They came to a place not far from the Canadian where some people had thrown up their tipis in a snowstorm. Nothing goes unmarked or unrecorded in the dry air of the plains and the edges of the plains. Tracks and marks of habitation remain for decades, for centuries. Along streambeds, among the spiked crowns of yucca, long leaf-shaped flints eroded out of the soil and some of these flints had been made many thousands of years ago. But someone had made them, an individual like no other, who had a guardian spirit and a wife and children. And so with the immense bones of buffalo who were as high at the shoulder as a tipi, wolves as tall as a man. From time to time a person could find the lower jaws and skulls of these giant wolves lying open and hungry. They had been big enough to devour the man who made the flint in a few moments of gore and noise.
And so they easily found the circles made by people who had thrown up their tipis in a snowstorm last fall. Had stayed a week or so. Inside the circles the grass was shorter, unwatered, but at the edges it was much greener where heavy banks of snow had slid from the tipis and had given more moisture to the roots of the grasses.
“Were they the Kiowa with my wife and children?”
“I don’t know,” said Tissoyo. He walked around one circle. “The Kiowa use three main support poles for the tipis. We Comanche use four. But I can’t tell which marks were the support poles.” He bent down to touch a buffalo skull and then looked up and saw another. “They were pointing the skulls toward the people,” he said. “To ask the buffalo to come. They were hungry. Very hungry.”
At night Britt and Tissoyo lay across the fire from each other and the horses ate their way through spring grasses with tearing sounds. From time to time one of the horses would snort an alarm and the rest would gather to him and then they would come close to the fire, shifting and nervous. Their eyes were lucent, glowing and deep in the firelight, as if they had some intense illuminations inside their skulls. Then Britt and Tissoyo sat up with rifles in hand and listened. The nighttimes were alive with distant noises, with disembodied beings, with great stars wheeling overhead.
They went on northwest on some trail that had been cut by the bison and also by people and horses. They came to the flat-topped Antelope Hills and then a few miles north of them, the Canadian River. They crossed the Canadian, gray as iron with spring rains, wide and shallow. When they passed a dry watercourse giving into the river, Britt saw something on the far side of it. He and Cajun scrambled up the bank, and he saw the remains of a child’s body. A skull with some patches of skin and hair on it, the spine a jointed white puzzle, the immature pelvis. He dismounted and reached down to the skull and saw that the hair was straight and black. Some child that had grown ill and weary and had been left behind, and the only children the Indians would leave behind would be captive children, and this abandoned small creature was not his child. Someone’s child, but not his.
“Mexican,” said Tissoyo. “Maybe he was sick.” The Comanche lifted one hand and threw a braid over his shoulder. He took the other braid and bit the end of it. “The Texans and the Nemernah don’t think the same way about captives.”
“No, we don’t,” said Britt.
“You can get another wife,” said Tissoyo.
“She is my wife. Mine. I don’t want another one. They took what was mine and killed my son.” Britt’s hand tightened on the reins.
“Yes, yes, understood.” Tissoyo waved one hand anxiously. “But it is curious.”
“What is?”
“The Texans never stop until they get their women and children back. It makes them so angry they become like beasts, when you take their wives and children.”
“And also when you kill them,” said Britt.
“Why do they take it so hard?”
“Just different,” said Britt. “Just different.”
BY NOONTIME A great wind came up out of the northeast. It began with one hard gust that almost blew Britt’s hat from his head and then stopped and it was calm again but in another fifteen minutes came another gust and then another and another. Then it blew straight and hard. The wind roared in their ears so they had to turn their heads to one another and shout. Tissoyo’s braids blew out behind him and his headdress writhed and fought to escape its pinnings. After an hour or so Tissoyo pulled up.
“I smell fire.”
They saw it after they had traveled another five miles in the battering, glassy wind. First the smoke lifting on the horizon as if the whole world were afire and the tall rollers booming up and then bending in the wind toward them. Blossoms of ochre and gray that the sun shone through and turned blue on the edges. As they went on they saw at the bottom of this smoke the first appearance of flames, bright red and erratic, appearing and disappearing. The wind was in their faces and driving the fire toward them.
