provide, an economy that cost several rangers their lives.
'Who are we chasing? Do we know?' he asked Goodnight--he had come to know the fighting styles of several Comanche chiefs rather well.
'Peta Nocona and some of his hunters,' Goodnight said. 'That's what I think, and Famous Shoes agrees.' 'I wonder if Buffalo Hump is still alive,' Augustus said. 'You'll still hear of Kicking Wolf taking horses now and then, but we ain't had to engage Buffalo Hump since the war started.' 'He's alive,' Goodnight said.
'How do you know?' Gus asked.
'Because I'd hear of it if he died,' Goodnight said. 'So would you. He led two raids all the way to the ocean. No other Comanche has done that. They'll be singing about him, when he dies.' Goodnight had a disgusted look on his face.
'I guess you're mad at me, Charlie, for not keeping up,' Augustus ventured.
'No, but I won't come back for that major again,' Goodnight said. 'If he can't keep hold of his compass then I'd rather he went home.'
Buffalo Hump was slow to recover from the shitting sickness--the cholera; for the first time in his life he was forced to live with weakness in his limbs and body. For two months he could not mount a horse or even draw a bow. His wives fed him and tended to him. A few of the warriors still came to confer with him for a while, but then they began to avoid him, as the strong always avoid the weak. Kicking Wolf was stealing many horses from the Texans, but he did not ask Buffalo Hump to raid with him, anymore.
No one asked Buffalo Hump to raid with them now, although warriors from many bands raided frequently. Many whites had gone to fight other whites, in the East; there were few blue coated soldiers left, and few rangers to defend the little farms and settlements. The young warriors killed, tortured, raped, and stole, but they did not take Buffalo Hump with them, nor did they come to him to brag of their courage and their exploits when they returned from the raids with horses or captives.
They did not ask Buffalo Hump, or brag to him, because he was not young anymore. He had lost his strength, and, with his strength, lost his power.
Buffalo Hump was resentful--it was not pleasant to be ignored or even scorned by the very warriors he had trained, the very people he had led--but he was not surprised. Many times he had seen great warriors weaken, sicken, grow old, lose their power; the young men who would have once been eager to ride with them quickly came to scorn them. The young warriors were cruel: they whispered and snickered if one of the older men failed to make a kill, or let a captive escape. They respected only the strong men who could not be insulted without a price being paid in blood.
When Buffalo Hump saw that the time had passed when he could be a powerful chief, he had his wives move his lodge into a cleft in the canyon some distance from camp. He wanted to be where he would not have to listen to the young men brag after each raid--even the screams of tortured captives had begun to irritate him. Buffalo Hump would not be scorned, not in his own camp; if he heard some young warrior whispering about him he would fight, even if it meant his death. But he thought it was only a foolish man who put himself deliberately in the way of such challenges. He took himself away, too far from the main camp for the shouting and dancing to disturb him.
Then he instructed his wives, Lark and Heavy Leg, how to make good snares--it was a craft he expected them to learn. There was little large game in the canyon now, but plenty of small game: rabbits, skunks, ground squirrels, prairie dogs, quail and dove, possums, and fat prairie hens. He wanted his wives to work their snares and catch what food they needed. When his strength returned, so that he could draw his bow and throw his lance, he meant to journey alone with his wives north to the cold rivers where the buffalo still lived. He would take two pack horses and kill enough meat to last all winter.
The shitting sickness had not affected his eyes, though, or his ears. He saw the young men riding south, murder in their hearts, singing their war songs; and he could count, as well. He saw how many young men rode out and he saw how many came back. In his days of raiding he rarely lost more than one or two warriors to the guns of the Texans. If he lost more than three men he did not claim victory; and, always, he recovered and brought back the bodies of the fallen warriors, so they could have a proper burial. Now, though, when the young men came back, claiming victory, they had sometimes lost five or six men; once they even lost eight, and, another time, ten. Seldom, in those battles, did they recover more than one or two bodies to bring home. Many warriors were left unburied, a thing that in his time would have shamed any chief or warrior who led a raid.
But it did not seem to shame the young men--they spoke only of the Texans they had killed and said nothing about the warriors who were lost and whose bodies had been abandoned.
Usually, after such a raid, a few of the old men would come to Buffalo Hump in his new camp, to discuss the shameful losses and the even more shameful abandonment of bodies. Some of the elders, old Sunrise in particular, wanted Buffalo Hump to speak to the young men; they wanted him to ride with them on a raid, to instruct them of the correct way to behave toward the dead; but Buffalo Hump refused: he would not ride with warriors who didn't want him. The young men had no use for him now--they made that clear by the arrogant looks they gave him when he walked through the camp or rode out to the horse herd to watch the young horses.
When the old men came to him with their complaints he listened but did not say much in reply. He had led the band for a long time, but now could not. Let the young men decide who should be chief; let them do without a chief, if they could not decide. After all, any warrior could follow anyone he wanted to--or follow no one, if that was his choice. Buffalo Hump did not like what he saw, but he could do little about it. His own time was short--it had almost ended in the weeks of his sickness--and he did not intend to use it giving advice to young men who did not want it.
With Kicking Wolf, though, he sometimes did talk and talk frankly about what the large losses meant.
'The Texans have learned to fight us,' he said.
Heavy Leg had caught a fat coon in a snare and was cooking it.
'Some have,' Kicking Wolf admitted. 'Some are fools.' 'Yes, some are fools, but Gun In The Water is not a fool, and neither is McCrae,' Buffalo Hump said. 'They don't get scared now just because we yell at them--theirthe men wait until we are close and then they shoot us. They have better guns now--if they had better horses they would follow us and kill us all.' 'Their horses are too fat and too slow,' Kicking Wolf agreed.
'That is because you have stolen so many of the good ones,' Buffalo Hump told him. Though Kicking Wolf had often annoyed him, it was clear that he was the best horse thief the tribe had ever produced. Now he felt annoyed again, but it was not because Kicking Wolf had been rude. Kicking Wolf had always been rude. What was annoying was that he was younger--he had not been sick, and the hand of age had not touched him. The young men made a little fun of him, but not much. They didn't fear him as a fighter, but they respected him as a thief.
