By comparison we were dumb as steers. They could not understand why they had not defeated us. Toshaway always said that white women laid crops of eggs like ducks, which hatched every night, so it didn’t matter how many you killed.
AS FOR ME, I dreamed about scraping hides and woke up with the feel of the scraper in my hands. Once a hide was scraped and dried, we took a rawhide bowl and mashed in whatever brains were around, tallow, soap water from yucca (which I had dug up, cut up, carried back to the camp, then pounded and boiled), and maybe some old liver. Bear tallow was used most of the time, and this was the main reason bears were killed. My father and the other frontiersmen considered bear meat and honey the king’s supper, but the Indians would only eat bear if there was no hoofed creature to be found.
As for the hides, if the hair was left on, you tanned one side; if the hair was off, you tanned both sides. Then it was the worst part of the process—two days of kneading and twisting to get the hide broken. The final step with buckskin was to smoke it to make it waterproof, though not if it was for trade.
ONE DAY IN August, Nuukaru caught up to me as I was fetching water. I was happy to see him as he’d been gone most of the summer, and even though we shared a tipi, we hardly got the chance to augur, because the women kept me working from can’t see to can’t see.
He’d come back from his last raid with a scalp, so even though he still looked like a boy, with bony arms and legs, the women now wanted his approval and the men invited him to their gambling. The Comanches had no ceremony for ending boyhood—no vision quests or hooks through the nipples—when you felt like it you started going on raids, watching the horses until gradually you were allowed into the fight.
“It’s women’s work,” he said, by way of greeting me.
I was carrying water up the hill. After I delivered it, I would go dig for potatoes in the mud. “They make me do it,” I said.
“So tell them you won’t.”
“Toshaway will beat me.”
“Definitely not.”
“Then his wives and mother and the neighbor woman will.”
“So what?”
We kept walking.
“What do I say to them?”
“Just stop doing it,” he said. “The rest is just details.”
We continued to climb the hill. The afternoon was cool and the women had not been asking so much of me. I saw no reason to stir the kettle. Nuukaru must have sensed this, because he turned and punched me suddenly in the groin. I went to my knees.
“For your own good you will give me your full attention now.”
I nodded. It occurred to me that in the old days I would have wanted to kill him; now I just hoped he wouldn’t hit me again.
“Everyone in the world wants to be Numunuu and here it is being given to you, but you are not taking it. When the Indians starve on their reservations, for instance the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Wichita, Shawnee, Seminole, Quapaw, Delaware”—he paused—“even the Apaches and Osages and plenty of Mexicans, they all want to join our band. They leave their reservations, they risk ooibehkaru, half of them die just trying to find us. And why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because we are free. They speak Comanche before they get here, Tiehteti. They speak their own language and they also speak Comanche. Do you know why?”
I looked after my water jug.
“Because Comanches don’t act like women.”
“I have to get the water,” I said.
“Whatever you want. But soon it’ll be too late and no one will think of you as anything but a na?raiboo.”
THE NEXT MORNING Toshaway’s wives and mother and the neighbor woman were straightening up camp. The men were sitting around the fire, smoking or eating breakfast.
“Get me some water, Tiehteti-taibo.” That was my full name. It meant Pathetic Little White Man. It was not bad as Comanche names went, and I went for the water carrier without thinking about it. Then I felt Nuukaru’s eyes on me.
“Go on,” said Toshaway’s daughter. She gave Nuukaru a look; she must have known what was happening. The work that wore me out had equally worn out her mother and grandmother, and if I quit, it would fall to them again.
“I’m not getting any more water,” I said. “Okwéetuku nu miaru.”
The neighbor woman, who had a voice like a burro and outweighed me by six or eight stone, picked up a hatchet in one hand and grabbed for my wrist with the other. I lit a shuck between the tipis, dodging around pots and equipment. The men were hooting and finally she threw the hatchet at my head, which, in my best stroke of luck in months, hit handle first. My bell was ringing but she stopped chasing me. She was trying to catch her breath. I slowed to a walk.
“I will kill you, Tiehteti.”
“Nasiinu,” I told her. Piss on yourself.
The men looked in the other direction and began to talk in loud voices about a hunting trip they were planning.
“I’m going to the river,” I repeated. “But I am not getting any more water.”
“In that case fetch some wood,” called Toshaway’s mother. “You don’t have to get water anymore.”
“No,” I said. “I’m done with those things.”
I followed the stream down to the Canadian and sat in the sun. There were elk on the opposite side and Indians a couple of furlongs downstream. I fell asleep awhile and woke up feeling narrow at the equator—I’d left camp before eating breakfast—but I had no knife and all I was wearing was a breechcloth. There were plenty of old mesquite beans, but I wanted meat, so I went into the cane and spent half an hour catching a turtle. Fish were taboo but turtles weren’t. I had nothing to kill him with so I carried him around until I found a good piece of rainbow flint, then stepped on his shell till his head stuck out and cut through his neck with my flint. I sucked down a bit of the blood and it was fishy but not too bad so I drank some more of it and then turned the turtle upside down and sucked him dry.
