Authors: Alan LeMay
In some ways the first night was the worst. The air was dense with the dry snow, but the wind, rushing with hurricane force down a thousand miles of prairies, would not let the snow settle, or drift, even in the crevice where they had taken refuge. No fire was possible. The wind so cycloned between the walls of the gulch that the wood they lighted in the shelter of their coats immediately vanished in a shatter of white sparks. Mart chopped a tub-sized cave into the frozen earth at the side, but the fire couldn’t last there, either. Their canteens were frozen solid, and neither dry cornmeal nor their iron-hard jerky would go down without water. They improvised parkas and foot wrappings out of the few furs they had happened to stuff into the commissary pack, and stamped their feet all night long.
Sometime during that night the Fort Worth stud broke loose, and went with the storm. In the howling of the blizzard they didn’t even hear him go.
During the next day the snow began rolling in billows across the prairie, and their gully filled. They were better off by then. They had got foot wrappings on their mule, lest his hoofs freeze off as he stood, and had fed him on gatherings of willow twigs. With pack sheet and braced branches they improved their bivouac under the downed willow, so that as the snow covered them they had a place in which a fire would burn at last. They melted snow and stewed horse meat, and took turns staying awake to keep each other from sleeping too long. The interminable periods in which they lay buried alive were broken by sorties after wood, or willow twigs, or to rub the legs of the mule.
But the third night was in some ways the worst of all. They had made snowshoes of willow hoops and frozen horse hide, tied with thongs warmed at the fire; but Mart no longer believed they would ever use them. He had been beaten against the frozen ground by that murderous uproar for too long; he could not hear the imperceptible change in the roar of the churning sky as the blizzard began to die. This night-mare had gone on forever, and he accepted that it would always go on, until death brought the only possible peace.
He lay stiffened and inert in their pocket under the snow, moving sluggishly once an hour, by habit, to prevent Amos from sleeping himself to death. He was trying to imagine what it would be like to be dead. They were so near it, in this refuge so like a grave, he no longer felt that death could make any unwelcome difference. Their bodies would never be found, of course, nor properly laid away. Come thaw, the crows would pick their bones clean. Presently the freshets would carry their skeletons tumbling down the gulch, breaking them up, strewing them piecemeal until they hung in the drift-wood, a thighbone here, a rib there, a skull full of gravel half buried in the drying streambed.
People who knew them would probably figure out they had died in the blizzard, though no one would know just where. Mart Pauley? Lost last year in the blizzard …Mart Pauley’s been dead four years …ten years …forty years. No—not even his name would be in existence in anybody’s mind, anywhere, as long as that.
Amos brought him out of that in a weird way. Mart was in a doze that was dangerously near a coma, when he became aware that Amos was singing—if you could call it that. More of a groaning, in long-held, hoarse tones, from deep in the galled throat. Mart lifted his head and listened, wondering, with a desolation near indifference, if Amos had gone crazy, or into a delirium. As he came wider awake he recognized Comanche words. The eery sound was a chant.
The sun will pour life on the earth forever...
(I rode my horse till it died.)
The earth will send up new grass forever...
(I thrust with my lance while I bled.)
The stars will walk in the sky forever...
(Leave my pony’s bones on my grave.)
It was a Comanche death song. The members of some warrior society—the Snow Wolf Brotherhood? —were supposed to sing it as they died.
“God damn it, you stop that!” Mart shouted, and beat at Amos with numbed hands.
Amos was not in delirium. He sat up grumpily, and began testing his creaky joints. He grunted, “No ear for music, huh?”
Suddenly Mart realized that the world beyond their prison was silent. He floundered out through the great depth of snow. The sky was gray, but the surface of the snow itself almost blinded him with its glare. And from horizon to horizon, nothing on the white earth moved. The mule stood in a sort of well it had tromped for itself, six feet deep in the snow. It had chewed the bark off every piece of wood in reach, but its hoofs were all right. Mart dragged Amos out, and they took a look at each other.
Their lips were blackened and cracked, and their eyes bloodshot. Amos’ beard had frost in it now that was going to stay there as long as he lived. But they were able-bodied, and they were free, and had a mule between them.
All they had to do now was to get through a hundred and ten miles of snow to Fort Sill and they could figure they had put the blizzard behind them.
