Читать книгу Mine Inheritance - Frederick Niven - Страница 22

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It was by Captain Macdonell’s desire that I went farther into that world. The Governor explained the situation to all, though to be sure few of us needed explanation again.

“We must have buffalo meat,” he told us. “It is absolutely essential. I have no right to demand of any of you young men who were engaged as labourers or writers to do such work as buffalo hunting, but I should like as many as possible to go out with these half-breeds to the hunt. I simply ask for volunteers.”

So it was that some days later I rode out of Pembina with a party going westwards to the buffalo hunting. A young métis of about my own age or a year or two older, whom I knew but by the name of Jules, had attached himself to me in a manner that seemed at one and the same time friendly and contemptuous. He would learn me this, that, and the other, he said. Miles Macdonell had arranged for all those who volunteered to go a-hunting to have horses. Jules gave me his bridle, explaining that he was so fine a horseman he did not need one. Some day possibly, he suggested, I might be able to ride as he did, with merely a piece of rawhide looped round the horse’s lower jaw. The manner of that looping, as a matter of fact, made it as effective as a cruel curb, and the bit he gave me was but as an ordinary snaffle. There were moments when I swithered between gratitude and annoyance!

We moved off on to the prairies of the coteau, young men on horseback, women also on horseback but with tepee-poles affixed on each side of their mount and dragging on the ground behind. On shorter poles laid across these were the rolls of tenting, the pots and kettles. As well as the dragged poles, the travois, we had some Red River carts with us. I thought that these made noise sufficient to drive all the buffalo out of the country. Yet ever and again the scouts ahead signalled that they had espied a herd and the column would halt and away we went in chase.

Not once during the first two or three days did I get in a shot. The small groups, small herds we sighted were quickly slaughtered without my aid; the women made up on the hunters—half-breed wives and their daughters and those women from among the settlers who had volunteered to accompany them and learn, or be learned, as the half-French Jules would say, how to gralloch these beasts. Their fires at night they made of dried buffalo dung, “buffalo chips,” with which the plains were strewn.

Then came a day when, out of the northward space, went lumbering right across our path a great herd. The carts and travois abruptly stopped and we rode ahead. It soon became clear because of the speed at which the buffalo moved that they were being pursued. There was herd panic there.

On that occasion I succeeded in getting within acting distance. Here, I realised, was a dangerous employ. Had the beasts been scattered out it would have been otherwise but they were already mobbed close. With the sudden arrival of these enemies on their flank they crowded against each other closer still in an attempt to veer westward. I recalled instructions regarding where to shoot—beside the shoulder—so that my shot would penetrate the heart. My aim was true, though less might it be called aim than a mere thrusting of my piece against the animal I selected—or rather that my horse selected, galloping alongside of it.

Down went the great bull upon his fore-knees, bowed on its head and succumbed. But I was not expert enough to reload with my horse at the gallop and found myself unable to slacken its pace. In attempts to reload I but spilt powder and came near to being spilt myself. I had killed a buffalo, one buffalo; I could kill no more. But my horse was accustomed to the game and it was obvious it was trying to keep level with another buffalo. The beasts with their heavily furred fore-parts and smoothed hinder-parts were soon all round me and their distracting lowing and bellowing was loud. I tried again to ride without rein, with but balance and leg-hold, and to reload my musket, but again in vain.

Then past me in the billowing dust went Jules.

“Watch me!” he shouted as he went by. “Like this! I learn you. Keep your bullets in your mouth, handy.”

Suddenly his horse fell and he went over its head. A second later out of the dust cloud came a scream of agony. I tried to rein in but could not. My horse had its neck craned, its head up. The horn of a frantic cow to left grazed my thigh while the shrill bellowing rose on all sides and the smell of the herd was pungent in my nostrils. Grit was in my eyes and throat, the grit of the stampede. A veritable Indian rode past me. Another surged past. Both were armed with bows and arrows. I saw a forearm thrust out, an elbow drawn back, heard the twang of the release. As the buffalo fell the hunter’s lean horse swung sidewise to avoid falling over it. For a moment the man’s leg rubbed against mine, his pony’s croup crushed my calf.

In that whirl of dust my horse was at last less anxious to continue. It was beginning to be blown with the chase and the excitement. Of its own will it slackened speed, loped, walked, permitted itself to be halted and in answer to a slap on the neck wheeled. The plain was strewn with buffalo I could dimly see in a slow subsiding of grit. By these Indians who had overtaken me I decided that the herd we had come upon had been started on its flight by a hunting party of full-bloods to north, and I wondered if they would consider that the half-breeds and we had no right to join the hunt, that the herd was theirs.

But Jules’ scream was still as it were in my ears. What had happened to him? Where was he? When he fell the herd was dense, the beasts packed close in flight. As I turned back to look for him a riderless horse ran across the plain with the quick drumming rub-a-dub of a horse in panic. It was not Jules’, and I began to speculate on how many accidents, or fatalities, there had been in that chase.

Through the falling dust I saw a group of men. There were several riders clustered together, both métis and Indians, but clearly not in a quarrel of any sort. One dismounted, then another. I drew closer. There lay Jules. There lay Jules, crumpled, trampled, torn.

One of those bending over him came erect and looking round saw me. In the act of dismounting, I immediately recognised him: that was Court Nez. Yes, that was the man so introduced by John Willis at Fort Gibraltar: “Court Nez, a free-trader—known by no other name on the prairies and desiring no other name.” He also recognised me.

“So there you are, Baxter,” he said. “Well, Baxter——” he repeated the name oddly; it seemed to me there was a note of derision in his way of saying it, “this is different from Renfrewshire, heh?”

I had nothing to say. There lay Jules’ body, the blood in a thick pool beside it.