The Holy Road dww-2

by Michael Blake

  When Smiles A Lot pulled up again the screams of his fellow fighters overwhelmed all sound. The voices did not abate. They rushed into his ears and spread through his body like fire. The black horse pivoted on his hind legs and charged again. This time Smiles A Lot did not conceal himself but rode into the oncoming fire from the wagons straight up. Again they leapt a wagon, tore over the ground occupied by the whites, flew over a second wagon, and sped back across the prairie until they reached the ranks from which they had come. The feathers on Smiles A Lot's head had been shot to pieces. The toe of one of his moccasins was missing. Both reins had been sliced in half. But the bodies of horse and rider were untouched by white man bullets.

  The power and magic of Smiles A Lot electrified the Comanches and Kiowas surrounding the wagon train. The young men could no longer be held in check, and even veteran warriors knew that something must be done. Smiles A Lot's charge had brought their pride to a boil; such that when the warriors talked excitedly about what course to take, it quickly became apparent they could not act without the one who was the soul of resistance.

  Riders were dispatched to the village, and, less than an hour later, overcoming his best instincts, Wind In His Hair answered their call.

  "We will ride over them," he bellowed, riding up and down the lines of warriors. "We will ride over them again and again until they are dead."

  Seeing that the Indians were attacking in full force, the wagon train's commander ordered everyone to take cover. Soldiers and civilians were instructed to go to small arms once the Indians penetrated the defenses, but one among them, a former buffalo-hunter named Arbuckle, had no intention of using a peashooter when he possessed the best rifle a man could own. He slid under a wagon and started firing at the oncoming horde, taking aim at the figure out in front, the one with the big, trailing bonnet of eagle feathers.

  Arbuckle emptied a couple of saddles but was unable to get a clear shot at the one he wanted. As the Indian charge broke overhead, Arbuckle about-faced under the wagon to fire at those who had gotten inside the circle.

  Suddenly, the mass of horses and men parted and Arbuckle sighted down his rifle at the back of his prize. He squeezed the trigger and the warrior with the bonnet jerked. A hand went to the small of his back and the Indian slumped forward. The man with the eagle feathers disappeared, and Arbuckle's disappointment at not being able to shoot him a second time was fleeting. He knew he had gotten him good with the first round.

  Chapter LVII

  Dances With Wolves and a man named He Who Does Not Listen To Them were the first to get to Wind In His Hair. Together they lifted him off his pony, and when they were clear of the wagons, Dances With Wolves pulled the mortally wounded warrior up behind him.

  "I am fighting no more!" Dances With Wolves screamed, and as he broke off the battle to carry Wind In His Hair back to the camp, most of the holdovers from Ten Bears' village followed.

  White Bear and his Kiowas wanted no more, either, and though a few pockets of young Comanche and Kiowa pestered the wagon train with sniper fire until dusk, the main force of fighters left the field without fulfilling their last, desperate hope. If the whites could kill Wind In His Hair, there was no point in fighting.

  The one-eyed warrior was still alive when they reached the temporary camp, but the bullet that had lodged in the bone of his back made it impossible for him to move his legs or even feel them.

  As he was carried to bed, Wind In His Hair heard Dances With Wolves calling for Owl Prophet.

  "No," he commanded, “I do not want to be doctored. I will not live like this. I am dying now. . let me die."

  Propped against a backrest, he lingered until moonrise. Then he closed his eyes and let his chin slump against his chest as the last trace of breath passed out of him.

  In his last hours of life the leader had made but one demand. He wanted his body secreted from the enemy, and as soon as he was dead, his remains were carried away from camp, buried in a deep hole, covered with earth, and carefully camouflaged with brush and stones.

  No ponies were killed over him and only a few personal items, hastily grabbed up by his friends, were placed in the grave with him. One Braid Trailing cut her hair and slashed herself, but she was the only one who mourned. There was no time for the others.

