The Holy Road dww-2

by Michael Blake

  While the constable thought, Dances With Wolves' mind had been working on a different line. He had decided that if he had to kill the white men, he would take the man with the star first. He was hoping to cut his throat with such speed that he could reach the man who had answered the door before he knew what was happening. He was already tensed for action, and as the constable came around the desk, his hand drifted almost imperceptibly to the skinning knife tucked in his belt.

  His fingers closed around the handle as the constable lifted a hand and brought it to rest on his shoulder. Had the pressure of his touch been stronger or the look in his eyes slightly less benign, the blade would have passed under the constable's chin in a single, perfect stroke. But the touch on his shoulder was light, and there was no malice in the eyes.

  "I don't know your name," the constable began, "and you don't have to tell me. I can't know how you feel, but I want you to understand that I'm real, real sorry for all your trouble."

  Dances With Wolves' eyes had turned to slits as he listened to what he could not understand. Perhaps it was his own clumsy English, but he could not imagine what the man with the metal star was talking about.

  The constable couldn't read his listener, either. The stranger seemed disoriented instead of comprehensive and the look in his narrow eyes was mindful of sudden death. The skin along the constable's shoulders rippled with terror and for a split second he thought he might have miscalculated. But the homicide in the stranger's eyes suddenly evaporated and the shuddering along his shoulders ceased. The constable sighed.

  "You get your children and get on your horses, 'cause I'm gonna need you to leave town. I'll ride along with you myself.”

  The constable's hand left Dances With Wolves' shoulder. He turned his back, snatched a fedora off its peg, and started out of the office. He paused when he saw that his revenger had not moved.

  "Come on, friend. . let's go."

  Before he reached the door Vernon's constable glanced quickly over his shoulder and saw with satisfaction that the stranger had begun to shepherd his children along in compliance with the order.

  They rode in silence until they reached a fork in the road almost a mile out of town.

  The constable indicated a track that curved northeast. “You folks take your business that way."

  Dances With Wolves looked perplexed and the constable sidled his horse closer.

  "Lemme tell you something, mister. . just a little piece of advice. Whatever happened to you I wouldn't wish on a dog, but the way you're goin' isn't gonna get you anywhere. You need to take care of these children. You need to find yourself a wife. . get yourself a new life started. Huh?"

  Dances With Wolves nodded.

  "As far as Christine Gunther is concerned. . you need to give that up. Nothin' good can come from it. Now, you can take my advice or not, that's up to you. But if you don't take it, I've got a warning for you. Soon as I leave you, I'm sending word to the law in Jacksboro to look out for a man traveling with two kids. You go down there, you'll find nothing but trouble."

  Gathering up his reins, the constable made a little shooing motion at Dances With Wolves and his children.

  "You get movin' now. Good luck to ya!""

  Dances With Wolves moved forward obediently and the constable turned back down the road to Vernon.

  When they were out of earshot, Snake In Hands and Always Walking brought their ponies even with their father's.

  “What is happening?" the boy asked. "What did that white man say?"

  Dances With Wolves glanced back down the road to Vernon. The constable was nearly out of sight.

  "I don't know. I think he was confused. He seems to think we want to find your mother and hurt her."

  The children looked at him in shock for a few seconds, and then, for the first time in recent memory, smiles broke over their faces.

  "Why does he think that?" asked Always Walking.

  “I don't know," Dances With Wolves replied.

  "He was mixed up." Snake In Hands laughed. "Are all white people mixed up like that, Father?"

  "Maybe."

  Always Walking's round blue eyes looked up hopefully at Dances With Wolves

  "Do you know where mother is now?"

  "She is in a place called Jacksboro,"

  "Are we going there?"

  "As soon as we meet someone who can tell us the way."

  "How can white people get along being so mixed up?” Snake Hands wondered aloud.

  "I don't know," Dances With Wolves said.

  "Is that what makes them so dangerous?"

