Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  And that fourth day, yesterday, Quanah had carefully selected seven scouts to find the exact location of the settlement and determine the strength of the tai-bos. The old Cheyenne chief, White Wolf, had asked to go along with the young scouts. Quanah had agreed. If the Cheyenne chiefs wanted these hide men rubbed out first, then let White Wolf see where this war would begin.

  And just this morning at dawn, a Kwahadi sentry atop a hill above the warriors’ camp called down.

  “The scouts—they return!”

  On foot Quanah had dashed anxiously to the top of the knoll. Many other warriors had followed. From the top they watched the seven scouts and the old chief circle their horses four times.

  “They have found the earth lodges!” Quanah shouted.

  The rest of the warriors yipped and sang, cheered and cried out their war songs. Some leapt into impromptu dancing, whirling, kicking up tufts of grass and puffs of dust from the baked, cracking, drought-stricken earth. Even the tall one they had captured from the buffalo soldiers three summers gone, the one with coffee-colored skin who had ridden the trail with Quanah’s Kwahadi for more than two winters now—even he with the bugle slung over his shoulder danced like a true Comanche warrior, screaming out his own war song.

  Then Quanah stopped before the smirking countenance of Isatai.

  “Is it as I told you?” asked the young shaman.

  More than once he had wanted to smash the flat of his hand into that sneer. But, again, he held himself—reminded that he needed Isatai, perhaps as much as Isatai needed him.

  Before he answered, Quanah glanced down at the warrior village below. Already there was an exciting throb to the frantic activity of those warriors and the few women who had followed their men on this war path. Finally he gazed back at Isatai’s face.

  “It is as you told it. We have found the hide hunters.”

  Quanah pushed on past the shaman, eager to be away from that smirk he wanted to claw from Isatai’s face.

  In the war village, the Kwahadi camp police had finished arranging the warriors and women into a long gauntlet by the time Quanah reached the meadow. He strode to the end of the two long lines, signaling Old Man Black Beard that he would have the honor of formally announcing the scouts’ return.

  Like the dead Kiowa chief, Satank, Old Man Black Beard preferred the idea of some facial hair. He had cultivated a tuft of coarse, black hair on his chin—like a buffalo bull.

  The seven scouts and White Wolf halted at the far end of the gauntlet. When all grew quiet, Black Beard signaled that they were to follow him down the opening between the hundreds of warriors and women. When at last the old Comanche had stopped the eight before Quanah, Black Beard turned to the party’s leader.

  “Tell us, with the honor in your heart—what did you see?”

  The young scout drew himself up. This was a great honor to announce the news. He was expected to tell the truth, without the slightest embellishment. “We circle four times, beyond the hill, Black Beard.”

  “We saw,” Quanah replied. “Four.”

  “Four earth lodges,” continued the young scout.

  “Any ponies?”

  “Some,” the young scout answered. “Spotted buffalo. Wagons too.”

  “How many tai-bos?” asked Black Beard.

  The scout held up five fingers then struck his other arm six times.

  Quanah smiled, satisfied. Three-times-ten. And they would be asleep. With their bullets useless and their guns like limp manhood unable to answer the Comanche challenge. He laughed loud, and in but a moment the hundreds were laughing with him.

  “We have had our last sleep before riding down on the tai-bos,” he told them. “Go ready your ponies. Pull your shields from their cases and string your bows. We ride to the river, where we will wait until the new sun.”

  By the time they had struck camp and were on the move to the Canadian, it was late morning, the bright, hot summer sun nearing mid-sky. They traveled slowly, scouts widely ranging on their flanks, carefully marching in a wide arc to the west as they inched their way across the broken country toward the river where the white man had raised his earth lodges. It was some time after mid-afternoon that Quanah halted them, sending word back through the many that here they were to stay until nightfall. Scouts were sent up and downstream now, to assure that they would not be seen by any white men and their surprise spoiled.