  Word came that yet another column of soldiers was coming, this one from the east. Some families had already started for the reservation and many others were making ready. Those who felt compelled to stay had no idea what to do next. White man soldiers whom they could not hope to fight were converging on them from all directions. If they stayed where they were, they would be annihilated. But where could they go?

  In the council convened shortly after the return of Wind In His Hair's burial party, it was decided that a single option was left. They must flee west before the soldiers could catch them, surmount the great caprock barrier, cross the trackless wilderness of the Staked Plains, dive into the Great Hole In The Earth, and hide.

  But they would have to escape the net closing around them before they could hope to hide, and, on the night Wind In His Hair passed over the stars, his heirs started west-three hundred men, women, and children pushing almost a thousand ponies, frantic to make themselves invisible.

  Chapter LVIII

  When Lawrie Tatum and Kicking Bird disembarked at a large spring wagon to the terminus of the train line, they were given a large spring wagon to carry Ten Bears overland to Fort Sill.

  At mid-morning of their journey's second day, Lawrie Tatum mentioned that he had been thinking of a suitable site for Ten Bears' interment and had concluded that a place of prominence at the post cemetery would be the best solution.

  "Not at Fort Sill," Kicking Bird replied flatly.

  "Then where?"

  "On prairie. . old way. You go Sill. Me. . Ten Bears go on prairie.”

  For a time Lawrie Tatum tried to talk his friend out of it, reminding him that they had much to accomplish on the reservation. But Kicking Bird was unmoved and the two parted, Lawrie Tatum angling north on his mule as Kicking Bird swung south, then west, to Comanche country.

  He had been told of the heavy, unremitting rains, but though the earth was still soggy, he encountered nothing but fair weather. The sun was bright, the breeze stiff, and the wagon's two mules had little difficulty navigating the trackless plain.

  The deeper Kicking Bird penetrated his homeland the more he wondered how it could be that the free ways were gone. The country looked the same as it always had-vast, ever-changing, and empty. It was hard to believe that white people were taking over the country and that their soldiers were chasing his friends.

  He hit a stream swollen by the recent rains, and instead of trying to cross, he followed it, trusting that the Mystery would lead him to the right place.

  He had camped but twice when he happened on the perfect spot, an exquisite glade of high grass and soft soil surrounded by sentinels of cottonwoods whose leaves were tumbling.

  As he stood watching the place, Kicking Bird heard a thumping in the air, and with only the strange sound as warning, he felt waves of motion suddenly crash over his head. He ducked reflexively, and a split second later saw the forms of two golden eagles sailing across the glade at low altitude. Simultaneously, they arched into an effortless, elegant climb and landed their big bodies with ease on the uppermost reaches of one of the cottonwoods.

  He could not believe they had passed so close to him, and as he watched the eagles get their bearings with quick twists of their heads, Kicking Bird understood that since his parting with Lawrie Tatum, the Mystery had been guiding his progress.

  For the rest of the afternoon he constructed a burial scaffold under the vigilant eyes of the eagles. When all was in readiness, Kicking Bird pulled apart the wooden box, lifted out the old man's corpse, and laid it on a blanket.

  Ten Bears was quite stiff, so there was little Kicking Bird could do to make him more presentable, but he gave the body a cursory inspection anyway. As his e
yes traveled to one of the old man's hands he was surprised to see the white man spectacles. They were held in the fingers and Kicking Bird's first reaction was to give the alien apparatus a tug. A second thought quickly seized him, however, and he relented. The hand and the spectacles seemed perfectly at ease. They were welded together in the same delicate way Kicking Bird had observed on so many occasions when Ten Bears was alive.

  He rolled the old man up in the blanket, hoisted him onto the scaffold, tied the body fast to its moorings, and stepped back to see if all was right. Then he tossed a few offerings of tobacco into the air and thought of leaving.

  But his body would not move. Kicking Bird stood transfixed, trying to understand what might be happening to him.

  Perhaps I am meant to stand here awhile longer, he thought.

