Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

by Comanche Moon

  "We could shoot it and see if it dies," Three Birds suggested. "If it dies it is not a witch horse." "Be quiet," Kicking Wolf said. "I don't want to shoot it. I want to steal it." "Why?" Three Birds asked. He could not quite fathom why Kicking Wolf had taken it into his head to steal the Buffalo Horse. Certainly it was a big stout horse whose theft would embarrass the Texans. But Three Birds took a practical view. If it was a witch horse, as he believed, then it could not be stolen, and if it wasn't a witch horse, then it was only another animal--an animal that would die some day, like all animals. He did not understand why Kicking Wolf wanted it so badly.

  "It is the great horse of the Texans--it is the best horse in the world," Kicking Wolf said, when he saw Three Birds looking at him quizzically.

  Once he calmed down he decided he had been too hasty in his judgment. Probably the Buffalo Horse wasn't a witch horse at all--probably it just had an exceptionally keen nose. He decided to follow the rangers another day or two, so he could watch the horse a little more closely.

  It was aggravating to him that Famous Shoes, the Kickapoo tracker, was with the Texans. Famous Shoes was bad luck, Kicking Wolf thought.

  He was a cranky man who was apt to turn up anywhere, usually just when you didn't want to see him. He enjoyed the protection of Buffalo Hump, though: otherwise some Comanche would have killed him long ago.

  The old men said that Famous Shoes could talk to animals--they believed that there had been a time when all people had been able to talk freely with animals, to exchange bits of information that might be helpful, one to another. There were even a few people who supposed that Kicking Wolf himself could talk to horses--otherwise how could he persuade them to follow him quietly out of herds that were well guarded by the whites?

  Kicking Wolf knew that was silly. He could not talk to horses, and he wasn't sure that anyone could talk to animals, anymore. But the old people insisted that some few humans still retained the power to talk with birds and beasts, and they thought Famous Shoes might be such a person.

  Kicking Wolf doubted it, but then some of the old ones were very wise; they might know more about the matter than he did. If the Kickapoo tracker could really talk to animals, then he might have spoken to the Buffalo Horse and told him Kicking Wolf meant to steal him. Whether he could talk to animals or not, Famous Shoes was an exceptional tracker. He would certainly be aware that he and Three Birds were following the Texans. But he was a curious man. He might not have taken the trouble to mention this fact to the Texans--he might only have told the Buffalo Horse, feeling that was all that was necessary.

  It was while watching the Buffalo Horse make water one evening that Kicking Wolf remembered old Queta, the grandfather of Heavy Leg, Buffalo Hump's oldest wife.

  Queta, too, had been a great horse thief; he was not very free with his secrets, but once, while drunk, he had mentioned to Kicking Wolf that the way to steal difficult horses was to approach them while they were pissing. When a horse made water it had to stretch out--it could not move quickly, once its flow started.

  Kicking Wolf had already noticed that the Buffalo Horse made water for an exceptionally long time. The big horse would stretch out, his legs spread and his belly close to the ground, and would pour out a hot yellow stream for several minutes.

  If Big Horse Scull was mounted when this happened he sometimes took a book out of his saddlebags and read it. On one occasion, while the Buffalo Horse was pissing, Scull did something very strange, something that went with the view that the Buffalo Horse was a witch horse. Scull slipped backward onto the big horse's rump, put his head on the saddle, and raised his legs. He stood on his head in the saddle while the Buffalo Horse pissed. Of course it was not unusual for men who were good riders to do feats of horsemanship--Comanche riders, particularly young riders, did them all the time. But neither Kicking Wolf nor Three Birds had ever seen a rider stand on his head while a horse was pissing.

  "I think Big Horse is crazy," Three Birds said, when he saw that. Those were his last ^ws on the subject and his only ^ws on any subject for several days. Three Birds decided he had been talking too much; he went back to his old habit of keeping his thoughts inside himself.

