Читать книгу The Shaggy Legion - Hal G. Evarts - Страница 6

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The pulsing throb of the skin drums rose and fell in barbaric rhythm. There was monotony in the sound, monotony fraught with curious insistence—a compelling urge exerted by the evenly spaced and sonorous reverberations of the tom-toms, as if one's blood attuned itself to pulse in unison with that demanding throb. It broke down reason and seized upon the primitive emotions. Deep and vibrant, that steady dum, dum, dum, dum beat up against the ears with maddening regularity.

Lieutenant Stone was assailed by the curious thought that there was something age-old and deathless, a survival of the beginning of all things in that savage pulsation—something universal, as if all living creatures, and even the trees and the tides, had been swaying in accord with it since the dawn of time. He had only to close his eyes, he thought, give way to it, and he would be swept back twice ten thousand years to find himself in the jungle dancing to the drums. He could not have that! He shook his head angrily as if to clear his vision.

The tempo of the drums slowed down but the slowing tended to quicken the spectator's expectancy. It seemed fraught with immediate portent. A row of warriors advanced in perfect slow time, their bodies painted jet-black save for a sprinkling of white specks. They represented darkness with the stars showing bright against the midnight sky. They retired before a second line of advancing braves, their bodies a bright vermilion shot through with vertical white streaks, portraying the first rays of the sun thrusting up through a rosy dawn to drive the night away.

Through it all the maddening insistence of the skin drums wove a throbbing insanity. Two mighty warriors, garbed in the entire skins of grizzly bears, shuffled into the wild picture, lurching and swaying in time to the savage strains. A brace of half-grown lads followed, their bodies painted chalk-white, feet and noses black, portraying a mated pair of swans. Next came those whose bodies were painted in clever imitation of the scales and markings of a serpent. Still others were adorned in the rear with the dried tails of beaver, their bodies clothed in the skins of those animals. The lordly elk, the mule deer, the bighorn sheep and other creatures of the plains and hills were represented there in pairs. In and out among the other performers lithe young boys skipped actively, jerking their bodies to whisk white flaps of skin that dangled behind them to represent the light rump patches of the antelope that frisked through every scene the length and breadth of the western plains.

But all these furnished mere atmosphere to lend realism to the scene about to be enacted. The principal actors made entrance now, in pairs, each brave encased in the whole skin of a buffalo, peering through the eyeholes of his headpiece, his back held horizontal so that the bison's small tail dangled behind.

The booming strains of rattle and drum increased in volume. Above the rhythmic throb of it rose the savage growls of the grizzlies; the serpents hissed, the bull elk bugled, the wolves howled, the swans voiced their clarion trumpeting, all woven into a wild barbaric chant, while in and out through the scene frolicked the antelope, flashing their rump patches in mock alarm, all as an accompaniment to the main event. In perfect time with the savage chant and the booming drums, the chief actors portrayed the mating moon of the buffalo herds.

That slow infernal movement! The resplendent costumes weaving colorful patterns in time to that chanted refrain of beasts and the rhythmic roll of drums! It drugged the senses. Stone felt his carefully acquired impassivity breaking down.

"What's it all about?" he demanded with assumed gruffness.

"It's the bull dance of the Mandans," Stone's companion answered. "It's aimed to insure a plentiful supply of buffalo in the Mandan hunting grounds."

Lieutenant Stone snorted some scornful comment about pagan nonsense. "Can't you bribe some of them to start now so that we can be getting on?"

"Nary a one would stir foot outside the village until the bull dance ceremonies end," Coleman said. "They'll finish it up to-night. We'll start to-morrow."

"Let's leave the beggars and go on alone," the officer suggested irritably.

Slowly, the plainsman shook his head.

"We'd better have a few Mandan braves to help keep an eye on our horses of nights," he said. "No. We'll make a start at sunup."

