Ride the Wind

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  "Are you hungry, Buffalo Piss?" asked Naduah.

  "Yes."

  The rest of the men sat silent, waiting for him to tell them what was happening. He ate the stew Naduah brought him, then took out his own pipe and lit it. He cupped his hands to keep the wind from blowing it out, and took a few deep breaths, still scowling. The pipe seemed to calm him a little. He went straight to the point.

  "They want to pen us in a corral like their cattle. Remember that tabay-boh soldier, Marcy? The one who made the trail five years ago and brought ka-ler-ah to us? Now he and his agent, Neighbors, want us to move onto a tiny piece of land and stay there so there will be no more war with the Texans. Sanaco told them they should pen the Texans up. They're the ones who are causing the trouble."

  "We saw the men who steal the land, measuring with their sticks near the Brazos," said Sore-Backed Horse. "Pahayuca isn't going, is he?"

  "He's thinking about it. There aren't many powerful leaders left who oppose him. Pahayuca likes the presents he's been getting at the honey talks. And he's an old man now. He's seen more than sixty seasons. He's so fat, he pants when he has to walk to relieve himself. Soon he'll have to ride on a travois. Can you imagine him leading his warriors to battle on a travois?" Buffalo Piss tapped the ash out of his pipe and relit it. "He might go. Wanderer. Things are bad. Game is scarce. The hunt this fall was scant. It's going to be a long, hard winter."

  "I know. Night's been studying the cottonwood bark. He seems to know he'll be eating a lot of it."

  "The white people's trails and wagon trains have disrupted the herds' migrations and scattered the game," continued Buffalo Piss. "They shoot the buffalo and leave it to rot. They kill anything that moves. And the noise of their guns scares away what they don't hit." The People still preferred to hunt their food with bows and arrows. They saved the ammunition and guns for two-legged quarry. "More Penateka will follow me here. They want to raid."

  "We welcome them," said Wanderer.

  Pahayuca was uncomfortable in the wooden building. The floorboards felt strange, and they shifted under his moccasined feet. They creaked, as though he were treading on small animals. There wasn't a chair big enough for him, but he wouldn't have wanted to sit in one anyway. He stood before the desk that separated him from the fort's commanding officer. There was no pipe, no fire, no circle of men discussing things as they should be discussed. People rushed in and out, interrupting Pahayuca, a humiliating discourtesy. Colonel Neill signed papers as he talked and listened. Jim Shaw stood nearby to translate.

  In the dust outside the colonel's door was a body waiting for burial. The weather had gone from cold to very hot in its usual way, and the body would have to be buried soon. Pahayuca had watched it all night as he sat outside his lodge, communing with his spirits and thinking. The sheeting tied over the corpse had glowed dimly in the moonlight, and its edges flapped in the wind like a ghost struggling with its bonds.

  Pahayuca and four hundred and fifty of his people were camped at the fort. They had come in search of the food rations that had been promised them by the agent. The rations were always late at the reservation on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, but never this late. Now the body outside gave Pahayuca another cause for unease. The man had died of smallpox. Even now the tabay-boh soldiers were lining up at the dispensary for vaccinations.

  "Chief, the food will be here. The rivers are swollen with the spring floods. The freighters are having a tough time getting through."

  "Colonel, the children of my band are hungry. They cry for food. The stomachs of our women are empty. We men have to watch our loved ones become thinner each day. There are no buffalo on the reservation. We want to go outside to hunt them. Think how it would be if you had to watch your family starving."

  "I can't let you go." A little starving will do the man good. Won't hurt that mountainous wife of his either, thought Neill. "It's for your own protection, Pahayuca. The United States government says that any Indians found off the reservation will be considered hostile and will be dealt with accordingly. I didn't make the law. I'm just following orders." Shaw always had a hard time explaining the concept of "orders" to Comanche. Neill shuffled his papers, hoping it would encourage the chief to leave. He was a busy man, and the body outside was beginning to decay. He could smell it through his open window. Where the hell is that burial detail? A rotting corpse and a herd of sullen, dirty Indians squatting on my doorstep. Damnation! He thought. What a way to start a morning.

