The Big Fifty

160 pp. The last days of the buffalo hunt...the vultures who profited...and a man who would make them pay. He had come out of the North with memories of a better time...when the land was more than white bones and rotting carcasses, when the men lived honestly by the code of the hunt and not for money squeezed from the sweat and blood of better men. He remembered names--Cody, Hickcok, Custer--and always the buffalo coming in a never-ending flood to cover the plains. The hunt had mean crawling miles in frozen cloths, the sweat against a man's skin, shooting and skinning and then heading back to town, full of lice and caked with dirt. But it had been a way of life, and he was proud that he had helped start it all. It was ending now, as he knew it would, but at least he would see that the men who had dirtied it would pay for all they had done.