Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

by Comanche Moon

  Before Naduah could flee, Flower dropped the breast and ran, crazed with fear of the Texans.

  She almost ran under one of the charging horses, but the rider pulled up just in time. The wind was up--dust swirled through the camp. In the confusion, with the dust blinding them, the Texans were shooting at anyone who ran, whether woman or slave. Naduah only wanted to catch her child before one of the horses injured her. Her hope was that Peta and the other hunters would hear the shooting and come back to attack the Texans.

  Just as Naduah caught up with her little girl she turned and saw two men aiming rifles at her. They were going to shoot her down. The wind blew her clothes away from her legs. She held tightly to Flower, regretting that there was no time to hide her. If she could just hide the child well, then even if she herself were killed the men would return and find her. Flower would live.

  Naduah thought death was coming, but the first man suddenly lifted his rifle and put out his hand to keep the other Texan from shooting. The first rider jumped off his horse and grabbed Naduah, to pull her aside so that none of the Texans would ride her down or shoot her. Some of the other women had been killed, and others were fleeing with their children. Naduah tried to pull free and run, but the man who held her was strong; though she fought and scratched she could not break free.

  When the shooting stopped several of the Texans gathered around her--theirthe smell was terrible. They peered into her eyes and rubbed her skin. One even lifted her garments to stare at her legs. Naduah thought rape was coming, the rape that many women experienced when a camp was invaded. The Texans kept rubbing her skin, arguing with one another. Naduah thought they were only arguing about who would rape her first, but the men didn't rape her. Instead, they began to make plans to take her with them--when Naduah saw what they were about she began to scream and try to free herself. She could not stand the touch of a Texan: their breath smelled like the breath of animals and their eyes were cruel.

  Naduah screamed and fought; when she got a hand free she began to rake at herself, clawing at her breast to make herself bloody and ugly, so the Texans would leave her to run away with the other women. She knew Peta would come back, if she could only find a hiding place where she could wait for him.

  The Texans would not free her, though. They tied her hands and put her on a horse, but Naduah immediately rolled off and ran a few steps before the Texans caught her again. This time, when they put her on the horse, they tied her feet under the horse's belly, so she could not get free. Some of the men rode off rapidly toward the west, in the direction Peta had gone with the other hunters. Naduah hoped that Peta was too far away for the Texans to catch. There were too many Texans for Peta and the few hunters to fight.

  Other warriors had already taken the stolen horses north--it was mainly the horses that the Texans wanted.

  Soon the riders came back and the Texans began to ride south. Naduah screamed and struggled with her bonds. She wanted the Texans to leave her. Two women lay dead at the edge of the camp, shot by the Texans in the first charge.

  But Naduah was tied to the horse and could not escape. She wished she could be dead, like the women whose bodies she had seen. She thought it would be better to be dead than to be taken by the Texans, men whose breath smelled like the breath of beasts.

  "She might be the Parker girl," Goodnight said, as they rode away from the Comanche camp. The blue-eyed woman tied to the horse behind them screamed as if her life were ending. Call had his doubts about taking the woman back; even Goodnight, who led the horse she was on, seemed to have his doubts. All of them had seen what happened when captive white women were returned to white society. Grief was what happened, and the longer the captivity the less likely it was that the women could accept what they would have to face, or be accepted even by the families who had wanted them back. Most of the returned captives soon died.

  "The Parker girl was taken twenty-five years ago," Call reminded Goodnight.

  "Comanche women themselves mostly don't live that long. I doubt any white woman could survive it." "I know I couldn't survive twenty-five years in one of their camps," Augustus said.

  "If I couldn't get to a saloon now and then I'd pine away." He said it in jest, hoping to lighten the general mood, but the jest failed. The mood was grim and stayed grim. They had killed six Comanche women as they charged into the camp; they had also killed three Kickapoo captives who were only boys. It was not their practice to kill women or the young, but the men were frightened, the dust was bad, and they knew there was a band of Comanche hunters in camp or not far away. At such times fear and blood lust easily combined--it was impossible to control nervous, frightened men in such a situation; men, in particular, who had good reason to hate all Comanches. Except for the new soldiers there was scarcely a man in the troop who had not lost loved ones in the Comanche raids.