  No fires were allowed as the warriors sat clustered in small groups, eagerly performing their toilet, that private ritual of grease and earth pigment before a fragment of a mirror stolen from some settler’s soddy or wagon. Braids were loosened then re-bound, perhaps wrapped in trade cloth or ermine skins. Silver conchos traded from the Comancheros were shined and hung from scalp locks and clothing. Special protective medicine, perhaps a special stone or the dried skin of a kingfisher, was tied to a warrior’s hair. Then each man moved to his favored war pony, where a sprinkling of puffball dust or red mud from the creek bank was smeared near the animal’s nostrils to give it extra wind for the coming fight, smeared up and down each of the four long legs to give the pony strength for what would be required in the coming hours.

  As he stroked his hands up and down the graceful limbs of the big gray horse he had stolen from the white settlement last winter, Quanah thought of how he stroked Tonarcy’s strong, thin limbs. Throwing the buffalo robes back so he could stroke them winter or summer, how he loved the feel of her legs. Supple and strong and oh, so willing to open and accept him. As quickly as they opened, they always wrapped back around Quanah to hold him firmly locked in her moistness.

  The warm breeze jostled the single golden eagle feather he had tied at the braid. It brushed his shoulder, reminding Quanah of the way Tonarcy brushed her fingers over him, kneading his muscles with musk oil from the glands of the big rats that lived in the marshes. In the red firelight of their lodge, their children asleep, the woman would then roll him over on his back, kissing his manhood into readiness, murmuring to it softly with her hot lips before she would settle down atop him and continue rubbing the oil onto his flesh—this time across the taut muscles of his chest as she moved up and down, up and down upon him.

  Quanah found it impossible not to grow excited, thinking how her breasts felt in his hands, the nipples rigid as he thrust himself up into her.

  He tried to shake off this heated remembrance of Tonarcy and think only of the coming fight. Gazing into the sky to the west, he watched the clouds gathering along the horizon, below where the sun would soon settle. They were the color of flint, streaked with the gray of his own eyes. Quanah hoped there would be no rain this night, that the clouds would dissipate from the sky so that his warriors could see by the light of the full moon that had already risen far to the east. It was a good omen.

  All about him the warriors prepared. Some smoked their small pipes, talking in low, excited voices. Others sat in silence, like he, remembering those back in the villages. Villages either on the reservation or those out on the mapless expanse of the Staked Plain.

  With the coming of the sun he would lead his own Kwahadi warriors into battle. Not only they, but also Kotsoteka and Yamparika Comanche, as well as Kiowa and Cheyenne and a handful of brave Arapaho.

  Although they had followed him here, Quanah knew that when the battle was enjoined, the warriors would listen only to their own war chiefs. Such independence in making war did not matter now. The only thing of consequence was that they were here, a handful of miles from the white hide hunters, and in a matter of hours the tai-bos would all be dead. Some things were just not important when thrown up beside this matter of death.

  “Put your saddles in the trees,” he had told them when they arrived at this spot hours ago

  Now the branches above them were heavy with saddles and other property the warriors and women did not want animals dragging off before the humans returned to reclaim it. Coyotes and badgers, even skunks, had a way of doing that—dragging off a man’s things, hiding them so that a man
never would find them again.

  For the first time since they had arrived at this place, he saw Isatai. The young shaman was strutting through camp on foot, leading his pony. Completely naked except for a special pair of yellow-painted moccasins, Isatai had carefully covered every inch of his body with ocher earth paint. His pony was smeared a dull yellow as well. In his hair the medicine man had tied sprigs of gray sage for their power to protect and heal. In his free hand he carried a long lance, its shaft adorned with scalps of many colors.

  Isatai strutted boldly, flaunting his bare flesh and uncovered manhood, without invitation telling those who stared too long that he needed nothing to stop the white man’s bullets—not even the thinnest of antelope clothing.

  At least his manhood will stay cool, Quanah said to himself and turned away with a smile.

