Cry of the Hawk

As he started to relax his breathing, Hook brought the front blade down on the nearest of the beasts. He set the blade back in the notch on the buckhorn rear sight and let half his breath out, held and moved his finger to the rear trigger.

With it set, he inched his finger to the front trigger. The rifle went off, shoving back against his shoulder so hard it surprised him. The cross-sighting sticks fell as the smoke rolled away.

“Damn, you missed him,” Moser said. “Fell short, Jonah.”

“Short?” he asked in that cursing tone as he dragged the rifle back, went to his knees, and blew down the barrel. Yanking up the powder horn, he poured a charger full of the black grains down the muzzle, followed by a ball seated on a greased linen patch that he drove home with the long hickory ramrod.

With the hammer at half cock, Jonah dug in his pouch for another cap and pressed it atop the nipple. “How far short, cousin?”

“From here, I’d have to say not more’n twenty foot where it kicked up dust.”

“Damn lucky, ain’t we?”

“How’s that, Jonah?”

Hook scrunched his belly down into the grass, spread his legs apart for a steadier hold, and closed one eye. “Lucky that shot didn’t spook that buffalo, or the whole damned herd.”

“I s’pose so, not knowing buffalo the way you do.”

The roar of the rifle surprised them both.

Through the gray smoke adrift on the gust of hot September breeze, Jonah watched the buffalo lurch forward as if spooked. Then his breath caught as the beast collapsed, hind legs first, then fell cleanly to the side, thrashing but a moment, attempting to throw its massive head about as if in so doing it could hurl itself back to his skinny, inadequate legs.

“Lordee, lordee!” Moser was screaming as Jonah clambered to his feet.

Hook grabbed his cousin and clamped a hand over his mouth. “Now you done it. Look it!”

“They’re going—dammit all and my big mouth!” Artus groaned. “But that was downright beautiful, Jonah!”

“To hell with the rest of ’em—we got one. Our first, by damned! We’ll get the other nine slick as shooting that one.”

“Damn right we will!”

They embraced unashamedly, bounding around and around in a tight circle there on the hilltop as the rest of the herd sauntered away from the carcass in their characteristic rocking-chair gait.

“You got work to do now, Artus.”

They looked at one another, smiling—a new kinship between them that had deepened what they already felt for one another.

“That’s just fine by me, cousin. Far as I’m concerned—you just keep me busy rest of the afternoon.”

“All right,” Hook replied, dragging the ramrod from the thimbles below the long barrel. “You get to skinning that one out so we can butcher him while I go see to dropping the other nine for the day.”

He was partway down the hill and jamming a cap on the nipple when Moser called out to him.

“Hey, Jonah! You’re a real buffalo hunter now.”

“By glory—I guess I am at that!”

19

Late November, 1866

ICE CRUNCHED BENEATH their boots as they plodded through the shallow puddles that lay everywhere. Ice-scum puddles and the dung from half a thousand horses and mules.

Track-end was always like this: its own shantytown of thrown-up board shelters and wall tents and smoky fires and sheet-metal stoves, men and animals all turned rump to the November wind that came down off the northern plains, invading Kansas where the K-P was shutting down for the winter freeze-up.

In long lines the men waited, stretching out from the tall Sibley tent like strings of coarse linen being threaded through the tent—in one side and out the other when they had been paid off and sent on their way. Germans and Irish mostly. The rest were a motley mixture of veterans come west after the war. Nothing left for them back home now. For most, home was gone, or something a man had no hankering to return home to after living through the horrors that had been that great rebellion.

So these men stood in line again, like old soldiers at the mess kitchens, collars turned up and hat brims pulled down as the few icy flakes lanced out of the low-bellied clouds little more than an arm’s length away overhead. A sky still deciding whether to snow or sleet. And with every gust of cruel wind, the smoke from the stoves and fire pits skidded in protest and in hurried patches along the ground in company with the dancing flakes.

Roadbed, grading, riprap, and track crews along with the hunters, laborers all—paid off then sent into the unknown for a winter’s respite. If the money lasted a man that long.

“Company will be back here come spring,” explained one of the men at the long table inside the tent as Hook and Moser inched inside the doorway, hugging as close as they could to those in front, so to squeeze into the warmth put out by the valiant sheet-iron stove.

“When you reckon on spring coming?” asked someone up ahead in line.