There were no white ones.
They came closer and once again Dunbar paused, his gaze searching the camp carefully.
No white people.
He spotted the fierce one and the men of his little party that had left them in the afternoon. They seemed to be the center of attention. This was definitely more than a greeting. It was a celebration of some sort. They were passing long sticks back and forth. They were yelling. The villagers who had gathered to watch them were yelling, too.
He and Cisco edged still closer and the lieutenant saw right away that he was wrong. They weren’t passing sticks around. They were passing lances. One of them came back to Wind In His Hair, and Dunbar saw him lift it high into the air. He wasn’t smiling, but he was surely happy. As he let out a long, vibrating howl, Dunbar caught a glimpse of the hair tied near the lance’s point.
At the same moment, he realized it was a scalp. A fresh scalp. The hair was black and curly.
His eyes darted to the other lances. Two more of them held scalps; one was light brown and the other was sandy, almost blond. He looked quickly at the wagon and saw what he had not seen before. A load of stacked buffalo hides was peeking over the rails.
Suddenly it was clear as a cloudless day.
The skins belonged to the murdered buffalo and the scalps belonged to the men who had killed them, men who had been alive that very afternoon. White men. The lieutenant was numb with confusion. He couldn’t participate in this, not even as a watcher. He had to leave.
As he was turning away he happened to catch sight of Kicking Bird. The medicine man had been smiling widely, but when he saw Lieutenant Dunbar in the shadows just beyond the firelight, his smile vanished. Then, as though he wanted to relieve the lieutenant of some embarrassment, he turned his back.
Dunbar wanted to believe that Kicking Bird’s heart was with him, that in some vague way it knew his confusion. But he couldn’t think now. He had to go off by himself.
Skirting the camp, he located his gear on the far side and went out onto the prairie with Cisco. He went until he could no longer see the fires. Then he spread his bedroll on the ground and lay looking at the stars, trying to believe that the men who had been killed were bad people and deserved to die. But it was no good. He could not know that for certain, and even if he did . . . well, it was not for him to say. He tried to believe that Wind In His Hair and Kicking Bird and all the other people who shared in the killing were not so happy for having done it. But they were.
More than anything he wanted to believe that he was not in this position. He wanted to believe he was floating toward the stars. But he wasn’t.
He heard Cisco lie down in the grass with a heavy sigh. It was quiet then and Dunbar’s thoughts turned inward, toward himself. Or rather his lack of self. He did not belong to the Indians. He did not belong to the whites. And it was not time for him to belong to the stars.
He belonged right where he was now. He belonged nowhere.
A sob rose in his throat. He had to gag to stifle it. But the sobs kept coming up and it was not long before he ceased to see the sense in trying to keep them down.
five
Something tapped him. As he came awake he thought he’d dreamed the little nudge he felt in his back. The blanket was heavy and damp with dew. He must have pulled it over his head during the night.
He lifted the edge of the blanket and peered out at the hazy light of morning. Cisco was standing alone in the grass a few feet in front of him. His ears were up.
There it was again, something kicking him lightly in the back. Lieutenant Dunbar threw off the blanket and looked into the face of a man standing directly over him.
It was Wind In His Hair. His stern face was painted with bars of ocher. A sparkling new rifle was hanging from one of his hands. He started to move the rifle and the lieutenant held his breath. This might be his time. He pictured his hair, dangling from the fierce one’s lance.
But as Wind In His Hair lifted the rifle a little higher, he smiled. He jabbed his toe gently into the lieutenant’s side and said a few words in Comanche. Lieutenant Dunbar lay still as Wind In His Hair sighted down his rifle at some imagined game. Then he shoved a hunk of imaginary food into his mouth, and like one friend playfully rousting another, he tickled Dunbar’s ribs with the toe of his moccasin once again.
six
They came from downwind, every able-bodied man in the band, riding in a great, hornlike formation, a moving crescent half a mile wide. They rode slowly, taking care not to startle the buffalo until the last possible moment, until it was time to run.
