by John Jakes
“One name the tribes got for the buffla is Uncle. Since he provides pretty near everything they eat or use, they figure he’s pretty near a relative.”
Under an ugly gray sky streaked silver by lightning, Charles held on to his hat and squinted through blowing dust at eight young Indians armed with lances and rifles. They were within hailing distance, so Charles clearly heard them yell, “Sons of bitches. Sons of bitches!”
One brave knelt on his pony’s back, thrust out his rear end, and thumbed it with his right hand. Wooden Foot sighed. “They’s sure learned all the best we got to teach.”
Boy crowded his horse close to his uncle’s. Charles rested the Spencer on his right leg, his mouth dry with worry. The lightning streaked east to west, and distant thunder pealed. Behind the braves milled a herd of at least fifty wild stallions, mares, and foals. The white men had stopped when they spied the Indians herding the ponies across some low hills.
“That’s money on the hoof, them horses,” Wooden Foot said. “Tribal wealth. They won’t risk losin’ it by comin’ after us. They seldom attack ’less they outnumber the other side or they’s trapped or provoked. ’Sides, they’s near enough to see we got these.”
He pumped his rifle up and down over his head a few times. The braves replied with more shaken fists and obscenities. As the wind strengthened and the rain started, they rode away with their herd. It took about ten minutes for Charles to calm down. In wartime combat, he’d never been free of fear, but it seemed sharper and more personal out here. Probably because of the space. All the empty, lonely, beautiful space.
“Dive, Charlie!” Wooden Foot yelled. “Dive and shoot!”
His feet out of the stirrups, Charles threw himself to the left. For a second, falling between the saddle and the grass as Satan galloped, he was sure he’d break his neck.
He didn’t. While his legs locked on belly and loin, he shot his left hand under the piebald’s neck and hooked it over. Clinging to the piebald’s left side in that way, and protected by the horse’s body, he tried to forget the prairie flying by beneath him.
“Shoot!” his teacher bellowed. He pulled himself up far enough to snap off a round above the withers of the racing horse. Wooden Foot yelled his approval. “Again!”
After five shots, his arm gave out and he fell off, remembering at the last moment to relax before he hit. The impact left him gasping, half senseless.
Fen ran circles around him, barking. Boy jigged and clapped for him. Wooden Foot pulled him up, slapping his back to help him breathe. “Good, Charlie. Better’n good. Damn fine. You’ve got a natural talent for plains craft. A real gift, God’s truth.”
“You think it’s important I know how to shoot from behind my horse?” Charles asked with some skepticism.
Wooden Foot shrugged. “The more you know, the better chance you got to save your hair if some wild Cheyenne wants it. They use that little trick in tiltin’. That’s a game on horseback, with padded lances. They try to knock each other off. Somebody musta figured out that it’s a lot safer shootìn’ that way, too. How you feel?”
Satan trotted back, dipped his head, and blubbered out breath. Dust-covered, Charles smiled. “Bumped up a good deal. Otherwise I’m fine.”
“Good. I think we should try it again. I mean, you did fall off—”
That night, Wooden Foot added a pictograph to the winter count. The stick figure represented Charles shooting while hanging on the side of his running horse. Charles felt a rush of pride when the trader showed him the finished picture. For the first time in weeks, he slept without dreams of any kind.
They rode on south, still pupil and teacher.
“This yere says Cheyenne.” Wooden Foot drew his right index finger rapidly across his left one several times. “What it really says is striped arrow, but it means Cheyenne ’cause they use striped turkey feathers for fletchin’.”
Charles imitated the sign a few times. Wooden Foot then clenched his hand, extending index and little fingers. “Horse.”
And the hands with fingertips touching, an inverted V. “Tipi.”
And a fist at either temple, index fingers raised. “You can guess this one.”
“Buffalo?”
“Good, good. Only a thousand more to learn, give or take a few.”
The lessons covered various subjects. Wooden Foot rode his horse down a slight slope, back and forth, a continuous Z pattern.
“If an Indian’s too far off to see your face or count your guns, this says you’re peaceful.”
