Also, now, the Texans came with bluecoat soldiers, and with agents who talked to the elders of the People about the advantages of reservation life. Some of the chiefs and elders, tired of running and fighting, had begun to listen to these agents of the Texans. So far the Comanches were still a free people, but Buffalo Hump knew, and the elders knew as well, that they could not simply scare the whites away by tortures and killings, or by taking a few captives now and then. There were too many Texans—too many. The very thought of them made him weary and sad.
Finally, when he had finished with his marrow bone, he tossed it aside and looked up at Blue Duck. The boy was tall and strong, but also rude, impatient, disrespectful.
“If you saw Gun-in-the-Water, why didn’t you kill him for me?” he asked his son. “You should have brought me his hair.”
Blue Duck was annoyed—he had brought his father a report on the Texans and had not expected criticism.
“He was with Big Horse Scull,” he said. “He had men with him.”
He stopped, uncertain. Surely his father did not expect him to kill a whole troop of rangers, on a day when the sleet was so bad a horse could not run without slipping.
Buffalo Hump merely looked at Blue Duck. He was gaunt now; his great hump was a weight he had grown tired of carrying. Once it had scarcely slowed him, but now he had to manage carefully if he was to avoid embarrassment.
“You can kill him. I give him to you,” he said to Blue Duck. “Do you think you can kill him tomorrow?”
“I told you he was with Big Horse,” Blue Duck said. The old man annoyed him. He knew that his father had been the greatest Comanche leader ever to ride the plains—from the age of ten, Blue Duck had been allowed to ride with him on raids and had seen how terrible his anger was against the Mexicans and the whites. No one in the tribe could throw a lance as far and as accurately as Buffalo Hump—and only Kicking Wolf was as quick and deadly with the bow. Though nowadays his father raided less, he was still a man to be feared. But he was older; he no longer had the strength of the bear, and the ugly hump, though it might scare the Texans, was just an ugly mound of gristle on the old man’s back. It had white hairs sticking out of it. Soon his father would just be an old chief, worn out, no longer able to raid; the young warriors would soon cease to follow him. He would just be an old man, sitting on his deer hides sucking at greasy bones.
“If you can’t kill Gun-in-the-Water, kill the other one—kill McCrae,” Buffalo Hump suggested. “Or if you are too lazy to kill a strong fighting man, then kill the Buffalo Horse.”
“Kill the Buffalo Horse?” Blue Duck asked. He knew he was being insulted, but he tried to hold his temper. Buffalo Hump had his lance at his side, and he was still quick with it. The ranger they called “Big Horse”—Scull, the great captain—rode the Buffalo Horse. Why ask him to kill the horse—why not ask him to kill Scull?
“I will kill Scull,” Blue Duck said. “Later we can kill the Buffalo Horse—he is so big it will take all winter to eat him.”
Buffalo Hump regretted that his son was boastful. Blue Duck thought he could kill anybody. He hadn’t learned that some men were harder to kill than even the great grizzly bears. Once the great bears had lived in the Palo Duro, and along the broken ledge that the whites called the caprock. In his youth, Buffalo Hump had killed three of the great bears. It had not been easy. One of his legs bore a scar from the claws of the last of these bears—when he went into battle he wore a necklace made from that bear’s teeth and claws.
Now there were none of the great bears in the Palo Duro or along the caprock. They had all gone north, to the high mountains, to escape the guns of the Texans. Now his boastful son stood before him, a boy with none of the wisdom of the great bears. Blue Duck thought he could kill Scull, but Buffalo Hump knew better. Big Horse Scull was a short man, but a great fighter—even without a weapon he would win against Blue Duck. He would tear open Blue Duck’s throat with his teeth, if he had to. Scull might suffer injuries, but he would win.