  It didn't occur to Pahayuca to plead. He had stated his case as eloquently as he could. And his request had been denied. It was humiliating enough to have to ask for permission to hunt. He wouldn't demean himself further by arguing. But he did have one other plea.

  "Colonel."

  Neill looked up, exasperated.

  "My people have been exposed to the white man's pox. Will you 'order' your doctor to scratch us to keep away the sickness?" Pahayuca had grasped not only the idea of chain of command but of preventive medicine.

  "No. There's hardly enough vaccine for the soldiers and the officers' families. We can't vaccinate four hundred Indians. Shaw, tell the chief to take his people back to the agency and wait there for the food supplies. There's nothing more I can do for him. "Britt," he roared at the open door. "Where is that nigger?" The orderly's black face appeared, shiny with sweat. "Where are those damned Micks and their shovels? There's a stinking corpse out there to bury."

  "Yes, sir." And the face disappeared.

  Pahayuca turned and walked out into the warm, redolent March sunlight. He shouted to Blocks The Sun and Silver Rain and Something Good to prepare to leave. Then he beckoned to Weasel, who was surrounded by a small group of soldiers. The enlisted men weren't allowed wives. Whorehouses had sprung up around the fort; hog ranches or blind pigs, they were called.

  A few men were lucky enough to have a bit of muslin on the sly, as they put it. A woman hidden away somewhere. The Cherokee women were especially prized for their beauty. But there wasn't a woman in a hundred miles as beautiful as nineteen-year-old Weasel. And she knew it. White men swarmed around her wherever she went. It was one more burden for Pahayuca to bear.

  Humiliated and enraged, Pahayuca lumbered to his lodge. He searched through his belongings for the waterproofed bag that held his letters of testimonial from various white leaders. Sitting cross-legged in front of the fire, he fed them one by one into the flames while his wives and daughters and granddaughters carried the household goods outside and dismantled the lodge around him.

  Pahayuca and his band of Wasps headed away from the fort in the direction of the agency so the soldiers wouldn't follow them. But once they were out of sight of the buildings, and past the wood details and the water details and the parties out hunting game, Pahayuca turned west and north, toward the Pease River and the country of the Noconi.

  The Wasps made it as far as the southernmost fork of the Pease before smallpox caught up with them. As the wails of mourning arose from the lodges and the families began to scatter, Weasel saddled her pony and struck out alone, looking for Naduah and Star Name. Their families were sick.

  Naduah arrived too late. As she and Star Name and Wolf Road and Weasel rode up to the familiar lodge with Takes Down's big yellow sun on it, she saw Pahayuca outside, his arms upraised. He had chopped off his right braid and painted his face black. He was chanting his prayer for the souls of his sister, Medicine Woman, his nephew. Sunrise, and his nephew's wife, Takes Down The Lodge.

  Crying and wailing, Star Name and Wolf Road ran to find their mother. Black Bird had been spared, but her face was pitted. She was keening in her lodge. In her grief she had cut off the top joints of the middle and fourth fingers of her left hand. Her hair lay in piles around her feet.

  In a daze, Naduah stood in the doorway of her mother's lodge. They couldn't be dead. Not Medicine Woman and Takes Down and quiet Sunrise. Not all of them. Something Good tugged at Naduah's sleeve, trying to pull her away. Even though Naduah was four inches tall
er, Something Good still used the old pet name.

  "Little one, it would be better if you stayed out and we burned the lodge with them in it." Something Good had seen much grief, but tears streamed down her cheeks anyway.'

  Naduah didn't seem to hear her. She stood frozen in the doorway, looking around at the familiar objects inside. The square mirror with its dangling feathers and bells still hung on a peg. Sunrise's otter skin quiver hung with his bow. And Medicine Woman's rabbit skin pouch lay opened next to her bed, the contents of it profanely scattered out on the floor for anyone to see. Aside from this, it seemed tranquil in the lodge. As though everyone were merely sleeping.

