Ride the Wind

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  "Watch her flanks just below the hipbone. If the flanks move once when she inhales and twice when she exhales, that's a bad sign. A horse that does that will have trouble breathing. But she's fine. Walk her a little to cool her off. And that will be enough for today."

  "I brought some food with me," she said shyly. "Takes Down packed extra. Would you like to share it? We can eat by the river under the cotton woods." Naduah knew she had no right to take up more of his time. He had important things to do, and he had already spent hours longer with her than she expected of him. But then, she was only beginning to realize how thoroughly he attacked everything he undertook. Why was he doing this, anyway? The thought nagged her some. She was only a girl. She would never be a warrior. His quiet answer startled her.

  "All right. I know a good place to eat." He owl-hooted softly to Night, who grazed nearby. It was an inconspicuous signal, and she kept it in mind as she whistled for Smoke and Dog. As they rode toward the river Naduah told him about her new saddle, her eyes glowing. Smoke's collar jingled in time with their hoofbeats as she teased Naduah to race with her. And Dog scrambled off through the underbrush after rustles only she could hear.

  "Takes Down is letting me put my own fringe on it. It's going to be the most beautiful saddle you ever saw." She had learned that modesty wasn't admired among the People. Wanderer watched her as she rode barebacked next to him. Her long, strong legs gripped Wind's sides, and she rode with loose-hipped grace. She was a natural, unlike most white people. Of course he could detect Something Good's style in the way she sat. She had picked a good model, but she had a style of her own, too.

  She would be an excellent rider, even without his help. Did he want to spend the time necessary to see that she learned the basics and the extras too? But then to Wanderer everything was basic when it came to weapons and horses. The plains didn't forgive carelessness or incompetence or ignorance. It would take a long time to see that she learned right. There was so much to teach her. Why was he doing this? He looked at her again, at her smooth, solid body and her long, cornsilk braids, greased to keep her hair from tangling hopelessly in the constant wind. She stared back at him with her brilliant blue eyes, like bits of the sky trapped there under the white clouds of her brows. She smiled shyly, showing a glint of even white teeth in her tanned face. Then she flushed under the tan and dropped her eyes. She pretended to concentrate on her pony.

  He was doing this because he could see her place in his future. That was why. He would teach her as much as he could while he was here. When he had to go back to the Quohadi, the Antelope band on the Staked Plains, he would leave instructions for Sunrise as to what he had taught her and what she still needed to learn. Takes Down and Medicine Woman were already teaching her many things, and he would ask Something Good to help. It would be good for her too, perhaps give her something to occupy her mind.

  Naduah walked back through camp after her morning with Wanderer. Sunrise had told her to use all her senses, rather than depend on her sight alone, and she was smelling her way home. She could almost close her eyes and tell what people were doing. There was pecan and mesquite bread baking, and corn and meat roasting. No, the corn was roasting and the meat was boiling. There was steaming horse dung and tanning compound, and one of the dogs had caught a skunk. Someone was preparing to go gathering mesquite beans or grapes. She could smell the faint, fetid odor of rosita, a plant the women rubbed on themselves to keep the bugs off when they went crashing around in the bushes. And Gray Hand had let her meat sit too long again before drying it. It was beginning to spoil.

  There was the odor of cut grass for the tethered war ponies, and crushed oak leaves and cedar on the brush arbors. There was sweat of humans and animals. Horse blankets, fresh leather from the hides stacked nearby, and smoke. There were so many different kinds of smoke. She sniffed deeply, closing her eyes to help herself sort them out. Tobacco, with sumac. So the pipe was being smoked just for gossip, and not a council. Buffalo chip smoke and several different kinds of wood. Deer must be using rotten mulberry bark to smoke her new antelope hide. It would make the hide a darker yellow-brown.

  Silver Rain was boiling up a pot of dried plums. The sweet tang floated all over camp. And someone was making yellow paint. She could smell the huckleberry roots boiling with decayed oak bark. As she walked among the groups of women working and children and dogs playing, she tried not to look to left or right, depending on her nose to give her information. It was a game she enjoyed, a treasure hunt and a test. She was always trying to add new smells, and to hone her ability to distinguish them.

