Autumn

Autumn marks the point when the hunt in the valley becomes harder to separate from the season closing around it. Colder nights and uncertain weather give Fred Schneider a practical reason to leave, but Miller’s attention remains fixed on the bison. For William Andrews, the season’s ordinary measure of passing days gradually gives way to the dwindling herd, binding the hunters’ return to the fate of the animals they are killing.

A season turning toward danger

As autumn arrives, Schneider points to the immediate signs of change: nights are beginning to grow cold, and no one can predict the weather at that time of year. His warning is not abstract. It puts the party’s continued stay in the valley against the risks of the season and the question of how they will eventually transport the hides. Miller tells Schneider to leave Charley Hoge out of the argument, but the disagreement exposes a divide over whether the hunt has gone on long enough.

The next morning, a thin layer of frost covers the grass. Miller reads another change in the landscape: the grass is beginning to dry, and the bison will try to cross the pass and descend beyond the mountain. The hunters respond by trying to drive them back. Autumn therefore does not simply announce colder weather; it alters the immediate conditions of the hunt, as the bison’s movement toward an exit becomes a new pressure on the men.

Departure, wages, and the decision to stay

Schneider’s concern over autumn’s approach culminates in his decision to leave. Miller agrees to pay him the sixty dollars owed under their arrangement, and William Andrews counts the money from his pouch and hands it over. Schneider counts it carefully beside the fire, gathers his bedroll, and disappears into the darkness. The other men hear him settle down and begin to snore; by morning, frost has appeared on the grass. His departure makes the season’s warning concrete: one member of the party chooses a fixed wage and an exit over remaining in the valley.

Miller stays, and the hunt continues. The daily attempts to turn the bison back are little more than diversions: at night, the animals graze forward again, moving closer to the pass through which they entered the plateau. As autumn advances, the herd’s instinctive movement toward escape and the hunters’ effort to prevent it pull in opposite directions. The changing season heightens that conflict without resolving it in Schneider’s favor; he has left, but the work and its risks remain for the others.

The season measured in bison

The hunt grows more intense as the herd presses toward the pass. Miller devotes himself almost wholly to killing, carrying two rifles and firing until their barrels become extremely hot. William Andrews and Fred Schneider had been working faster and faster to skin the animals Miller left behind, often failing to finish before dark and rising before dawn to cut up carcasses stiff with cold. After Schneider’s departure, Andrews remains among the men confronting the continuing work and its consequences. The routine of shooting, skinning, and butchering gives autumn a laborious rhythm: daylight and the condition of the carcasses set the pace as much as the hunters’ intentions do.

The season also recedes behind a more disturbing measure of time. As the herd thins, Andrews realizes that he has never seriously considered the day when every bison might be dead. He has understood, without needing Miller to say so, that Miller will not leave while even one animal remains. Andrews has therefore been counting time by the number of bison and by the anticipated moment of their return, rather than by the days passing one after another. He can scarcely recall the world outside the plateau—Butcher’s Crossing, the mountain they climbed, or the thirsty plains they crossed—and cannot imagine himself away from the valley. Autumn’s familiar calendar has been displaced by the hunt’s internal countdown.

That altered measure sits against a longer history of depletion. Miller recalls that, four years earlier, the spring plains had been black with bison; a two-week hunt could yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals. Now the herds are small, and a successful outing might produce only two or three hundred; he expects Kansas to offer no bison to hunt within another year or two. He also remembers riding among immense fields of bones during the great hunts, from Pawnee Fork to the end of Smoky Hill. The remains could be made into tools, ornaments, and other useful things, but Miller imagines that a farmer will eventually load them onto a wagon as fertilizer. Against this history, autumn in the valley is not merely a seasonal turning: it frames another stage in the conversion of living herds into carcasses, hides, and discarded remains.

Seasonal rhythms and the hide trade

Autumn’s pressure is entangled with the commercial calendar. J.D. McDonald explains that he buys and resells bison hides, processes them himself, and ships them wholesale to Saint Louis. He had handled nearly one hundred thousand hides the previous year and expected two or three times as many that year. Miller, by contrast, condemns the economics of McDonald’s expeditions: hunters receive fifty cents per head for raw summer hides, which are thin, while McDonald organizes thirty or forty expeditions around the country. Miller insists that he hunts for himself or not at all.

The distinction between summer and winter hides also shapes the men’s expectations in the valley. Miller says J.D. McDonald will buy their hides at four dollars apiece for winter pelts, with a buyer already secured in the East; Fred Schneider immediately asks what the summer hides would bring, since the party would have to wait at least three months for the winter ones. Their plans give the season an apparent economic logic: wait for the more valuable pelts, then carry them out. But the promise depends on a market that can change faster than the weather.

When Miller later returns expecting to collect on the agreement, he insists that the three thousand winter hides stored in the mountains are worth more than ten thousand dollars, even after transport. J.D. McDonald tells him that demand has collapsed: people who wanted bison fur have already bought it, and nobody wants more. He compares the reversal to beaver pelts after beaver hats went out of fashion, and suggests that a future use for bison hides might emerge only years later, when even winter hides could be worth no more than summer ones. The seasonal distinction that had supported the expedition’s calculations cannot protect the hides from a change in taste.

The railway offers a final, bitter contrast between seasonal expectations and economic reality. J.D. McDonald says the line is being laid fifty miles north, while hunters sell bison meat to the railway company and leave the hides to rot where they skinned the animals. The valley’s autumn hunt has been organized around the future value and transport of hides; by the time that value vanishes, the slaughter has already happened. In the novel’s seasonal pattern, autumn brings warnings of weather and departure, but it also exposes how little control the hunters have over the larger cycles governing animal life, labor, and demand.