Текст книги "Comanche Moon"

Автор книги: Larry McMurtry

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Текущая страница: 41 (всего у книги 46 страниц)

Behind his black lens he could no longer see the Colonel, which was how he preferred it. He wanted to think for a few minutes. Inez hated the black lens; she knew he could click the black lens and make her vanish from view.

But Colonel Soult was not in on the secret; he didn't know that he had just vanished from view.

All he could tell was that Blinders Scull, victor in fifteen engagements with the Rebs, was staring at him from behind the very blinders that had produced his nickname.

It made Colonel Soult distinctly uncomfortable, but no more uncomfortable, he felt sure, than having to journey back to Washington with the news that Scull had refused everything. The refusal would undoubtedly be taken as the result of his own inadequate diplomacy; he was unhappily aware that he had blundered by offering General Scull Texas before he had quite refused the whole West. If ^w of that misspeaking leaked out, the Colonel knew that his own next posting was not likely to be one that would appeal to Mrs.

Soult; if it happened to be west of Ohio, Mrs. Soult would be disturbed, it being her firm belief that Ohio was the westernmost point at which a civilized existence could be sustained. She had heard once of a frontiersman who, faced with a howling blizzard, had actually torn pages out of one of Mrs. Browning's books in order to start a fire; Mrs. Soult herself wrote a little poetry, mostly of a devotional nature–the report of the frontiersman and the fire struck her as evidence enough that, beyond Ohio, there was only barbarism and blizzards.

General Scull, secure behind his blinders, was reflecting on the fact that he had abruptly stopped hopping during the siege of Viicksburg. The flea malady, as he called it, that had seized him while in Ahumado's pit had left him because of a particularly loud cannon blast one gray morning in Mississippi. He had been hopping uncontrollably, to the bewilderment of his troops, when the cannon boomed in his ear; since then he had not indulged in a single hop.

Now he had been offered the West, land of distances and sky, the place where the last unpacified aboriginal people dwelled. He had been at a conclave once attended by a few Cheyenne and thought he had never seen a handsomer people.

The necessity of blasting and starving them into line with territorial policy did not appeal to him. It was a job he could happily refuse.

When he remembered Texas, though, he found himself unable to be quite so immediate or so categorical in his refusal. He had enjoyed tramping the plains at the head of his ranger troop–it beat mowing down his cousins from the Carolinas, or Inez's cousins from Georgia. He remembered his sharp engagements with Buffalo Hump, an enemy he had never even really seen, at close range. He remembered the daring thievery of Kicking Wolf, and the loquacity of the tracker Famous Shoes. In particular Scull remembered Ahumado, the Black Vaquero, the pit, the cages, the raw pigeons, and the blistering his brain suffered once the old Mayan had taken off his eyelids.

His friend Freddie Catherwood and his companion Johnnie Stephens had regaled him several times with tales of Chiapas and the Yucatan.

Catherwood had even given him a portfolio of drawings of lost temples in the Yucatan, made on his last journey with Johnnie Stephens.

Ahumado, he recalled, had been a man of the south, of the very regions Catherwood and Stephens had explored. Scull felt he might go someday and see the jungles and the temples, the place that had spawned his shrewdest foe.

But Ahumado, if alive, was in Mexico, whereas Texas was the theater he was being offered. He wondered which of the men he had once led were still alive, and whether Buffalo Hump still held the great Palo Duro Canyon. Scull had kept up, as best he could, with the battle reports from Texas, but it had been years since he had seen Buffalo Hump's name mentioned in connection with a raid. Like most great chiefs, his name had simply dropped from history, once he grew old.

It occurred to him, as he hid behind his blinders, that the one good reason for going back to Texas was Inez. Since there was no way to control her it was no doubt better to turn her loose on a frontier than in the somber streets of Boston.

The cattle business was booming, from what he could read. With cowboys and cattle barons to amuse her Inez might be content, for a year or two.

But Inez was in Cuba, mistress now to the greatest plantation on the island. There was no telling when or if she would return, and, in any case, experience persuaded him that it was seldom wise to return to a theater he had left. There were far too many places in the world that he hadn't seen to waste his years revisiting those he had already been to. Johnnie Stephens had been to Persia and was enthusiastic about it, going on and on about the blue mosques and the long light.

