Dunbar cleared his throat.
“I am John,” he said, and pronounced the word carefully. “John . . . John.”
Once more her lips worked at the word, and once more she tried to speak it.
“Jun.”
“Yes.” Dunbar nodded ecstatically. “John.”
“Jun,” she said again.
Lieutenant Dunbar tilted his head back. It was a sweet sound to him, the sound of his own name. He had not heard it for months.
Stands With A Fist smiled in spite of herself. Her recent life had been so filled with frowns. It was good to have something, no matter how small, to smile about.
Simultaneously, they glanced at Kicking Bird.
There was no smile on his mouth. But in his eyes, though it was ever faint, was a happy light.
three
The going was slow that first afternoon in Kicking Bird’s lodge. The time was eaten up by Stands With A Fist’s painstaking attempts to repeat Lieutenant Dunbar’s simple words and phrases. Sometimes it took a dozen or more repetitions, all of them excruciatingly tedious, to pronounce a single one-syllable word. And even then the pronunciation was far from perfect. It was not what would be called talking.
But Kicking Bird was greatly encouraged. Stands With A Fist had told him that she remembered the white words well. She was only having difficulty with her tongue. The medicine man knew that practice would bring the rusty tongue around, and his mind galloped with the happy prospects of the time when conversation between them would be free and full of information.
He felt a twinge of irritation when one of his assistants arrived with the news that he would shortly be needed to oversee final preparations for the dance that evening.
But Kicking Bird smiled as he took the white man’s hand and bid him good-bye with hair-mouth words.
“Hulo, Jun.”
four
It was tough to figure. The meeting had ended so abruptly. And so far as he knew, it had been going well. Something must have taken priority.
Dunbar stood outside Kicking Bird’s lodge and looked down the wild avenue. People seemed to be congregating in an open space at the end of the street near the tipi that carried the mark of the bear. He wanted to stay, to see what was going to happen.
But the quiet one had already disappeared into the steadily growing crowd. He spotted the woman, so small among the already smallish Indians, walking between two women. She didn’t look back at him, but as the lieutenant’s eyes followed her receding form, he could see the two people in her carriage: white and Indian.
Cisco was coming toward him, and Dunbar was surprised to see that the boy with the constant smile was riding his horse. The youngster pulled up, rolled off, patted Cisco’s neck, and chattered something that Lieutenant Dunbar correctly interpreted as praise for his horse’s virtues.
People were streaming into the clearing now and they were taking little notice of the man in uniform. The lieutenant thought again of staying, but much as he wanted to, he knew that without a formal invitation he would not be welcome. There had been no invitation.
The sun was beginning to sink and his stomach was starting to growl. If he was going to get home before dark and thus avoid a lot of fumbling just to get dinner together, he would have to make quick time. He swung up, turned Cisco around, and started out of the village at an easy canter.
As he passed the last of the lodges he chanced upon a strange assembly. Perhaps a dozen men were gathered behind one of the last lodges. They were all draped in all kinds of finery and their bodies were painted with loud designs. Each man’s head was covered with the head of a buffalo, complete with curly hair and horns. Only the dark eyes and prominent noses were visible beneath the strange helmets.
Dunbar held up a hand as he cantered past. Some of them glanced in his direction, but none of them returned the wave, and the lieutenant rode on.
five
Two Sock’s visits were no longer limited to late afternoon or early morning. He was likely to pop up anytime now, and when he did, the old wolf made himself at home, roaming the little confines of Lieutenant Dunbar’s world as if he were a camp dog. The distance he once kept had shrunk as his familiarity grew. More often than not he was no more than twenty or thirty feet away as the solitary lieutenant went about his little tasks. When he made journal entries Two Socks would usually stretch out and lie down, his yellow eyes blinking curiously as he watched the lieutenant scratch on the pages.
The ride back had been a lonely one. The untimely end of his meeting with the woman who was two people and the mysterious excitement in the village (of which he was not a part) saddled Dunbar with his old nemesis, the morose feeling of being left out. All his life he’d been hungry to participate, and as with every other human, loneliness was something that constantly had to be handled. In the lieutenant’s case loneliness had become the dominant feature of his life, so it was reassuring to see the tawny form of Two Socks rise up under the awning when he rode in at twilight.
The wolf trotted out into the yard and sat down to watch as the lieutenant slipped off Cisco’s back.
Dunbar noticed immediately that something else was under the awning. It was a large prairie chicken, lying dead on the ground, and when he stooped to examine it, he found the bird fresh-killed. The blood on its neck was still sticky. But aside from the punctures about its throat, the guinea fowl was undisturbed. Hardly a feather was out of place. It was a puzzle for which there was only one solution, and the lieutenant looked pointedly at Two Socks.
“Is this yours?” he said out loud.
The wold raised his eyes and blinked as Lieutenant Dunbar studied the bird a moment longer.
“Well, then”—he shrugged—”I guess it’s ours.”
six
Two Socks stood by, his narrow eyes following Dunbar as the bird was plucked, gutted, and roasted over the open fire. While it was on the spit he trailed the lieutenant to the corral and waited patiently as Cisco’s grain ration was doled out. Then back to the fire to await the feast.
