Will Andrews and Miller

Will Andrews and Miller form the central working relationship of the hunting expedition: Miller supplies the knowledge and direction on which Andrews depends, while Andrews becomes his assistant in a hunt that grows into mass killing. Their bond changes from apprenticeship and reliance to estrangement. The same man who guides Andrews through thirst and mountain trails also teaches him how to kill a herd efficiently; as that lesson becomes the expedition’s governing purpose, Andrews’s attention to Miller turns from admiration toward alarm, and finally toward a separation neither man explains.

Identity and the Beginning of the Bond

Miller enters the relationship as an experienced hunter with an independent code. He distinguishes his own work from the expeditions organized by J.D. McDonald, which pay hunters fifty cents for each raw summer hide and send thirty or forty parties across the country. Miller says he hunts for himself or not at all. He has seen the Kansas herds shrink from immense spring gatherings, once yielding a thousand or fifteen hundred animals in a fortnight, to small groups from which a hunter might take only two or three hundred. His account gives Andrews an early view of both Miller’s expertise and the vanishing resource on which his livelihood depends. Miller expects that Kansas may soon have no bison left to hunt, but he is already thinking of places where a skilled hunter could still find them.

The old carcass Andrews and Miller inspect makes that decline visible in another form. Miller recalls riding among mountains of bones from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill River only five or six years earlier, and identifies the remains as the consequence of the Kansas hunts. He describes how bison bone could be fashioned into tools, weapons, ornaments, and toys, then throws a leg bone away after rejecting the idea that a farmer might use such remains as fertilizer. In these exchanges Miller is not simply Andrews’s guide to hunting technique: he is also the person who interprets the changed landscape, even as his own livelihood is implicated in its transformation.

Dependence on the Plains and in the Mountains

The expedition’s water crisis makes Andrews’s reliance on Miller intensely physical. After a night of severe thirst, Andrews is so weak that he can barely keep his hands on the saddle horn or draw breath without pain. When he wakes alone in the darkness, unable to tell where he is or which direction he is traveling, the vast sky and ground seem remote from him. He finds the wagon by its sound and returns to the others, but the panic of being left behind stays with him. He follows Miller’s movements closely, not because he believes Miller can take him where he wants to go, but because Miller is his only safeguard against being lost in the emptiness. The relationship begins to exceed ordinary instruction: Miller becomes a point of orientation when Andrews cannot trust his own sense of place.

That dependence continues as the party climbs into the mountains. The trail forces the men to walk beside the wagon, and Andrews, newly invigorated by the mountain air, strides ahead and calls back to Miller and Fred Schneider. At a steep incline, Miller summons him to help push the wagon. Andrews braces his shoulder against a wheel while Miller pulls a spoke and Charley Hoge drives the oxen; the wagon inches uphill through their combined effort. Andrews collapses during the climb. Miller tells him that the thinner air requires a slower pace, while Schneider makes light of the fall. The scene joins care to a rough, practical mode of instruction: Miller explains what happened, but Andrews has to learn his limits by exhausting himself.

Apprenticeship and the Hunt

Once the party finds the herd, Miller directs Andrews’s attention and teaches him how to approach it. He leaves Schneider behind and takes Andrews around the bison, explaining that they remain downwind and cannot be shot well from the men’s position. When they reach a firing place, Miller shows Andrews where to aim and explains why he wants the scarred old bull killed first: as the herd’s leader, its death will make the animals less able to move as a group. He also weighs the trade-off between a quick heart shot and a slower shot from the front that might keep a wounded animal from traveling far. His lesson makes killing an exercise in observation, positioning, and control.

Miller’s instructions quickly become a shared routine. After he has fired repeatedly and the herd circles without a leader, he sends Andrews back for another rifle, more cartridges, and a bucket of water. Andrews gathers empty cartridges and helps keep the rifle working. Miller corrects him when he cleans the hot barrel improperly, showing him how to dampen the cloth and work from the rear. Then Miller resumes firing. Andrews follows the hunt from close range, crawling after him through powder smoke, collecting ammunition, carrying water, and tending the weapon. The regular shots become a rhythm: Miller fires, reloads, studies the herd, and chooses another target, while Andrews learns to anticipate the sequence and keep it supplied.