Then there was the impediment of his book. All during the war sentences and paragraphs had boiled up in his brain; he had scribbled them down on every imaginable article, including, on occasion, his saddlebags. He had worn out a whole set of Pickering's excellent little Diamond Classics, thumbing through them during intervals in battle for chance references to eyelids.

When at last he clicked his lenses and brought Colonel Soult back into focus he saw that the man was almost shaking with anxiety. Battle itself could have hardly unnerved him more than his hour in the dim old mansion on Beacon Hill.

"They thought if I came myself, to bring you their respects in person, maybe you would consider a command in the West," Colonel Soult said. "Some part of the West, at least, General." The Colonel saw from the set of General Scull's jaw that he was about to deliver a refusal. Sam Soult had not served as a subordinate to seven generals not to know when he was about to get a no rather than a yes.

"Thank them kindly, Colonel, but as you can see I'm a man of the library now," Scull said. "I've just served five years in a great war –the only struggle that still interests me is the conflict with the sentence, sir–the English sentence." Colonel Soult had got the refusal he expected, but the grounds the General gave confused him.

"Excuse me, General–the sentence?" Colonel Soult replied.

Scull seized a blank sheet of foolscap and waved it dramatically in front of Colonel Soult's face–it might make the man's job easier if he could be sent back to Washington with the conviction that the great General Inish Scull was a little teched.

"See this page of paper? It's blank," Scull said. "That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir– this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it's harder than fighting Lee.

Why, it's harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, which is why I can't oblige the President, or the generals who sent you here." Then he leaned back and smiled.

"Besides, they just want one to go back and eat dust so they won't have to," he said. "I won't do it, sir. That's my final ^w." "Well, if you won't, you won't, General," Colonel Soult said. It was a dictum he was to repeat to himself many times on the somber train ride back to Washington. General Scull had said no, which meant that he himself could look forward to a posting well west of Ohio, where Mrs. Browning's books were considered little better than kindling. Sam Soult knew well that it would greatly dismay his wife.

Famous Shoes was travelling by night, covering as much ground as he could, when he heard the singing to the south. At first, when he was far from the singer, he thought the faint sound he heard might be a wolf, but as he came closer he realized it was a Comanche, though only one Comanche. All that was very curious. Why would a single Comanche be singing by himself at night, on the llano?

He himself had been to the Cimarron River, where a few old people of his tribe still held out. He had been showing some of the flints he had found while tracking Captain McCrae to some of the oldest of the Kickapoos. Over the years since his discovery he had shown the flints to most of the oldest members of his tribe, and they had been impressed. He had been back several times to the place where he found the flints, and had located so many arrowheads and spearheads that he had to take a sack with him, to carry them. He had found a fine hiding place, too, on the Guadalupe River, a small cave well concealed by bushes, which is where he hid the flints that had been made by the Old p.

His one disappointment was that he had never found the hole where the People emerged from the earth. He had talked about the hole so much that the Kickapoos had come to consider him rather a bore. Of course, the hole where the People had emerged was important, but they themselves did not have time to look for it and had lost interest in talking to Famous Shoes about it.

It was while returning from his trip to the Cimarron that Famous Shoes had the misfortune to run into three of Blue Duck's half-breed renegades. They had just ambushed an elderly white man who was riding a fine gray horse.

It was the white man Famous Shoes saw first.

He had been shot two or three times, stripped of all his clothes, and left to die. When Famous Shoes spotted him he had just stumbled into a little gully; by the time Famous Shoes reached him he was staring the stare of death, though he was still breathing a little.

Then the renegades themselves came riding down into the gully. One of them rode the old man's fine horse and the others had donned pieces of his clothing, which was better clothing than their filthy rags.

"Leave him alone, he is ours," one of the renegades said insolently.

Famous Shoes was startled by the bad tone the renegades adopted. Apparently they had decided to torture the dying man a little, but before they could start the man coughed up a great flood of blood, and died.

