“They’re good scouts.”
“They are that. If only they’d stop eating each other.”
“Surely they don’t eat each other!” Ford had seen a great deal, but he could still be horrified at times.
“My father suspects they do. On the reservation. There are more women pregnant than there are births reported. Many more.”
“They eat their babies?”
“Boiled as stew. So the rumors go. But we can’t catch them at it. And maybe it isn’t true. People will believe anything about them because they eat their enemies.”
Ford remembered the aftermath of the battle of Plum Creek and the hands and feet bubbling among the potatoes and carrots and turnip greens in the huge laundry kettle. Enough of that subject.
“Looks like rain,” said Ford.
“I hope not,” said Ross. “When these damned buckskin trousers get wet they feel like the skin of a corpse drowned three days.”
When the column reached the Red River it disintegrated as the Rangers rushed to drink and fill their canteens before their horses stirred up the bottom. Scouts had reported no Comanche for miles, so the men stripped and sat in the water. They scrubbed themselves with sand and bellowed bawdy songs. They were bronzed or carmine above the neck and below the elbows, and as white as peeled chestnuts everywhere else.
Ford sat smoking a cornhusk cigarette and waiting patiently on the bank. Placido squatted beside him. Across the back of his pony was a freshly killed deer for dinner. The scouts did most of the hunting because their bows and arrows were silent. “Got smoke, Cap’n?” asked Placido.
Ford took another cigarette from his shirt pocket and handed it to the Tonkawa. Then he lit it with his own and watched Placido from the corner of his eye. He tried to imagine the dignified old man eating a human baby. And he thought of the stories he’d heard. Of the Tonkawa’s favorite way of cooking their food, driving burning splinters into a living prisoner’s flesh and eating the half-cooked meat around them.
Best not to think about it. No white man could ever really understand how Indians felt about things, or why they did them. “They’re the uncertainest creatures in God’s creation,” as one of his men had put it. Whatever their dietary habits, the Tonks were brave allies. At times old Placido seemed almost fanatic in his efforts to track Comanche. And everywhere he went, he carried a single arrow, unlike any of his own. It was an arrow with three red lines painted around its shaft.
“Chief,” said Ford, to break the silence, although Placido seemed content to sit without talking. “Why don’t you ever hunt the turkeys that are all around?”
The Tonkawa gave it some thought, working the English out in his head.
“Hunt turkey no good. Deer, him see Injun, him say ‘Mebbe so Injun, mebbe so stump.’ Turkey, him say ‘Injun, by God!’ and him gone.” Placido flapped his bony elbows and gave a gobble of alarm that set a flock in flight far away. “We eat here, Cap’n?”
“No, we’ll cross first as usual. This time of year we might find the river six feet higher when we finish dinner.”
Twenty-four hours later, they were deep into Comanche territory and heading north toward the Canadian River. The scouts were finding many signs of their enemies. They could barely contain their excitement. The Rangers kept their weapons ready.
Naduah and Wanderer sat in front of their lodge, basking like lizards in the warm May sunshine. The flowers and grass and leaves of spring covered more than the scars on the land. They covered scars on the heart too. In the beauty of spring life became worth living again, no matter what sorrows it had brought in the past.
As though in reaction to being crowded together during the long, cold winter of 1858, the Noconi had scattered their lodges widely on the grass-covered slopes of Antelope Hills. Outside the village, narrow paths, beaten bare by the tread of unshod hooves and moccasined feet, meandered through a pastel carpet of flowers. The air was heavily scented with them. Now and then a dog or a small child would wander off a path, and only the waving grass and flowers would mark his progress. Bees kept up a steady drone, and Naduah counted eight hummingbirds. Other birds flitted in and out of the clumps of small oaks and mesquite scrub that dotted the campsite.
Streamers and feathers fluttered from the lodge poles. The big yellow sun painted on the side of Naduah’s lodge seemed to pulse with a cheerful heat of its own. The string of deer hooves hanging above them clacked gaily. Nearby, thirteen-year-old Quail, Turtle, Star Name’s twelve-year-old daughter, and a few of their friends were scraping a huge buffalo hide. Quail was a good worker. She was stocky and solemn, and her eyes really lit up only when Gathered Up was around. No one had seen Quanah or Pecan or their friends since they had all left at dawn.
