by Alan Lemay
And they took a great quantity of sheet-iron arrowheads, the most sure-fire merchandise ever taken onto the plains. These were made in New England, and cost the traders seven cents a dozen. As few as six of them would sometimes fetch a buffalo robe worth two and a half to four dollars.
So now they set out through the rains and muck of spring, practicing their sign language, and learning their business as they went along. They were traveling now in a guise of peace; yet they trotted the long prairies for many weeks without seeing an Indian of any kind. Sometimes they found Indian signs— warm ashes in a shallow, bowl-like Comanche firepit, the fresh tracks of an unshod pony—but no trail that they could follow out. Searching the empty plains, it was easy to understand why you could never find a village when you came armed and in numbers to destroy it. Space itself was the Comanche’s fortress. He seemed to live out his life immune to discovery, invisible beyond the rim of the world; as if he could disappear at will into the Spirit Land he described as lying beyond the sunset.
Then their luck changed, and for a while they found Comanches around every bend of every creek. Mart learned, without ever quite believing, the difference between Comanches on raid and Comanches among their own lodges. Given the security of great space, these wildest of horse men became amiable and merry, quick with their hospitality. Generosity was the key to prestige in their communal life, just as merciless ferocity was their standard in the field. They made the change from one extreme to the other effortlessly, so that warriors returning with the loot of a ravaged frontier settlement immediately became the poorest men in their village through giving everything away.
Their trading went almost too well for their purposes. Comanche detachments that had wintered in the mountains, on the borders of Piute and Shoshone country, were rich in furs, particularly fox and otter, far more valuable now than beaver plews since the passing of the beaver hat. A general swap, big enough to clean out a village, took several days, the first of which was spent in long silences and casual conversations pretending disinterest in trade. But by the second day the Comanche minds had been made up; and though Mart and Amos raised their prices past the ridiculous, their mules were soon so loaded that they had to cache their loot precariously to keep an excuse for continuing their search.
Once the first day’s silences were over, the Indians loved to talk. Caught short of facts they made up stories to suit—that was the main trouble when you wanted information from them. The searchers heard that Debbie was with Woman’s Heart, of the Kiowas; and Red Hog, with Wolves-talk-to-him, with Lost Pony in the Palo Duro Canyon. They heard, in a face-blackened ritual of mourning, that she had died a full year before. Later they heard that she had been dead one month. Many Indians spoke of knowing Scar. Though they never knew just where he was, he was most often said to ride with Bluebonnet—a name sometimes translated as “the Flower.” Mart and Amos both felt certain that they were closing in.
That was the summer a sub-chief of the Nocona Comanches, named Double Bird, tried to sell them a gaggle of squaws. They didn’t know what he was driving at, to begin with. He signed that he had something to show them, and walked them out of his squalid ten-lodge village to the banks of the Rabbit Ear. Suddenly they were looking down at a covey of eight or nine mother-naked Indian girls, bathing in a shallow pool. The girls yipped and sat down in the water as the strangers appeared. Double Bird spoke; slowly the girls stood up again, and went on washing themselves in a self-conscious silence, lathering their short-cropped hair with bear grass.
Double Bird explained in sign language that he found himself long on women, but short of most everything else—especially gunpowder. How did they like these? Fat ones. Thin ones. Take and try. Amos told the chief that they didn’t have his price with them, but Double Bird saw no obstacle in that. Try now. You like, go get gunpowder, lead; he would like a few dozen breech-loading rifles. Squaw wait.
Some of the young squaws were slim and pretty, and one or two were light-skinned, betraying white blood. Amos looked at Mart, and saw that he was staring with glassy eyes.
“Wake up,” Amos said, jabbing him with a thumb like the butt of a lance. “You going to pick some, or not?”
“I know one thing,” Mart said, “I got to give up. Either give up and go back, or give up and stay out.”
“That’s just the trouble. Pretty soon it’s too late. Longer you’re out, the more you want to go back— only you don’t know how. Until you don’t fit any place any more. You’ll end up a squaw man—you can mark my word. You see why I tried to leave you home?”
During this time Mart had one recurrence of the terror-dream. He had supposed he would never have it any more, now that he had a pretty fair idea of how it had been caused. But the dream was as strong as ever, and in no way changed. The deathly dream voices in the reddish dark were as weird and unearthly as ever, only vaguely like the yammering war cries he had heard at the Cat-tails. Amos shook him out of it, on the theory he must be choking on something, since he made no sound. But he slept no more that night.
Nevertheless, he was steadying, and changing. His grief for his lost people had forked, and now came to him in two ways, neither one as dreadful as the agony of loss he had felt at first. One way was in the form of a lot of little guilt-memories of unkindnesses that he now could never redress. Times when he had talked back to Martha, hadn’t had time to read to Debbie, failed to thank Henry for fixing him up a saddle—sometimes these things came back in cruelly sharp detail.