As a novice among experts Lieutenant Dunbar was absorbed in trying to piece together the strategy of the hunt as it unfolded. From his position close to the center of the formation he could see that they were moving to isolate one small section of the gigantic herd. The riders comprising the right part of the moving horn had nearly succeeded in closing off the small section while the middle was pressuring its rear. Off to his left the hunting formation was swinging into an ever straightening line.
It was a surround.
He was close enough to hear sounds: the random bawling of calves, the lowing of mothers, and an occasional snort from one of the massive bulls. Several thousand animals were straight ahead.
The lieutenant glanced to his right. Wind In His Hair was the next rider over, and he was all eyes as they closed on the herd. He seemed unaware of the horse moving under him or of the rifle rocking in his hand. His keen eyes were everywhere at once: on the hunters, on the quarry, and on the shrinking ground between them. If the air could be seen, he would have noticed every subtle shift. He was like a man listening to the countdown tick of some unseen clock.
Even Lieutenant Dunbar, so unpracticed at such things, could feel the tension bristling about him. The air had gone absolutely dead. Nothing was carrying. He could no longer hear the hooves of the hunter’s ponies. Even the herd ahead had gone suddenly silent. Death was settling over the prairie with the surety of a descending cloud.
When he was within a hundred yards a handful of the shaggy beasts turned as a unit and faced him. They lifted their great heads, nosing the dead air for a hint of what their ears had heard but their weak eyes were as yet unable to identify. Their tails went up, curling above their rumps like little flags. The largest among them pawed at the grass, shook his head, and snorted gruffly, challenging the intrusion of the approaching riders.
Dunbar understood then that for every hunter, the killing about to take place would not be a foregone conclusion, that it would not be a lying-in-wait thing, that to perform death on these animals, each man was going to chance his own.
A commotion broke out along the right flank, far up the line at the tip of the horn. The hunters had struck.
With astonishing speed this first strike set off a chain reaction that caught Dunbar in the same way an ocean breaker slams into an unsuspecting wader.
The bulls that had been facing him turned and ran. At the same time every Indian pony shot forward. It happened so fast that Cisco nearly ran out from under the lieutenant. He reached back as his hat blew off, but it tumbled past his fingertips. It didn’t matter. There was no stopping now, not if he had used all his strength. The little buckskin was surging ahead, chewing up the ground as if flames were tickling his heels, as if his life depended on running.
Dunbar looked at the line of riders to his right and left and was appalled to see that no one was there. He glanced over his shoulder and saw them, flat on the backs of their straining ponies. They were going as fast as they could, but compared to Cisco they were dawdlers, hopelessly struggling to keep up. They were falling farther behind with each passing second, and suddenly the lieutenant was occupying a space all to himself. He was between the pursuing hunters and the fleeing buffalo.
He tugged on Cisco’s reins, but if the buckskin felt it at all, he paid it no mind. His neck was stretched out straight, his ears were flat, and his nostrils were flared to their fullest, gobbling the wind that fueled him ever closer to the herd.
Lieutenant Dunbar had no time to think. The prairie was flying past his feet, the sky was rolling overhead, and between the two, spread out in a long line directly ahead, was a wall of stampeding buffalo.
He was close enough now to see the muscles of their hindquarters. He could see the bottoms of their hooves. In seconds he would be close enough to touch them.
He was rushing into a deathly nightmare, a man in an open boat floating helplessly toward the lip of the falls. The lieutenant didn’t scream. He didn’t say a prayer or make the sign of the cross. But he did close his eyes. The faces of his father and mother popped into his head. They were doing something he had never seen them do. They were kissing passionately. There was a pounding all about them, a great, rolling rumble of a thousand drums. The lieutenant opened his eyes and found himself in a dreamlike landscape, a valley filled with gigantic brown and black boulders hurtling in a single direction.
They were running with the herd.
The tremendous thunder of tens of thousands of cloven hooves carried the curious silence of a deluge, and for a few moments Dunbar was serenely adrift in the crazy quiet of the stampede.
As he clung to Cisco he looked out over the massive, moving carpet of which he was now a part and imagined that, if he wanted, he could slip off his horse’s back and make it to the safety of empty ground by hopping from one hump to another, as a boy might skip across the rocks in a stream.