He was calmly final about it. Lieutenant Stone, specializing in the arts of war and recently graduated as an expert, felt again that rankling sense of offended dignity that he had known from the first because of Coleman's casual assumption of knowledge pertaining to things warlike.

The dance and the booming tom-toms ceased as one; the throng surged to the big medicine lodge at the head of the village. Here the young warriors prepared to undergo the self-imposed ordeal of proving their own powers of physical endurance. The head medicine man made incisions some two inches apart in the flesh of these aspirants, lifted up the broad bands thus laid open and fastened through each such incision a horsehair or rawhide rope. Some such openings were made in the flesh of the breast, others in the back or thighs. Each participant was accorded two or more ropes. The actors chose their own individual methods of freeing themselves. Some caused their friends to fasten them aloft, where, struggling in mid-air, they endeavored to break the bands of flesh and free themselves. Others were made fast to the central support poles of the medicine lodge and leaped violently to the end of their tethers. Some had elected to have buffalo skulls attached to the ends of their tethers. These latter ones left the lodge to careen across the prairies until the trailing burdens would tear away the bands of flesh.

"And what has all this devils' business to do with the bull dance and the mating moon of the buffalo?" Stone inquired.

"Nothing much," Coleman said. "But it's held at the same time—a sort of religious rite to prove to each brave whether or not his own medicine is good or bad in the near future. It's common in some form with all plains' tribes. The Mandans call it O-Kee-Pa; the Cheyennes Hock-e-a-um, meaning 'the lodge-made-of-cottonwood-poles,' because their tribe used to hold it in a lodge of that type. The Cheyenne name is understood and used by all tribes. In effect, it means church, to include the place where it's held, the ceremony itself, the people who are there and so on. A single Injun often decides to hold Hock-e-a-um by himself to atone for something or other. I don't know the Sioux name for it, but the white men call it the Sun Dance of the Sioux. It's largely similar, in whatever tribe you run across it."

Well, Stone reflected, the less intelligent among all races and all religions had resorted to self-torture as a matter of penance or entreaty. Why not the Indians? But he was in no mood to watch the barbaric spectacle longer and crossed the intervening strip of prairie to the little soldier camp a half-mile outside the village. A young Mandan brave came leaping past him, several buffalo skulls bouncing behind him on the prairie sod.

Throughout the night that infernal throbbing of the drums seemed to pound on in Stone's brain long after the sound itself had ceased. An hour after dawn his party was on its way, Coleman riding in the lead with Stone. Six troopers and six Mandan warriors, each leading a pack horse, followed. The new green grass formed a vivid velvet carpet on the undulating prairies.

Some three hours after noon, Coleman reined up and pointed. "There's the buffalo you've been hankering to see."

Stone's eyes swept the immediate foreground and he saw no signs of buffalo. Eventually his gaze focussed on a swarm of tiny, antlike specks in the middle distance. He had expected bison to loom up bigger than that.

"They're close to three miles off," Coleman said.

Stone focussed his field glasses upon the distant specks. "Great guns, man! That big dark splash is a herd bedded down. Hundreds of them. Thousands!" he reported.

Coleman nodded. "Yeah; and train your glasses over southeast a piece. You'll pick up tens of thousands. Good buffalo belt hereabouts."

"Let's be after them," Stone urged. The powerful field glasses brought the scene into closer perspective and the officer marveled. For as far as the vision extended there were those dark splotches against the table of green, scattered units of the great herd, some bedded, others grazing slowly. He picked up one band of fifty or more that traveled in single file.

"On the march—headed for water, likely," Coleman said when Stone commented upon the peculiar formation.

Three troopers and three Mandans took charge of the led horses while their companions followed Coleman and Lieutenant Stone. Coleman veered to the right, against the wind, to come upon one of the outermost units of the big herd. The band toward which he headed was composed of some two hundred animals, most of them bedded on the prairie. He chose a shallow depression as the route of approach.

The officer was examining his rifle, one of the type with a revolving cylinder that held six shots.

