The Hide-Hunter
A Weird Western Short Story
The tale which I am about to relate must surely stand as the queerest incident to occur in the annals of that golden era of paleontological exploration in the Old West, between the conclusion of the bitter “bone war” of Marsh and Cope, and the tragic beginning of the Great War. It stands far above Davis’s discovery of a pristine, very out-of-place gorgonopsid skull in the Demopolis Chalk, and even surpasses the complete vanishment of Brown’s infamous “Widow” bonebed, in the grand firmament of anomalies which have transpired upon this earth. Nevertheless, I, Joseph Yarnall, do solemnly swear that it is true in every minute detail.
It was just after the conclusion of the hardest season in my career as a fossil collector, that being the summer of 1906, when my team conducted excavations in the Permian Red Beds of north-central Texas on behalf of Professor Skinner of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. The briefest summary of our efforts that thirsty summer is in order-
After an initial struggle simply to locate the beds- all the locals knew was that “old bones” were to be found “over in the brakes”- we were rewarded after many days of fruitless search with a wealth of remains from the great pelycosaurs and batrachians which populated the world in that bygone era. The bones were mostly weathered and broken, like everything else in that redrock hell, but it was a blessing to recover a nearly complete skeleton of the sail-backed carnivore Dimetrodon, sans a few of the caudal vertebrae which the chance intersection of a wagon had deigned to pulverize long before our arrival. The skull and forequarters of the giant batrachian Eryops were also recovered in fair condition. Under the conditions which we labored, it beggared belief that the Red Beds had ever been able to support such semiaquatic beasts, and the sedimentary ghosts of that vanished swamp seemed to rear up to taunt us wearing ragged gowns of whorled gypsum and chains of banded sandstone. That summer the mercury often rose to 113 even in shade, and there was nary a dewdrop to be found in all that hopeless searing land. In the evening, the fuming rays of the sun made the plains appear as though they were being blasted by fire in the oven of some wrathful ogre who wished to wring us out of our every last bead of sweat.
When the season was mercifully through, we had catalogued over two hundred specimens, though of these perhaps only thirty or so were fit for any sort of public display at the Academy. The remainder, it is my understanding, are now sequestered down in those vast archival halls of the museum’s cellars, to be studied by generations of paleontologists yet unborn. For this, the suffering of that season was a worthwhile sacrifice. I and the other diggers endured much, but whatever losses we may have incurred will have been paid in full by the benefits our discoveries shall bestow upon the future.
After seeing our precious cargo off at the station in Seymour, the digging team at once disbanded. Some of the diggers remained in Seymour to drink away their earnings; others scattered to the four winds, back to their farms and families. Moorehead, the other Academy collector in attendance, decided to take the next train to Fort Worth to visit a martial brother of his who lately had been promoted to Colonel.
As for myself, I decided to “hitch-hike” my way up to Omaha, to see some of the recently closed frontier which had hitherto remained unknown to me. The only possessions I carried were a canteen, a soldier’s ruck of food and bedding, and an old Lakota medicine pouch I had purchased at one of the agencies during a dig in Kansas some years back, which was stitched together from buffalo hide and small enough to be worn comfortably as a necklace, indeed to fit comfortably in the palm of one’s hand. The ruck was ragged, the pouch tasseled in sinews, and the canteen in perpetual need of filling.
Alas, for all the romantic descriptions I had heard as a boy, I found the prairie to be decidedly lacking in character, unless one were to interpret its own desolate emptiness as its genius loci. The sights of interest were limited in the main to rudely constructed fenceposts and errant masses of tumbleweeds which had of late replaced the swelling herds of bison and pronghorn.
Indeed, my journey offered no evidence of these latter beasts ever having existed. The buffaloes’ great migration trails had been rubbed smooth after decades of dust driven by the amnestic winds; though here and there I suspected a well-worn wagon rut might have been an appropriated path once trod by the rough, sharp, cleansing clip of quaternion hooves in their millions. Their legendary wallows, where they rubbed themselves clean of flies, and the stage upon which so many of the great last stands of the Indian Wars had played out, had likewise been infilled by sand and sharp-leafed gourds which had long since shriveled and blown away in the drought, leaving behind only shallow, plowed-over bowls to rumple the plains, as though the place had been ravaged by some titanic artillery barrage and then settled by a steady fall of snow. Nor were any of the fabled tzompantli skull-pyramids left behind from when the great hunt was through- those had all been picked clean years before and sold to factories to be rendered into fertilizer.
Indeed, the Red Beds, always sparse, were revealed during that first nighttime stroll to be as desolate as the maria of the risen Moon, invoking mirrors of Imbrium, Crisium, Nubium, but not Tranquillitatis, not ever again on this broken side of the sky; and those worldly plains I trod were infinitely more unsettling in their silence. The drought which by day burnt the land raw at night rendered it a frigid tundra, and it was with lonely consternation that I pitched a humble hobo-tent upon the roadside to rest for the night. To the west lay the Caprock, to the east the Brazos. And somewhere in all that deserted scrub was a speck known as Joseph Yarnall, huddling round a fire dim as any of the pennycandle stars stippling the black canvas above.
I was cursed with insomnia that night, and so to pass the time between stokings and rekindlings, I took the medicine pouch from my neck and examined its contents by touch alone, as if reading the brailled missives of worlds long dead. It contained, like most medicine pouches, a plethora of biotic and geologic odds and ends- the downy “breath feathers” of an indeterminate bird, a pair of contour feathers from a prairie falcon, a riversmooth moss agate which seemed to encrystal its own secret vegetal world, a fox’s tooth, and, most relevant to my own profession, a smattering of fossils. The Indians, in their simple way, considered fossils to be magical talismans, and this pouch held three- a horn coral of Carboniferous vintage, a near-pristine Rhaeboceras ammonite no bigger than a thumb’s nail, and one of the isolated sections of a Baculites compressus which tend to calve off as the shell erodes.
All of these pulverized bits were scientifically useless, yet I held onto them in the knowledge that, though they were but the scraps of worlds long vanished, they nevertheless were each and all unique fingerprints of our Creator. No matter how broken a nub the coral was, or how shattered the Baculites might be, there will never again be another made upon this Earth. For this, they are as blessed to me as any of the saintly relics venerated among Catholics, and provided me with comfort on many a lonely night in the wilderness.
In the morning, I set out into the denuded country with the sere sun glowing on my back like a desk lamp while the winds carried on their wings clouds of dust. As I walked, my trained eye could scarcely help but notice the geology of the bloodbay hills surrounding me, the wrinkled strata faulted and turned up at all angles like the building blocks of a Titan child. The prevailing color was Indian red, though many of the outcrops were capped by greenish sandstones and white ledges of gypsum. None of them were decent localities for fossils. These observations, I believe, were what kept me from going mad during those long hours of the morning, as the ground began to burn through my shoes, and the cooler dawn breeze changed to the Devil’s own breath.
