Daria on the Trail Roaming Buffalo One

DISCLAIMER: A Song of Ice and Fire and A Game of Thrones are the creations of George RR Martin, neither of which I own. Daria is the creation of Glen Eichler and is the property of MTV Viacom. The descriptions of the Oregon Trail are based on my research of the REAL Oregon Trail, not the computer game of the same name.

Daria on the Trail*Daria on the Trail*Daria on the Trail

Daria POV

It was now five days since we'd left Fort Laramie. We were still following the Platte, and would be until just after we crossed over the Platte River Bridge. There was an Army post there, which I'd learned to my dismay was the last permanent Fort until we reached Oregon. I remembered its name as Fort Caspar from the history books: it had been named for an Army officer killed by the Indians. So far as I knew, the fort's namesake was still alive and well, so in the here-and-now it was called the Platte River Station. Aside from the bridge and the fort, there was also a Pony Express station. There would soon be a telegraph office, but not for another year or two. The only money I had on me was from the Twenty-first century and I couldn't spend it.

Our pace was slow, little more than a walk, as we made our way towards the Rockies. I wish I could say that it was a pleasant trek, but there were companies ahead of us and we were eating their trail dust. I hated the dust but kept telling myself that that the trail dust meant that we were making tracks. So were the companies ahead of us. I'm sure some future history buff would be thrilled to be in my position so he or she could see almost-pristine Wyoming before railroads, highways, billboards, power lines, and the occasional truck stop. Truth be told, the view wasn't that great from where I was trudging. The Overland Trail followed the course of the Platte River as it flowed between the tolling hills that led to the Rockies and the hills made for very effective view-blocks. Once in a while, though, you could see the mountains beyond. I'd noticed that they'd turned red and I felt the twinge of homesickness.

Red Rock Country made me think of home. I'd spent most of my childhood in Highland, Texas and Highland had been on the edge of the red rock country that not only covered Cibola, eastern New Mexico, and most of the Texas Panhandle, but much of the country south of it. And while I'd hated Highland, I still couldn't help but think of friends, family, and the world I'd been torn away from.

How were they doing? Had my room mate or my friends from Raft University noticed my absence yet? Had anyone called the cops? Had anyone talked to my Mom and Dad? They'd be frantic. Dad would be especially upset and I worried that my disappearance would cause him to have another heart attack, not that I could do anything about it thousands of miles and universes away from "my" Lawndale.

I was so lost in my gloom that I almost didn't notice that the company in front of us had come to a complete stop. If I hadn't noticed it, Captain Trout had. "Hold!" he shouted. I wondered what the cause was for their stopping. As a de facto member of the Trout family, I'd met the head of the wagon train in front of us, a man named Bradley Johnson. Captain Johnson's people were what I'd call Anglos. Unlike us, they were headed for California, not Oregon. Despite the fact that the Gold Rush had been over for half a decade, many of his people were younger guys hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields, not homesteaders. In spite of their differences—Captain Trout being a Riverlander from Westeros and Captain Johnson being a native-born Ohioan, they'd already developed a mutual respect for each other. Captain Johnson recognized that Captain Trout was an experienced wagon boss and Captain Trout saw Captain Johnson as a good leader willing to listen to good advice and learn from experience. If Johnson had halted his wagons, there was probably a good reason for it.

I hoped someone from Johnson's company would tell us what was up. Hopefully, somebody would, but until they did, there wasn't much to do except wait.

Kara, the girls, and I stopped and waited. "What's going on?" Minti said in Andal

"I don't know," I said.

Minti decided that wasn't an adequate answer and walked up to her father and asked the same question.

"I don't know, love," he said, then tussled her hair. "We'll wait, then find out."

We continued to wait and wonder what was up. One of the oxen sneezed. Another lifted his foot, then set it down. They didn't seem perturbed. Oxen were far more patient than people.

"I'm going to go ask," said Captain Trout. "Kara, Daria, you're in charge." Kennard was with Willem and the other wagon and was probably wondering what was going on too.

Oliver Parkhurst, our company's pet Englishman, walked up to where we were standing.

"What's with the delay?" he said in Andal.

"We don't know," I said in Andal. "Something made Captain Johnson stop."

Parkhurst was a bachelor who'd decided to buy a farm in Oregon. He'd hired a man to come with him: a Northerner named Jos who was also teaching him how to speak Andal. As far as I could tell, he'd done a good job. Parkhurst wasn't fully fluent yet, but he could now understand it. I thought he was nuts for taking the Trail: if I were trying to get from Britain to the Northwest, I'd have taken a ship, crossed either Panama or Nicaragua, taken another ship to San Francisco Bay, then set off for Oregon from there.

A man walked down from the head of Johnson's wagon train. I recognized him as one of Johnson's lieutenants. I'd seen him a few times but couldn't remember his name. Cartwright, I think.

