Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

by Comanche Moon

The two warriors were not trying to help him, particularly; they had just ridden over out of curiosity, to see what might have occurred. Even when they realized he was wounded they did not become any more helpful. Neither of them offered him a horse to ride to camp, a discourtesy that made him want to pull out his knife and stick it in both of them.

  He wanted to, but he held back, afraid of what would happen if he killed them both.

  Slipping Weasel had already told him that the old men had talked to Buffalo Hump about sending him out of the tribe. It was because of his Mexican blood, Blue Duck felt sure. Several young men in the tribe had been born of white captives, or brown captives, and the old men didn't like it. The half-breeds were sometimes driven out. The old men might tell his father that it was because of his behaviour, his fighting, that he should be sent away, but Blue Duck didn't believe it. They wanted to be rid of him because he carried his mother's blood. He often thought of leaving the tribe himself, but hadn't, because he was not ready and not equipped. He had only a poor gun, and now he had no horse. When he was ready he meant to leave of his own accord--one morning his father would just discover that he was gone. He would shame the old ones, though, by killing more whites than any of the young men who were pure blood, of the tribe.

  "Get off your horse, I need it," Blue Duck said, walking over to Slipping Weasel.

  Slipping Weasel was shocked that Blue Duck would be so rude. There was a polite way to inquire about borrowing horses, but Blue Duck had not bothered about the polite way--m and more he did not bother with the polite way, which is why many of the younger warriors did not want to go with him when he wanted to hunt or raid. He was not a great chief, like his father. He could not simply order people to give him horses. It was true that he was wounded and would probably like to ride a horse to camp, but the camp was not far away. Why would he need a horse now, when he had to walk only a little distance further?

  Besides, Slipping Weasel and Last Horse had been thinking of going on a deer hunt. If Blue Duck had been badly hurt they would have helped him without question--but he wasn't badly hurt. There was no reason they should waste time when the deer were farther down the canyon, waiting to be killed. Last Horse had seen them just at dusk --they would not have grazed far in one night, especially since they would have to paw at the sleety grass with their hooves before they could eat it.

  "I see the Buffalo Horse up there," Last Horse remarked. The whole rim of the canyon was bright now, with the sunny dawn.

  "If he had stepped on you, you would not need to borrow anybody's horse, because you would be dead," he added. "That horse has big feet." "I see him standing up there," Slipping Weasel said, looking up at the Buffalo Horse. He would have liked a closer look at the great horse--all the Comanches would have liked a closer look. But there was no way to get one without having to fight Big Horse Scull.

  "I have heard that the Buffalo Horse can fly," Last Horse said. "They say his wings are larger than the wings of many buzzards put together. If he flies down here while we are talking I am going to run away." "If he flies down here I will shoot him," Slipping Weasel said. He too had heard the rumour that the Buffalo Horse could fly. He watched the horse closely; he too meant to run if the Buffalo Horse suddenly spread his wings and flew down at them.

  Blue Duck didn't bother replying to such foolishness. If the Buffalo Horse could fly, Scull would long ago have flown above the Comanche people and killed them all. His father had once told him that there were vision women who could teach a man to fly, but no one had introduced him to such a vision woman. Buffalo Hump admitted that he himself might not be able to fly, because of the weight of his hump, but he thought that other men might be able to, if they could find the right old woman to teach them.

  Blue Duck walked on away from the two men --he decided not to bother with their horses. The two vexed him so, that he might forget and kill them if he stayed around them; then he would be driven from the camp before he was ready to go.

  When Blue Duck walked away, Slipping Weasel saw that most of his back was covered with fresh blood. The sight made him feel a little guilty. Blue Duck might have a worse wound than he and Last Horse supposed. What if he were to die before he reached camp? Men could die very suddenly, once they lost too much blood.

  One minute they might be walking and the next minute they might be dead.

  Part Mexican or not, Blue Duck .was the son of Buffalo Hump, and Buffalo Hump was their great chief. Though he didn't seem to be particularly fond of Blue Duck, there was no telling what Buffalo Hump might do if his own son dropped dead from a wound received fighting the white men. It would come out, of course, that he and Last Horse had failed to lend him a horse, although he was bleeding a lot. It would not please Buffalo Hump; there was no telling what he might do.

  With that in mind Slipping Weasel trotted after Blue Duck--the deer down the valley could wait a few minutes, before they were killed.

  "You had better take my horse," he said.

  "You have too much blood coming out of you--I don't think you should be walking." Blue Duck ignored him. He was close to the camp now. Why should he take a horse when he had already done the walking?

  Besides, now that he was close to camp and no longer had to fear that Gun In The Water or Silver Hair McCrae would slide down the canyon wall and ambush him, he was in no great hurry to get home. He would soon have to admit to his father that he had lost a horse, and his father would not be pleased.

  "Your Mongol Hun cooked his meat by horse heat," Inish Scull observed. He was comfortably seated on a large rock at the edge of the Palo Duro, studying the distant Comanche camp through his binoculars. Gus and Call had both wanted to scamper down the slope after the fleeing warrior, but Inish Scull waved them back.

  "Nope, it's too shadowy yet," he said.