“We’d better get back to the river,” said Tissoyo. “We are in the path of it.”
It came on very fast. It boiled forward over many square miles of dried winter grasses and then they could see objects lifting in the air in the updrafts, limbs and flaunting webs of burning grasses. Before long the smoke covered the sky overhead. A running form flashed out of the fire and then three and four. Antelope bolted past with their little ears laid back and several fawns leaping behind them on knobby, angled legs.
They turned and went at a run for the Canadian behind them. The hot, smoking wind was at their backs. Britt’s arm was nearly jerked out of its socket as he hauled at the pack pony’s lead rope until it finally broke into a gallop. That distance seemed very long. He heard behind them a sucking, roaring sound. Before they rode down onto the sandy flats Tissoyo jumped off his horse and handed Britt his reins.
Tissoyo sat down on his haunches and gathered a pile of grass. With his thickened, muscled hands he ripped a dead agarita from the ground. He ignored the tiny thorns. He threw this on the pile of grass and mashed it into a ball. He tied his rope around it. Then he took up his flint and steel and struck a shower of sparks into the pile while loose strands of his black hair streamed out around his head in the searing wind. The packed ball of grass caught fire. The wind took up the two small heads of flame within it like a transparent magician, a dextrous invisible being, and sucked fire out of it. Tissoyo vaulted onto his buckskin. Fire leaped to the grass alongside as Tissoyo rode dragging the ball behind him. Then he threw the flaming ball into the stands of dry bluestem. The fire caught and ran sideways and then toward the water. They rode out onto the white sands of the Canadian River and the porous sandstone flats that clicked beneath their horses’ hooves. The backfire spread and ate the dry grass along the bank and the smoke rolled into their faces.
Britt pulled the pack off the pony in case he could not hold him and then they would lose all that was in the pack. The ransom money and gifts, his ammunition and what supplies remained to him. He threw the pack onto a layer of sandstone that looked like petrified broadcloth and soaked a blanket and threw it over the pack and the ammunition inside it. He hobbled the pony and then Cajun, and wet his second blanket and threw it over Cajun and the saddle. He turned to help Tissoyo.
The two paint horses trembled in waves all over their bodies as they stood staring at the darkening sky and there was white around their eyes. Their tails blew between their legs and their manes stood out ahead of them.
“Throw them down,” said Britt. “Blindfold them. They’ll run.”
Tissoyo roped both of the spotted ponies and then tied up a forefoot on the Medicine Hat paint, so that he stood, three-legged and helpless. Then he laid a loop around the other forefoot and jerked him down on his front end and then they did the same with the black-and-white mare, and blindfolded both of them. Tissoyo wet his blankets and draped them sticky and soaked over the paints.
The backfire had now burned along the north bank of the river and died out, leaving a landscape in the negative. Here and there a stand of big bluestem still burned like a handful of crisp red signal flags. The main fire came on and with it the smell of cooking meat and sulphur. Br
itt and Tissoyo soaked their neckerchiefs in the water and tied them over their faces. They lay down in the stone pools of the riverbed. The smoke came upon them with a killing chemical smell, carrying in itself the gases of some remote burning coal bank and seared flats of cactus. Cajun stood steady with his blindfolded head down and his skin shivered as sparks fell on him.
It grew very dark. Vagrant sheets of fire blew into the air like burning laundry and disappeared. Other flames crawled low to the earth and roared when they fell upon fresh fuel. Sparks shot forward out of incandescent green brush whose stems were full of spring sap. In the middle of the hottest flames long thin ropes of fire tornados moved, bright pink and alive.
The fire stopped at the edge of the backfire but the smoke came on. Sparks cascaded down on them. Britt beat them out and they left black holes in his coat. Tissoyo had dipped his head in the water. Britt could smell the scent of burning flesh and closed his eyes. Don’t let me come this far and hope and have Mary and the children die in this.
