Comanche Moon (73 page)

What Buffalo Hump knew was that he must not leave the black horse; their fates were now linked. When the horse stumbled and wanted to stop, Buffalo Hump let him rest. As the horse rested he began to sing again the high songs of the war trail. For a time the old horse did nothing.

Then he lifted his head and pricked up his ears, as if hearing again his own hoofbeats from the time of warring.

Buffalo Hump was not singing to the horse--he was singing the memories of his own life--but the horse, once he was rested a little, was able to go a few more miles, though at a slow walk. As the heat of the day grew, though, the horse weakened again, and stopped, though they were not yet to the Lake of Horses.

Now Buffalo Hump began to beat the old horse with his lance. He beat it with all his strength. He twisted the horse's tail and pounded it on the sides with his lance. He was determined, once more, to make a horse go where he wanted it to go, and he succeeded. The black horse, which had been about to sink down and die, quivered while he was being beaten; then he revived and walked on another few miles until Buffalo Hump saw the cracked earth of the dry lake not far ahead. Soon the horse smelled the water from the little spring and became excited. He ran toward the water in a wobbly canter--when Buffalo Hump caught up with him he had pushed aside the thick weeds that hid the spring and was sucking the cold water. The spring was so small that it left only a little film of water around the stems of the weeds.

Nonetheless, it was water--pure water--and it saved both Buffalo Hump and the old black horse. They drank and then drank again. The horse was even able to nibble on the tops of the thick weeds around the spring, nourishment enough to enable him to continue the walk to the north when the cool of the evening came.

Though the horse could eat the tops of the weeds, Buffalo Hump couldn't, and he was out of food.

He had his short bow and some snares, but the only animals he saw were some prairie dogs. He could not see well enough to hit one of the prairie dogs with an arrow and did not have the time or the patience to lay an effective snare. He wanted to hurry on to where the black rocks were.

In the night, after they left the spring, it was he, rather than the black horse, that faltered. By the middle of the next day he was as unsteady on his feet as a baby just learning to balance himself and stand upright. Buffalo Hump became so weak and unsteady that he mounted the black horse again and made it carry him a few more miles. By the evening, to his joy, he began to see a black rock here and there on the ground, although, strain his eyes as he might, he could see no sign of the mesa land he sought. He began to feel uncertain about the mesa. Perhaps it was only the black rocks that he remembered; perhaps he had imagined the mesa, or dreamed it, or confused it with a mesa in another place. He wasn't sure; but at least he had found the black rocks, the rocks which were said to welcome the dead.

Then, in the heat of the day, the horse fell. It didn't wobble; it simply fell, throwing Buffalo Hump to the ground. Slowly he got up, meaning to beat the horse again and urge him to get up and go on a few more miles, but before he could even find his lance and raise it, the black horse heaved a sigh and died.

For a few minutes Buffalo Hump was upset with himself for having ridden along carelessly, singing battle songs, as if he were a young warrior again, on a spirited warhorse, when in fact he was an old man on a horse that was walking its last steps. If he had dismounted and led the horse again they might have made it a few more miles into the country of the black rocks.

But now it was too late: the horse was dead, and the place where he stood was the place he would die. At least, though, he had reached the place of the black rocks. Buffalo Hump would have preferred to be high on the mesa, looking over the plains where he had spent his life; but that was a thing he had not been granted; he would have to make the best death he could on the spot where his horse had fallen.

Buffalo Hump went to his horse and, with his knife, neatly and quickly took out its eyes and buried them in a small hole. The eyes a horse needed in life were not the eyes it would need when it trod the plains of death. Then he began to gather up as many of the black rocks as he could.

He meant to make a ring of rocks in which to sit until he died. He could not find the mesa, which might only be a dream mesa anyway. As he worked, gathering the rocks, he began to remember bits and pieces of his life, scraps of things that had been said to him by various people. Once his memory had been good, but now it was as leaky as a water sack that had been pierced by a thorn. He could not remember very much--j bits and pieces of things said long ago. While memories flowed in and out of his mind, like a river eddying, he worked at gathering the rocks.

