The Scourge of God

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PRAIRIE, WESTERN SOUTH DAKOTA

JUNE 10, CY24/2022 AD

"It's different, seeing so many together," Rudi said quietly. "They're impressive enough one by one, but it's something else here."

The rise they were on was a hill only by prairie standards, but it gave them a good view. The bison were in clumps and straggling groups and lone individuals, grazing their way across the rippling plain and working gradually northward; the grass was fetlock-high before them, and cropped to an inch or less behind. The morning sun cast their outlines eastward, until the shape was like cloud shadow moving over the plains.

And as you raised your eyes there were more, and more, and more.. almost to the edge of sight. The wind was from the south, and it brought the scent of them, like cattle but harsher, a wild musky smell. Birds flew about the great animals' feet, snapping up the insects they stirred; a twenty-strong pack of wolves hoping to cut out a calf had sheered off to the westward when the mounted humans arrived. Several pair of golden eagles swept the sky above, seven-foot wing-spans tiny with height, waiting for the herd to flush something bigger. As he watched, one of them folded its pinions and struck like a bronze-colored thunderbolt.

Rudi mentally drew a box, rough-counted the buffalo within and multiplied.

Eighty or ninety thousand head, he thought. I don't think I've ever seen that many of anything breathing but birds in one place before.

He could feel his hair starting to bristle; the low rumble of their hooves was like a vibration that echoed in the tissues of his lungs and gut. And he could hear the sound of their feeding, nearly a hundred thousand pairs of strong jaws tearing at the Western wheatgrass, needle-and-thread and sagewort.

"Pretty, aren't they?" Red Leaf said, looking down at the mass of moving muscle and bone and horn and smiling with delight. "Never thought I'd see anything like it when I was your age, except in a movie. This is a cow-calf herd-cows, calves, yearling and two-year bulls. The big herd bulls mostly stay away until the rutting season, in another couple of months."

" Awesome was more the word I was thinking, not pretty," Rudi said. "And so many! Weren't they rare before the Change?"

"There were a couple of hundred thousand around, on ranches mainly," Red Leaf said. "And they can double every three years, if there's room, even if you harvest a third every year-you just take the bulls. They only need one for every twenty or so cows. There's another herd twice as big as this a few miles north; millions altogether."

Mathilda blinked. "Do they go away in the winter?"

"No, they just scatter a bit. Storms that'll kill half the cattle on a range don't even bother 'em-they don't freeze and they can get at grass through any ordinary snow."

"Why hunt a lot of them now, then? Why not a bit at a time when you need them?" she asked.

Red Leaf nodded. "We do take a few every so often, for fresh meat; and we have a winter hunt, for robes-that's when the hair's best. But this is the best time of year to make pemmican; you dry the meat, grind it up to powder and flakes, mix it with melted fat and pour it into rawhide parfleche bags. It'll keep for three, four years if you're careful. It makes great soup base, with a little dried onion."

Mathilda nodded gravely in her turn; she'd tasted the results. Rudi had the same thought: pemmican was convenient and nourishing, and that was about all you could say for it.

Red Leaf raised a brow and waved at the prairie. "I know what you're thinking. But this has been a good year; good rain, good grass-third good year in a row. Sure as fate, though, we get bad droughts every so often. Sometimes for years at a time. Then most of the herds will die, cattle and tatonka both, or we have to slaughter everything except some of the breeding stock to let the grazing recover faster. So we keep a couple of years' food on hand. That way after a dry-year dieback we can harvest less. Then they'll breed back faster."

Mathilda nodded thoughtfully. "Very sensible," she said.

"Pemmican isn't hump steak by a long shot, but it beats starving to death," the itancan said. "Which is what the wolves do when the rains fail."

He waved, and Rudi's group gathered close, their horses' noses in a circle; the young men and a few of the young women of the hocoka who'd be going on their first hunt closed in around them. His first words were to the outsiders.

"OK, now you're hunk-ate, you're entitled to take part in the hunt. That doesn't mean you have to do it. These aren't cattle; they're wild animals, and big ones. You come off your horse once they start moving, or your horse goes down, you'll have to be scraped up with a shovel. Even guys who've been doing this for years get killed sometimes. Understand?"

They all nodded; Rudi kept his face sober, but he felt a grin bubbling up beneath it, like the ones that were splitting Edain's face, and Fred's. Odard was looking politely interested; he might not have gone if the other men hadn't, but he was going to enjoy himself anyway. The only male of their party not here was Father Ignatius, who'd politely excused himself to continue hearing confessions and celebrating masses; and to consult with the hocoka 's physicians about replenishing their medicine chests; and to the brain-cracking labor of putting their reports in cipher.