And, as they watched another wild pony herd stream along the horizon to the southeast:
“Thing you got to do out here, Charlie, is turn your notions upside down. White man’s rules and ways, they don’t operate. F’rinstance, steal a horse back in Topeka, they’ll hang you. Out here, runnin’ off ten or twenty head from another bunch of lodges is the very bravest of deeds. If we’d learn to parley on Indian terms ’stead of our own, there might be real peace on the plains.”
And, kneeling by some tracks in the steel-colored morning:
“What would you read from this, Charlie?”
He studied the marks, a number of nearly identical sets overlapping and partially obliterating each other. He glanced at Fen, panting from pulling the travois, then at the flat and empty land. “Travois. A whole lot of them, according to those pole tracks. A village.”
“Which is what you’re s’posed to think. But look back two miles, to where these tracks started. You won’t see any dog droppin’s. Just horse turds. No dogs, no village. A few braves made these, with stone-weighted poles tied to their waists. In a few blinks of an eye, they can conjure up a village big enough to scare you off. Old fear’s a powerful medicine. It can trick you into seein’ what you expect to be there, ’stead of what is. Look.”
He stood in the stirrups to point, his other hand holding his hat in the keen wind. On a rise to the southeast, so far away the figures were miniature, Charles saw horsemen. Four of them.
“There’s your whole village. If you just saw the tracks, you’d ride real wide of it, wouldn’t you?”
Charles felt stupid and showed it. Wooden Foot slapped his shoulder, to say it was all part of learning. Then he fired a rifle round over his head. The sound boomed away toward the distant riders, who quickly trotted out of sight. Like the other lessons, it burned into Charles’s head with the permanence of a white-hot iron.
Old fear’s a powerful medicine. It can trick you into seein’ what you expect to be there, ’stead of what is.
Over the fire that night, while adding the incident to the winter count with strokes of black and red, Wooden Foot said in a mild voice, “You forgettin’ about her some? The one you lost, I mean?”
“Some.” These days he occasionally thought of Willa, too. “I’m grateful to you.”
Wooden Foot waved the dainty brush. “All in the job. If I wanted a partner worth the name, I knew I had to pull you out of the glooms. They’s just too damn many interestin’ things and too many kinds of possible trouble out here for a man to stay sunk in a puddle of grief. Man’s got to be alert, to keep his hair.”
“I believe you,” Charles said. He leaned back on his elbows, warmed by the fire and friendship, feeling a new, if fragile, contentment. He was beginning to feel the same kind of affection for this part of the world that he’d felt for Texas.
About an hour before dawn, a familiar pressure woke him. Too damn much coffee again.
As quietly as he could, he rolled out of his buffalo robe. His breath plumed in the dim light from the embers in the center of the tipi floor. He untied the flap thongs and slipped out the round hole without making a noise.
He heard the horses and mules fretting on their picket line and wondered why. The cold, star-bright night seemed untroubled. One thing sure, if some kind of animal interloper was prowling, Fen would never announce it. He was everything except a watchdog.
Charles walked along the side of a draw, away from the faint glow insi
de the tipi. He opened his trousers, then his long underwear. Over the stream of water, he heard a voice.
He cut off the water, jerked his clothes back in place, and reached automatically to his hip.
The holstered Colt wasn’t there. He slept with it next to his head. He had his Bowie in its belt sheath, though.
He crept back through the draw and saw silhouettes cast by the fire onto the tipi cover. Two people sitting up, a third standing between them with something stubby in his hand.
A gun.
Licking his chapped mouth and furiously blinking sleep away, Charles crept toward the tipi. The intruder, who must have stolen into the tipi right after he left, and not seen him, was speaking to Boy.
“You lie still, you barrel-headed idiot. If you don’t, I’ll blow this old fool’s brainpan to pieces.” The shadow man jammed the shadow gun against Wooden Foot’s shadow head to demonstrate. “You fucking old geezer, I want some of your trade goods. And whatever money you got.”
“Little early in the season for snowbirds, ain’t it?” Wooden Foot remarked. Charles suspected he wasn’t as calm as he sounded. “I thought fellas like you ate Army food all winter, then lit out in the spring.”
“Shut the fuck up, unless you want me to shoot that prune-eyed cretin.”
Very quietly, Wooden Foot said, “No, I don’t want you to do that.”
