Bless the Beasts & Children by Glendon Swarthout

Author:Glendon Swarthout
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: coming of age", kids, buffalo, western, camp
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Published: 1970-07-15T19:25:49+00:00

11

BUFFALO PRESERVE ARIZONA GAME AND FISH DEPARTMENT ROSCOE RANCH 4 MILES SOUTH VISITORS WELCOME

This was the yellow lettering on a big brown sign alongside U.S. 66 eight miles east of Flagstaff. They had seen it from the pickup early yesterday morning while headed back to Box Canyon Boys Camp after an overnight camp-out in the Petrified Forest. Wheaties was driving, two boys beside him in the cab and the other four in the bed with sleeping bags and gear.

The Bedwetters had the idea simultaneously. Those in back hammered on the cab window, the two in front argued they were not due in camp till afternoon anyway, this might be the only chance they would ever have to see a herd of real buffalo, and after a mile or two of debate, Wheaties gave in, chauffeuring them back to the sign and through the gate and down the dirt road across the plateau.

They stopped at a closed gate. The road on the other side continued past a ranchhouse and a motley of vehicles, most of them parked side by side to form a barricade, and a small army of men, women, and children sat on hoods or fenders or bumpers, waiting. There were horsemen near the gate, mounted, waiting.

They opened the gate, passed through, closed it, and drove down the road. Wheaties pulled the pickup into line with the other vehicles. Here they faced an acre of open ground, barren except for dark spillings. The acre was wire-fenced on its opposite side, and a fenced lane led away past a little pond. Ten yards in front of the barricade of cars and pickups and campers, a tarpaulin had been spread. On it, a heavy rifle with a telescopic sight in her lap, a young woman in jeans sat waiting.

The young visitors waited, too. It was a vivid morning. Sun glanced from metal. The high, dry air was crystalline with suspense.

Then men, women, and children murmured. Down the lane bobbed three brown, four-legged shapes, three toy animals in the distance. Lingering at the little pond to drink, they were driven on into the open ground by other horsemen, waving hats and shouting.

They paused together, a bull and two cows, fullgrown, confronting the barricade of vehicles and humans. Curious, they tossed their heads. These were semidomesticated buffalo, from four to ten years old. Born on this preserve, fear of men had been bred out of them. Inoculated against disease, they were prime. Fed hay when winter snows covered their browse, they followed a feed truck about like sheep. They had never known the arrow or the lance, the lightning or the fire which crazed their ancestors over cliffs and into swollen rivers, nor had they known, until yesterday, the sound and implication of a gun.

Now the range between the young woman on the tarpaulin and the three buffalo was less than a hundred yards. She raised the rifle, notching it between her knees, and sighted on the bull. She fired. Dust exploded on

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