Tie My Bones to Her Back Read Online Free PDF Page A

terror, Vixen more so than the old veteran Zeke. After Otto had shot a few of the wolves and left their hides nearby, moving them closer and closer to the corral over the course of the next few days, both horse and mule lost their native fear of wolf scent. Anyway, most of the wolves would soon be gone south with the shaggies.
    He remembered how he had missed them when they were gone. Their singing had lulled him to sleep during those first nights alone on the Smoky Hill River, while he was still adjusting to the solitude. He had never been alone this long. At home there’d always been Mutti and Vati, then Jenny growing up. In the Army there were his tentmates, messmates, marching comrades. On the hunting trips up north, he had brought Jenny—mainly for her company, he realized, though it had been enjoyable teaching her how to shoot, how to skin and butcher and cook what they had killed together. Now he had only himself for company, and until he realized what was bothering him, the loneliness had been hard to bear.
    Vixen and Zeke were some comfort, but it was the wolves that really saved him. Their voices, combed by wind and grasses as they echoed through the empty hills, sounded to him like some alien choir—remote and ancient, untranslatable, like the Gregorian chants he’d heard one Sunday morning in Fredericksburg while walking past a church where the Catholics were burying their dead.
    Late one night, awakened by wolf howls and the panic of his beasts, he had taken his rifle and gone into the hills determined to find them. He stalked quietly into the wind toward their chorus. The moon was just rising, and by its cold light he saw them outlined in silver on the crest of a ridge. Half a dozen at least, maybe more in the shadows. He lay on his belly for a long while, watching them circle, sit, scuffle with one another, raise their muzzles to the moon and sing their baleful song. Then he elevated the sights to 350 yards and proceeded to kill them. He dropped three before the rest ran away. When he went up to skin them, he found that the largest wolf was still alive—a scarred and grizzled male, taken through the shoulders, who stared up at Otto with slanting yellow eyes. Otto stepped back quickly. The wolf’s gaze was like a match to his heart. The wolf was unafraid. Otto cocked the hammer of the Sharps and finished him.
    After taking their hides, Otto dragged the skinned carcasses down the riverbank. By the next morning, nothing remained of them but splintered bones. The rest had disappeared into the bellies of their kinfolk. That helped somewhat to ease his sense of guilt.
    There were catamounts in the hills along the river, too. Otto saw their signs on the mudbars and heard their occasional screams at night, loud and shrill as a woman in terror. But the big cats never ventured near his camp. He wished he had a few dogs to run the panthers with, and for companionship through the long nights. Panther meat was good, light as veal. He’d eaten it that winter on the Niobrara.
    Each morning he rode out to hunt and to explore the country. He wrapped burlap sacks around his calves for leggings, securing them with wraps of rawhide. The bottomland was thick with ripgut cordgrass and sunflowers, ten feet high, wind-dried now as winter came on. It was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead, even on horseback. The rattle of the sunflowers in the constant wind and the sudden spatter of their falling seeds unnerved him at first, as did the unexpected flush of migrant birds feeding in the brakes—warblers and goldfinches, sparrows, blackbirds, and jays. War nerves, Otto thought. With me forever, I guess. How silly, expecting any movement to explode into screaming Secesh . . .
    In places, though, the buffalo and elk had beaten a labyrinth of trails through the sunflowers. He and Vixen rode the trails slowly, always hunting into the wind. Sometimes they came face-to-face with buffalo at a bend in the trail. Most of them fled