Ride the Wind

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Wanderer had described Gathered Up's illness, and Gets To Be An Old Man had left his drum and eagle feathers behind. He trotted up on his bandy legs, still talking to himself.

  "... Cheyenne are good for something." He pulled his medicine bag from the folds of his baggy breechclout.

  "What did you say, Old Man?" As Naduah grew older, she had developed more respect for Old Man's skill as a healer. And she understood now why even Medicine Woman called him for the cases she couldn't handle.

  "I said the Cheyenne are good for something." He continued mumbling as he worked, and Naduah leaned close to watch and listen.

  "Back in the year of the Council House fight, in San Antonio, ten years ago it was. When we made treaty talk with the Cheyenne. You remember, Wanderer, when we gave them all those horses. A lot of horses. Remember all those horses we gave those no-good Cheyenne, Wanderer? Or were you born then?"

  "I was born. I heard of it, Old Man."

  "I met one of their medicine men there. A very powerful man. He taught me this." With a slender trade needle Old Man had been trying to thread small, spine-covered burs onto a piece of split sinew. Finally he thrust it at Naduah, his fingers too unsteady and his eyesight too blurred for the task.

  "Here, Daughter. This is woman's work anyway. Ugly." Old Man returned to his monologue on the Cheyenne. "That Cheyenne was the ugliest human being I ever saw. But powerful. He saved the life of Hook Nose, that white trader up on the Canadian River. Hook Nose told us so himself, when the Wasps were there a few years ago. And Hook Nose is the only white man I ever met who didn't lie."

  Naduah finished stringing the burs, and Old Man covered them with marrow fat from a buffalo. He held the sinew up between his thumb and forefinger and, with his spidery fingers, kneaded the fat gingerly around the burs.

  "Sit up, boy." Naduah helped Gathered Up sit, and supported him, watching the procedure closely. With a thin, notched stick Old Man rammed the burs down Gathered Up's swollen throat. Naduah and Wanderer held the boy as he gagged and retched. Old Man peered into his mouth, still mumbling and chanting. He pulled the sinew back out, tugging gently, as though he had a fish on a line. When it cleared Gathered Up's lips, there was a hunk of blue-white membrane, as dry and hard as tree bark, attached to it.

  "Better?"

  "Yes." Gathered Up collapsed onto the bed, gulping air in painful swallows. "I can breathe," he rasped.

  "Cheyenne know a thing or two. Not much, but one or two things." Old Man began collecting his medicine.

  "May I have that?" Gathered Up signed the request and pointed to the hard, scaly lump caused' by diphtheria. It was powerful. It had almost killed him. He picked it up gingerly and laid it aside. Later, when he felt better, he would put it into his medicine bag. He plucked at the medicine man's breechclout to get his attention. He spoke in hand talk, to save his throat.

  "I stole some ponies on this raid. You can have any of them."

  "I don't want them. What use are they to me? I have my old war pony, Lightning." He nodded to the wreck cropping grass with thick yellow teeth worn down to stubs. "This is my last trip anyway. Keep your horses, young man. You're young. You'll need ponies to buy a wife. Women aren't cheap. And they're getting more expensive every year. When I was young, you could buy a good wife, a hard-working wife, for one horse and a few blankets." Still grumbling. Old Man waddled off to the spring. He rolled from side to side on his bowed legs as he went to take his morning bath.

  Naduah lightly touched Gathered Up's hand as she rearranged his covers. He smiled up at her, and closed his eyes in sleep. While he slept, Naduah built a travois to carry him.

  The party traveled on, through the desolate country north of the Rio Grande. It was a world where colors hadn't been invented yet. The rock-covered hills were painted in neutral tones of brown, yellow, buff, and ochre. The deep ravines were choked with tangles of dust-covered brush perforated by huge spikes of ocotillo cactus and threaded with long yellow rattlers. It was hostile, merciless country, defended by a hundred miles of spiny agave, cactus, and mesquite that tore at their legs.

  The second day, they found the previous year's campsite in the mountains. The war party moved on to camp elsewhere, so that the old site would be undisturbed. Wanderer and Wolf Road and Naduah began casting around among the fallen drying racks, fire pits, and piles of brittle cut brush. They were looking for some sign left by Cub. They found the bones of animals and of the captives they had murdered the year before. Most of the bones were picked clean, anonymous and scattered. They were white and dry, like an element of the earth itself.

