Ride the Wind

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  "I have no ponies to pay for you. And many men will offer your father a handsome price."

  "I don't care about the other men. I'm going with you."

  "I don't even know where I'm going."

  "It doesn't matter." Small Hand rode in silence for a few minutes before she spoke again. "Will you go back to the whites?"

  "No!" He realized how bitter his voice was, and softened it. "No, I can't go back there." How could he tell her? He remembered one of his uncle's neighbors bragging that he had the answer to the Indian problem. How could Cub explain to Small Hand the satisfied look on the man's face when he told of how he had inoculated a captured Comanche with smallpox and turned him loose to spread the disease. Cub had heard the story repeated in his Uncle James' house, among righteous, God-fearing Christians. And no one had condemned the man. No. Cub knew he couldn't go back there. He had seen what the white people's ways had done to Old Owl. Besides, he thought pragmatically, if he went back, the Texans would hang him for a horse thief.

  "I'll probably look for my sister," he said at last.

  "Naduah? With the Noconi?"

  Cub nodded.

  "Small Hand."

  "Yes, Echo Of A Wolfs Howl?"

  "I'm glad you came with me."

  Small Hand smiled shyly at him. Her eyes brimmed with love as well as grief.

  Cub and Small Hand roamed the Comancheria, tracking down rumors and sightings of the elusive Noconi. At first the two of them had stayed with the bands they encountered. But almost every village they entered resounded with the wails of mourning, as cholera cut its way through Texas. Families, the basic unit of the People's society, were broken and destroyed. Terror and despair were on every face they saw. Finally, sobbing, Small Hand refused to sleep in another camp.

  From then on Cub rode into a village alone while Small Hand waited outside. As warriors gathered, their weapons ready, he held his hand up in the sign of peace.

  "Hi, haitsi, hello, friends." he called. Then he went to find the leaders of the band while the children swarmed after him. They were enchanted by his hair, bleached almost white in the sun. He smoked with the council in each camp and asked about Wanderer and the yellow hair, his wife. Then he rode away again.

  Often a party of men and boys from the village accompanied Cub and Small Hand a few miles on their journey. They gave them gifts of food, and watched as the two grew smaller in the distance, leading their single pack pony after them. They had no lodge, no spare clothes, no cooking gear or personal possessions other than what Small Hand had hastily thrown into her saddle bags before she followed Cub from Old Owl's village.

  At night they sought shelter in caves, or under brush lean-tos in protected breaks and ravines. For their meals. Small Hand scooped out a depression in the ground and laid a buffalo hide in it. She poured water into the hide and heated it with rocks taken from the fire. When the water reached the boiling point, she cooked a stew of whatever they had killed that day. When darkness fell, they slept in each other's arms.

  One night, Cub felt her shake him gently awake, calling him by her pet name.

  "Sun hair, listen."

  Cub pushed to the surface of consciousness and lay still. He breathed shallowly, listening.

  "Do you hear it?"

  "You know you have better hearing than I do, small one. What is it?"

  "I don't know. It sounded like an animal in distress."

  "Maybe a rabbit caught by an owl."

  "No. There it is again. Can't you hear it?"

  Cub listened intently. Finally he heard the faintest of sounds, eerie and broken, carried on the light night wind. He pushed the robe back and searched for his moccasins. He shook them automatically to make sure they were empty, then slipped them on. Small Hand did the same. In silence they saddled their ponies, leaving the camp and the pack animal. Using the pale light of the moon, they picked their way over the sweeping hills. The sound grew as they approached it.

  "What is it, sun hair?"

  "Fiddles."

  Small Hand looked puzzled.

  "A fiddle is a musical instrument that white people play and dance to. Like drums or flutes or rattles."

  "I don't like it. It sounds like dead souls in agony."

  But Cub's feet had begun jerking in time with the music, in spite of himself, and to his pony's confusion. They dismounted just below the crest of the last hill and crawled to the top. On their bellies, they looked down at the wagon train below them. The wagons were in a circle, the tongue of one under the rear wheels of the next and laced with heavy chains. In the center of the ring was a huge bonfire, and the gold-rushers had gathered to dance around it. Over to one side stood two fiddlers, one of them a large man with a flowing red beard.