By midday I was coming to the dregs of my canteen, and I prayed I could keep apace to the town of Fulcher seven miles ahead. A dense patch of prickly pears bloomed from the gulch beside the road, sucking up red mud puddled long ago by buffalo, lately cattle. The cattle in that country had it very hard that season- many of them, for moisture, were forced to subsist on the prickly pear, leaving their mouths and tongues pocked by putrefying, pus-filled sores from where the spines had stitched them. During our excavations, we’d often been forced to share with cattle the foul water that collected in artificial basins made by ranchers, for in the red beds there is no natural surface water, nor any wells or springs of any kind, owing to the porous nature of the soil. Any water collected in tanks is immediately fouled by windblown clay, becoming thick as cream with the stuff, and of course it is made all the fouler by virtue of the beasts who will drink and wallow in it in turns. It made me long dearly for the clear wells of the East, but alas, si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi. And in that country, the common wisdom was to drink your water first, and taste it afterwards.
Fresh water was certainly on its way, though. Texan weather is a fickle thing, and one may become attuned to its whims by the dizzying changes in air pressure preceding a storm. Sure enough, when I turned back down the road towards the wallow-cratered country I had just transited, I could see the dread beginnings of a norther rumbling in over the low hills. Lightning flared deep within that leaden front like some dread foetus stirring in a charcoal womb, but the clouds were still twenty miles behind me yet, so I perceived I would have more than enough time to reach Fulcher if I traveled at a brisk pace. The fitful gusts even aided me in this, for the wind was both at my back and much cooler than the day had hitherto been.
About five miles outside the town I came upon a shack, situated atop a low rise some half mile back away from the road. The place seemed abandoned, the walls visibly brindled by dryrot even from a distance, yet what first drew my attention to it was the thin coil of smoke rising from its chimney like a phantom’s pennon. As I drew nearer, I could see that the place should by all rights have been abandoned, as numerous clapboards hung askance and the sheetbark roof sagged ominously, such that the dwelling appeared to have a broken back. A few thick branches bleached white as ribs held up a porch awning, under which was situated a broken rocking chair, a spare wagon wheel, and other miscellaneous rubbish. But my approach revealed more hints of habitation- the laundry was hung out to dry on the line, and a well-used wagon was tied to those skeletal porch posts.
It still did not make an inviting place to take sanctuary, and I was intending to press on to Fulcher until a blast of ice-chipped air stung my back, and the noonday sun was snuffed like a candle under a bell of blackness. I spun slowly round to see the vast norther cloud now hanging almost directly over me, having advanced with far more rapidity than I’d imagined in my dreadest nightmare. As that chill walked the ladder of my spine, I understood then why the people of the southlands speak of them as they do, and dread their coming. Almost as soon as my eyes met upon that ponderous ellipsone, my arms were flecked with the first heavy spittles of rain, and I took off running towards the shack. I was a much younger man then, and had sprinted in college, so the half mile journey was made in scarcely more than two minutes of leg-pounding. Had I been racing a horse, I am confident I could have overtaken it.
The tumbleweeds skeltered before me like frightened animals as I reached the shack, and there I was confronted with the hermit who resided therein. He was a mummy of a man, the flesh drawn taut round his bones and sinews, with skin as gray and papery as a wasp nidus and rheumy blue eyes pooled in rims of halfmad scarlet. He hobbled about in a frenzy, attempting to remove his clothes from the line, cursing the storm and every other storm like it and the One who made them all from the first. His right leg had a pronounced limp, and his fingers were stiffened with arthritis. When he first took notice of me, it was merely to jab a knobby finger and bark a command- “Well don’t jes stand there, boy! Help me get me britches down offa’ this rope!”
I obliged him at once, throwing his laundry- which was, despite being on the line, still quite soiled- into an ancient wicker basket, whereupon I began hastily introducing myself while hoisting up the load to carry it inside for the old man. Before I could get out a sentence, however, the old anchorite cut me off-
“I s’pose you’ve come to beg my kinderness to take shelter from the norther?”
I bristled somewhat at his rude frankness, but held my temper at bay long enough to meekly admit that this was indeed so.
The man spat a putrid wad of tobacco juice onto the dirt before us, not quite in my direction and yet not quite away from me either, adding his own small contribution to the storm whose drops grew bigger and wetter with each ticking second. He looked up at the fulgurous sky for a spell, then addressed me while seeming yet to speak to some loftier being midst the churning clouds- “Ah, poppycock. Well, seein’s to how I doubt you’ll reach Fulcher ‘fore the storm breaks, I reckon the good Lord would want me to take you in. C’mon in, I was jes about to fix supper.”
So saying, he spat again onto the ground before us, and turned back to his dwelling. I thanked him profusely, then asked- “Have you lived here long?”
“‘Bout fifteen years now,” he replied, already hobbling up the porch steps and into the shack. “Name’s Hedgepeth.”
“A pleasure,” I replied, introducing myself properly and, after cradling the laundry basket securely in one arm, offering my hand. Hedgepeth had the firm shake of a man who seemed like he’d rather have his hands wrapped round your neck. “And is Hedgepeth your first name, or your last?”
“Hedgepeth ain’t enough?” he asked crossly.
So much for our introduction. I shall not bore the reader with the trivialities of how this gaffe was repaired, and how we resumed our cordiality enough for the old man to invite me to eat at his table with him. Nor shall I dwell upon the ramshackle construction or spartan furnishings of his abode. Suffice to say, they would not have been enough to outfit a priory. His main amenities were a dry stone fireplace, over which was suspended a simmering, weatherbeaten cauldron of hunter’s stew, and a kitchen counter which wrapped round in an L-bend the back quarter of his shack, covered in anonymous old cutlery and kitchenware.
Instead, I shall take the liberty of advancing the narrative roughly one hour ahead, to the time when we had seated ourselves to a supper of jackrabbit stew. The norther by this time had well broken over us, and the wind shrieked and wailed and the thunder growled and gnashed and the rain fell hard upon the empty plains. The drops must each have been the size of golfballs to make the sound they did as they landed, else Hedgepeth’s scoliotic roof- revealed upon entering to be composed only of mud and woven limbs- was even flimsier than my worst fears. Nevertheless, he seemed untroubled by the pluvial racket which threatened to drown us at any moment. He was a singularly coarse man who kept an old tin watering pail as a spittoon beside his chair, and if ever he was bothered or unbothered by some turn of events, he would merely grumble- “Poppycock.”