It was a good bird, tender and full of meat. The lieutenant ate slowly, carving off the plump flesh a strip at a time and tossing a piece out to Two Socks every now and then. When he’d eaten his fill he lobbed the carcass into the yard and the old wolf carried it off into the night.
Lieutenant Dunbar sat in one of the camp chairs and smoked, letting the nighttime sounds entertain him. He thought it amazing how far he had come in such a short time. Not so long ago these same sounds had kept him on edge. They’d stolen his sleep. Now they were so familiar as to be comforting.
He thought back over the day and decided it had been a very good one. As the fire burned down with his second cigarette he realized how unique it was for him to be dealing singly and directly with the Indians. He allowed himself a pat on the back, thinking that he had done a credible job thus far as a representative of the United States of America. And without any guidelines, to boot.
Suddenly he thought of the Great War. It was possible that he was no longer a representative of the United States. Perhaps the war was over. The Confederate States of America . . . He couldn’t imagine such a thing. But it could be. He’d been without any information for a long time now.
These musings brought him to his own career, and he admitted inwardly that he’d been thinking less and less about the army. That he was in the midst of a great adventure had much to do with these omissions, but as he sat by the dwindling fire and listened to the yip of coyotes down by the river, it crossed his mind that he might have stumbled on to a better life. In this life he wanted for very little. Cisco and Two Socks weren’t human, but their unwavering loyalty was satisfying in ways that human relationships had never been. He was happy with them.
And of course there were the Indians. They held a distinct pull for him. At the least they made for excellent neighbors, well-mannered, open, and sharing. Though he was much too white for aboriginal ways, he felt more than comfortable with them. Maybe that was why he’
d been drawn from the start. The lieutenant had never been much of a learner. He’d always been a doer, sometimes to a fault. But he sensed that this facet of his personality was shifting.
Yes, he thought, that’s it. There is something to learn from them. They know things. If the army never comes, I don’t suppose the loss would be so great.
Dunbar felt suddenly lazy. Yawning, he flipped the butt of his smoke into the embers glowing at his feet and stretched his arms high over his head.
“Sleep,” he said. “I will now sleep like a dead man the whole night through.”
seven
Lieutenant Dunbar woke with alarm in the dark of early morning. His sod hut was trembling. The earth was trembling, too, and the air was filled with a hollow rumbling sound.
He swung out of bed and listened hard. The rumble was coming from somewhere close, just downriver.
Pulling on his pants and boots, the lieutenant slipped outside. The sound was even louder here, filling the prairie night with a great, reverberating echo.
He felt small in its midst.
The sound was not coming toward him, and without knowing precisely why, he ruled out the idea that some freak of nature, an earthquake or a flood, was producing this enormous energy. Something alive was making the sound. Something alive was making the earth tremble, and he had to see.
The light of his lantern seemed tiny as he walked toward the rush of sound somewhere in front of him. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards along the bluff before the feeble light he was holding picked up something. It was dust: a great, billowing wall of it rising into the night.
The lieutenant slowed to a creep as he got closer. All at once he knew that hooves were making the thunderous sound and that the dust was being raised by a movement of beasts so large that he could never have believed what he was seeing with his own eyes.
The buffalo.
One of them swerved out of the dusty cloud. And another. And another. He only glimpsed them as they roared past, but the sight of them was so magnificent that they may as well have been frozen. At that moment they froze forever in Lieutenant Dunbar’s memory.
In that moment, all alone with his lantern, he knew what they meant to the world he lived in. They were what the ocean meant to fishes, what the sky meant to birds, what air meant to a pair of human lungs.
They were the life of the prairie.
And there were thousands of them pouring over the embankment and down to the river, which they crossed with no more care than a train would a puddle. Then up the other side and out onto the grasslands, thundering to a destination known only to them, a torrent of hooves and horns and meat cutting across the landscape with a force beyond all imagining.
Dunbar dropped the lantern where he stood and broke into a run. He stopped for nothing except Cisco’s bridle, not even a shirt. Then he jumped up and kicked his horse into a gallop. He laid his bare chest close on the little buckskin’s neck and gave Cisco his head.
eight
The village was ablaze with firelight as Lieutenant Dunbar raced into the depression where the lodges were pitched and pounded up the camp’s main avenue.
Now he could see the flames of the biggest fire and the crowd gathered around it. He could see the buffalo-headed dancers and he could hear the steady roll of the drums. He could hear deep, rhythmic chanting.
But he was barely aware of the spectacle opening before him, just as he had been barely aware of the ride he’d made, tearing across the prairie at full speed for miles. He wasn’t conscious of the sweat that coated Cisco from head to tail. Only one thing was in his head as he rushed his horse up the avenue . . . the Comanche word for buffalo. He was turning it over and over, trying to remember the exact pronunciation.
Now he was shouting the word. But with all the drumming and chanting, they hadn’t yet heard his approach. As he neared the fire he tried to pull Cisco up, but the horse was high on runaway speed and didn’t answer the bit.
