Spring

Spring is a measure of change in the novel: Miller remembers it as the season when the plains once teemed with bison, while in the mountain valley it becomes the distant point at which the trapped hunters might recover Fred Schneider and resume their journey. Its promise is practical rather than restorative; thaw can reopen a route, but it cannot bring back the herds or the earlier world of the hunt.

Abundance and depletion

Miller recalls arriving at Butcher’s Crossing four years earlier, the same year as J.D. McDonald. In spring, he says, the plains had been black with bison, packed together like grass for miles. Two weeks of hunting could yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals, including valuable spring hides. By the time he tells the story, the herds have dwindled to small groups, and a successful hunt brings only two or three hundred. Miller estimates that Kansas may have nothing left to hunt in another year or two. Spring therefore carries the force of a comparison: it preserves the memory of abundance even as the present reveals how quickly commercial hunting has consumed it.

The change is visible not only in the shrinking herds but in what remains after the hunt. Miller points to a large carcass and recalls that, five or six years earlier, hunters rode among mountains of bones from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill River. He imagines that a farmer may eventually collect the scattered bones for fertilizer, though he doubts they will be of much use. He also recalls how Indigenous people made needles, knives, arrow points, jewelry, toys, and combs from bison bone. Against that history of varied use, the prospect of bones left for fertilizer makes the aftermath of the hunts seem less like renewal than waste.

The planned return

Spring also becomes a deadline in the valley. When Fred Schneider asks how they will transport all the hides, Miller answers that they will load what they can, leave the rest, and return for it in spring, as they had agreed before leaving Butcher’s Crossing. When Schneider asks whether that means staying until Miller has killed the entire herd, Miller confirms that it does. The season is thus bound to Miller’s decision: the party’s return is not set by a fixed calendar so much as by the completion of the hunt he intends to carry out.

As the herd diminishes, Andrews begins to measure time by the number of bison remaining rather than by the days passing. He understands that Miller will not leave while even one animal survives. The planned spring journey—loading hides, yoking the oxen, descending the mountain, and crossing the plains back to Butcher’s Crossing—remains subordinate to that objective. Meanwhile, the valley has displaced the outside world in Andrews’s memory. The mountain route, the thirsty plains, and the town seem distant and dreamlike; he cannot imagine being elsewhere. Spring promises a return, but Andrews’s altered sense of time makes that return difficult to picture.

Thaw and uncertainty

During the blizzard, the snow covers the camp so deeply that Miller cannot tell where Fred Schneider might be. He says they may not find him until spring, when the thaw comes. The season here is first a condition of visibility and access: winter has buried the familiar ground, and only melting snow may reveal what it has concealed. Andrews then sees the snow move beside the camp’s stone chimney and calls out that Fred is there, so the feared wait until spring is averted in this instance. The episode nevertheless makes the season’s limits clear: while snow holds the valley, even the location of a companion can become uncertain.

A season without restoration

The contrast between remembered spring and anticipated thaw is sharpened by the changed economy beyond the valley. Back in Butcher’s Crossing, J.D. McDonald tells Miller that the railroad is being laid fifty miles to the north. Hunters are selling bison meat to the railroad company while leaving the hides to rot where the animals were skinned; McDonald calculates that Miller might have earned nearly five cents a pound for the meat he abandoned. The railroad signals a new outlet for the animals’ remains, but not a return to the spring abundance Miller remembers. Across these seasonal references, spring marks a change in access, work, and expectation, while the lasting consequence is depletion: the season can expose a path or recall a lost abundance, but it cannot reverse what the hunt has destroyed.