52.
BUFFALO HUMP let the summer pass, resting with his wives, climbing to the spire of rock to pray and meditate. At night around the fire the warriors made songs about the great raid. Hair-on-the-Lip died suddenly; something went wrong inside her. Word came that Blue Duck was the leader of a gang of renegades, white and half-breed, who killed and robbed along the Sabine River. In July Buffalo Hump went on an antelope hunt far north, near where he had taken the great buffalo whose skull he had used for his shield. He had heard that the antelope were thick in the north, and it was true. In one day he killed seven antelope with the bow. Worm made a prophecy about the feat. There was no fighting with the whites. The story came from an Apache that Gun-in-the-Water and his friend McCrae had rescued Big Horse from the camp of Ahumado. The Apache said that Big Horse Scull was insane; he jumped around like a flea. The Apache mentioned that Ahumado had cut off Scull’s eyelids, which was what had made him insane.
“No eyelids, what a clever torture,” Buffalo Hump said to Slow Tree—it was Slow Tree who had brought him this gossip. When asked about Ahumado, though, Slow Tree grew vague. There were many stories, much speculation, but it had all come from Apaches and Apaches were all liars, Slow Tree reminded him.
“Tell me the stories anyway,” Buffalo Hump said.
“No one has seen Ahumado all summer,” Slow Tree said. “He left his camp at night, through a hole in the mountain. They think he went back to the place he came from, in the south. Most people think he died.”
“What else?” Buffalo Hump asked.
“Two white men were found stuck on the sharpened trees,” Slow Tree said. “No one does that but Ahumado.”
“Anyone can do it if they want to,” Buffalo Hump said. “All they have to do is sharpen a tree and catch a white man, or any man. An Apache could do it. You could do it, if you wanted to. It doesn’t mean that Ahumado is alive.”
“They say a jaguar lives in his camp now,” Slow Tree said. “The Texans took away Big Horse Scull and the jaguar came. Some people think he ate Ahumado.”
“Ho!” Buffalo Hump said. “I have never seen a jaguar. Have you?”
Slow Tree was reluctant to answer. He had never seen a jaguar, either, but he was reluctant to admit this to Buffalo Hump. He liked people to think that he was the wisest and most experienced chief, a man who had tasted every plant and killed every animal. He did not like to confess that he had never seen a jaguar.
“They are very shy,” Slow Tree pointed out. “They can make themselves invisible, so you cannot see them. They have much power, jaguars.”
“I know they have much power but I don’t think they can make themselves invisible—they are just good at hiding,” Buffalo Hump said. “I think I will go south and see this jaguar. Would you like to come with me?”
Slow Tree was surprised by Buffalo Hump’s invitation. Buffalo Hump had never offered to hunt with him before. Now he was offering to ride with him all the way to Mexico, to see a jaguar. Slow Tree decided on the spot that it was a plot to kill him. Probably Buffalo Hump knew that Slow Tree would kill him, if he ever got a chance to drive a lance through his big hump. But Buffalo Hump was wary: he never slept in Slow Tree’s presence, and rarely turned his back to him, even for a moment. Slow Tree knew that Buffalo Hump didn’t really like him or respect him; even now Buffalo Hump looked at him with hooded eyes, smiling a little. Buffalo Hump was mocking him, only doing it politely, with just enough regard for ceremony and custom that Slow Tree could not challenge the mockery without appearing to be more touchy than a great chief should be.
Slow Tree knew that he did not want to go to Mexico with Buffalo Hump—that would be a fatal mistake. He regretted even telling Buffalo Hump the story about the jaguar—once again his own tongue had got him into difficulties.
Thinking quickly, Slow Tree produced several reasons why it would be imprudent for him to leave on a long trip just then. The buffalo would have to be hunted soon, and they were scarce. Also, one of his wives was dying and he did not want to leave her. Buffalo Hump himself had just lost Hair-on-the-Lip—he knew how important it was to stay with a valued wife while she was dying.
Buffalo Hump pretended to be surprised when Slow Tree began to pile up reasons for not going to Mexico with him.