  Kicking Wolf decided he should wait until the Buffalo Horse was pissing before he approached him again. It would require patience, because horses did not always make water at night; they were more apt to wait and relieve themselves in the early morning.

  When he mentioned his intention to Three Birds, Three Birds merely made a gesture indicating that he was not in the mood to speak.

  Then, that very night, opportunity came. The men who were around the campfire were all singing; the Texans sang almost every night, even if it was cold. Kicking Wolf was not far from the Buffalo Horse when the big horse began to stretch out.

  As soon as the stream of piss was flowing from the horse's belly, Kicking Wolf moved, and this time the big horse did not look around. In a minute, Kicking Wolf was close to him and grasped the halter--the Buffalo Horse gave a little snort of surprise, but that was all. All the time the Buffalo Horse was pissing Kicking Wolf stroked him, as he had stroked the many horses he had stolen. When the yellow water ceased to flow Kicking Wolf pulled on the halter, and, to his relief, the big horse followed him. The great horse moved as quietly as he did, a fact that, for a moment, frightened Kicking Wolf. Maybe he was not the one playing the trick--maybe the Buffalo Horse .was a witch horse, in which case the horse might be following so quietly only in order to get him off somewhere and eat him.

  Soon, though, they were almost a mile from the ranger camp, and the Buffalo Horse had not eaten him or given him any trouble at all. It was following as meekly as a donkey--or more meekly; few donkeys were meek--then Kicking Wolf felt a great surge of pride. He had done what no other Comanche warrior could have done: he had stolen the Buffalo Horse, the greatest horse that he had ever taken, the greatest horse the Texans owned.

  He walked another mile, and then mounted the Buffalo Horse and rode slowly to where he had left Three Birds. He did not want to gallop, not yet. None of the rangers were alert enough to pick up a horse's gallop at that distance, but Famous Shoes was there, and he might put his ear to the ground and hear the gallop.

  Three Birds was in some kind of trance when Kicking Wolf rode up to him. Three Birds had their horses ready, but he himself was sitting on a blanket, praying. The man often prayed at inconvenient times. When he looked up from his prayer and saw Kicking Wolf coming on the Buffalo Horse all he said was, "Ho!" "I have stolen the Buffalo Horse," Kicking Wolf said. "You shouldn't be sitting on that dirty blanket praying. You should be making a good song about what I have done tonight. I went to the Buffalo Horse while he was making water, and I stole him. When Big Horse Scull gets up in the morning he will be so angry he will want to make a great war on us." Three Birds thought that what Kicking Wolf said was probably true. Scull would make a great war, because his horse had been stolen. He immediately stopped praying and caught his horse.

  "Let's go a long way now," he said.

  "All those Texans will be chasing us, when it gets light." "We will go a long way, but don't forget to make the song," Kicking Wolf said.

  "Genius! it's absolute genius!" Inish Scull said, when told that his great warhorse, Hector, had been stolen. "The man took Hector right out from under my nose. The other horses, now that took skill. But stealing Hector? That's genius!" It was hardly the reaction the rangers had expected. The four men on guard at the time-- Long Bill Coleman, Pea Eye Parker, Neely Dickens, and Finch Seeger--were lined up with hangdog looks on their faces. All of them expected the firing squad; after all, they had let the most important horse in Texas get stolen.

  None of them had seen or heard a thing, either.

  The big horse had been grazing peacefully the last time they had looked. They had been expecting Kicking Wolf to try for the other horses. It hadn't occurred to any of them that he might steal the big horse.

  "You should have expected it!" Call told th
em sternly, when the theft was discovered. "He might be big, but he was still a horse, and horses are what Kicking Wolf steals." Augustus McCrae, like Captain Scull, could not suppress a sneaking admiration for Kicking Wolf's daring. It was a feat so bold it had to be credited, and he told Woodrow as much.

