Comanche Dawn (14 page)

Horseback watched his own flint point arch high—too high he feared—then saw it slant down and disappear in the cow's flank just over the tuft of hair that served as his target. The wounded animal jumped straight up to a height that seemed impossible for an animal her size and came down on legs that were already running. Veering toward the river, she ran into a yearling calf, knocking it down as she fled in pain and terror.

The other wounded animals acted the same way, sending an instant scare through the herd, as a whole flock of blackbirds would suddenly move almost as one in the sky by some spirit's power. Only two of the wounded buffalo fell in view of the hunters, one of them being the cow that had been shot twice. The others scattered with the fleeing herd, making the whole valley tremble and livening the air with sounds of snapping branches down in the timber.

Flinging his robe aside, Horseback started sprinting back up the draw as the other hunters watched the herd run. There were sounds of splashing water coming faintly now through the timber.

“Where are you going?” Shaggy Hump shouted.

“To my horse!” the young hunter replied. “Maybe some will sink in the mud, where I can kill them with a lance!”

“Ride my horse! He was caught running with buffalo and will not be afraid to run with them again!”

Horseback reached the buffalo pony winded, his legs aching from the charge uphill. He grabbed his father's lance and mounted quickly, knowing the horse would do his running for him now. Excited by the familiar noise of the herd below, the horse would barely wait for the rider to swing across his back. The instant he had mounted, Horseback slipped his knees tightly under the coils of rope his father had tied around the barrel of this pony, and this too seemed to alert the horse to a hard ride.

Plunging through
soohoo
clumps and weaving around the larger
sohoobi
trees, Horseback came galloping onto the grassy bottom lands between the slopes and the river timber. He thundered beyond the hunters, who watched him pass like a thing they had never seen. He rumbled past the two dying cows on the ground and entered the shadows of the timber. Dead falls and low branches slowed him down, but the buffalo had trampled a broad path for him to follow.

Suddenly he saw a big dark mass of fur moving strangely through the trees and rode that way, finding a young bull with a broken leg flopping piteously. He thought of dismounting and rushing the bull with his spear, keeping behind trees to protect himself from the horns. But something made him lean forward over the neck of his mount, as he reined toward the crippled bull.

The animal tried to turn away, but Horseback rode hard against the side opposite the broken foreleg, knowing the young bull would not be able to push against the broken limb to wheel and hook him. The lance was firm in his grip, the shaft clamped hard between his arm and ribs. The horse acquired some magic that made him rush the bull with neck outstretched and teeth popping.

Horseback lowered the broad flint point of the lance as he galloped forward and stuck it in the bull behind the ribs. Once through the tough hide, the lance went easily into vitals. The buffalo bellowed, tried to whirl, but fell on the broken leg, his weight yanking the lance from Horseback's tight hold. The hunter veered away, then spun his mount to face the dying beast. His eyes were large, thinking of what he had done. Never had a tale been told of a warrior lancing a buffalo bull from the back of a horse. The muscles across his shoulders writhed, and power consumed him.

Sucking in much air, he loosed a joyous cry, “Ye-ye-ye-ye-ye!” so his father and the other hunters would know he had ridden well.

The sound of splashing water came from lower down, so Horseback reined his mount close enough to grab the shaft of his lance, angling up from the heaving bull. He pulled and pulled at it, finally using both hands and a wrap of the horse's mane to dislodge the flint point. Finding the point unbroken, he spun his horse toward the river.

Riding out of the timber, Horseback saw one cow bogged in quicksand, then saw a stray bunch of seven animals crossing back to his side of the river, fleeing insensibly from unknown terrors. Across the river, buffalo were scattering everywhere. He remained still until the seven had come out of the water on his side of the river, then he reined his excited mount in behind them.

The beasts were tired from having swum the river, and Horseback closed on them quickly, his mount leaping obstacles in the timber as he ducked low limbs. Seldom had he ridden in thick timber, and this made the going slower. The hunter thought to himself that he had better practice this kind of riding in days to come in case he should ever have to attack or escape through thick trees.