They took so many weeks to make Fort Sill that they were sure Bluebonnet’s village would be there ahead of them; but it was not. They were in weakened, beat-down shape, and they knew it. They slept much, and ate all the time. When they went among the Indians they moved slowly, in short hauls, with long rests between. Hard for them to believe that only a year and a half had passed in their search for Debbie. Many thought they had already made a long, hard, incredibly faithful search. But in terms of what they had done it wasn’t anything, yet.
Living things on the prairie had been punished very hard. The buffalo came through well, even the youngest calves; only the oldest buffalo were winter killed. Things that lived down holes, like badgers, prairie dogs, and foxes, should have been safe. Actually, animals of this habit were noticeably scarcer for the next few years, so perhaps many froze deep in the ground as they slept. The range cattle were hit very hard, and those of improved breeding stood it the worst. Where fences had come into use, whole herds piled up, and died where they stood. Hundreds had their feet frozen off, and were seen walking around on the stumps for weeks before the last of them were dead.
After the blizzard, a period of melt and freeze put an iron crust on the deep snow. A lot of the cattle that had survived the storm itself now starved, unable to paw down to the feed with their cloven hoofs. Horses did considerably better, for their hoofs could smash the crust. But even these were fewer for a long time, so many were strewn bones upon the prairie before spring.
Yet all this devastation had come unseasonably early. After the first of the year the winter turned mild, as if it had shot its wad. Once travel was practicable, more Indians streamed into the sanctuary of Fort Sill than ever before. Their deceptively rugged tepees, cunningly placed, and anchored by crossed stakes driven five feet into the ground, had stood without a single reported loss; and the villages seemed to have plenty of pemmican to feed them until spring. Perhaps they had been awed by the power of the warring wind spirits, so that they felt their own medicine to be at a low ebb.
They were anything but awed, however, by the soldiers, whom the Peace Policy tied down in helplessness, or by the Society of Friends, whose gentle pacifism the Wild Tribes held in contempt even while they sheltered behind it. Appears-in-the-Sky, Medicine Chief of the Kiowas, who claimed a spirit owl as his familiar, in January moved out a short distance through the snow to murder four Negro teamsters. Two cowboys were killed at Sill’s beef corral, barely half a mile from the fort, and a night wrangler was murdered and scalped closer than that. Half a dozen Queherenna, or Antelope Comanches—the military were calling them Quohadas—stole seventy mules out of Fort Sill’s new stone corral, and complacently camped twenty miles away, just as safe as upon their mothers’ backboards.
Both Kiowas and Comanches were convinced now of the integrity of the Quakers. They pushed into the Quakers’ houses, yanked buttons off the Agent’s clothes; helped themselves to anything that caught the eye, then stoned the windows as they left. Those Quakers with families were ordered to safety, but few obeyed. Resolute in their faith, they stood implacably between their Indian charges and the troops. It was going to be a hard, rough, chancy year down below in Texas.
Meanwhile Mart and Amos searched and waited, and still Bluebonnet did not come in. As spring came on they bought new horses and mules, replenished their packs and once more went looking for Indians who forever marched and shuffled themselves in the far lost wastes of their range.
Most of that second trading summer was like the first. Being able to understand what the Indians said among themselves had proved of very little use, so far as their search was concerned. They did hear more, though, of what was happening back home, upon the frontier their wanderings had put so far behind. Mart, particularly, listened sharply for some clue as to whether the Mathisons still held, but heard nothing he could pin down.
In Texas the outlying settlers were going through the most dreadful year in memory. At least fourteen people were dead, and nine children captive, before the middle of May. Only a stubbornness amounting to desperation could explain why any of the pioneers held on. Bloody narratives were to be heard in every Comanche camp the searchers found. A party of surveyors were killed upon the Red River, and their bodies left to spoil in a drying pool. The corpses of three men, a woman and a child were reduced to char in a burning ranch house, cheating the raiders of the scalps. Oliver Loving’s foreman was killed beside his own corral. By early summer, Wolf-Lying-Down had stolen horses within sight of San Antonio; and Kiowas under Big Bow, crossing into Mexico near Laredo, had killed seventeen vaqueros, and got back across Texas with a hundred and fifty horses and a number of Mexican children.
