The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [113]
A pyramid built in the air, perhaps, but inspirational to a boy whose first fifteen years had been spent in a society with downward dynamics. “It was listening to these talks after supper, in the old shack on the Cannonball, that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us, and not for a chosen few.”52
AS THE EVENINGS WORE ON, Roosevelt’s talk turned more and more to a subject which was clearly preoccupying him—ranching. “Mr. Lang,” he said one night, “I am thinking seriously of going into the cattle business. Would you advise me to go into it?”
His host reacted with Caledonian caution. “I don’t like to advise you in a matter of that kind. I myself am prepared to follow it out to the end. I have every faith in it … As a business proposition, it is the best there is.”53
Roosevelt had time to ponder this remark during long wet hours on the trail. But on the sixth day of the hunt, the sun finally broke through, and his thoughts returned with fierce concentration to the pursuit of buffalo. If he was passionate before, he became fanatic now.54 “He nearly killed Joe,” Lincoln recalled—with some satisfaction, for the boy did not care for that dour Canadian.55
Heading eastward into the rising sun, Roosevelt and his guide soon discovered the fresh spoor of a lone buffalo.56 For a while it was easy to follow, in earth still soft from rain; but as the day heated up, the ground baked hard, and the tracks dwindled to scratches. The hunters spent half an hour searching the dust of a ravine when suddenly
as we passed the mouth of a little side coulee, there was a plunge and crackle through the bushes at its head, and a shabby-looking old bull bison galloped out of it and, without an instant’s hesitation, plunged over a steep bank into a patch of rotten, broken ground which led around the base of a high butte. So quickly did he disappear that we had not time to dismount and fire. Spurring our horses we … ran to the butte and rode round it, only to see the buffalo come out of the broken land and climb up the side of another butte over a quarter of a mile off. In spite of his great weight and cumbersome, heavy-looking gait, he climbed up the steep bluff with ease and even agility, and when he had reached the ridge stood and looked back at us for a moment; while doing so he held his head high up, and at that distance his great shaggy mane and huge forequarter made him look like a lion.
This thrilling vision lasted only for a second; the buffalo was evidently used to the ways of hunters, and galloped off. Roosevelt and Ferris followed his trail for miles but never saw him again.
They found themselves now on the edge of the eastern prairie. “The air was hot and still, and the brown, barren land stretched out on every side for leagues of dreary sameness.” At about eleven o’clock they lunched by a miry pool, and then ambled on east, trying to conserve their horses in the midday heat. It was late in the afternoon before they saw three black specks in the distance, which proved to be buffalo bulls. The hunters left their horses half a mile off and began to wriggle like snakes through the sagebrush. Roosevelt blundered into a bed of cactus, and filled his hands with spines. At about 325 yards he drew up and fired at the nearest beast. Confused by its bulk and shaggy hair, he aimed too far back. There was a loud crack, a spurt of dust, “and away went all three, with their tails up, disappearing over a light rise in the ground.”
The hunters furiously ran back to their horses and galloped after the buffalo. Not until sunset did they catch up with them. By then their ponies were thoroughly jaded. Flailing with spurs and quirts, Roosevelt closed in on his wounded bull, as the last rays of daylight ebbed away. Fortunately for him, a full moon was rising, and he managed to move within