Despite the peril of the storm and the claustrophobic confines of the shack- Hedgepeth shuffled with his head bowed to clear the ceiling, and I had to bend nearly double to fit in the room- we soon got to talking, over water served in beaten pewter cups which was not as foul with mud as I had become begrudgingly accustomed to in the previous months, owing to Hedgepeth collecting rainwater in a cistern- the most modern infrastructure apparent in his dwelling place. Nevertheless, the infernal red clay had infiltrated it, necessitating boiling it with pulped cactus leaves. This acidly sour liquid is not a tempting drink despite being clarified, yet it was all that was on offer and I drank it with vigor. My canteen I had the foresight to leave out upon the porch with the lid open to fill directly from the generous sky.
As we dined, the roof creaked and groaned like the hull of a ship in a tempest. Hedgepeth coughed as he drank the water, perhaps himself not used to it even after all the lonely years he’d spent in that shack. He cleared his throat loudly and asked me- “What’s brung you out to Texas, boy?”
“I am a fossil collector, for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia,” I replied proudly. “Our season has just concluded, and I’ve decided to travel the country over winter rather than returning directly to the east.”
“Ah, poppycock. Are you one of them fellers who goes round picking up rocks fer’ a livin’?” Hedgepeth asked in his crude way, though this particular question had a note of concern in its delivery. He’d leaned forward slightly in his chair- not aggressively, and yet there was an unmistakable sort of anxious alertness to his posture, a willingness to spring up and fight or flee at an instant’s notice.
“Well, yes, but not just any rocks,” I chuckled, “Fossils. That is, the bones and shells and other such remains of prehistoric lifeforms.”
“I see,” Hedgepeth said, in a tone that conveyed he wouldn’t have cared if I were collecting individual grains of sand. He leaned his elbows upon the table and clasped his hands together, and looked down at them for a long while, kneading his rimpled thumbs against each other. When he looked back at me, his countenance had changed completely- there was genuine curiosity in those old eyes of his, along with a half-concealed worry peering out just behind it. “You ever heard of a calling stone?”
I confessed that I had not.
“Ah,” the old man replied, disappointed. “It’s a redskin term. Blackfeet, mostly. They’d pick up these bits of stone- queer little bits, ain’t no bigger than a pair of dice but shaped jes’ like a buffalo- and named ‘em calling stones. Said they could summon the buffalo with them, if ever they was thin on the ground and the tribe was wantin’ for game.”
I replied that I had never heard of any such stone, though my geological purview was rather limited to what was strictly necessary to the pursuit of paleontology. Hedgepeth sighed, at first sounding disappointed, but then he leaned back comfortably in his seat once more.
“The reason I ask,” he said, “is I had a run-in with some of them callin’ stones when I was a youth, and I ain’t too keen on ever seeing another one, if you fancy my lingo.”
I did not, in truth, fancy his lingo, and begged him to elaborate. “I’ve never heard of such a stone, but surely you must have a reason for detesting them so?”
“Detest ain’t the word,” Hedgepeth replied. “I fear ‘em, boy. I fear ‘em as any man ought to fear God Hisself. Let me back up aways for you. It was back in December of ‘85. December the eighth, to be precise about my dates. It don’t matter none in the end, but you’re the first and most probably the last person I’ll ever be tellin’ this tale to, so I want to tell it right. I know to you it’ll all sound as phony as a fish climbing a tree on the thirtieth of February, but I’ll swear on a tower of Bibles it’s the dyin’ truth.”
“I understand completely,” I replied, making at this point a conscious effort to commit every detail of his tale to memory. There was something in his tone, even at the very outset of his story, that told me Hedgepeth considered it a matter of great import, perhaps the only thing he considered more important than himself, and this alone made it noteworthy.
“Well, let me back up quite a few years, cause it all really was fated at Appomattox. See, when Lee laid down his sword and the war was over, I had nothing left and nowheres to go. Sherman had burnt up my family’s farm, and I was never too keen on a’hoein’ nohow. But I knowed how to use a gun. So I set out west to claim my little share of that ‘manifest destiny’ all the top bananas in the government was talkin’ about at the time. At Saint Louis, I fell in with a group of buffalo runners heading off into Blackfeet country and that was the whole start of it.
“See, them buffaloes was walkin, bellerin’ sacks of gold. An individual hide in good condition would fetch you around three dollars and a half, at any of the Missouri agencies. We tried to stay in those areas cause they was closer to the herds, but you could fetch five dollars a hide in Saint Louis. Took the steamboats down there more than a few times, when we was feelin’ particularly proud of ourselves. In the best years right after the war, we never took fewer than a hundred a day, so our skinners would be carving out twenty-five robes a day each.”
“You shot a hundred a day?” I asked incredulously. It seemed impossible that the empty lands I had traversed ever supported so many animals that such slaughter was feasible.
“That’s what I said,” Hedgepeth, who was not in the habit of repeating himself, replied, “Could’ve shot more, but that would’ve been a waste of buff, and ammunition, which was more important. And it didn’t even make a dent in the herds. The ground was carpeted in buffaloes out there. It was like God planted them instead of grass. We was after cows and yearlings, mostly. Had the softest robes. Split between all of us, I was rakin’ in about six thousand dollars a month. Now, after expenses my net came down a mighty discount, but still, that’s more than I could make in a year back east, boy. That’s more than the President was makin’.”
“That’s more than I make in a year right now,” I replied wryly.
He chuffed indignantly. “Anyhow, it was easy money. Buffaloes was pretty stupid, at least for those first years. So long as you snuck up on ‘em alright, they’d jes stand there waitin’ for you to line up on ‘em, almost willingly. Shootin’ them was the easiest thing in the world, no different than shootin’ a beef critter in the barnyard. All you had to do was wound the herd leader and the rest would start millin’ around her waitin’ to be shot, like there was really a lamb inside their beastly heads. All we really had to worry about was other hide runners and sometimes the redskins. We got into quite a few fights with other runners, over who had the right to a herd, especially at the height of things when the whole country went buffalo-wild. It was like a gold rush- men left their jobs, businesses, wives and children to get into buffalo runnin’, over ten thousand men of all walks, savory and unsavory alike. Lost a few boys in those tussles; I took an ounce of lead in my shoulder once, but I made that bastard eat an ounce in the gut so I consider us even now.”
I held my tongue, but Hedgepeth must have seen the consternation on my face, for he waved his hand flippantly and leaned back in his chair.
“Ah, poppycock. It was a slay or be slain sorter business. And for ten good, long years we jes kept shootin’. Every year between November and March, for that’s when the furs were in their prime. Nobody ever thought they’d run out, cause there was so many of ‘em. We’d shoot till our rifle barrels was so hot the cleanin’ patches sizzled in the bore and more’n once I burnt my fingerprints off from just touchin’ the steel. We was just carvin’ our way through the herds. My shooting shoulder is still yellow and blue from all that, right down to the elbow. But I didn’t mind it none. It was fun, and I was good at it. I was good at takin’ life, whether it be Yankees or buffaloes.”