  "I don't know white people anymore," Dances With Wolves explained, "but I think the answer to your question is yes."

  Chapter XXXII

  A chord was struck that reverberated up and down the southern plains like the tolling of a great invisible bell, free village on the prairie failed to heed Kicking Bird's call.

  The Cheyenne under Wolf Robe, the Arapaho under Young Dog, and the Kiowa under Touch The Clouds and White Bear and hundreds of other proven warriors fired with the prospect of taking up arms against the clearest threat to their existence eagerly answered the summons.

  The war party swept north, constantly gaining strength through the addition of roving warriors and, as almost a thousand fighting men approached the hunting grounds white hunters had entered with complete indifference to all but their own ambition, they moved like a deadly wind that sent everything in its path rushing for cover. In sheer size the body of defenders far surpassed what anyone had experienced and presented a front of unity that few could have conceived.

  Owing to the necessity of obtaining food for themselves and forage for their ponies, the party did not travel en masse but in several sections. They stayed in touch through the use of runners, who reported the smallest development with an urgency that fully reflected the significance of having more warriors in the field than could be counted.

  Even Owl Prophet was caught up in the thrill of a gathering of such historic proportion. With Kicking Bird's call to arms he had sensed an instantaneous change in the atmosphere and, as warriors streamed into Ten Bears' village by the hundreds, he found himself unable to think of anything but driving the whites out of the buffalo country.

  Knowing his advice would be solicited, the prophet withdrew to his mysterious lodge while the warriors made frenzied preparations to march north. When all was ready, they converged on Owl Prophet's lodge and were amazed once again at the spirited, unknowable babble that comprised the conversation of the prophet and his owl.

  When the now familiar silhouettes fell away, the spent prophet, running with sweat, staggered from his lodge with upraised arms.

  "The Mystery has told of the skunks!" he screamed. "They are not to be harmed. If this is done, the whites will be driven out!"

  The warriors, euphoric with the promise of success, surged in around the prophet, while he, collapsing into their arms, cried out as if it were his last breath.

  "Owl Prophet will ride with you. . die with you!"

  The Comanche seer proved as good as his word, riding with Kicking Bird at the head of a large contingent of warriors from Ten Bears' village that also included Wind In His Hair and his Hard Shields.

  The one-eyed warrior had been one of the first to volunteer his services, ducking into the special lodge shortly after the crier had begun to trot through the village with Kicking Bird's proposal.

  "Wind In His Hair and all the Hard Shields will ride with you," he had declared.

  "You make my heart good," Kicking Bird had replied.

  Since then the two rivals had barely spoken. But there was no lingering trace of the divisions that separated them. All animosity lay buried deep beneath the common cause that had brought them together at the behest of a man who seemed to have changed his skin.

  From the moment they set out, Kicking Bird, resplendent in battle dress, led with the cool, unhesitating hand of a veteran general. It was he who had designed the novel line of march
that would bring the various discrete elements of his force together again at the edge of the hunting grounds. It was he who had counseled. secrecy, night rides, small fires, and evasion instead of engagement if white soldiers were encountered. It sages every few hours between himself and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa. And it was Kicking Bird himself who had declared that the war party would stay out until the country was cleared, no matter how long it took.

  Shortly after the great force rendezvoused, on a day when the plains that spread before them were spotted with the shifting shadows of the cloud world, Kicking Bird lifted a hand and a thousand fighting men halted their ponies.

  A group of four scouts were flying toward them from the north. The great party watched as the scouts grew larger; each warrior aware that the speed at which the scouts were traveling meant that they bore urgent news. Something had happened.

  A Comanche named Blue Turtle leapt from his pony and dashed up to Kicking Bird, gasping for breath.

  "On the earth ahead. . the ground is covered with dark bumps. Some are streaked with pink."

  "What are these bumps? "

  "We didn't go close enough to see them. Maybe they are dead buffalo —”

  "Many?" grunted Kicking Bird.

