He scanned the horizon as he jammed the ramrod down the barrel.
When he looked back at the herd, Glass was surprised that they hadn’t stampeded out of range—and yet every animal seemed in flailing motion. He watched a bull struggling at the front of the herd. The bull lunged forward, sinking to his chest in the deep, wet snow. They can barely move.
Glass wondered if he should shoot another cow or calf, but quickly decided that they had more than enough meat. Too bad, he thought. I could shoot a dozen if I wanted.
Then an idea struck him, and he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. He moved to within forty yards of the herd, aimed at the biggest bull he could find and fired. He reloaded and quickly shot another bull. Suddenly two shots rang out behind him. A calf fell into the snow and he turned to see Chapman and Red. “Yee-haw!” yelled Red.
“Just the bulls!” yelled Glass.
Red and Chapman moved up beside him, eagerly reloading. “Why?” asked Chapman. “The calves is better eating.”
“It’s the hides I’m after,” said Glass. “We’re making a bullboat.”
Five minutes later eleven bulls lay dead in the little vale. It was more than they needed, but Red and Chapman were caught in a frenzy once the shooting started. Glass pushed his ramrod hard to reload. The flurry of shooting had fouled his barrel. Only when the charge was seated and the pan primed did he approach the closest bull. “Chapman, get up on that ridgeline and take a look around. That’s a lot of noise we just made. Red, start putting that new knife to use.”
Glass approached the closest bull. In his glazed eye shone the last dim spark of vitality as its lifeblood pooled around him on the snow. Glass walked from the bull to the cow. He pulled out his knife and cut her throat. This is the one they would eat and he wanted to be sure she was properly bled. “Come over here, Red. It’s easier if we skin them together.” They rolled the cow on her side and Glass made a deep cut the length of the belly. Red used his hands to pull the hide back while Glass cut it away from the carcass. They laid the hide fur-side down while they carved out the best cuts: the tongue, the liver, the hump, and the loins. They threw the meat on the hide and then went to work on the bulls.
Chapman returned and Glass set him to work, too. “We need to cut as big a square as we can out of each hide, so don’t be hacking away.”
His arms already red to the shoulder, Red looked up from the great carcass beneath him. Shooting the buffalo had been exhilarating; skinning them was just a big damn mess. “Why don’t we just make a raft?” he complained. “There’s plenty of timber along the river.”
“Platte’s too shallow—especially this time of year.” Aside from the abundance of building materials, the great benefit of the bullboat was its draft—barely nine inches. The mountain runoff that would flood the banks was still months away. In early spring the Platte hardly trickled.
Around noon Glass sent Red back to camp to set fires for jerking meat.
Behind him Red dragged the cow’s hide across the snow, piled high with choice cuts. They took the tongues from the bulls, but otherwise worried only about the hides. “Roast up that liver and a couple of those tongues for tonight,” yelled Chapman.
Skinning the bulls was the first of many steps. With each hide, Glass and Chapman worked to cut the largest square possible—they needed uniform edges. Their knives dulled quickly against the thick winter fur, forcing them to stop frequently and sharpen their blades. When they finished it took three trips to drag the hides back to camp. A new moon danced merrily on the North Platte by the time they laid out the last skin in a clearing near the camp.
To his credit, Red had worked diligently. Three low fires burned in rectangular pits. All the meat had been cut into thin slices and hung over willow racks. Red had been gorging himself all afternoon, and the smell of the roasting meat was overwhelming. Glass and Chapman stuffed mouthful after mouthful of the succulent meat. They ate for hours, contented not only by the abundant food, but also by the absence of wind and cold. It seemed incredible that they had huddled in a blizzard the night before.
“You ever make a bullboat?” asked Red at one point.
Glass nodded. “Pawnee use them on the Arkansas. Takes a while, but there’s not much to it—frame of branches wrapped in skin—like a big bowl.”
“I don’t see how they float.”
“The hides stretch tight as drums when they dry. You just caulk up the seams every morning.”
It took a week to build the bullboats. Glass opted for two smaller boats rather than one large one. All of them could fit into one in a pinch. The smaller craft were also lighter and could float easily in any water deeper than a foot.
They spent the first day cutting sinews from the buffalo carcasses and building the frames. They used large cottonwood branches for the gunwales, bent in the shape of a ring. From the gunwales they worked their way down with progressively narrower rings. Between the rings they braided vertical supports with stout willow branches, tying the joints with sinew.
Working the hides took the longest. They used six per boat. Stitching the skins together was tedious work. They used their knife tips to auger holes, then sewed the skins tightly together with the sinew. When they finished, they had two giant squares, each consisting of four hides laid out two-by-two.
In the center of each rectangle they placed their wooden frames. They pulled the hides over the gunwale with the fur toward the inside of the boat. They trimmed the excess, then used sinew to stitch around the top. When they were finished, they set the boats upside down to dry.
Caulk required another trip to the dead buffalo in the vale. “Jesus it stinks,” said Red. Sunny weather since the blizzard had melted the snow and set the carcasses to rot. Magpies and crows swarmed over the plentiful meat, and Glass worried that the circling carrion eaters would signal their presence. Not much they could do about it, except finish the boats and leave.
They cut tallow from the buffalo and used their hatchets to hack off slices from the hooves. Back at the camp they combined the reeking mixture with water and ash, melting it together slowly over coals into a sticky, liquid mass. Their cooking pot was small, so it took two days to prepare the dozen batches necessary to render the quantity they required.
They applied the caulk mixture to the seams, liberally smearing the mixture. Glass checked the boats as they dried in the March sun. A stiff, dry wind helped the process along. He was pleased with the work.