  Even if Isatai’s medicine did not prove strong enough to keep the white man asleep as the warriors rode down on the earth lodges, even if Isatai’s medicine were not strong enough to make the tai-bos’ guns useless, even if the bullets did erupt from those weapons … Quanah was nonetheless convinced they would quickly overwhelm the two dozen white men at the settlement. In his mind he quickly scratched at the calculation, something he had never been good at … and still came up with more than twenty warriors for every one of the tai-bo hunters in that evil place.

  Dark came at last, and the biting bugs came out with the cooling of the air. Quietly he passed along the word to move out once more. They were to lead their ponies on foot from this point on until mounting at the moment of attack.

  “Riding ponies, the white man will hear,” he explained to them. “Walking, the tai-bo cannot hear.”

  They crossed the Canadian, then moved east once more. At the southern end of the valley Quanah halted them near the red hill that rose beside the little creek.

  “Sleep now,” he told the war chiefs. “Have your warriors sleep with their reins in their hands. We will wake them when it is time to mount for the attack.”

  He did not sleep, his mind so full of many things as the stars whirled overhead. Thoughts of the little ones and old ones in the villages far out on the prairie—how they hungered for the meat that should have filled their bellies, but instead lay rotting on the ground, beneath a sky blackened with buzzards, stripped of the hide and tongue before the white man moved on.

  Too, he thought of those who in despair had limped back to live on the white man’s reservations, with hopes of having enough to eat, a warm blanket to replace a warmer buffalo robe. But there was far too little to eat, and what the white man gave them was rancid and full of bugs. Too often the warm blankets did not arrive for the winter, and when they did, the blankets were thin and full of holes.

  No, long ago Quanah had decided he would die here on the free plains. Never to die cooped up on the white man’s reservation. Some might take their last breath in their blankets, perhaps like old Paracoom was dying at this very moment. But Quanah wanted to die like his father, the Wanderer, had died—like a warrior.

  With horse thieves and whiskey traders sucking the very life out of the tribes—Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne all—the reservations had become prisons where the white men could prey at will upon the Indian. Sucking the last bit of life from the Indian just the way the drying prairie winds drew the last bit of moisture from the great stalks of buffalo grass in the autumn of every year.

  The same grass that fed his brother, the buffalo.

  “May I sit with you, Quanah?”

  He looked up in the dark, beneath the travel of the full moon, recognizing the face of his young friend, Timbo. “Sit beside me.” He patted the ground beside him, then offered some of the cooked buffalo meat from the small herd they had bumped into just that morning on their march west of the white man’s earth-lodge settlement.

  “My heart is glad I did not let you talk me out of coming,” Timbo said quietly after a few moments of silence.

  Quanah had tried to convince the young warrior to stay behind and protect the village. “This will be your first time under fire, Timbo. It seems nothing I said was enough to convince you to stay behind. Not even what the owl told me.”

  “Told you that my medicine was not right?”

  “Not yet strong enough, Timbo.” How Quanah wished the young man, related distantly to his wife Tonarcy, had stayed behind with some of the rest to protect the Kwahadi village.

  “Is your medicine not strong enough for us both?” Timbo asked, then before Quanah could answer, he continued. “I know that it will be, Quanah. There is powerful blood in your veins—enough medicine to protect us both come this fight.”

  His eyes misted in the moonlight as he looked upon the brave youth. Praying that his medicine would be strong enough for two, now that the owl had spoken to him of death. “Wait here … with me, Timbo. Until it is time to ride.”

  The great patterns of light overhead slowly whirled until He Bear and Tabananica returned from the meadow where the white men had their earth lodges.

  “It is time,” He Bear told Quanah.

  “Tell the others to mount,” Quanah said, rising with Timbo. “At the edge of the meadow beside the red hill, we will make a line.” As the other two older warriors left to inform the rest, Quanah turned to Timbo. “You ride beside me.”

  Timbo beamed proudly in the graying light of predawn seeping into the summer sky. “To ride near your strength is a great honor!”