Finally, the trees began to thin, and the buffalo burst onto the grassy bottom lands where the hunt had begun. Horseback felt sunlight hit his bare shoulders as he came out of the trees, and it felt like the voice of Sound-the-Sun-Makes, giving him strength. His father and the other hunters were watching now. His mind raced even faster than he rode, plunging across the green grassland with a wind of his own making, pulling his hair long behind him.

Suddenly, his guardian spirit gave him the idea. He veered to the right of the herd, as his hunting party remained spread out to the left, against the steep banks. He would choose an animal to lance from his horse, and at the same time frighten the other animals into the range of the bowmen.

The buffalo horse seemed crazy with the idea of catching the buffalo, his mane streaming with every galloping lunge of his head. The horned beasts were tired, their tongues hanging out as they ran. Horseback angled into the right side of the herd, choosing a lagging cow as his prey. The beasts cut to their left, but Horseback and his crazy buffalo horse stayed with them, closing fast.

The bloody flint point swooped downward as the gap closed, and Horseback leaned into the coming resistance just as the blade found its mark behind the ribs. He had learned from just the one kill of the broken-legged bull, and he reined his horse back as soon as the shaft reached deep enough to kill. The lance slipped free and the cow bellowed as she stumbled and weaved, finally falling with a cough of blood, and rolling with legs kicking air.

The rest of the buffalo scattered toward the other hunters. Horseback turned his heaving mount to watch. They were hiding behind the animals they had already killed, and when the live buffalo sped by in range of their arrows, they rose and sent feathered shafts speeding with such expert magic that not one missed, and all six of the animals ran wounded toward the slopes, some dropping within view, some lumbering into the trees.

“Ye-ye-ye-ye!” he cried, the dripping shaft of the lance held above his head. He felt a trickle of blood run warm across his knuckles, and lowered the fist to lick the fresh blood away.

The answer came back like a nation of echoes, and he felt like a great hunter—the first of his kind. Only now did he realize that he had lived his vision—and Spirit Talker's—only now the vision of hunting horseback had come out of the fog and was plain.

But there were other still-hazy visions of other things to do on horseback. And the one nearest in the mist was battle. Horseback was ready. He was going to ride the war path soon. He would kill or die astride the gift his gods had given him.

14

Horseback woke happy and
eager to get on with the day's work. They had butchered and feasted until dark yesterday, gorging themselves on raw brains, blood, and curdled milk, raw liver smeared with juices of gall bladder, and raw marrow raked with sticks from bones broken open. Only half of the kill had been skinned, and plenty of butchering was left to do.

The women were already working at the Two Rivers camp, making many good things for the men to eat as they woke. Coming out of the lodge he had shared with his father and mother last night, Horseback saw River Woman stripping lengths of slick buffalo intestine between her fingers to carry to the river for washing.

She smiled when she saw him. “May the sun rise now in your heart, as it rises soon over the rim of the river valley.” She offered him the length of gut in her hands.

Horseback scratched his stomach and respectfully declined the raw intestine, having eaten plenty of that delicacy yesterday. Looking toward the cook fire, he saw a fresh buffalo paunch suspended by four sticks to make a cooking vessel, now bulging with water. “What are you cooking in the paunch, my mother?”

“Anything you like. Brains? Heart? Tongue? Liver?”

“Tongue,” he said.

Happily, she snatched a calf tongue from a branch where it hung and plunged it into the paunch filled with water. “The stones are hot,” she said. “It will not take long.”

Grabbing the forked limb she had fashioned for the purpose, River Woman slipped the green forks under one of the stones in the coals. Bending the other end of the green limb over, she clamped the hot stone firmly against the fork and lifted it, smoking, from the fire. The stone was the size of a turkey egg, smooth from much use and travel. River Woman carried her best cooking stones with her from camp to camp, for they were heavy and hard and possessed the magic of holding much heat—more than ordinary stones.

