Comanche Moon

For most of a day and all of one night he nursed the old horse along, leading him carefully over the sparse grass, letting him stop to rest when he needed to, watching him nuzzle the sparse brown grass with his stubs of teeth to get a few bites of nourishment. Always, on the llano, Buffalo Hump's eyes had sought the horizon, the distant line drawn by earth and sky. But now, when he looked toward a horizon, there was no line, but a wavering, in which sunlight, sky, and earth were all mixed and indistinct. Once he would have known exactly how far he was from the Lake of Horses and, again, how far from Black Mesa--but he was no longer sure of the distances to either place.

What Buffalo Hump knew was that he must not leave the black horse; their fates were now linked. When the horse stumbled and wanted to stop, Buffalo Hump let him rest. As the horse rested he began to sing again the high songs of the war trail. For a time the old horse did nothing.

Then he lifted his head and pricked up his ears, as if hearing again his own hoofbeats from the time of warring.

Buffalo Hump was not singing to the horse--he was singing the memories of his own life--but the horse, once he was rested a little, was able to go a few more miles, though at a slow walk. As the heat of the day grew, though, the horse weakened again, and stopped, though they were not yet to the Lake of Horses.

Now Buffalo Hump began to beat the old horse with his lance. He beat it with all his strength. He twisted the horse's tail and pounded it on the sides with his lance. He was determined, once more, to make a horse go where he wanted it to go, and he succeeded. The black horse, which had been about to sink down and die, quivered while he was being beaten; then he revived and walked on another few miles until Buffalo Hump saw the cracked earth of the dry lake not far ahead. Soon the horse smelled the water from the little spring and became excited. He ran toward the water in a wobbly canter--when Buffalo Hump caught up with him he had pushed aside the thick weeds that hid the spring and was sucking the cold water. The spring was so small that it left only a little film of water around the stems of the weeds.

Nonetheless, it was water--pure water--and it saved both Buffalo Hump and the old black horse. They drank and then drank again. The horse was even able to nibble on the tops of the thick weeds around the spring, nourishment enough to enable him to continue the walk to the north when the cool of the evening came.

Though the horse could eat the tops of the weeds, Buffalo Hump couldn't, and he was out of food.

He had his short bow and some snares, but the only animals he saw were some prairie dogs. He could not see well enough to hit one of the prairie dogs with an arrow and did not have the time or the patience to lay an effective snare. He wanted to hurry on to where the black rocks were.

In the night, after they left the spring, it was he, rather than the black horse, that faltered. By the middle of the next day he was as unsteady on his feet as a baby just learning to balance himself and stand upright. Buffalo Hump became so weak and unsteady that he mounted the black horse again and made it carry him a few more miles. By the evening, to his joy, he began to see a black rock here and there on the ground, although, strain his eyes as he might, he could see no sign of the mesa land he sought. He began to feel uncertain about the mesa. Perhaps it was only the black rocks that he remembered; perhaps he had imagined the mesa, or dreamed it, or confused it with a mesa in another place. He wasn't sure; but at least he had found the black rocks, the rocks which were said to welcome the dead.

Then, in the heat of the day, the horse fell. It didn't wobble; it simply fell, throwing Buffalo Hump to the ground. Slowly he got up, meaning to beat the horse again and urge him to get up and go on a few more miles, but before he could even find his lance and raise it, the black horse heaved a sigh and died.

For a few minutes Buffalo Hump was upset with himself for having ridden along carelessly, singing battle songs, as if he were a young warrior again, on a spirited warhorse, when in fact he was an old man on a horse that was walking its last steps. If he had dismounted and led the horse again they might have made it a few more miles into the country of the black rocks.

But now it was too late: the horse was dead, and the place where he stood was the place he would die. At least, though, he had reached the place of the black rocks. Buffalo Hump would have preferred to be high on the mesa, looking over the plains where he had spent his life; but that was a thing he had not been granted; he would have to make the best death he could on the spot where his horse had fallen.

Buffalo Hump went to his horse and, with his knife, neatly and quickly took out its eyes and buried them in a small hole. The eyes a horse needed in life were not the eyes it would need when it trod the plains of death. Then he began to gather up as many of the black rocks as he could.

He meant to make a ring of rocks in which to sit until he died. He could not find the mesa, which might only be a dream mesa anyway. As he worked, gathering the rocks, he began to remember bits and pieces of his life, scraps of things that had been said to him by various people. Once his memory had been good, but now it was as leaky as a water sack that had been pierced by a thorn. He could not remember very much--j bits and pieces of things said long ago. While memories flowed in and out of his mind, like a river eddying, he worked at gathering the rocks.

As Buffalo Hump was about to finish the ring of black rocks that he meant to sit in until he left his body and became a spirit, he remembered another thing his old grandmother had told him long ago, when he was a boy, too young to ride the war trail. It had been dry in the fall and winter; there were many sandstorms. The sandstorms put his grandmother in a bad mood; she did not like it when the air was dusty. One day when the dogs were turning their tails to the wind that whipped through the camp his grandmother had begun to wail and utter lamentations.

Because of her bad mood she began to sing dark prophecies, in which she foresaw the end of the Comanche people. She predicted wars and pestilence; the People would lose their place. The plains would be covered with white people, as numerous as ants; the People would die of their plagues. Then the buffalo would go away and the time of the Comanche would end.

As Buffalo Hump arranged the rocks in a large circle--large because he wanted to show that he was one with the plains, with the great ring of the sky--he realized that his grandmother had prophesied truly. At the time he had thought she was just a bad-tempered old woman who ought to keep her wailing to herself. Now, though, he realized that he had been unjust. The whites had swarmed like ants up the rivers, spreading their pestilence, just as his grandmother had predicted. And, as she had predicted, the buffalo had gone.

Evening came. Buffalo Hump seated himself on a fine buffalo robe he had brought with him; he put his bow and his lance and the fine bone shield he had carefully made from the skull of the great buffalo he had killed near to hand. It was a clear day with little wind--the sun sank clearly in the west, free of the yellow haze which blowing sand sometimes produced. Buffalo Hump kept his face turned toward the red light of sunset until the light died and the horizon grew purple. He was sorry to see the sun go. He wanted to keep the sunlight that had bathed him his whole life, but the sun went and the plain darkened; no man could slow the sun.