“Then fetch me the goods.”
“They’re in travel bags. Outside.”
The man pushed the muzzle of the gun into Wooden Foot’s shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
14
CHARLES DREW HIS BOWIE from its sheath. His heart raced as he started for the tipi. Long strides brought him near the round hole a few seconds before Wooden Foot crawled out.
The trader sensed Charles close by, standing against the tipi, but didn’t turn his head to give it away. He was followed by the man with the gun. In the starlight, Charles saw a bearded face, then sleeves with yellow corporal’s stripes. A deserter, all right.
“Hold it there, old man,” the man said, straightening. He was stocky and a head shorter than Wooden Foot, who wasn’t all that tall. God knew from which fort he’d bolted. Maybe Larned, or the newer one, Fort Dodge.
Charles shifted his weight for the strike. About to speak, the deserter heard or sensed something. He pivoted, saw Charles, fired.
The ball scorched past Charles’s cheek and tore through the tipi cover. Charles rammed the knife into the deserter’s blue blouse and turned it, skewering him.
“Oh, no,” the soldier said, rising on tiptoe. “No.” A second later, he was unconscious on his feet. His hand opened, and the gun dropped. His knees unlocked, and Charles supposed he was dead, or nearly so, as he sprawled on the moonlit ground, boneless as a cloth doll. The stinking excretions of death came quickly.
Charles wiped his knife on the grass. “What do we do with him?”
Wooden Foot was puffing as though he’d run a long way. “Leave him”—more gasps—“for the scavengers. He don’t deserve no better.”
Fen trotted from the dark, whining; he knew something was wrong. Wooden Foot patted him. “That was slick work with the knife, Charlie. You’re learnin’ fast.” He grabbed the blue uniform collar, raising the dead man’s head. Moonlight on the lifeless eyes made them shine like coins. “Or did you already know how to do that sort of thing?”
Charles finished cleaning the knife with a wad of dead grass. He shot the Bowie back in the sheath and tapped the handle with his palm. The handle hit the sheath with a soft but distinct click. That was answer enough.
In the tipi, Boy crouched with his arms crossed. Hugging himself hard, he cried big tears. By now Charles understood why the youngster reacted that way. It wasn’t merely fright. His poor short-weighted mind sometimes understood that his uncle faced a hard task or a rough situation. He always wanted to help but couldn’t send the right orders to his hands or feet or any other part of his body. Twice before, Charles had seen him weep in angry frustration.
Wooden Foot took Boy in his arms. He patted and comforted him. Then he plucked at the front of his own shirt. Charles again noticed the deep red of the trader’s face. Wooden Foot saw him staring.
“I told you, it ain’t anythin’,” he said, almost as angry as his nephew.
Charles didn’t pursue it.
In early November, the Jackson Trading Company crossed trails with a half-dozen Arapahoes moving north. All wore their hair heavily dressed with grease, but one, more sensitive than the others to the recent summer sunshine, had hair more golden-brown than black. The scalp showing in the part of each man’s hair was painted red.
Wooden Foot talked with the Arapahoes in a combination of sign, rudimentary English, and their own tongue. Charles heard “Moketavato” a few times; he recognized the Cheyenne name of Black Kettle, the peace chief Wooden Foot admired and respected.
He needed no special understanding of Indians to recognize the animosity of the Arapahoes. It snapped in every syllable, every sharp gesture and fiery look. Still, they kept talking with Wooden Foot, squatting in a semicircle opposite him, for almost an hour.
“I don’t understand,” Charles said after the Arapahoes had ridden away. “They hated the sight of us.”
“Sure, they did.”
“But they talked to you.”
“Well, we hadn’t done nothin’ to stir ’em up, so they was duty-bound to treat us in a civil manner. Most Indians are like that. Not all, though, so don’t be lulled.”
“You talked to them about Black Kettle.”
