A belligerent moooo from through the window caused Colonel Hubbert to involuntarily glance outside. He wished he hadn’t. The plains horrified him. Burning stalks of switchgrass sprouted from arid dirt like unruly patches of hair, each strand illuminated fiery orange like his paintbrush mustache. The sunset was violent every day, raining meteors that shattered the landscape and revealed the thinness of each organism claiming life in the awful place. He saw the shadow of the calf, distorted and tall, stalking the bluestem and shuddering in the dying light. Pulling himself from the stretched world, he focused on lighting a cigar.
“Your orders, sir?” Major Jones asked.
The match danced as a ghost across his cupped palm. God! Even in the house, everything was a flat stretch of orange. The attentive puppet of Jones stood two-dimensionally in the wooden stage, harsh lines of darkness etching his cheeks, his sunken eyes, the crook behind his nose. Every corner of the cabin glowed with a disgusting light, as if everywhere Hubbert looked he had his eyes closed and was seeing the sun through his eyelids. He shook the match out and threw it to the ground, stomping it into the planks.
“We’ll be staying the night. Set up camp around the perimeter. Sentinel on duty.” “Outside the fence, sir?”
“There’s not enough space inside, is there?” “And you, sir?”
He refrained from turning to the molten glass, from turning to the endless cough of the plains. “The woman offered me a room. I’ve set up my maps and will have a course plotted by morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are dismissed, major.” “Yes, sir.”
And how he walked out! Like he was a thread in a sewing machine, yanked back and forth in the stiff swing of his legs, and the dusty brass buttons of his coat were a needle stabbing back and forth, back and forth. Hubbert refocused on his cigar, but his eyes followed the thread out of the room as it whirred along its path. The door was open for a hallowed second, and he caught a glimpse of the oceanic blackness seeping in like an inescapable tsunami from the eastern horizon, and then the wooden box was closed off again.
The calf lowed once more. Hubbert jumped.
July 18, 1874. They were lost somewhere in the Dakota Territory. How were two hundred men lost in a region not far from civilization? Hubbert blamed himself. He yanked the silky black curtain over the intrusive gaze of the window, and its tightly-woven body stopped the perverted prairie sun. The sunset made him sick. Everything around for miles, illuminated to its fullest extent, and there was nothing, nothing but sickly grasses and disturbed dirt. Until an hour ago, when they spotted this hut in the distance.
It was a crude cabin, built mostly from logs that must have been imported from some distant area, but containing enough sod to be justified as a pioneer settlement. A lopsided stone chimney struggled up the side like an ailing snake caught in its death throes. Soot carved its lineage in the rough stone, generations of smoke clutching to the throat that it choked.
Undeniably pathetic, yet undeniably in use, the ugly anomaly hung like a gross mirage in the eyes of the weary cavalry men as they approached. Where were they? Hubbert couldn’t find the
valley on a map. Who lived out here? Hubbert didn’t know of anyone who did. It was unsettled territory, disputed territory.
But the strangest part, the most fantastically strange part, was the miles of fencing wrapped around the cabin. Fencing penning in sheep, fencing penning in goats, fencing with thin wire stretched across the posts, fencing made of whittled wood and pointed sticks, fencing nestled around the cabin like a great nautilus shell, nullifying the direct approach of the soldiers as they gazed and contemplated what to do.
“We shoot a flare and see if anyone comes out,” Lieutenant Briggs suggested. “Let’s keep riding and leave them undisturbed,” Captain Thomas offered.
“Why don’t we just head up and find a way through the goddamn fencing?” Hubbert demanded impatiently. “What’s so wrong with that?”
“But sir, we don’t know who lives there,” the captain said. “It might be dangerous to compromise our location.”
“It’s a cabin,” Hubbert scoffed. “It’s clearly not an Indian encampment. What do we have to fear?”
The men muttered unhappily, but they all followed Hubbert as he rode down to the cabin.