"I say," said Parkhurst, switching to English. "What's the delay?"

"There's a herd of buffalo blocking the trail," said Cartwright. "Captain Johnson decided that he didn't want to get too close."

Smart move, I thought. Those things were dangerous. I remembered reading a magazine article a couple of weeks before my transposition to the Nineteenth century about some idiot tourists who'd gotten out of their car and tried to pose for pictures next to a wild buffalo. They'd gotten flipped over for their trouble. They got off lucky: they might have been gored or trampled.

"A buffalo?" said Parkhurst. "Capital! I should have a look!" He turned away and went back to his wagon to get something. I hoped it was a spyglass and not a rifle; if I had my druthers, I wouldn't take on a wild buffalo with anything short of an elephant gun or a sniper rifle. A 50 caliber twenty-first-century sniper rife.

It only took a moment for Captain Trout to make a decision. "I'm going up to talk with Johnson," he said. "In the meantime, we'll stay put."

He then turned to me. "Daria, have you ever seen a buffalo before?"

"Once or twice at a Pioneer Heritage ranch near Highland," I said. "They weren't wild, but I'd hesitate to call them tame. Either way, they were dangerous." Despite my current circumstances I could still remember them vividly. Most of them were large, standard-sized buffalo, which was scary enough back when I was an undersized girl back in Highland, and even scarier now when I was an adult in a second-hand Emigrant's dress without a steel fence topped by electric wire running current between me and the wildlife. If there were buffalo here, they wouldn't be the partially-domesticated animals you saw in wildlife parks and zoos, they'd be wild animals.

"Hell-cows," said Captain Trout.

"Hell cows?" I said.

"Hell-cows," said Captain Trout. "A herd of those monsters appeared in Lord Frey's lands one day and trampled crops and fields, gored peasants and even killed several men-at-arms who tried to stop them. That was how we found out about the Arch. They came over from your side."

I refrained from reminding him that I didn't come from this universe: we both knew that already. "I can't imagine anyone in the American government sending them over on purpose," I said. "Millard Filmore wasn't supposed to be that clever and I hear that many Americans believe that magic is a sin."

Captain Trout gave a brief chuckle. "For all the wonders I've seen you Yankees perform, I don't think they could open an Arch," he said.

"You're right," I said. "I don't think we could and I don't see that these guys could."

"I'm surprised there are buffalo here."

"So am I," said Captain Trout. "I was told that they usually avoid the trail."

"You didn't see any while you were crossing the grasslands?" I said.

"No," he said. "Buffalo skeletons and buffalo dung, but no buffalo."

I chewed that over. I'd always assumed that the great buffalo slaughter started after the Civil War, but it was clearly already underway.

Parkhurst returned with a spyglass. Good. I knew that there were buffalo hunters out here on the Plains, but white buffalo hunters used heavy-caliber rifles and Indians got way too close. Some of the company had hunting rifles, including Captain Ridge, but while they might be good for shooting deer and hostiles, I doubted that they had enough stopping-power to drop a charging buffalo.

"I'd like to have a look myself," I said.

"Daria," Captain Trout said warningly.

"I'll be careful," I said. "I know better than to get too close."

"No," said Captain Trout.

"All right," I said, acquiescing. I still wanted to have a look, but I wanted a look from a good, safe distance. I wasn't too sure that Parkhurst knew what a good, safe distance was.

Some worried Emigrants from one of the companies in front of Johnson's drifted past our wagon. I didn't know them: they'd taken the St. Joseph Road to get here and since they used mules instead of oxen, they moved at a different pace. They looked tense and fearful. A worried farm wife lost in conversation with a friend of hers said "They're mean." A short time later I heard a man say "They're killers. One of the Sloane Company's men said that one of them's a big one and tossed his friend Jerry like a toy and then trampled him."

That wasn't enough to stop Parkhurst. "Tally-ho!" he cried, and set off.

Idiot, I thought.

Orrick Trout POV

The Englishman and I walked past Captain Johnson's wagons. The company before his were mostly Americans and used mules instead of oxen. They'd started their journey at a town called St. Joseph, a town named after a holy man from the Three-In-One God religion. The mules were skittish. I decided to step away from their wagons. Mules may not have been horses but I knew they could bolt if frightened, and these animals were definitely frightened. I was far less familiar with mules than I was with horses and oxen but I knew that these animals would not go forward.

Beyond them was a line of Emigrants looking nervously at something in the distance. From where I was, Well beyond them, there was what looked like a gathering of brown specks. These were the buffalo in their native country. Unlike the ones I'd seen in the Riverlands, there looked like they belonged here.

"Don't come any closer," said a man wearing a straw hat and a red checkered shirt.

I decided that this was close enough. I wondered about Parkhurst.

