Comanche Moon ld-4

by Larry McMurtry

  "The buffalo won't come back," he said angrily.

  Kicking Wolf was startled by the anger in Buffalo Hump's voice--the old chief had seemed half asleep, his eyes staring vacantly across the prairie. But his voice, when he spoke, was the voice of the fighter, the man whose cold eyes had made even brave warriors want to run.

  "The buffalo will return," Kicking Wolf said. "They have only gone to the north for a while.

  The buffalo have always returned." "You are a fool," Buffalo Hump said.

  "The buffalo won't return, because they are dead.

  The whites have killed them. When you go north you will only find their bones." "The whites have killed many, but not all," Kicking Wolf insisted. "They have only gone to the Missouri River to live. When we have beaten the whites back they will return." But, as he was speaking, Kicking Wolf suddenly lost heart. He realized that Buffalo Hump was right, and that the ^ws he had just spoken .were the ^ws of a fool. The Comanches were not beating the whites, and they were not going to beat them. Only their own band and three or four others were still free Comanches. The bands that were free were the bands that could survive on the least, those who would eat small animals and dig roots from the earth. Already the bluecoat soldiers had come back to Texas and begun to fill up the old forts, places they had abandoned while they fought one another. Even if all the free tribes banded together there would not be enough warriors to defeat the bluecoat soldiers. With the buffalo gone so far north, the white soldiers had only to drive them farther and farther into the llano, until they starved or gave up.

  "The whites are not foolish," Buffalo Hump said. "They know that it is easier to kill a buffalo than it is to kill one of us. They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve--then they won't have to fight us. Those who don't want to starve will have to go where the whites want to put them." The two men sat in silence for a while. Some young men were racing their horses a little farther down the canyon. Kicking Wolf usually took a keen interest in such contests. He wanted to know which horses were fastest. But today he didn't care.

  He felt too sad.

  "The medicine men are deceiving the young warriors when they tell them the buffalo will return," Buffalo Hump said. "If any buffalo come back they will only be ghost buffalo. Their ghosts might return because they remember these lands. But that will not help us. We cannot eat their ghosts." Thinking about the buffalo--how many there had once been; not a one remaining on the comancher@ia --Kicking Wolf grew so heavy with sadness that he could not speak. He had never thought that such abundance could pass, yet it had. He thought that it would have been better to have fallen in battle than to have lived to see such greatness pass and go. The sadness was so deep that no more ^ws came out of his throat. He got up and walked away without another ^w.

  Buffalo Hump continued to sit, resting. He could scarcely see the horses racing on the prairie, though he could hear the drum of their hoofbeats. He was glad that Kicking Wolf had left. He did not like it anymore when people took up his time, talking foolishness about the buffalo returning. The medicine men thought that their ranting and praying could make the white buffalo hunters die, but it would surely be the other way around: the white buffalo hunters, with guns so powerful that they could shoot nearly to the horizon, would be making the medicine men die. Worm had already been killed by one of the long-shooting guns; of course old Worm had been crazy at the time.

  He had smeared himself with a potion made from weasel glands and eagle droppings, convinced that it would stop a bullet--a buffalo hunter with a good aim had proven him wrong.

  Later that day Buffalo Hump walked through the horse herd until he located his oldest horse, a thin gelding whose teeth were only stumps. That night he took his bow and arrows, his lance, and a few snares, and left the camp on the old horse. No one heard him go and no one would have carred if they had heard. Buffalo Hump thought the horse might be too old to climb the steep trail out of the canyon, but the horse was eager to go and climbed the trail as quickly as if he were a young colt again, snorting like a wild horse might snort.

  When he reached the lip of the canyon Buffalo Hump didn't stop--he rode north and west, all night, only stopping when dawn touched the sky. He wanted to ride to the empty places, the land where he was not likely to meet any of the People, or any whites either. He had left the tribe forever--he wanted to see no more humans. Most of the talk of human beings was silly talk, talk that was of less weight than a man's breath. He had taken leave of all such silliness. He wanted to go where he could only hear the wind, and whatever animals might be moving near him--the little animals, ground squirrels and mice, that lived under the grass.

  The thing that Buffalo Hump was most grateful for, as he rode into the emptiness, was the knowledge that in the years of his youth and manhood he had drawn the lifeblood of so many enemies. He had been a great killer; it was his way and the way of his people; no one in his tribe had killed so often and so well.

  The killings were good to remember, as he rode his old horse deeper into the llano, away from all the places where people came.

  "I feel like I've been around this ring once too often, Woodrow," Augustus said.

  "Don't you? The same governor we used to work for wants to send us after the same outlaw we ought to have killed way back when Inish Scull was our boss." The governor he was referring to was e. m.

  Pease, one of the few able men willing to take the provisional governorship under the terms of a harsh Reconstruction; the outlaw in question was Blue Duck, whose band of murderers was making travel hazardous from the Sabine to the Big Wichita. The army was busy trying to subdue the few remaining free Comanches; the rangers were depleted in numbers and in spirit, but they were still the only force capable of dealing with general lawlessness of a magnitude likely to be beyond the scope of local sheriffso.

