Part One
“My father has spoken of you often,” Andrews said.
“Me?” McDonald’s mouth hung open again; he shook his head slowly; his round eyes seemed to swivel in their sockets. “Why? I only saw him maybe half a dozen times.” His gaze went beyond Andrews, and he said without expression: “I wasn’t anybody for him to speak of. I was a clerk for some dry goods company. I can’t even remember its name.”
“Consider it!” McDonald released his arm and stepped back from him in astonishment. He threw up his hands and they fluttered as he walked around once in a tight, angry little circle. “Consider it? Why, boy, it’s an opportunity. Listen. What were you doing back in Boston before you came out here?”
“I was in my third year at Harvard College.”
“You see?” McDonald said triumphantly. “And what would you have done after your fourth year? You’d have gone to work for somebody, or you’d have been a schoolteacher, like old Mr. Andrews, or—Listen. There ain’t many like us out here. Men with vision. Men who can think to tomorrow.” He pointed a shaking hand toward the town. “Did you see those people back there? Did you talk to any of them?”
Miller shrugged. “Things ain’t been right for it. One year Charley was laid up with the fever, another year I was promised to something else, another I didn’t have a stake. Mainly I haven’t been able to get together the right kind of party.”
“What kind do you need?” Andrews asked.
Miller did not look at him. “The kind that’ll let it be my hunt. They ain’t many places like this left, and I never wanted any of the other hunters along.”
Though afterward he thought often about their walk, he could not remember anything they said.
“Don’t be angry,” she said. “I’m glad you’re young. I want you to be young. All of the men here are old and hard. I want you to be soft, while you can be....When will you go with Miller and the others?”
“Three or four days,” Andrews said. “But we will be back within the month. And then—”
Francine shook her head, though she continued smiling. “Yes, you’ll be back; but you won’t be the same. You’ll not be so young; you will become like the others.”
Andrews looked at her confusedly, and in his confusion cried: “I will only become myself!”
She continued as if he had not interrupted. “The wind and sun will harden your face; your hands will no longer be soft.”
He thought of how he might spend them, and he wondered how he might press them into one crumpled bit of time that he could toss away.
Part Two
Miller, his eyes still straining at the distant herd, said: “I can recollect the day when you never saw a herd less than a thousand head, and even that was just a little bunch.” He swept his arm in a wide half-circle. “I’ve stood at a place like this and looked out, and all I could see was black—fifty, seventy-five, a hundred thousand head of buffalo, moving over the grass. Packed so tight you could walk on their backs, walk all day, and never touch the ground. Now all you see is stragglers, like them out there. And grown men hunt for them.” He spat on the ground.
“As long as we keep going in that direction,” Miller pointed away from their shadows, toward the falling sun, “we’re not lost. We’re bound to run into water tonight, or early in the morning.”
“This is a big country,” Schneider said. “We’re not bound to do anything.”
“All right,” Schneider said. “But just tell me. Even if we do stay around here, how are we going to load all the hides back?”
“The hides?” Miller said, his face for a moment blank. “The hides?...We’ll load what we can, leave the others; we can come back in the spring and pack them out. That’s what we said we’d do, back in Butcher’s Crossing.
With his awareness of the diminishing size of the herd, there came to Andrews the realization that he had not contemplated the day when the herd was finally reduced to nothing, when not a buffalo remained standing—for unlike Schneider he had known, without questioning or without knowing how he knew, that Miller would not willingly leave the valley so long as a single buffalo remained alive. He had measured time, and had reckoned the moment and place of their leaving, by the size of the herd, and not—as had Schneider—by numbered days that rolled meaninglessly one after another. He thought of packing the hides into the wagon, yoking the oxen, which were beginning to grow fat on inactivity and the rich mountain grass, to the wagon, and making their way back down the mountain, and across the wide plains, back to Butcher’s Crossing. He could not imagine what he thought of. With a mild shock, he realized that the world outside the wide flat winding park hemmed on all sides by sheer mountain, had faded away from him; he could not remember the mountain up which they had labored, or the expanse of plain over which they sweated and thirsted, or Butcher’s Crossing, which he had come into and left only a few weeks before. That world came to him fitfully and unclearly, as if hidden in a dream. He had been here in the high valley for all of that part of his life that mattered; and when he looked out upon it—its flatness, and its yellow-greenness, its high walls of mountain wooded with the deep green of pine in which ran the flaming red-gold of turning aspen, its jutting rock and hillock, all roofed with the intense blue of the airless sky—it seemed to him that the contours of the place flowed beneath his eyes, that his very gaze shaped what he saw, and in turn gave his own existence form and place. He could not think of himself outside of where he was.
He thought of Francine. He could not bring her image to his mind, and he did not try; he thought of her as flesh, as softness, as warmth. Though he did not know why (and though it did not occur to him to wonder why), he thought of her as a part of himself that could not quite make another part of himself warm. Somehow he had pushed that part away from him once. He felt himself sinking toward that warmth; and cold, before he met it, he slept again.
He saw himself pushing away from him her warm white flesh, and he wondered at what he had done, as if wondering at the actions of a stranger.
