There were heads and sections of spine, feet and hands, rib cages, the muscle black and the bones very white, lumps of fat stuck to rocks, arms and legs wedged in the branches of cottonwoods where they had been dragged by cougars or bobcats. There were rifles and bows and knives scattered and starting to rust. There were so many dead that not even the wolves and coyotes and bears had been able to eat them. The sun had blackened everything but I could see that none of the people had been scalped. I could not think of who had done this to them.
Most of the horses had been driven off by the wolves, or eaten, but a few dozen of the most loyal or helpless grazed the periphery; there was a big dun mare still saddled, though the saddle had rolled all the way under her belly and she could barely walk. I nickered and rode up next to her and she stood resigned to whatever I might do. I cut the cinch and at the sound of the saddle hitting the ground the mare stepped away, then shook herself and broke into a trot. She had an army brand on her hip, though she had been wearing an Indian saddle, and I wondered about the things she had seen.
One of the tipis had been sealed shut, rocks and brush piled around it, and without dismounting from my horse I took hold of the flaps and cut the ropes. Inside there were two dead vultures and dozens of small bodies, carefully placed in rows and stacked on top of one another. Whoever had put them there was too weak to bury them, or maybe they had been dying too quickly; it was either smallpox or cholera or some other disease and I turned my horse and kicked him and went back to where the others were waiting for me.
“They still had their hair?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How many?”
“Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
“I think around one thousand. Did you touch anything?”
“Not really. A tipi that was in the sun.”
He squinted and looked around. It was a pleasant little canyon. “I guess there are worse places to die.”
“Who were they?”
“I think that is Kicking Dog’s band. Tenewa Comanche. They are outside their territory so something was not going well when they put their camp there, they were running from something.
Tas
í
a,
probably.” He dotted his face with a finger. “The gift of the great white father.”
I
RODE MY
horse into the middle of the stream and scrubbed his feet and legs with sand, then did the same to my own body. I slept by myself that night, a good distance from the others. A few days later, before we reached camp, I went to the river to scrub myself again and asked N
uu
karu to bring me a bowl of yucca soap and place it on the ground. I cleaned the horse again as well.
When I reached the village they were preparing a big celebration and scalp dance. One of the medicine men took me into a tipi and made me strip. He swallowed breaths of cedar and sage smoke, blew them onto me, then rubbed my body with leaves. I told him I had already used soap, but he figured the smoke was better.
A
FEW WEEKS
later a group of Comancheros came through the camp and said they had seen more Indians killing buffalo. Toshaway told me we were going on another scouting trip. I acted enthusiastic.
“Give me one of the Tonk rifles,” I said.
He must have thought something would happen because he handed it over without comment, along with a dozen of the paper cartridges.
At night we had fires but only in gullies and far away from any trees so there was nothing to show the light. Finally the scouts came back and reported a party of Indians cutting up buffalo: they appeared to be Delawares, who, though the Comanches would never admit it, were the best hunters of all the eastern tribes, good trackers and men to be taken seriously.
We decided to make a cold camp and sleep before we laid into them. The Delawares made a cold camp as well, though they did not know they’d been seen, and I thought of them out there in the dark, they’d once been the kings of the east as we were the kings of the west, but now they’d killed twenty buffalo and couldn’t even have a fire to celebrate.
T
HE LIGHT WAS
flat and gray and a slick mist was rising from the grass. There were horses going in all directions and everyone shouting and I was staring at one man who had taken four or five arrows but stood calmly tamping a charge into his musket. Someone came from behind and pinned him with a lance. It was N
uu
karu. There was something about the man squirming on the ground but N
uu
karu didn’t seem to mind.
The rest of the Delawares were quickly unroostered, but one managed to make a clear swing. I had stayed on the outskirts and he went right past me; he might as well have been standing still, though he didn’t react to the shot and with the smoke I wasn’t sure I’d hit him.
I watched him ride off. I knew what I had to do. There was no time to reload the rifle, and even with all the fighting I knew Toshaway and Pizon were probably watching me. While I was thinking this, the two of them finished killing the man they had started to kill, saw the escaping Delaware, and took off after him.