  "I don't credit it," Call said. "It's still just a thief stealing a horse. We ought to be chasing him, instead of standing around talking about it." "We've been chasing him off and on for ten years and we ain't caught him," Gus pointed out. "The man's too fleet for us. I'd like to see you go into Buffalo Hump's camp and steal one of his horses sometime." "I don't claim to be a horse thief," Call said. "The reason we don't catch him is because we stop to sleep and he don't." Call felt a deep irritation at what had happened. The irritation was familiar; he had felt it almost every time they had gone after the Comanches. In a direct conflict they might win, if the conflict went on long enough for their superior weaponry to prevail. But few engagements with the Comanche involved direct conflict. It was chase and wait, thrust and parry--and, always, the Comanches concentrated on what they were doing while the rangers usually piddled. Their own preparations were seldom thorough, or their tactics precise--the Comanches were supposed to be primitive, yet they fought with more intelligence than the rangers were usually able to muster. It irked Call, and had always irked him. He resolved that if he ever got to be a captain he would plan better and press the enemy harder, once a battle was joined.

  Of course the force they had to deploy was not large. Captain Scull, like Buffalo Hump, preferred to mount a small, quick, mobile troop. Yet in Call's view there was always something ragtag about the ranger forces he went out with. Some of the men would always be drunk, or in love with a whore, or deep into a gambling frenzy when the time came to leave; they would be left behind while men who were barely skilled enough to manage town life would join up, wanting a grand adventure. Also, the state of Texas allotted little money for the ranger force--now that the Comanches had stopped snatching children from the outskirts of Austin and San Antonio, the legislature saw no need to be generous with the rangers.

  "They don't need us anymore, the damn politicians," Augustus said. He had become increasingly resentful of all forms of law and restraint. The result of the legislature's parsimonious attitude toward frontier defense meant that the rangers often had to set out on a pursuit indifferently mounted and poorly provisioned. Often, like the Indians they were pursuing they had to depend on hunting--or even fishing--in order to survive until they could get back.

  Now, though, Kicking Wolf had stolen the big horse, and all Captain Scull could think of to do was call him a genius.

  "What is a genius, anyway?" Augustus asked, addressing the question to the company at large.

  "I guess the Captain's a genius, you ought to ask him," Call said.

  The Captain, at the moment, was walking around with Famous Shoes, attempting to discover how the theft had been accomplished.

  "A genius is somebody with six toes or more on one foot," Long Bill declared. "That's what I was told at home." Neely Dickens, a small, reedy man prone to quick darting motions that reminded Gus of minnows, took a different view.

  "Geniuses don't have no warts," he claimed.

  "In that case I'm a genius because I am rarely troubled with warts," Augustus said.

  "I've heard that geniuses are desperate smart," Teddy Beatty said. "I met one once up in St. Louis and he could spell ^ws backwards and even say numbers backwards too." "Now, what would be the point of spelling backwards?" Augustus asked. "If you spell backwards you wouldn't have much of a ^w. I expect you was drunk when you met that fellow." Finch Seeger, the largest and slowest man in the company when it came to movement, was also the slowest when it came to thinking. Often Finch would devote a whole day to one thought--the thought that he wanted to go to a whorehouse, for example. He did not take much interest in the question of geniuses, but he had no trouble keeping an interest in food. Deets had informed the company that there was only a little bacon left, and yet they were a long way from home. The prospect of baconless travel bored into Finch's mind like a screwworm, so painfully that he was moved to make a comment.

  "Pig," he said, to everyone's surprise.

  "I wish we had us a good fat pig." "Now Finch, keep quiet," Augustus said, though the comment was the only ^w Finch Seeger had uttered in several days.

  "No one was discussing swine," Gus added.

  "No one was discussing anything," Call remarked. "Finch has as much right to talk as you have." Finch ignored the controversy his remark had ignited. He looked across the empty prairie and his mind made a picture of a fat pig. The pig was nosing around behind a chaparral bush, trying to root out a mouse, or perhaps a snake. He meant to be watchful during the day, so that if they came upon the pig he saw in his mind they could kill it promptly and replenish their bacon supply.

