Long Live The Chief
A brilliant array of red and orange made up the sky as the sun set over Apple Springs Buffalo Reservation. And everywhere else in Equestria too. The main difference was that, at the Reservation, one got this a nagging feeling that it wasn’t going to rise again the next morning.
Sunset, one set, and that was all you got.
Chief Thunderhooves watched the day end from the porch of his new plywood house. It would have been a tipi, made of the skin from his honored forefathers, but that was considered uncivilized now. The modern buffalo built with dead wood and not than the living bones of his ancestors, and he liked it. Or so the ponies claimed these days.
Beside the Chief sat Ex-Sheriff Silver Star, who was officially there as a visitor, and unofficially there as an old friend. The two of them had watched a lot of sunsets together, from the rickety board-up saloon to the wide-open Appleloosan plain. Neither of those still existed these days, but a porch of a new plywood house did fine. In a pinch.
“Would you like the last slice of the apple pie?” Chief Thunderhooves asked, pushing the tin toward the pony beside him.
“Naw.” Silver Star shook his head. “I’m stuffed full. You have it.”
“No, no. I insist. You take it.”
“Shucks.” Silver Star shrugged. Well, why not? Freely offered, freely taken. He took the slice and gulped it down. Crusty and no longer hot, but still good.
“Y’know,” Silver Star chuckled, “I never thought I’d see the day you buffalo folk would go around offering us apple pie.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” The Chief snorted. “I suppose it is.”
“Aw, shoot, I didn’t mean it that way,” said the Ex-Sheriff. “My apologies.”
“It was no trouble. You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“Even so.”
“I will not accept apologies.”
Silver Star couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Stubborn as always, huh?”
“One tries.”
They sat there, silent for the most part, while the sun went on its merry way. It was going to be dark soon. If either of them realized that, they gave no sign.
In the distance, sirens blared; no more apple pies handed out after dark.
What a shame.
“Beautiful, ain’t it?” said Silver Star, after a spell. He was, of course, referring to the brilliant and manifold colors of the setting sun.
“Tragic,” said Chief Thunderhooves, referring to the exact same thing.
“How’s that?”
“It reminds me that all things come to an end, given time... Including my people.”
“There’ll be buffalo for a while yet,” the pony pointed out. “Ya’ll got all the Reservation to yourselves. They made sure of that much. Your people ain’t going nowhere.”
“Nonsense. We are the last buffalo. There will be no more after us.”
“I know you already got yourself some baby Thunderhooveses, Chief. Don’t lie to me.”
The Chief sighed. “The buffalo,” he said, “once had a long and winding stampeding trail that we ran upon for many generations. My father stampeded upon those grounds, and his father before him, and his father before him, and his father before him. And his father before him...”
“I think I get the point.”
“Do you? My sons will never see those grounds, much less stampede upon them. And neither will their sons after them. And neither will their sons after them...”
“And neither will their sons after them.”
The Chief sighed. “The last buffalo. You see now?”
“Reckon so,” said Silver Star quietly. “Darn tragedy.”
“For my kind, at any rate.”
“Well, you could say my kind’s disappearing too. They don’t have much use for tough old settler ponies out west anymore.”
“Oh?”
“These days it’s accountants and tellers and clerks.” Silver Star spat. ‘The settler ponies already won the West,’ they tell folk like me. ‘It’s our job to civilize it.’”
“Ah.”
“You should see the sorts of things they’ve built up now. Big cities and towns all over the place. As if we didn’t come west to get away from all that.”
“I am sorry to hear that your people have also been trampled by the hooves of civilization.” The Chief gave a rueful sort of smile. “We thought we were the only ones.”
“Hey, now — you know we didn’t mean for any of... this to happen the way it did.”
“Yes, and yet, so it was. The treaties were broken, the land taken. All your good intentions did not save the buffalo.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, Appleloosa kept the treaty for as long as—”
“For as long as it was small. Then it grew. New settler ponies, new families, new foals. How could they be fed with the buffalo taking up so much of the land needed for apple trees?”
“They couldn’t,” Silver Star admitted. “But there weren’t enough apples to go around, and we... Well, we tried to...”
More silence.
“Reckon you got a lot of reasons to be mad at us too, Chief,” he choked out.
“All our anger will not revive the buffalo,” said the Chief sadly. “The battle was fought
and lost long ago.”
“Still wasn’t right.”
“No. But there’s nothing we can do. Your foals will grown up without the sins of their fathers, and if the buffalo ever reclaim the land — what will that be? Stealing it from those who owned it from their birth. As you did from us. It is the greatest brilliance of your crime, that we cannot undo it without repeating it.”
Silver Star considered that for a second. He grabbed a flask of the strong apple cider beside him and took a long, hard drink. Hay bales, but that sort of news was tough to take. “I’m sorry.”
“Again with the apologies! What did you ever do but look out for your own? We are guilty of the same feelings. You were simply better at acting upon them.” The Chief huffed. His hoof crashed into the pie tin, warping it beyond all recognition. “Apple trees for your families! Always more apple trees! There was a time, once, when you bought our happiness with them. Do you remember?”
Silver Star nodded. “Who could forget?”
“It is our fault. We should have foreseen what we’d pay in that deal.”
“But we were the ones who made it with you.”
“How many times must I tell you that you have nothing to be sorry about?” asked the Chief. “Did anypony ever wish the buffalo destroyed? Did you ever wish that? No. I would not believe you if you told me yes. Everypony wished for one thing: the best they could get for them and their kind. Of course they would choose their own children over us. Could we expect them to let their foals starve for our traditions? Sacred, though they were? Would we have done any less?”
He looked at the crushed pie tin. “And that is also the brilliance of your crime.”
“You’re a strange sort, Chief. Putting it like that doesn’t make what we did any better.”
“No, but it makes a strange sort of sense, does it not?”
“Maybe,” said Silver Star. “But what about the nastiest pieces of work? Probably there were lots of ponies who got rich off of clearing ya’ll off your land. They sure as hay didn’t have any trouble feeding their young’uns.”
“A few drops in a rainstorm,” the Chief replied sagely.
The Sheriff considered that again, and took another swig from his flask.“I just don’t get you, Chief. If I were you, I’d be mad as all-get-out. I’d want revenge. But you... I just don’t get you.”
“Perhaps that is for the best,” said Chief Thunderhooves. Ponderously, he sat up and adjusted his feathered headress. The one that had been given to him by his father, who had received it from his father, who had received it from his father, and so on up the line.
“I am a buffalo, after all. And you are a pony.”
The Chief yawned. The sun had long since finished setting, and now the night reigned over Apple Springs Buffalo Reservation. All the fiery red had gone out of the sky, replaced by softer blues and dimmer stars. For a long while, if not forever.
“I am tired now,” Chief Thunderhooves said. “I shall rest.”
“You do that.”
“And perhaps you should go.”
“Will do that,” said Silver Star, staring up at the moon. “Just gimme a minute or so. These tough old settler bones don’t always work when you need them to.”
The Chief took up the pie tin and stepped inside his plywood house, looking so sad and forlorn that all the world would have believed him to be the last of his kind.
Which maybe he was.
Silver Star listened until the noises from the house died down, and rumbling snores echoed out to replace them. He felt like having a little cry, right then and there, but all his tears had dried out long ago. Used up, way back, when all those brilliant crimes were still being committed.
He did have the next best thing to crying, though: He put his old Sheriff’s hat on his heart, raised his flask up until it glinted in the starlight, then downed all the remaining cider in one last swallow. “Here’s to you then, Thunderhooves,” he whispered. “If you’re the last buffalo, then long live the Chief.”