"He is not yours now," Famous Shoes pointed out. "He is dead." "No, he is still ours," the renegade said. The three renegades were drunk. They began to hack the old man up–soon they had blood all over the clothes they had taken from him.

While the renegades were cutting up the old man, Famous Shoes left. They were in such a frenzy of hacking and ripping that they didn't notice him leaving. He was a mile away before one of the drunken killers decided to pursue him. It was not the bandit who had taken the gray horse; that man was called Lean Head.

The man who pursued Famous Shoes was a skinny fellow with a purple birthmark on his neck. Birthmarks brought either good luck or bad, and this bandit's did not bring him good luck.

Famous Shoes noticed the other two bandits riding off in the direction the old man had come from.

No doubt they wanted to scavenge among his possessions a little more thoroughly.

Because the skinny renegade was alone, and his companions headed in the other direction, Famous Shoes saw no reason not to kill his pursuer, which he did with dispatch. He had a bow and a few arrows with him which he used to provide himself with game. When the renegade loped up behind him Famous Shoes turned and put three arrows in him before the man could catch his breath. In fact, the renegade never did catch his breath again. He opened his mouth to yell for help, but before he could yell Famous Shoes pulled him off the horse and cut his throat–then he grabbed the horse's bridle and cut the horse's throat too. The horse was as skinny as the rider; Famous Shoes left them together, their lifeblood ebbing into the prairie. He left the arrows in the dead man– there were so many guns on the plains now that it was becoming rare to see a man killed with arrows. The renegades might be so ignorant that they could not tell Kickapoo arrows from any other; they might conclude that their friend had been killed by a passing Kiowa.

The renegades, though, were not quite so ignorant.

By the middle of the afternoon Famous Shoes saw their dust, far behind him. Once he knew they were pursuing him he turned due west, onto the llano. He was soon into a land of gullies–he skipped from rock to rock and walked so close to the edge of the gullies that the pursuers could not follow his steps without riding so close to the gullies that they risked falling in.

That night he only rested for an hour. However drunken or foolish the renegades might be, pursuit was likely to make them determined, or even bold. They would think that he was a rabbit they could run to ground. They would never think that since he had killed one of them he might kill them too. In general he preferred to avoid killing men, even rude, ignorant, dangerous men, for it meant setting a spirit loose that might become his enemy and conspire against him with witches.

He ran west into the llano all night and most of the next day, not merely to evade his pursuers but to put as much distance as possible between himself and the spirit of the dead man. Now that the skinny man was dead Famous Shoes began to worry about the birthmark, which might mean that the man had had an affinity with witches.

It was as he moved deeper into the waterless llano that he heard the faint singing, at night, and determined that it was made by a single Comanche.

Famous Shoes thought he ought to just pass by the Comanche, but the closer he came to the singing, the more curious he felt. Though he knew it was dangerous to approach a Comanche, in this case he could not resist. As he eased closer to the singer it became clear to him that the man was singing the song of his life. He was singing of his deeds and victories, of his defeats and sorrows, of the warriors he had known and the raids he had ridden on.

As he came closer Famous Shoes saw that the man was indeed alone. He had only a tiny fire, made of buffalo dung, and a dead horse lay nearby. The song he sang was both a life song and a death song: the warrior had decided to leave life and had sensibly decided to take his horse along with him, so that he could ride comfortably in the spirit world.

Famous Shoes decided that he wanted to know this warrior, who had chosen such a fine way to leave life. He didn't think the Comanche would turn on him and kill him–f listening to the life song that was a death song he knew that the warrior would probably not be interested in him at all.

He knew, though, that it was not polite to interrupt such a song. He waited where he was, napping a little, until the gray dawn came; then he stood up and walked toward the warrior, who was poking up his fire a little.

The warrior by the small fire did not rise when he saw Famous Shoes coming. His voice was a little hoarse, from all his singing. At first, when he saw Famous Shoes approaching, his look was indifferent, like the look of warriors so badly wounded in battle that their spirits were already leaving their bodies, or like the look of old people who were looking beyond, into the spirit home. The warrior was very thin and very tired. He had not eaten any of the dead horse that lay nearby; he was exhausted with the effort it took to get his life into the song.

Famous Shoes did not know him.