And none of the girls was going to back down if the others didn't, either. They wouldn't have been here if they were the types who could back down from a dare, even an unspoken one.

Mathilda and Virginia don't seem to have hit it off. That's a pity; they're rather alike, in some ways.

Red Leaf nodded, then spoke a little louder to include the Sioux youngsters: "OK, here's how we do it, and don't you roll your eyes while I'm talking, Mato Kokipapi. The bears may be afraid of you, but tatonka ain't. You've helped your folks with their cattle since you could ride, right?

"Sure, itancan," the young man in question said.

"Well, there's a good goddamned reason you haven't been allowed on the buffalo hunt yet and how heavy a bow you could pull is only part of it. Tatonka aren't cattle. You can get 'em moving but you can't head them off. We love tatonka, but remember that the Buffalo People don't love us; we're just like the wolves or the damn lions to them. They don't care if you yell and wave a lariat in their faces. If you get between them and where they want to go they'll smash right into you and dance on you, and they'll hook you or your horse if they can. You keep behind them or alongside… but not too close."

He pointed, obviously taking the opportunity provided by the new-comers to force the Lakota youngsters to listen to what they'd already heard many times; that one more time that could save a life. Even with the mounting excitement Rudi recognized the manner. Sam Aylward and Sir Nigel had the same technique of patient repetition to drive essential lessons home in resistant young skulls.

"Now, everyone see those guys?"

A dozen mounted Sioux were easing their horses into the herd on the southern fringe, careful not to spook any of them. The animals moved away from them, but slowly; sometimes a ring would form, the bearded horned heads looking inward. A few of them blatted in surprise when the riders approached and lumbered off, or bellowed and pawed the earth, but most put their heads down and began grazing again almost immediately. The men were mostly older, in their thirties or even forties, and they were lofting balls of fleece at the odd buffalo here and there. When one struck a gout of pink dust went up, staining the beast's hump.

"Those are the Choosers. They've been marking the ones you don't shoot for a couple of days now."

Ah, Rudi thought. They're picking the young bulls that won't charge or make threat displays. Selecting the most even-tempered ones.

The itancan continued: "Don't go near the cows with calves, or the young females. When the herd starts to move, the mothers will drift to the inside anyway, so stay towards the rear and the outside. The other reason we have the big hunt now is that they start breeding in July, and Iktomi! they get mean! What we're after is the yearling and two-year bulls and the barren cows. Give them an arrow through the lungs or heart, and then sheer off. Finish them with the lance later when they're down. Start when you hear the call and stop when you hear the call for that."

Rudi nodded, and there was a murmur of agreement from the others. The Sioux dismounted and gathered in a murmuring circle around a small fire of sweetgrass; Red Leaf was waving it with an eagle-wing fan. Rudi made the Invoking sign, raised his bow above his head and murmured his own hunter's prayer:

"Forgive us, brothers, and speak well of us to the Guardians; thank you for your gift of life. It won't be wasted. Horned Lord, witness that we take from Your bounty in need, not wantonness. Guide the spirits of those we slay home to the fields of the Land of Summer, where no evil comes, until they are reborn through the Cauldron of Her who is mother to us all. This we ask, knowing that the Hour of the Hunter shall come for us too at the appointed time, for we borrow our bodies from Earth for only a little space, and Earth must be fed."

Then they moved out, bows in hand and hunting lances in the scabbards behind their right elbow; the weapons had seven-foot shafts and a vicious head like a double-edged butcher's tool. Rudi was riding one of Red Leaf's trained buffalo ponies, though Epona and the rest were with the remount herd. The animal was smallish for someone his height, but it had a deep muscular barrel and a bright intelligent eye, and it had done this for five or six seasons. They rode south down the long slope, across the front of the great mass of bison and down its western flank with a thousand-yard wide space on their left, until they were behind the herd and the Choosers rejoined them.

Those were Red Leaf's most experienced hunters, and each of them took a selection of the first-timers under his care; other men worked alone, or in family groups, and there were seventy bows in all. The itancan himself kept his son and his new relatives with him, as well as Frightens Bears and a few others. The older hunters were steady and intent, their faces grave; Rudi took a deep breath and focused, pulling up strength from Earth below and down from Sky above.

