They rode single file through the gorge, which had been cleared enough to make navigating it an extremely tight squeeze. They rode past the abandoned wind wags, or what was left of them. Vengeful Amicans had dismantled them piece by piece. Only the skeletal, wheelless frameworks lay on the plain. By the time they reached the open prairie, the sun had risen above the horizon, drenching the landscape with a yellow-red glow.
The seven people, their horses and two mules walked across the open grasslands of the Washakie Basin. Shallow coulees broke up the monotonous flatness of the plain, and here and there were cottonwood groves. They kept on a straight course for the Wind River Mountain Range far in the distance, so far in fact, it seemed they couldn’t possibly reach them in three years, much less three days.
The stretch between the basin and the mountains was probably one of the least-known regions of Deathlands. Even before the nukecaust it hadn’t been heavily populated. Even Trader and his old partner, Marsh Folsom, who had boasted a vast library of maps and predark aerial surveys, knew little about the area.
They rode through the morning, speaking very little. Joe was a cooperative, if somewhat taciturn, traveling companion. Doc complained about the low comfort level of his saddle, but not vociferously enough to get on anyone’s nerves.
At midmorning they saw the black shapes of vultures wheeling and circling ahead of them. Their route brought them within a few hundred feet of one of the Red Cadre’s wind wags. It hadn’t been touched, but bodies were strewed over the ground. The air buzzed with flies, and several vultures feasted on the banquet of rotting flesh, blood and excrement.
The body of a pirate dangled from the main mast of the wag, lashed upside down by the ankles. His cranium had been exposed by a scalping knife, revealing blue-white bone with a few clinging strips of red tissue.
The stench made Ryan’s mouth fill with sour saliva, and he cast a questioning look at Joe.
The Lakota shrugged and said, “I mentioned the stragglers had been dealt with, didn’t I?”
At noon they stopped to eat, but rather than building a fire, they ate beef jerky, washing it down with swigs of water from their canteens. After an hour they got under way again, this time walking to spare the horses. The company was in a better mood, and Ryan was almost completely recovered from his hangover. Joe didn’t speak of their destination or what they might find when they reached it.
Gradually the plains gave way to hilly terrain. Toward midafternoon, as they were climbing the slope of a rock-strewed bluff, Ryan felt the earth trembling, every so slightly, beneath his boots. At the same time, he detected a musky, wooly odor in the air. The others became aware of the faint ground quake and smell at the same time.
“Come on,” Joe said, quickening his pace as he urged his pinto up the face of the slope.
The seven people assembled on the crest of the ridge and looked across the plains below. On the opposite side of a fast-running ribbon of water, a heavy plume of dust shook with a sound like a continuous rumble of distant thunder. Beneath the dust cloud, a sea of brown, moving bodies blotted out the prairie floor. It was a large herd of buffalo moving across the plains like a rolling, never-ending wave. The ground shivered under the impact of at least two thousand hooves.
“Ever hunted buffalo, Ochinee?” Joe asked with a smile.
“No, but they’ve hunted me,” he replied. He glanced over at J.B., and both of them smiled at the memory of the time they’d been caught in a stampede of mutie buffalo in Colorado. These animals, however, didn’t appear to be of the genetically altered variety. They were still very big, however.
Joe explained how buffalo had been hunted by his people several hundred years before. “The soldier band went first, riding twenty abreast, and anyone who dared to go ahead of them would be knocked off his horse. After them came the hunters, riding five abreast. The butchers came up in the rear. The hunters would circle around the herd and the cry went up ‘ Hoka hey !’ as if in battle. All the hunters went in to killevery man for himself. A bows length away was the distance the hunters had to try for, and the preferred targets were the intestinal cavity just behind the last rib, and just back of the left shoulder and into the heart. Unless the buffalo was hit in a vital spot, he died slowly, which was a disgrace, or raced away and was lost to the tribe, which was an even greater disgrace.”