  "We'll not be skating down a cliff this morning after one red killer. He might have a few friends, scattered among those rocks." "I don't think so, Captain," Call said.

  "He was alone when he came at me." "That doesn't contradict my point," the Captain said, a little sharply. Woodrow Call, though a more than competent fighting man, had a disputatious nature--not a welcome thing, in Inish Scull's command.

  "If his friends were hiding in the rocks, then they couldn't have been with him when he shot the arrow at you, now could they?" Scull said. "Human beings are rarely in two places at once, Mr.

  Call." Call didn't reply. Of course human beings couldn't be in two places at once; but the fleeing boy was well past the rocks in question, and no one had appeared to join him.

  Augustus was puzzled by the remark about horse heat, a form of heat he had never heard of; nor was he exactly clear about the Mongol Huns.

  The Captain was always talking about faraway places and peoples he had never heard of, Gurkhas and Zulus and Zouaves and the like, frequently launching into a lecture just as Augustus was possessed of a powerful urge to sleep. What he wanted to do at the moment was stretch out on a big rock and let the warm sun bake the chill out of him.

  It was Woodrow Call who liked to hear the Captain discourse on the wars of history, or weaponry, or fighting tactics of any kind.

  The Captain had even given Call a ragged old book about Napoleon; though the book had one cover off, Call carried it in his saddlebags and read in it a page or two at a time, at night by the campfire.

  "What is horse heat, Captain?" Augustus asked--he did not want to seem indifferent to Inish Scull's instruction.

  Indifference might result in Woodrow getting promoted over him, a thing he would find intolerable.

  "Horse heat?" Inish said. "Why, your Mongol would slice off his steak in the morning and stick it under his saddle blanket. Then he'd gallop along all day, with the steak between him and the horse. Your Mongol might ride for fourteen hours at a stretch. By the time he made camp the steak would be cooked enough to suit him--a little horse heat and a lot of friction would do the job." "Fourteen hours under a saddle blanket?" Augustus said. "Why, it would ju
st be horsehairs mostly, by then. I doubt I could stomach horsemeat if it had been under a saddle blanket all day." The Captain raised his binoculars--he had been looking down the canyon, where the sizable Comanche horse herd grazed.

  "Buffalo Hump and his boys are hardly shy of horseflesh, at the moment," he said. "There must be nearly a thousand horses in that herd. I wonder what would happen if we tried to spook his ponies." "We'd need to find a good trail down off this rim," Call said, but Captain Scull seemed hardly to hear him. He was imagining a grand charge.

  "These red men are in their winter camp," he said. "I expect they're lazy and well fed.

  There's buffalo meat drying everywhere. We could come down like the wolf on the fold. It would be a chase you'd never forget." Augustus was annoyed. Just when he wanted to stretch out and enjoy the sunlight, the Captain wanted to run off the Comanche horse herd, a mission that was sure to be perilous.

  "I expect they'd stop feeling lazy pretty quick, if we was to run off their horses," he said.

  Inish Scull, binoculars to his eyes, suddenly stiffened. He had his glasses fixed on a certain lodge in the Comanche camp.

  "That's him, gentlemen--I told you. That's Buffalo Hump. Bible and sword," the Captain said in an excited tone.

  Call strained his eyes, but could barely see the lodges, across the canyon. Augustus, whose vision was the talk of the rangers, saw people, but they were the size of ants. He had once owned a good brass spyglass, but had lost it in a card game several months before. He had meant to get another, but so far had been prevented by poverty from acquiring that useful tool.

  Inish Scull had not moved--his binoculars were still trained on the same spot.

  "That young brave you chased is talking to Buffalo Hump--I expect it's his son.

  The young wolf's bold, like the old wolf. We put some bullets in him, though. He's leaking considerable blood." "Not enough bullets, I guess," Call said.

  "He made it back to camp." "Yes, and the rascal had a good look at the troop," Scull said. "He knows our numbers --in fact, he reduced our numbers, the damned scamp. He has a Mexican look-- the son of a captive, I expect. Here, gentlemen, I'll share my glass. It's not every day you get to watch Buffalo Hump at breakfast." It's not every day I'd want to, Call thought, but he eagerly took the binoculars. It took him a moment to focus them, but when he did he saw the great hump man, Buffalo Hump, a figure of nightmare across the southern plains for longer than he and Augustus had been rangers.

  Call's last good look at the man had come twelve years earlier, during an encounter in the trans-Pecos. Now, there he stood. A young wife had spread a buffalo robe for him, but Buffalo Hump declined to sit. He was looking around, scanning the rims of the canyon. As Call watched, Buffalo Hump looked right at him-- or at least at the large rock where they all sat.

  "He's looking for us, Captain," Call said. "He just looked right at me." "Let me look," Augustus said. "He almost got me once, the devil. Let me look." Call handed Gus the binoculars--when Augustus trained them on Buffalo Hump, the man was still standing, his head raised, looking in their direction.

  "He's older, but he ain't dead, Woodrow," Gus said.