  Sobbing, Naduah crossed the lodge and scooped the bundles of leaves and packets of powders and roots back into the bag. She tied it shut and hung it at her waist. The bodies lay under buffalo robes on the beds. She stood over her grandmother's form, forcing her hand down to the edge of the cover. She had to see. Otherwise she would spend her days not believing it had happened. She pulled the cover back and gagged as she stared at the devastation that had once been her grandmother's kind, gentle, humorous face.

  She did the same for her mother and father. Then she left in search of Wolf Road and Star Name. Pahayuca still chanted outside, and she circled around him. She brought the other two back with her. Weasel and Something Good helped them drag the shrouded bodies outside, and tie them onto ponies. Then they each mounted their own horses. The small funeral procession wound through the remnants of the camp toward the ravines of the river's banks. Naduah and the others buried Medicine Woman, Takes Down The Lodge, and Sunrise, wedging them deep into crevices and piling stones on top of them to keep scavengers out.

  When they died Something Good had thoughtfully and bravely positioned each body properly with the knees drawn up before rigor mortis made moving them impossible. They picked handfuls of the spring flowers that grew everywhere and placed them on the graves along with offerings of food. Naduah lay Sunrise's bow and quiver across the stones of his grave.

  As the shock wore off, she began to remember what she had lost. Her grandmother's elfin laugh, Takes Down's quiet instructions, the evenings talking and telling stories around the fire with them. Sunrise's soft voice teaching her to ride and shoot. Sobs shuddered through her body. Crying and wailing in shrill ululations, she pulled out her skinning knife. Grabbing hunks of her thick blond hair, she began hacking at them. She slashed her arms and breasts and tore at the ragged ends of hair she had left. She screamed her grief to the sky above her.

  Bent over, on her knees, she cried and moaned for hours, rocking back and forth. Finally she sank to the ground and slept there in the open. Something Good and Weasel draped robes over her and Star Name as they lay unconscious from exhaustion. Then they sat under their own robes to watch over them.

  Naduah grieved for another day. Then she burned her parents' lodge. Star Name and Wolf Road helped her kill Sunrise's ponies, holding their tether lines and slashing their throats. As the three of them and Black Bird rode among the remaining twenty or thirty lodges of the camp, Naduah saw a child sitting alone in front of her tent. She reined Wind to a halt.

  "Where are your parents, Daughter?"

  The girl looked up at her dully, as though she hadn't heard.

  "Where is your family?" Naduah repeated.

  "Dead."

  "All of them?"

  "All of them."

  "And what is your name, child?"

  "Kuyusi, Quail."

  "Come with us. Quail." Naduah held out her hand. Quail used it to mount Wind, settling down behind her. As they rode away, Quail's family's dogs roused themselves and trotted along after the procession.

  In November of 1855, Company A of the newly formed cavalry regiment halted at the ford of the Red River. On the other side lay Texas. They affectionately called themselves Jeff Davis's Own, in honor of the cavalry's creator, the United States Secretary of War. But with the peculiar logic of the military, this very first cavalry regiment was officially designated the Second Cavalry. The cavalry was only six months old, and already it was the elite of the United States forces. Davis threw over established procedure when he formed it. And he'd roared at congressmen and generals to do it.

  "I know it'll cost three times as much as an infantry unit, God damn it to hell. But it'll be ten times as effective."

  Jefferson Davis went to the heart of horse country, Louisville, Kentucky, to organize his new unit. He personally selected each officer, disregarding seniority when he did it. And each senior officer was in turn permitted to choose his noncommissioned officers. Davis offered commissions to the seasoned Indian fighters of the Texas Rangers, and he made Albert Sidney Johnson, Texas' former Secretary of War, its commander. In effect, the cavalry was formed to fight Comanche.

  He recruited troops from Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, the states famous for their horses and their horsemen, but the Second Cavalry was predominantly southern, both in its makeup and in its outlook. He sent special teams to select and buy the finest blooded horses available. Each of the regiment's ten companies rode horses of the same color.

  The horses belonging to the men of company A were grays. They went well with their riders' black, round-crowned Jeff Davis hats. Each man had pinned one side of his brim up with a brass ornament, and soft gray ostrich plumes nodded from the officers' hat bands.

