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soon shoot a hare dead, centre of the head, a hundred feet, no trouble. Better not starve before we go to do our work. We knew in our hearts our work was to be Indians. People in California wanted rid of them. Wanted them routed out. Troopers couldn’t take the bounty legal-wise of course but someone high up had agreed to help. There was two dollars per scalp for a civilian, for God’s sake. It was a funny way to earn your card-money. Volunteerswere going out and shoot maybe sixty bucks and bring the bodies in.
The major said he liked Indians well enough, he couldn’t see the harm in those Diggers, so called. They’re not the same as the Indians on the plains, he said. Diggers didn’t even have horses, he said, and this time of year you could find them all in one place praying. The major had a melancholy sort of look when he said this, like he had said too darn much, or maybe knew too much. I was looking at him. The sergeant, his name was Wellington, snorted through his dusty nostrils. Goddamn Injuns, we’ll show ’em, he said, all to himself nearly, grinning, as if he were among pals, which he was not. No one could prize a man with a tongue like a bolus of knives. He hated the Irish, said the English were stupid, the Germans worse. Where the hell was he from? John Cole wanted to know. Little village, he said, you never heard of it. Did he say Detroit? We didn’t know what that sergeant was saying half the time, because he kind of laughed when he talked, except when he was giving orders, then all was clear enough. Forward! Advance! Slacken off! Dismount! It made our Irish, English and German ears sore.
So what happens next day was me and John Cole and Watchorn himself and also a nice sonofabitch called Pearl, we went up with the scouts to find that herd. We came into marshy ground first but the Shawnee boys knew the path through and we weaved along it content enough. Cook had put some of his cooked sparrows in our stomachs. We were after something bigger. Shawnees, seem to remember one of them was called Birdsong, as it happens, cool-minded, timber-skinned boys theywere, giving themselves the old information in their own lingo, had done up their prayer bags the night before. Kinda lucky charms they liked to put together in an old bag made from the scrotum of a buffalo. They were lashed to their ponies’ necks now, they rode without saddles. Long before we had news of it, they were going slower, they knew something was close, they brought us about a mile sideways so we could start to work in up the wind. There was a big low sickle-shaped hill before us, covered in a dark grass, and the country there was quiet and almost windless, except for a sound you were guessing might be the sound of the sea. There was no sea thereabouts, we knew. Then we breasted the hill, it was giving a horizon of maybe four miles, and I drew in my breath, amazed, because right down below us was a herd of maybe two or three thousand buffalo. They musta taken a vow of silence that morning. Shawnees now were putting their ponies into a polite trotting, and ourselves likewise, we were to go down as close to the buffalo as we could without stirring them. Maybe buffalo isn’t the smartest chicken in the coop. We had the wind in our faces such as it was. We knew as soon as they felt us there was going to be fireworks. Sure enough, the nearest dozen must of felt us. They started to stumble forward all of a sudden, nearly falling down. We must have smelled like death to them. We hoped we did. Birdsong kicked forward and we kicked forward, John Cole was a beautiful rider, he streaked through the Indians and fled after the biggest cow he could spot. I had a line on a big cow too, must have been that we preferred the cow meat. Then the land dipped again, the near buffalo had set everything moving, it was ten thousandhooves then drumming the hard earth and the whole cavalcade pouring down into the declivity. Seemed to swallow them, every last one, then the