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

towns to scratch their humped backs, later filled with water and thus afforded drink to antelope, elk, blacktail, lobo, coyote, badger, swift fox, and even the drymouthed two-legged pilgrim. The flooded wallows served as convenient way stops for the ducks and geese and cranes and herons that twice a year traversed the skies of the Great West. Buffalo birds—magpies, merles, redwings, and cowbirds—snapped up insects kicked out of the grass by the hooves of the migrating herds, picked lice and flies off the buffalo’s back in summer, and warmed their toes in its wool in freezing weather. Otto had seen a dozen cowbirds perched in a row on a single bull’s back, as on the ridgepole of a slowly ambulating barn. It was the buffalo in its millions that kept the prairie fertile and growing, by cropping the curly buffalo grass back to its roots and enriching the soil with dung. Otto was farmer enough to see that. The only thing that could threaten the ageless rhythms of the Buffalo Range was civilization. But these badlands were too poor, too dry for farming, as many homesteaders had learned to their sorrow. And high plains winters were too severe to support cattle without costly supplementary feeding. What’s more, the Great West—thank God—was too remote from the cities of the East to ever attract industry. At least in the opinion of Eastern editorial writers.
    _____
    T HE DOOR BANGED open behind Otto, and the conductor stepped onto the rear platform of the train, a portly, prunefaced man.
    “Did I get your ticket?”
    Otto showed him the punched stub. Took another drag on his cheroot.
    “Kind of chilly back here, ain’t it?” the conductor said, reluctant to return to his duties.
    “I’m used to it.”
    The conductor studied Otto’s face and attire. “You one of them Westerners, hey?”
    “Of late,” Otto said.
    “Too bleak a country for me,” the conductor said. He pulled a big silver watch from his vest pocket and consulted it with an air of self-importance. “Well, you’ll be back in it right quick now. We’re almost to the river.”
    Otto stared at him, silent, and then turned his back on the man. A moment later he heard the door slam shut. Too many people back East, he thought, and all of them want to make conversation. Yet he had to admit that there were times on the Smoky Hill when he’d found himself longing for the sound of a human voice.
    O NE DAY, HUNTING elk in the timber above the sunflowers, Otto had found a stand of cedars. Returning with his ax, he split out a buckboard load of fragrant red shakes from the stumps of wind-felled trees. With these he shingled the roof of Zeke and Vixen’s stable, and the sloping roof of a porch he built out from the entrance to the soddy. He made a large smokehouse of cedar slabs, where he brined the tongues, hams, hump steaks, and tenderloins of young buffalo in a pit vat lined with a green hide and smoked them over a slow, cool fire of damp alder and cedar chips until they were cured to his taste.
    He had seen the smoke of many small fires up the valley of the Saline, where it entered the Smoky Hill River, and knew that a settlement lay under the pall. He scouted a bit and found a well-traveled wagon road, the hoofprints of iron-shod horses. White folks for sure. On a sunny, lazy day when he had nothing better to do, he drove up the Saline with a load of flint-dried buffalo hides, robes, smoked meat, and split cedar shingles.
    It was a town called Hell Creek. At the general store he traded his goods for coffee, dried fruit, tins of canned peaches, a crock of molasses, gunpowder, bar lead, a bag of birdshot, priming caps, and a double-barreled shotgun—an English-made 12-bore by Westley Richards. Though the scarred walnut stock and the bluing on the tubes, worn silvery in places, attested to hard service, the insides of the barrels were unpitted and the vents in the nipples looked free of rust. With the permission of the storekeeper, he took the shotgun out