Comanche Moon

The cold and sleet were of little moment--he had lived with plains weather all his life. But in recent years the ache in his bones had come, forcing him to pay more attention to the cold weather. He had to be sure, now, that his lodges were warm.

"Why are you talking to me about killing these Texans?" he asked Blue Duck. "If it is Kicking Wolf who has brought them, let him kill them." Blue Duck was disgusted with the old man's attitude. The whites were only a few miles away. With only half the warriors in their camp they could kill the whites easily. Maybe they could even capture Gun In The Water and torture him. It was easy to cripple a man when the footing was so bad. His father would at last have his vengeance and they could all boast that they had finished Big Horse Scull, a ranger who had been killing Comanches almost as long as Buffalo Hump, his father, had been killing whites.

Yet Buffalo Hump just sat there, tilted sideways a little from the weight of the ugly hump, sucking marrow from buffalo bones. Blue Duck knew his father didn't like Kicking Wolf. The two had quarrelled often: over women, over horses, over the best routes into Mexico, over what villages to raid, over captives. Why let Kicking Wolf have the glory of killing Big Horse and his rangers?

It was on Blue Duck's tongue to call the old man a coward, to tell him it was time he stayed with the old men, time he let the young warriors decide when to fight and who to attack.

But, just as Blue Duck was about to speak, Buffalo Hump looked up at him. The older man had been fiddling with the knife he used to split the buffalo leg bone--suddenly his eyes were as cold as the snake's. Blue Duck could never avoid a moment of fear, when his father's eyes became the eyes of a snake. He choked off his insult--he knew that if he spoke, he might, in an instant, find himself fighting Buffalo Hump. He had seen it happen before, with other warriors. Someone would say one ^w too many, would fail to see the snake in his father's eyes, and the next moment Buffalo Hump would be pulling his long bloody knife from between the other warrior's ribs.

Blue Duck waited. He knew that it was not a day to fight his father.

"Why are you standing there?" Buffalo Hump asked. "I want to think. I gave you Gun In The Water. If you want to fight in the sleet, go fight." "Can I take some warriors?" Blue Duck asked. "Maybe we could take him and bring him back alive." "No," Buffalo Hump said. "Kill him if you are able, but I won't give you the warriors." Angered, Blue Duck turned. He thought the old man was trying to provoke him--perh his father was seeking a fight. But Buffalo Hump was not even looking at him, and had just put his knife back in its sheath.

"Wait," Buffalo Hump said, as Blue Duck was about to walk away. "You may see Kicking Wolf while you are travelling." "I may," Blue Duck said.

"He owes me six horses," Buffalo Hump said. "If he has stolen a lot of horses from the Texans, it is time he gave me my six. Tell him to bring them soon." "He won't bring them--he is too greedy for horses," Blue Duck said.

Buffalo Hump didn't answer. A gust of wind blew shards of sleet into the little warm place under the rock. Buffalo Hump knocked the sleet off his blanket and looked into the fire.

By morning Augustus McCrae was so tired that he had lost the ability to tell up from down. The dawn was sleet gray, the plain sleet gray as well. There was not a feature to stop the eye on the long plain: no tree, ridge, rise, hill, dip, animal, or bird.

Augustus could see nothing at all, and he was well known to have the best vision in the troop. The plain was so wide it seemed you could see to the rim of forever, and yet, in all that distance, there was nothing.

Augustus, like the other rangers, had been in the saddle thirty-six hours. Before the chase started he had been up all night, whoring and drinking; now he was so tired he thought he might be losing his mind. There were those among his comrades who thought that it was excessive whoring and drinking that had caused Gus's hair to turn white, almost overnight; but his own view was that too many long patrols had fatigued his hair so that it had lost its color.

Now, when he looked up, the horizon seemed to roll. It was as if the plain was turning over, like a plate. Augustus's stomach, which had little in it, began to turn, too. For a moment, he had the sensation that the sky was below him, the earth above. He needed to see something definite--an antelope, a tree, anything--ffrid himself of the queasy sensation he got when the land seemed to tip. It grew so bad, the rolling, that at one point he felt his own horse was above him, its feet attached to the sky.

The more Gus thought about it, the angrier he became at Captain Scull.

"If he don't stop for breakfast I'm just going to dismount right here and die," Gus said. "I'm so tired I'm confusing up with down." "I guess he'll stop when he hits the Canadian," Call said. "I doubt it's much further." "No, and I doubt the North Pole is much further, either," Gus said. "Why has he brought us here? There's nothing here." Call was weary, too. All the men were weary.

Some slept in their saddles, despite the cold.

Under the circumstances, Call just wanted to concentrate on seeing that no one fell behind, or straggled off and got lost. Though the plain looked entirely flat, it wasn't. There were dips so shallow they didn't look like dips, and rises so gradual they didn't seem to be rises. A ranger might ride off a little distance from the troop, to answer a call of nature, only to find, once the call was answered, that he had traversed a dip or crossed a rise and become completely lost. The troop would have vanished, in only a few minutes. A man lost on the llano would wander until he starved-- or until the Comanches got him.

Call wanted to devote what energies he had to seeing that no one got lost. It was vexing to have to turn his attention from that important task to answer Gus's questions--particularly since they were questions that Gus himself ought to know the answer to.

"He brought us here to catch Kicking Wolf and get those horses back," Call said. "Did you think he was leading us all this way just to exercise our horses?" Ahead they could see Inish Scull, his coat white with sleet, moving at the same steady pace he had maintained the whole way. Hector's shaggy coat steamed from melting sleet. It crossed Call's mind to wonder just how far Hector could travel without rest. Would it be one hundred miles, or two hundred? The Captain was well ahead of the troop. Seen from a distance he seemed very small, in relation to his huge mount. Seen up close, though, that changed.

No one thought of Inish Scull as small when his eyes were boring into them, as he delivered commands or criticisms. Then all anyone remembered was that he was a captain in the Texas Rangers--size didn't enter into it.