"I was passing and heard your song," Famous Shoes said. "Some of Blue Duck's men were chasing me. I had to kill one of them–t was two days ago." At mention of Blue Duck the warrior's expression changed from one of indifference to one of contempt.

"I was at the camp of Blue Duck," he said, in his hoarse voice. "He was camped on the Rio Rojo, near the forests. I did not stay.

They had a bear there and were mistreating it. The men with Blue Duck are only thieves. I am glad you killed one." He paused and looked into the fire.

"If I had been there I would have killed the other two," he said. "I did not like the way they abused the bear." Famous Shoes knew the man was in a state not far from death. It was most uncommon for a Comanche to say he would have fought along with a Kickapoo, since the two peoples were enemies, one of the other.

"What did they do to the bear?" he asked.

"I killed the bear," Idahi said, remembering the expression on the bear's face when he had walked up to shoot it. It had been a sad bear, broken by many beatings.

Though Idahi felt no anger at the Kickapoo who had stopped to talk with him, he did feel a great tiredness when he tried to speak to the man. He had been almost out of life, singing the song of his deeds, but the Kickapoo was not out of life at all. He was a fully living man, still curious about the things that living men did. Idahi found it hard to come back. He had turned inside him, toward the spirit time, and could not easily concern himself with Blue Duck or the things of fleshly life.

Famous Shoes saw that the Comanche was weary and only wanted to get on with his dying. Though he knew it was impolite to detain a person bent on travelling in the spirit time, he could not resist one more question.

"Why are you alone?" he asked.

The Comanche seemed a little annoyed by the question.

"You are alone yourself," he pointed out, with a touch of disdain.

"Yes, but I am merely travelling," Famous Shoes said. "You have killed your horse.

I don't think you want to travel any farther." Idahi thought the Kickapoo was a pesky fellow–t was the problem with Kickapoos. They were all pesky, continually asking questions about things that were none of their business. Probably that was one reason his own people always killed Kickapoos as soon as possible, when they happened on one of them. Idahi decided just to tell this Kickapoo what he wanted to know; maybe then he would leave so Idahi could continue singing his song.

"My people have gone to the place the whites wanted them to go," he said. "I did not want to go to that place, so I left. I went to be with the Antelope Comanche but they have nothing to eat. They live on mice and prairie dogs and roots they pull out of the ground. I am not a good hunter, so they did not want me.

"None of the Comanches have much to eat now," he added.

"But the Comanches have many horses," Famous Shoes reminded him. It had always struck him as a vanity that the Comanches were so reluctant to eat their horses. They were not practical people like the Kickapoo, who would as cheerfully eat a horse as a deer or buffalo.

Idahi didn't answer. Of course the Comanches had horses–even the Antelopes had quite a few horses. But Quanah, war chief of the Antelopes, still meant to fight the Texans, and fighting men could not afford to eat their mounts while they still contemplated war. Their horses were their power; without horses they would not really be Comanches anymore. He did not want to talk of this to the Kickapoo, so he began to sing again, although in a faint voice.

Famous Shoes knew he had stayed long enough. The Comanche had chosen to go on and die, which was a wise thing. His own people had gone onto the reservation, and the other bands of Comanches did not want him. Probably the warrior was tired of being hungry and alone and had decided to go on to the place that was well peopled by spirits.

"I am going on with my travelling," Famous Shoes told him. "I hope those two renegades who ride with Blue Duck do not bother you–they are very rude." Idahi did not respond to the remark. He was remembering a feast his people had once had, when they had managed to stampede a herd of buffalo off a cliff into the Palo Duro.

There had been meat enough for the whole band to feast for a week–one or two of the neighboring bands had come too.

Famous Shoes did not have much food either; he did not like prairie dog meat, which was the easiest meat to obtain on the dry llano. He would have liked to take a little horsemeat from the Comanche warrior's dead horse, but he knew that it would not be a polite thing to do.

The lone Comanche who had decided to die sang his final song so faintly that before Famous Shoes had taken many steps he could no longer hear him singing.

Kicking Wolf was the last person in the tribe to have a conversation with Buffalo Hump, and the conversation, as usual, had been about horses.

