Daria on the Trail
Roaming Buffalo Two

DISCLAIMER: A Song of Ice and Fire and A Game of Thrones were created by George RR Martin. Daria was created by Glenn Eichler. I own neither franchise. The story is based on my research on the REAL Oregon Trail, not the computer game of the same name.

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ADVISORY: Foul language

Orrick Trout POV

Parkhurst and I returned to our wagon train. I was relieved to find that Daria had remained close at hand. In fact, she and Kara were talking with a couple of the women from Johnson's Company.

Actually, Kara was doing much of the talking while Daria mostly contented herself with translating when needed, although she did occasionally ask the other women questions. Some of the women were intrigued that Kara and I had lived in a land of kings and bannermen and asked if we'd seen either King Robert or any of the Tullys. As a matter of fact, I had seen King Robert, Hoster Tully, and Lord Stark once or twice while they were campaigning against the Targaryens, although I'd never had speech with them. They had other questions, too: such as whether our lords lived in castles and what sorts of dresses highborn ladies wore. I could tell that Kara would rather talk of other things, but she gamely answered their questions truthfully, although she did embroider or exaggerate some of her replies.

I motioned at Daria. "Daria, could you come with me, please?" I said in Andal.

"What is it, Cap'n?" she replied, also in Andal, although she used the Yankee word for Captain.

"Parkhurst and I saw the buffalo," I said.

"OK," said Daria.

"They looked different," I said.

"How so?" she said.

"Some of them look bigger," I said. "You grew up on the Southern Grasslands, didn't you?"

"I did, although what they call the Big Spring is hundreds of miles away from here," she replied.

"You may not be a buffalo hunter but I think you'd know more about these animals than I would," I said. "I'd like you to come with me and share your thoughts."

"Will we be looking at the buffalo?" she asked.

"Yes," I replied.

"Will do," she said.

"Come, then," I said.

We walked back the way we came just minutes earlier. Together, we climbed the hill that Parkhurst and I ascended a short time ago. Parkhurst and I had had the hilltop to ourselves, but by now there was now a small crowd of gawkers staring at the herd of buffalo off in the distance. I glanced around them, not expecting to see any familiar faces, but was relieved to see Johnson and his lieutenant Cartwright. We nodded to each other.

"Didn't expect to see any buffalo this far west," said Johnson. "I'd heard that they'd moved away from the trails."

"I didn't expect to see any either," I said. "But there they are."

"They're trouble," said Johnson. "I'd heard that a good hunter can practically creep up to a buffalo and kill it. That doesn't seem to work here. These critters are alert and mean. A couple of fellows have tried to sneak up on them and died for it. They'd charged the shooters and caught a couple of them. They're still out there and won't let anyone get close; nobody can get close enough to reach them and bring them back."

"So why is this young woman here?" asked Johnson.

"She knows a little bit about buffalo," I said. "What she knows might help."

"It would help if someone has a spy-glass," she said.

"Ben, you've got a spy-glass," Johnson said to his lieutenant. "Let the lady look through it and see is she knows anything."

Cartwright handed his spyglass to Daria. She thanked him, then did something to it before bringing it up to her eye."

She turned the spy-glass towards distant animals. At first she looked happy to see them, then her shoulders slumped and her expression changed.

"Oh, damn!" she said.

She brought the eye-piece back up to her eye again for another look.

"Shit!" she said. "This sucks!" She looked at Cartwright and blushed. "Sorry about the language," she said.

"You know something. What is it?" I said in English.

"When I was a kid, my town had a museum—" she paused, looking at Johnson and Cartwright. She didn't like talking about time travel, so she was editing her story. "with a lot of old bones and other in their collection. One of the things they had were some skulls that belonged to some buffalo. Some really big buffalo."

"Like the ones over there?" I said.

"Like the ones over there," she said.

"So what makes these buffalo so special?" I said.

"Two things," she said. "The big ones were thought to have died out thousands of years ago and they were supposed to be bigger and smarter than most of the ones that are around now."

"So why are they around now?" said Johnson.

"You got me," Daria replied. "Either they were hiding someplace and came down for a visit or the same folks who created the Arch brought some along for amusement or…" She frowned. "Or God Almighty sent them a memorandum telling them that they were supposed to drop dead and they forgot to sign off on it."

Cartwright laughed, Johnson looked scandalized, and I resolved to ask her what a memorandum was.

"So what do you suggest we do?" I said.

"I'm not an expert," she said, "But I think we ought to wait and let them wander on off. The grazing isn't that good along the trails, they won't go straight up to the mountains, so they'll probably go off to the Northeast."

She looked at Johnson's expression. He still looked scandalized over her earlier jape.

"Then we ought to thank God Almighty that there aren't more of them," she finished.

-(((O-O)))—

And that's what we did. Somehow, the buffalo decided that the grazing along the trail was too poor to bother with and most of them left.

The trains that had suffered from the buffalo sent men out to bury or bring back the injured and began salvaging what they could from their wrecked wagons. The buffalo had killed four or five men and injured half a dozen more.

We resumed our journey, but not alone. Not only did we continue to keep pace with Johnson's company, but we gained a new member, a buffalo calf that attached himself to one of Georg Stauffer's two dairy cows.

Georg told me about the calf and I shared the news at supper that evening.

"We should name him," said Minti.

"What should we call him?" I said.

"Bluebell," said Jilla.

"Ser Barristan," said Kennard.

Daria smiled, then said "Let's call him Bob."

A Reminder: I am one of those fan authors who does not believe that the common language of Westeros either resembles or is spoken like or is written like English. Most pioneers hearing spoken Andal would find it incomprehensible.

Author's Notes:

Those large bison were well out of the ordinary for that time period. The entities that created the Arch used time-travel to bring forward some Ice Age-era buffalo and set them down not far from the trail.

These bison were members of the Bison antiquus species. In our universe, they went extinct thousands of years ago. They were at least a third larger than Bison Bison, the species most familiar to us from movie westerns and wildlife documentaries. Their humps were larger and they had huge skulls and larger horns, although not as large as the long-horned bison once found further east.

I thought I read an article somewhere about someone trying to back-breed examples of Bison antiquus using contemporary buffalo as a starting point. The experiment halted after researchers discovered that the buffalo they were using had cattle DNA mixed in with the bison genes, but not before they learned that the animals they'd bred were more intelligent and meaner than contemporary Plains buffalo.

The buffalo calf attaching itself to a dairy cow is a steal from real events. A buffalo calf actually did get separated from a buffalo herd, attached itself to a dairy cow, and traveled with the cow and a wagon train for dozens of miles.