Then I thought my mother wouldn’t be happy if she saw me drinking turtle blood like a wild Indian. I figured I’d been with the Comanches six months, but I’d had no time to think, just work and sleep, and I wondered if my mind had been rubbed clean. When I thought of my mother I saw a pretty woman’s face, but part of me was not sure it was really her. I forgot about the turtle and sat down. I watched the other Indians downriver. They had a new captive with them, a red Mexican. I waved and they waved back. That made me feel better.
Meanwhile the turtle was still leaking blood. I wondered if Nuukaru was right or if he had played me for a gump. If the women were allowed to cut me up again—the only fun they ever got to have—it would be better to carry water.
I saw another turtle sunning himself and decided to catch him, then saw two more. After I cut their heads off I had nothing to make a fire. That was fine; I found some dead cedar and shaved off the bark. I found another flint to dig the notch for a fireboard and a short straight stick for the drill. My hands were hard and I got a coal in a few minutes and the tinder caught easily.
When Toshaway’s father rode up I was dozing in the grass with my belly full of turtle. He looked at the empty shells.
“You leave any for me, fat boy?”
“I didn’t know you were coming.”
He sat there on his horse, looking out over the river and thinking about things. “Get on behind me,” he finally said. “You don’t have to worry about the women anymore.”
THE NEXT MORNING I slept the latest I had in months, waking up to the sound of Nuukaru and Escuté chattering.
“The white one becomes a man,” said Nuukaru as I emerged from the tipi. I could not believe how long I’d slept.
“Actually,” said Escuté, “he has become a boy.” They offered me some meat they’d been roasting, and some sumac lemonade, a couple of small potatoes. We sat and smoked.
“What are we doing today?”
“We are doing nothing,” said Escuté. “You are going out with the other chi
ldren.”
I looked at them but they were not joking. Being retarded in all things they found important, the men had decided that I was best matched with the eight- and nine-year-olds.
BY THE AGE of ten, shooting a rough bow he made himself, a Comanche child could kill anything smaller than a buffalo. At the Council House Fight in San Antonio, when the great chiefs came in for peace talks and the whites massacred them, an eight-year-old Comanche boy, hearing the news that his people were betrayed, picked up his toy bow and shot the nearest white man through the heart. He was trying to retrieve his arrow when the mob of whites killed him.
The children I was sent to play with were smaller than they would have been if they had grown up among the Anglos, but they’d spent every minute of their short lives riding, shooting, and hunting. They could sit a horse that would have thrown any white man, they could hit each other with blunt arrows at a dead run. There had never been any church or lessons; in fact, nothing had ever been asked of them, except to do what came naturally, which was to be out hunting and tracking, playing at making war. By the time their short hairs came in they would be going on raids to watch the horses, until the practice for making war and the making of war itself had become the same thing.
They were also encouraged to steal, though only if the owner of the item were present, and only if the item were returned. Toshaway’s butcher knife was taken from his sheath as he ate lunch, his pistol was stolen from under his robe. The whites knew that an Indian could steal your horse while you were sleeping, even if you’d tied the reins around your wrist, and for a Comanche to say “that man is the best horse thief in our tribe” was nearly the highest compliment that could be paid, a way of saying that a person could walk into the heart of an enemy camp without being seen and, horses being common currency among both whites and Indians, was likely to become rich. The Comanches were just as happy to steal all the horses of a group of Rangers or settlers as they were to actually kill them, knowing that the buffalo wolves, mountain lions, or sparse water would eventually do them in.
AFTER A FEW weeks of instruction I was considered ready to go hunting with the bow, and so three other boys and I went down to the canebrakes near the river and sat waiting a long time. There was nothing moving and one of the boys took a section of reed and put it in his mouth, which, when he blew through it, made a sound like a fawn in distress. Within a few moments we heard stamping, then nothing, and then more stamping. Then I saw a doe walking slowly through the tall grass and blowdown. She pricked her ears and looked straight at me and I knew I couldn’t draw the bow without her seeing me. Not to mention arrows wouldn’t cut through the frontal bones, only the ribs.
The ten-year-old made a noise with his mouth that seemed to come from the other side of the thicket. The doe turned her head, but her body was still facing us.
“Now would be a good time to shoot,” he whispered.
“But the chest . . .”
“Shoot her in the neck.”
“Remember to aim low so she ducks into it.”
I drew the bow and began to feel better about everything—the deer still hadn’t moved—but at the sound of the string she crouched and took a leap. By a miracle the arrow went into her, but it only cut muscle. Then she was running at full speed with her flag up.
The youngest one shook his head. “Yee,” he said, “Tiehteti tsa? awinu.”
“What do you think?” I said.
“Aitu,” said the oldest. “Very poor. We will be tracking her all day.”
