They came from downwind, every able-bodied man in the band, riding in a great, hornlike formation, a moving crescent half a mile wide. They rode slowly, taking care not to startle the buffalo until the last possible moment, until it was time to run.
As a novice among experts Lieutenant Dunbar was absorbed in trying to piece together the strategy of the hunt as it unfolded. From his position close to the center of the formation he could see that they were moving to isolate one small section of the gigantic herd. The riders comprising the right part of the moving horn had nearly succeeded in closing off the small section while the middle was pressuring its rear. Off to his left the hunting formation was swinging into an ever straightening line.
It was a surround.
He was close enough to hear sounds: the random bawling of calves, the lowing of mothers, and an occasional snort from one of the massive bulls. Several thousand animals were straight ahead.
The lieutenant glanced to his right. Wind In His Hair was the next rider over, and he was all eyes as they closed on the herd. He seemed unaware of the horse moving under him or of the rifle rocking in his hand. His keen eyes were everywhere at once: on the hunters, on the quarry, and on the shrinking ground between them. If the air could be seen, he would have noticed every subtle shift. He was like a man listening to the countdown tick of some unseen clock.
Even Lieutenant Dunbar, so unpracticed at such things, could feel the tension bristling about him. The air had gone absolutely dead. Nothing was carrying. He could no longer hear the hooves of the hunter’s ponies. Even the herd ahead had gone suddenly silent. Death was settling over the prairie with the surety of a descending cloud.
When he was within a hundred yards a handful of the shaggy beasts turned as a unit and faced him. They lifted their great heads, nosing the dead air for a hint of what their ears had heard but their weak eyes were as yet unable to identify. Their tails went up, curling above their rumps like little flags. The largest among them pawed at the grass, shook his head, and snorted gruffly, challenging the intrusion of the approaching riders.
Dunbar understood then that for every hunter, the killing about to take place would not be a foregone conclusion, that it would not be a lying-in-wait thing, that to perform death on these animals, each man was going to chance his own.
A commotion broke out along the right flank, far up the line at the tip of the horn. The hunters had struck.
With astonishing speed this first strike set off a chain reaction that caught Dunbar in the same way an ocean breaker slams into an unsuspecting wader.
The bulls that had been facing him turned and ran. At the same time every Indian pony shot forward. It happened so fast that Cisco nearly ran out from under the lieutenant. He reached back as his hat blew off, but it tumbled past his fingertips. It didn’t matter. There was no stopping now, not if he had used all his strength. The little buckskin was surging ahead, chewing up the ground as if flames were tickling his heels, as if his life depended on running.
Dunbar looked at the line of riders to his right and left and was appalled to see that no one was there. He glanced over his shoulder and saw them, flat on the backs of their straining ponies. They were going as fast as they could, but compared to Cisco they were dawdlers, hopelessly struggling to keep up. They were falling farther behind with each passing second, and suddenly the lieutenant was occupying a space all to himself. He was between the pursuing hunters and the fleeing buffalo.
He tugged on Cisco’s reins, but if the buckskin felt it at all, he paid it no mind. His neck was stretched out straight, his ears were flat, and his nostrils were flared to their fullest, gobbling the wind that fueled him ever closer to the herd.
Lieutenant Dunbar had no time to think. The prairie was flying past his feet, the sky was rolling overhead, and between the two, spread out in a long line directly ahead, was a wall of stampeding buffalo.
He was close enough now to see the muscles of their hindquarters. He could see the bottoms of their hooves. In seconds he would be close enough to touch them.
He was rushing into a deathly nightmare, a man in an open boat floating helplessly toward the lip of the falls. The lieutenant didn’t scream. He didn’t say a prayer or make the sign of the cross. But he did close his eyes. The faces of his father and mother popped into his head. They were doing something he had never seen them do. They were kissing passionately. There was a pounding all about them, a great, rolling rumble of a thousand drums. The lieutenant opened his eyes and found himself in a dreamlike landscape, a valley filled with gigantic brown and black boulders hurtling in a single direction.
They were running with the herd.
The tremendous thunder of tens of thousands of cloven hooves carried the curious silence of a deluge, and for a few moments Dunbar was serenely adrift in the crazy quiet of the stampede.
As he clung to Cisco he looked out over the massive, moving carpet of which he was now a part and imagined that, if he wanted, he could slip off his horse’s back and make it to the safety of empty ground by hopping from one hump to another, as a boy might skip across the rocks in a stream.
The rifle slipped, nearly falling out of his sweaty hand, and as it did, the bull running on his left, no more than a foot or two away, veered in sharply. With a thrust of his shaggy head he tried to gore Cisco. But the buckskin was too deft. He jumped away and the horn only grazed his neck. The move nearly dumped Lieutenant Dunbar. He should have fallen to his death. But the buffalo were packed so tightly around him that he bounced against the back of a buffalo running along the other side and somehow righted himself.
Panicked, the lieutenant lowered his rifle and fired at the buffalo who had tried to gore Cisco. It was a bad shot, but the bullet shattered one of the beast’s front legs. Its knees buckled and Dunbar heard the snap of its neck as the bull somersaulted.
Suddenly there was open space all around him. The buffalo had shied away from the report of his gun. He pulled hard at Cisco’s reins and the buckskin responded. In a moment they had stopped. The rumble of the herd was receding.
As he watched the herd fall away in front of him he saw that his fellow hunters had caught them. The sight of naked men on horseback, running with all these animals, like corks bobbing in high seas, held him spellbound for several minutes. He could see the bend of their bows and the puffs of dust as one after another of the buffalo went down.
But not many minutes had passed before he turned back. He wanted to see his kill with his own eyes. He wanted to confirm what seemed too fantastic to be true.
Everything had happened in less time than it took to shave.
It was a big animal to begin with, but in death, lying still and alone in the short grass, it looked bigger.
Like a visitor at an exhibit, Lieutenant Dunbar circled the body slowly. He paused at the bull’s monstrous head, took one of the horns in hand, and tugged at it. The head was very heavy. He ran his hand the length of the body: through the wooly thatch on the hump, down the sharply sloping back, and over the fine-coated rump. He held the tufted tail between his fingers. It seemed ridiculously small.
Retracing his steps, the lieutenant squatted in front of the bull’s head and squeezed the long, black beard hanging from its chin. It reminded him of a general’s goatee, and he wondered if this fellow had been a high-standing member of the herd.