  "I agree we ought to have killed him then," Call said. "But we didn't. Now will have to do." "I dislike it!" Augustus said. His face was red and his neck swelled, as it was likely to do when he was in a temper. Why the temper, Call didn't understand. Governor Pease had been meek as a mouse when he called them in and asked them to go after Blue Duck.

  "I can see you're riled but I don't know why," Call said. "Governor Pease was polite--he's always been polite." "I ain't a policeman, that's why I'm riled," Augustus said. "I don't mind hanging a fat bandit, or a skinny one either, if they're handy, but I've been a free ranger all this time and I don't like being told that all I'm good for is hanging bandits and putting drunks in jail. We ain't to fight Indians now, unless it's to save our hair. We can't chase a bandit across the Rio Grande. I feel handcuffed and I'm ready to quit." "You've been ready to quit ever since you joined up with Major Chevallie," Call said.

  He knew, though, that Gus's complaint was mainly valid. All they had been given to do lately was cool off feuding families, of which there were plenty among the land-grabbing settlers pushing into lands the Comanches were no longer able to contest. The country was changing--it wasn't the Governor's fault.

  Call meant to point out that Blue Duck was no modest bandit. He was Buffalo Hump's son, and his gang of ruffians had taken more than forty lives along the military trail that led from Fort Smith to Santa Fe. That trail, blazed by the great Captain Marcy himself, passed through the Cross Timbers and the southern plains.

  Before he could present his arguments, though, Augustus marched into a saloon--when in town, he was seldom outside the saloons. Whenever he was annoyed or bored, Augustus drank--and he was all too frequently annoyed or bored. In that, he was no exception, of course; the frontier was laced with whiskey.

  What Call could not contest was Gus's fury at the diminished status of the rangers. For years the rangers had provided what protection the frontier families had; it was hard, now, to find themselves treated as no better than local constables.

  Call, as much as Gus, wanted to be done with it, but he could not feel right about refusing a request from Governor Pease, a kind man who had fought
with the legislature many times in his earlier term to get the rangers what they needed in the way of supplies, horses, and weaponry.

  He thought that catching or killing Blue Duck was something they ought to do--once they had done it, that would be enough. They could quit their rangering then, though what they would do once they quit he didn't know. Cattle ranching was the new thing--hundreds of thousands of Texas cattle were being driven north every year now. Once, while in San Antonio, he and Gus had ridden out with Captain King to watch one of his herds pass--some four thousand cattle in all. They were being skillfully handled by experienced vaqueros, a sight that interested Call but immediately bored Gus, for the vaqueros were mainly letting the cattle graze along at their own pace.

  "Watching weeds turn brown is more interesting than this," Augustus said. "I could have stayed in the saloon and looked out the window at a donkey eating a prickly pear. It would have been just as much fun, and besides, I'd be drunk." This sally caused Captain King to laugh heartily.

  "Use your mind's eye, Captain," he said. "Think of the East, the teeming millions." "The what?" Gus asked.

  "The people, sir," Captain King said. "The millionaires and the beggars. The English, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles--the Swedes and the Jews. People in the finest New York mansions will soon be eating this beef. The cooks in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington will soon be cooking it." "Why, what a bother--y'd take cattle all that way so a bunch of foreigners can eat beef? Let them grow their own beef, I say." "But there's no room, sir--the East is mighty crowded," Captain King explained.

  "Beef is what will bring Texas back from the war. Cotton won't do it. There's too damn much cotton in the world now. But beef? That's different. All the starving Irish who have never tasted anything except the potato in their entire lives will pay for beef." "Me, I'd rather have whores," Augustus said.

  "Me, sorting dry goods, no thank you," Augustus had said, when Call once mentioned the possibility of their buying a store. He had given a similarly dismissive reply to several other ideas Call had floated. Only the notion of running a livery stable seemed to arouse his interest, if only because--z Gus envisioned the enterprise--there would be Pea Eye and Deets to do the work, whereas he would take the money to the bank and perhaps wet his whistle, against the drought, on the way back.

  The thought of owning a livery stable affected Gus much as the thought of the beef-eating millionaires affected Captain King. Every time a livery stable was mentioned, around the bunkhouse, Gus would get a light in his eye and would soon be spinning notions that made the contemplated livery stable unlike any Call, or Pea, or Deets had ever seen.

  "Of course, we wouldn't have to just rent horses," he said, one blazing day when the group of them were sitting in the shade of a big mesquite, behind the bunkhouse.

  "No, we could rent a mule or two, if we had a couple," Call allowed, only to draw from Augustus the look of scorn he reserved for the hopelessly unimaginative.

  "I wasn't talking about mules, Woodrow," he said. "A mule is just a lesser horse, and so is a donkey." "They may be lesser, but a lot of people would rather rent a mule than a horse, I imagine," Pea Eye said. "A mule won't step in a hole, and a horse will." "You're out of your depth when it comes to commerce, Pea," Gus said. "You should keep your tongue back there behind your teeth." Call was puzzled.

  "What other kind of animls would you be renting, then?" he asked, though he knew Augustus was probably just launching into one of the elaborate leg pulls he loved so much. He particularly loved them when he had the credulous Deets and Pea to confound and dumbfound.