Using the bent and forked stick, she dropped the stone into the paunch with the water and calf's tongue. The music of the boiling water made her smile, and she turned back to the fire to get another hot cooking stone.

Soon the tongue was boiled and Horseback was tearing at it with his teeth, holding it on a sharpened stick. His mother had added some marrow and wild onion to the water, flavoring the tongue to his liking. As he ate he saw the ponies standing in the grass, and noticed the buffalo horse he had ridden yesterday looking at him while the others grazed.

“My son,” Shaggy Hump said, walking briskly back to the lodge from upstream, “we have one more cow to track. I hit her with an arrow yesterday when you ran the six strays past us. She did not bleed much, but I have found a trail.”

“I will find her,” Horseback said. “I know how to look for blood and tracks. If my father shot an arrow into a cow, she could not have run far.”

“It was not my straightest shot, but straight enough to kill. We will find her around the next bend of the river, or the next. The wolves and coyotes scattered far after the herd yesterday. If our medicine stays strong, we will find the cow before them. And if they find her first, they will have her, for they are our ancestors, and we have already made much meat.”

They fixed the war bridles around the jaws of their horses and threw the buffalo-hide pads over backs and withers, winding the coils of rope around behind the forelegs. Grabbing a handful of mane, each rider vaulted onto his pad. Returning the proud looks of the other hunters, they rode upstream, seeking the last of the wounded animals from yesterday's great hunt.

“The cow ran into the timber here,” Shaggy Hump said, “between these two
sohoobi
trees. From this place, only Mother Earth can tell the story of where our meat has gone.”

Horseback slid off the horse and crouched, looking for some tiny speck of blood on a blade of grass. He covered the distance between the two trees painstakingly, but failed to find the sign he sought. He heard his father chuckle.

“My son, when the hawk hunts, does it walk upon the ground? Does it slide through the grass like a snake?”

“The hawk flies.”

“Yes. It looks not for the track, but the trail.”

Horseback straightened and led his horse away from the place. He mounted again, and thought of himself as a hawk. He looked again at the space between the two trees, and saw what the hawk would see. A trail of grass stalks bent slightly lower than those around them showed plainly where the wounded cow had run into the timber. He had come near obliterating it with his own trail, but saw enough of it to show which way the buffalo had entered the timber. He made his horse walk beside this trail and leaned to one side as he watched the ground pass slowly under him, as if he were a soaring bird of prey.

The signs came to him like little leftover pieces of yesterday: a broken stick, a trampled vine, a tuft of hair on rough bark, the print of a dew claw in the forest litter, a speck of dried blood on a leaf. Through them, he remembered sounds he never heard, glimpsed sights he never saw. Two led toward the third, three to the fourth, four to the fifth, and so the tracks became the trail, and the signs became the story.

He remained astride his horse, looking down, plodding steadily up the river bottom, until he came to something that made him jerk his horse to a standstill. There were deer droppings here, and part of one deer track, crossing the trail of the wounded buffalo. Worrying that he might have missed other deer tracks, Horseback stopped to judge the path of the lone deer, so he would not tread on it and offend his guardian spirit. Making his pony back away from the deer trail, he found a dead limb on the ground to make the horse jump over, assuring himself that he would jump over the deer trail as he crossed it.

His search for the wounded buffalo continued until, riding down into a draw that led to the river, he heard a deep growl, and looked up from the ground. There across a small clearing, a great humpbacked bear was tearing a huge piece of meat from the loin of the dead buffalo cow. He reached for his bow as his father came up beside him.

Suddenly the bear turned its head and looked at the men. It roared once, loud and quick, then charged with its muscles shaking fur violently all across its shoulders. To his surprise, Horseback heard his father yell the war cry and felt him rush by to meet the bear with the lance he had brought to finish the cow should she still live. Shaggy Hump's mount refused to meet the great bear, shying to one side, but the bear came on, and ran onto the point of the lance. Screaming, in rage and pain, the great beast swatted at the shaft, then gathered it in with its forepaws and snapped it in its jaws.