  Killing women left a bad taste in the mouth.

  But the deed was done: they had killed six. The women were dead. There was nothing to do but go home.

  They were all troubled by the woman's screaming, and by the way she ripped at her breast when she saw that they meant to take her. Despite her blue eyes and white skin, the poor woman thought she was Comanche; she wanted to stay with the people she felt and believed to be her own. Taking captive women back was not a duty any of the men could be sure of or be easy with. Of course, leaving a white woman with the Comanches would have been just as hard and left them just as uneasy.

  "She doesn't know English," Goodnight said. "She's been with them so long she's forgot it." "In that case it would be a mercy to shoot her," Call said. "She'll never be right in the head." "I don't know why you think she's the Parker girl, Charlie," Augustus said. "That girl was taken before I was even a ranger, and I can't even remember what I was before I started being a ranger." "You were a loafer," Call said, though he agreed with Gus's point. Sometimes Goodnight's opinions irritated him. The poor woman could be anybody, yet Goodnight had convinced himself that she was the long-lost Parker girl, the mother, some said, of Quanah, the young war chief of the Antelope band, a warrior few white men had ever seen.

  "I know the Parkers, that's why I think it," Goodnight said. "I've been around Parkers ever since I came to Texas, and this woman looks like Parker to me." "Even if she was born a Parker, she's a Comanche now--and she's got a Comanche child," Augustus said. "Call's right--it would be a mercy to shoot her." Goodnight didn't argue further. He saw no point; there was no clear right to be argued. The captive was a white-skinned woman with blue eyes; she had not been born a Comanche. They could neither shoot her nor leave her. He knew, as did Call and McCrae, that only sorrow awaited her in the settlements of the whites. It was a hard thing. The white families, of course, thought they wanted their captive loved ones back --they thought it right up until the moment when rangers or soldiers did actually return some poor, ragged, dirty, wild captive to them, a person who, likely as not, had not been washed, except by the rains, since the moment they had been stolen. If the captivity had lasted more than a month or two, the person the families got back was never the person they had lost. The change was too violent, the gap opened between new life and old too wide to be closed.

  Call said no more about the white woman, either.

  He knew they were saving her merely to kill her by tortures different from those the Indians practiced. He could take no pride in recovering captives, unless, by a rapid chase, the rangers were able to recover them within a few days of their capture; only those who had been freshly taken ever flourished once they were returned.

  As usual he rode homeward off the plains with a sense of incompletion. They had fought three violent skirmishes and acquitted themselves well.

  Some livestock had been recovered, though most of the stolen horses had escaped them. Several Comanche warriors had been killed, with the loss of only one ranger, Lee Hitch, who had lagged behind to pick persimmons and had strayed right into a Comanche hunting party. They shot him full of arrows, scalped him, mutila
ted him, and left; by the time his friend Stove Jones went back and found him the Comanches had cut the track of the ranger troop and fled to the open plains, joining the horse thieves in their flight. Stove Jones was incoherent with grief--in the space of an hour he had lost his oldest friend.

  "Them persimmons weren't even ripe yet, either," Stove said--he was to repeat the same bewildered comment for years, whenever the name of Lee Hitch came up. That his friend had got himself butchered over green persimmons was a fact that never ceased to haunt him.

  Call regretted the loss too. An able ranger had made a single mistake in a place where a single mistake was all it took to finish a man. It was the kind of thing that could have happened to Augustus, if whiskey bottles grew on bushes, like persimmons.

  What troubled him continually was the impossibility of protecting hundreds of miles of frontier with just a small troop of men. The government had been right to build a line of forts, but now the civil war was rapidly draining those forts of soldiers. The frontier was almost as unprotected as it had been in the forties, when he and Augustus had first taken up the gun.