  The breeze rose. Soon it was whistling through the burial scaffold, and as he listened to the eerie music, Kicking Bird realized the full depth of what he was saying good-bye to. He looked over his shoulder and the white man wagon was suddenly more than just a wagon. It was the life awaiting him, and, to his horror, Kicking Bird understood with crushing finality that he could never live successfully in a world of wagons. He looked again at the scaffold swaying in the wind and the pair of eagles high in the cottonwood and realized that he was saying good-bye to the country that had been his whole life.

  Feeling a rising in his stomach, he said to himself, It is a beautiful country. . the most beautiful. . and a torrent of sadness flooded in on him. It permeated his skin and swamped his heart, and with his next conscious thought Kicking Bird found himself sobbing on the ground.

  Wiping his face with his hands, he stumbled back to the wagon and climbed onto the seat. He kept his eyes down as he picked up the team's reins and didn't look up until they were turned around and headed out of the glade.

  He drove many miles that night before finally making camp.

  Chapter LIX

  The remainder of the Comanche and Kiowa hostiles moved as one great body, employing every known tactic to evade the soldiers who were chasing them. Despite being encumbered with a huge horse herd, dismantled homes, and the women, children, and elderly, they had managed to stay out of the enemy's reach for weeks. Every day the warriors risked their lives trying to distract and annoy the soldiers. They backtracked miles up swollen rivers. on dry days they built and set fires far from their true line of march. Parties large and small constantly tried to decoy the soldiers by showing themselves or harassing the enemy with sniper fire. They harnessed artificially weighted travois to their ponies and created miles of false trails.

  Audaciously, they struck Bad Hand's horse herd in daylight, and though they captured only a few animals, many broke free in the attack and scattered over the drenched prairie in every direction. They suffered few casualties, but Bad Hand pursued them so relentlessly that only by splitting themselves over and over, until they were fleeing in groups of twos and threes, did the warriors save themselves.

  On another occasion, a party led try Dances With Wolves and White Bear boldly doubled back on a group of Bad Hand's scouts and attacked them within earshot of the main column. They killed two Tonkawas and an Osage and would easily have overwhelmed the others had not Bad Hand dispatched a squad of rescuers at the first sound of firing. Dances With Wolves and Blue Turtle were the last to break off the action and escaped only because they were able to jump from one back to another of the five ponies between them.

  Actual battle against the soldiers was practically nonexistent because every warrior was consumed with trying to keep people out of harm's way. But the success they had in keeping their friends and families from being killed or captured was so miraculous that each man knew it could not be sustained without intervention from the Mystery.

  Owl Prophet had said that if they could reach the Great Hole In The Earth they might yet achieve deliverance from their tormentors. But reaching the Great Hole seemed more implausible with the close of every day. They had tried every strategy and trick but still could not shake Bad Hand and his soldiers. Even if they reached the great caprock barrier, the soldiers were too close now for them to climb over undetected. The soldiers would pursue them onto the Staked Plains and there would be nothing to keep them from following the Comanches straight into the ancient winter sanctuary.

  The tenuous stalemate which threatened the hostiles with destruction was finally broken when they were within sight of the caprock. At any other time the weather's lifting would have been greeted with relief but the sudden clearing of the skies finally forced the hostiles' hand. They were hemmed in by Bad Hand's column from the east and Bradley's from the south, and the sunshine washing over the prairie left them with but one alternative. They would have to make a run for the caprock in broad daylight, a maneuver sure to be seen by the soldiers swarming over the country in their rear.

  A desperate plan, concocted by the warriors in the predawn, started with a squad of children, including Rabbit, Snake In Hands, and Always Walking, driving the thousand ponies toward the brooding outline of caprock that vaulted skyward from the prairie floor. Close on their heels came the women and elderly dragging the essentials of the village behind them.

  Several detachments of warriors tried to create a diversion by opening fire on the waking soldier camp. The main body of warriors daringly positioned themselves between the fleeing village and the soldiers sure to pursue it.