  "By columns of four into line!" The bugle sounded as Sergeant McKenna called the command. There was a rattle from the heavy dragoon sabers that each NCO carried for show. "Old Wristbreakers," they called them. Saddle leather creaked as the men formed four abreast to cross the river. They splashed into the shallow ford, the sun glinting on the silver sprays of water sent up by the hooves and on the brass-mounted saddles. Each man carried a new breechloading Springfield carbine socketed in a boot next to his left knee. And each had a brace of thirty-six-caliber Colt Navy model revolvers at his waist.

  For their entry into Texas, the ninety men of Company A wore their dress uniforms. Their tailored, dark blue jackets were waist length, with high collars and twelve shiny buttons down the front. The officers and NCOs had yellow stripes down the outside seams of their blue trousers. Everyone's brass and tall, black boots were highly polished. Company A glittered as it moved. Each man in it rode with the unconscious grace of someone at home in the saddle. A retinue of black slaves and servants, mounted on mules or riding in wagons, followed.

  The tramp of hooves subsided in a diminishing clatter as the men halted on the Texas side of the river. They awaited further orders, and the arrival of the twelve-pound mountain howitzer that followed them.

  " 'Tention! By squadrons! Left wheel into line. March!"

  With the column once more moving forward, Sergeant McKenna rode alongside the man who was second in command of the entire Second Cavalry. Colonel Robert E. Lee was a quiet, gracious man, easily approachable, which was why McKenna chose to speak to him directly.

  "Sir."

  "Yes, Sergeant?"

  "I think we had best find shelter now and stay put fer the rest of the day."

  "I see the black clouds to the north, Sergeant. But they're on the horizon, miles away."

  "It'll be cold afore you can boil a pot of coffee."

  "Sergeant, I wouldn't want to doubt your word, but it's unusually balmy for this time of year." Snatches of wind blew the grass in ripples, like cat's paws across the surface of water. "The wind does seem to be freshening, but frankly," Colonel Lee tugged at his high, tight collar, "I find it a relief. Surely the storm won't hit before we've bivouacked for the night."

  "Begging your pardon, sir. But I've lived in this here state since I was high as a grasshopper's thigh. That's a blue norther acomin'. And blue northers move faster'n a snake with a bee up his ass. They blow the world inside out and freeze the linin'."

  Lee flinched imperceptibly. It was easy to pick out the Texans in the ranks.

  "We'll ride a couple more hours and see what the weather looks like then, Sergeant."
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  "Yes, sir."

  In an hour the temperature had dropped twenty-five degrees and was still plummeting, and the wind had already hit the bottom of the thermometer. The men of Company A unbuckled their overcoats from behind their saddles, unrolled them, and put them on. The huge black clouds rolling overhead seemed to sink lower and lower under their own swollen weight. A coyote skulked off shivering, his fur blown up in ridges on his back.

  Sand began blowing around them. Then, as the wind picked up to gale gusts, pea-sized bits of sharp gravel stung them. Sand and gravel mixed with a cold rain drove slantwise into their faces. Finally it seemed to be raining mud that trickled down the men's collars and ran in grating streams down their backs.

  "Column right. Double time for that bluff," shouted McKenna. The huge rock rose from the plain, a dark green skirt of cedar around its base. The wind whipped Sergeant McKenna's words from his mouth, and he had to ride along the line repeating the instructions. The rain fell even harder and turned to needlelike sleet as the temperature continued to drop. The trail became a morass of gluey red mud that formed heavy balls on the horses' hooves. Then the animals began to slide on the ice that formed over the mud. At three o'clock in the afternoon it was as dark as night, with lightning playing continuously all around the horizon.

  Lord, just let us make shelter and I'll never take your name in vain again. McKenna pulled his coat up higher on his neck and turtled down inside it.

  By the time they came to the dubious protection of the bluff, he was numb with the cold and the wet, and chills shook him. He hurried around, seeing that the men picketed the horses and mules in as much shelter as possible, and that they storm-lashed their own little A-shaped tents and the large conical Sibleys for the officers. The canvas duck bucked and snapped in their hands, and it took six to a dozen men to tame each one. Then he crawled into one of the Sibleys with the other noncoms and huddled with them for warmth.