“You can’t kill Big Horse,” Buffalo Hump told the boy, bluntly. Blue Duck was tall and strong, but he was awkward. He had not yet learned how to run smoothly. He was too lazy to learn to use the old weapons—he could not throw a lance accurately, or hit an animal with an arrow. He wore a great knife that he had taken off a dead soldier, but he did not know how to fight with a knife. Without his gun he was helpless, and he was too foolish even to realize that he might lose his gun, or that it might misfire. Buffalo Hump liked weapons that he had made himself, and could depend on. He chose the wood for his own arrows; he scraped and honed the shafts and set the points himself. He chose the wood for his bow and saw that the bowstrings were of tough sinew. Every night, before turning to his women, he looked at his weapons, felt them, tested them; he made sure his lance head was securely set. If he had to fight in the night, he wanted to be ready. He did not want to jump into a fight and discover that he had mislaid his weapons or that they were not in good working order.
All Blue Duck knew of weapons was how to push bullets into a pistol or a rifle. He was a boy, too ill prepared to give battle to a warrior as fierce as Big Horse Scull. Unless he was lucky he would not even be able to kill Gun-in-the-Water, who had been too quick for his other, better son, in the encounter on the Brazos years before.
“I did not give you Big Horse, I gave you Gun-in-the-Water,” Buffalo Hump said. “Go take him if you can.”
“There are only twelve Texans, and Big Horse,” Blue Duck said. “We have many warriors. We could kill them all.”
“Why have they come?” Buffalo Hump asked. “I have done no raiding. I have been killing buffalo.”
“They are chasing Kicking Wolf,” Blue Duck said. “He stole many horses.”
Buffalo Hump was annoyed—Kicking Wolf had gone raiding without even asking him if he cared to go, too. Besides, he did not feel well. In bitter weather an ache made his bones hurt—the ache seemed to start in his hump. It made his bones throb as if someone were pounding them with a club. The cold and sleet were of little moment—he had lived with plains weather all his life. But in recent years the ache in his bones had come, forcing him to pay more attention to the cold weather. He had to be sure, now, that his lodges were warm.
“Why are you talking to me about killing these Texans?” he asked Blue Duck. “If it is Kicking Wolf who has brought them, let him kill them.”
Blue Duck was disgusted with the old man’s attitude. The whites were only a few miles away. With only half the warriors in their camp they could kill the whites easily. Maybe they could even capture Gun-in-the-Water and torture him. It was easy to cripple a man when the footing was so bad. His father would at last have his vengeance and they could all boast that they had finished Big Horse Scull, a ranger who had been killing Comanches almost as long as Buffalo Hump, his father, had been killing whites.
Yet Buffalo Hump just sat there, tilted sideways a little from the weight of the ugly hump, sucking marrow from buffalo bones. Blue Duck knew his father didn’t like Kicking Wolf. The two had quarreled often: over women, over horses, over the best routes into Mexico, over what villages to raid, over captives. Why let Kicking Wolf have the glory of killing Big Horse and his rangers?
It was on Blue Duck’s tongue to call the old man a coward, to tell him it was time he stayed with the old men, time he let the young warriors decide when to fight and who to attack.
But, just as Blue Duck was about to speak, Buffalo Hump looked up at him. The older man had been fiddling with the knife he used to split the buffalo leg bone—suddenly his eyes were as cold as the snake’s. Blue Duck could never avoid a moment of fear, when his father’s eyes became the eyes of a snake. He choked off his insult—he knew that if he spoke, he might, in an instant, find himself fighting Buffalo Hump. He had seen it happen before, with other warriors. Someone would say one word too many, would fail to see the snake in his father’s eyes, and the next moment Buffalo Hump would be pulling his long bloody knife from between
the other warrior’s ribs.
Blue Duck waited. He knew that it was not a day to fight his father.
“Why are you standing there?” Buffalo Hump asked. “I want to think. I gave you Gun-in-the-Water. If you want to fight in the sleet, go fight.”
“Can I take some warriors?” Blue Duck asked. “Maybe we could take him and bring him back alive.”
“No,” Buffalo Hump said. “Kill him if you are able, but I won’t give you the warriors.”
Angered, Blue Duck turned. He thought the old man was trying to provoke him—perhaps his father was seeking a fight. But Buffalo Hump was not even looking at him, and had just put his knife back in its sheath.