The rifle slipped, nearly falling out of his sweaty hand, and as it did, the bull running on his left, no more than a foot or two away, veered in sharply. With a thrust of his shaggy head he tried to gore Cisco. But the buckskin was too deft. He jumped away and the horn only grazed his neck. The move nearly dumped Lieutenant Dunbar. He should have fallen to his death. But the buffalo were packed so tightly around him that he bounced against the back of a buffalo running along the other side and somehow righted himself.
Panicked, the lieutenant lowered his rifle and fired at the buffalo who had tried to gore Cisco. It was a bad shot, but the bullet shattered one of the beast’s front legs. Its knees buckled and Dunbar heard the snap of its neck as the bull somersaulted.
Suddenly there was open space all around him. The buffalo had shied away from the report of his gun. He pulled hard at Cisco’s reins and the buckskin responded. In a moment they had stopped. The rumble of the herd was receding.
As he watched the herd fall away in front of him he saw that his fellow hunters had caught them. The sight of naked men on horseback, running with all these animals, like corks bobbing in high seas, held him spellbound for several minutes. He could see the bend of their bows and the puffs of dust as one after another of the buffalo went down.
But not many minutes had passed before he turned back. He wanted to see his kill with his own eyes. He wanted to confirm what seemed too fantastic to be true.
Everything had happened in less time than it took to shave.
seven
It was a big animal to begin with, but in death, lying still and alone in the short grass, it looked bigger.
Like a visitor at an exhibit, Lieutenant Dunbar circled the body slowly. He paused at the bull’s monstrous head, took one of the horns in hand, and tugged at it. The head was very heavy. He ran his hand the length of the body: through the wooly thatch on the hump, down the sharply sloping back, and over the fine-coated rump. He held the tufted tail between his fingers. It seemed ridiculously small.
Retracing his steps, the lieutenant squatted in front of the bull’s head and squeezed the long, black beard hanging from its chin. It reminded him of a general’s goatee, and he wondered if this fellow had been a high-standing member of the herd.
He stood up then and backed up a step or two, still taken with the sight of the dead buffalo. How just one of these remarkable creatures could exist was a beautiful mystery. And there were thousands of them.
Maybe there are millions, he thought.
He felt no pride in having taken the bull’s life, but it brought him no remorse either. Aside from a strong sensation of respect, he felt no emotion. He did feel something physical, however. He could feel his stomach twisting. He heard it grumble. His mouth had begun to water. For several days his meals had been skimpy, and now, gazing down at this large pile of meat, he was acutely aware of his hunger.
Barely ten minutes had passed since the furious charge, and already the hunt was over. Leaving their dead behind, the herd had vanished. The hunters were hanging about their kills, waiting as the women and children and elderly poured onto the plains, hauling their butchering equipment along with them. Their voices were ringing with excitement, and Dunbar was struck by the idea that some kind of festival had begun.
Wind In His Hair suddenly galloped up with two cronies. Flush with success, he was smiling broadly as he vaulted off his heaving pony. The lieutenant noticed an ugly, leaking gash just below the warrior’s knee.
But Wind In His Hair didn’t notice. He was still beaming grandly as he sidled up to the lieutenant and whacked him on the back with a well-intentioned greeting that sent Dunbar sprawling onto the ground.
Laughing good-naturedly, Wind In His Hair pulled the stunned lieutenant to his feet and pressed a thick-bladed knife into his palm. He said something in Comanche and pointed at the dead bull.
Dunbar stood flatfooted, staring sheepishly at the knife in his hand. He smiled helplessly and shook his head. He didn’t know what to do.
Wind In His Hair muttered an aside that made his friends laugh, smacked the lieutenant on the shoulder, and took back the knife. Then he dropped to one knee at the belly of Dunbar’s buffalo.
With the aplomb of a seasoned carver he drove the knife deep into the buffalo’s chest and, using both hands, dragged the blade back, opening it up. As the guts spilled out, Wind In His Hair stuck a hand into the cavity, groping about like a man feeling for something in the dark.