Both of Buffalo Hump's wives were now dead; of the two, Heavy Leg had lived the longer, though Lark was much the younger woman. Lark had foolishly let a deer kick her–though the deer was down and dying, it still managed to kick Lark so badly in the ribs that she began to spit blood.

Within two days she was dead. Heavy Leg had not been foolish in regard to dying deer, but, in the winter, she had died anyway, leaving Buffalo Hump with no one to tend his lodge.

Of course, Buffalo Hump possessed many horses. He could easily have bought himself another wife, but he didn't. The young women still tittered about the old chief's hump. Some of them wondered what it would be like to couple with such a man, but none of them found out because Buffalo Hump ignored them.

Although his lodge soon grew tattered and poorly kept, and he had to prepare his own meals, he did not send for a new wife, or seek one. He spent most of his days sitting on his favorite pinnacle of rock, watching the hawks and eagles soar high above the canyon. He had no visitors. Many of the young people of the tribe had forgotten that he had ever been a chief. Only when there was singing and a few of the old warriors sang about the thousand-warrior raid was Buffalo Hump recalled.

Buffalo Hump himself kept apart from the singing, which, itself, had become a rare thing. Singing was most likely to happen when there was a feast; since there was less and less to feast on, there were fewer and fewer feasts.

Kicking Wolf, of course, was still an active horse thief. He seldom fired a gun at a Texan, and seldom was fired at, preferring, as always, to work at night and depend on stealth.

The reason Kicking Wolf sought out Buffalo Hump was because he wanted his opinion on the horse herd. Peta, the war chief, thought there could never be too many horses, the result being that almost two thousand grazed on the grasslands near the camp.

Kicking Wolf's view was different. He thought there could be too many horses. He wanted to divide the horse herd and give some of the horses to the other bands that were still free. He even favored driving some of the horses away alt, letting them go wild, and he thought his arguments were sound. Having so many horses together made it easier for the bluecoat soldiers to find them. There was not enough grass in the canyon itself to graze so many horses, and their presence kept the buffalo from coming back.

Kicking Wolf was a firm believer in the return of the buffalo. There had been too many buffalo simply to vanish. They had gone north, he believed, because they did not like the smell of the whites, or the smell of their cattle, either. But the buffalo were not gone from the earth; they had merely gone north. Someday they would return to the southern plains–they would, at least, if the People were patient and respectful and did not graze out the plains with too many horses.

When Kicking Wolf found Buffalo Hump he had just climbed down from his rock. It was a hard climb, almost beyond Buffalo Hump's strength. He was sitting in a patch of shade, resting, when Kicking Wolf approached.

"Why do you climb that rock?" Kicking Wolf asked. "Haven't you climbed it enough in your life?" Buffalo Hump didn't answer–he found the question annoying. It was none of Kicking Wolf's business how many times he climbed the rock. In the last year or two he had not only grown indifferent to company, he had begun to find it irritating. Everyone who came to see him asked questions that were either stupid or impertinent.

Better to see no one than to see fools.

For himself, the one sad thing about climbing the rock was that he could no longer really see the hawks and eagles. He knew they were there; sometimes he could almost feel their flight, but he could not see them as he had seen them when he was a younger man. Now his eyes would water when he tried to look hard at a flying bird or even a running deer. Sometimes he would think he saw a jackrabbit, sitting for a moment, but when he came closer the jackrabbit would become a rock or a clump of grass. The plains became a blur now, when he tried to look across them to some distant point. Often his ears were of more use than his eyes–he could tell what animals were near by listening. He could hear an armadillo scratching, hear the slow walk of a possum. [ it not for his skill at snaring small game, he would have had a hard time finding food.

He did not mention his problems to Kicking Wolf–z always, Kicking Wolf had only one thing on his mind, which was horses. He immediately started talking about the horse herd–it was too big, it needed to be divided, it would lead the soldiers to them, it would keep the buffalo from returning. Buffalo Hump had heard it all before. The only part he felt like responding to was the nonsense about the buffalo. It annoyed him that an experienced warrior such as Kicking Wolf, a horse Comanche all his life, could be so foolish as to think that the size of the horse herd had anything to do with the disappearance of the buffalo. What were a thousand horses, or two thousand, to the millions of buffalo that had once roamed the prairies?