The fences began at least one hundred feet away from the building. The labyrinthine complex splattered the ground like a mass of intestines, a maze of twisting passages and masses dedicated to animal pens. None of the fences were so high that Hubbert couldn’t vault over them, but as he approached he noticed thin pricks of barbed wire racing along the outer edges. The nautilus had spines.
They paced the perimeter until they found a gate. “Jones. Thomas. Follow me,” Hubbert commanded, and, kicking the gate open, steered his horse into the spiraling complex.
The map was no use. This valley shouldn’t exist! Whoever made the map had clearly been one of those lackluster surveyors suckling from the government for money and was completely unfamiliar with the actual layout of the territory, and the field of cartography, for that matter. Hubbert tore the paper in two, crumpled up the pieces, and threw them on the small wooden desk crunched into the corner of his lowly quarters. Embarrassing.
He paced the cramped space, running a hand across the smooth blanket draped across the bed. It was made of the same material as the curtains, and felt soft and comforting under his hand. He wondered which of the many animals outside produced it.
There had been far more than sheep and goats. Like a demented petting zoo, the fenced path led Hubbert and his men past merino sheep, cashmere goats, llamas, alpacas, Newfoundland dogs, Angora rabbits, vicuña, antelope, bison. Any and all types of wool were represented. Every animal bore an odd coat: half of each was shorn clean, while the other half was fluffy and thick. Their uneven fur gave them a lopsided appearance, as if their skin was what was really missing and their skeletons had crawled free from their heavy coats.
As the men passed each pen, the animals raised their heads and stared at them. Stared at them with nothing behind their eyes. The llamas went slack jawed and the rabbits stopped moving. Hubbert hated them as much as he hated the plains. What was this asylum of animals, this remote madhouse of no one and nowhere? Silent as a grave, he thought. Silent as a grave. Not even the brush of wind against the grass sounded in the maze of wood and wire.
It took them a quarter of an hour to navigate the winding fences. When Hubbert expected their current path to open into the clearing surrounding the ever-approaching cabin, it stole away and looped past yet another pen of dead-eyed animals. Their eventual entry to the opening was
heralded by the abrupt yell of a cow. Hubbert jumped in his seat and turned furiously from side to side, searching for the perpetrator. It yelled again, and with a sickening twist in his stomach, Hubbert realized it was from directly below. Yanking the reigns of his steed, he hurried to the side and peered down.
A mangy, crusty-eyed calf, feeble in its trembling legs and shaking head, stared back. Chunks of dirt with earthworms dangling from the sides hung suspended in its filthy coat. The calf lowed once more, then stumbled away, hanging its lanky head as it went.
Disgusted, Hubbert swung from his horse and marched to the door of the cabin. Its weak porch planks shuddered under his pounding boots. The door wavered at his knock. “Whoever owns this wasteland better have an explanation for why they aren’t on the map,” he snapped. The captain nodded, eyes wide with anxiety.
At nine the woman knocked quietly on Hubbert’s door. “Enter,” he called. The acid of the sun had washed its way down the flat landscape and burned holes in the sky, leaving heavy gray clouds that stank of dust. Without the eternal spotlight revealing the flat hideousness of the world, Hubbert could pull back the curtains and gaze out the window at a cool earth. Cool but scarred by a mess, cool but scratched by heavy claws, cool but bubbling with the bobbing heads of silent animals, cool but! He couldn’t keep the curtains parted long.
The woman hobbled in, stopping at the desk. She was completely bald. Hubbert was seated on the bed, running his hand along the smooth black blanket. “I hope my humble accommodations are satisfactory,” she said. “I don’t often see guests.”
She owned the cabin and all its fenced land. She had embraced them at the door, inviting them in and encouraging them to stay the night. It belonged to her family for many generations,
she said. The daring frontier people, stretching the boundary of America since its founding, had led their livestock to the remotest region of land and sought to survive.
Was she here alone? Yes. What happened to the rest of her family, then? Some moved, some died. There was a plot of family graves in the back. Was she aware that her settlement was not on any official maps? She did not consult official maps, so she had no idea. She rarely saw people come through the valley, so was not surprised. What did she do here?