The younger children raced and played, laughing, while their dogs chased after them. Long, slender, scissor-shaped travois leaned upright against the lodge walls. Gear was heaped onto raised platforms to keep it dry in case of rain. The muffled clatter of Lance’s medicine rattle and the thump of his drum could be heard. He must be curing someone. Gathered Up was sitting in his doorway, laboriously carving and fitting the pieces of a new Spanish saddle with high pommel and cantle.
In front of a neighboring lodge, Wears Out Moccasins was holding court with the older ladies of the village. She sat under her cherished sunshade, a large yellow umbrella that glowed like a miniature sun. She had traded two horses to get it from Cruelest One. He hadn’t wanted to give it up and had driven a hard bargain. The camp had echoed with their shouts. Naduah had been afraid Wears Out Moccasins would squash the tiny warrior in her excitement. But she had gotten the prize in the end. And she had lashed a tripod to hold it in place over her head.
A small flock of scruffy hens and a bedraggled rooster scratched and bustled around the women. The hens roosted in Wears Out Moccasins’ lodge if there were no bushes or trees nearby. When the camp was moved, Wears Out Moccasins tucked the hens’ eggs into the cavernous cleavage of her bosom to keep them warm.
Her rooster, the Old Buzzard she called him, had a special hatred for men and dogs. He trained the dogs young. He would launch himself at a puppy’s face. Squawking and flapping, he aimed for the eyes and tender muzzle. All the dogs went out of their way to avoid him.
Quanah was fascinated with him. He watched the rooster often from a safe distance as he methodically mounted and serviced each hen. The boy had once tried to approach him from behind a thick piece of rawhide. The rooster attacked and sank his talons deep into the leather. Quanah figured he could win a fortune if he could get the Old Buzzard away from Wears Out Moccasins and go into cockfighting with him. But there was no hurry. So far, the Old Buzzard was the only rooster in the village.
Near where Naduah and Wanderer sat, a tiny wren, oblivious to the commotion in camp, was taking a bath in a shallow puddle of dust. She flapped and fluttered, fluffing her feathers so the dust would penetrate them and discourage mites. Wanderer was cleaning the old Hall carbine he had taken from the warehouse on the gulf coast, eighteen years earlier.
He rarely used it anymore. He preferred the newer Springfield he had traded from Tafoya and his Comancheros. It was an official United States Army weapon. With his keen nose for graft, Ho-say had sniffed out the officers in New Mexico who were willing to trade guns for Texas cattle.
The old Hall wasn’t much good. The joint between the chamber and the barrel was worn and weakened. When the gun was fired, powder gases exploded next to his ear with a painful noise. But Wanderer couldn’t bear to throw a gun away. The old Colt Paterson five-shooter that he had taken from the white man six months before lay wrapped in front of him. It was his most prized possession, and he planned to clean it next.
His wound from the raid last fall had healed cleanly, leaving a shiny ridge across his hard stomach. Sore-Backed Horse had tattooed lines radiating out from it. Even before the wound had stopped itching, Wanderer was back on the raid trail. All across the frontier he and his men and others of the People left farmsteads burni
ng and corpses bloating in the sun.
Now he worked lazily and slowly, as he sat quietly in the sun, buffing the brass trigger guard to a fine sheen and wiping each piece of the firing mechanism clean with a soft piece of oiled calico. Naduah knelt behind him, brushing his hair. He liked to have her do it. Every once in a while he would close his eyes. A look would come over his face, rather like a dog who is having the base of his tail scratched by someone with a superb set of fingernails. Wanderer was thirty-nine years old, but he looked ten years younger.
“Hold still.” Naduah tugged at a tendril of his hair. He had washed it and it was still slightly damp. It reached past his waist and hung thick and loose, raven black and wavy from being in braids most of the time. As she brushed, Naduah could see the russet highlights gleaming in the sun and a few strands of silver.
