Heath’s eyes kept straying to me, and knowing he was a Boston man, I was ready for the question when it came. “That’s an uncommon name you have, my friend.” I shrugged. “Chantry? There’ve been Chantrys on the frontier for years, Mr.
Heath. An ancestor of mine was on the east coast as early as 1602.” My reply was flat and short, spoken with a finality that left small room for questions, and I wanted none. The past was in the past and there I wanted it to remain. If he had been in Boston within the past few months, he might know that which I wished to forget.
We mounted and rode west with the Otoe scouting ahead, his pony knee-deep in the tall bluestem grasses. Occasionally flocks of prairie chickens flew up, then glided away across the grass to disappear like smoke. Far off we saw several moving black dots.
“Buffalo,” Talley said. “We’ll be seeing them by the thousand, Chantry. This is their country we’re coming to, and a grand, broad country it is.” He leaned down from his saddle and pulled a handful of the bluestem. “Look at it, man! And this is the country some call the Great American Desert! They’re fools, Chantry! Fools!
Earth that will grow such grass will grow rye or barley or wheat. These plains could feed the world!” “If you could get men to live on them,” Ebitt said wryly. “It’s too big for them, too grand. They can’t abide the greatness of the sky, or the distances.” He pointed ahead. “Look!
There’s no end yonder. No horizon. You ride on and on and on and all is emptiness.
Only the buffalo, the antelope, and the grass bending before the wind. I’ve seen men frightened by it, Chantry! I’ve seen them turn tail and run back to their cities and their villages. Only in Russia or the Sahara is there anything like it.” “There’s the pampas, on the Argentine,” I suggested. “I’ve not been there, but it must be very like this.” “Maybe,” Ebitt said skeptically, “but I think there’s nothing like it, not anywhere. The Sahara’s desert. Well, Russia, maybe, like I said. I’ve talked with Russians and there seems to be a vastness to their land as well.” My mind was on other things, for by nature I am a cautious man. “How much does the Otoe understand?” I asked Talley.
“Not much, I’m thinking, but you can’t tell about a redskin. They talk little when there’s a white man about, but they listen, and nobody in his right mind thinks an Indian is not quick.
“He hasn’t our education, and his upbringing isn’t Christian, but there’s nothing wrong with his senses or his wits. He’s tuned to the land, Chantry, and don’t ever forget he’s lived in this country, in this same way, for a mighty long time.” “Not on the plains,” Deg Kemble objected.
“Until the Indian got the horse from the white man, he never traveled far over the grassland.
He followed streams, and followed the buffalo at times, but there’s nothing to live on out here. Once the redskin got the horse, there was no holding him.” Davy Shanagan rode up beside us.
“Chantry, I’m cuttin’ out to shoot some meat.
Want to ride along?” We turned away from our small column and trotted our horses over the prairie, then walked them to the summit of a small knoll. We found ourselves with a surprising view of the country around.
Within sight, but some distance off, were two herds of antelope, but no buffalo. Far and away to the westward there seemed to be a fold in the hills with some treetops showing.
“There’s game along the creeks,” Shanagan said. “The Otoe told us that. None of us ever been this far west before. There’s bear occasionally, some deer, and lots of prairie chickens.” We walked our horses toward the antelope but holding a course that, while bringing us nearer, seemed aimed at passing them by. At first they seemed unimpressed, but as we continued to advance one or two of them started to move. We decided to have a try at them although they were a good two hundred yards off.
Drawing rein, I lifted the Ferguson to my shoulder, took a careful sight, then squeezed off my shot. The antelope stumbled, then broke into a run. From childhood I had learned to think my bullet to the target, for given a chance the eye is accurate, and I knew a deer would sometimes run a quarter of a mile with a bullet through its heart.
The antelope raced on, running swiftly, until suddenly it crumpled, kicked, and lay still.
Davy shot at the instant I did, and his long Kentucky rifle held true. As we rode up to our game, he got out his ramrod and prepared to reload. “Better load up, Chantry. You don’t want to be ketched with an empty rifle.” “I am loaded.” He glanced at me, then at the Ferguson, but made no comment. He was a better skinner than I, so while he skinned out both our kills and selected the best cuts of the meat, I kept watch from a nearby knoll.
He was working only a few yards from me and he said, “Can’t take nothing for granted. Looks like open country but there’s hollows and coulees out yonder where you could hide an army. Just when you figure there ain’t anybody within miles, a dozen Injuns come foggin’ it out of a coulee and you’ve lost your hair.” My eyes were getting accustomed to the country.
It is remarkable how one’s vision becomes limited to nearby objects and what we expect to see. Out here the distance was enormous, a vast sky and an endless rolling plain of grass to which the eye must adjust.
First the mind must accept the clouds, the grass bending before the wind, the changes in the light on the grass, and the shadows left by clouds.
Soon the mind has sorted the usual sights and the eye becomes quick to pick up the unusual, the smallest wrong movement in the bend of grass, a deepening of a shadow at the wrong place. The land where I had spent my earliest years was forest and foothills, with frequent streams. Here the only trees were along the watercourses. Later, in New England, I had hunted in farming country, occasionally taking trips into the mountains of Vermont or to Maine. The open plains were new to me, and I was wary of them.
“Known many Indians?” “Here and there,” Davy acknowledged.
“Shawnees, mostly. Some Ponca Sioux, Cherokee, and Delaware. I’ve no bad thought for them. They have their ways and we ours, but when it comes to livin’ in this country, their way is best.
“Bob Sandy now, he figures the only good Injun is a dead one. He come home from the mill one time with his pa to find his family butchered, their cabin burned. Even the pigs were shot full of arrows.
“So Bob, he’s got a full-sized grudge against Injuns. That’s why we put him up to watchin’ the Otoe.” “You’re watching him? You don’t trust him?” “Chantry, that Injun is ridin’ toward his own people. What we got may seem mighty small to a gent from back east, but to an Injun, it’s treasure. If he could murder us all, or set a trap with his own folks to kill us, they’d have all we got and he’d be a big man among his own folks.
“They got no Christian upbringin’.
Nobody ever told them to forgive their enemies, or told them that stealin’ was bad, except in their own village, from their own people. With most Injuns the word stranger is the same as that for enemy.
“A lot of white men think the Injun is dead set against them because they’re white. Nothing to it.
An Injun will kill another Injun as quick as he will a white man, except that the white man may have more loot on him.” “They’ve had it pretty good, Davy. The best hunting in the world, no taxes to pay, and a lot of country to move around in.” “Uh-huh”–Shanagan chuckled–“t’s your Boston showin’. What you don’t figure on is that you folks yonder in civilization have yourvs nicely protected by the law and custom.
Out here you’ve got no protection but a quick eye, a fast horse, and the ability to shoot straight.
“That free savage that folks talk about, he never leaves his camp but what somebody is likely to take his hair.” After that neither of us spoke for some time. My own thoughts strayed far afield. These broad plains must resemble those from which the wild riding Scythians migrated when they moved west and south from Central Asia. They took scalps as well, although they worked with metal and were in many ways further advanced than the American Indian.