Butcher's Crossing by John Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

his own glass in his large, hairless hand and cupped it; Andrews took a quick sip. The liquor burned his lips and tongue and warmed his throat; he could taste nothing for the burning.
    “I come out here four years ago,” Miller continued, “the same year McDonald did. My God! You should have seen this country then. In the spring, you could look out from here and see the whole land black with buffalo, solid as grass, for miles. There was only a few of us then, and it was nothing for one party to get a thousand, fifteen hundred head in a couple of weeks hunting. Spring hides, too, pretty good fur. Now it’s hunted out. They travel in smaller herds, and a man’s lucky to get two or three hundred head a trip. Another year or two, there won’t be any hunting left in Kansas.”
    Andrews took another sip of whisky. “What will you do then?”
    Miller shrugged. “I’ll go back to trapping, or I’ll do some mining, or I’ll hunt something else.” He frowned at his glass. “Or I’ll hunt buffalo. There are still places they can be found, if you know where to look.”
    “Around here?” Andrews asked.
    “No,” Miller said. He moved his large, black-suited body restlessly in the chair and pushed his untasted drink precisely to the center of the table. “In the fall of sixty-three, I was trapping beaver up in Colorado. That was the year after Charley here lost his hand, and he was staying in Denver and wasn’t with me. The beaver was late in furring out that year, so I left my traps near the river I was working and took my mule up towards the mountains; I was hoping to get a few bears. Their skin was good that year, I had heard. I climbed all over the side of that mountain near three days, I guess, and wasn’t able to even catch sight of a bear. On the fourth day, I was trying to work my way higher and further north, and I come to a place where the mountain dropped off sharp into a little gorge. I thought maybe there might be a side stream down there where the animals watered, so I worked my way down; took me the best part of a day. They wasn’t no stream down there. They was a flat bed of bare ground, ten, twelve foot wide, packed hard as rock, that looked like a road cut right through the mountain. Soon as I saw it, I knew what it was, but I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was buffalo; they had tromped the earth down hard, going this way and coming back, for years. I followed the bed up the mountain the rest of that day, and near nightfall come out on a valley bed flat as a lake. That valley wound in and out of the mountains as far as you could see; and they was buffalo scattered all over it, in little herds, as far as a man could see. Fall fur, but thicker and better than winter fur on the plains grazers. From where I stood, I figured maybe three, four thousand head; and they was more around the bends of the valley I couldn’t see.” He took the glass from the center of the table and gulped quickly, shuddering slightly as he swallowed. “I had the feeling no man had ever been in that valley before. Maybe some Indians a long time ago, but no man. I stayed around two days, and never saw a human sign, and never saw one coming back out. Back near the river, the trail curved out against the side of the mountain and was hid by trees; working up the river, a man would never see it.”
    Andrews cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange and hollow to himself: “Did you ever go back there?”
    Miller shook his head. “I never went back. I knew it would keep. A man couldn’t find it unless he knew where it was, or unless he stumbled on it accidental like I did; and that ain’t very likely.”
    “Ten years,” Andrews said. “Why haven’t you gone back?”
    Miller shrugged. “Things ain’t been right for it. One year Charley was laid up with the fever, another year I was promised to something else, another I didn’t have a stake. Mainly I haven’t been able to get together the right kind of