Into the Savage Country (11 page)

Meanwhile, the beast sunk bit by bit into the water. Ferris stepped off the bank and tested the ice gingerly with one foot. I strode halfway out towards the fallen beast. I motioned for Ferris to follow.

“The ice held a buffalo. It’ll hold us,” I said.

“You show some sense there, Wyeth.”

“I’ve been known to,” I said.

It had started to snow, coming fast at moments and then clearing suddenly with patches of blue showing here and there overhead. The low clouds moved very fast. Ferris and I walked out to the bull and stood there, far out on the ice. We could just make out our picketed horses on the bank, gray silhouettes through gray veils of snow.

The buffalo had sunk to about a third of the height of its body and then hit the shallow bottom. Bits of dirt spiraled in the icy water. I measured the water’s depth with a stick. It was higher than my boot tops. I cleared a spot on the ice then untied the binds at the base of my leggins and peeled them up and pried my boots off. I stood barefoot on the ice, hopping from foot to foot. Ferris grinned.

“How’s it feel?”

“Balmy,” I said.

I tossed my gloves back with my boots and edged up to the spot where the ice was cracked and then, carefully, stepped into the water. The muscles in my calves tightened and began to ache and then go stiff and numb like wood. I gripped the beast’s fur with both hands and lifted my feet from the water and placed
them on the thick, stiffening fur, then lifted myself up and plunged a knife in at the neck and drew it backward, wedging my feet on the bulging girth of the great beast, using all my weight as I sawed through the tough, thick pelt. The cut widened and the intestines toppled out and splashed in the water. I hacked at the hump ribs until I’d cut through bone and tossed them back on the ice. I found the gallbladder and punctured it. The green juices poured out around the blade. I cut the liver out and tossed it back on the ice with a slap, skidding, so it left a red streak and melted the snow around it and lay there steaming on the wet ice. I went for the heart—an enormous, squishy, rubbery thing, as big as my head. I cut the great vessels with a splash of warm blood around my hands. When I squeezed the heart, blood oozed over my hands and down my arms. I tossed it back onto the ice and it rolled and wobbled to a halt leaving a trail and a bright splash of red where it came to rest. I cut the choice pieces of meat from the breast. I cut out the tongue. When I was finished the ice was scattered with red gore and all around was that vast wilderness with just that spot of blood and tossed nastiness, a tiny stain in all that white world.

Ferris had started back for a deerskin on his pony that could be used to wrap meat when there was a whooshing sound. Blood and gore rained around me. Ferris slipped on the ice, but was up in an instant, scrambling. There was a native on horseback on the crest of the riverbank, a vague gray shape in the snow, lowering his weapon. I dropped into the water up to my thighs. Something splattered overhead and I heard the delayed pop of gunfire. Ferris rushed past and slipped on the ice and clambered behind the beast.

“Wyeth!” he yelled.

“What?”

“You alive?”

“I’m half frozen in this blasted water.”

Over the edge of the ice I saw our horses fading into the snow, a caterwauling Indian driving them on. There were three more natives at the river’s edge.

“On the bank,” I yelled.

“What?”

“Three on the bank.”

“I’m going to fire,” he said. “When I do, get out of the water.”

I heard the scrape of the ramrod as Ferris loaded his rifle. I heard the metallic click as he cocked the hammer. He was aiming. Three natives slipped behind the bank. I leaped out of the water, grabbed my gun, and skittered along the ice. Ferris fired and I saw the snow explode several inches from where the natives had vanished.

I joined Ferris behind the buffalo.

“You get one?”

“I think I scared them,” he said.

We pressed ourselves to the buffalo. The ice had broken cleanly on the back end of the buffalo so we could lean against the beast and not be in the water. The ice bent as we stood on the edge but it was wedged against the buffalo’s fur and did not break. I loaded my rifle.

“You wait a moment after I fire,” I said. “Get them when they come up.”

“Good plan,” he said, not earnestly.