General Sherman, who habitually took Texan complaints with a grain of salt, finally had a look for himself. He appeared in Texas along about the middle of the summer, with an escort of only fifteen troopers—and at once nearly added himself to a massacre. Near Cox Mountain a raiding party of a hundred and fifty Comanches and Kiowas destroyed a wagon train, killing seven, some by torture. Unfortunately, for it would have been the highlight of his trip, General Sherman missed riding into this event by about an hour and a half. Proceeding to Fort Sill, Sherman supervised the arrest of Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree, showing a cool personal courage, hardly distinguishable from indifference, in the face of immediate mortal danger. He presented the three war chiefs in handcuffs to the State of Texas; and after went away again.
All this, the two riders recognized, was building up to such a deadly, all-annihilating showdown as would be their finish, if they couldn’t get their job done first. But for the present they found the Comanches in high and celebrative mood, unable to imagine the whirlwind that was to come. The warriors were arrogant, boastful, full of the high-and-mighty. Yet, luckily, they remained patronizingly tolerant, for the time, of the white men who dared come among them in their own far fastnesses.
During this time the terror-dream of the red night and the unearthly voices came to Mart only once, and he saw no copy of the unexplained death tree at all. Yet the attitudes of the Indians toward such things were beginning to influence him, so that he more than half believed they carried a valid prophecy. The Comanches were supposed to be the most literal-minded of all tribes. There are Indians who live in a poetic world, half of the spirit, but the Comanches were a tough-minded, practical people, who laughed at the religious ceremonies of other tribes as crazy-Indian foolishness. They had no official medicine men, no pantheon of named gods, no ordered theology. Yet they lived very close to the objects of the earth around them, and sensed in rocks, and winds, and rivers, spirits as living as their own. They saw themselves as of one piece with a world in which nothing was without a spirit.
In this atmosphere, almost every Comanche had a special spirit medicine that had come to him in a dream, usually the gift of some wild animal, such as an otter, a buffalo, or a wolf—never a dog or horse. By the time a Comanche was old, he was either a medicine man, believed to know specific magics against certain ills or disasters, or a black-magic sorcerer, feared because he could maim or kill from far away.
You could never learn to understand an Indian’s way of thinking, or guess what he was about to think next. If you saw an Indian looking at the sky, you might know why you would be looking at the sky in his place—and be sure the Indian had some different reason. Yet sometimes they ran into a Comanche, usually an old one, who knew something there was no possible way for him to know.
“You speak Nemenna very well,” an old Nocona said to Mart once. (The names of the bands were turning themselves over again; in a single year the name “Nawyecky” had fallen into almost total disuse.) Mart supposed the old man had heard of him, for he had not opened his mouth. He pretended not to understand, hoping to discredit a rumor of that kind. But the old Comanche went on, smiling at Mart’s effort to dissimulate. “Sometimes you come upon a spirit in the form of a dead tree,” he said. “It is blackened; it looks like a withered corpse, struggling to free itself from the earth.”
Mart stared, startled into acknowledgment that he understood the old man’s speech. At this the Comanche grinned derisively, but went on in grave tones. “You do not fear death very much, I think. Last year, maybe; not this year any more. But you will do well to fear the evil tree. Death is a kind and happy thing beside the nameless things beyond the tree.”
He sat back. “I tell you this as a friend,” he finished. “Not because I expect any kind of gift. I wish you well, and nothing more. I want no gift at all.” Which of course meant that he did.
By middle fall the mood of the Comanches had begun to change. Raids were lacing into Texas at an unprecedented pace; Colorado was heavily scourged, and Kansas hurt to the very borders of Nebraska. Almost every village they came to was waiting in brooding quiet for a great war party to return, if it were not whooping up a scalp dance to celebrate a victory, or a glory dance for sending a party out. But now both Texas and the United States Army were fighting back. The Texas Rangers were in the saddle again, losing men in every skirmish, but making the Indians pay three and four lives for one. The Fort Sill garrison was still immobilized, but Fort Richardson, down on the West Fork of the Trinity, was beyond the authority of the Friends. From Richardson rode Colonel Mackenzie with a regiment and a half of yellowlegs; his forced marches drove deep into the land of the Quohadas. Shaking Hand’s Kotsetakas got out of his way, and the great Bull Bear of the Antelopes, with such war chiefs under him as Black Horse, Wolf Tail, Little Crow, and the brilliant young Quanah, threatened briefly in force but drew back.