  "Wanderer!" Naduah shouted and waved. "They're alive!"

  They all squatted around a wedge-shaped pile of stones. There was a stone for each day Cub wanted them to travel. The point of the wedge gave them the direction. Naduah picked up each stone, counting it, until she saw a tiny leather bag buried under them. She opened it carefully and shook out into her palm a lock of pale yellow hair, curled up on itself like fine golden wire cut from a spool. The hair was tied in the middle with a piece of sinew. With it was another sheaf of hair, this one black and curly.

  Naduah held her palm up for Wanderer and Wolf Road to see. She grinned at them. Then she slid the hair back into the bag and slipped the bag into a larger one hanging next to the beaded awl case on her belt.

  When the band broke up into smaller raiding parties, Naduah went with Wanderer and Wolf Road, Sore-Backed Horse, Spaniard, Quanah, and Gathered Up, who was still weak. Because of Gathered Up, they were the last to leave camp. Naduah looked over her shoulder as they rode away. On top of a ridge looking out over the broad valley was a solitary figure. Gets To Be An Old Man sat on Lightning and surveyed the land below him. From his perch he could see seventy miles into Mexico.

  Naduah was carrying Wanderer's lance, and she waved it at him. But either he didn't see her or he chose to ignore her. He was probably remembering the past, when a thousand warriors and their families took this trail to plunder the isolated Mexican ranches. Maybe he was remembering the honors and presents heaped on them by the fawning Spanish, and the fear the People struck wherever they rode.

  Now there was a ragged, ugly white man's fort squatting on the trail behind them like a sleeping dog that trips you when you leave the lodge to relieve yourself at night. As he watched the small groups of men and women disperse out onto the vast brown bowl of the valley below, Old Man was grateful that he was old and that it was his time to die. He sat all day, watching the shifting shadow patterns the clouds created on the pale brown palette of the valley floor. He watched a tiny, solitary coyote lope through the mesquite and cactus scrub, and he looked up when a silent hawk sent his shadow gliding across the land. And he felt the wind, his lifelong companion.

  He watched the sunset paint piles of cottony cumulus clouds with brilliant, translucent colors, more beautiful in the soaring sky than the stained glass windows of a cathedral. And when the colors began to fade, Gets To Be An Old Man turned Lightning and went in search of a place to lay his bones.

  The lodge looked out of place in front of the sprawling adobe ranch. There was a shield with a cover made of wolf's hide standing on its tripod by the door. A fourteen-foot lance with a slender war blade leaned against the three-legged stand. A string of long, black scalps fluttered from the lodge pole.

  A few small burros stood in the yard, the occasional twitching of their ears the only sign that they were alive. Chickens, searching for crumbs they might have missed that morning, scratched around the single, scarred wooden door in the long, dingy mud wall. There were horses in one corral and cattle in another. Pigs lay panting in the dust, pretending that it was mud.

  A pack of dogs, their hackles raised and their tails tucked at the same time, set up a fearful clamor. The four dogs with Wanderer and Naduah barked back, advancing stiff-legged on them. Spaniard leaned down and swatted one of his, and they all quieted, growling softly instead.

  The door of the ranch opened and a man stepped out,
stooping to clear the low lintel. He wore the tough leather chaps of a vaquero. A faded, striped serape was draped over his shoulders. He carried a rifle, obviously cocked, and he wore his big straw hat low, shading his face. He raised the gun as they approached.

  Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe this is the wrong place. Naduah tried to see the man's features, but the sun was behind him. She remembered the scalps, long and black, hanging from the lodge pole. How many guns were hidden behind the parapet along the flat roof? Wanderer's palm was up in the sign of peace, but Sore-Backed Horse's hand rested on the butt of his carbine, easing it out of the saddle holster by his leg. Suddenly the man started running toward them, leaping the pigs that lay in his way. He shouted back over his shoulder as he ran.

  "Small Hand, it's Naduah and Wanderer and Wolf Road."

  A small woman, dressed in a white blouse and full skirt of bright red cotton, darted barefoot after him. When Naduah dismounted, she was almost knocked down by Cub's rush and bear hug. He picked her up and swung her around, sending one of her moccasins flying. She gasped for breath as his arms squeezed the air out of her.