"The buffalo won't come back," he said angrily.

Kicking Wolf was startled by the anger in Buffalo Hump's voice–the old chief had seemed half asleep, his eyes staring vacantly across the prairie. But his voice, when he spoke, was the voice of the fighter, the man whose cold eyes had made even brave warriors want to run.

"The buffalo will return," Kicking Wolf said. "They have only gone to the north for a while.

The buffalo have always returned." "You are a fool," Buffalo Hump said.

"The buffalo won't return, because they are dead.

The whites have killed them. When you go north you will only find their bones." "The whites have killed many, but not all," Kicking Wolf insisted. "They have only gone to the Missouri River to live. When we have beaten the whites back they will return." But, as he was speaking, Kicking Wolf suddenly lost heart. He realized that Buffalo Hump was right, and that the ^ws he had just spoken .were the ^ws of a fool. The Comanches were not beating the whites, and they were not going to beat them. Only their own band and three or four others were still free Comanches. The bands that were free were the bands that could survive on the least, those who would eat small animals and dig roots from the earth. Already the bluecoat soldiers had come back to Texas and begun to fill up the old forts, places they had abandoned while they fought one another. Even if all the free tribes banded together there would not be enough warriors to defeat the bluecoat soldiers. With the buffalo gone so far north, the white soldiers had only to drive them farther and farther into the llano, until they starved or gave up.

"The whites are not foolish," Buffalo Hump said. "They know that it is easier to kill a buffalo than it is to kill one of us. They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve–then they won't have to fight us. Those who don't want to starve will have to go where the whites want to put them." The two men sat in silence for a while. Some young men were racing their horses a little farther down the canyon. Kicking Wolf usually took a keen interest in such contests. He wanted to know which horses were fastest. But today he didn't care.

He felt too sad.

"The medicine men are deceiving the young warriors when they tell them the buffalo will return," Buffalo Hump said. "If any buffalo come back they will only be ghost buffalo. Their ghosts might return because they remember these lands. But that will not help us. We cannot eat their ghosts." Thinking about the buffalo–how many there had once been; not a one remaining on the comancher@ia –Kicking Wolf grew so heavy with sadness that he could not speak. He had never thought that such abundance could pass, yet it had. He thought that it would have been better to have fallen in battle than to have lived to see such greatness pass and go. The sadness was so deep that no more ^ws came out of his throat. He got up and walked away without another ^w.

Buffalo Hump continued to sit, resting. He could scarcely see the horses racing on the prairie, though he could hear the drum of their hoofbeats. He was glad that Kicking Wolf had left. He did not like it anymore when people took up his time, talking foolishness about the buffalo returning. The medicine men thought that their ranting and praying could make the white buffalo hunters die, but it would surely be the other way around: the white buffalo hunters, with guns so powerful that they could shoot nearly to the horizon, would be making the medicine men die. Worm had already been killed by one of the long-shooting guns; of course old Worm had been crazy at the time.

He had smeared himself with a potion made from weasel glands and eagle droppings, convinced that it would stop a bullet–a buffalo hunter with a good aim had proven him wrong.

Later that day Buffalo Hump walked through the horse herd until he located his oldest horse, a thin gelding whose teeth were only stumps. That night he took his bow and arrows, his lance, and a few snares, and left the camp on the old horse. No one heard him go and no one would have carred if they had heard. Buffalo Hump thought the horse might be too old to climb the steep trail out of the canyon, but the horse was eager to go and climbed the trail as quickly as if he were a young colt again, snorting like a wild horse might snort.

When he reached the lip of the canyon Buffalo Hump didn't stop–he rode north and west, all night, only stopping when dawn touched the sky. He wanted to ride to the empty places, the land where he was not likely to meet any of the People, or any whites either. He had left the tribe forever–he wanted to see no more humans. Most of the talk of human beings was silly talk, talk that was of less weight than a man's breath. He had taken leave of all such silliness. He wanted to go where he could only hear the wind, and whatever animals might be moving near him–the little animals, ground squirrels and mice, that lived under the grass.