"I say," said Parkhurst, "what's this about the buffalo?"

"There's some over there," said one of the men staring at the buffalo. "They're mean."

The buffalo looked to be at least 150 yards away, just out of bowshot. Safe enough, I thought.

"They tore into the train in front of us, gored some men and oxen and tore up some wagons for good measure," said one of his companions.

Maybe not, I thought.

Parkhurst stared at the buffalo, entranced.

He was so entranced that he started to walk forward to get an even closer view.

I gripped his shoulder. I might have been a landlord farmer for years but I still had a strong grip. He looked at me as if I'd kept him from entering a bakery. "Don't get any closer," I said.

Parkhurst gave me a look like that of a small boy who'd just had his name-day gift taken from him.

"If I were you, I'd climb one of these little hills," I said. "The view is better from up there."

Parkhurst glared at me resentfully. For a moment, I thought he was going to swing at me, then his expression changed. I watched as he contemplated my idea. He must have decided that he liked it, because the next thing he said was "Let's go climb one."

I looked over the hills west of the trail, searching for one that had a suitable climb from the river bottoms over to a hilltop where we'd have a less obstructed view. I found one. "That one over there," I said in Andal, pointing at a suitable path. I crossed the trail and started climbing. Parkhurst following me. Climbing the hills wasn't quite easy-peasy, but we managed. When we reached the top of the hill, Parkhurst extended his spyglass and looked northwest. "Let's see what sort of game is afoot," he said, grinning in anticipation.

His gaze turned towards a brown speckled mass that covered the trail and the parts of the surrounding terrain. "Oh, my," he said, switching from Andal to English. "What magnificent beasts! What a sight! If I'd brought a bigger gun from Chicago I would try my hand at taking some of the buggers down."

"I gather you see buffalo," I said.

"A nice herd of them," said Parkhurst, "including some particularly big brutes."

He continued to peer at them for a long time. I sometimes had difficulty understanding Parkhurst's dialect, but I could follow most of what he was saying: Parkhurst admired the beast and like, like more than a few of the highborn back in Westeros, very much wanted to hunt some of them and take their heads for trophies. That we were still less than halfway to this continent's western ocean and that he lacked a house or wall to display his trophies were notions that failed to penetrate his thoughts.

He finally lowered his spyglass and sighed. He looked around the hilltop, noticed at me, then said "Sorry. Would you like to have a look?"

"I would," I said. I briefly wondered if he remembered that I was not only captain of our wagon train but also someone who needed to know about the conditions facing our Company.

Parkhurst sheepishly handed me his spyglass and I brought the lens up to my eye. I had a bit of trouble at first; while the spyglass made distant objects look closer, everything I saw through it looked a bit blurry. When I told Parkhurst about it, he told me to change the focus and everything I saw looked clearer.

The spyglass allowed me to see what appeared to be distant specs with my naked eyesight into full-sized bison. There seemed to be the better part of a hundred of them. Most were about the size that I expected, having seen drawings in the newspapers I'd seen back in the Riverlands as well as skulls I'd seen in St. Louis and at Fort Kearney. But some were bigger, half again the size I'd expected. Were they some new sort of Buffalo that I'd never seen before? Did they come from someplace else? Were they common? Would we see more of them? I hoped we wouldn't.

I decided to go back to my wagon and ask Daria. While she'd disavowed any knowledge about animals, she had grown up in a town set on what she described as being at the edge of the South Plains, a place on the same great sea of grass we'd just crossed, except many leagues to the south. While her studies had dealt with the history and culture of her folk, she might remember what sorts of creatures had roamed the area around her birthplace.

Author's notes:

I am not one of the fans who believes that the Andals of A Song of Ice and Fire and A Game of Thrones are speaking English. I suspect that Westerosi Common/Andal would sound very different from English (my native language) and have a very different grammar, vocabulary, and alphabet.

The great buffalo herds that once roamed the Great Plains and ranged as far west as southern Idaho and as far south as northern Mexico after the Ice Ages were already thinning out due to the extensive hunting both by Native American and Euro-American hunters. The decline of the herds and the passing wagon trains' effects on grazing and firewood supplies were already sore spots with the Plains tribes and some of the tribes of the Rockies and the Great Basin (the area between the Rockies and the Pacific mountain ranges) in 1860.

The Arch (Gate) had opened in the northern Riverlands eight years before and was brought to the Seven Kingdoms' notice when a large herd of buffalo drifted over from the area near what is now Dodge City i, Kansas in our universe to the settled lands of the northern Riverlands. After being forced to deal with the destruction and disarray the buffalo brought with them, the lords and lowborn of the Riverlands followed their tracks back to an interdimensional porthole that led them to the Kansas Territory Great Plains in 1852.

Rivermen (and Riverwomen) do not have much liking for bison.