inching his way down the grassy slope until he was within fifty yards. The first beast to notice the hunter turned his body so that he appeared ready to confront the intruder, raising his muzzle into the air to determine just what sort of creature this was approaching the edge of the herd.
With a snort and a bellow, the old bull wheeled about and set off at an ungainly lope, his warning cry enough to drive a hundred or more before him. In moments the nearby prairie lay empty except for the fallen yearling. Then, as suddenly as they had bolted into action, the rest of the thousands rolled to a halt half a mile away and resumed their grazing, their numbers darkening the rounded hills in places, blanketing the prairie with solid black in others.
The air was growing hotter when Bass reached the carcass, cautiously approaching it, his rifle leveled at the yearling, expecting it just might leap up any moment. Then he caught a glimpse of his own shadow cast upon the grass as he crept stealthily around the carcass and stopped, laughing out loud at just how silly that shadow appeared.
When he quit laughing at himself, Titus inched forward carefully and jabbed at the buffalo with the muzzle of the rifle.
“Sure ’nough dead, ain’cha.”
On its dark, curly coat, Bass recognized the shiny patches of blood where the first two shots had struck.
“Can’t aim high,” he muttered as he measured where that first shot had connected. “And that’un in the middle didn’t bring you down neither, did it?”
Only the one low on the brisket, there behind the front leg. Bass rubbed the spot with the muzzle of the flintlock as if to embed its location within his mind. Lucky, he thought now, that the creatures didn’t tear off once they heard the boom of the big gun. Maybe buffalo didn’t hear all that good. And the way that huge bull momentarily stood in challenge to him, long, shaggy fur dangling over its eyes—perhaps these creatures were half- blind as well as being near deaf.
Easy enough for a man to creep up near them, Titus thought. They ain’t a wary, watchful critter when it comes to danger. No wonder they got themselves killed off back east.
Stepping around to venture inside the sprawl of the four legs, he knelt on one knee.
“Now, how you s’pose a body’s to go about dressing such a big critter?”
Laying his rifle in the crook of the bull’s neck, Titus removed the big skinning knife from the scabbard hanging at the back of his belt. Checking one last time at the horizon to the west and north, Bass hefted the left front leg, locked it over his shoulder, and plunged the knife into the furry throat. Using a sawing motion, he dragged the sharp blade back a few inches at a time through the thick hide, down the breastbone and across the belly, until he was confronted with the huge ham of that hind leg, all but impossible to move by himself. Nothing else to do but try his
