Dances With Wolves (15 page)

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.

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.

Shortly, two riders broke away from the meeting and galloped back down the line. while they were gone Kicking Bird glanced once at the lieutenant, and Dunbar knew his face well enough now to know that this expression meant not all was as it should be.

Hoofbeats sounded behind him, and the lieutenant turned to see a dozen warriors charging to the front of the line. The fierce one was leading them.

They stopped next to Ten Bears’s group, held a brief consultation, and, taking one of the scouts with them, flew off in an easterly direction.

The column began to move again, and as Kicking Bird came back to his place next to the white soldier, he could see that the lieutenant’s eyes were full of questions. It was not possible to explain this thing to him, this bad omen.

Enemies had been discovered in the neighborhood, mysterious enemies from another world. By their deeds they had proved themselves to be people without value and without soul, wanton slaughterers with no regard for Comanche rights. It was important to punish them.

So Kicking Bird avoided the lieutenant’s questioning eyes. Instead, he watched the dust of Wind In His Hair’s party trail off to the east and said a silent prayer for the success of their mission.

two

From the moment he saw the little rose-colored bumps rising in the distance, he knew he was coming on to something ugly. There were black specks on the rose-colored bumps, and as the column drew closer, he could see that they were moving. Even the air seemed suddenly closer and the lieutenant loosened another button on his tunic.

Kicking Bird had brought him to the front with a purpose. But his intention was not to punish. It was to educate, and the education could best be served by seeing rather than talking. The impact would be greater in front. It would be greater for both of them. Kicking Bird had never seen this sight, either.

Like mercury in a thermometer, a bilious mixture of revulsion and lament climbed steadily in Lieutenant Dunbar’s throat. He had to swallow constantly to keep it from coming out as he and Kicking Bird led the column through the center of the killing ground.

He counted twenty-seven buffalo. And though he couldn’t count them, he figured there were at least as many ravens swarming over each body. In some cases the heads of the buffalo were covered with the battling black birds, screaming and twisting and flopping as they fought for the eyeballs. Those whose eyes had already been swallowed played host to larger swarms, which pecked ravenously as they strolled back and forth on the carcasses, defecating every so often as if to accent the richness of their feast.

Wolves were appearing from all directions. They would be crouching at the shoulders and haunches and bellies as soon as the column passed.

But there would be more than enough for every wolf and bird within miles. The lieutenant calculated roughly and came up with a figure of fifteen thousand. Fifteen thousand pounds of dead flesh decaying in the hot afternoon sun.

All this left to rot, he thought, wondering if some archenemy of his Indian friends had left this as a macabre warning.

Twenty-seven hides had been stripped away from neck to buttocks, and as he passed within feet of a particularly large animal, he saw that its open mouth held no tongue. Others had been robbed of their tongues, too. But that was all. Everything else had been left.

Lieutenant Dunbar suddenly thought of the dead man in the alley. Like these buffalo, the man had been lying on his side. The bullet that had been fired into the base of his skull had taken the right side of the man’s jaw out when it exited.

He had been just John Dunbar then, a fourteen-year-old boy. In succeeding years he’d seen scores of dead men: with whole faces missing, men whose brains leaked onto the ground like spilled mush. But the first dead man was the one he remembered best. Mainly because of the fingers.

He’d been standing right behind the constable when it was discovered that two of the dead man’s fingers had been sliced off. The constable had looked around and said to no one in particular, “This fella got killed for his rings.”

And now these buffalo lying dead on the ground, their guts spread all over the prairie just because someone wanted their tongues and hides. It struck Dunbar as the same kind of crime.

When he saw an unborn calf, half hanging from its mother’s slit abdomen, the same word he’d first heard that evening in the alley jumped into his mind like a glowing sign.

Murder.

He glanced at Kicking Bird. The medicine man was staring at the wreckage of the unborn calf, his face a long, sober mask.

Lieutenant Dunbar turned away then and looked back along the column. The whole band was weaving its way through the carnage. Hungry as they were after weeks of scraps, no one had stopped to help himself or herself to the bounty spread out around them. The voices that had been so raucous all morning were now stilled, and he could see in their faces the melancholy that comes from knowing a good trail has suddenly turned bad.

three

The horses were casting giant shadows by the time they reached the hunting grounds. While the women and children set to work pitching camp in the lee of a long ridge, most of the men rode ahead to scout the herd before night fell.