  "Well, that's one less horse," Long Bill commented. "I guess one of us will have to ride a pack mule, unless the Captain intends to walk." "I doubt he intends to walk, we're a far piece out," Call said, only to be confounded a few minutes later by the Captain's announcement that he intended to do just that.

  "Kicking Wolf stole Hector while Hector was pissing--it was the only time he could have approached him," Scull announced to the men.

  "Famous Shoes figured it out. Took him while he was pissing. Famous Shoes thinks he might have whispered a spell into his ear, but I doubt that." While the rangers watched he began to rake around in his saddlebags, from which he extracted his big plug of tobacco, a small book, and a box of matches wrapped in oilskin. He had a great gray coat rolled up behind his saddle, but, after a moment's thought, he left it rolled up.

  "Too heavy," he said. "I'll be needing to travel light. I'll just dig a hole at night, bury a few coals in it, and sleep on them if it gets nippy." Scull stuffed a coat pocket full of bullets, pulled his rifle out of its scabbard, and scanned the plain with a cheerful, excited look on his face, actions which puzzled Call and Gus in the extreme. Captain Scull seemed to be making preparations to strike out on foot, although they were far out on the llano and in the winter too. The Comanches knew where they were, Buffalo Hump and Slow Tree as well. What would induce the Captain to be making preparations for foot travel?

  And what was the troop to do, while he walked?

  But Scull had a cheerful grin on his bearded face.

  "Opportunity, men--it knocks but once," he said. "I think it was Papa Franklin who said that--it's in Poor Richard, I believe.

  Now, adversity and opportunity are kissing cousins, I say. My horse is missing but he's no dainty animal. He leaves a big track. I've always meant to study tracking--xs a skill I lack. Famous Shoes here is a great authority. He claims he can even track bugs. So we'll be leaving you now, gentlemen.

  Famous Shoes is going to teach me tracking, while he follows my horse." "But Captain, what about us?" Long Bill asked, unable to suppress the question.

  "Why, go home, boys, just go home," Captain Scull said. "Just go home-- no need for you to trail along while I'm having my instruction. Mr. Call and Mr.

  McCrae, I'll make you co-commanders.

  Take these fine men back to Austin and see that they are paid when you get there." The rangers looked at one another, mightily taken aback by this development. Famous Shoes had not returned to camp. He was waiting on the plain, near where the big horse had been taken.

  Captain Scull rummaged a little more in his saddlebags but found nothing more that he needed.

  "I've got to pare down to essentials, men," he said, still with his excited grin. "A knife, some tobacco, my firearms, matches--a man ought to be able to walk from Cape Cod to California with no more than that. And if he can't he deserves to die where he drops, I say." Call thought the man was mad. He was so impatient to be striking out alone, into the middle of nowhere, that he didn't even want to stop and give proper orders--he just wanted to leave.

  S--suddenly and unexpectedly--he and Augustus ha
d been thrown into a situation they had often discussed. They were in charge of a troop of rangers, if only for the course of a homeward journey. It was what they had long desired, and yet it had arrived too suddenly. It didn't seem right.

  "So, we are just to go home?" Call said, to be sure he had it right.

  "Yes, home," Captain Scull said.

  "If you encounter any rank bandits along the way, hang them. Otherwise, get on home and wait until you hear from me." We won't hear from you, you fool, Augustus thought. But he didn't say it.

  "What will we tell Mrs. Scull?" he inquired.

  "Why, nothing," Scull said. "Inez ain't your concern, she's mine. If I were you I'd just try to avoid her." "Sir, she may be worried," Call said.

  The Captain stopped rummaging in his saddlebags for a moment and turned his head, as if the notion that his wife might be worried about him was a novelty he had never before considered.

  "Why, no, Mr. Call," he said. "Inez won't be worried. She'll just be angry." He grinned once more at the troop, waved his hand, picked up his rifle, and strode off toward Famous Shoes, who fell in with him without a ^w. The two men, both short, walked away into the empty distance.