The other way in which his grief returned was in spells of homesickness. Usually these came on him when things were uncomfortable, or went wrong; while they lasted, nothing ahead seemed to offer any hope. He had no home to which he could ever go back. No such thing was in existence any more on this earth. This homesickness, though, was gradually being replaced by a loneliness for Laurie, who could give him worries of another kind, but who at least was alive and real, however far away.
A more immediate frustration was that he could not seem to catch up with Amos in learning Comanche. He believed this to be of the utmost importance. Sign language was adequate, of course, for talking with Indians, but they wanted to understand the remarks not meant for their ears. Maybe Mart was trying too hard. Few Comanche syllables had anything like the sound of anything in English. But Amos substituted any crude approximate, whereas Mart was trying to get it right and could not.
Then Mart accidentally bought a squaw.
He had set out to buy a fox cape she was wearing, but ran into difficulty. His stubbornness took hold, and he dickered with her whole family for hours. At one point, Amos came and stood watching him curiously, until the stare got on Mart’s nerves. “What the devil you gawkin’ at? Y’see somepin’ green?”
“Kind of branching out, ain’t you?”
“Caught holt of a good hunk o’ fur—that’s all!”
Amos shrugged. “Guess that’s one thing to call it.” He went away.
Mart fingered the fox skins again. They still looked like prime winter stuff to him. He closed the deal abruptly by paying far too much, impatient to get it over with. And next he was unable to get possession. Amos had already diamond-hitched the mule packs, and it was time to go. But the squaw would only clutch the cape around her, chattering at him. When finally she signed that she would be back at once, and ran off among the lodges, Mart noticed that an uncomfortable number of Comanches were pressed close around him, looking at him very strangely. Bewildered and furious, he gave up, and pushed through them to his horse.
By the time he was set to ride, the young squaw had unexpectedly reappeared, exactly as she had promised. She was mounted bareback on an old crowbait that evidently belonged to her, and she carried her squaw bag, packed to bulging, before her on the withers. Behind her massed a whole phalanx of her people, their weapons in their hands. Mart sign-talked at the scowling bucks, “Big happy present from me to you,” in rude gestures dangerously close to insult; and he led out, wanting only to be away from there.
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The Comanche girl and her old plug fell in behind. He ignored her for a mile, but presently was forced to face it: She thought she was going with them. Brusquely he signed to her to turn her pony. She wheeled it obediently in one complete revolution, and fell in behind them again. He signaled more elaborately, unmistakably this time, telling her she must go back. She sat and stared at him.
Amos spoke sharply. “What the hell you doing?”
“Sending her home, naturally! Can’t leave her tag along with—”
“What for God’s sake you buy her for, if you didn’t want her?”
“Buy her?”
“Mean to tell me—” Amos pulled up short and glared at him with disbelief—“You got the guts to set there and say you didn’t even know it?”
“Course I didn’t know it! You think I—” He didn’t finish it. Comprehension of his ridiculous situation overwhelmed him, and he forgot what he had had in mind.
Amos blew up. “You God damned chunkhead!” he yelled, “When in the name of the sweet Christ you going to learn to watch what you’re doing?”
“Well, she’s got to go back,” Mart said sullenly.
“She sure as hell is not going back! Them bastards would snatch our hair off before sundown, you flout ’em like that!”
“Oh, bloody murder,” Mart moaned. “I just as lief give up and—”
“Shut up! Fetch your God damned wife and come along! What we need is distance!”
Wife. This here can’t be happening, Mart thought. Man with luck like mine could never last. Not even this far. Should been killed long ago. And maybe I was—that’s just what’s happened. This horse ain’t carrying a thing but a haunted saddle....
He paid no attention to her, but when they camped by starlight she was there, watering and picketing their animals, building their fire, fetching water. They wouldn’t let her cook that night, but she watched them attentively as they fried beans and antelope steak, then made coffee in the same frying pan. Mart saw she was memorizing their motions, so that she would someday be able to please them. He furtively looked her over. She was quite young, a stocky little woman, inches less than five feet tall. Her face was broad and flat, set woodenly, for the time being, in a vaguely pleasant expression. Like most Comanche women, her skin was yellowish, of a lighter color than that of the males, and her hair was cropped short, in accordance with Comanche custom. Her long, entirely unlearnable name, when Amos questioned her about it, sounded like T’sala- ta-komal-ta-nama. “Wants you to call her Mama,” Amos interpreted it, and guffawed as Mart answered obscenely. Now that he was over his mad, Amos was having more fun out of this than anything Mart could remember. She tried to tell them in sign language what her name meant without much success. Apparently she was called something like “Wild-Geese-Fly-Over-in-the-Night-Going-Honk,” or, maybe, “Ducks-Talk-All-Night-in-the-Sky.” In the time that she was with them Mart never once pronounced her name so that she recognized it; he usually began remarks to her with “Look—” which she came to accept as her new name. Amos, of course, insisted on calling her Mrs. Pauley.
