Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 04
WAR CHIEFS
BILL DUGAN
Summer 1832
V
IEWED FROM HIGH
up on the ridge, the camp looked more like an anthill than the habitation of human beings. The conical structures, dun and buff colored, here and there darker brown, some painted with brilliant swirls of color, others left the same unadorned shade of tan they had been under the skinning knife, were scattered for nearly half a mile along the valley floor. The river, which curved in the bright sun, seemed poised like a blue-bladed scythe about to harvest the tipis. The specks of children darted in and out among them, their headlong turmoil as confusing as that of a swarm of gnats.
On the far side of the shallow river, two thousand or more horses grazed contentedly, sometimes snorting, sometimes dashing in short sprints, flexing muscles that hadn’t been used for several days. On the ridge, the heavy heads of hollyhock waved in the breeze, bees darted in
and out among the taller stems, and a thick carpet of flowers in reds, blues, and yellows followed the gentle curve of the slope all the way down to the village.
Standing just outside his tipi, Peta Nocona surveyed the hillside, glanced up at the sun, so hot it was almost white, bleaching the sky of its blue and threatening to parch everything for as far as he could see. Even the flowers on the hillside seemed pale under the brilliant glare. He watched a handful of young boys race toward the riverbank and splash out into the current. Their sun-brown feet kicked up curtains of gleaming silver as they waded in until the water was waist deep and it was no longer possible to run. Then they pushed out still deeper, their chests generating lengthening vees of blue water out behind them until, almost as one, they dove under the surface, disappearing in a sudden jungle of calves and ankles.
Nocona remembered when he had been young enough to play like that, when he didn’t have to worry about where the next buffalo would be found, when the next Osage war party would swoop down on the horse herds and the tipis, when the next hunting party would fall prey to Apaches. It hadn’t been that long, maybe twenty winters, but so much had happened in that time that it might as well have been twenty lifetimes.
He walked through the camp, nodding to friends, smiling at children who stopped what
they were doing to watch him pass. The attention came with being someone everyone knew would one day be a chief, and there were some who thought that’s all there was to it—smile, spread your arms wide, and gather in the glory. But those who thought that way couldn’t have been more wrong. Being chief was like living under a cloud, a cloud so dark it obscured even the most brilliant sun, so heavy it threatened to crush the air from a man’s lungs, make pulp of flesh and bone, grinding him to paste and then to powder, as if he were no more than a handful of corn between two great stones. They should only know what I know, he thought.
They should only know for one day what it was like to have the lives of so many people closed in your hand. Keeping them safe was like trying to hold a fistful of water. No matter how tightly you squeezed, drops managed to slip away, to land in the dust and disappear as surely as if they had never been. Try to save one, snatch it from the air as it fell, and you lost another and another. All you could do was watch, and try to keep the others safe. If you were naive enough to believe in the Great Spirit, you could pray for his guidance, but Nocona had seen too much to think it did any good. But still, he knew that one day those problems would be his, and he would accept them because the people demanded it, and a man did what his people asked of him. And he would ask the Great Spirit for help, with no great expectation of an asnwer.
After all, he thought, it was not just the Comanche who asked for His intercession. The Osage prayed, too, and the Apache and the Mexican. He had heard that even the Texans and other white men prayed to the Great Spirit. And it seemed to Nocona that the Great Spirit had a sense of humor of sorts, and a cold detachment that allowed him to stand by and watch while men struggled against one another the way a child stood by and watched armies of ants make war on one another, sometimes even egging the contenders on, not out of malice so much as just to see what might happen if this were done, or that were changed.
And later that day, he knew, he would be leaving the camp behind again, most of the warriors with him, and riding across the Rio Grande and into Mexico, where there were horses to be had for the taking. Others would try to stop the Comanche, of course. There would be Mexican soldiers, who were little trouble, and Apache, who were too much trouble. He wished there were some other way, not knowing what that other way might be, but he was wishing away a thousand years and more of history, trying to change what had always been, and substitute nothing more than the vague notion that another way might be better. He said so around the council fire, but the chiefs always laughed because when they asked what he proposed to take the place of life as they had always known it, all he could do was
shrug his shoulders. But he knew they had to change, because a change was coming, and it was better that the matter be decided by the Comanche than by others.
He reached the water’s edge and looked up at the sky once more. The sun was still there, watching him, patient, emotionless, the unblinking eye of a teacher who knows that a mistake will be made, if only he waits long enough. Nocona watched the boys swim for several minutes, feeling a pull to join them, as if somewhere deep inside him he carried some tenacious remnant of the boy he was in that time so long ago he barely remembered it now.
Without thinking, without even being aware of what he was doing, he waded out into the water, feeling the silky glide of the current as it pressed against, then swept past, his calves. The water was cool and clear, the blue color gone now that he was so close. He looked at the surface, like a sheet of silver one moment and the next as transparent as if it weren’t there at all. He saw a school of small fish, darting a few inches at a time, then stopping, their fins fluttering like rags in a stiff breeze. He half expected to hear the flap of cloth snapping, but there was nothing but the burble of water against his legs and, across the river, the shouts of the boys, to break the stillness.
Nocona leaned over, watching the fish, staring at them intently, as if he hoped to mesmerize them with his stare. Unblinkingly, the fish stared
back, hanging there suspended, frozen, only the pulsing of the gills and ragged wave of the fins to prove they were living things.
He let his hand slide into the water, then cupped the fingers. With a movement so sudden it startled him, the fish darted and he reached for them almost instinctively, his forearm throwing off a great wave that obliterated the transparency in a flash. He felt the tickle of a single fish against his palm for an instant as he closed his fingers, but knew that he had missed it even before he looked.
