There was a little edge in my voice. “Why do you keep making that sound?”
“I’m not.” He glanced around, but his eyes came back to mine. “I thought that was you.”
There was a noise directly behind us.
Tavis stepped in closer to me. “Do you think it’s your buddy?”
“No, not from that direction.”
The patrolman edged in even closer, looking behind us. “Maybe he got lost.”
“He doesn’t get lost.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
It was quiet all of a sudden, and the only sound was our breathing and the snow crunching as Tavis adjusted his weight. “Maybe he—”
“Sssh.” Something exhaled to my left. “Well, whatever or whoever it is, it’s moving around out there in this storm at a pretty amazing speed.”
“A horse, maybe? Or a mountain lion?”
“No, whatever this is, it knows what it’s doing in deep snow and mountain lions don’t make that kind of noise.” I turned and started off. “C’mon, let’s get going before we—” There was another sigh, this one directly in front of me that came with what looked like the exhaust from a steam train. I pulled up and stopped and took a step back, almost standing on Tavis’s feet.
“Hey—”
“Be still—whatever it is it’s in the trail right in front of us.”
“Maybe it’s a tree.”
“That would mean the truck drove over it; besides, trees don’t breathe.” I leaned forward, but it looked like a rock, white with fissures and cracks running through it, darker than the snow, but not by much. It breathed out, twin billows that drove the flakes floating in the air like a double blast of a breathing shotgun. “It’s a buffalo, and I think there are more than one.”
As I whispered, a low plaintive noise emanated from my right that was answered by a snort from the animal in front of me. I slowly turned my head and could now see two more massive things to my left that swung their heads and regarded us—four, no counting the rest.
Having once roamed the grasslands of America in herds estimated at sixty to seventy-five million, the American bison became nearly extinct in the nineteenth century after being hunted and slaughtered relentlessly. Approaching twelve feet in length, six feet at the shoulder, and weighing well over two thousand pounds, the buffalo is the largest mammal on the North American continent. With the ability to fight grizzly bears, mountain lions, and entire packs of wolves to a standstill, they fear nothing. And because they’re capable of reaching speeds of forty miles an hour, your percentages of being attacked by a buffalo in the national parks are three times greater than any other animal.
Tavis whispered, “There’s a herd here in Custer State Park, a big one with more than a thousand of them, but they round them up and auction a bunch off in October.”
“Including the bulls?”
“I don’t know.”
I sighed myself. “The bulls are bigger and meaner . . . I think we’ve stumbled into a herd of buffalo bulls, so don’t put on your roller skates.”
“What?”
“That was a joke.”
“Oh. Right.”
The one on the trail in front of us shook its head and came a step closer. I could see that it was the packed and melted snow on him that had made him appear to be made of rock, the snow and ice cracked revealing the dark coat underneath. He was close enough that I could see the horns and the broad, black nose that blew contrails into the snow around his barrel-sized hooves.
There was nothing we could do, and nowhere we could go. If we tried to back away or change direction it was likely that we’d just run into another of the shaggy behemoths—maybe a thousand of them.
The big bull took another step closer, bringing him within seven yards of us, but his eyesight, which wasn’t so great in the best of conditions, was failing him in the still fast-falling snow and the fog.
“Should we draw our guns?”
I whispered out of the corner of my mouth. “No, the damn things have very thick skulls—all you’ll do is piss them off or start a stampede and get us gored or trampled to death.”
“So what do we do?”
“The hardest thing in the world—nothing.” The bull took another step closer, stretching its neck out for that much more of a view and even going so far as to stamp a hoof. It was only a question of time, given the animal’s natural curiosity, before he would eventually get close enough to realize that we were not part of the herd, and then all bets would be off.
I ignored my own advice and, humping my sheepskin coat onto my shoulders, I placed a boot forward and stamped it in the snow in order to convince him that we were buffalo, too.
The bull didn’t move.
“What the heck are you doing?”
“It’s what he did. Now, will you shut up, because I’m pretty sure he knows that buffalo don’t talk.”
I wondered where Henry was and then thought about Vic, safely ensconced at the Franklin Hotel in a bubble bath, but mostly I was just glad that neither of them were here to see me imitate a buffalo.
The real buffalo still didn’t move and didn’t seem to know what to make of my performance—hell, for all I knew I was asking him out to the buffalo prom, but as a rancher’s son with a long history of dealing with large animals, I did know that when they get confused, they become dangerous.
I stopped moving, too.
Suddenly his head dropped, and I saw his tail lift and stick straight up.
There still wasn’t anything to do; if I jumped out of the way the kid would get killed and I couldn’t allow for that—the only other thing to do was to charge the buffalo myself.
All I wanted was to bluff him and not send all the others into a stampede that would leave us as bloody puddles in the snow, and I was just getting ready to make a bold and most likely foolish move when I heard a song lifted like the wind in a melody that was familiar.
“Oooh-Wahy-yo heeeey-yay-yoway, Wahy-ya-yo-ha, Wahy-yo-ho-way-ahway-ahway . . .”
The buffalo bull immediately pivoted to the right and then in a full circle to look at us again, shook its head, and turned its wide horns to the right and left—like us, unable to determine from where the song came.
It was silent for a beat, while the singer took a breath, but then he continued.
“Aho, hotoa’e! Netonesevehe? Netone’xovomohtahe? Eneseo’o . . . They are the foolish Ve’ho’e, the trickster people, and do not watch where they go.”
The bull turned again, this time to the left, and waited.
“I am Nehoveoo Nahkohe, Hotametaneo’o of the Tsetsehestehese. Do you know me, big brother?”
The buffalo turned a bit more.
“We mean you no harm, and only wish to pass through this sacred place.”
I watched as the buffalo bull’s tail descended, and the muscles relaxed in the beast as he finally lowered his head and pawed at the ground again, this time in a disinterested manner, as if surprised to find snow on his buffet. Another moment passed, and he started off, up the slight grade to our right.
I sighed. “You still out there?”
“I am.”
I still could not tell exactly where he was.
“Did I just see you attempting to imitate a buffalo?”
“You did.”
“Do not quit your day job.”
I buttoned my coat, flipped the collar back up, and started forward carefully with Tavis in tow. After a few steps I could see Henry in the pale gloom, a tall figure with a leather cloak moving in an imaginary breeze. “We lost you; where the heck did you go?”
He glanced at the buffalo—there were still a lot of them milling around—and whispered. “I was ahead of you when we walked into them; when I tried to double back they blocked my path. I was simply going to wait until they moved on, but then you started challenging the biggest one and I thought I should intercede.”
I began whispering, too. “Challenging, is that what I was doing?”