  Blue Turtle nodded, then turned his head away as he spoke.

  "Yes," he said, "many."

  Blue Turtle had averted his eyes because he was not certain he could trust what he had seen. He could not believe what his mind said his eyes had found on the prairie. The scale of it was too enormous, and even as he made his report to Kicking Bird, Blue Turtle still wondered if he might be hallucinating.

  An hour and a half later when the army of confederated warriors reached the place Blue Turtle had described, there was no man among them who did not feel as if he were in the throes of dementia. Most of them had seen the work of white hunters before, but this was beyond conception.

  Ahead, in a country of unbroken plain, the dead lay in uncountable numbers. As far as the human eye could see, corpses of the revered, indomitable buffalo blanketed the prairie. At first glance it seemed inconceivable that anything but the Mystery could have produced such a startling panorama of death. Yet as soon as Kicking Bird and his feathered warriors began to cross the ocean of slaughter, they knew it was the work of the people they had come to fight. Only white men killed like this.

  Birds in numbers that occasionally darkened the sun rose from the carcasses in massive clouds as the warriors passed through, their deafening shrieks obliterating the hoofbeats of a thousand ponies.

  Rising from the floor of the prairie were the yips and growls and snaps of four-leggeds as the smaller predators were evicted from one carcass by teeming clans of coyotes and wolves only to arrive at another for a few frantic seconds before being driven off again. The entire animal world, it seemed, had been driven mad by the tragedy of the buffalo.

  The stench of decaying flesh quickly became so great that many hardened warriors, men who had endured injury and deprivation, found their hands involuntarily flying toward their faces to shut out an odor that seemed to have become the air itself.

  It was only when the corpses began to thin that the body of warriors, weighed down by an invisible, incomprehensible anchor of woe, gradually slowed and stopped. The men fell out to wander the nearby prairie, trying to clear the concussive haze of what they had seen through their eyes. Some sat in numb groups of two or three, and in many of these cells no words were exchanged until the light began to fade. In others, a few low sentences were uttered but it amounted to nothing that could be called conversation.

  The majority of warriors sought out little patches of individual space to reflect on the damage inflicted upon their hearts and, in opening themselves to grief, they inadvertently created a spectacle of their own. Fires were kindled and pipes were lit and a wide array of prayers were spoken, beseeching the Mystery to relieve their misery. Everywhere men sat cross-legged, their arms outstretched toward heaven, their innermost thoughts sealed behind pursed lips. Some, for the first and last time in their lives, wobbled, then collapsed in uncontrollable sobs.

  At twilight, hundreds of tiny fires twinkled in the vast prairie night, and an hour after the lonely plain was cloaked in darkness, one sorrowful man lifted his voice and began to sing his death song. Spontaneously, others followed, and in a short time hundreds of sad voices were singing about how they had lived and how they hoped to die. The short, simple laments were repeated many times before the singers, satisfied that the Mystery had noted their pleas, lay their heads down and rested.

  Kicking Bird was no less affected than any other man, but all night his mind hummed with the responsibilities of leadership, and shortly before first light he was presiding over an extraordinary council of half a hundred warriors. Once the men were seated, Kicking Bird rose to address them. The pipe had not been passed, but no one thought of smoking.

  "We have seen what cannot be seen," Kicking Bird signed. “A monster walks our land."

  The warriors watched his words in unblinking silence.

  "I have never fought a monster. I have wondered all night if such a thing can be done. It must take the strongest men with the bravest hearts, men who are not afraid to die, to fight a monster. . men like ourselves."

  A ripple of affirmative grunts coursed through Kicking Bird's audience.

  "Is any man here afraid to die?"

  A chorus of no's rose in the dawn.

  "Is any warrior among us afraid to die?"

  Louder and more confident, the chorus was repeated as light spread over the prairie.

  "Then we must fight this monster!"