Here he stopped and coughed, checking his own excitement at recounting his memories before continuing- “Had their hides pegged out over the ground so thick that if you flew over in a balloon you’d think you were near a town. We shipped ‘em out in huge caravans, tons and tons of ‘em on ox wagons. It was like an ancient system of barter for in exchange we received our own wagon trains of lead to keep the slaughter going. The meat we left to rot. Drew in the wolves and the bears and the coyotes and the magpies and the eagles all. At night, the sounds… it reminded me of that line in Isaiah, the one about the wild beasts of the desert gnashing and snarling in the ruins of the nations. I shot at them from our campfire, to keep my aimin’ sharp and for something to do. Got bounties off them, too. They scarce noticed, so hogwild were they for the meat.
“It didn’t last, though. That’s the darndest thing about it. It jes didn’t last. Let me tell you something, boy- when I first set out there, I crested a ridge and laid out before me was an ocean of buffaloes, all surgin’ and swayin’ jes like waves, just a sea of black shaggy beasts rollin’ like breakers at our feet. Seven years later I crested that same hill and they was all gone. Nothing but bones left, painting the prairies white to the limit of my sight, and my eyes were a good deal better back in those days. I don’t know how many hides reached the railhead in total. I heard there was thirty million of ‘em once. They’re all gone now. There’s nothing left. Not a robe, not a bone. Nothin’ but a memory in the mind of God. Even their trails and wallows is all turned under the plow, now. The babes born into tomorrow’s world won’t even believe there ever was such a thing as a buffalo. I can see it even in your eyes- part of you can’t believe it either. But nobody will miss them. How can you miss what you never done knew?”
He stopped here and sighed heavily. He folded his hands once more and looked at them for a long while, as if by some arcane palmistry he might be able to glean what twenty-one years of reflection had not granted him.
“I want you to understand somethin’ boy. We done all that for a reason. I know a lot of folks back east are gettin’ all sappy now about the plight of the buffaloes. But you have to understand that it had to be done. Them buffalo hides, they went to good use- they made leather belts, miles and miles of ‘em, for use in factories and wagon suspensions. All the things needed for civilization to move forward, to conquer the west. And it made that possible in other ways, too. It’s been said the Army wanted the redskins’ commissary destroyed. Every buffalo we killed, that was one more buffalo the Indians couldn’t eat and make their tools and clothes out of. So it was either the buffaloes went, or the redskins went. See?”
“Did the Army pay you to kill the buffalo?” I asked, for in the papers I had read claims to this effect and now had the chance to get an affirmative answer.
“Never saw a dime from ‘em,” Hedgepeth said bitterly. “We wasn’t always on speakin’ terms with the soldiery. That damned fool Sheridan even wanted to keep some buffaloes around for them Injuns on the reservations. Poppycock, every last syllable of it. No, no, the Army never paid us. But I’d’ve done it for free. Any one of them families killed by the Comanches was worth more to civilization than all the millions of buffalo that ever roamed from the Pecos to the Platte. They had to die, them buffaloes. They had to.”
“Money was no object to you then, I presume?” I asked.
He sighed frustratedly. “Sure, I needed money. Sure I shot ‘em up and made a handsome buck for it. But what was good for me was good for America.”
“America, at present, seems to differ quite markedly with your viewpoint,” I said.
Hedgepeth grunted, his eyes leveling on mine with icy hatred. “That’s easy for America to say now, now that all the bleedin’s dispensed with. Now that there ain’t no damned Comanches runnin’ loose on the plains. Now that there ain’t no more buffalo fightin’ with cattle for pasture.”
“Oh, come now,” I said, “This is a big continent. Surely there’s room for-”
“Boy, them buffaloes done served their destiny. Even if we’d left some, then what? His pasture would all have been plowed up for corn and wheat and oats and schoolhouses and grange halls. His home is gone. His time is gone. He gave the Indians everything they needed, but he don’t fit in no more with civilization. The minute the Pilgrim fathers touched that rock up yonder in Plymouth he was a misfit. So he had to go.”
“Granted,” I replied, at this point taking it upon myself to play attorney for the vanished race, “But could it not be argued that the world has been left bereft by their absence? After all, it was God, not man, who put them here- they were His creatures, not ours… they and the pigeon and the elk and the egret.”
“God made us master of ‘em,” Hedgepeth spat, “Says right there, Genesis chapter one page one- let Man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowl of the air and over all the beasts of the earth. Dominion, boy. We were a’fixed here to be kings, don’t you see? It was always to be whatever we made of it.”
“Kings, perhaps,” I replied, “But if the beasts are to be our subjects, then isn’t it true we owe some responsibility to them as well? Or do you seriously believe we have no duties whatsoever in our governance of Creation?”
“None beyond those strictly required to make a harvest and a dime, boy,” Hedgepeth replied. “Poppycock. Oh, sure, you miss the buffaloes, but would you’ve given up the west for ‘em? Would any of you have given up your wagons and blankets and coats to keep ‘em here on God’s earth? Would you have done any different, if you had been in my place? Out of work and strapped for cash and with no skill in this life other than what wisdom you could bestow from the barrel of a gun? Three dollars and a half a hide was a pretty bargain to fetch this entire continent for you! It’s cause of me that you can dig up your rocks in peace without havin’ to worry about catchin’ an arrow in the lung! Hell, boy, I deserve medals for what I done, not this damned hovel!”
He banged his fist on the table at this last remark, and was quiet for awhile while the storm outside keened over the empty plains. When he spoke again, his voice was much quieter, and I struggled to hear him over the racket of the storm-
“Maybe some. Maybe some, we should’ve left. I wanted to live a little higher on the hog. That’s God’s truth, and I won’t deny it. And when that money started coming in, I just kept hog-climbin’ until I made it to the top. And when I finally got there, I suppose there wasn’t anything left no-how, for anyone who might’ve wanted to climb up after me. I suppose maybe that’s the way it was.”
I looked around the shack Hedgepeth claimed as his kingdom, and thought back to the desolate, cratered land I had transited to arrive here. I cleared my throat. “It certainly is quite a top you’ve made for yourself.”
My remark sailed over his head. He replied with greater animation, “Oh, it was great while it lasted. All that money meant two things- women and booze, and not in that order neither. You might see an old man before ye’ now, but once upon a time I was known in every cathouse and saloon from Billings to Sheridan, and was banned outright from even enterin’ the town of Forsyth. That’s how infamous my name was, back in those days. Back in the good days, before that last hunt…”
His mood again became somber. “That last hunt is what all I’ve been building up to here. This was in December of 1885, as I mentioned, near Carnegie Hill, right off the Niobrara in Nebraska. All the buffaloes north and south of that point was gone, gone like God never spoke ‘em out of the ground. But we had a hunch there might be a few left in the pine scrub out in that country, and we wanted to go git our five dollars worth of each hide.
