Butcher's Crossing by John Williams Page B

easy for a while,” Miller said. “The stock will have to graze; we can take it easy for a couple of hours.”
    Small black flies buzzed about their damp faces, and their hands were busy slapping them away; the slow gurgle of the river, hidden by the dense brush, came to their ears. Schneider lay on his back and placed a dirty red handkerchief over his face and folded his bare hands under his armpits; soon he was asleep, and the center of the red handkerchief rose and fell gently with his breathing. Charley Hoge wandered along the grassy outer bank of the river toward the grazing animals.
    “How far have we come this morning?” Andrews asked Miller, who sat erect beside him.
    “Pretty near eight miles,” Miller answered. “We’ll do better when the team is broke in. They ain’t working together like they ought to.” There was a silence. Miller continued: “A mile or so ahead, we run into the Smoky Hill trail; it follows the river pretty close all the way into the Colorado Territory. It’s easy traveling; should take us less than a week.”
    “And when we get into the Colorado?” Andrews asked.
    Miller grinned briefly and shook his head. “No trail there. We’ll just travel on the country.”
    Andrews nodded. The weakness in his body had given way to a lassitude. He stretched his limbs and lay on his stomach, his chin resting on his folded hands. The short grass, green under the trees and moist from the seepage of the river, tickled his nostrils; he smelled the damp earth and the sweet sharp freshness of the grass. He did not sleep, but his eyes drooped and his breath came evenly and deeply. He thought of the short distance they had come, and he tensed muscles that were growing sore. It was only the beginning of the journey; what he had seen this morning—the flatness, the emptiness, the yellow sea of undisturbed grass—was only the presentiment of the wilderness. Another strangeness was waiting for him when they left the trail and went into the Colorado Territory. His half-closed eyes nearly recaptured the sharp engravings he had seen in books, in magazines, when he was at home in Boston; but the thin black lines wavered upon the real grass before him, took on color, then faded. He could not recapture the strange sensations he had had, long ago, when he first saw those depictions of the land he now was seeking. Among the three men who waited beside the river, the silence was not broken until Charley Hoge began leading the oxen back to the wagon to yoke them for the resumption of the afternoon trip.
    The trail upon which they went was a narrow strip of earth that had been worn bare by wagon wheels and hooves. Occasionally deep ruts forced the wagon off into the tall grass, where the land was often more level than on the trail. Andrews asked Miller why they stuck to the trail, and Miller explained that the sharp grass, whipping all day against the hooves and fetlocks of an ox, could make him footsore. For the horses, which lifted their hooves higher even in a slow walk, there was less danger.
    Once, along the trail, they came upon a wide strip of bare earth that intersected their path. In this strip the earth was packed tightly down, though its surface was curiously pocked with regular indentations. It extended away from the river almost as far as the eye could see, and gradually merged into the prairie grass; on the other side of the men, it led toward the river, gradually increasing in width to the very edge of the river, which at this point was bare of brush and tree.
    “Buffalo,” Miller said. “This is their watering place. They come across here—” he pointed to the plain, “in a straight line, and spread out at the river. No reason for it. I’ve seen a thousand buffalo lined up in ruts like this, one behind another, waiting for water.”
    Along the trail they saw no other signs of the buffalo that day, though Miller remarked that they were getting into buffalo country. The sun whitened the western