Time came to turn in, in spite of Mart’s efforts to push it off as long as he could. Amos rolled into his blankets, but showed no sign of dozing; he lay there as bright-eyed as a sparrow, awaiting Mart’s next embarrassment with relish. Mart ignored the little Comanche woman as he finally spread out his blankets, hoping that she would let well enough alone if he would. No such a thing. Her movements were shy, deferential, yet completely matter-of-fact, as she laid her own blankets on top of his. He had braced himself against this, and made up his mind what he must do, lest he arm Amos with a hilarious story about him, such as he would never live down. He did not want this Comanche woman in the least, and dreaded the night with her; but he was determined to sleep with her if it killed him.
He pulled his boots, and slowly, gingerly, doubled the blankets over him. The Comanche girl showed neither eagerness nor hesitation, but only an acceptance of the inevitable, as she crept under the blankets, and snuggled in beside him. She was very clean—a good deal cleaner than he was, for the matter of that. The Comanche women bathed a lot when they had any water—they would break ice to get into the river. And often steeped themselves in sage smoke, particularly following menstruation, when this kind of cleansing was a required ritual. She seemed very small, and a little scared, and he felt sorry for her. For a moment he thought the night was going to be all right. Then, faint, but living, and unmistakable, the smell of Indian…. It was not an offensive odor; it had to do, rather, with the smoke of their fires, with the fur and wild-tanned leather they wore, and with the buffalo, without which they did not know how to live. He had supposed he had got used to the smoky air of lodges, and outgrown the senseless fear that had haunted his childhood. But now he struck away the blankets and came to his feet.
“Need water,” he said in Comanche. She got up at once, and brought him some. A choking sound came from where Amos lay; Mart had a glimpse of Amos’ compressed mouth and reddening face before Amos covered his head, burying the laughter he could not repress. Anger snatched Mart, so violent that he stood shaking for a moment, unable to turn away. When he could he walked off into the dark in his sock feet; he was afraid he would kill Amos if he stood there listening to that smothered laughter.
He had figured out an excuse to give her by the time he came back. He explained in signs that his power-medicine was mixed up with a taboo, such that he must sleep alone for a period of time that he left indefinite. She accepted this tale readily; it was the kind of thing that would seem logical, and reasonable, to her. He thought she looked mildly relieved.
At their noon stop on the third day, Amos believed they had come far enough to be safe. “You can get rid of her, now, if you want.”
“How?”
“You can knock her on the head, can’t you? Though, now I think of it, I never seen you show much stomick for anything as practical as that.”
Mart looked at him a moment. He decided to assume Amos was fooling, and let it pass without answer. Amos doubled a lead rope, weighted it with a couple of big knots, and tested it with a whistling snap. “Show you another way,” he said; and started toward the Comanche girl.
Suddenly Mart was standing in front of him. “Put that thing down before I take it away from you!”
Amos stared. “What the hell’s got into you now?”
“It’s my fault she’s here—not hers. She’s done all she possibly could to try to be nice, and make herself helpful, and wanted. I never seen no critter try harder to do right. You want to rough something— I’m in reach, ain’t I?”
Amos angered. “I ought to wrap this here around your gullet!”
“Go ahead. But when you pick yourself up, you better be running!”
Amos walked away.
The Comanche girl was with them eleven days, waiting on them, doing their work, watching them to foresee their needs. At the end of the eleventh day, in the twilight, the girl went after water, and did not come back. They found their bucket grounded in the shallows of the creek, and traced out the sign to discover what they were up against. A single Indian had crossed to her through the water; his buffalo pony had stood in the damp sand while the girl mounted behind the rider. The Indian had been the girl’s lover most likely. They were glad to have him take her, but it made their scalps crawl to consider that he must have followed them, without their at all suspecting it, for all that time.
Though he was relieved to be rid of her, Mart found that he missed her, and was annoyed with himself for missing her, for many weeks. After a while he could not remember what had made him leap up, the night she had crept into the blankets with him; he regretted it, and thought of himself as a fool. They never saw her again. Years later Mart thought he heard of her, but he could not be sure. A Comanche woman who died a captive had told the soldiers her name was “Look.” Mart felt a strange twinge, as of remorse without reason for remorse, as he remembered how a sad-eyed little Comanche woman h
ad once got that name.
He had realized she had been trying to teach him Comanche, though without letting him notice it any more than she could help. When she talked to him in sign language she pronounced the words that went with the signs, but softly, so that he could ignore the spoken speech, if he wished. She responded to his questions with a spark of hidden eagerness, and with the least encouragement told hour-long stories of wars and heroes, miracles and sorceries, in this way. He wouldn’t have supposed he could learn anything in so short a time after beating his skull against the stubborn language for so long. But actually it was a turning point; the weird compounds of Comanche speech began to break apart for him at last. When next he sat among Comanches he became aware that he was able to follow almost everything they said. Amos presently began to turn to him for translations; and before the end of that summer, he was interpreter for them both.
Understanding the Comanches better, Mart began to pick up news, or at least rumors filtered through Indian minds, of what was happening upon the frontier. Most of the Comanches didn’t care whether the white men understood their tales of misdeeds or not. The Wild Tribes had as yet been given little reason to think in terms of reprisals. Returning raiders boasted openly of the bloodiest things they had done.