Long streamers of fire leapt the river. Britt glanced up and it was like shimmering red silk vibrating over his head. It jumped to the grass and brush on the far bank and flashed into a brief inferno and ate everything there was to eat, burned everything there was to burn, and then on the back of the windstorm it roared on.
BRITT AND TISSOYO waited until the following day to move. It was blowing a hard wind yet. The earth ahead of them would be hot and full of glowing small cinders of burned brush. They took the blindfolds and ropes off the spotted horses; they struggled up to drink and then Britt and Tissoyo slept on the stone of the riverbank that night. The water was thick and dark. The next morning they strained it through their dirty handkerchiefs and then went on, walking and leading the horses. They had to get through the burned area to find grass. If they did not get through the burned area the two loose horses would begin to range for grazing and be lost.
They passed smoking carcasses of antelope and the charred bodies of two wolves lying with their tongues sticking roasted and fleshy out of their mouths. They passed a raised, bumpy area that had been a prairie dog town. The small creatures lay dead in their entrance holes where the fire had sucked the air out of their tunnels and they had crawled up to breathe and died in the burning. A blackened armadillo looked like a Dutch oven someone had abandoned.
By the end of the day they had not reached the farther limit of the fire. They and the horses walked on with black and ashy legs. A cold front came down on them, out of the north, a hard spring chill in a transparent wind and a cloudless sky. It blew Britt’s coat open and he had to grasp his hat to his head.
They were black to the knees and clouds of ashes like a charcoal mist blew along the ground. Britt strode forward like a machine, his head down against the wind and the haze of ashes rising around his feet. Ahead was a low draw. He and Tissoyo and the horses headed down it and stumbled over the broken plates of yellow sandstone. Up on one side they saw the shallow protection of a long cave. They scrambled up and into it, out of the wind. They let the horses go. Above the cave, in a ledge of stone, a thin seam of coal had caught fire. The seam was in round deposits, each the size of a fist. It ran all along one layer of limestone like a string of beads and each bolus burned fitfully with a blue flame.
Chapter 16
BRITT WOKE UP some time later. The horses were gone. Tissoyo lay facedown at one side of the cave. A great pain in Britt’s head shot all around his skull and burned behind his eyes. He was very weak. Britt pulled himself forward through the dirt and rocks of the cave floor until he was beside Tissoyo and then managed to roll himself over the edge. He fell down several layers of stone and boulders and through a stabbing yucca and came to rest in a sandy fan where water poured when it rained. He began to breathe slowly and deeply. His eyes burned. It seemed to be the middle of the day. The northern wind was still blowing and cold and a mist of ashes sailed and snaked like ropes above them still. A translucent daytime moon looked down on him from the blue sky with an astonished face. He felt very sick. It was the coal fumes.
Britt shifted his long body until he was sat upright. There seemed to be so much of him, terminating in weighty, unmanageable hands and large feet encased in blackened boots the color of cast iron. The coal gas was drifting downward; coal gas was heavier than air and it had soaked their lungs and blood all night. It was a miracle he had awakened. Some driving, alert part of his mind had reached through the coma and shook him and said You must live, you must.
He turned over onto his hands and knees and began to crawl slowly back up the slope. In a clumsy motion of his hand he turned over a rock. The scorpion beneath it whipped up its thin tail and stung him on the heel of his thumb. Britt smashed it with a rock and felt the deep pain rocketing up his arm and shoulder and this drove him on, it wakened him and made him angry. He placed his large unwieldy hands flat on the broken stones and dragged his heavy feet after him over the rock and at last reached the cave. He bent his head and took a deep breath of air and then closed his mouth and laid his scorpion-stung hand on Tissoyo’s tangled, ashy hair. He closed his hand tight and then fell backward. He dragged Tissoyo over the lip of rock and they fell over each other until they came to rest in the sand and stones at the bottom of the draw.
The wind howled. Britt’s head hurt so badly he felt as if fire were shooting out of his eyes. He was torn by thirst. With his thumb he lifted Tissoyo’s left eyelid and with the other forefinger, touched the eyeball and Tissoyo blinked.