I pulled up to aim. Saw nothing. Just snow and the riverbank and the gore spread across the ice. Then, to my right I saw the three natives crouched in a declivity, loading their weapons. I fired and they dipped beneath the bank, and when one came up
Ferris fired and they slipped back down again and then they all came up at once and fired and one of the bullets grazed Ferris’s leggins. We were at a bend in the river and if the Sioux spread out far enough they would be able to get a shot from either side. Ferris reloaded. I reloaded, too. We pressed ourselves against that beast, making the most of the shelter.

“Too exposed here,” Ferris said. “If the snow dwindles we’ll be easy prey. We’ll scramble to the embankment. You ready?”

“You can go first.”

“You got the footwear for it,” he said.

My bare feet were pale and bluish and looked shrunken to me. I could not feel them. Ferris gripped his rifle, then sat up and aimed.

“Go on!” he hissed.

It was snowing heavily. The bank was only a gray shadow. I turned and ran over the ice barefoot. It was like running on wooden stilts. I made the far bank and clambered up across rough ground. I threw myself over the rocky edge and while I was doing it I heard a shot. The smoke from Ferris’s rifle drifted past me.

I positioned myself, peering over the bank. I saw nothing except the frozen river and the gray shape of Ferris huddled behind the bull.

“I’m loaded,” I yelled.

Ferris bolted and all the while I scanned the far bank. I could see some of it clearly. Other parts were simply a gray silhouette. Ferris threw his rifle over the top and heaved himself up and landed next to me. We both put bullets in our mouths and looked out over the windswept ice and the lump of the dead buffalo. The snow came heavily for several minutes, blotting everything out, and then dwindled. We lay there, scanning the bank.

“You see ’em?” I hissed.

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“Sioux. From south of here,” Ferris said. “You see the way their hair’s inlaid with fur?”

“I failed to admire their coifs as they were shooting at us.”

“I scoped them on the way in. It’s them for sure.” Ferris scanned the far back, then spit his bullets into his hand and said, “There they go.”

Far off on a distant hill four natives galloped in the gray light with our horses driven in front of them. Ferris watched them then turned and looked at me. The blood was already freezing on the front of my deerskin jacket. He tilted his head and looked at the bottoms of my feet and said, “You don’t feel that?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” he said. “You don’t want to feel that.”

I felt a dull ache in my calf and after a moment Ferris held up some cactus spines. There was bloody gore on the end of the spines.

“You walked on a cactus,” he said.

“Aw hell,” I said.

He pulled some more spines out of the bottom of my feet and seemed to be shoving a few in farther so they wouldn’t stick up. He looked me in the face again and said, “You’re glad you don’t feel that. We better cover those up.”

With Ferris’s help I hobbled back to the buffalo and washed my feet off and then walked along the ice to the place where my gloves and boots had been. The gloves were still there. I did not see my boots.

“Ferris,” I said. “Find my boots.”

“What?”

“I don’t see my boots. Find them.”

They were brogans, light and warm, that I’d bought from Smitts to wear in the settlement. I’d only worn them that day to show Ferris I had them. Ferris kicked around in the snow. He got down on his knees but the ice was windswept. If the boots were there, we would have seen them. We looked in the water and we looked on the bank. We saw footprints other than our own all the way up to the buffalo. I understood one of the natives must have crept up while we were on the embankment.

“They took ’em,” Ferris said.

“They were good boots.”

“At least you can’t feel your feet,” he said.

Ferris scanned the horizon then set his rifle on the ice and stepped behind the buffalo and began working at a section of the pelt. I slid back into the water and clung to the top of the buffalo and my feet made a sucking sound as they sunk into the warm innards. Ferris cut two sections of pelt and cleaned them as best he could and tied the oval sections together with two long strips of deer hide. He wrapped the meat up and made a sort of sling that he could throw over his shoulder. All the while I had my feet pressed inside the beast. It was snowing harder and the gore was covered up now except for a certain grayness on the ice. When Ferris was finished I stepped down and stood on the sections of buffalo hide he had cut out. Ferris wrapped the hide over my feet then tied the hide off with the makeshift thongs that wrapped up around my ankle. Afterward Ferris found his deerskin gloves and put them on and I washed my hands at the edge of the water and got my gun. We were about two miles from the place where we’d been lying out earlier in the day. We’d left provisions there.