  The Comanches had been in retreat, demoralized, sick, hungry--a few aggressive campaigns would have eliminated them as a threat to white settlement; but now, because of the war, progress had been checked. With so few fighting men to oppose them, the Comanches would raid again at will, picking and choosing from the little exposed ranches and farms. There had just been reports that a young chief had even ridden down the old war trail into Mexico, destroying three villages and costing the Mexicans many children.

  It left Call with such a sense of futility that he and Augustus had even begun to talk of doing something else. They rarely had even fifty men under their command at any one time.

  Though the Comanches were comparatively weak, the rangers were weaker still.

  Meanwhile, to the south and west, the banditry raged unchecked. The more prominent cattlemen of south Texas--men such as Captain King--were virtually at war with their counterparts in Mexico, forced to employ large bands of well-mounted and well-armed riflemen in order to hold their ground.

  To the east, where the war raged, the tide of battle was uncertain; no one could say whether North or South would win. Even those partisans in Austin who regarded General Lee as second only to the Almighty had muted their bragging now.

  The struggle was too desperate--no one knew what would happen.

  What Call did know was that his own men were tired. They had more ground to cover than any one group of men could reasonably be expected to cover, and, despite many promises, their mounts were still inadequate. Governors and legislators wanted the hostiles held in check and the bandits hung, but they wanted it all to be done with the fewest possible men on the cheapest possible horses. It irritated Call and infuriated Augustus.

  "If I could I'd strike a deal with old Buffalo Hump," Augustus said at one point --admittedly he was well in his cups--?I'd bring him down and turn him loose in the legislature. If he scalped about half the damn senators I have no doubt they'd vote to let us buy some good horses." "How could they vote if they were dead?" Call asked.

  "Oh, there'd soon be more legislators," Gus said. "I'd make the new ones dig the graves for the old ones. It would be a lesson to them." Meanwhile, the captive woman had not ceased or abated her shrieking. It was a cold, cloudy day, with a bitter wind. The woman's wild shrieking unnerved the men, the younger ones particularly. As Pea Eye watched, the woman tried to bite her own flesh, in order to pull her wrists free of their rawhide bonds. She bit herself so violently that blood was soon streaming down her horse's shoulders. Of course it did no good. Jake Spoon had tied the knots, and Jake was good with knots. It was Jake, of all the rangers, who seemed most disturbed by the woman's screaming.

  "I wish we could just shoot her, Pea," Jake said. "If I had known she was going to bite herself and carry on like that I would have shot her to begin with." "I wouldn't want to shoot no woman, not me," Pea Eye said. He wished the sun would come out--af violent skirmishes his head was apt to throb for hours; it was throbbing at the time. He had a notion that if the sun would just come out his head might get a little better. His horse had a hard trot, which made his head pound the worse.

  Jake Spoon, who was delicate and prone to vomits at the sight of dead people, couldn't tolerate the woman's shrieks. He plugged his ears with some cotton ticking he kept in his saddlebags for just such a purpose. Then he loped ahead, so he wouldn't have to see the blood from the woman's torn wrists dripping off her horse's shoulders.

  "What's wrong with that boy?" Goodnight asked, when he saw the tufts of cotton sticking out of Jake Spoon's ears.

  "Why, I don't know, Charlie," Augustus said. "Maybe he's just tired of listening to all this idle conversation."

  Idahi had ridden all the way from the Big Wichita to the Arkansas River, looking for Blue Duck and his band of renegades; he wanted to join the band and become a renegade himself, mainly so he could go on killing white people and stealing their guns. Idahi would kill anybody, Indian or white, if they had guns that he wanted to shoot. He didn't consider himself a harsh or a particularly bloodthirsty man--it was merely that killing people was usually the easiest way to get their guns.

  To his annoyance Idahi missed Blue Duck as he was travelling toward the Arkansas.

  Several people had told him Blue Duck was camped on the Arkansas, when in fact he was camped on a sandy bend of the Red River, well east, where the river curved into the forests.