Then the Comanche’s lips moved and his head turned one way and then the other. Britt fell back and clasped his stung hand to his chest. He lay there for a few moments.
He sat up, slowly, and tried to call his horses. No sound came out. His mouth and lips were so dry they stuck together. His tongue was as big as a bolster. He pulled his knife out of the scabbard and slashed a wound on the back of his wrist, and lifted it to his mouth as if it were a chalice and took the blood into his mouth and swallowed. He wiped his lips on his shirtsleeve. He lifted his head and called “Come boys!” He called several times and then fell back again. Tissoyo did not move.
After a while Britt heard a horse’s steel shoes clicking up the draw toward him. It was Cajun. Lost and hungry and thirsty and without anything to eat in a world of drifting ash.
Britt got to his feet and walked slowly toward Cajun. Once he crossed one foot in front of another but recovered. He pulled the canteen off the saddle horn and drank and drank. Cajun smelled the water and pushed him with his nose.
Britt carried the canteen back to Tissoyo and poured water on his face. Tissoyo’s hands reached up for the water with a Comanche word. He opened his eyes and drank the rest of the water. Then he leaned forward and threw up the water and the pemmican he had eaten and then green acid slime. It shot out of him, over his thighs, and ran off the buckskin in rivulets.
Britt stood up and said, “Wait. I will come back.”
His voice was better now that he had drunk half the canteen. He went off down the draw with Cajun’s reins in his hand. Where the draw fed out to a wide wash he found the pack pony with the pack off to one side, standing braced against the weight of it, and the two spotted horses. The fire had jumped the wash and left patches of stiff inedible bear grass and sotol. Even so the horses ripped at it. They saw him and called anxiously.
Britt got Tissoyo and himself mounted and the pack straightened on the pony. They started out across the burned country. Tissoyo fell forward from time to time and sank both hands in his buckskin horse’s mane and then straightened and then slumped backward and caught himself again.
On a rise Britt saw ahead a horizon of shifting grass, the tossing new leaves of cottonwoods floating and lifting over some watercourse. As they went on toward it they passed the place where the fire had begun; a great spiked flash of black, the earth exposed, where lightning had struck.
That night they ate the rest of the pemmican and four pilot biscuits. The water lay in shallow pools but it was enough.
The horses stayed near them to graze and search out the buffalo grass where it sprang up in tight curls under the winter bluestem.
Tissoyo’s head fell forward into both hands. He was silent for a long time. He was crying without noise. Britt watched him. His head still hurt and when he moved too quickly he saw the cottonwoods ambulating in a queasy and uncertain way. He wondered if the coal fumes might have damaged Tissoyo’s mind. Britt held out the canteen.
Tissoyo drank and drank and then wiped his face, his eyes and nose.
“Now I have to give you the horses. They are the best horses I ever owned. They are so beautiful.” Tissoyo’s voice was thready.
Britt raised his head. “Why do you have to give them to me?”
“For my life.”
“Hm.” Britt watched him in the firelight as Tissoyo pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
“I love them,” said Tissoyo.
“But you owe them to me.” Britt clasped his hands together and leaned back on one elbow. This was a new development and it was very interesting and he did not want to interrupt Tissoyo’s train of thought.
“Yes. Otherwise a being would be offended. Somebody has already sent down the fire. Because of the fish.”
“But I didn’t catch any fish.”
“But you spoke about it where they could hear you. It could get worse.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Oh, yes. Much worse.” Tissoyo wiped his hands on his buckskins.
Yes, thought Britt. I could shoot you and take them.
Tissoyo looked up at him suddenly and his eyes narrowed. “You could have left me to die and taken the horses. Or shot me and then taken them anyway.”
Britt nodded. Despite his long day of ash and smoke he groped in the pocket of his burned coat and brought out his tobacco and squares of newspaper and rolled a cigarette. The heel of his thumb still burned from the scorpion sting and a hard, round knot had formed with a tiny red dot in the middle of it. He would have given a great deal for a drink of Paint Crawford’s acidic mustang-grape wine.
The Color of Lightning Page 16