Buffalo Girls Read Free Page A

traveling so slow, sixty miles to him is an easy trot. The horse ain’t the problem, I’m the problem—if I’m feeling moody I’m hard to hurry. It used to drive Dora crazy, she’s feisty, on the move every minute, but I sort of turn into mud, that’s what I feel like, old thick mud. When Dora gets nervous Fred gets nervous, parrots are unusual that way—you wouldn’t think a bird would care how a person was, but Fred’s a bird with a nervous temperment. He used to sit on my arm pecking at a silver bracelet a Mexican gave me and saying “General Custer, General Custer.” Fred you’re going to say General Custer once too often and I’m going to strangle you, I told him once when I was in one of my mud moods. I guess he believed me, he went back to his perch.
    Of course Dora would throw me out if I strangled her parrot—I might do it anyway, I’m hard to predict, Janey, I have done worse things than that. Your mother has not always been able to be good—it’s hard if you have no one special to be good for.
    Your father Wild Bill was special, they had to wrestle me down and stuff me in jail to keep me from killing Jack McCall after he murdered Wild Bill, I had a good bowie knife then and I was going to cut his liver out and hang it on a tree. An Indian would do that to his enemy and Jack McCall was my enemy, I wanted revenge. Jack McCall was later hung, he’s lucky, he would have died harder if I’d been the one to kill him.
    I guess such talk will shock you, Janey, I’m sorry, I have not had the advantage of living in a nice town like Springfield, thank God you’re growing up in a civilized place. Out here the daynever passes without someone threatening to cut out someone’s liver and hang it on a tree—and it’s not just all talk, people do it, not just Indians either. Jim Ragg has killed three men, all friends—he’s terrible when he drinks, everyone with any sense leaves when Jim starts drinking. The three he killed were too drunk to think or they would have left too.
    Bartle is the exception, Jim has never tried to kill Bartle that I remember, I hope Bartle is too smart to let Jim kill him—that would be a terrible thing.
    This letter is not exactly about the prairie flowers, is it? I meant to be more cheerful, it was remembering the smallpox that set me on the downward path. I may just throw this letter away. Goodnight in any case.
    Your mother,
Martha Jane

2

    N O E ARS SAT BEHIND A LARGE SAGE BUSH, WATCHING SEVEN cranes wade in the small creek. The cranes had arrived in the dark. Because he had no ears, the old man had felt, rather than heard, their arrival. Their great wings disturbed the air sufficiently to wake him from his light sleep.
    The fact that it had been dark when the cranes arrived made No Ears suspicious. The cranes had shown bad manners, in his view. In the first place, they belonged in the Platte River, not a small creek in Wyoming. No Ears, an Ogalala, had lived by the Platte River most of his life; he had seen the cranes come in their thousands, year after year, to rest in the wide river.
    No Ears had little patience with bad manners, whether in bird or beast. He liked things to behave as they should, and the caprice of the cranes annoyed him. Crazy Woman Creek was not the Platte. What did these cranes think they were doing, straying into such a creek? Even worse, they had arrived at night, a very unmannerly thing. In his more than eighty years, No Ears could not remember seeing birds behave so badly, and he considered marching down to the creek to inform them of his disapproval.
    What kept him silent behind his sage bush was the suspicion that the cranes’ arrival had something to do with him. It was well known that cranes were spirit messengers. All cranes were thought to have the ability to travel to the spirit place, and theseven cranes in Crazy Woman Creek were not ordinary cranes of