“Wait,” Buffalo Hump said, as Blue Duck was about to walk away. “You may see Kicking Wolf while you are traveling.”
“I may,” Blue Duck said.
“He owes me six horses,” Buffalo Hump said. “If he has stolen a lot of horses from the Texans, it is time he gave me my six. Tell him to bring them soon.”
“He won’t bring them—he is too greedy for horses,” Blue Duck said.
Buffalo Hump didn’t answer. A gust of wind blew shards of sleet into the little warm place under the rock. Buffalo Hump knocked the sleet off his blanket and looked into the fire.
3.
BY MORNING Augustus McCrae was so tired that he had lost the ability to tell up from down. The dawn was sleet gray, the plain sleet gray as well. There was not a feature to stop the eye on the long plain: no tree, ridge, rise, hill, dip, animal, or bird. Augustus could see nothing at all, and he was well known to have the best vision in the troop. The plain was so wide it seemed you could see to the rim of forever, and yet, in all that distance, there was nothing. Augustus, like the other rangers, had been in the saddle thirty-six hours. Before the chase started he had been up all night, whoring and drinking; now he was so tired he thought he might be losing his mind. There were those among his comrades who thought that it was excessive whoring and drinking that had caused Gus’s hair to turn white, almost overnight; but his own view was that too many long patrols had fatigued his hair so that it had lost its color.
Now, when he looked up, the horizon seemed to roll. It was as if the plain was turning over, like a plate. Augustus’s stomach, which had little in it, began to turn, too. For a moment, he had the sensation that the sky was below him, the earth above. He needed to see something definite—an antelope, a tree, anything—to rid himself of the queasy sensation he got when the land seemed to tip. It grew so bad, the rolling, that at one point he felt his own horse was above him, its feet attached to the sky.
The more Gus thought about it, the angrier he became at Captain Scull.
“If he don’t stop for breakfast I’m just going to dismount right here and die,” Gus said. “I’m so tired I’m confusing up with down.”
“I guess he’ll stop when he hits the Canadian,” Call said. “I doubt it’s much further.”
“No, and I doubt the North Pole is much further, either,” Gus said. “Why has he brought us here? There’s nothing here.”
Call was weary, too. All the men were weary. Some slept in their saddles, despite the cold. Under the circumstances, Call just wanted to concentrate on seeing that no one fell behind, or straggled off and got lost. Though the plain looked entirely flat, it wasn’t. There were dips so shallow they didn’t look like dips, and rises so gradual they didn’t seem to be rises. A ranger might ride off a little distance from the troop, to answer a call of nature, only to find, once the call was answered, that he had traversed a dip or crossed a rise and become completely lost. The troop would have vanished, in only a few minutes. A man lost on the llano would wander until he starved—or until the Comanches got him.
Call wanted to devote what energies he had to seeing that no one got lost. It was vexing to have to turn his attention from that important task to answer Gus’s questions—particularly since they were questions that Gus himself ought to know the answer to.
“He brought us here to catch Kicking Wolf and get those horses back,” Call said. “Did you think he was leading us all this way just to exercise our horses?”
Ahead they could see Inish Scull, his coat white with sleet, moving at the same steady pace he had maintained the whole way. Hector’s shaggy coat steamed from melting sleet. It crossed Call’s mind to wonder just how far Hector could travel without rest. Would it be one hundred miles, or two hundred? The Captain was well ahead of the troop. Seen from a distance he seemed very small, in relation to his huge mount. Seen up close, though, that changed. No one thought of Inish Scull as small when his eyes were boring into them, as he delivered commands or criticisms. Then all anyone remembered was that he was a captain in the Texas Rangers—size didn’t enter into it.
Augustus’s head was still swimming. The horizon still rocked, but talking to Woodrow helped a little. Woodrow Call was too hard-headed to grow confused about up and down; he was never likely to get sky and land mixed up.
“He’s not going to catch Kicking Wolf,” Gus said. “I expect the reason he’s rarely run off from is because he’s careful who he chases. If you ask me, he usually just chases the ones he knows he can catch.”