  "Quicksand," Blue Duck informed him, when Idahi finally found his camp and asked why he was camping on the Red River. "There's bad sand along this stretch of the river. If the law tries to come at us from the south they'll bog their horses. We can shoot them or let them drown.

  Five or six laws from Texas have drowned already." "If they drown, do you get their guns?" Idahi asked. He was from the Comanche band of Paha-yuca, whom Blue Duck had known long ago, when he was still welcome among the Comanche people. But Paha-yuca had agreed to take his people onto a reservation the whites had promised him.

  Paha-yuca was old; what had made him agree to go onto the reservation was the news that the big war between the whites might soon end. The white soldiers were said to have reached an agreement to stop killing one another. At least that was the rumour, though there had been other such rumours in the last few years and they had not been accurate. But it was Paha-yuca's opinion that once the white soldiers stopped killing one another they would start killing Comanches again. The bluecoat soldiers would return to the empty forts stretching westward along the rivers. Many bluecoats would come, and this time they would come onto the llano and press the fight until there were no more free Comanches left to kill.

  Paha-yuca was not a coward, nor was he a fool. Idahi knew that he was probably right in his assessment, right when he said that the People would no longer be able to live in the old ways. If they wanted to live at all they would have to compromise and live as the whites wanted them to. Also, they would have to stop killing whites--they could no longer just kill and scalp and rob and rape whenever they came across a few whites.

  It was that injunction that caused Idahi to leave and seek out Blue Duck, the outcast, the man not welcome in the lodges of the Comanches--Blue Duck continued to kill whites wherever he met them. He also hated Kiowas because they had denied him a woman he wanted--he killed Kiowas when he could, and also Kickapoos and Wichitas.

  Idahi had known Blue Duck when the latter was still with his people; they had ridden together and practiced shooting guns. They both thought it was foolish to try and kill people or game with bows and arrows, since it was so much easier to kill them with bullets. The two had been friends, which is why Idahi decided to seek him out when Paha-yuca made his decision.

  Fortunately Blue Duck was at the camp on the Red River when Idahi rode up--the camp was a violent place, where strangers were not welcome. Everyone stopped what they were doing when they saw a horseman approaching; they all picked up thei
r guns, but Blue Duck recognized Idahi and immediately rode out to escort him into camp, a signal to all the renegades that Idahi enjoyed his protection.

  "All the people are going on reservations now," Idahi said, when Blue Duck greeted him.

  "I do not want to live that way. I thought I would come and fight with you." Blue Duck was glad to see Idahi--no other Comanches had ever come to join his band. He remembered Idahi's love of guns and immediately presented him with a fine shotgun he had taken from a traveller he killed in Arkansas. Idahi was so delighted with his present that he immediately began to shoot off the shotgun, a disturbance hardly noticed in the camp of Blue Duck, where a lot of loud activity was going on. At the edge of the Red River, where the bad sand was supposed to be, two renegades were dragging a white woman through the water. They seemed to be trying to drown her. One man was on horseback--he was dragging the woman through the mud on the end of a rope. The other man followed on foot. Now and then he would jump on the woman, who was screaming and choking in fear.

  Idahi saw to his astonishment that there was a half-grown bear in the camp, tethered by a chain to a willow tree. The bear made a lunge and caught a dog who had been unwary enough to approach it. The bear immediately killed the dog, which seemed to annoy Blue Duck. He immediately grabbed a big club and beat the bear off the corpse of the dog--Blue Duck took the dog's tail and slung the dead dog in the direction of a number of dirty women who were sitting around a big cook pot. Two half-naked prisoners, both skinny old men, lay securely tied not far from the women. Both had been severely beaten and one had had the soles of his feet sliced off, a torment the Comanches sometimes inflicted on their captives. Usually a captive who had the soles of his feet sliced off was made to run over rocks for a while, or cactus, on his bloody feet; but the old man Idahi saw looked too weak to run very far. The two prisoners stared at Idahi hopefully; perhaps they thought he might rescue them, but of course Idahi had no intention of interfering with Blue Duck's captives.