Chapter 8

AJ looked around frantically, but all he could see was a seething mass of brown backs, floating in a sea of dust. They were packed so thickly that he couldn't even see the hooves that were raising the thick tan clouds.

It seemed to go on forever, though it was only ten minutes. This herd was actually a small one, by comparison with the historical great masses that had roamed the plains for hundreds of years, utterly disregarding the few white men who came one day, and then those in larger groups, who began slaughtering them in obscene numbers. This plain was their territory, and they came and went in ignorance of their fate.

That fate became audible, as the herd began to thin. Sharp reports could be heard. Bella looked over the transom, still shaking from the ordeal, and saw men mounted on horses, sitting bolt upright, the reins hanging untended in front of them. The men held rifles which they aimed, fired, and then reloaded. Each time they fired a big beast would stumble, fall and roll, raising a huge cloud of dust. The rider who had shot the beast simply rode on, aiming again, and firing again at a different beast.

There were some dozen of the shooters, from what Bella could see before they came even with the wagon and passed, as if it wasn't even there. Then it was AJ who saw the slaughter. He knew that skinners would follow, and wagons after them, in a day's time. Men in the wagons would find stacks of buffalo hides, stiffened by sun, wind and time, and stinking in a way that required such men, if they stayed with the job more than a week or two, to have no sense of smell.

What would be left, when the hunters, skinners and wagons were gone, would be only the corpses of hundreds of slain bison, rotting in the sun. Clouds of crows would come, and scavengers on four feet too, but a hundred times their number could not feast on the amount of meat that would lie there. Maggots would claim the rest.

AJ had heard stories of this, but had never seen it. He hadn't believed them either. He hadn't believed there could be that many beasts in a herd. And he hadn't believed that men could be so wasteful.

With the last of them, the oxen began to calm. AJ knew that Frank Jr. must have been unable to control the horse, and would be ahead somewhere. He was afraid of what he'd find, as he released the brake, and shook the reins, letting the oxen run off the last of their terror. At their lumbering trot, the wagon jounced so much that he had to hold onto the seat to keep from being thrown off of it. He heard the women yelling, in the back, but ignored them. There were two voices back there, raised in fear and anger. Two voices.

That was all that mattered.

At first AJ thought it was just another dead buffalo lying to one side of their direction of travel. Then he saw the horse struggle to its feet, shaking like a dog just out of the water. Dust slid off its body like flowing water, and then clouds as it shook. He hauled hard on the reins, slowing the oxen and turning them toward the spot. As got closer he pulled up and the oxen, panting now, finally plodded to a stop. He could see the newly churned earth, devoid of standing grass, just like everything he had driven across thus far.

He'd only gone maybe half a mile, but in that distance, all that stood above the prairie dirt were dead buffalo bodies, and now his horse. The wagon rolled to a stop just as the horse skittered sideways, and its head was jerked around and down.

There, sitting on the ground, on top of the only grass within sight, was a very shocked, and very dirty Frank Jr. He was holding tightly onto the reins of the horse, though he wasn't really aware of it. He shook his head and dust fell from his hair in sheets as it moved.

"Damn!" he yelled. Then he grinned a stupid, shocked grin, his teeth looking impossibly white in his dusty, brown face. He stood, causing more sheets of dust to fall off his body. He looked up at AJ and said it again. "Damn!"

Two women's bodies rushed over the bumpy soil, appearing in AJ's peripheral vision. His horse whinnied and jumped, finally tearing the reins from Frank Jr.'s hands as it avoided the running women. They crashed into Frank Jr., who almost went down in a heap.