  "Well, we could rent sheep and goats and laying hens," Augustus said, without hesitation.

  "Laying hens? Why would anybody pay to rent a hen?" Call asked.

  "It could be that a salesman had just come to town for a few days," Gus said. "He might want a nice raw egg with his coffee andof course he'd prefer it to be fresh. We could rent him a hen for a day or two so he'd have his egg." The answer had a certain logic to it--sch a thing could happen, though Call knew it never would.

  That was the devilish thing about arguing with Augustus: he could always come up with answers that made sense about schemes that would never happen.

  "How much would I have to pay if I was to rent a hen from you for a day or two, Gus?" Pea Eye asked.

  "If it was one of those nice speckled hens I expect I'd require a quarter a day," Augustus said. "If it was just one of those plain brown hens I might let you rent her for fifteen cents." "All right, but why would anyone want to rent a sheep or a goat?" Dan Connor asked. He was a small, feisty ranger who had joined the troop after Jake left.

  "Well, our same salesman might want a sheep around because the odor of sheep repels mosquitoes," Augustus said. "He might want to hitch a sheep at the foot of his bed so the skeeters wouldn't bite him too hard." That answer, which Augustus delivered with a straight face, stopped conversation for a while, as the various rangers tried to remember if they had slept free of mosquitoes while there was a sheep around. Of course, there .were no sheep in Austin, and very few anywhere in Texas, so the theory was hard to test.

  "What would a goat do, then?" Pea Eye inquired.

  "Goats eat up the trash," Deets ventured, unexpectedly. Though he always listened intently to the general conversation, he rarely contributed a remark, especially not if one of the captains was around. Alone with Pea Eye, though, Deets had plenty to say.

  "That's it, Deets--t's it," Augustus declared. "Your salesman might have some old ledgers or a few bills of lading he wants to dispose of. We'd rent him a goat for thirty cents a day and the problem would be solved." "How about pigs, then, Captain?" Dan Connor asked. "A pig has got as good an appetite as a goat. How much would a pig rent for?" At that Augustus looked stern.

  "Oh, we wouldn't be renting no pigs, couldn't afford to, Dan," he said. "It might lead to lawsuits." "Why would renting a pig lead to lawsuits?" Call asked. He had had enough of the conversation and was about to take a walk, but he thought he would hear how Augustus justified his remark about pigs and lawsuits.

  "Now the difficulty with a pig is that it's smarter than most human beings and it has a large appetite," Gus said. "A pig might even eat a customer, if the customer was drunk and not alert. Or it might at least eat one of his legs, if it was in the mood to snack. Or it could eat his coat off, or swallow the nice belt buckle his wife had given him for his birthday, which would get him in trouble at home and cause a passel of bad feelings. Even if it didn't mean a lawsuit it might cause him to tell all his friends not to rent from us, which could mean a sag in the profits." At that point Call walked off, as Gus was regaling his audience with his wildest scheme yet, which was to locate a zebra somewhere and teach it to pull a wagon, after which they could rent the zebra and the wagon together at a steep price for all manner of festivities.

  "It might work for weddings," Augustus allowed. "We could teach it to pull the buggy that the bride and groom ride in." "As I recall, you walked to your weddings," Call said. "I doubt anyone in this part of the country could afford to rent a zebra, even if we had one, which we don't." The one point the two of them agreed on was that their future, once they left the rangers, would not be spent in Austin. They had been there too long, seen too much of politics, and had arrested, for one crime or another, a relative of virtually every person in town; they had also hung, for murder or horse thievery, quite a few men who had been popular in the saloons. They had been the local law too long--it was time to move.

  Call walked on to the lots, to begin to get the horses ready for their attempt to catch Blue Duck. The boy Newt was there, as he usually was, practicing his roping on the chickens.

  Call wondered sometimes about Maggie--since Jake Spoon's departure she had not been seen in the company of a man. Augustus, who gossiped about everyone, had no gossip to dispense about Maggie Tilton. Call remembered the night he had walked all the way down the San Antonio road to the split tree, but he could not bring to mind
exactly what his upset had been about. Something had gone wrong between himself and Maggie --he had not been up her steps since she threw the cornmeal at him.

  Sometimes he missed Maggie, and would have liked to sit with her for an hour, and enjoy one of her tasty beefsteaks. Still, he knew he was better off than Augustus, who still pined so severely for Clara Allen that the mere sight of her handwriting on an envelope would send him into the saloons for a long bout of drinking. Often Gus would keep one of Clara's letters for a week before he could even work up to opening it. He never said much about the letters, though he did once remark that Clara had lost a boy--a year or two later he remarked that she had lost another boy.

  Augustus, when he chose to employ it, had a great gift for politics. He could persuade better than any governor or senator Call had ever met. Gus could easily have been elected a senator, and gone to Washington; he could have been elected governor. And yet, because he had lost the love of the one woman he really wanted, Clara Allen, Augustus had stayed a ranger. Once or twice Gus did consider running for office, but then another letter from Clara would come and he'd drink and put off reading it for a week. It seemed, to Woodrow Call, a strange way to live a life.