  One of the men must be repairing his bow and filling the air around his lodge with the sharp odor of hot glue made from boiled hoofs and hide scrapings. From the amount of glue he was using, it must be one of those compound bows made of several layers of wood or bone. And there would be a new kick ball soon, judging from the smell of charred wood. Name Giver had promised to make the girls one. The usual method was to hold an oak bole over a fire to char the lumpy areas and make them soft. Then he would scrape the bole smooth and round. Naduah could feel her sore insteps and toes and wished that Name Giver would take the time to cover the ball with mesquite gum so it would be a little softer.

  She caught the faint aroma of roasting hackberry candy and veered in its direction, knowing she would be offered some if she dropped by to pay her respects. In one hand Naduah held Wind's empty bridle, and in the other she clutched the thick, furry piece of bearskin that Wanderer had given her as a saddle pad. She hadn't even been able to tell him how happy his present made her before they were interrupted by Buffalo Piss and Pahayuca, and she had left him deep in a cloud of smoke and conversation.

  But he had told her the story of the bearskin as they sat by the river, dangling their legs in the tepid water and eating the jerky and honey she had brought. She wondered how she could ever have thought him arrogant. She shuddered now to think of the story he had told her, and tried to imagine what it must be like to face a grizzly bear alone. Wanderer had been inside the bear's grasp, held in the crushing vice of the shaggy forelegs, when he reached up and slit the animal's throat with his knife. He had been drenched in a waterfall of warm blood. One of the thick, sharp claws had left the long, curved, satiny welt under his left shoulder blade.

  Wanderer had spoken of it as calmly as though he were telling her about a rabbit hunt. And he showed her the knife, letting her hold it. It was a plain, broad trader's butcher knife about a foot long, with a flat wooden handle. It looked just like the one her real mother had used. This one was only a few years old, but it had been sharpened so many times it was much thinner than her mother's. She could barely make out "Green River" on the flat of the blade. Wanderer had done what most of the People did with their skinning knives. He had ground down the original edge and then beveled it on only one side. And he kept it razor sharp and oiled. Takes Down had one that had been worn to a sliver, and she had made a special, narrow case to hold it.

  Wanderer had only been fifteen years old when the bear attacked him. What if he hadn't had the presence of mind to have his knife in his hand and to keep his arm free when the grizzly grabbed him? What if he had died there alone, somewhere in a wild ravine on the Staked Plains, and the wolves and coyotes and ravens and vultures had picked his bones clean and dragged them off and scattered them?

  There by the warm, muddy river, in the speckled shade of the cottonwoods, with the sun hot and high over the bristly hills and the crickets singing, she had held the knife, warm from riding in its sheath at his waist. She tried to picture her handsome Wanderer dead, with ants crawling over him. What if he hadn't lived to pull her onto Night's rump and ride away with her? Would she still be at Parker's Fort with her family? No. Someone would have stolen her, probably. The People needed children. And they loved them. Perhaps it would have been Cruelest One. Except that he never took captives. But it might have been someone just as bad.

  She and Wanderer had talked about the raid on Parker's
Fort as they rode double back from the horse pasture. It had been painful, but he seemed to want to be sure she understood what had happened that day. She could still hear his voice, low and matter-of-fact, in her mind. He had turned to look back at her as he spoke, his large, black eyes searching her face in that way he had, like a wolf inspecting something he's unsure of.

  "Buffalo Piss had formed a raiding party to go where the white men make their lodges. They are very careless, and it is so easy to steal horses from them that there are often none left worth taking. We met a band of Caddo. In the past we fought them, but several years ago we made treaty talk and gave them presents. When we met them we planned to trade for corn with them. But they invited us to join their war party. They aren't the warriors we are, and they could use us. They were on a revenge raid, to pay back the white eyes for an attack on one of their villages by the white police society."

  "You mean the Ranger companies?" Naduah translated it as "roving warrior band," which was as close as she could come.

  "Yes. They attacked a village at dawn while everyone was sleeping. They killed many people and drove off the pony herd."