Dust flew everywhere as hands searched for wounds. Eyes went to the little patch of grass that had been protected by the body of the horse and its rider from the hooves of the herd. Frank babbled about watching the bellies of a thousand buffalo sailing over him as they jumped the hurdle that he had created when, in abject terror, he did exactly what AJ had told him to do. He'd forgotten to yell, and couldn't have anyway because he was screaming intelligibly at the time. But it had worked. With buffalo all around him, he'd watched the world tilt, the skyline going crazy. Something had struck him hard on the shoulder, knocking the breath out of him and he'd come to his senses with thunder all around him, and buffalo leaping four abroad right over his head. After seeing dozens of hooves flashing by within what seemed like inches of his face, he'd just closed his eyes, burrowing his face into the rough hair of the trembling horse lying beside him.

The soldiers, once they'd seen the herd, had realized how fruitless it would be to try to divert it from its path. As if they'd practiced it a hundred times, the formation wheeled to the East and then they rode for their lives. They knew to angle away from the herd, trying to find the flank of the seething mass. Their horses could run faster than even the enraged bison, but by the time they got to the edge of the herd they had galloped flat out for two miles, and their horses were in bad shape.

They rested their mounts, and then rode back to the west, hoping to find the wagon they had said they'd protect.

By the time the soldiers appeared again, things had calmed down. The land around them was still surreal, with its lack of grass, or more correctly its covering of cut hay, broken up only by the occasional dead bison. It was eerily quiet, other than the wind, which picked up whorls of dust ahd chaff and then dropped them again. Bella had watched the wind ruffle the fur of the buffalo AJ and Frank Jr. butchered. She was amazed at the size of the thing, and how huge the hide would be if it were spread out. AJ left the hide for the skinners, but took as much meat as he could cut away easily. There was nothing to build a fire with, to smoke the meat, but they would take as much as they could carry, hoping to find fuel later in the day.

She heard the column approaching just as the last of the meat was loaded into the wagon, and shaded her eyes with one hand. AJ had already seen them coming and gotten back inside the wagon, where he was trying to store the meat in a way that would allow air to get to the slabs. He stopped long enough to tie his bonnet on with bloody hands. Bella's dress was ruined, soaked with blood and mud made with blood, as were Frank Jr.'s clothes.

Outside Lieutenant Dobbs tipped his hat, relief plain in his eyes. He was no longer the sharply dressed professional soldier she'd seen before. All of the men were covered in dust, the blue of their uniforms muted to a dingy gray. He looked a little wilted. She knew she did too

"I'm glad you survived," he said simply.

"It wasn't so bad," she said. She felt the urge to laugh hysterically at the blatant lie. She felt almost giddy to be alive. "I'm glad to see your men made it too."

"It looks like the wagon fared well," he offered.

"All we lost were the cattle," said Bella. "So much work to gather them, and now they are scattered again."

"Yes ... well," sighed the officer. "Where there are buffalo hunters, there soon follow unhappy Indians. I fear we must leave you, now that I see you are unharmed. If you maintain your direction of travel you should make Wichita in another week. I don't think you'll be bothered by anything between here and there."

"We'll be fine," said Bella.

And, for the first time since she started this journey, she actually believed it.

AJ peered ahead, wondering if the dark line he saw was trees, or some mirage in the heat. He hoped it was trees, because that meant water.

He was a laughable figure, still cloaked in the now stiff and stinking dress, his boots and his hat. He didn't want to change into clean clothes, though, until he could wash the blood and stink from his body. They needed a fire too, to save the meat.

They had altered their course, doing, in effect, the same thing that the soldiers had done to get out of the churned earth that was all that remained after the stampede they had lived through. All of them wanted to see grass again, and AJ wanted nothing to do with skinners. He'd heard stories about them too, and had decided to believe them now. It wouldn't do to have a crew of skinners happen upon two women in the middle of nowhere. If that happened, he was sure there would be bloodshed, and he still winced at the thought that his gun had already killed three men.

They'd managed to recapture four steers. Bella mourned the loss of her milk cow, which hadn't been seen yet. But they hadn't seen any dead cows either. It was likely they had just run with the buffalo until they could stop.

By the time he confirmed that there was, in fact, a line of trees ahead, the light was failing. He told Bella, who was now sitting on the wagon seat with both of her children. Nobody wanted to ride in back.