The others sighed.
We snuck down to the river and looked for turtles to catch, made a few snares, and when the boys decided the doe had calmed down and likely begun to stiffen from her wound, we followed her through featureless tall grass to where she was bedded a half mile away, using four spots of blood and a scuffed patch of moss on a log. She took off running but was hit with three more arrows. We sat awhile longer and when we found her again she was dead.
I said: “That seemed like cheating, using the call to bring her in.”
“So next time get closer and use a lance.”
“Or a knife.”
“Or go after a bear.”
“I was only saying about the fawn call.”
The oldest one waved his hand impatiently. “We were told to bring a deer back, Tiehteti, and they’d be mad if we didn’t get one. And next time you might try to break the neck so we don’t have to track the deer all day.”
“It would also be fine to hit one of the big arteries.”
“You’re rolling your fingers,” said the eight-year-old. He drew an imaginary bow. “You have to pop them away from the string.”
“Like we showed you,” said the oldest.
I didn’t say anything.
“If you roll your string, you will never shoot straight.”
“Toshaway will tell you I’m a good shot with a gun.”
“So go find us a sapling, Mr. Good Shot.”
THE BOYS MADE their own bows and arrows, but the people who made the real weapons were the old men, retired warriors who had become too blind or too slow to go on raids, or maybe their wind had given out, or maybe, unbelievably to us, they had grown tired of killing and wanted to spend their last years making items of an artistic nature.
Osage was preferred for the bows—though ash, mulberry, or hickory could substitute—and dogwood for the arrows. We carried the big ohapuupi seeds with us, planting them anywhere they might grow, and as this had been done by the various tribes for hundreds or maybe thousands of years, bois d’arc trees were found all along the plains. Equally important was the parua, or dogwood. When we found a grove of them we would prune back the trunks almost to the ground. The next spring each trunk would send out dozens of thin new shoots, which grew very straight and were easy to make into good arrows. The location of these arrow groves was kept track of, and they were harvested carefully, making sure that the trees would survive.
A regular bow—better than any factory could make today—was worth one horse. The upper and lower limbs had to release with even pressure while pulling a specific weight at a specific distance from the grip. A fancy or unusually good bow was worth two or three horses. They were all about a yard in length (short compared to the eastern tribes’, as, unlike them, we fought from horseback) and backed with the spine sinews from a deer or buffalo. If times were bad, the bowyers would turn out bows very quickly; if times were good—if our warriors were not being killed and their equipment not being lost on raids—the bowyers would take their time and their bows would be the stuff of legend.
Arrows were no different. It could take half a day to make one just right: straight, the proper length and stiffness, the feathers all in alignment—though in a single minute of fighting you might need two dozen. The shafts were felt and squeezed and held up to the light and straightened in the teeth. A crooked arrow was no different from a bent rifle barrel. The Comanches expected their bows to reach fifty yards when they were shooting quickly, hundreds of yards if they were taking their time. On a calm day I saw Toshaway kill an antelope at a full furlong, the first shot going over the animal’s back (though falling so quietly it was not noticed) the second falling just short, also in silence, and the third finally telling between the ribs.
The strings were commonly sinew, which when dry shot arrows the fastest but could not be depended on when wet. Some preferred horsehair, which shot slower but was reliable in all conditions, and still others preferred bear gut.
The best feathers for fletching were turkey feathers, but owl or buzzard feathers were also fine. Hawk or eagle feathers were never used as they were damaged by blood. The best shafts were grooved along their length. We used two grooves and the Lipan used four. This prevented the arrow from stanching the wound it had just cut, but it also kept the shaft from warping.
The blades of hunting arrows were fixed vertically, as the ribs of game animals are vertical to the earth. The blades of war arrows were fixed parallel to the eart
h, the same as human ribs. Hunting points were made without barbs and tied tightly to the shaft so they could be pulled from an animal and reused. War arrows had barbs and the blades were tied loosely, so that if the arrow was pulled, the head would remain lodged in the enemy’s body. If you were shot with a war arrow, it had to be pushed through the other side to be removed. By then all the white people knew that, though they did not know that we used different arrows for hunting.
All the plains tribes used arrows with three feathers, though some of the eastern bands used only two, which we looked down on, as they were not accurate. Of course the eastern Indians did not care much, as they lived on a weekly meat allowance from the white man and were drunk most of the time anyway, wishing they had died with their ancestors.
OCCASIONALLY, THROUGHOUT THE fall and winter, I would see the German girl who’d been taken captive with me. Most families had at least one slave or captive, often a young Mexican boy or girl, as Mexico was where they did most of their raiding and horse stealing—the Comanches’ toll on that country was on another scale, entire villages wiped out in a single night—Texans had nothing to complain about.
Of course there were numerous white captives as well, from settlements near Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio; there was a boy who had been snatched in far East Texas; there were captives from other tribes. But as I was considered to have a great future, I avoided talking to them.