“I thought you wanted to see a jaguar,” he said, and quickly changed the subject. Of course he hadn’t wanted Slow Tree to go in the first place, but it was nice to embarrass him and make him think up lies.
Later, when Slow Tree left the camp, Buffalo Hump sought out Kicking Wolf—the great horsethief had become discouraged since losing his friend Three Birds. Kicking Wolf hardly left the camp all summer, only going out now and then to hunt. He had not stolen a horse since the theft of the Buffalo Horse; though his vision had improved he still complained, now and then, that he saw two where there was one.
Buffalo Hump had often found Kicking Wolf irritating, but there was no denying that he was a good horsethief. In the fall it might be wise to raid again, to put more fear in the Texans, but Buffalo Hump suddenly felt like traveling. He wanted to go somewhere, and a chance to see a jaguar was not to be missed. Even if the jaguar was no longer there it would be good to go to Mexico—if Ahumado was gone there might be some villages worth raiding near the Sierra Perdida.
He found Kicking Wolf not far from his tent, sitting alone, watching some young horses frolic. Two of his wives, both large, stout women not noted for their patience, were drying deer meat. Kicking Wolf was braiding a rawhide rope. The rawhide came from three cows Kicking Wolf had found on the llano, thin cows he had killed and skinned. He was good at braiding rawhide into ropes and hobbles.
“I have heard of a jaguar—I think we should go try and kill it,” Buffalo Hump said. “If we killed such a beast it might clear up your sight.”
Kicking Wolf had been prepared to be annoyed with Buffalo Hump; the comment took him by surprise. He looked at Buffalo Hump gratefully; they had been good friends when they were boys, but, as they grew older, rivalry made them touchy with one another.
“My sight is still uncertain,” Kicking Wolf acknowledged. “If we were able to kill a jaguar it might clear up.”
“Then go with me,” Buffalo Hump said. “I want to leave right now, before the women try to stop us.”
Kicking Wolf smiled. “Where is this jaguar?” he asked.
“In Mexico,” Buffalo Hump said. “It lives near where you took the Buffalo Horse.”
“Slow Tree told me the same thing,” Kicking Wolf said. “He is a liar, you know. He makes up stories and claims he heard them from Apaches, but he never kills these Apaches, which is what he should be doing.”
“I know all that,” Buffalo Hump assured him. “Let’s go anyway. If we don’t find the jaguar we can steal some horses on the way back.”
Kicking Wolf immediately got up and coiled up his rawhide. He seemed eager to leave off braiding the rope.
“If the jaguar lives in Ahumado’s old camp, as Slow Tree claims, where is Ahumado?” he asked.
“They say he is gone,” Buffalo Hump said.
“Do you believe it?” Kicking Wolf asked.
“I don’t know,” Buffalo Hump said. “He may be gone or he may be waiting for us.”
“I will go with you,” Kicking Wolf said. “I want to see the jaguar and I want to know what happened to Three Birds.”
“How will you know that—he went with you in the winter,” Buffalo Hump pointed out. “If he is dead there won’t be much left of him by now.”
“I intend to look, anyway,” Kicking Wolf said.
Heavy Leg knew Buffalo Hump much better than did his young wife, Lark. Heavy Leg could tell by the way her husband moved, and by the way he looked at the horses, when he was wanting to leave. By the time he came back with Kicking Wolf she had already filled a pouch with dried deer meat, for him to take on his journey. She was not allowed to touch his bow or his lance, but she got his paints ready, in case he had to paint himself and go into bat
tle.
Buffalo Hump was a little surprised when he saw what Heavy Leg had done. Though Heavy Leg had been his wife for a long time, it still startled him that she could anticipate his intentions so accurately. His young wife, Lark, by contrast, had no idea that he was in a mood to leave. She was putting grease on her black hair and had not even noticed what Heavy Leg was doing. Buffalo Hump was almost ready to mount before Lark awoke to the fact that he was leaving. Though he depended on Heavy Leg and respected her for providing him what he would need on his journey, he sometimes wished she were a little dumber, like Lark. He was not sure he trusted a wife who could read his thoughts so clearly.