They fanned out and walked their horses forward. The noise of the herd grew steadily as they approached it, the grunting of mothers to calves the loudest sound. Rudi blinked as he realized that the deep rumbling beneath it was tens of thousands of ruminant stomachs, then grinned in delight for an instant. That would be a wonder to tell his grandchildren!

"When you get within twenty yards, they start moving away," Red Leaf said.

The chief's recurve came up and he drew smoothly to the ear. The four-edged triangular head slid back through the cutout of the bow until it rested just above his left knuckle. The buffalo ahead of him was a two-year-old male, big and turned dark brown but without the muscled hairy massiveness of the great herd bulls. It sped up a little as his horse approached, giving a look over its shoulder and then moving up to a trot that looked clumsy and lumbering but started to draw away from the hunter.

"So shoot… now!"

The snap of the string against his bracer and the wet solid thunk of the arrowhead merged with each other. Beneath that Rudi could hear the crack of a rib parting under the impact of the steel. The arrow vanished to its fletching against the beast's flank, and a bawl of astonished agony cut across the lowing and stomach-grumble of the great herd. The young bull galloped then, blood fanning from its nose and mouth as it groaned; a thousand yards later it stumbled and went down as its left foreleg collapsed under it.

Rudi came to himself with a start as the other bows snapped, distracted by the primal dance of life and death. A yearling threw its head up at the smell of blood not ten yards away; he clamped his legs on the barrel of his horse, judged the moment…

Snap. The arrow's flight had the sweet inevitability to it, as always when you were going to hit the mark. It struck the buffalo high on the right shoulder and slanted down, vanishing completely within the body cavity. The beast stiffened and raised its tail, started to gather itself for a leap forward and collapsed.

"Kiy-ee-kiy!"

The shout rose from three-score throats as the hunting party signaled their agile ponies up to a gallop, and the alarm ran through the herd like a wave across water-the ambling progress suddenly turning to milling chaos, and then to headlong flight. The sound of its passage changed from a grumble to a roar to a thunder like the hammer of a god striking ten times a second, as twenty thousand tons of weight pounded the hard prairie soil through three hundred thousand hooves. Dust spurted upward, and suddenly he was riding through a mist of it, with great hairy rolling-eyed shapes looming up out of nowhere.

One came close; it had the pink slash on its hump, and he ignored it. Now he was deeper into the rearward fringe of the herd, with the black-brown shaggy humps plunging up and down on either side of him. A head jerked sideways, and the black curved horn missed his foot by inches; his arrow was already on the way, and cracked into the beast's spine. It fell, and another rammed into it from behind and went cartwheeling.

"Kiy-ee-kiy!" Rudi screamed exultantly himself; twitched an arrow out of the quiver and shot again When the recall sounded he coughed dust out of his lungs and spat brown. A swill of water from his canteen came out almost as soil-stained; he could feel the dust gritting between his back teeth. He coughed again, rinsed his mouth once more, then took a long lukewarm swig. The hunt had been brief-he'd spent the same amount of time stalking a single deer in the Cascade forests many a time. And none of the humans had been hurt badly, though Frightens Bears was flushed and embarrassed because Red Leaf had had to pull him out of a tight spot, and his friends were giving him new names-Craps His Pants and Tatonka's Trampoline were popular. The herd had swung well away eastward, and it was slowing as the pursuit ended and the smell of blood fell away.

There were smells aplenty around the Sioux hunting camp with its wagons and bustling scores, and plenty of work left to do. Nothing in either was unduly strange to someone who'd been born among farming folk who also hunted for the pot; Rudi had helped butcher livestock and dress game all his life, and so had his friends.

"Except the scale of the thing," Rudi muttered to himself, as he turned his exhausted pony over to a youth.

The great bodies were scattered back over miles, until they dwindled to black dots against the flower-flecked tawny-green grassland. Horse-drawn sleds of salvaged sheet metal with upturned fronts like toboggans were already at work, dragging the carcasses back. Rudi walked over and joined in as a team of men heaved a thousand-pound body onto one of them, then moved on to the next as a woman led the horses away, leaning into their collars; after he had his breath back it was enjoyable enough work except for the flies. Soon his whole body gleamed with sweat in the hot sun as he labored stripped to his breechclout.

