The Legend of Bass Reeves by Gary Paulsen Page B

set up camp and made a fire. He cooked bacon and made some corn dodgers from cornmeal first soaked in water and salt, then fashioned into patties and fried in bacon grease.
    He ate until he was nearly sick, licking his fingers carefully to savor every last morsel and picking the crumbs off his lap. He almost groaned aloud at the delicious taste in his mouth and felt a sudden sharp pang of loneliness for Mammy and her fine cooking.
    By then it was midafternoon and he set to work.
    He had gone all winter and early spring without a rasp and the animals’ hooves looked terrible, with broken edges and cracks. He’d tried to treat them with his knife, and that had gotten him through the winter. Now he tied the animals to a tree and rasped their hooves even and clean with rounded edges.
    He wished he had shoes for them, but there had been none in the store, and without a forge to shape them they might not have stayed on long anyway. And besides, anybody who saw his hoofprints now would think he wasanother Indian; if he had shod hooves somebody might think he had money. Worth following.
    He knew little about the Territory as yet, but that shotgun barrel that had followed him around the store told him there must be a serious worry about violence or theft.
    In any event, he was a fugitive, and he didn’t want anybody thinking he was worth following. For any reason.
    He stayed in the canyon for two weeks, cooking on small dry-wood fires that made almost no smoke, eating corn bread and bacon, and venison from a deer he had shot. He was very nervous about the shot, which echoed in the canyon walls. But it was his one shot in the two weeks, and when nobody showed up for two days he assumed nobody had heard it, or if they had, they hadn’t thought it was worth investigating.
    Being alone with the horse and mule and the animals around him in the trees made him very aware that they could see and hear and sense things that he could not. Through the winter it had not mattered so much. But now the trees were filled with different types of birds, and they sang almost all the time. He learned that if they suddenly grew quiet, it meant that something was moving near them, a coyote or bobcat; when he walked into the trees, they grew quiet then, too.
    So he listened and watched the horse and mule, because they could hear and smell better than he could. One morning as he sat on his blanket eating a corn dodger and cold venison from the night before, he looked at the horse and mule, tied nearby, and saw them looking up at the east ridge of the canyon, ears perked forward and nostrils flared to get the scent of something.
    At the same time the birds grew quiet.
    The hair went up on Bass’s neck. It could be a coyote or a bobcat or a cougar. Even a bear or a buffalo. But for some reason this time seemed different. Bass belted his revolver around his waist, took his rifle and stood up.
    No sound. Nothing to see.
    Then he felt a low drumming of hooves, and, a half mile away, on the low eastern edge of the little canyon, where there was a slope instead of a vertical drop, a buffalo came thundering over the edge and down into the canyon.
    He was pursued by two men on horses, one riding on each side. The buffalo came straight at the camp until he was two hundred yards away, then veered and headed out the mouth of the canyon.
    The two men saw Bass. They headed for him, firing at him as they rode.
    Their shots missed, but one ball passed close enough for him to hear the wind whistle.
    Without thinking, he raised his rifle, aimed at the closest man, squeezed the trigger, and saw him throw up his hands and somersault off the back of his horse.
    The other man kept coming. He pulled a revolver from his belt and fired at Bass.
    Close now, very close, and Bass pulled his revolver, aimed carefully and squeezed. He missed the man but caught the horse in the forehead, and it went head over heels, throwing its rider down so hard, Bass could see the dust thump off his