Kicking Wolf’s wives were indignant that he was leaving them on such short notice, but Kicking Wolf ignored them. It had been a long time since he had traveled with Buffalo Hump—it pleased him that Buffalo Hump had asked him to come on the journey to Mexico.
By sunset the two warriors had left the camp. Eager for travel, singing a little, they climbed out of the canyon and rode all night.
53.
FOR TWO DAYS, as they approached the canyon of the Yellow Cliffs, Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf saw no game, though there had been an abundance of antelope and deer as they traveled south. Soon after crossing the Rio Grande they discovered a small herd of wild horses, a discovery that excited them both. They were small horses, mustangs—as soon as they saw the Comanches, they fled.
Kicking Wolf wanted to chase them awhile; at the sight of the quick, hardy wild horses, animals able to live where there was little water and almost no grass, his appetite for catching horses revived a little.
But Buffalo Hump was intent on one purpose, which was to go to the canyon of the Yellow Cliffs and see the jaguar.
“We know where those horses are now,” he told Kicking Wolf. “We can come back and track them anytime. If we chase them they might move into Apache country.”
“The Apaches don’t like horses,” Kicking Wolf said.
“Not to ride, but they like to eat them,” Buffalo Hump said. “I would like to have a few of them. The jaguar must have eaten all the deer and antelope but he has not been able to catch those horses.”
Kicking Wolf was growing very excited. His passion for horses was very great, and these horses did not even have to be stolen, they only had to be caught. Buffalo Hump wouldn’t listen to him, though, so he reluctantly had to leave the mustangs, for the moment.
All Kicking Wolf talked about for a whole day was the wild horses they had found near the Rio Grande.
The next day he led Buffalo Hump to the place where he and Three Birds had been ambushed.
“Ahumado was behind us,” Kicking Wolf said. “He walks as quietly as I do when I go into a herd of horses.”
“I don’t think he is here,” Buffalo Hump said, “but if he is I don’t want him behind me.”
He started to reveal the prophecy of the hump, but caught himself. Kicking Wolf was a gossip—if he knew of the prophecy the whole camp would soon know.
“Let’s go high on the rocks,” he said. “If he is here I would rather be above him than below him.”
They picked their way up to the high plateau that led to the Yellow Cliffs. To their surprise there was a declivity on the plateau, a great crater whose sides were steep. Near the center of the crater was a pit, with some charred and broken horse bones in the bottom of it, laying in the deep ashes. Kicking Wolf knew at once whose bones he was looking at.
“This is the place where they ate the Buffalo Horse,” he said. “Why did they eat him?”
“Why does anyone eat any horse?” Buffalo Hump said. “They were hungry.”
Kicking Wolf stayed a long time by the pit, looking at the bones of the Buffalo Horse. That Ahumado would kill and eat such a beast, rather than keeping him as a prize, astonished him. He jumped down into the pit and came back with one of the great rib bones.
Buffalo Hump spent some time riding around the rim of the crater, trying to understand how it had come to be. The rocks in it were black, the walls steep. He knew that the great hole with the black rocks in it was a place of power, a place where people came to pray and perform their spirit ceremonies. Some of the old ones thought that such holes were the footprints of the first spirit people to visit the world. His own view was that it might be the hole where the People first came out of the earth; only, in time, it had silted over, so that the People could not go back into the darkness they had left.
Buffalo Hump put a few of the black rocks in his pouch, to show to Worm and a few of the old men when he got home. It occurred to him that the reason Ahumado had so much power was because he had put his camp near the place of the black rocks. He was said to be black himself, like the rocks.
The crater was such a powerful place that Buffalo Hump was reluctant to leave it; but they had come to look for the jaguar that had been eating all the game.
In the afternoon they rode across the plateau to the Yellow Cliffs. They found the place where the posts were, and the cages, all but one of which had human remains in them. From the cliffs they could see far south, down the range of peaks. Several eagles soared along the cliff edge. Buffalo Hump wanted badly to shoot an eagle. He waited until dusk with his arrows ready, but none of the eagles flew close enough for him to risk an arrow.