Call had been thinking the same thing, though he had no intention of saying it in front of the men. He didn’t like to be doubting his captain, but it did seem to him that Captain Scull had met his match in the game of chase and pursuit. Kicking Wolf had had nearly a day’s start, and the shifting weather made tracking difficult. Inish Scull didn’t like to turn his troop, any more than he liked to turn his own head when spitting tobacco juice. He seemed to think he could keep an enemy ahead of him by sheer force of will, until he wore him down. But Kicking Wolf had lured the Captain onto the llano, which was his place. He wasn’t subject to anybody’s will—not even Buffalo Hump’s, if reports were true.
Then Augustus spotted something moving in the sky, the first sign he had seen that there was life anywhere around.
“Look, Woodrow—I think that’s a goose,” Gus said, pointing at the dark in the gray sky. “If it comes in range I mean to try and shoot it. A fat goose would make a fine breakfast.”
“Geese fly in flocks,” Call reminded him. “Why would one goose be flying around out here?”
“Well, maybe it got lost,” Gus suggested.
“No, birds don’t get lost,” Call said.
“A bird dumb enough to fly over this place could well get lost,” Gus said. “This place is so empty an elephant could get lost in it.”
The bird, when it came in sight, proved to be a great blue heron. It flew right over the troop; several of the men looked up at it and felt some relief. All of them were oppressed by the gray emptiness they were traveling in. The sight of a living thing, even a bird, stirred their hopes a little.
“I see something else,” Gus said, pointing to the west. He saw a moving spot, very faint, but moving in their direction, he felt sure.
Call looked and could see nothing, which vexed him. Time and again he had to accept the fact that Augustus McCrae had him beaten, when it came to vision. Gus’s sight just reached out farther than Call’s—that was the plain fact.
“I expect it’s Famous Shoes,” Gus said. “It’s about time that rascal got back.”
“He ain’t a rascal, he’s our scout,” Call said. “What’s rascally about him?”
“Well, he’s independent,” Augustus commented. “What’s the use of a scout who goes off and don’t bring back a report but every two or three days? And besides that, he beat me at cards.”
“An Indian who can beat a white man at cards is a rascal for sure,” Long Bill volunteered.
“I expect it just took him this long to find Kicking Wolf’s track,” Call said.
A few minutes later they sighted the Canadian River, a narrow watercourse cutting through a shallow valley. There was not a tree along it.
“Now, that’s a disappointment,” Augustus said. “Here we are at the river, and there’s not any dern w
ood. We’ll have to burn our stirrups if we want to make a fire.”
Then Call saw Famous Shoes—Inish Scull had stopped to receive his report. What amazed Call was that Famous Shoes had arrived so swiftly. Only moments before, it seemed, the scout had been so far away that Call hadn’t even been able to see him; but now he was there.
“I’m about to quit rangering, if it means coming to a place where I can’t tell up from down,” Augustus said, annoyed that there seemed no likelihood of a good roaring fire beside the Canadian.
Call had heard that threat from Augustus before—had heard it, in fact, whenever Gus was vexed—and he didn’t take it seriously.
“You don’t know how to do anything besides ride horses and shoot guns,” Call told him. “If you was to quit rangering you’d starve.”
“No, the fact is I know how to gather up women,” Augustus said. “I’ll find me a rich fat woman and I’ll marry her and live in ease for the rest of my days.”
“Now you’re talking bosh,” Call said. “If you’re so good at marrying, why ain’t you married Clara?”
“It’s far too cold to be talking about such as that,” Augustus said, vexed that his friend would bring up Clara Forsythe, a woman far too independent for her own good, or anybody else’s good either—his in particular. He had proposed to Clara the day he met her, in her father’s store in Austin, years before, but she had hesitated then and was still hesitating, despite the fact that he had courted her fast and furiously, all that time. Clara would admit that she loved him—she was not the standoffish sort—but she would not agree to marry him, a fact that pained him deeply; despite all he had done, and all he could do, Clara still considered herself free to entertain other suitors. What if she married one? What could he do then but be broken-hearted all his life?
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 51