The rhythm has a cost. By afternoon, the ground is strewn with dead bison and the herd has been reduced by at least two-thirds. Andrews’s knees are raw, his eyes and lungs burn from the smoke, his head throbs from the gunfire, and blisters rise on the hand holding the hot barrel. Yet his estrangement from his own actions grows alongside his physical exhaustion. He sees Miller as an automaton moved by the circling herd, his destructive fury less a matter of profit or rage than a cold reaction to the life he has entered. At the same time, Andrews watches himself crawling behind Miller, gathering cartridges, hauling water, and cleaning the rifle, and can no longer understand who he is or where he is going. Their practical closeness has made Andrews a participant, but it has not given him a stable sense of purpose.

Obsession and Growing Unease

The relationship grows more disturbing as the hunting continues. When a wounded young female escapes after Miller hits her leg, the herd breaks its circle and flees. Miller recognizes that he has missed the chance to kill every animal; his attention fixes on the possibility of the entire herd’s destruction. His vacant, smoke-blackened face and sudden small smile make the moment less a triumph than a glimpse of an obsession Andrews cannot resolve. Andrews asks whether it has been a great hunt, and Miller answers that he has never had a larger one. The exchange places their different positions side by side: Andrews seeks a measure for what they have done, while Miller measures the hunt by its scale.

During the following weeks, the men’s isolation does not bring them closer. They speak mostly about hunting, and Miller grows increasingly withdrawn except when shooting or helping to skin the animals. Andrews sees him staring toward the valley at night as though keeping watch over a herd he cannot see. In his imagination, Miller’s powder-blackened face and irritated, reddened eyes persist even when Miller is absent; Andrews wakes from dreams of being pursued by an implacable presence. These images register the pressure Miller exerts on Andrews’s attention without suggesting that the two men share an understanding.

The valley’s changing landscape confirms what Andrews has begun to suspect about Miller’s purpose. The bison grow fewer while carcasses cover the ground, and the surviving animals graze among the bodies. Andrews realizes he has never seriously imagined the day the herd will be exterminated, because he has always assumed Miller will not leave while even one bison remains alive. He has been reckoning the expedition’s duration by the number of animals, not by the passing days. In the same period, the world beyond the valley fades from his memory: the mountains they crossed, the dry plains, and Butcher’s Crossing seem remote and dreamlike. Miller’s pursuit has become the measure of time, while Andrews’s own former world loses definition.

Departure and Final Separation

As winter confines the party, Andrews discovers that his desire to leave is not straightforward. He can understand Schneider’s wish for decent food, a clean bed, and sexual release, but his own urge is vaguer and more painful; he cannot tell what he hopes to find or what he wants to escape. He follows Miller and Schneider’s tracks toward the snowbound pass and peers through the narrow opening, unable to see the country beyond. Miller’s calm refusals to leave before the pass is ready prolong the uncertainty. When the thaw finally makes departure possible, Miller announces that the party will load the wagon the next day.

Miller’s motive for carrying the hides back is not merely financial. He insists on taking a substantial load because he wants to return to Butcher’s Crossing with something that will astonish people there. He counts the hides left behind as well as those loaded and calculates the possible value if prices hold, including Andrews’s prospective share. The figures give Andrews a concrete stake in Miller’s plan, but the return exposes how fragile that promise is. When J.D. McDonald dismisses the expedition as having come back empty-handed, Miller answers that three thousand winter hides remain hidden in the mountains. McDonald replies that they are worth little now. He also explains that hunters are selling bison meat to the railroad while leaving the hides to rot, a change in the market that undercuts the enterprise Miller has pursued and the killing Andrews helped sustain.

Their last separation comes at the fire. Miller rides his horse to the piles of hides and pushes the bales into the blaze, then drives the animal against isolated bundles to shove them into the flames. Andrews sees what he is doing and tries to rush forward, but Charley Hoge tells him to let Miller continue. Miller feeds the hides and wagons into the fire for nearly an hour, until the blaze rises above the wreckage. When he finally rides back, his face and hair are scorched, and his exhausted horse bleeds from the mouth. Andrews moves toward him as if to speak, but Miller looks at him without recognition, spurs his horse forward, and rides into the dark. The horse strikes Andrews’s shoulder, turning him aside without knocking him down. Charley Hoge follows Miller; Andrews and McDonald remain behind in silence. The practical partnership ends without explanation or reconciliation. Miller leaves Andrews not with a lesson or a shared conclusion, but with the image of a man riding away from the fire that has consumed the object of their expedition.