  "Why?" Naduah had heard the story from her father, who was one of the first Rangers. But she had heard that the attack was to recover horses that the Caddo had stolen from the settlers, and to punish the thieves.

  "Other Caddo had stolen horses to replace the ones white people had taken from them as they passed through." And so it went, with one group stealing, then another, involving people who had had nothing to do with it in the first place. "The fort was a good place to take revenge."

  "But the people there hadn't stolen from the Caddo or attacked them." They both avoided mentioning Naduah's relationship with the victims, or the fact that she was white.

  "It didn't matter. Those of the Caddo village weren't the ones who had stolen the whites' horses either. The fort was far from other white lodges. The soldiers who had been there had left. And the people who lived there were careless. The Caddo had been watching them and knew their routine. Big Bow and his Kiowa and those of us of Buffalo Piss' party went for loot and horses We weren't on a revenge raid, but the Caddo were. And when blood is shed, a man forgets why he is there. Blood is like the white man's stupid water."

  "You mean whiskey?"

  "Yes. Wih-skee. It makes him brave and foolish, and he does things he can't even remember afterward. And so it happened. Suvate, that is all."

  And so it happened. And here she was. And it had been almost four months and no one had come for her. By now she wasn't sure she cared. Deep in her own thoughts now, she walked along, staring at the buff-colored puffs of dust that rose when she put her feet down. She dodged to avoid the stringy vine that sent tendrils running through the dust and gravel. By this time next year the whole area would be covered with them. She kicked at it to uproot it. The vines grew in masses, their thorns clutching at anything that moved through them. But their red flowers, like furry little balls, filled the air with the scent of roses. She could smell it strongly from just one plant.

  "Naduah."

  "Hi, tai, hello, women friends. How are you?" She had tracked the hackberry candy to its lair, a brush arbor in front of Owl's lodge. She Laughs had finished roasting it, and it lay in a small turtle shell. She smiled one of her rare smiles, and it lit up her face. She Laughs was homely, with coarse features, but her smile was beautiful as though to make up for it. Like the ugly little vine with its delicious aroma.

  "Is Owl here?" Naduah peered toward the dark lodge opening behind them. Name Giver sat next to it working on the kick ball.

  "No. She went to gather saplings for her grandfather."

  "We heard that Wanderer was helping you with your pony."

  "Yes." Eka Na-pe, Red Foot was pretty, but Naduah was wary of her. She was vain, and she didn't seem to think about much except finding a husband. Wanderer, preferably. Perhaps Naduah disliked her because she was the one who followed him around the most, always intruding when Naduah managed to get a word in with him. Now she'd had three or four hours with him and apparently the news was all over camp already. She wasn't surprised at how fast it had spread, just that they would bother to talk about a nine-year-old girl. But then, everything Wanderer did was gossip for this crew.

  "What did you two talk about?" She Laughs sounded wistful. Could she be interested in Wanderer too? She was old. Almost thirty winters.

  "We talked about horses."

  "You were gone all morning and you only talked about horses?" The envy in Red Foot's voice gave Naduah a twinge of pleasure.

  "Yes. We talked about horses. And how he got this piece of bearskin here." She held it up. "I'll tell you about it when I have the time." And when I've rehearsed it enough, she thought as she reached out to tickle the face of Slope's new baby with the crow feather that dangled from his cradle board. Strapped into his V-shaped frame, the baby hung from a pole in the roof of the arbor and swung gently. She tweeked his small penis that stuck out through the swaddling cloth, and he spouted like a tiny spring.

  "The candy was good. She Laughs. Tell Owl I'll come by to see her later." And she left before she could be asked any more questions. Smoke and Dog trotted around her, tangling with her legs and almost tripping her. She shooed them with her arms.

  She decided to ask Wanderer if Owl and Star Name could come to the training sessions. And she would swear the girls to secrecy about what happened there. That ought to keep Red Foot in a state of agitation. She grinned at the thought. And did a little heel-toe step, and the sideways slide of the love dance.