Withdrawing the hand, he stared at it for several seconds, conscious that there was no squirming in the closed fist. Slowly, he uncurled the fingers to find his hand empty of everything but the water which lay in a small pool in the bow of his palm. He watched the water as if not quite sure it was as empty as it seemed. The hand moved, and he saw the sun staring back at him from its center. Tilting the hand, he watched the sun vanish and the water trickle like liquid silver back into the river, each drop sending out a circle that disappeared within a few inches.
To himself, he whispered, “That’s all we are, a few drops of water in a great river that doesn’t know whether we are there or gone. And doesn’t care.”
He took a couple of steps out into the current, feeling the coolness climb past his knee to midthigh. Turning, he looked upriver for a long time, only dimly aware of the raucous laughter
of the boys. Turning again to stare, this time downstream, at the water that just a moment before had not yet reached him and now was already past and moving away as certainly as if he had never stood in its way, he shook his head.
A shout reached him then, and he turned to see several of the boys waving at him, their thin arms churning the air, beckoning him to join them. He smiled, wishing he could. One of them was his son, Little Calf, and the boy took a few strokes toward him. He wanted to say that he couldn’t, that he was too busy to join them, that he had things to do that were more important than flopping onto his belly and drifting like an otter on the sluggish current.
But before he could shape the words, he realized it would be a lie. He could do what he wanted, not because he was a great warrior, but because he was one of the people, and what was the point of being a man if he couldn’t do what he wanted when he wanted?
He dove then, landing with a slap that sent great waves in every direction. Digging in, he stroked rapidly across the river, until he sensed the boys in a school around him, darting just like the fish. He stopped then to dogpaddle, spitting a shining feather of water high into the air, then using his palms to send sheets of water like Mexican swords slicing just above the surface.
The boys squealed and used their own small hands to fight back, sending a dozen daggers for every saber. Nocona rolled onto his back and
stroked toward them, provoking squeals of fright that were half simulated and half real. Rolling back onto his stomach, he felt for the bottom with his feet and only then was conscious that he was still wearing his moccasins. He would be in trouble for that one.
The moccasins were nearly new, and his wife would surely skin him alive for his carelessness. He smiled at the thought. He could see her now, hands on hips, a skinning knife jutting out from one clenched fist, as if she had grown a steel spine. But in the end, he knew, she would shake her head more in amazement than resignation that such an influential man could also be such a fool. Then, in the manner of all husbands since Adam, he shrugged and turned back to his fun. She might not understand, but she would forgive, in a day or two. It was too late, in any case, to undo the damage.
During the brief period of inattention, the boys had rallied, quieted down enough to sneak closer and when he turned back to the business at hand, he found himself surrounded. With an earsplitting shriek, the boys charged ahead, most of them too short to stand on the bottom, treading water as they flailed their arms and sent sheets of water cascading over him from every direction.
With a roar, he swept his arms in a broad half circle, setting off a tidal wave that pushed the boys back, and he dove under, heading straight for the legs of his son, Little Calf. Sliding under,
he rose to the surface, with Little Calf on his back. Then he lifted the boy high in the air and tossed him away.
Little Calf landed like a huge stone, and sent another wave across the current. Spluttering and laughing, he surfaced, raised a fist, and charged back into the fray.
Nocona, knowing when to retreat, stroked for the far shore, and hauled himself out dripping and laughing. Instinctively, he glanced at the new moccasins, shook his head and took a deep breath. He swept his gaze from one end of the camp to the other, and it seemed as if the river was a kind of screen, one that gave him some detachment. It didn’t matter for that moment that it was his village and that its people were his people, people who depended on him to make decisions and who, if they chose, one day would follow him, but
only
if they chose. It was only by making his decisions wisely that he would keep his authority.
And at the moment, the prospect of that authority seemed like a burden, instead of the gift it was meant to be. Still dripping wet, Nocona walked away from the river, toward the huge herd of horses. It was a motley assortment—large American horses stolen from Texans, wild mustangs run down on the Llano Estacado, the smaller, more delicate Mexican horses.
Looking at the animals, Nocona wondered how it came to be that the Comanche could
have become so dependent on an animal they had first seen not that long ago. In less than three hundred years, the horse had revolutionized a way of life that had persisted for four times that long. The old ones were full of stories handed down from grandfather after grandfather, and no one knew exactly how many winters it was that the first Comanche had climbed onto the back of a horse—but it was a long time, everyone agreed on that.
And now, the slender ankles of the animals were all that kept the Comanche from starvation or, worse, death at the hands of the Osage or the Pawnee or the Apache. It was hard to know whether the gift of the horse was a blessing or a curse. But it no longer mattered which. The Comanche were hooked, and that could not be undone.
Pushing through the herd, Nocona climbed the gentle slope all the way to the wooded ridge beyond it. When he reached the crest, he sat down, his back against a cottonwood, and thought about the coming war party. Everything he saw spread out before him could be wiped out in one blinding flash. He might ride into Mexico never to return. He wasn’t afraid, he was too much of a warrior for that and, too much of a fatalist. But the thought made him sad all the same.
He wondered if he were to die whether he would still be able to see the wonders of this world. Would he be able to watch Little Calf
grow to manhood? Or White Heron take off her dress and wade out into a pool draped in willows to bathe, the way he had first seen her? Would he be able to warn his people if danger threatened to take them by surprise, or kill a buffalo for a starving old grandmother who had no one to care for her?
He wanted to think so, but he just didn’t know. Dying didn’t frighten him, not anymore, not like it used to. But the thought that he would never again be part of his people’s lives filled him with a thick gloom shot through with streaks of terror, like lightning flashes in a winter storm.
And he closed his eyes to listen to the wind in the leaves high above him.