Mr. Hornaday's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

systematic way. They would saddle up the packhorses, load rifles, blankets, and rations for two to four days, and set out in a vast circuit through new territory, covering as much ground as possible each day and making camp under the immense stars wherever night overtook them. Despite the sorrow of their task, Hornaday could not help but feel exultant, spreading out his bedroll in the sagebrush with no sound but the wind around them and the happy crackle of a little campfire. There was no place he felt more at home than out here.
    After several unsuccessful forays like this, Hornaday and Hedley went out one day with Boyd and a private from Fort Keogh named Moran, who was riding an Army mule. In the early afternoon, they came trotting over a hill and saw, to their utter astonishment, a bull buffalo calf, cowering in a barren hollow between two high buttes, “as lonesome-looking a waif as ever was left to the mercies of a cold world.” He appeared to be only a few weeks old and was wobbly legged as a fawn. 2
    Moments later, they caught a fleeting glimpse of three adults, apparently cows, tearing away over the hilltop. For whatever reason, the little bull had been abandoned by its mother. When the calf saw the two men on horseback approaching, he tried to run, but before he’d gone a hundred yards, they’d caught up to him. Hedley and Hornaday leaped off their horses and tried to grab the calf with their outstretched arms, but he head-butted each of them in turn. Then he kicked the mule that Private Moran was riding. So Boyd threw a lasso around the little rascal and hauled him in. He struggled and kicked, but he was so thin and so weak that his efforts to resist were futile. Hornaday laughed in amazement and delight at the endearing pluckiness of the little calf, who fought at all odds to go his own way. He reminded him of himself.
    To all of them, the buffalo calf was “a genuine curiosity.” Most buffaloes over a year old are dusty brown, but this one was a “perfect blonde, with coarse, woolly sandy-red hair.” Hornaday named him“Sandy” on the spot. They tied him to a clump of sagebrush and went galloping off after the three adult buffalo that they’d seen running off, but it was too late; the adults, apparently including the calf’s mother, seemed to have vanished, as if they’d only been ghosts. Returning to the tethered calf, Hornaday hoisted him onto his horse, with his legs dangling down on either side and a look of wary surprise in his eyes, and carried him back to camp. The next night, Hornaday and Hedley returned to the place where the calf was found and camped there, hoping that the mother would return for her baby. They listened for the sound of buffalo hooves all night, but all they heard was “the occasional chirp of a sparrow breaking the silence” of the moonlit night.
    Ten days after they captured Sandy, Hornaday and Hedley finally spooked a couple of adult bulls out of the tree cover along the Little Dry, about fifteen miles from the LU-Bar Ranch. 3 One got away, but Hornaday managed to chase down the other and shoot him from horseback. Once he got his experienced taxidermist’s hands on the hide of this animal, which was a large one, standing five feet four inches at the shoulder—the first time he’d ever touched an adult in the wild—he could see right away that the shedding of his winter coat was in progress. A rich mantle of new hair, three to six inches long and of a “peculiar bluish–gray appearance,” was coming in over most parts of his body while its old hair, brown, weather-beaten and matted with mud and dung, was being shed. The new hair was coming in unevenly, though: on parts of the bull’s hindquarters, there were patches of skin that were perfectly bare, and in other places, only patches of shaggy, old, brown hair, giving the animal a ragged, seedy appearance.
    The capture of the little calf and the