The major said he liked Indians well enough, he couldn’t see the harm in those Diggers, so called. They’re not the same as the Indians on the plains, he said. Diggers didn’t even have horses, he said, and this time of year you could find them all in one place praying. The major had a melancholy sort of look when he said this, like he had said too darn much, or maybe knew too much. I was looking at him. The sergeant, his name was Wellington, snorted through his dusty nostrils. Goddamn Injuns, we’ll show ’em, he said, all to himself nearly, grinning, as if he were among pals, which he was not. No one could prize a man with a tongue like a bolus of knives. He hated the Irish, said the English were stupid, the Germans worse. Where the hell was he from? John Cole wanted to know. Little village, he said, you never heard of it. Did he say Detroit? We didn’t know what that sergeant was saying half the time, because he kind of laughed when he talked, except when he was giving orders, then all was clear enough. Forward! Advance! Slacken off! Dismount! It made our Irish, English and German ears sore.
So what happens next day was me and John Cole and Watchorn himself and also a nice sonofabitch called Pearl, we went up with the scouts to find that herd. We came into marshy ground first but the Shawnee boys knew the path through and we weaved along it content enough. Cook had put some of his cooked sparrows in our stomachs. We were after something bigger. Shawnees, seem to remember one of them was called Birdsong, as it happens, cool-minded, timber-skinned boys they were, giving themselves the old information in their own lingo, had done up their prayer bags the night before. Kinda lucky charms they liked to put together in an old bag made from the scrotum of a buffalo. They were lashed to their ponies’ necks now, they rode without saddles. Long before we had news of it, they were going slower, they knew something was close, they brought us about a mile sideways so we could start to work in up the wind. There was a big low sickle-shaped hill before us, covered in a dark grass, and the country there was quiet and almost windless, except for a sound you were guessing might be the sound of the sea. There was no sea thereabouts, we knew. Then we breasted the hill, it was giving a horizon of maybe four miles, and I drew in my breath, amazed, because right down below us was a herd of maybe two or three thousand buffalo. They musta taken a vow of silence that morning. Shawnees now were putting their ponies into a polite trotting, and ourselves likewise, we were to go down as close to the buffalo as we could without stirring them. Maybe buffalo isn’t the smartest chicken in the coop. We had the wind in our faces such as it was. We knew as soon as they felt us there was going to be fireworks. Sure enough, the nearest dozen must of felt us. They started to stumble forward all of a sudden, nearly falling down. We must have smelled like death to them. We hoped we did. Birdsong kicked forward and we kicked forward, John Cole was a beautiful rider, he streaked through the Indians and fled after the biggest cow he could spot. I had a line on a big cow too, must have been that we preferred the cow meat. Then the land dipped again, the near buffalo had set everything moving, it was ten thousand hooves then drumming the hard earth and the whole cavalcade pouring down into the declivity. Seemed to swallow them, every last one, then the ground rose in front of us, and there they were again, the flood of buffalo, like a big boil of black molasses in a skillet, surging up. Goddamn blackberries they were as black as. My cow had taken a wild run to the right, she was gearing herself to go through her comrades, I don’t know if an angel hadn’t given her a message I was on her tail. You gotta treat a buffalo like a killer, like a rattlesnake on legs, she wants to kill you before you kill her. She wants to lure you on too, and then she wants to suddenly run sideways at you, knock down your horse in full flight and then come back before Saturday and stamp you to death. You never want to fall to the ground on a buffalo hunt, if I can just instruct you in that. My cow won’t act out of character, but I got to get myself in close, get a shot into her head as best I can, it’s no easy task to keep your rifle raised and ready, when your horse was seeming to be an aficionado of every goddamn rabbit hole out there. He better keep his footing. Maybe we are moving at thirty, forty miles an hour now, maybe we are sheeting along like the wind, maybe the herd is making a noise like a great storm coming down from the mountains, but my heart was up and I couldn’t care what happened unless I could get my bullet into her. Blooms in my head the picture of the troopers roasting her and cutting great steaks out of her. The blood running down the meat. Well, I am caterwauling now, and I see the other Shawnee now nameless in my memory, he is riding down a most splendid bull, he is sitting back on his pony Indian style, and he is shooting arrows into the bull, who is only a raging roaring mass of meat and hair. That sight vanishes in a vanishing second. My own task is at hand. Sure enough, she makes a brilliant-minded lunge sideways at me, just as I think I am steady to strike. But my horse isn’t the first time out against buffalo, and he skips to the right, like a good dancer, and now we have drawn a bead on that cow, and I fire, and the lovely orange flame shoots the bullet forth, and the burning black steel is absorbed into her shoulder. That girl is all shoulder. We burn along the grasses together, the herd seems to take a violent turn left, as if to escape her approaching fate, I fire again, I fire again, then I see her right haunch sort of dip down, just a half a foot, well, glory be to God, that’s the good sign, my heart swells, my pride explodes in my breast, down, down she goes, a blaze of dust and power, and she takes fifteen feet to reach a stop. Must have pierced her heart. That’s a dead buffalo. Then I got to keep riding, riding away out right, or the herd might swing back and kill me. Then I am galloping, galloping, and hollering, and hallooing, gone berserk, and I guess nearly crying for joy. Was there ever such excitement as that. And now I am a quarter mile off, and my horse is just busted, but I think I smell his sense of victory too, and I wheel about, and take a watching stand on a short run of hill. And my horse is breaking his chest trying to breathe, and it is very glorious and crazy the feeling. And then the herd has passed on, how quickly it utterly vanishes across the horizon, but me and John Cole and Birdsong have killed six, and they are left behind like the dead after a battle, the long grasses all flattened like the fur on a mangy dog, and Birdsong laughing, I can see him, and John Cole being a devotee of silences sort of laughing without laughing, without even a smile, funny old dog that he is, and in the next while we know we will kneel to the task of skinning and we’ll take the best meat off the bones, and lash it to our horses in huge wet slabs, and leave the enormous heads to moulder there, so noble in their aspect, so astonishing, so that God Himself might marvel at them. Our knives flashed through. Birdsong cut the best. He made a sign to tell me, laughing, this is women’s work. Strong women if so, I signed, best as I knew. This was a big joke for Birdsong. He’s roaring, Man, I guess he’s thinking, these stupid whitemen. Maybe we are. The knives opened the flesh like they were painting paintings of a new country, sheer plains of dark land, with the red rivers bursting their banks everywhere, till we were sloshing in God knows what and the dry earth was suddenly turned to noisy mud. The Shawnees ate the lights raw. Their mouths were sinkholes of dark blood.