After an instant of elation at Miller’s announcement, Andrews felt a curious sadness like a presentiment of nostalgia come over him. He looked at the small campfire burning cheerily against the darkness, and looked beyond the campfire into the darkness. There was the valley that he had come to know as well as the palm of his own hand; he could not see it, but he knew it was there; and there were the wasting corpses of the buffalo for whose hides they had traded their sweat and their time and a part of their strength. The ricks of those hides lay also in the darkness, hidden from his sight; in the morning they would load them on the wagon and leave this place, and he felt that he would never return, though he knew he would have to come back with the others for the hides they could not carry with them. He felt vaguely that he would be leaving something behind, something that might have been precious to him, had he been able to know what it was. That night, after the fire died, he lay in darkness, alone, outside the shelter, and let the spring chill creep through his clothing into his flesh; he slept at last, but in the night he awoke several times, and blinked into the starless dark.
“I ain’t hardly going to stop,” said Schneider, “except to get my belly full of greens and wash it around with some liquor, and then see that little German girl for a bit. I’m going straight on to St. Louis.”
“High living,” Miller said. “St. Louis. I didn’t know you liked it that high, Fred.”
“I didn’t either,” Schneider said, “until just a minute ago. Man, it takes a winter away from it to give you a taste for living.”
Part Three
“And I aim to hold you to it,” Miller said.
“You aim to hold me to it,” McDonald said. “By God, I wish you could.”
“Well,” McDonald said, “you had your hunt.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you lost your tail, just like I said you would.”
Andrews did not speak.
“That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” McDonald asked.
“Maybe it was, in the beginning,” Andrews said. “Part of it, at least.”
“Young people,” McDonald said. “Always wanting to start from scratch. I know. You never figured that someone else knew what you was trying to do, did you?”
“I never thought about it,” Andrews said. “Maybe because I didn’t know what I was trying to do myself.”
“Do you know now?”
Andrews moved restlessly.
“Young people,” McDonald said contemptuously. “You always think there’s something to find out.”
“Yes, sir,” Andrews said.
“Well, there’s nothing,” McDonald said. “You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”
“No,” Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. “That’s not the way it is.”
“You ain’t learned, then,” McDonald said. “You ain’t learned yet....Look. You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing. You kill three, four thousand buffalo, and stack their skins neat; and the buffalo will rot wherever you left them, and the rats will nest in the skins. What have you got to show? A year gone out of your life, a busted wagon that a beaver might use to make a dam with, some calluses on your hands, and the memory of a dead man.”
“No,” Andrews said. “That’s not all. That’s not all I have.”
“Then what? What have you got?”
Andrews was silent.
“You can’t answer. Look at Miller. Knows the country he was in as well as any man alive, and had faith in what he believed was true. What good did it do him? And Charley Hoge with his Bible and his whisky. Did that make your winter any easier, or save your hides? And Schneider. What about Schneider? Was that his name?”
“That was his name,” Andrews said.
“And that’s all that’s left of him,” McDonald said. “His name. And he didn’t even come out of it with that for himself.” McDonald nodded, not looking at Andrews. “Sure, I know. I came out of it with nothing, too. Because I forgot what I learned a long time ago. I let the lies come back. I had a dream, too, and because it was different from yours and Miller’s, I let myself think it wasn’t a dream. But now I know, boy. And you don’t. And that makes all the difference.”
She looked at him closely; she nodded. “You are older,” she said again; there was a trace of sadness in her voice. “And I was wrong; you have changed. You have changed so that you can come back.”
“Don’t you remember?” Andrews’s voice cracked. “Schneider’s dead.”
Charley Hoge looked at Andrews, shook his head, and smiled; a drop of spittle gathered on his lower lip, swelled, and coursed into the gray stubble around his chin. “Nobody dies,” he said softly. “The Lord will provide.”
For another moment Andrews looked deep into Charley Hoge’s eyes; dull and blue, they were like bits of empty sky reflected in a dirty pool; there was nothing behind them, nothing to stop Andrews’s gaze from going on and on.
Andrews said: “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, Mr. McDonald. It looks like he has gone crazy.”
McDonald nodded. “Looks like it.”
“And besides,” Andrews went on, “you said yourself the hides weren’t worth anything.”
“It’s not that,” McDonald said quietly. “It’s not that they were worth anything. But they were mine.”
And he remembered McDonald, and his flailing against a dark animal shape that would not remain still to receive his fury, a shape that had betrayed a faith that McDonald would not acknowledge; he remembered the sudden slump of McDonald’s body when he ceased his vain pursuit and the distant, almost quizzical, look upon his face as he stared before him, as if to search the meaning of his fury.
It was that nothingness of which McDonald had spoken back in the sleeping house as he stood beneath the lantern that flickered weakly against the darkness; it was the bright blue emptiness of Charley Hoge’s stare, into which he had glimpsed and of which he had tried to tell Francine; it was the contemptuous look that Schneider had given the river just before the hoof had blanked his face; it was the blind enduring set of Miller’s face before the white drive of storm in the mountains; it was the hollow glint in Charley Hoge’s eyes, when Charley Hoge turned from the dying fire to follow Miller into the night; it was the open despair that ripped McDonald’s face into a livid mask during his frenzied pursuit of Miller in the holocaust of the hides; it was what he saw now in Francine’s sleeping face that sagged inertly on her pillow.