At the camp the bodies were skinned by the women-that seemed to be considered female work among the Lakota, their curved knives flashing with unerring skill-but help in turning the bison from one side to another was appreciated. Then they were hoisted up by the hind legs with hook and rope and chain on tripods of stout wooden poles or metal rods, aided by pulleys at the top. The gutting and cleaning went swiftly with over a hundred hands at work with knife and hatchet, cleaver and bone-saw, but there were over eight hundred of the big beasts.

The first few bison to be broken up were surrounded by rings of hopeful camp-dogs, but there was enough offal to spare that they soon wandered off in a daze of bloated ecstasy. Garbh had quickly established herself as alpha-female and got the best bits; he saw her lying on her back not far from where Edain was working, feet splayed in the air and belly rounded, tongue lolling over her fangs as she made faint moaning sounds.

"Eight hundred and twenty-two!" Red Leaf called, as he walked through-the most senior hunters didn't have to do anything more. "Good work! Plenty of pemmican for winter, plenty of hides for tipis and harness and clothes!"

Call it two hundred tons of meat when they're dressed out, and much else of use besides, Rudi thought. Now, that is a good day's work!

The scores of the individual hunters were chalked up on a board hung on one of the wagons. Rudi's had been very respectable-seven- but Red Leaf had gotten fifteen, and his son Three Bears twelve. Edain, listed as Swift Arrow, had scored nine, the highest of all of the newcomers; he'd been using his longbow, possible on horseback when you were shooting directly to the left.

You know, I'd like nothing better than to pass a summer with these folk, Rudi thought. It's a pity that we'll be moving on soon.

The butchering teams worked steadily at their messy, bloody task, stopping only now and then to sharpen tools on whetstones and drink water carried around by youngsters. The area stank and attracted hordes of flies, but everyone was in good humor; there was a lot of teasing between the men and women, some of it as bawdy as anything Mackenzies did, though most of that was in Lakota. The entrails were turned inside out and scraped, put aside for a dozen uses; horns were carefully stacked, to be turned into everything from drinking vessels to strips on the bellies of bows; the valuable sinew that ran down beside the spine was bundled up. Most of the tongues went into barrels, to be salted down as delicacies for months to come.

Others gave the hides a first scraping and then scattered salt on the flesh side and stacked them high in bundles on wagons. The crack.. crack… of axes on bone sounded as the skulls were split for the brains that would be used to tan the leather. Bones and hooves would make glue, or handles for tools; from what Red Leaf had told him, there was a use for everything, right down to cured stomach linings making good canteens. Of course, that didn't mean that every part of every beast was used, but most were.

The meat itself was sliced into long narrow paper-thin strips; those were dumped into tubs and pulled over to the racks. Others had cut back long shallow trenches in the turf and lit fires in them, low and smoky with sage; over those were erected the knock-down drying racks of wire mesh. The meat was rubbed with salt and powdered herbs and laid carefully in long rows, in the first stage of preservation.

Still other fires were lit for cooking. A number of young calves had been killed inadvertently-mostly knocked down by the near stampede. Those were split open and butterflied and set to grilling over the coals, with a cook using a long-handled brush to slather sauce on them from a keg. Tongue and hump meat went on beside them, and young girls carried around skewers of grilled tongue and kidney and liver. Rudi paused for a moment to take one; the rich taste of the organ meat spurted over his tongue, just short of burning-hot, incomparable when taken fresh in the field like this.

"That's the hunter's share," the girl said. "Seven tatonka! And on your first hunt, too."

"Tasty!" Rudi said, grinning at her; she was about the age of his sister Maud, twelve or so. "And done just right. Have a bite."

She did, then looked at him. Her eyes went a little wider as she took in the scars; the distinctive puckered arrow-marks on his shoulder and lower back, the long white marks of blades on his arms and legs and along the left side of his jaw. It was a remarkable collection for a man his age, and one who wasn't crippled by it either. If you knew anything about the matter, which nearly everyone in a Sioux camp did, it implied that the people who'd given him the scars were mostly worse off-fatally worse.

"You must be a great fighter!"

He took the skewer back and bit off a lump of kidney, chewing with a solemn, considering look, and said:

"Well, I'd be lying if I said no." Then he grinned and winked at her. "But I prefer hunting to fighting, and also dancing and wine and song and talking to pretty girls."

She laughed, flushing to the roots of her ash-blond hair, and dashed away. Rudi tallied on to a rope and helped hoist up another carcass, heaving with half a dozen others as the pulley clattered. Butchering hundreds of tons of buffalo took a lot longer than hunting them. By the time the late-summer sunset came Rudi could feel the tiredness down in his bones, the way you did at the end of the wheat-harvest back home. And the brief shower under nozzles attached to a wagon bearing a water-tank was inexpressibly welcome.