The skin that was wrapped around my feet had not been
dried or cured. Ferris had bound the skin as tightly as he could, but once it froze on the outside snow worked its way through crevices. It took us an hour to get back to the place where we’d started the hunt. Our provisions were still there. Our extra powder and balls and our robes were there. Ferris got a fire going and I held my feet to the fire and when they started to warm up I groaned and tears came to my eyes. There were cactus spines wedged half an inch into the bottom of my feet and every time I bumped them I wished I was dead.

“I can leave you here and try to make it back,” Ferris said. “If this is a real storm building, which I think it is, it’ll be two or three days. You’ll be all right with the robes and the wood and the provisions. Long as you can keep the fire going.”

“And as long as those Sioux don’t come back,” I said.

He was quiet. He had not thought of that.

“They won’t come back. Not with this storm,” he said.

“The storm could end,” I said.

“We could try to walk out together,” he said. “Can you do it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You decide.”

“I’m not staying out here waiting for those Sioux. And you’ll never make it back without me. You don’t know the land like I do.”

“I know it well enough,” he said.

“Better we stick together,” I said.

He was quiet, thinking about it. “We better get going then,” he said.

Ferris made new moccasins from one of the buffalo robes. He wrapped the new buffalo-skin footwear around my feet and tied it off, more easily and tightly now because it was a treated
pelt. By the time all of that was finished it was dusk. There was a three-quarter moon showing overhead and it had gotten colder. Tears from the eye froze immediately on the face. Deep breaths could be felt descending into the chest. The moon appeared and vanished many times and the clouds moved fast and low over the vast, snowy prairie. Snowflakes spiraled down among the dim trunks of trees.

We started off, Ferris carrying the provisions, walking ahead, and me walking in the path he plowed. It went on all night and over that time we said about twenty words to each other. It was only, “How are you, Wyeth?”

“Passable. You?”

“Sprightly.”

And more trudging.

It cleared during the night and the hills were faintly blue with new snow. The stars could be seen down to the horizon and spread wide and vast over our heads. It was very quiet and for a long time it was still, but near dawn, the stars to the west vanished and it seemed to get warmer, and I felt sweat beneath my hat and then it was pitch black and began to snow, slowly at first and then more heavily. The wind began to blast in from the north, and we fumbled our way to the lee of two boulders and sat out of the wind in the darkness. We had hoped to beat the storm but we had not and we both thought we would have done better to stay encamped in the lowlands. Ferris’s beard was completely frozen now, just a white mass in the darkness. We began to shiver and then stopped shivering and a while later Ferris stood and said, “Get up.”

“We can’t see anything.”

“We’ll freeze if we don’t.”

“I don’t care.”

Ferris leaned in, put his mouth close to my head, and screamed directly in my ear, “Get up, you stupid beast!”

It startled me. I looked at him, wide-eyed, then did what he said. I got up. But unsteadily, realizing that I wouldn’t have been able to get up at all if I’d waited much longer.

We started off again. At some point the black night eased into a featureless gray dawn. We kept walking. Ferris pulled me along through snowdrifts and up and down the banks of frozen waterways. Around midmorning the snow let up and the wind seemed to die on the ground, though the clouds still moved quickly overhead. Through a part in the clouds a bar of sunlight slanted and flamed the vast gray landscape and, turning to see it, I noticed a rock pillar we called Chimney Butte to the north. I understood that we’d veered far from the settlement.

“How far?” Ferris asked.

“Four, five hours maybe.”

He didn’t say anything. We just turned back north, almost in the opposite direction that we’d been going.

The snow started again late in the afternoon. It stopped. We tried to keep on heading northeast. We’d get to a rise and see the chimney and adjust our course. We gnawed on frozen meat and ate snow. Ferris adjusted the weight so he had all the food except a tiny portion that I could eat as I walked. He was constantly checking on me, though it was me who guided us through the snow-covered land.

Just after dark we’d climbed a high ridge and were starting down the back end when Ferris said, “Wait,” and stepped back up to the crest of the ridge that we’d just passed. He brushed his foot in the snow. He got down and was pawing at the snow.