“I make yarn,” she told them, her aged voice warbling with excitement. “Yarn, thread, string. All with the wool of my many creatures. You saw them as you walked around, yes?” They had. “Aren’t they lovely? All with different fur, hair, wool. Each one is unique. Have you ever felt the down of a bison? It’s wonderfully soft, but not the way a rabbit is.”
“What about the cow?” Hubbert asked impulsively.
“Oh, he’s been wandering around,” the woman said dismissively. “I don’t believe he’s one of my animals.”
Hubbert found her odd, but did not mistrust her, and she was eager to assist them. “Please, stay the night,” she implored. “Your men will be safe in the valley, and I have a spare room to offer. I always wish to be of service to our great nation.”
So they had agreed, and somewhere outside Hubbert’s hundred men had pitched tents and were choking on the stench of hairy animals under the void of a sky. And he was inside, hiding behind it all with the strong, thin curtain and calming his sweating palm with the blanket.
“The room will do,” Hubbert said. “I’ve been sleeping in a tent the last few months.
There’s nothing much worse than that.”
“I am honored,” the woman said. “I shall not disturb you further. If you need anything, knock on my door and I will attend to you.”
As she backed out of the doorway, another uncontrollable curiosity burst from Hubbert’s mouth. “What is this made out of?” he asked, patting the blanket.
The woman’s smile remained placid. “Indian hair. The best luxury our great nation has to
offer.”
Indian hair! He thought about it as she closed the door. So the curtain, and the blanket, were not made of sheep or alpaca or antelope at all. He ran his hand along the blanket again and began preparing his toilette. Indian hair! It was wonderful stuff, truly a natural resource, a gem of the plains. He wondered about how much of it he could get from the regiment’s future exploits.
He settled into bed under the blanket and forgot about the linear plains, the dry-heaved sunset, the horrific bareness of the land, and how Major Jones marched from the cabin like a thread, picking up its trail as it maneuvered through the labyrinth without Hubbert, leaving him behind in the heart of the maze.
He sat atop his steed on the brink of victory, racing across plateaued mountaintops, swinging his pistol and firing into the air. The Indian settlement was ahead. He whipped his horse and leaned forward, heading faster, faster, his head full of the stamping of horse hooves and rushing blood. He leapt from the saddle and charged from behind a steep hill, crushing the weak prairie grass and shouting with fierce jubilance.
But it was empty. There was no one there! In fact, there was no trace of a settlement; no vestige of life. He had been tricked! Someone had alerted them, or they were never there to begin with. He looked at the map in his hands. It was an incomprehensible mess of scribbles, blurred symbols, and waving lines. Useless. He tossed it away and walked around the empty plain, searching for anything. It was empty.
He turned around and realized his men had not followed him. He had walked far enough from the hill that it merged with the rest of the landscape, creating a horizontal line that stretched endlessly into the ruby sun. As if a fishhook were attached to the end of this line, he felt himself tugged toward it, pulled in the direction of the infinite desert. He struggled away and stumbled backward into a thick wire mesh. The whole place had been fenced off, or, as he ran his eyes down the line of wooden beams and observed the curvature, fenced in.
There was something else in the pen with him. At first, he could not tell what it was, but as it walked closer, he recognized its haggard hide. The disgusting, flea-ridden calf lurched toward him, lowing the same tremulous, somber note in a continuous cry. He reached for his pistol, but found only a pair of scissors in his hand. He did not want to get close enough to use them. They were shears, in fact. He would not trim this cow. He would not even cut the clumps of dirt from it, not even trim the matted patches. Snip, snip. He backed away from the pitiful cow. He refused to trim it. Snip, snip. He wouldn’t. Snip.
Hubbert’s eyes shot open. Snip, snip. With a full-voiced yell he rolled to the side and leapt from the bed, swinging his fists. The cold brush of steel met his cheek as he did so. The lamp was on. In the dim light, he saw the bald woman crouched by his bed, clutching a bundle of his own fiery gold hair, his own wavy precious hair.
“What are you doing?” he bellowed.
“Your troops have been running the Indians away,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ll take what I can get.”