He charged into the very center of the dance, scattering Comanches in every direction. With a supreme effort the lieutenant pulled him up, but as Cisco’s hindquarters brushed against the ground, his head and neck rose straight up. His front legs clawed madly at empty space. Dunbar couldn’t keep his seat. He slid off the sweat-slicked back and crashed to earth with an audible thud.
Before he could move, a half-dozen infuriated warriors pounced on him. One man with a club might have ended everything, but the six men were tangled together and no one could get a clear shot at the lieutenant.
They rolled over the ground in a chaotic ball. Dunbar was screaming “Buffalo” as he fought against the punches and kicks. But no one could understand what he was saying, and some of the blows were now finding their mark.
Then he was dimly aware of a lessening of the weight pressing against him. Someone was shouting above the tumult, and the voice sounded familiar.
Suddenly there was no one on him. He was lying alone on the ground, staring up through half-stunned eyes at a multitude of Indian faces. One of the faces bent closer.
Kicking Bird.
The lieutenant said, “Buffalo.”
His body was heaving as it sucked for air, and his voice had been a whisper.
Kicking Bird’s face leaned closer.
“Buffalo,” the lieutenant gasped.
Kicking Bird grunted and shook his head. He turned his ear to within a whisker of Dunbar’s mouth and the lieutenant said the word once more, struggling with all his might for the right accent.
“Buffalo.”
Kicking Bird’s eyes were back in front of Lieutenant Dunbar’s.
“Buffalo?”
“Yes,” Dunbar said, a wan smile flaring on his face. “Yes . . . buffalo . . . buffalo.”
Exhausted, he closed his eyes for a moment and heard Kicking Bird’s deep voice bellow over the stillness as he shouted the word.
It was answered with a roar of joy from every Comanche throat, and for a split second the lieutenant thought the power of it was carrying him away. Blinking away the glaze on his eyes, he realized that strong Indian arms were bringing him to his feet.
When the erstwhile lieutenant looked up, he was greeted with scores of beaming faces. They were pressing in around him.
CHAPTER XVIII
one
Everyone went.
The camp by the river was left virtually deserted when the great caravan moved out at dawn.
Flankers were sent in every direction. The bulk of mounted warriors rode at the front. Then came the women and children, some mounted, some not. Those on foot marched alongside ponies dragging travois piled with gear. Some of the very old rode on the drags. The huge pony herd brought up the rear.
There was much to be amazed at. The sheer size of the column, the speed with which it traveled, the incredible racket it made, the marvel of organization that gave everyone a place and a job.
But what Lieutenant Dunbar found most extraordinary of all was his own treatment. Literally overnight he had gone from one who was eyed by the band with suspicion or indifference to a person of genuine standing. The women smiled openly at him now and the warriors went so far as to share their jokes with him. The children, of which there were many, constantly sought out his company and occasionally made themselves a nuisance.
In treating him this way the Comanches revealed an altogether new side of themselves, reversing the stoic, guarded appearance they had presented to him in the past. Now they were an unabashed, thoroughly cheerful people, and it made Lieutenant Dunbar the same.
The arrival of the buffalo would have brightened the lagging Comanche spirits in any event, but the lieutenant knew as the column struck out across the prairie that his presence added a certain luster to the undertaking, and he rode a little taller at the thought of that.
Long before they reached Fort Sedgewick, scouts brought word that a big trail had been found where the lieutenant said it would be, and more men were immediately dispatched to locate the main herd’s grazing area.
/>
Each scout took several fresh mounts in two. They would ride until they found the herd, then come back to the column to report its size and how many miles away it was. They would also report the presence of any enemies who might be lurking around the Comanche hunting grounds.
As the column passed by, Dunbar made a brief stop at the fort. He gathered a supply of tobacco, his revolver and rifle, a tunic, a grain ration for Cisco, and was back at the side of Kicking Bird and his assistants within a matter of minutes.
After they’d crossed the river, Kicking Bird motioned him forward and the two men rode beyond the head of the column. It was then that Dunbar got his first look at the buffalo trail: a gigantic swath of torn-up ground a half mile wide, sweeping over the prairie like some immense, dung-littered highway.
Kicking Bird was describing something in signs that the lieutenant couldn’t fully grasp when two puffs of dust appeared on the horizon. The dust swirls gradually became riders. A pair of returning scouts.
Leading spare mounts, they came in at a gallop and pulled up directly in front of Ten Bears’s entourage to make their report.
Kicking Bird rode over to confer, and Dunbar, not knowing what was being said, watched the medicine man closely, hoping to divine something from his expression.
What he saw didn’t help him much. If he’d known the language, he would have understood that the herd had stopped to graze in a great valley about ten miles south of the column’s present position, a place they could easily reach by nightfall.
The conversation suddenly became animated and the lieutenant leaned reflexively forward as if to hear. The scouts were making long, sweeping gestures, first to the south and then to the east. The faces of their listeners grew markedly more somber, and after questioning the scouts a few moments more, Ten Bears held a council on horseback with his closest advisers.