As Buffalo Hump was about to finish the ring of black rocks that he meant to sit in until he left his body and became a spirit, he remembered another thing his old grandmother had told him long ago, when he was a boy, too young to ride the war trail. It had been dry in the fall and winter; there were many sandstorms. The sandstorms put his grandmother in a bad mood; she did not like it when the air was dusty. One day when the dogs were turning their tails to the wind that whipped through the camp his grandmother had begun to wail and utter lamentations.

Because of her bad mood she began to sing dark prophecies, in which she foresaw the end of the Comanche people. She predicted wars and pestilence; the People would lose their place. The plains would be covered with white people, as numerous as ants; the People would die of their plagues. Then the buffalo would go away and the time of the Comanche would end.

As Buffalo Hump arranged the rocks in a large circle--large because he wanted to show that he was one with the plains, with the great ring of the sky--he realized that his grandmother had prophesied truly. At the time he had thought she was just a bad-tempered old woman who ought to keep her wailing to herself. Now, though, he realized that he had been unjust. The whites had swarmed like ants up the rivers, spreading their pestilence, just as his grandmother had predicted. And, as she had predicted, the buffalo had gone.

Evening came. Buffalo Hump seated himself on a fine buffalo robe he had brought with him; he put his bow and his lance and the fine bone shield he had carefully made from the skull of the great buffalo he had killed near to hand. It was a clear day with little wind--the sun sank clearly in the west, free of the yellow haze which blowing sand sometimes produced. Buffalo Hump kept his face turned toward the red light of sunset until the light died and the horizon grew purple. He was sorry to see the sun go. He wanted to keep the sunlight that had bathed him his whole life, but the sun went and the plain darkened; no man could slow the sun.

In the night Buffalo Hump, though weak from lack of food, began to sing a little, though his voice was cracked. Again, he was remembering scraps of things. The wind came up. He was glad he had a good blanket to put over his shoulders. A little dust began to blow, reminding him of his grandmother and her lamentations, her wailings, her prophecies of the end of the Comanche time.

It was then that he remembered his grandmother's prophecy about his own end, a thing he had not thought of in years. She had said that he would only die when his great hump was pierced, and had suggested in her prophecy that this would happen when a dark woman came, riding a white mule and holding aloft a sword. At the time his grandmother made the prophecy Buffalo Hump thought she was just a crazy old woman. Half the old men and old women of the tribe spent their time making strange prophecies. No one paid their mutterings much mind.

But then, a few years later, on a plain west of the Rio Pecos, he had seen a dark woman on a white mule, holding aloft a great sword. Buffalo Hump might have tried to kill her, then and there, except that, with her, there had been a naked white woman with a rotting body, singing a high war song and carrying a great snake: a witch, undoubtedly, and a powerful one.

All his men had run away at the sight of the naked witch whose body was rotting; even Kicking Wolf had run away. Buffalo Hump had not run, but he did remember his grandmother's prophecy about his hump being pierced. The sight of the witch was so horrible that Buffalo Hump retreated, but he retreated slowly, backing his horse step by step, so that his hump would not be exposed to the dark woman with the sword.

All that had happened so many years before that Buffalo Hump had almost forgotten it. The dark woman with the sword was the servant of a powerful witch--it puzzled him that the witch had made no effort to pierce his hump and kill him.

But then the years began to pass. He fought the Texans and the Mexicans, he stole many captives, he made his first great raid to the sea and then his second; the buffalo were still on the plains and there were hunts to pursue. Buffalo Hump had much to do, trying to drive the white people back so the plains would be free of their smell. The sickness came; it became difficult to find enough good warriors to make war. As the years passed, the memory of the dark woman and the rotting witch faded; his grandmother died and her prophecies were lost, with the many prophecies of the old women of the tribe. He had even forgotten the prophecy about his hump being pierced, but now he remembered it.

He remembered how careful he had been not to turn his back on Slow Tree, for fear that Slow Tree would stick him with a lance behind and succeed in killing him.

