Beyond the sunset

by Arthur D. Howden Smith

They dropped so fast and so easily that I was overcome with a pang of horror. It seemed ghastly, this wholesale slaughter. Bulls, cows, half-grown calves—but especially cows—fell by the score. It was a battue. And yet it made no impression at all upon the myriads of the herd. As far as we could see from horizon to horizon all was buffalo. They surged up over one skyline and dwindled behind another. And the only noises they made were the low rumbling of their countless hoofs and an indescribably plaintive note, part bellow, part moo—before the fright took them.

Our hunters had slain until their arms ached from pulling the taut bows, and whilst the thousands of buffalo adjacent to us had threshed away and striven to gallop either backward or forward or into the heart of the mass, the mass, itself, had given no indication of realizing that it was being attacked. I remember thinking that if the brutes possessed any reasoning power they would turn upon us in their numbers and trample us in the dust.

Instead, they fled from us. By some obscure process of animal instinct the warning was conveyed at last from the minor hordes we had harried so mercilessly to their farther-most brethren on the unseen western edge of the swarming myriads. One moment they were trending from north to south like some unsoluble phenomenon of nature, an endless, dusty procession of shaggy brown hides. The next they had showed us their sterns, turned westward, and were galloping away with a deafening roar of hoofs. It was as if the whole world was in motion. The dust clouds became so dense as to hide all movement. We stood now on the verge of the prairie. From our feet a brown desert stretched in the wake of the fugitive herd, a desert of pulverized earth in which there was not a single growing thing.

The roar of hoofs became faint in the distance. The dust-clouds slowly settled. A short while afterward I came and looked in the direction the buffalo had taken, and they were gone. The brown desert filled the skyline. And all about our Indians were busy with skinning-knives, wrapping the choice cuts of meat in the bloody hides; and Chatanskah was dispatching runners to bring out the full strength of the tribe; for we had made such a killing as seldom fell to the lot of an Indian community, and it behooved them to lose nothing of the riches nature had thrown in their way. Whatever might be the lot of their brothers in the neighboring villages, the Dakota of the Wahpeton Council Fire knew that for this Winter at least they were certain to abide snug and well-fed in their teepees.

Chatanskah talked of our deeds as the band clustered about the camp-fire that night, with sentries thrown out around the area strewn with dead buffalo to guard the spoil against wolf and wild dog and the eagles that swooped from the air.

"There will be much spoken of this in the Winter Count," he announced proudly. "The old men will say we have done well. The other Council Fires will be envious. But remember, brothers, that it was our white brother who slew Nakuiman with his bare hands and turned the hearts of Cheyenne to water. Hai, that was the greatest fight I ever saw! The Cheyenne will go home and creep under their squaws' robes.

"And what shall we say of our white brother who broke Nakuiman in pieces? The Cheyenne was called The Bear. Is not a warrior who slays a bear more than a bear? Hai, my warriors, I hear you say yes! So let us give the slayer of The Bear a new name. We will call him Mahtotopah*—for he is a bear, himself; he is Two Bears."

* Two Bears.

"Hai, hai," applauded the circles of warriors who sat around the fire, first the old men, outside those the youngsters, who had names to win.

"But Chatanskah will not forget that he has promised to guide Tawannears and his white brothers to the country of the Teton Dakota?" reminded Tawannears.