"I'm going to ride ahead, to pick a campsite," he said. "I'm going to take a bath too, but I should be done by the time you get there. If I can, I'll get a fire going and get the sticks together to build a drying rack. He leaned over to take the axe from Bella. It had been found and set aside, in preparation for this very task.

He was just far enough away that he couldn't hear when Bella shouted to remind him he hadn't taken clean clothes with him.

AJ tried to get the dress clean, but it seemed hopeless to him. He'd discovered his lack of clothes as soon as he splashed into the shallow water in the creek bed. He had to lie down to get wet all over, but it felt wonderful. He had to work at getting clean too, waiting for the cloudy water his body produced to slowly be replaced by new. The bottom of the creek was muddy, but at least it was clean, fresh smelling mud, and it washed off easily.

When he got done, and realized that the wagon would be there soon, he decided that the only decent thing to do was try to put the dress back on, but he wasn't going to do it until it was as clean as he could get it. When he was able to sniff it and get no trace of dead buffalo, he wiggled back into it. He put his boots on wet feet, which took a long time too. By the time he heard the oxen lowing for water, he'd managed to gather firewood and had cut enough branches to make a passable drying rack if he could figure out how to fasten the branches together in a way that the fire wouldn't defeat.

He was trying to weave the branches together when his three traveling companions dashed past him, heading for the creek and ignoring him completely. He watered the oxen from the barrel, figuring they could refill it with fresh water from the creek, once the mud cleared. Then he got the fire going and tackled the meat. As it turned out, he got filthy again cutting the meat into strips to hang on the drying rack.

The meat was dusty, with bits of grass sticking to it, and looked entirely unappetizing. He got the watering bowl again and dipped more water in it to clean each strip of meat off in. That worked pretty well, but a bowl of water would only clean five or six strips of meat before it was fouled beyond use.

When the barrel was half empty, he decided to get water from the creek. He'd been so busy he hadn't thought of Bella and her children. When he got to the creek they were still splashing in the water.

All of them were stark naked.

It had started when Frank Jr. started ripping his clothes off, driven by the same demanding desire to get apart from his bloody, stinking clothes. Becky had chastised him, at first, but Bella told her to hold her tongue. Then, to Becky's consternation, her mother shrugged out of her dusty dress.

"I'm going to get clean!" said Bella firmly. "We're all in the same family here. There's no shame in bathing, under these circumstances."

"I'm not taking my clothes off in front of him!" yelped Becky.

"Fine," said her mother, and sat down in the creek. She began bathing her upper body with handfuls of cool water.

Frank, having gotten stripped down to his socks, stood, mouth agape as he saw his mother's ripe, womanly body bared to his eyes. He closed his mouth to gulp. His mother ignored him, and eventually he sat to remove his socks. Then he got into the water himself, and managed to keep his eyes mostly on himself as he sighed in contentment. He was upstream from Bella, and she turned her head to look at him.

"You're making the water all muddy," she complained.

"Sorry," he said, rubbing at the dark red blood that stained him to his elbows. He didn't sound sorry.

"Well get done, or move downstream," ordered his mother. "You're dirtier than either of us."

He got up and, wincing as his tender feet were abused by rocks and twigs, managed to move past her with a dancing gait. His young penis flopped, taking his balls with it. Becky stared at it, her own mouth hanging open.

"Stop staring at him," said Bella. "All men have them. I suspect you'll be seeing one up close in the next few years, if I can ever find a man brave enough to take you."

That shocked Becky out of her amazed reflection on what made her brother a boy. She meant to simply stamp her foot, but it landed in inch deep water and mud sprayed everywhere.

"Becky!" groused her mother, washing mud from her breasts and arms.

Frank Jr. sat back down, downstream, and happily started bathing himself again. He found that his penis had become twice its normal length, and was thicker too.

Becky tried to take a bath with her clothes on, but it was obvious it wasn't working. Finally, in a fit of anger, she pulled her dress off. She looked downstream.

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