  Noah Smithwick wasn't heading for the gold fields, but he was guiding the train part of the way. His fiddle was held against his barrel chest, and his arm was flying. The broken strands of his horsehair bow flailed around his head. He had laid boards of raw lumber down and was standing on them so the pounding of his hobnailed boot could be heard. It provided a thumping base line.

  Another man played a cigar-box banjo with Gem razors cut down for frets. What it lacked in size it made up for in volume. The rhythm section was an iron pot and ladle and two big tin spoons. The spoons were held back to back and beaten in a clattering, jumpy cadence against a thigh. Someone in the group was Irish.

  There were no women, so the men formed up and danced with each other. Those who took the ladies' part tied rags around the waists or arms. And between each dance there was a rush for the whiskey barrel.

  Noah broke into "Arkansas Traveler" and the other fiddler joined him. They both stopped between choruses to tell outrageous stories, and the men howled with laughter. No one could tell a joke better or with a straighter face than Noah Smithwick. Cub and Small Hand lay watching them for an hour, mesmerized by the beat that seeped through them, permeated them with a fleeting sense of peace.

  The sound of the fiddles conjured up strange longings in Cub. He remembered sneaking from his uncle's house at night. He would walk five miles through the dark forest to where he knew a dance was being held. He couldn't participate. Word would certainly have gotten back to the Parker house and his uncle would have whipped him soundly. So he stood, alone in the dark, looking into the lighted windows, tapping his feet and wishing he could join in the fun.

  For Cub the music was more than a reminder of his isolation among the white people. Even in their gaiety, the dissonant notes were lonely and primitive. They called up something from deep within him, something fierce and martial. They were the skirl and drone of the bagpipes they imitated, calling soldiers to die in the moors and mountains of a far-off land. There was joy and death and love and war in them. And for some reason that Cub himself couldn't know, they brought tears to his eyes.

  Finally, he noticed Small Hand shivering in the cold night air. He signaled to her, and they backed off the crest of the ridge. He put an arm around her shoulders and cut a little jig as they walked. Then, catching her by surprise, he whirled her around. He gathered her in his arms and swung her in time to the music, until her feet lifted off the ground and spun freely. She laughed silently with him, and they walked, holding hands, to where their ponies were tethered.

  The next morning, they went back to the site where the wagon train had been. It was deserted, but not empty. The grass was trampled by the animals and by the men's dancing. There was a litter of cans and paper sacks blowing across the prairie. There were broken axles and scraps of metal. There were bits of discarded clothing, socks that were more hole than yarn, the mule-chewed fragments of a straw hat. Small Hand dismounted and picked up an empty bottle in the shape of a cabin. Imprinted on it were the words "Log Cabin Whiskey" and the name of its manufacturer, E. G. Booz. She held it up for Cub to see.

  "We can carry water in this."

  Cub whirled around.

  "Drop it!" he shouted.

  He startled her and she let the b
ottle slip from her fingers. It shattered against a rock at her feet.

  "I'm sorry, small one. But don't pick up anything here. Don't even touch anything."

  "There might be something we can use."

  "The white men carry disease. They leave it lying along the path with their trash. Look." He pointed east, back the way the wagon train and hundreds like it had come. Even after it had disappeared among the hills, the trail could still be followed. It was marked by a line of vultures that circled over it, growing smaller and smaller in the distant sky. The trail was littered with abandoned wagons, broken wheels, garbage, and the putrifying carcasses of dead mules and horses, oxen and buffalo and deer. Cub and Small Hand crossed the dusty furrow and continued their journey. Even Cub didn't know that the whites left more than rotting trash behind. They contaminated the pools of drinking water.

  At last Cub and Small Hand found the Noconi, camped on a high bluff overlooking the Pease River. The village had a commanding view of the countryside around. It was a land of rolling, grass-covered hills covered with the usual dark green cedars and pale green mesquites. Against the horizon to the north, flat-topped bluffs marched along in silhouette, like elephants in a line. And dotting the hills as far as the eye could see was a herd of wild mustangs, thousands of them.