Wooden Foot nodded. “He and the Arapahoe peace chief Little Raven touched the pen to that treaty on the Little Arkansas not two weeks ago. The treaty stakes out a new reservation, gives a parcel of land on it to every Cheyenne or Arapahoe who’s willin’ to live there, and sweetens it to a hundred sixty acres if somebody lost a parent or a husband at Sand Creek. The guv’mint came down hard on what happened there, and they’s sendin’ Bill Bent, a good man, into the villages this winter to see that the sojers don’t do the same thing again. Only trouble is, they was only about eighty Cheyenne lodges at the Little Arkansas. They’s some two hundred others roamin’ loose, and to them the treaty’ll be just so much spit in the wind.”
Charles scratched his chin; lengthening stubble was turning into a beard. “Did you find out where Black Kettle’s camped?”
“Straight ahead, on the Cimarron. Right where I meant to look for him. Let’s travel.”
Under the rim of the low bluff, Wooden Foot pointed to littered bones. “Buffla jump. They turn the herd and run it over the edge. Pretty soon the buffla are pilin’ up and breakin’ legs and generally makin’ it easy for the braves to kill ’em.”
Two days had passed since their meeting with the Arapahoes. Light snowflakes fell in the windless afternoon, melting as they touched the frost-killed grass. Charles relished the warmth of his cigar and wondered how his son would react to his first sight of a snowfall. He surely wished he could be there to see—
“Jumpin’ the herd that way ain’t quite as glorious as killin’ buffla in a reg’lar hunt. But if winter’s closin’ in and there ain’t enough carcasses put by yet, it’s a good quick way to—” He broke off, turned his head. “Hold on.”
He ran out of the jump and up to the rim. There he knelt, palms pressed to the ground. “What is it?” Charles said.
“Riders. Comin’ fast. Damn. They’s two dozen or more. I got a hunch we used up all our good luck on that thievin’ snowbird, Charlie.”
Charles ran for Satan, jerking his Spencer from the saddle scabbard. Wooden Foot ordered him to put it away.
“Why?”
“ ’Cause we need to see who they are. You want to guarantee you’ll be kilt, shoot an Indian without tryin’ to palaver first.”
Wooden Foot walked along the lip of the jump, thumbs in his cartridge belt, his slow slouching gait indicating a lack of worry. Charles saw plenty in his eyes, though. He slid the Spencer b
ack and joined his partner. Wooden Foot motioned Boy to his side as bareback riders in a wide concave line came galloping down on them.
The Indians wore fringed leggings. Some had scarlet blankets tied around their waists. Six wore huge bonnets of eagle feathers. Charles also noted, not happily, three Army-issue garments, two of them short fatigue jackets with the light blue facings of the infantry, the third an old-style tail coat faced with artillery red. The wearer of the tail coat displayed a couple of medals on the front.
Another Indian, a sleek, thin, notably darker man in his mid-twenties, wore a huge silver cross on a chain around his neck. Strands of some wispy material hung from the sleeves and front of his buckskin coat. Almost all of these decorative strands were black, though Charles did notice a few yellow and gray ones. He assumed the cross, like the Army coats, was stolen.
“Oh, God, Cheyennes,” Wooden Foot muttered. “And Dog Society men on top of it. They ain’t wearin’ their regalia, but I recognize the one in front. This couldn’t be worse.”
“Who is—?”
The rest of the question about the leader went unheard as the Cheyennes reined in, setting the air ajingle with the small round bells braided into the manes of their ponies. Trade bells, from white men, as were the trade carbines they leveled at the Jackson Trading Company. Besides the guns, the Indians carried bows and arrows.
Fen pulled back and forth in his travois harness, growling. Charles bit down on his cigar, now reduced to a stub by rapid puffing. Boy hid behind his uncle.
The darkest Indian, the one wearing the cross, sawed the air and yelled at them in his own tongue. He had a fine, narrow face, though unusually severe. The red paint with which he and the others had decorated their faces and hands was applied to his left cheek with special care. Two broad parallel strokes bracketed a long white scar curving from the outer tip of his eyebrow down along the line of his jaw, where it took a short upward turn beneath the left corner of his mouth—a red-lined fishhook.
The snow fell faster. The Cheyennes eyed Charles and his partner while the leader continued his harangue. Charles understood an occasional word or sign; Wooden Foot’s teaching was beginning to sink in. But he didn’t need to know any Cheyenne or sign language to understand that almost all of the leader’s remarks were angry and nasty.