“Sure enough we found ‘em- a herd of ten; nine cows and one big grizzled old bull who was in charge. They was wild, them buffaloes, and cunnin’ like foxes. They knowed we was after them and once we started chasin’ ‘em they led us down the Niobrara for damn near fifteen, twenty miles, tryin’ every trick they had to git away. Led us into damn near every draw and canebrake up the Niobrara. They knowed where every mire and scree-slope was precisely, and each time one of us got bogged down we’d all have to stop and that little herd would get farther away. Bill Winston lost his horse entirely, fell and broke its neck in a prairie dog hole, and poor Bill looked as if he’d been run through an accordian factory. Had to waste on near half an hour getting’ him resaddled on a fresh horse. By that time the herd was more than five miles off. But we was tenacious as bulldogs and got back on ‘em real quick. They was our ticket, see, to liquor and women. Thirty hides were waitin’ for us like sacks of silver and we jes didn’t wanna cut ‘em loose. Besides, catchin’ up was no issue- buffaloes had short legs and top-heavy bodies, so they could only run two-thirds as fast as a good horse; givin’ him a quarter-mile start, you could catch a buffalo before your horse had to call on its second wind. So it was only a matter of time til we caught up with ‘em.
“Finally, I hollered out that we needed to be more strategic about this. Up to that point we’d been pursuing them more or less in a straight line, but now them buffaloes was leading us into some badlands, a real hardscrabble valley. So I hollered out that I’d move up to the rim of the valley and try to head them off, and for the rest to drive the herd hard as they could to exhaust them. That did the trick.
“I found a good spot at a fork in the gulch, where the buffalo would have to slow down a pace to decide which way they was a’goin’. First buffalo came round the bend, I put a round twixt between her eyes and she bowled right over like a train wreckin’ itself. That worked to our advantage, cause then all the rest of the buffaloes started trippin’ over her when they came round the bend. That was how I shot my last ten buffalo. For all I know they was the last buffalo any man will ever shoot.”
He heaved out another sigh, and stared long into the stovefire.
“One of ‘em was the bull. Big boy, the biggest I’d ever seen. Found out later from one of the skinners that he’d been shot twice before, which accounts for how he was so darned clever. The dust from the rest of the herd stung my eyes and threatened to botch my aim, but nonetheless I drilled him in the lung from about a hundred yards. But he kept a’comin, so I shot him again. I swear I hit him that time in the shoulder, but he kept chuggin’ on as indomitable as a locomotive. He charged right past me, so close I could’ve reached out and touched him if I weren’t so busy tumblin’ out of his way.
“I wanted to go right on after him, but the boys was already busy puttin’ down the last of the cows and we all agreed that my shot would do him in sooner or later, so we’d jes go and pick him up in the mornin’. It was gettin’ dark around this time anyhow, so we pitched our tents up on top of the gulch and fixed our fire and fell fast asleep, tryin’ to ignore the reek of buffalo musk that fumed out of the draw. The skinners worked for a few hours longer then they joined us and fell asleep too.”
Here, Hedgepeth paused to take a swig of the bitter cactus-water. He swished it round his mouth like a wash, and then unapologetically spit into his pail.
“I woke up before dawn. I don’t to this day know what it was. Normally I was one of the last ones up, and only got up at all due to receivin’ a boot in the belly. But that mornin’ was cold, and I woke up with a shiver on my skin… and in my soul. When I opened my eyes to that blue mornin’ right there before me was a red Indian. Squattin’ down, just starin’ at me. He looked kinder like a statue. Natcherly I jumped up out of my skin like a cricket, but as soon as I’d thrown my blanket aside that Injun had a blowgun up to his mouth and he shot me right in the leg. Well I was fixin’ to start cussin’ up a storm cause, in the first place, it stung like a sonofagun, and in the second place I thought he’d poisoned me. Well, he did sorter, but I’ll get into all that. Anyhow, before I could get a swear out that Injun had his one hand coverin’ over my mouth and the other pressin’ me into the ground, like he wanted to shove me into the maw of the earth. Then he started talkin’.
“Said his name was Gnaski. Said some other stuff too- I don’t in truth remember all of it verbatim. But the gist of it was he’d come to avenge that buffalo herd. He said there was no use in fighting him no-how, cause he’d already done it. That blowgun, he said he’d used it to sting me with the bone of what he called an unk-teg-ee. I asked about that later, it’s supposed to be some kind of monster that lived way back yonder in time, when all that land was underwater. I don’t know that I believe that, even now, but I don’t know that I don’t believe in it neither. There was a lot of strange bones on them plains, constantly poking and crumbling out of the draws and coulees. I suppose they was all left over from the Flood.”
I did not reply that what he’d witnessed were the remains of a far older world than he knew. Hedgepeth shook his head and spat another wad into his pail.
“He said he’d put a curse on me, for what I done. That the whole ground cried out in pain when I done shot that bull, and to appease the bull’s spirit, my life from then on would be cursed. Every penny I earned would be dust in my hands, and I’d be stricken down with every affliction a man can suffer. I’d toil for nothin’ and have all my riches changed back into rags, that I’d be an outlaw unto God. Them’s all his words. He said- and I recall this distinctly- that he never knew me. For a long time I thought he meant hisself, but I realized not too long ago- bout five year back- that he didn’t. He meant God. He meant God never knowed me.
“He finished all this with the rest of his curse. He reached into the medicine pouch he kept round his neck, and pulled out a handful of callin’ stones. He held them right up to my eyes so I could get a good look at them. Then he told me what they was, and said to me that when I next laid eyes on such a callin’ stone, the spirit of the buffalo would come for me. They’d come to claim their vengeance for all those of ‘em that I’d shot and skinned over the years. Then he done threw down the callin’ stones onto me, and they hit my chest and belly all over and wheresoever they landed it felt like I got pelted by buckshot. Then he let go of my mouth, stood up, and turned to go.”
“Natcherly, I was madder than a hornet in a pickle jar at this point, and I immediately rolled over to grab my Sharps. I was good with a Sharps, real good. I’d already slid the bolt and had it ready by the time I finished rolling back to a sitting stance, but when I leveled my sights on that Injun, he was gone. Gone like he’d never existed. I started hollerin’ to wake up the camp and we looked for him for about half the mornin’, me limpin’ like a lame dog on account of my leg. We never found so much as a hair of him. We did find the bull, though. What was left of ‘im, anyhow. All that was left was the great big head, with blood clotted round the nose and mouth. It were painted red on one side and yellow on the other, with a red and yeller rag tied onto one horn, and four notches carved into the other. Laid up before it was one fresh-boiled shoulder blade, which is how we knew he’d been shot before. All about that head were moccasin tracks; we could tell it was from jes one Injun, but the trail went away real quick, like he’d disappeared mid-step.”