  When he handed the binoculars back to Captain Scull he felt his stomach quivering--an old fear unsteadied his mind, and even his hand. His first glimpse of Buffalo Hump, which had occurred in a lightning flash many years before, was the most frightening moment in all his time as a fighting man on the Texas frontier. He had only escaped the hump man that night because of darkness, and because he had run as he had never run, before or since, in his life. Even so, he bore a long scar on one hip, from where Buffalo Hump's lance had struck him.

  "Did you see, Woodrow?" he said. "He still carries a big lance, like the one he stuck in me." "Why, you're right, sir," Inish Scull said, studying Buffalo Hump through his binoculars again.

  "He does have a lance in his hand. He's devoted to the old weapons, I suppose." "Why not?" Call said. "He come near to wiping out our whole troop the first time we fought him, and he didn't have nothing but a bow and a knife and that lance." "It's practice, you see," Scull said.

  "The man's probably practiced with those weapons every day of his life since the age of four." Call had fought the Comanches as hard as any ranger, and yet, when he had looked down at them through Captain Scull's glass, saw the women scraping hides and the young men racing their ponies, he felt the same contradictory itch of admiration he had felt the first time he fought against Buffalo Hump. They were deadly, merciless killers, but they were also the last free Indians on the southern plains. When the last of them had been killed, or their freedom taken from them, their power broken, the plains around him would be a different place. It would be a safer place, of course, but a flavor would have been taken out of it--the flavor of wildness. Of course, it would be a blessing for the settlers, but the settlers weren't the whole story--not quite.

  Inish Scull had lowered his binoculars--he had stopped watching the Indians and was staring into space.

  "It's the quality of the opponent that makes soldiering a thing worth doing," he said. "It ain't the cause you fight for--the cause is only a cause. Those torturing fiends down there are the best opponents I've ever faced. I mean to kill them to the last man, if I can--but once it's done I'll miss 'em." He sighed, and stood up.

  "When we finish this fight I expect it will be time to go whip the damn Southern renegades-- there'll be some mettle tested in that conflict, let me assure you." "Renegades, sir," Call said, a good deal puzzled by the remark. "I thought the Comanches were about the last renegades." Inish Scull smiled and waved a hand.

  "I don't mean these poor savages," he said. "I mean the Southern fops who are even now threatening to secede from the Union. There'll be blood spilled from Baltimore to Galveston before that conflict's settled, I'll wager. It's the Southern boys I called "renegades"'--and they are renegades, by God. I'd like to ride south on my good horse, Hector, and kill every rebel fop between Charleston and Mobile." Captain Scull cased his binoculars and looked at the two of them with a mean grin. "Of course, all rebels ain't fops, gentlemen.

  There's mettle on both sides, plenty of it.

  That's why it will be a terrible war, when it comes." "Maybe it won't come, Captain," Augustus said, with a glance at Call. He was uneasily aware that the Captain was a Yankee, whereas he and Call were Southern. If such a war did come, the Captain and the two of them might find themselves on different sides.

  "It will come within five years," Inish Scull said confidently. He stood up, walked to the very edge of the cliff, and spat a great arc of tobacco juice into the canyon.

  "It'll be brother against brother, and father against son, when that war comes, gentlemen," he said. He turned and was about to walk to his horse when Augustus saw a movement, at the far south end of the canyon. It was just some moving dots, but there had been no dots there a few minutes earlier, when they had been looking at the Comanche horse herd.

  "Captain, look," he said. "I think there's more Indians coming." Inish Scull took out his binoculars and scanned the southern distance with some impatience.

  "Damn it, every time I make a sensible plan, something happens to thwart me," he said. "There are more Indians coming. If we tried to spook the horse herd now, we'd be heading right into them." Call looked where the others were looking but could only see a faint, wavy motion.

  "Mr. Call, go rouse the men--we better skedaddle," Scull said. "It's old Slow Tree and he's got his whole band with him.

  We're but twelve men, and Buffalo Hump knows it. Even if he's not in much of a fighting mood, some of the young men are bound to be excited by an advantage like that." Call knew that was true. It was well enough to look forward to the day when the Comanche would be a broken people, no longer dangerous--but that day was not in sight, and speculation along those lines was premature, in his view. There were now four or five hundred Comanche warriors right below them, a force strong enough to overrun any army the U.S.

  governm
ent could put in the field. Call could now see a line of Indians, moving up from the south.

  There were still the size of ants, but he knew they would sting a lot worse than ants, if it came to a fight.

  "Go, Mr. Call--g," Captain Scull said. "Wake up the nappers and get everyone mounted. We're a tempting morsel, sitting up here on the top of this hole. At least we better make ourselves a morsel in motion." When Augustus looked to the south again he saw that the lead warriors had scared up a little pocket of buffalo that had been grazing in a small side canyon. There were only four buffalo, running for their lives, with a wave of warriors in pursuit.

  "Those buffalo would have done better to stay hid," he remarked. "They'll soon be harvested now." Inish Scull seemed uninterested in the buffalo.

  "I met old Slow Tree once, at a big parley on the Trinity," he said, his binoculars still pointed south. "Quite the diplomat, he is. He'll talk and promise peace, but it's just diplomacy, Mr.

  McCrae. It won't help the next settler he encounters, out on the baldies somewhere." He paused and spat.