Naduah was not quite three months pregnant. She had told Wanderer that morning. She knew he was proud of her. All in all, it had been a fine day. When she thought Wanderer was as relaxed as he ever would be, she brought up what was on her mind.
“There’s a rumor that your father is coming. They say he wants to camp with us and see his grandsons.”
“I heard that rumor.”
“Will you see him?”
His answer was a stony silence.
“My wandering one, you haven’t seen Iron Shirt in fifteen years,”
“If it were fifty years I still wouldn’t see him. He dishonored me as no man ever has.”
“Maybe he wants to apologize.”
“Iron Shirt? He wouldn’t know how.”
“His coming here is an apology of sorts. He’s an old man now. You’re his only son. No matter what he did, he deserves to see his grandsons before he dies.”
“Naduah, you have a way of persuading me to do what you want me to do. But not this time. I will never speak to Iron Shirt again. He is not welcome in my lodge. The worst of my enemies would be given hospitality if he asked for it. But not my father. Suvate, it is finished.”
Naduah said no more. She braided in silence. As she worked, she studied his profile, stark and chiseled. There was strength in the sharp angles of his cheekbones and nose, and gentleness in the full, sensual curves of his mouth and chin. But now his face was a beautiful mask, shutting her out from the thoughts behind it. Suddenly, the afternoon lost its delight.
Neither of them spoke to the other for the rest of the day. As it lengthened, the silence seemed to become more solid, like fragile spun silk that forms a cocoon. Naduah was afraid to speak, afraid her voice would damage the love she knew was hidden inside Wanderer’s silence.
She was relieved when Pecan came home, full of news about his day. Perhaps his chatter would distract Wanderer from his anger. But Wanderer’s answers were so curt and slow in coming that Pecan gave up talking to him.
“Pecan,” asked Naduah. “Where’s Quanah?”
“I don’t know. Here comes Gathered Up. Ask him.”
Gathered Up left his pony tethered outside his lodge and walked toward them.
“Gathered Up, have you seen Quanah?”
“No. Maybe he’s staying out tonight with his friends. He was talking about hunting for the humped elk we saw. None of the boys will believe they exist. And Sore-Backed Horse pretends he never saw them. He makes Quanah furious. At any rate, he wants to shoot or capture one.”
Naduah had to smile a little at the picture of Quanah trying to lasso a camel.
“Quail, come eat,” Naduah called. And they all filed inside.
Quanah didn’t return that night. But he wasn’t hunting camels. On Polecat, he rode alone toward the west, looking for Iron Shirt. He had heard many stories about his grandfather, and he was determined to meet him. When night fell, he found a small hunting camp of five lodges. They belonged to Quohadi from Iron Shirt’s band, and they insisted that he eat with them. They invited him to sleep there and travel the three miles to the main encampment the next morning.
He had eaten breakfast and was tying the surcingle on Polecat when the Tonkawa swooped down on them from the south. The people of the camp fled in all directions, racing for their ponies. Quanah leaped onto Polecat and spurred him eastward, back toward his father’s camp. He and his pony arrived in a lather, and. Quanah hit the ground running.
“Father.” His voice was changing and it cracked as he shouted. “They’re attacking Grandfather.”
“Iron Shirt?” Wanderer put aside the arrow he was making.
“Yes. Tonkawa, I think. And white men. Hundreds of them.”
“Tell Lance to spread the word. Then come back here immediately. You’ll lead us to them.”
Quanah ran to find the crier, and Wanderer ducked inside.
“You’re going to help him.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course. They’re not just attacking my father. They’re attacking the People. They’re Tonkawa and Texans.”
Naduah silently handed him his war clothes. She collected his weapons and ammunition while he quickly dressed and painted his face black. Within minutes he and Quanah rode out at the head of one hundred and fifty warriors. Naduah and the other women began dismantling the village to flee.
The Noconi warriors paused at the top of the tallest hill overlooking Iron Shirt’s camp. Wanderer sent a protesting Quanah back to help his mother and Quail. Then he sat and studied the situation. The valley below them seemed alive and shifting with humanity. Three hundred hastily painted warriors from Iron Shirt’s band raced back and forth outside the camp. Each man was showing off his riding skill and howling insults at the attackers. They were stalling for time, covering the retreat of their women and children.
