Scratchy and itchy. That always goes well when mixed with hot and humid.

I laid in the long grass at the crest of a small hillock, and it was scratchy and itchy laying there in the grass. Lunch and my two favorite mules were picketed just below me and out of sight. I’d ridden one of the mules out here to keep Lunch fresh and ready to run; when the buffalo broke I’d need all of Lunch’s speed and stamina to complete the hunt. It wasn’t a true hill or anything, but it was a large enough roll in the land to hide the horses and give me a good line of sight.

I was the lucky one: I had the long ranged rifle from the future and I was going to start the shooting from six hundred yards out. Everyone else had to sneak up much closer and stay under cover until I gave the signal. The hope was that I could take multiple young bulls before the herd realized what was happening. At that range, there was a good chance that the herd wouldn’t realize what was happening for quite a bit and wouldn’t be spooked.

Pete was astonished when I showed him the range and accuracy of the AR-15. The Spencer was actually more powerful, but it was louder and slower. I could run through multiple targets in the same time that the Spencer might give you one or two. So I cracked off a few long range rounds for Pete, and once he’d gone down range to hear what it sounded like, it didn’t take him long to figure it all into his hunting plan; his practical intelligence was one of the things I liked best about him. I’d put a single round at that distance into a young beef bull we had decided to butcher, and that was enough to make him happy. It was decided that I could snipe at range until the herd reacted.

So we lay in wait.

We really didn’t want to take any cows if we didn’t have to. The sexual birth rate was roughly fifty-fifty and, since a single mature bull could service a hundred cows or more in a season, there were a lot of spare bulls for the harvesting. Pete had specified that we focus on the young bulls who were usually relegated to the outskirts of the herd to preserve the viability of the herd itself. One thing I did know was that you could safely snipe any herd without stampeding them, so long as each report was far enough away and was a quick kill shot. Unfortunately the AR-15 wasn’t up to making head shots on North America’s largest land mammal by weight; they had a skull on them that would stop everything but the heaviest of rounds. You had to make spine or heart shots, and that wasn’t necessarily easy.

Obviously, any animal which was merely wounded would run around and make a whole lot of noise to warn his herd mates. After that it would no longer become a turkey shoot but a live action stunt event for every creature involved. An angry bison, male or female, had no problem attacking a hunter and had killed plenty over the ages, so this wasn’t a place to make a mistake. Every single one of our hunters needed to be cognizant of the dangers involved; if a bison turned to engage you, running was your best option.

The Pawnee scouts and hunters slowly and gently guided the herd into the tiny valley where our trap was laid. We didn’t have a cliff, or ‘jump’, to run them off of, and there was no way were going to capture a herd of this size in some sort of corral. The herd went back at least a mile and was a quarter-mile wide if my thumb was an inch; Pete allowed that it was of good size, but not by any means largest they’d hunted.

For a while I simply gazed, dumbstruck, at the size of the herd itself…and more so at the actual size of the animals themselves. Little wonder buffalo jumps were so popular before horses and firearms came into the picture. The very concept of running up to one of these highly testosteroned bulls with nothing but iron age projectiles as weapons - spears, a hand axe or a dagger - made my blood run cold.

I’ll admit that I froze for a minute or few while I observed the majestic beauty of the beasts and the amazing flow of the herd across the plain. The sun was still behind us and they were lit up in all of their majesty: truly an amazing vision. I’d seen artists’ renditions in my school books as a child, but most of those had come after the great Army kill-offs directed by President Grant; it was difficult to get any sense of scale in those low resolution and grainy photos.

I had once been to Versailles and been struck by how different it was to stand in the midst of the geometric gardens extending in every direction, as opposed seeing them as two- or three-inch photos on a textbook page.

This experience blew that one away by every measure.

The herd was like a slow flood: grazing as they walked, they casually meandered into the small valley that was to be our killing field. They were single-mindedly eating their way north into the cooler climes, just as they would later reverse their path and head back south again with the vast majority of the cows carrying next years calves in the early stage of pregnancy.

The sight was simply mind-blowing.

I was so caught up in the majesty before me that I didn’t catch Petalesharo’s bird signal until probably the third time it sounded. Then I remembered who I was and what I was meant to be doing. The herd was almost upon our first hunting blind, and the minute those guys opened up with the close range muskets and rifles it would become a havoc strewn running hunt. I needed to wake up and do my job.

I quickly check my load and cleared my mind. I picked out the frontmost young bull and, with ‘sight alignment, sight picture’ rotating through my head, I settled on my target.

I gently squeezed the trigger.