  "Cub, you're going to force my liver up into my throat and pop my eyeballs out. Put me down."

  He dropped her and turned to Wolf Road and Wanderer. While they all cried and thumped each other, Naduah pulled her dress back down over her knees and checked to see if anything was broken in the various bags hanging at her waist. She hugged Small Hand, who stood shyly by, and they all headed for the ranch house.

  Naduah hadn't been inside a solid building for fifteen years. She felt uneasy as the thick, heavy walls closed in around her, as if she were being sealed off from the world. She walked quickly through the main room and into the open patio beyond. From there she could inspect Cub's kingdom. She sat on a stone bench beside the small, circular fountain in the center of the courtyard. A spring kept the cachement trough full of cold water. Naduah trailed her hand through it as she looked around her.

  A continuous open corridor with rooms along it enclosed the patio on all four sides. Each room had a massive door, but none of them was closed. Some of the rooms were obviously for sleeping. There were piles of buffalo robes and even a mattress or two. The floors had wolf pelts and bear skins scattered as rugs.

  One storeroom was piled almost to the ceiling with dried meat and huge oxen stomach paunches of tallow. Another room was filled wall to wall with corn. The cobs spilled into the corridor, flowing over the low barricade that had been built to keep out the pigs.

  "Patron, qué haces tú con esos indios bravos?" A tiny Mexican woman, brown and wrinkled as a smoked sausage, shook her finger at Cub. He answered her in Spanish, and she scurried away.

  "She wanted to know what I was doing with a bunch of wild Indians. I told her that my house was theirs, and that she was to tell the herders to kill you a steer. You're welcome to stay as long as you want."

  "I'll stay longer if I can do it outside, Cub." Naduah couldn't stand the trapped feeling anymore.

  "My husband prefers it outside too," said Small Hand. "But at least now he'll sleep inside when the weather's cold. Which isn't very often."

  "But the lodge will always be there for guests like you. And also to show that I'm one of the People."

  "Have any of the People ever raided you, Brother?"

  "No, Wanderer. They see the lodge first. But I do get raided. You can come on one of my hunting trips if you like."

  "What do you hunt?"

  "Apache."

  "I wondered whose scalps were hanging from the lodge pole," said Naduah.

  As Wanderer's group set up their camp near the ranch house, the Mexicans, who called Cub patron, began drifting cautiously back from wherever they were hiding. They stood around curiously as the steer was slaughtered and roasted, and joined in the eating of it.

  "Cub," said Naduah as they ate, "how did you get all of this? Did you kill the ones who were here?"

  "No, Sister." He searched for a word for "buy" and couldn't find one. "I traded it for a bag of the yellow metal that my grandfather was saving. He gave it to me before he died."

  "Why didn't you come back to live with us?"

  It was a difficult question for Cub to answer.

  "I couldn't, Sister. I've changed. The People have changed. We're better off here, Small Hand and I. I miss the life of the People. But I'm the chief here. All this is mine." The sweep of his big arm took in the hundred miles of the brown valley and the deep violet, snaggletoothed mountains that divided it from the royal-blue sky overhead. "I can do as I please. I probably didn't have to give the Mexican—" Again he searched for the word. Government? Officials? Politicians? "—council of chiefs anything for this. No one wanted it. It's been deserted for years. Small Hand and I have been working to repair it.

  "The Mexicans are terrified of the People and of the Apache. They had all left. But now they're coming back to work for me." He knew that working for someone was something else the People couldn't understand. They would never comprehend a man, his head bowed and his hat in his hand, offering himself virtually as a slave in exchange for protection and subsistence. Nor would they understand how dependent the Mexicans were on their strange, taciturn patron, a man who wore an eagle feather dangling from the sweat-stained leather band of his battered straw hat. A man who more often than not chose to sleep in a tent in his own ranch yard. But strange as Cub was, the vaqueros recognized him as someone who would prevail over any adversity.