  Each of the smaller herds, or manadas, was converging at a leisurely walk on the river that meandered among the hills.

  Wanderer's band had grown until there were over a hundred lodges spread out under the pecan trees. The tops of the tents and the lodge poles could be seen for more than a mile along the ridge. There were no cries of mourning, and no sign of the white man's diseases. Wanderer and his warriors disdained councils with the whites. And they stayed far from trading posts and wagon routes, except to raid.

  His war parties struck like lightning, flashing down from the hills then disappearing into the wild labyrinth of breaks and arrayos. They stole only weapons and stock, horses and cattle and mules to add to their own herds and to trade with José Tafoya. The size of the Noconi herds rivaled the vast band of mustangs moving and shifting below them. The trained ponies, the cattle, and the pack animals grazed on one side of camp, and the wild mustangs that they had caught were tethered on the other.

  Small Hand and Cub rode into the village together, and Wanderer stood to greet them. His lodge was the largest one and it was set in the center of the camp. It had a huge, bright yellow sun painted on its side, and a string of deer hooves clacked in the breeze. Wanderer recognized Cub immediately. But he did so probably because of the young man's resemblance to Naduah, rather than remembering the child he had known briefly many years before.

  "Hi, Tah-mah," he said, smiling. "I welcome the brother of my wife, and his woman."

  Cub smiled back, a feeling of relief washing over him, as though he had found a warm sheltered hearth in a howling snowstorm.

  "Greetings, Brother." When he slid down off his horse, Wanderer embraced him.

  "You have a nephew around here somewhere, Echo Of A Wolf's Howl."

  "So I've heard. People say he's handsome." Cub didn't ask how Wanderer knew his new name. Perhaps he would find out later, after dinner and over a pipe. "Where's my sister?"

  "She's busy." Wanderer glanced toward a lodge set apart from the others. It was near a small, spring-fed stream and a large hackberry tree. "She's giving birth. Most of the men have gone hunting. But I stayed until the child is born." Wanderer waved behind him. "You can stay in the guest lodge, that one over there."

  Silently Small Hand led the spare pony toward it and began unpacking their few belongings. Some of the neighbor women helped her. When they saw the sorry state of Small Hand's household, they sent their children scurrying for things to loan and give. Soon there were people coming from all directions with robes, clothing, food, ladles, containers, even a tiny child struggling along under a big brass kettle. Small Hand accepted all the presents shyly, but she kept a strict accounting in her head. Someday she would repay each one's kindness.

  Wanderer sat down again in front of his own doorway and motioned for Cub to join him. He leaned against a saddle, with his long legs stretched comfortably in front of him. He reached for his pipe and flint.

  "I'm glad you're here, Echo Of A Wolf's Howl. Naduah will be very happy. I don't think she ever stopped missing you. She speaks of you often. Tomorrow we'll visit the pony herd. You can choose the horses you want."

  Cub started to protest, but Wanderer held up his hand.

  "You don't have to keep them if you don't want to. But they'll give you a start at regaining what you've lost. Soon you'll have many horses of your own. I'm planning a raid to Mexico for more." He grinned wickedly. "There are so few good horses left in Texas. Will you come with us?"

  Cub nodded.

  "Good. Tell me the news from the Penateka."

  "You already seem to know most of it."

  "One never knows all of it. And each man has his own version. I want to hear yours. I trust yours."

  "That makes my heart glad, my brother. Especially since you haven't seen me in such a long time. I may have changed. Become a white man."

  "I know you haven't. I've heard many good things about you from the other bands. And besides, you're my wife's brother.

  "I also heard that you were traveling with nothing. That you burned everything when your grandfather died. And that you killed his ponies. That was as it should be. These days, people are greedy. They only shave the tails of the dead one's ponies, and then they keep them. You did things properly, as they should be done.

  "My heart is in the grave with your grandfather, my brother. He was a great warrior and a wise man."

  Wanderer's eyes filled with tears, and they were both silent. Then they heard the thin wail of a newborn baby, testing its lungs. Wanderer ran toward the birth lodge, with Cub close behind him.