  Kicking Bird's words were what every warrior needed. They shifted restlessly on the ground, muttering and grunting their approval. A few jumped to their feet and shouted out their disdain for all enemies, regardless of size. More warriors were streaming in from the surrounding prairie, and in what seemed no time, a gigantic circle had formed around the men in council.

  "We must fight this monster with care if we are to defeat him," Kicking Bird continued. "We must fight him as he sleeps in the night."

  "Yes. . yes. . at night," the voices of his listeners rejoined.

  "The monster is of many parts. We must kill it a little at a time. We must kill it whenever, wherever we can find it. Death to the killers of our brother!"

  It would have been useless for Kicking Bird to sign more because pandemonium had overtaken the council. Every warrior was on his feet. Some had begun to dance and sing. Others were racing onto the prairie to gather their horses.

  Kicking Bird stood calmly at the center of the upheaval. He did not know what would happen now, nor did he want to think about it. But for the moment he felt good. The hearts of the men who followed him were beating again.

  Chapter XXXIII

  That same afternoon, outriders of the great party discovered the first camp of hunters. The scouts had not actually seen their bivouac, but the distant boom of the long-barreled, far-shooting buffalo guns of the whites told of its existence. Following instructions, the scouts hurried back to the main body of warriors and, shortly after their arrival, the leading men went into council.

  No one had ever seen a party of white hunters that consisted of more than ten or twelve men, and their camps never had fortifications. Their heavy, fast-firing rifles presented the most difficult problem. A warrior might not even see the man who was firing before losing his life an instant after he heard the hollow report of the big gun. A handful of such rifles were enough to deter large forces. A night attack, however, reduced this threat to practically nothing.

  As the men in the circle talked these things through, it quickly became apparent to all that Kicking Bird's strategy was wise. A few men wondered aloud at the lack of honor in killing enemies as they slept, but they were quickly reminded that the whites were not so much an enemy as a scourge, and a scourge, as everyone knew, must be eradicated by any possible means.

  Ever mindful of the niceties o
f diplomacy, Kicking Bird suggested that each tribe select fifteen warriors by lot to ride in the first wave, an approach embraced by every man in the circle. The timing of the attack was set for an hour before dawn, and as the sun dropped below the horizon, the warriors concluded their talk and returned to their followers, certain that by the time the sun returned, the prairie would be soaking up the hated blood of the buffalo-killers.

  Around midnight a force of sixty-five warriors, augmented by Kicking Bird, Wind In His Hair, Young Dog, Touch The Clouds, Wolf Robe, and White Bear, who, by virtue of standing, had been exempted from the random draw, moved to within striking distance of the hunters, camp.

  After an hour's wait, two scouts returned to report that there were eight white men in the squalid camp and that all of them, even the guard they had posted, were asleep. Two wagons were parked near the fire, but otherwise there was no visible impediment to the attack.

  A few young men whooped with anticipation but their cries were quickly stifled by the reproaches of elders mounted next to them. Only a signal from the man who had created the war party could send it into action, and Kicking Bird was sitting calmly on his pony.

  Like any good field commander who strives to leave nothing to chance when the lives of his fighters are in the balance, Kicking Bird decided to wait a few more minutes. It was possible that the scouts, maneuverings had caused a light sleeper to open his eyes, and the Comanche leader wanted to give the camp time to slip back into the deepest slumber possible.

  But even the shrewdest commander cannot anticipate all of the infinite chance deviations of life, and it was no different with Kicking Bird. That one of the hunters might have a toothache never occurred to him, much less that the man who sat up in his blanket shortly after the scouts departed had done so at the instance of a throbbing jaw and not because some sixth sense had alerted him to danger. Nor could Kicking Bird have foreseen that the pain in one man's mouth would have such devastating consequences for himself, his warriors, and those whose prayers for success they carried. Had he been able to divine any of these things, Kicking Bird might have concluded that the fate of the Comanches and all other free people on the plains had turned cruel.