The hills were dark with families who had packed what they could and had scattered, driving their animals in front of them. Women’s shouts could be heard fading in the distance as they called for their missing children.
When the overzealous Tonkawa had attacked the hunting camp . that morning, they had ruined the Rangers’ advantage of surprise. Ford cursed his scouts as he watched the two Comanche galloping away to warn the main band. Now his Tonkawa were as hysterical as their enemies. They screamed their hatred, waving their arms and shouting obscenities. And the Comanche warriors circled them, calling challenges.
The Texans, bearded and ragged and coated with dust, sat in the center of the Indians like the calm eye of a hurricane. They watched the swirling bodies warily as they checked their weapons and shifted their quids. When they were as ready as they ever would be, they waited for Ford to give the signal.
He took his time. The show had been going on for almost an hour when Wanderer arrived at the crest of the hill. Then Iron Shirt gave them the chance for which Ford had been waiting. While Wanderer watched from the hill, his father cantered in front of his men. His voice floated up in snatches to where the Noconi sat unnoticed. Iron Shirt was calling on his men to follow him, and to put an end to the white eyes and their cowardly vultures, the Tonkawa, once and for all.
“I am magic,” he shouted. “I am invincible. My breath blows away bullets.” He waved his lance and shield over his head, taunting the silent Texans. He wore his metal cuirass, the platelets lapped like shingles, over his hunting shirt. His huge buffalo headdress had feathers and red flannel strips fluttering from the tips of the horns. He paraded back and forth, oblivious to the shots fired at him.
“Pockmark,” Placido called his best marksman. “His iron jacket doesn’t cover his head. Shoot for that.”
Jim Pockmark took aim, one steady form in the confusion around him. He fired. There was a muffled clank when Iron Shirt fell from his pony like a sack of sand. He lay without moving. The Quohadi were stunned into silence. It was impossible. And it was just the chance Ford had been waiting for. The medicine had been broken. The Quohadi were demoralized. Ford shot a brown arc of tobacco from between his teeth, and ordered the charge.
Then everything happened at once. Ford led the Texans and Tonkawa, whooping and firing, into a force almost twice their siz
e. And with a high yodeling yell. Wanderer lunged down the hill, as though chasing his own voice. His men, ready to fight, followed close behind him. But Wanderer had something else in mind. Without slowing, and running down anything in his way, he headed for the spot where his father had fallen. In the middle of the melee Wanderer could see Iron Shirt’s war pony, and he focused on him. The horse never moved from his master and friend’s side.
It seemed to take forever to reach the body. Wanderer dodged and feinted reflexively. He kept a steady pressure on Raven’s sides, guiding him in as straight a line as possible. Once into the press it was harder to keep his bearings, but he rode toward the oak tree near where Iron Shirt had fallen. He defended himself when necessary, but he did it almost absentmindedly. The noise and stench, the acrid smell of sweat and the sweet odor of blood, were familiar to him.
He was concentrating so intently on reaching his father’s body that he didn’t notice Deep Water and Sore-Backed Horse flanking him. They deflected blows aimed for him and protected him from behind with their shields and bodies.
He arrived as Placido was standing over the old man. He intended to take off the cuirass and cut out Iron Shirt’s heart. Later, when there was time, he would eat it and devour his enemy’s medicine along with it. He looked up as Wanderer leaped from his pony. They stared at each other over the corpse. It had been twenty years since Placido and his men had killed his friend piece by piece, but Wanderer would never forget his face. Nor had Placido forgotten Wanderer’s. He knew this was the man who had killed his family and destroyed his village.
The battle had scattered as Ford used Hays’ trick of charging again and again into the Comanche. He never let them form their magic surround ring, because even if it wasn’t really magic, it was effective. Soon there was no battle, but a series of skirmishes as the Comanche fled. Deep Water and Sore-Backed Horse melted into the fray, carrying on running fights with the Rangers who chased them. It was as though the two chiefs were alone. They both stood facing each other.
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 65