  CHAPTER 20

  The pale reddish soil and short, patchy brown grass looked like a rumpled, mangy buffalo robe thrown across the hills. The rolling plain marched off to meet the horizon with nothing blocking its way. The sky seemed to hang lower to the earth than usual, and it was the color of ashes. From the distance came the steady roar of thousands of buffalo. It was a dull rumbling, as pervasive as the cold wind and the gray sky.

  Wanderer sat loosely on Night, and tucked the reins into his belt, leaving his hands free. The reins were twenty feet long, and they would come loose from his belt if he fell while chasing the buffalo. If he was lucky he could grab them in time for Night to pull him free of the herd.

  In the cold air of the late October dawn he wore only a breechclout, moccasins, his skinning knife, and his quiver and bow case. He rode barebacked, unwilling to burden Night with even the weight of a surcingle. He shivered a little as he made one last check of his equipment. He took the coiled sinew bowstring from under his armpit, where he kept it to protect it from the morning dampness, and strung it onto his bow. If the sinew became too wet, it stretched, and it shrank and snapped when it was too dry. He had two spare strings tucked into a small pocket on the quiver, in case this one broke.

  He slipped the bow under his thigh to hold it and shifted the quiver so that it was at his left side, where he could reach it more quickly than by groping over his shoulder. The wind chilled his back where it had been warmed by the thick fur of the quiver. He shook the quiver so all the arrows were lying in the bottom, the wider part of its tear-drop shape. With the bow gone its case drooped at the ends, out of the way of the quiver that was attached parallel to it. Both cylinders were made from the entire dense winter pelt of a huge white wolf, with the tail turned into a case for the bow. The four paws hung down at both ends of the quiver and were decorated with beadwork and tassels. White wolves were very rare among the red wolves of the plains, and their medicine was powerful.

  Wanderer pulled out seven arrows, all of them banded with the three stripes of red paint near the base of the turkey fletching. He put two of the shafts in his teeth and held five in his bow hand. All together, the quiver with its twenty hunting arrows weighed less than two pounds.

  The great semicircle of fifty men advanced slowly toward the buffalo herd grazing out of sight on the other side of the long, low ridge. The hunters had no metal, no horseshoes, no saddles, nothing to cr
eak or jingle, and the wind was blowing toward them. In the gray light of the overcast dawn they drifted silently through the ground fog that eddied around their ponies' hooves. They seemed like phantom hunters, their heads and shoulders wreathed in writhing swirls of steam from their own breath and that of their ponies.

  Out of the corner of his eye Wanderer watched Pahayuca sitting like a statue on his big red bay. The People had no need of police societies for hunts, like those of other tribes. Each man was his own master, yet he cooperated fully with the others on a hunt. It wouldn't have occurred to them to do otherwise. The tension vibrated among the men as they waited for Pahayuca's signal. They were flesh and blood springs wound tightly and held by a hair trigger. Wanderer forced himself to relax, but he still shivered slightly. Night flicked his ears once.

  As he waited, Wanderer thought of a hunt three years before and of his cousin's crushed and mutilated body. Wanderer had stared down at it after the wounded bull had finally died and been dragged off with lines tied to several horses. A buffalo hunt could be deadlier than a raid against men. It was harder to predict what buffalo would do.

  Wanderer remembered his first hunt and the huge bull he had only wounded. He had been thirteen years old and frightened for the first time in his life. Since then he had felt that expanding bubble of fear in his bowels many times, but the first time had been the worst. He would never forget the smell of the beast's breath, and the hissing noise of blood and steam venting from his mouth and nostrils. He could still see the huge bulk of the animal looming from the cloud of dust. He could see the veins in the encrusted, bloodshot eyes that seemed about to pop from the animal's head.

  His broad back, matted with burs and caked with dust, seemed yards across, and his shaggy, tangled mane brushed the ground as he bellowed and pawed. His shoulder muscles bunched and tautened and his head went down, the wicked, curving horns thrust forward. He was preparing to charge. He stood seven feet tall at the shoulder and weighed over two thousand pounds. Of course Wanderer had picked the biggest bull he could find for his first kill. Now it was debatable who was going to be killed. Wanderer knew that even if the bull died, his momentum and will to live and nervous system would keep him going several yards.