Lieutenant Dunbar went with them.

About a mile from the new camp they rendezvoused with three scouts who had made a little camp of their own a hundred yards from the mouth of a wide draw.

Leaving their horses below, sixty Comanche warriors and one white man started quietly up the long western slope leading out of the draw. As they neared the crest, everyone dropped close to the ground and crawled the final yards.

The lieutenant looked expectantly at Kicking Bird and was met with a shallow smile. The medicine man pointed ahead and put a finger to his lips. Dunbar knew they had arrived.

A few feet in front of him the earth fell away to nothing but sky, and he realized they had surmounted the back side of a cliff. The stiff prairie breeze bit into his face as he lifted his head and peered into a great depression a hundred feet below.

It was a magnificent dish of a valley, four or five miles wide and at least ten miles across. Grass of the most luxuriant variety was rippling everywhere.

But the lieutenant barely noticed the grass or the valley or its dimensions. Even the sky, now building with clouds, and the sinking sun, with its miraculous display of cathedral rays, could not compare with the great, living blanket of buffalo that covered the valley floor.

That this many creatures existed, let alone occupied the same immediate space, set the lieutenant’s mind spinning with incalculable figures. Fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand? Could there be more? His brain backed away from the enormity of it.

He didn’t shout or jump or whisper to himself in awe. Witnessing this put everything but that which he was seeing in suspension. He didn’t feel the little, odd-sized rocks pinching against his body. When a blue wasp landed on the point of his slackened jaw he didn’t brush at it. All he could do was blink at the coating of wonder that glazed his eyes.

He was watching a miracle.

When Kicking Bird tapped him on the shoulder, he realized his mouth had been open the whole time. It was parched dry by the prairie wind.

He swung his head dully and looked back along the slope.

The Indians had started down.

four

They had been riding in darkness for half an hour when the fires appeared, like faraway dots. The strangeness of it was like a dream. Home, he thought. That’s home.

How could it be? A temporary camp of fires on a distant plain, peopled by two hundred aborigines whose skin was different than his, whose language was a tangle of grunts and shouts, whose beliefs were yet a mystery and probably always would be.

But tonight he was very tired. Tonight it promised the comfort of a birthplace. It was home and he was glad to see it. The others, the scores of half-naked men with whom he’d been riding the last few miles, were glad to see it, too. They had begun talking again. The horses could smell it. They were walking high on their toes now, trying to break into a trot.

He wished he could see Kicking Bird among the vague shapes around him. The medicine man said a lot with his eyes, and out here in the darkness, bunched so intimately with these wild men as they approached their wild camp, he felt helpless without Kicking Bird’s telling eyes.

A half mile out he could hear voices and the beat of drums. A buzzing swept the ranks of his fellow riders and suddenly the horses surged into a run. They were packed so tightly and moving at such a good clip that, for a moment, Lieutenant Dunbar felt part of an unstoppable energy, a breaking wave of men and horses that no one would dare to oppose.

The men were yipping, high and shrill, like coyotes, and Dunbar, caught up as he was in the excitement, let out a few barks of his own.

He could see the flames of the fires and the silhouettes of people milling about the camp. They were aware of the returning riders now and some were running onto the prairie to meet them.

He had a funny feeling about the camp, a feeling that told him it was unusually agitated, that something out of the ordinary had happened during their absence. His eyes widened as he rode closer, trying to pick up some clue that would tell him what was different.

Then he saw the wagon, parked at the fringes of the largest fire, as out of place as a fine carriage floating on the surface of the sea.

There were white people in camp.

He pulled Cisco up hard, letting the other riders blow past while he hung back to collect his thoughts.

The wagon looked crude to him, a thing of ugliness. As Cisco danced nervously under him, the lieutenant was startled by his own thoughts. He imagined the voices that had come with it, he didn’t want to hear them. He didn’t want to see the white faces that would be so eager to see his. He didn’t want to answer their questions. He didn’t want to hear the news he’d missed.

But he knew he had no choice. There was no place else to go. He fed Cisco a little rein and they walked forward slowly.

He paused when he was within fifty yards. The Indians were dancing about exuberantly as the men who had scouted the herd jumped off their horses. He waited for the ponies to clear out, then he scanned all the faces in his line of sight.