  CHAPTER 45

  An early norther had pounced on the camp and howled around the lodge, looking for a way inside. The heavily weighted hide door bowed inward with the force of it. Naduah sat on a pile of furs, her back against the pole bedstead. She was basking in the warmth of the fire and the joy of having her friends and loved ones with her. She looked up at the seams of the lodge, firm and taut in the fifty-mile-an-hour gale. The lodge was crowded with men smoking and quietly talking, and with children waiting for the first corn kernel to pop. Wears Out Moccasins was tending the corn, stirring it gently in the bed of hot sand.

  Naduah was nursing her second son. His steady, rhythmic sucking at her breast lulled her and filled her with contentment. She knew there were terrible things happening in the southern bands, but they seemed far removed this night. She had left the birth tent sooner than usual when she heard her brother had returned. As Cub held her new son in his arms, he answered her questions about Pahayuca's band and her family. They were safe. Cub had warned them to isolate themselves, as they had when the pox broke out ten years before.

  Naduah looked down at her son's fuzzy little head, nuzzling her. He was called Nakahtaba, Pecan. Wanderer had named him.

  "You named Quanah," he had said. "I name this one. He stared down at the tiny, brown, wrinkled baby. "He looks like a pecan." And Pecan he would be until someone gave him a better name.

  Quanah, almost five years old now, sat on Sore-Backed Horse's lap, braiding the long fringes on the warrior's leggings. He studied his blond-haired uncle surreptitiously, his slate-gray eyes peering from under a heavy fringe of straight, dark brown hair. Echo Of A Wolf's Howl wasn't unfriendly, but he had a formal, preoccupied air about him. He always looked as though he was thinking about something else. It was a defense that Cub had used to keep his white family at a distance, and it was part of him now. Quanah wasn't sure how to react to him, so he stayed with Sore-Backed Horse. He was certain to have his own way there. Sore-Backed Horse had been filling the important role of uncle ever since Quanah was born.

  If only Medicine Woman and Takes Down The Lodge and Sunrise were here, thought Nad
uah. And Black Bird and Something Good and Little Weasel. Not so little anymore, she corrected herself. She must be almost as old as Small Hand. Cub had also reported that Weasel was even more beautiful than her mother. He had visited them to tell Something Good of her parents' death. He spoke of it to Naduah through clenched teeth, fighting to keep his face impassive. Naduah loved Cub, but even she felt uneasy around him. He no longer had the openness and sense of humor of one of the People.

  Star Name and Deep Water and their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Wakare-ee, Turtle, were there, as well as Spaniard and his wife and their little girl. But the most unexpected guest to show up at the lodge door that evening was Cruelest One, looking like some evil spirit blown in on the storm. He came in after Star Name's brother, Wolf Road, and he scowled at Naduah as he handed her the present of popping corn, traded from the Wichita. He brushed past her before she could say anything.

  Naduah wasn't as surprised to see him as she should have been. She caught him once in serious conversation with little Quanah. He didn't know she had seen him, and she would never tell him. She still didn't feel any warmth for Cruelest One. Few people did. But he was given a place in the family circle because he had saved Wolf Road's life in the battle of Plum Creek nine years ago. And because he quietly, without words, asked for a place.

  Gathered Up, fifteen now, sat next to Wolf Road. Wolf Road and Cub had been entertaining everyone with stories from their boyhood. Naduah knew they had played pranks, but she had no idea how much trouble they had caused, or the tight spots they had gotten themselves into. On the other hand, she thought, no one knows some of the tricks Star Name and I pulled either. As he reminisced, Cub's eyes rekindled, and his old charm surfaced. Small Hand watched him closely, as though seeing a stranger she had never met before.

  The first small, dark kernel of corn exploded with a tiny pop, and the three older children crowded around to watch. They had never seen it before.

  "Stand back," said Wears Out Moccasins, waving them away. "Give me room." The corn was exploding steadily now, and even Wears Out Moccasins couldn't keep the children away. The adults leaned forward too. Popcorn was a rare treat. As it popped, Wears Out Moccasins swept the top kernels off onto a flat piece of bark. Now and then, one would arc up and out of the sand, and the children scrambled for it.