  For over a century the farmers and ranchers of Northern Mexico had been terrorized by Comanche and Apache. Even now, leaving the ranch's patio was venturing into a war zone. It was a no-man's land where there was no such concept as quarter, and where a man could expect mutilation and torture if caught by the enemy. Clanking with belts of ammunition, pistols, rifles, and the huge, razor-honed machetes, as well as their rolled blankets, coiled lariats, and big gourd canteens, the cowboys left the safety of the ranch only in large groups.

  El Patron often rode out alone. And sometimes he returned with a grisly black Apache scalp dangling from the muzzle of the rifle he carried, its butt end resting against his thigh. His men cheered when they saw one of those scalps, looking like hair from a horse's tail, fluttering and revolving in the wind.

  As the months passed, Cub had come to respect the men who worked for him. Next to his hulking size, they looked like children. But they had courage nonetheless. It was a quiet, fatalistic bravery that had endured every horror and hardship, even as they themselves had. They had been victimized all their lives. Because they had to live isolated and scattered to scratch a living from the stubborn, dry soil of their homeland, defense was impossible for them. But in a group, they were as good an army as Cub could wish for.

  The stem discipline of James Parker and the wise counsel of Old Owl had turned Cub into a good administrator. He made every decision concerning the ranch. And he arbitrated almost every detail of his employees' lives. He did it not because he wanted to, but because they expected it of him. They needed him. And although Cub himself didn't realize it, he needed them.

  Wanderer and Naduah and their friends stayed a week and the time passed quickly. At last they packed to leave for the north. Cub stood with his arm resting around Small Hand's shoulders, and they both waved good-bye. The small group took with them twenty head of Cub's cattle as a present.

  Quanah appointed himself chief herder and rode among them on his patient old pinto pony. Yipping and snapping his quirt and spinning his lariat, he harassed them steadily. He practiced his roping on their horns, which were wicked and curved and longer than his outstretched arms. The cattle tolerated him as they did the horseflies and buffalo gnats, the mosquitoes and the snakes.

  In the week he had spent with his uncle, six-year-old Quanah had become cock of the roost. He charmed the women, who sneaked him snacks of sweetened cornbread cakes. He spent each twilight squatting with the vaqueros against the rough adobe walls of the ranch. Solemnly he tried their long, slender cornh
usk cigarettes. And he listened attentively to the strange, soft language that passed back and forth over his head.

  Perched on top of the twisted cedar and mesquite rails of the corral fence, he spent hours each day watching the men break their horses. He cheered them as they "tailed" bulls. They would race alongside the animal, grab its tail, throw a leg over it, and pull it to the ground. Quanah wandered back to the guest lodge at all hours of the night. And he was usually hoarse from screaming at the cockfights.

  "Maybe we should have left him with his uncle," said Naduah as she watched little Quanah bobbing around among the cattle. "He says he wants to be a rancher."

  "No," said Wanderer. "He would drive his uncle loco. I would rather have your brother as a friend. He would be too formidable an enemy." Once again Wanderer's medicine bag rode inside his breechclout. Cub had returned it to him.

  "It's very powerful. Brother," he had said. "It saved my life. But from now on, I'll make my own medicine."

  "Gathered Up," called Naduah, twisting around in her saddle to look at him. "How are you feeling?"

  "Fine. My throat is well." He grinned at her, his even, white teeth flashing in his brown face.

  "He ate more than two of us last night," grumbled Wanderer.

  "If he ate more than you and Spaniard, then he ate more than four," Naduah answered.

  Laughing, they rode toward Eagle Pass and the rendezvous with the rest of the war party.

  CHAPTER 48

  Late in the fall of 1854, Buffalo Piss again rode into the Noconi camp. This time he was followed by ten families.

  "What brings you back, Buffalo Piss?" asked Wanderer. "You migrate like the geese or the buffalo. First you move north, and then you go south. Now here you are in the north again."

  "I'm through with the Penateka." Buffalo Piss dismounted and untied the cinch on his saddle. "Pahayuca is no longer one of the People. He's a white man with red skin." He stalked into the guest lodge and threw his saddle in a heap, with the saddle bags on top of it. While his patient wife, Red Foot, began unloading the packhorses and sorting things out, Buffalo Piss sprawled in the middle of the group of men sitting in the shelter of Wanderer's lodge. He pulled his robe angrily over his head and crossed his arms on his raised knees, as much to contain his anger as to shut out the chill of the November wind.