I fell in behind. I had never whipped a horse so hard but the four of us were strung out in a long line across the prairie with the Delaware at the head. He was riding a legendary animal, putting ground on us with each step, he was nearly a half mile ahead, but there was nowhere to hide, no canyons, no forest, just open prairie, and we began to close. Then Toshaway’s pony stumbled and collided with Pizon’s and I went around them.
As for the Delaware, I could see a shiny slick down his back where my ball had gone in and I whipped the horse even harder, though I had no plan for what I would do if I caught him.
Then he was on the ground. There was a gulch he’d tried to jump and the horse had thrown him. He was lying in the tall grass.
I was on him before I knew it and I nocked an arrow but it went several feet wide. I tried to nock another but my hands were shaking and the horse was skittering so I slid off onto the ground.
The Delaware hadn’t moved. I felt better about everything, I was looking down at my string, trying to get the arrow set, and I looked up to see him spin and draw and shoot in the same movement.
There was an arrow sticking out of me. It seemed like I ought to sit down. Then I was looking at myself; then I decided there was nothing wrong. I grabbed the arrow and pulled it out.
Later I realized that the Delaware was so weak he hadn’t been able to fully draw his bow. My quiver strap had stopped his arrow—but right then I picked up my own bow, which I had dropped, aimed carefully, and shot the Delaware in the stomach. The arrow went to the feathers.
He was looking around for his quiver. It had gotten separated in the fall. I shot another arrow, then a third, which went between his ribs. He was tugging at the one where it was stuck into the ground and I knew he would send it back to me. I shot the rest of the arrows I was holding and he gave up, though he was not quite dead. I knew I should go and thump him but I didn’t want to get any closer, I was ashamed of his breathing and gurgling, of my bad shooting, of being afraid of a man who was nearly dead, and then someone kicked me in the backside.
It was Toshaway and Pizon. I hadn’t heard them come up.
“
Ku?e tsasimap
u
.
” Toshaway nodded at the Delaware.
“Do it quickly,” said Pizon. “Before he dies.”
The Delaware was lying on his side and I rolled him onto his belly. I put my foot on his back and grabbed his hair and he raised his arm to stop me, but I cut all the way around. He was slapping at my hand the whole time.
“Snap it off,” called Pizon. “One big motion.”
The scalp came off like a cracking branch and the Delaware lost his fight. I walked a few yards and looked at it: it could have been anything, a piece of buffalo or calf hide. The sun was coming up and my leg began to hurt: I’d cut myself on my own arrow spikes where they’d come through the Delaware’s back. He gave a last moaning rattle, and, looking at him there on the ground, stuck through from every direction with my spikes and the grass matted with his blood, it was like a haze clearing from my mind, like I’d been dunked again, like I’d been chosen by God Himself. I ran over to Toshaway and Pizon and grabbed them.
“Fucking white boy,” said Pizon. But he was smiling as well. He turned to Toshaway. “I guess I owe you a horse.”
T
HERE WAS A
big dance when we got back, eight scalps had been collected, but before it began, Pizon told the story of how I’d gone after the Delaware alone, like a proper Comanche, with nothing but my bow, and he said we know what a great talent Tiehteti is with his bow. There was general laughter, which annoyed me. But this is serious, he continued, this was not some filthy
N
u
m
u
T
uu
ka,
but a warrior, and Tiehteti’s only weapon was one he cannot yet use from his horse. And to be shot in the heart, only to have the arrow refuse to go in? What does that say about Tiehteti?
For the rest of the night the medicine man who’d cleansed me of smallpox told everyone that he had given me his bear medicine, as only that could have stopped the arrow, but no one believed him. I knew the Delaware was almost dead when I reached him, that he had taken a ball in the lungs and been thrown from his horse onto the rocks, that if I had caught him five or ten minutes earlier he would have driven his arrow to my spine. That even in his final condition, if the buffalo-hide strap of my quiver hadn’t been hanging just so, the spike would have reached my heart. But by the end of the night those details meant nothing, and this was the point of the scalp dance, we were eternal, the Chosen People, and our names would ring on in the night, long after we’d vanished from the earth.