"Don't run 'em too far," Coleman advised. "If you empty your rifle, better keep your pistol in reserve until you can reload."

"In case a buffalo should charge?" Stone asked.

"No. In case the Sioux jump us up. They might," Coleman said.

Stone thought the prediction an unlikely possibility but was too intent upon his first buffalo hunt to comment upon the matter at the moment. The draw concealed them until they were within a hundred yards of the edge of the herd.

"Now!" Coleman said, and led the way. The eight riders bore down upon the bison band at a full run. There was a dull rumble of hooves as the buffalo gained their feet and dashed away in mad panic. The racing horses soon overtook the rearmost members of the herd. Coleman rode near Lieutenant Stone as the officer singled out a bull and reined his mount toward it. The cavalry horse snorted and veered away—would not approach within twenty yards of the flank of the stampeded herd. The horses of the troopers performed in similar fashion. Stone fired three shots at the bull, two of them taking effect but without retarding the animal's speed. The three troopers also were emptying their rifles promiscuously into the herd. The Mandans, mounted on trained buffalo ponies, each singled out an animal and rode close alongside, launching arrows from a distance of ten feet.

One cow went down with the first shaft. Two others required three feathered darts apiece before tumbling headlong to the prairie.

Stone emptied the remaining three loads of his rifle into the wounded bull. The great beast staggered in his stride and lurched to his knees, then rolled over on his side. Stone waved his empty rifle in triumph.

The Mandans had accounted for seven of the shaggy brutes. Two others had dropped from the promiscuous herd shooting of the troopers while several others, more or less severely wounded, left the course of the stampede and strayed off across the prairie. The cavalrymen, heeding Coleman's original admonition, did not fire their pistols but instead dropped out of the chase to reload their rifles.

The run led over the crest of a low prairie divide, and as Coleman and Stone topped out on the ridge, it was to come close upon the rear of a huge herd into which the animals they pursued had stampeded. Coleman held up his hand as a signal for Stone to halt but the officer, enthralled by the wild scene that unrolled before his eyes, failed to note. His horse, a magnificent animal, bore him on and on. The rumble and jar of countless feet rose about him. On all sides and ahead, as far as he could see, thousands of buffalo were rushing in a mad stampede. He pulled the big pistol from its holster and with the first shot brought down a bull, drilled behind the ear. Elated, Stone pulled in behind another. His mount seemed to encounter more difficulty in overtaking this last one. But the horse settled to the chase, his powerful muscles driving him on and on. The rider saw several wolves loping off at right angles to the course of the chase. A band of antelope flashed across in front of him as if bent upon proving their superior speed. A dozen or more elk were running far off to one side. And the whole prairie seemed to be a rushing mass of buffalo.

Stone fired two shots at a cow that his horse had overtaken, both taking effect in her rump. She held her lead for half a mile. Stone's horse was breathing heavily now but he made a gallant effort and drew alongside the cow. The man fired two shots into her flank. The cow whipped sidewise in a vicious lunge, her horn missing the horse by inches. The startled horse stampeded and before Stone could regain control of the animal the cow had gained more than a hundred yards and was running in the wake of the rushing herd. Even at her diminished speed it was with difficulty that the horse gained on her. The gap seemed to close only by inches. At the end of a mile the horse was breathing heavily. Stone glanced back over his shoulder and saw only the lifeless green of the prairie. He had crossed another low divide after distancing Coleman. Well, at least he had showed the self-sufficient young plainsman that he was no mean competitor in a race. The main herd was streaming over a low roll of ground two miles or more ahead. The last of them disappeared and in all that sunlit expanse of green there was only the wounded cow moving ahead of Stone. Suddenly she lurched in her stride, ran in a crazy half circle and pitched down. The horse came to a stop, sides heaving, dripping at every pore, its breathing labored. Stone dismounted and finished the cow with a shot behind the ear—the last shot in the big revolver.