Though his grandmother had been right about the wars and pestilences, about the whites, and about the departure of the buffalo, it seemed now that she had just been talking nonsense about the dark woman on the white mule. He was dying all right, in a circle of black rocks near the Lake of Horses, but his hump was as it had always been, a thing woven into his muscles, a hunk of gristle that had always been there to slow him when he drew a bow or mounted a horse. He had lived with it and now he would die with it; neither the rotting witch nor Slow Tree would come to pierce it.

Between the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon Buffalo Hump dozed. When he woke he saw a form walking near the ring of black rocks, a white bird which rose when he moved.

The bird was the owl of his dreams, the white owl of death. In flight the owl passed between him and the thin moon and flew away. Though it had annoyed him to see the owl walking around near his circle of rocks, once the owl was gone he relaxed and began to sing his memory songs again. The owl had merely come to tell him to get ready to let his spirit slip away from his body, as the little moths slipped away from caterpillars. Buffalo Hump .was ready. He was hungry and would not wait too long to slip away.

"Famous Shoes don't like these snow owls-- that's four we've seen now," Augustus said.

"He thinks it means the world's coming to an end." "They're just birds," Call said, impatiently. They were in the driest country he had been in since he had been marched as a prisoner across the Jornada del Muerto many years before, a trip that Augustus also had made and survived. This time they were in pursuit of a dangerous man, and had their horses to think of.

Finding water for them and their horses was what Famous Shoes ought to be thinking about--water, not the fact that a few snow owls from the north had decided to linger in Texas.

"He ought to be worried about this dry country," Call said. "Not those birds." Augustus, as usual, found himself having to explain the obvious to Woodrow Call, the obvious being that a white owl meant one thing to a white man and another thing to a Kickapoo tracker.

"He might be right, though, Woodrow," Augustus said. "Maybe the owls mean there ain't no water out here anywhere. If we die of thirst, then the world will have come to an end, don't you see?" He knew Woodrow Call was a single-minded man who couldn't think about but one problem at a time; but a glance at Pea Eye and Deets, not to mention the agitated Famous Shoes, convinced him that something had to be done to improve company morale, else they would die of worrying before they died of thirst.

Famous Shoes was indeed very upset about the white owls, because they should not be where they were. The white owls were there to bring death. Famous Shoes knew that, and did not care what the whites thought about it. He was very thirsty; so were the other men and so were the horses. That morning, though, he had seen a plover flying north, which meant that there was water somewhere near. Plovers were not birds that flew far. Also, Blue Duck and his two men were still ahead of them, their tracks as plain as rocks.

For Famous Shoes, the important thing was that Blue Duck was ahead of them. Where Blue Duck could go, he could go.

Twice Famous Shoes had thought he saw Blue Duck, far ahead, but Captain McCrae, who still had his keen eyesight, insisted that he was wrong--it was only an antelope they saw.

Call and Augustus too could plainly see the tracks bearing to the northwest. The tracks didn't deviate, either, as they would have if Blue Duck and his two companions had been casting about for water. Blue Duck either knew where he was going, or thought he did--he was gambling his life and the lives of the two men with him that water would be where he thought it was.

"Wherever he's going, he's been there before," Call said, when they stopped for the night.

"Yes, he has been there before, and so has the other one," Famous Shoes said.

"Other one--I thought you said there were two men riding with Blue Duck," Call said.

Augustus protested, confused by the statement.

"There are two men riding with Blue Duck, but there is another one, an old one," Famous Shoes said. "He is the one they are looking for." "Oh Lord, that's four against us now," Pea Eye said. Although they were five themselves, he feared the Comanche tendency to multiply unexpectedly.

If there were four against them today, there might be twenty tomorrow.

"The old one is too old to be dangerous," Famous Shoes said. "He is riding a horse whose feet are split and whose teeth are gone. I think Blue Duck will catch him tomorrow." "I wish you'd told us about this other one sooner," Call said--like Gus he was confused by the news.