Again Hedgepeth shook his head, only this time, he heaved out a deep, sorrowful sigh. I perceived it was becoming a habit of his.
“After that, my life pretty much ended. None of the Injun scouts wanted anything to do with me. Kiowa, Crow, Arikara, didn’t matter. They all steered well clear. Said I was bad medicine. Without guides it was next to impossible to find any buffalo. There were so few left, by then… Once the buffalo dried up, I tried turning my hand to other pursuits- first I tried shooting pronghorn, but the bastards was too fast for me. Them buggers don’t even run, they float. Second they get a whiff of you, they’re gone. What else? No luck at prospecting; all it got me was this here scar on my cheek, from a man who’d staked his claim and was willing to assert it at knifepoint. Couldn’t ride a horse, thanks to the leg. That wrote off ropin’ and cow-punchin’. Gold pannin’ in the Gila went alright for awhile, til the Clooney gang came in and pushed us freelancers out of the business. I even tried wolf-baiting, but they were already real thin on the ground by the time I started at that. And then there just weren’t anything left for me to try. Found my way out here and bought this place with my last dollar, and been here ever since.”
“All by yourself?” I asked, feeling a twinge of sympathy twisting itself in my heart, even despite my utter distaste for the life this man had led.
“Out here, yes. Had a girl, once. I mean a real, refined lady, not some cathouse lay. Name was Rebecca and I done loved her. She was always what I had in mind, for what lay at the end of my huntin’ days- a beautiful girl, a big house, and me in my silken britches. Met her in St. Louis and told her to wait for me, and we wrote letters back and forth for a few months like we was little kiddies in love. I still went to the cathouses, but my mind was always a’fixed on her. After that last hunt though, I didn’t write her back for awhile. Figured she’d be understandin’, and she was for a couple of letters. When I finally got back to St. Louis that April she’d forgot all about me. Had shacked up with some feller from the east. After that I moved across the country, makin’ what work I could make. Last few years I’ve been repairin’ shoes for a dime apiece.” With a sad sort of wit, he added, “Sometimes I take my money outta the jar and rub them dimes together tryin’ to make ‘em produce quarters, but I ain’t had no such luck yet.”
I was unsure what to say in response to this remarkable, rather improbable sounding tale. If it were meant to be an entertaining yarn, the old hunter certainly did not show it. He’d told it all in total sincerity, and his somber mood afterwards reflected that Hedgepeth at least believed it to be true.
“I’m sorry,” I replied, not knowing what else to say. I cleared my throat. “You believe this curse to be genuine?”
“With all my soul, boy.” Hedgepeth replied. “How could I not? It sure left me with a string of bad luck, when the day before all had been smooth sailing.”
“Many a man has fallen far from what he perceived as his zenith,” I replied, trying to assuage him of his superstitions. It did not have the intended impact.
“You don’t believe me.” he spat, staring long across the table with a gaze as withering as acid.
“I never meant to imply…”
“No, no. It’s alright,” he said, in a tone that made it clear he thought it was anything but alright, “Here, lookit that there.”
As he spoke, he hoisted his leg up onto the table with a pained grunt and rolled up the tattered right leg of his jeans to show me the old wound left by Gnaski. I expected the deathly pallor of an ancient scar. Instead, what confronted me on the inset of his thigh was a midnight corruption of the flesh. A long, jagged line running lengthwise down his leg roughly along the course of the sartorius muscle. Black was that scar, black as a tiger’s stripe, and still there seemed to be some putrescence lurking just below the skin, for round the main line of it ominous threads of ink petered off into veins and capillaries. It reeked of pus and decay, a scent which had hitherto been wholly hidden by his pantleg.
“That’s my curse,” Hedgepeth said plainly. “Plain as day for all the world to see. Now do you believe me, boy?”
“I suppose I must,” I replied, shaking my head in lingering disbelief. It might yet have been a yarn. Perhaps the wound was of recent vintage, a fetid splinter or the envenomed bite of some desert reptile. But I could not deny Hedgepeth’s sincerity, nor could I account for his apparent health despite having so odious a wound. I was thankful when he removed his leg from the table and rolled back down his pantleg. My supper churned in my stomach at the lingering odor, and for a nauseous moment I feared the jackrabbit stew would hop itself back into my bowl.
“That’s what I’ve been walkin’ with for twenty-one odd years now. It’s not gonna kill me. It’s a mark, like the one what God gave to Cain.”
Hedgepeth harrumphed and folded his arms across his chest, picking at one of his gnarled cuticles, leaving me to reflect in silence on what I’d just witnessed. What was there to say to this impossible, yet ineffaceably true, tale?
“Whatcha got in that pouch of yers?” Hedgepeth asked after awhile, breaking me from the immersion of my thoughts. “It’s a medicine pouch, ain’t it?”
“Oh, this?” I replied, holding up the fossil pouch. “Yes. Lakota, I believe. I purchased it at Fort Riley several years ago. It was taken from the body of a warrior slain at Wounded Knee.”
“I recall that,” Hedgepeth nodded. “They was upset about the buffalo goin’ away.”
“Indeed,” I replied.
“Well, what’s in it?”
“In what?”
“The pouch, boy. Ain’t God screwed your ears on right? Or did you never open it to take a peep?”
I smiled. “Oh. The contents are mostly uninteresting; there are a few fossils, which is what garnered my interest. Seashells, mostly.”
“Been a long spell since I’ve been by the sea,” Hedgepeth said, a thin smile folding up the corners of his papery lips as he reminisced. “As a boy in Savannah I’d go down to the beach to collect shells. They was real purdy-like, y’know. All shiny like gold.”
I smiled at the thought- I myself had often enough collected shells in Cape May as a boy, and perceived showing off these more ancient forms would be a perfect way to repair the mood of the evening after Hedgepeth’s dire tale. I even thought, somewhat delusionally, of perhaps of educating the roughneck as to their great age.
“Well,” I said, removing the pouch from my neck and placing it gently on the table, “Let’s go to the beach.”
As I began to untie the pouch’s sinew thread, a sudden peal of thunder stayed my hand for a moment. Hedgepeth was stunned by it as well, and he gazed fitfully up at the leaky roof of his hovel. I presumed in the moment that he was merely worried for the structural integrity of his home, but what commanded my own attention was the anomalous auditory character of this thunder. I am no ceraunophobe, yet I must admit that never before nor since has a tumult in the heavens chilled me so thoroughly. For this thunder did not merely crack or clap over our heads, but rather came as a continuous, galloping clip, as if a herd of animals were stampeding by. And as those rhythmic hoofbeats of thunder reached their crescendo, I swear upon the altar of God I heard emanating from the nearest heavens a deep, throaty growl which gave the planks of the cabin’s roof a good shaking.