  Quickly the Kwahadi war chief rode the big gray horse among the hundreds, searching out the other war chiefs, reminding them to restrain their hot-blooded young men in a solid, unbroken line until the order was given to charge.

  “We go slow at first, walk,” he told them. “When we see the earth lodges clearly—then I will order the charge.”

  Without disagreement, Quanah led the great gathering along the cottonwoods and brush, pointing the big gray’s nose to the north. In the moonlight, they passed the ruins of Hook Nose’s old trading post. Its mud walls now stood only four to five feet tall in places, slowly weeping from many winters of rain and summers of scouring wind. The dust of this land itself silvered his sweaty body in the milky moonlight.

  Quanah prayed his people had the strength to prevent such a crumbling of their culture. As warm as the morning was, nonetheless he shivered as he looked over the empty ruins, windows and doorways like the empty eye sockets of a buffalo skull. He tore his eyes away and looked north across the meadow.

  In the murky, graying light, he could barely make out the dark shadows of the four buildings they were told the white man would hide within. And off to the side of the closest, he saw a fifth, but much, much smaller than the others. Without speaking, he halted the hundreds, spreading one arm to the right and the other to the left. The warriors obeyed, forming a long, compact phalanx, ready for the charge.

  Off to their right the two great hills limned blue-gray before the coming of the sun. He would not wait for the orange streaking of the sky. Still, in a matter of heartbeats there would be enough light to make their swift ride across the meadow, closing this last gulf between them and their victims—and club the white men in their sleep.

  Among the cottonwood and chinaberry lining the creek, a bird called. Another answered. Then a trio of them took to the wing, swept overhead, and suddenly darted back to the north, having discovered the long line of feathered horsemen waiting in the darkness atop their snorting ponies.

  It was a good sign, these birds.

  The dawn fell silent again among the trees and brush, clear across the meadow to the white man’s earth lodges. As much as he strained his eyes, Quanah could not see much across that distance. Then as he watched, the air seemed to take on a gauzy texture. Eventually he could make out the wisps of smoke above the white man’s lodges, like ghostly entrails, remnants of last night’s untended fires.

  As he watched, he saw a dark figure emerge from the side of a wagon and stand motionless for a few moments while the man relieved himself on the ground. At the
corner of a far building, Quanah watched another shadowy figure ambling toward the meadow. Between that white man and his warriors grazed the tai-bo horses and mules.

  He sniffed the air, filled with the ghosts of old fires as it was. Good, for the breeze was in his face at this time of day, with the cool air rushing down the valley toward the Canadian. The white man’s horses had not smelled them.

  That solitary tai-bo kept moving toward the horses.

  Then a third far-off figure stood, and in the growing light the man hacked and coughed and spit on the ground.

  Soon his blood would moisten that very spot, Quanah vowed.

  “It is time!” he hollered, waving his rifle.

  From the throats of seven hundred burst a war cry that rattled the valley and sent a thousand birds winging from the trees. Hooves hammered the dry, drought-seared earth as the line erupted into uneven motion, the old men trying their best to hold the young men back in a concerted charge.

  In a matter of heartbeats they were among the white man’s horses, scattering the frightened animals.

  The yelling was deafening. The pounding of the hooves like a hailstorm on a buffalo-hide lodge.

  Quanah felt the wind whip the tears from his eyes as he peered over at Timbo beside him. The young man smiled, throwing his head back to scream at the lightening sky.

  Around them a few of the riders began to go down, their ponies stumbling in prairie dog holes. Horses screeching in fear and the pain of broken legs, riders crying out in tumult as others vaulted over them in the gray light. Dust was everywhere, kicked up by hooves, stived up by the tumbling beasts and falling men.

  And still they rode on, gathering speed. Ever faster. Ever, ever faster.

  It was good to see the white men running now. Turning away and running.

  Death was coming.

  Death was coming on the summer wind.