S
OMETIME BEFORE MORNING
I opened my eyes. I was lying in the yard of our old house and there was an Indian standing over me. I was watching the arrows go in but decided not to believe what I was seeing; I remembered I’d hit my head and was probably confused. The Comanche was young and there was something familiar about him and after a time I began to recognize his face.
W
HEN MORNING CAME
I could still feel the hollow where the arrows had gone. The sun had risen and was shining directly through the open door of the tipi and N
uu
karu and Escuté were outside smoking. I went and sat with them. The three boys who had taken me hunting, all of whom were still better hunters, riders, and bowmen than I was, came over and said hello, but didn’t sit—I was now their superior—and then N
uu
karu waved them away. “You’re done with those kids,” he said.
Escuté called his mother to bring us something to eat and then there were sugarberry cakes, which were hackberries and tallow mashed together and cooked over a fire. N
uu
karu and I thanked her. Escuté just took the food and ate. He must have seen the way I looked at him because he said: “We could get killed every time we leave camp. They all know this. Half of us will be dead by the time we reach forty winters.”
A short time later Fat Wolf, Toshaway’s eldest son, came by with his wife.
“So this is the famous white boy?”
Escuté said, “You’re a man now, Tiehteti, and I’m sure Fat Wolf appreciates the respect but you don’t have to stare at the dirt.”
Fat Wolf leaned over and gripped my chin, then his hand softened. “Don’t listen to my asshole brother. I always put him in a bad mood.” He pointed over his shoulder. “This is Hates Work. Obviously you’ve noticed her before, but as you are a man now, you may talk to her, and take note of her unfortunately soft hands.”
Hates Work, who was standing a ways back from her husband, smiled and waved, but didn’t say anything. She was by far the most beautiful Indian I’d ever seen, in her early twenties with clear skin and shining hair and a good figure; it was widely thought a tragedy that she would soon be ruined by children. Her father had asked fifty horses as a bride-price, which was outrageous according to N
uu
karu, but Toshaway, because he spoiled his sons terribly, as anyone spending time with Escuté might notice, had given the fifty horses and the marriage had been approved.
Fat Wolf himself was as tall as his father, but while his face was young, he already had the thin arms and heavy paunch of a much older man. He looked as Toshaway might if Toshaway had stopped hunting and raiding. I nodded at Hates Work and tried not to show too much interest.
Fat Wolf had lifted my poultice and was touching me gently, the open skin and bone, the cut still weeping. “Motherfucker,” he said. “I have never seen a wound like that on a living man.” He looked me up and down. “My father talked about you, but he likes everyone and we thought he was going soft. Now we see he was right. It’s no small thing.” He took me by the shoulders; he was a very touchy Indian. “You ever need anything, you come to me. And don’t hang around my brother too much, he’s a bitter little fuck.” Then he walked away with his pretty wife.
“What a fat fuck,” said his brother, when the pair were out of earshot.
“Escuté has been hoping that Fat Wolf will send her his way, but Fat Wolf is not interested in sharing yet.”
“I get plenty of
tai?i
on my own. I don’t need a handout from the fat one.” He looked at N
uu
karu: “You, on the other hand . . .”
“I get plenty.”
“From old women, maybe.”
“Like your mother.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you,” said Escuté.
It was quiet. I’d invented a number of stories about the various girls I’d been with, but N
uu
karu and Escuté knew better than to ask.
A
FTER LUNCH
I went to the stream to clean my trophy. I scraped the inner skin to remove all the meat and fat, rinsing it in the water, rubbing it with a coarse stone and rinsing it again, teasing off the silverskin with my fingers, repeating until the inner scalp was white and full and soft. Then I took a wooden basin, filled it with water and yucca soap, and carefully washed the hair, separating the strands, trying not to pull too hard, as if the Delaware might still feel what I was doing, teasing out each burr and grass seed, the dandruff and dried blood. I rewove his braids, replacing all the beads, which were turquoise and red glass, in the same places he had put them. I made a paste of brain and tallow and rubbed it into the inner skin, allowing it to dry and then rubbing in more of the paste. I stretched it on a willow hoop to dry, then carried it back to the tipi to hang in the shade.