When once the eldritch sound had passed, the shack settled back at once into the characteristic amniotic vulnerability of any flimsy building being pummeled by a storm. The rain beat down hard upon the rooftop, and the tonitrual orchestra resumed its normal rolling pace at a healthier distance. I swallowed my own consternation, and turned back to my comrade, who stared at me nearly bug-eyed in fear.
“I’m not so sure I want to know what’s in yer pouch there no more’s,” he quavered uncertainly.
“Nonsense, lad,” I replied, trying to recover my own nerve, now bothered more by the fact that I had been so shaken up than by the queer thunder which had done the shaking. “Nonsense. Please, permit me. I promise not to lecture.”
That earned a bark of laughter out of the old hunter, who thanked me for “havin’ the decency to condescend to the common tongue.” Yet, nevertheless, his voice retained a wary tone, and he kneaded his knuckles together fitfully.
I opened the pouch and began my lesson, removing the fragments one by one. I shall refrain from describing Hedgepeth’s response to each individual relic- suffice to say, he was not a learned man, and his queries were as naive as those of a grammar school student. He understood what the feathers were, but beyond these he was utterly ignorant. I do not wish to sound pretentious- overall, this was the most delightful part of the evening, for Hedgepeth’s ignorance was more than compensated for by his curiosity to know the nature of these fragments. The moss agate in particular captivated him, and he questioned me for a long time as to how the little plants had become trapped in the stone. Unfortunately for each of us, the evening soon took a sharp and irrevocable turn for the worse.
I had just finished showing him the Rhaeboceras ammonite, which he examined with delightful curiosity, and held my last fossil, the fragment of the Baculites shell, in my hand. I expressed to the man that this was not a complete shell, as such specimens are very rare owing to their fragility, and that what I held was indeed only a mold of the inner shell left behind after all the original conch had been dissolved in the kiln of the earth. Then, I held out the fragment for the wonderment of his eyes.
Words may never adequately describe the grimace of abject horror which swept over my hitherto gruff, rough-and-tumble host’s face when his gaze settled upon the baculite fragment I had placed before him. All color drained from his complexion with such rapidity that I feared he had taken a stroke. Midst this exsanguinated pallor, his cataracted eyes appeared clear as sky, his gaze riveted with perfect clarity upon the fossil. His long fingers clutched at the grain of the table with rigor mortis strength, yet at the same time arched as if recoiling from the touch of this ghost of another life.
All of this lasted but one dreadful moment, a single instant of silence between my placement of the baculite upon the table, and Hedgepeth’s mouth opening wide as a grave to emit a bloodcurdling scream.
He sprang up and away from the table like a cat from water, knocking his chair aside in his desperation to flee. Then the demented soul pressed himself into the corner of his kitchen wall as though he thought my fossils might rear up at any moment to bite him. He pressed his body tighter and tighter into that corner until it seemed he was trying to compress himself into a singular point to hide from whatever horror had so thoroughly mortified him.
“You fool… you fool…” he muttered, over and over, shaking his head with increasing violence but never once taking his eyes from the apparently offensive shell.
Finally he turned his head, as slowly and deliberately as an owl, and I cannot in truth deny the tingle of fear that frosted my spine as I saw the wild, harried look in his eyes, his knobby old hands groping about on the countertop til his fingers curled white-knuckle round the hilt of a knife.
“You fool… you’ve damned me, you damn bloody fool!”
Naturally, I had begun to back away slowly from the man as his chants grew increasingly deranged, and so when he lunged for me, I was not by any means unprepared. Rather, I pivoted back onto my right foot and, in the same motion, drew my six-shooter.
Samuel Colt, in my estimation, ought to be posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for the silver sight of the gun had an instantaneous calming effect upon Hedgepeth which words alone could never have achieved.
“Drop the knife,” I commanded as coolly as I could. Despite having the clear command of the situation, on account of my wielding lead against steel, my voice trembled in both fear and confusion at this sudden downward turn of events. Hedgepeth obeyed me without question, and the blade clattered to the kitchen floor.
“Pull a gun on me… on my own property…” he spat, but his voice rang hollow. The deflated hunter continued- “Go on. Go on and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor, compared to what’s a’comin’ now. You’ve damned me. You’ve damned me…”
At this last statement, he heaved out a rattling breath, trying to suppress tears, and fell against the counter, burying his head in his hands and rubbing at his temples as if trying to soothe a massive headache.
“Hedgepeth, have you gone mad? What is the meaning of this?” I demanded, not yet lowering my pistol from its alert bead upon his chest even as he fell ragdoll slack against the wall and began to cry. “Explain yourself, damn you!”
“It’s the stone… it’s the callin’ stone!” he wept. “It’s the callin’ stone. I can hear it, oh God, I can hear it callin’ to them, hollerin’ at thems up there on the other side of the sky, beckoning them down unto me! To kill me!”
I perceived that the man had lost all sanity, and began backing away slowly to reassess my situation. This was quite an unsatisfactory turn of events, you may accurately gather. The norther gales still howled beyond the flimsy walls of the cabin, and I was thoroughly trapped with an apparent lunatic.
“I’d like ya’ to leave,” Hedgepeth said. His voice was perfectly flat and unemotional. It was the voice of a man who had lost all hope, and saw nothing but oblivion bearing oppressively close upon him, looming above his head as low and dark as the norther howling just over his roof.
“Leave?” I asked weakly. “But the norther…”
“You won’t want to be here when they show up.” he replied flatly, evincing no sympathy for my plight. “You keep walkin’ five miles up the road you was on when you came in. That’ll getcha to Fulcher.”
“Hedgepeth…”
“Go on!” he ejaculated, suddenly thrashing to his feet in a fit of rage. “Go on and git! Git out of here! You’ve doomed me to die and I’d like to face that by my God-damned self! Now git!”
He’d picked up the only weapon available to him in that corner of the kitchen, a tea kettle, and hurled it so hard and so near to my head that had I not ducked I likely would still bear its imprint on my forehead. Having had quite enough, I decided that the norther might prove more hospitable than Hedgepeth, and, forcing the door open against the wind, I tumbled out into the gales.
Five miles through the storm. I dogtrotted through the withering hail til at last, blessedly, I came to the town of Fulcher. Soaked to the marrow, I tumbled into the town’s hotel and begged accommodation. I would even take a spot on their floor so long as it was dry. Thankfully, this was not necessary, and the innkeeper placed a room at my disposal.