The night-camp was well away from the butchering site, though relays of guards would be posted throughout the hours of darkness around the racks; he could hear the song of the coyotes already, and fainter with distance the deeper, fiercer sound of the lobo packs signaling to one another. The smell might bring bear or lion as well, which was a good reason to get a little distance before you slept. The water and fuel carts were there, but nobody needed a tent tonight.

"That was… interesting," Odard said, as they settled down around Red Leaf's campfire. "It's certainly not like shooting cows, which I thought it might be. Not in the least!"

Airag tasted better after you'd been drinking it for a week or so, Rudi found. It had a dry flavor beneath the first snail-squeezing impression, and it went down pleasantly with plates of hump steak and slices of juicy buffalo tongue. He took a swallow, upending the leather bottle with the bulk of it supported on his right elbow in the local style, and managing to avoid spilling any over his chin. Then he passed it on to Ingolf.

Mathilda sighed. "I'm having a great time. Things are less… complicated here than they are back home."

Fred Thurston nodded, but Virginia Kane thumped him on the shoulder.

Now, they are getting on well indeed.

"No, it ain't," she said. "You're just seeing part of it, and with an outsider's eyes, too."

Rudi sighed agreement, despite Mathilda's glare; still, even if it was disappointing, it was better to shatter the illusion.

"Matti, if someone were a guest at Castle Todenangst, they might think that your life was nothing but balls and hunts and hawking and tournaments and listening to the minstrels."

"This isn't like that," she replied. "This is working life. And even the festivals at home, you're always looking out for some plot or intrigue or conspiracy or something."

Red Leaf was on the other side of the fire from them. He could still hear, and he chuckled:

"Nah, this is more of a working vacation; more interesting than sitting on your horse looking up a cow's ass, at least. And we've got our politics and problems, same as anyone else-and not just the Cutters. You folks haven't been around long enough to get a handle on them, is all. Plus, you're seeing the best time of year. Hunkered down in a blizzard, things can get sorta stressful, nothing but the same faces for weeks on end. I think that's why the old Lakota had a lot of those rules that look silly when you hear about 'em-not looking at your mother-in-law, and that sort of thing."

Rudi finished up the last spoonful of beans and roasted buffalo sirloin tips. He'd put away a lot of it, and felt an impulse to curl up on a warm rock for a week or two.

It's a good thing I'm not prone to constipation, he thought. This diet would bring it on, sure and it would.

Ingolf poured himself a cup of chicory from the tin pot that rested across two stones in the firepit; he could drink it past sundown and not stay awake, which he claimed was the result of overdosing on the stuff in his career as a paid soldier and salvager. Mary was leaning against his shoulder, blinking into the embers of the fire with drowsy contentment while Ritva plucked out a little wandering tune on Odard's lute.

The man from Wisconsin spoke, his voice a deep rumble:

"Yah, I've been to a lot of places from Oregon to the East Coast and back, and I've yet to find one where life is simple. You might think some plow-pusher's is, but you get close enough to see the details and it's got just as much going on beneath the surface as a Bossman's court. Mind you, there are Bossmen and then there are Bossmen. Des Moines-"

He shrugged. Unexpectedly, Ritva spoke:

"I agree with Matti, a little. A lot of things depend on size. Things are simpler when there aren't so many people."

She grinned. "Not necessarily better. Sometimes Mary and I would go on long winter hunts just to get away from Stardell Hall. There's that point where if you hear Aunt Astrid correcting someone's pronunciation of the Sindarin pronominal verb endings just one more time you're going to start screeching and do something nasty with a hatchet."

She bent her head and began playing seriously, and she and Mary sang a duet. Rudi lay back against his saddle, watching the occasional spark drift upward towards the frosted sky. Matti's hand stole into his and she squeezed forgiveness for the momentary disagreement. He squeezed back, pleasantly aware of the solid warmth of her and the herbal wash on her hair, something the Lakota women made from sunflower oil and boiled-down flowers.

Then the twins started a tune he knew and he joined in with his strong baritone:

"A shadow in the bright bazaar;

A hint of gold where none should shine-"

More of Red Leaf's people drifted over, listening quietly.

"— her gold flanks heaving in distress;

Half woman and half leopardess;

From either side-nowhere to hide It's time to fight or die!"