“In the morning I will hide myself better,” he said. The eagles were the large eagles of the south; he thought if he was patient he might kill one.
They camped on the plateau. In the morning the sun and moon were in the sky together, one to the east and the other to the west.
Both men knew that it was time to be careful, when the two powers, sun and moon, were in the sky together. At such times unexpected things could happen. Below them the cliff was pocked with caves. Buffalo Hump wondered if the jaguar lived in one of them. It soon became clear that no people were in the old camp. Three jackrabbits were nibbling at the bushes near the edge of the clearing, a thing that would not happen if the people were still nearby.
As he stood on the cliff looking down, Kicking Wolf suddenly had a memory of his friend Three Birds—a memory so strong that he began to tremble.
“What’s wrong—why are you shaking like that?” Buffalo Hump asked.
“I was thinking of Three Birds,” Kicking Wolf said.
Although Buffalo Hump waited, Kicking Wolf did not say more, but he continued to tremble for some time.
Though Buffalo Hump hid himself well near the edge of the cliff, he soon realized that the eagles were not going to come anywhere near him, certainly not close enough that he could kill one with an arrow. One eagle did dip close enough to tempt him, but it was merely a trick on the eagle’s part. He tilted and let the arrow pass under his wing—it fell all the way to the bottom of the cliff, so far that Buffalo Hump lost sight of it.
“Let’s go down,” he said to Kicking Wolf. “I want to find my arrow.”
Once they rode into the camp at the base of the Yellow Cliffs they saw that no people had been there for some time.
“The jaguar was here,” Buffalo Hump said. “The Apache who spoke with Slow Tree did not lie.”
Near one of the little caves they found some scat, and, everywhere, there were tracks. But the scat was old and none of the tracks were fresh. The jaguar had slept in a little cave near where the people had been. He had left some of his hairs on the rock. Carefully the two men collected as many hairs as they could—the hair of a jaguar would be very useful to Worm or the other medicine men.
While Buffalo Hump finished collecting the hairs, and some of the scat to be used in medicine, Kicking Wolf walked a good distance along the base of the cliff, looking for any trace of his friend. They had looked in the smelly pit and determined that the hastily buried bodies in it were Mexican. There was nothing of Three Birds in the pit, and it was not he rotting from the post in the center of what had been the camp. Yet Kicking Wolf felt that Three Birds would not have come to him so powerfully in memory if his remains, or at least some part of them,
were not near the cliff somewhere.
“Be careful,” Buffalo Hump told him. “The jaguar might be clever. He might be hiding.”
Kicking Wolf did not answer. He wanted to be away from Buffalo Hump for a while. Buffalo Hump was so strong in himself that when you were with him it was hard to think about other people, even such an old friend as Three Birds.
Kicking Wolf thought that if he just got away from Buffalo Hump for a while he might receive another strong memory and be able to locate some trace of his friend; his thinking was correct. Near the base of the cliff, below where the cages hung, Kicking Wolf found the bones of the Comanche Three Birds. The bones were scattered and most of them broken, with only a little skin clinging to them here and there, but when Kicking Wolf found the skull he knew that he had located his friend. Three Birds had a knot, a little ridge of bone, located just below his left temple. As a boy he had been hit in the head with a war club while playing at war with the other boys: the blow left the little ridge or knot of bone behind his temple.
Kicking Wolf looked up at the cliff, so high that it was hard to see the top—there two eagles were soaring. He wondered if Ahumado had had Three Birds thrown from the cliff, or if he had fallen out of one of the cages. It might be that he had jumped, in hopes of becoming a bird as he was falling to his death.
Kicking Wolf knew that he would never know the answer to that question, but at least he had found what he had journeyed to Mexico to find.
He went back to his horse and got a deerskin he had brought just for that purpose; then he wrapped the bones of Three Birds carefully in the deerskin and tied them securely with a rawhide thong. Buffalo Hump came to him as he was working. When Kicking Wolf showed him the skull and the hand he merely said, “Ho!” and helped Kicking Wolf search the site so they would not miss any bones. It was Buffalo Hump who found one of Three Birds’ feet.
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 101