As I wrung out my clothes over the sink and prepared to sleep in the buff, I recall fleetingly writing off my poor little fossil collection as lost. I was wholly unwilling to return to the shack of that crazed old man to reclaim the pouch, and indeed considering that the fossils had incited him to such frothing rage, he more than likely had destroyed them once I left his premises. This grieved me, for as I stated earlier, although ammonites and baculites are among the most common fossils one may find, they are nevertheless each and every one a gift from our Lord, who maketh all things, and for all the numbered days of the earth never shall another identical impression of His Mind be made.
The norther continued to rage for three days and three nights, and not once in all that time did I venture beyond the four sturdy walls of the hotel. When the sun finally shone again on that fourth morning, my clothes had dried and I was ready to depart. I went across the street, where the mud was still clarifying itself back into dust, to procure a late breakfast at the saloon. Much to my consternation, I overhead two cowpunchers at the bar discuss the following-
“Did’ya hear about Hedgepeth?”
“What about ‘im?”
“He got trampled by cows in that norther.”
“Cows?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Ain’t nobody got no cows left to trample. Drought done kill’d ‘em all.”
“Well, it was cows alright. I found him there, trampled to paste. Was jes comin’ back from a stint up in the Caprock. Figure it was the Copper Breaks herd, come down from the chaparral.”
“Copper Breaks, eh?”
“That’s what I said.”
“And they trampled him?”
“Sheriff says so, yeah. Poor Hedgepeth was in his kitchen a’fixin’ some tea when they broke in.”
“Cows breakin’ into a man’s kitchen, what kind of fool do you take me for?”
“It’s the dyin’ truth.”
Upon hearing of Hedgepeth’s demise, I endeavored to return to his shack to see what kernel of truth might be gleaned from that cowpoke’s tall tale. Hedgepeth was such a recluse that it would not have surprised me if he had been rumored dead several times before, only to spring Lazarus-like back to life. The apparent word of a sheriff meant little in this instance- every good yarn is embellished with some seal of authority. Returning to him, perhaps I might extract an apology for his behavior during the height of the storm, or at least negotiate the return of my medicine pouch. Of course, in the event that he really were dead, I certainly was the last person to speak to him before his untimely demise, and so, sentimental though it may seem, I felt compelled to return to find out for myself.
Immediately I discerned that whatever else might be said of the improbable story, a large herd of bovids had indeed visited Hedgepeth’s hovel. And in no way can the word ‘visited’ be considered an accurate descriptor of the interlopers’ actions. The place was thoroughly trampled. Wet, muddy hoofprints were stamped across every square inch of the property. I surrendered my attempt at counting them when I reached two hundred without moving from where I stood near the clothesline. Yet, queerly, I could find no origin point for this romping herd- there was no track, no path which it might have taken from the chaparral. Nor was there any trail marking their exit from the poor man’s homestead. It was as though they had simply appeared round Hedgepeth’s cabin, transported on wings of lightning and gale, to wreak their havoc before being blown away once more by the norther’s cruel winds.
The door of the cabin had been splintered in half inward, with many matchwood fragments scattered about the immediate interior of the house, plainly driven in by the blunt force of some immense head. Oddly enough, there were no marks on the walls to denote the horns of a steer, which surely would have been snagged if the animal attempted to push its head through the narrow frame. No- I could not escape the sense that, whatever sort of beasts had destroyed Hedgepeth’s home, they were not cattle.
The interior of the place was just as thoroughly eviscerated as the exterior. Several of the floorboards had buckled under the weight of the immense animals. The table where not four days previous I had sat by candlelight listening to the old hide hunter’s tale was now shorn of two of its legs, appearing like a sinking ship with one end of the smashed table pointing at an angle towards the ceiling, with a beamling of the day shining down upon it. The roof had finally surrendered and collapsed in on itself, leaving several large skylights, though whether this was due to the storm or beasts I could not tell. The ladderback chairs had been reduced to matchwood, and the firepit bore many chipped wounds where horn had sheared against stone, and the pokers and ashes were scattered all about the little room. As for Hedgepeth himself, his body had mercifully been removed, and all that remained of his presence was a thick red blot smeared across the floor of the kitchen, in the corner behind the table. Discarded upon the floor near here was one Colt revolver, and one knife. The former was empty of shells, and appeared to have been hurled in desperation. The latter was destroyed, the hilt broken and stomped upon.
I found too the casings of several revolver shells, where Hedgepeth had no doubt made a stand to deter the invaders. This presented me with a tangible part of the mystery to grapple with. I immediately crouched into the rubble and combed through to recover the spent brass- one, two, three… six. He had fired off all six rounds in his weapon, and none of his shots had been misfired into the floor, for there was no trace of the splintered gouges they would doubtless have drilled into the dried wood. In fact, as I examined the whole of the house with the scrutiny of a consulting detective, I could find no trace of any bullet holes whatsoever. The windows were shattered, so that left the possibility that they had been fired outward in that direction, but if they had been there was certainly no way to tell. Nor had I seen the glint of any spent lead out on the property.
The only other place the expended rounds could be was in the body or bodies of those bovines at whom Hedgepeth had aimed. But if he had wounded one, or even several of them, with six shots- six shots certainly well-placed from so expert a marksman, and in the confines of the little hovel, six shots that had torn into the animal’s flesh and not passed through, there should have been blood everywhere. Yet there was nary a drop on the floorboards, save for what was obviously Hedgepeth’s own.
It made me wonder if Hedgepeth had not been shooting at ghosts, at some phantom whim of the storm- and yet, it was certainly no fireside ghoul which had stampeded across his property.
Though the incident had occurred four days previous, the room was still thick with the sharp tang of black powder, and the unmistakable musky scent of animals. Indeed, the scent was far muskier than any cattle I had ever known of. As I finished my examination of the shell casings, I abruptly had occasion to crouch once more at the sight of a tuft of hair snagged on the broken leg of one of the chairs. It was a coarse, curly clump of black wool which- impossible as it may seem- could only have come from the hide of an American bison. No cattle, nor any other creature on the continent, produces such ragged wool. This left me with a singular conclusion as to the culprit in Hedgepeth’s untimely demise, despite the nearest herd of bison being the harried survivors of the market hunt residing in the National Park nearly a thousand miles to the north.
One final anomaly to add to this heap of anomalies is the recovery of my fossils. Much to my shock, they had not been pulverized, as I had feared. Rather, I found my medicine pouch positioned neatly atop the counter, as full as a coinpurse with its wealth of the ages, save for one artifact-
That singular baculite, the so-called ‘buffalo calling-stone’ which had caused Hedgepeth such woe, had been placed with quite deliberate care atop the leather pouch.
The cover art for this story is by Eveline Kolijn
Just started reading but already you’ve done a great job capturing the voice & speech pattern of a scholar of that era!
My favorite tale of yours thus far!!!