  The distraction provided by the snipers bought them little time. White man scouts quickly spied the horse herd and the village behind it, and with only hours to make up, the hair-mouth force started in furious pursuit.

  Dances With Wolves, White Bear, Smiles A Lot, Blue Turtle, and their compatriots fought as they retreated, sometimes engaging the soldiers from cover, sometimes throwing themselves in feints against the enemy flanks.

  But as the morning wore on it became clear that the soldiers would not be stopped, and, to the dismay of the warriors, they found the ground they were backing over increasingly littered with lodge poles and cooking pots and other miscellaneous articles of camp. The women ahead were losing pace.

  Just as the curtain of total defeat lowered, the long-hoped-for intervention of the Mystery made its appearance, with the spectacular timing of a last-minute reprieve.

  The village was barely a mile ahead of the warriors when the air temperature started to plummet. Moments later, an unbroken wall of gray crested the looming caprock and swirled down the face of the great natural divide.

  Knowing they now had a chance, the warriors stiffened against the onrushing blue-coats, who were nearly upon them when the first particles of sleet began to sting their faces. Minutes later the storm slammed into them and Bad Hand had no choice but to sound recall as he watched his quarry vaporize into a maw of ice and snow so thick that he was soon unable to see beyond his horse's head.

  Chapter LX

  While his friends and relatives fought for their lives on the plains, desperation of a different kind gnawed at the hearts of Kicking Bird and his fellow leaders on the reservation.

  The passing of the ultimatum had swollen the reserve's population with anxious people utterly ignorant of how to navigate the holy road. The former free roamers knew nothing of the structure upon which the white man's culture was based and, though the wild people of the plains responded to peer pressure, to follow instructions from any type of central authority was as alien to them as celebrating a birthday.

  People weren't used to camping in one place, often adjacent to other clans or tribes, and men of standing like Kicking Bird and Touch The Clouds found themselves struggling against a constant stream of problems.

  While they tried to instill basic principles of sanitation, they also were called upon to settle disputes over pasturage of horses between feuding neighbors. When they tried to convince mothers to let their young be treated by white man doctors, they incurred the enmity of traditional medicine men. Getting people to bring their children to Lawrie Tatum's school was difficult en
ough, but keeping the pupils in class was even harder. Young men were constantly counseled against leaving the reservation to raid, but no inducements were offered to convince them to stay. Those in defiance of the ultimatum regularly slipped in and out of the reservation to visit family, creating even greater unrest. And though the sale of liquor to reservation residents was strictly forbidden, some people had already begun to blot out their misery with inebriation.

  Confusion, uncertainty, and fear were a palpable presence inside every reservation lodge. In making a journey of little more than a hundred miles, the Comanche, like the other tribes, had stepped literally from one age of humankind to another and while Kicking Bird had expected many problems, he could not have fully anticipated his own impossibly demanding role in the transition.

  His far-seeing nature isolated the former medicine man. He alone could speak the white man tongue, and he was the only one with the knowledge and influence to assure that the walk down the holy road was safe and sound.

  But Kicking Bird had not been long on the reservation before he realized that the holy road was not a point of confusion for Indian people only. The whites seemed confused too. After only a few dry, of official dealings he was forced to conclude that for nearly every white there was a different perception of the holy road, and it came to him, in a queasy, haunting recognition, that the whites did not know how to operate the system they had invented. Few of them obeyed its tenets, and it was Kicking Bird's fate to engage in a long, lonely struggle against these puzzling powers.

  Only half of the promised cows arrived on the first ration day, and instead of fat beeves, the hungry Indians saw a collection of half-dead animals of skin and bone. Kicking Bird complained immediately, but no one could tell him what had gone wrong. The cows could neither be rejected nor replaced. The people would have to make do, and in the end Kicking Bird was forced into the unenviable position of making certain that everyone got a fair share of nothing.