'Slow Tree has sat down with the white man,' Kicking Wolf informed him one day. 'So have Moo-ray and Little Cloud. They are all going to the place the whites want to put them, near the Brazos. The Texans have promised to give them beef.' That news came as no surprise to Buffalo Hump. He had never sat down with the white men and never would, but it did not surprise him that Slow Tree and others, worn out by the difficulty of feeding their bands, would talk with the whites and go to the places the white men wanted to put them.
'It is because the buffalo have left,' Kicking Wolf said, a little apologetically. Buffalo Hump was looking angry. He did not like the news that Comanches were giving in to the white men, ceasing to fight or be free. Yet he knew how thin the game was; he saw that the buffalo were gone.
'The buffalo haven't left the world,' Buffalo Hump told him. 'They have only gone to the north, to be away from the Texans. If we go north we can still kill buffalo.' 'Slow Tree and the other chiefs are too old,' Kicking Wolf said. 'They don't like to go into the snows.' 'No, I see that,' Buffalo Hump said.
'They had rather sit with the Texans and make speeches. They had rather be given beef than steal them, although cattle are easy to steal.' Kicking Wolf was sorry he had mentioned that the chiefs were too old. It brought anger to Buffalo Hump's face. He was fingering his knife, the cold look in his eyes. Kicking Wolf understood that the anger was because Buffalo Hump himself was now old--he could not ride the war trail again.
It was known that he planned to go north, to hunt buffalo alone. Kicking Wolf thought that was foolish but he didn't say anything. There were many whites to the north and they did have good guns.
'Would you let the whites tell you where to live?' Buffalo Hump asked him. 'Would you let them buy you off for a few of their skinny beeves?' 'No, I would rather eat horsemeat than beef,' Kicking Wolf said. 'I can eat the horses I steal. I will never sit down with the whites.' There was a long silence. The coon had been chopped up--it was bubbling in the pot. The flesh sagged on Buffalo Hump's arms and his torso was thin now--his hump seemed as if it would pull his body over backward.
'Doesn't Slow Tree have horses he could eat?' Buffalo Hump asked. 'Doesn't Moo-ray?' 'They have some horses,' Kicking Wolf said.
'I think they are just tired of fighting. Many of their young men have been killed, and their women are unhappy. They have been fighting for a long time.' 'We all have been fighting for a long time,' Buffalo Hump reminded him. 'We have been fighting for our whole lives. That is our way.' He was silent again. He had begun to think that it was time for him to leave his people--perh even leave his wives. If, one by one, the chiefs of the various bands were giving up, making peace with the white men, then the time of the free Comanche was over--and so was his own time. Perhaps he should go away, alone, and seek a place to die. The greatest warriors inconvenienced no one when their time was ending. They simply went away, alone or with one old horse. Of course it was a thing rarely done now, a custom that was almost forgotten; the Texans had made it hard for any man to survive long enough to come to the natural end of his time. Now so many warriors fell in battle that few could survive until they could die with dignity, in the old way.
Buffalo Hump did not want to discuss this possibility with Kicking Wolf. He wanted only one more piece of information: he wanted to know about Quanah, the young chief of the Antelope band, the Comanches who lived the farthest west, in the barren llano. These Comanches had never sat down with the whites. They survived in their harsh land even when the buffalo didn't come. The Antelope Comanches would live on roots and grubs, on weeds and prairie dogs and bulbs they dug from the earth. Buffalo Hump himself had only been among the Antelope Comanches once or twice in his life; they lived too far away, and were not friendly--the fact that they were not friendly was something he had come to admire. They lived in their own place, in the old way, hunting, moving as the game moved, finding enough water to survive in a place where no one else could find water. The Antelope rarely fought the whites, because the whites could not find them. When the whites came the Antelope merely retreated deeper and deeper into the long space of the llano. Always, the whites ran out of food and out of water before they could attack them. Antelope knew their country and could survive in it; the whites didn't know it, and feared it. Even Famous Shoes, the Kickapoo who went everywhere, did not try to follow the Antelope Comanches to their watering holes.
Even he found the llano too hard a test.
Now Buffalo Hump had heard that there was a young chief of the Antelope band--his name was Quanah. Though scarcely more than a boy he was said to be a great fighter, decisive and terrible in battle, a horseman and hunter, one who had no fear either of the whites or of the country. The talk was that Quanah was half white, the son of Peta Nocona and the captive Naduah, who had been with the Comanche for many years. She had been taken in a raid near the Brazos when Buffalo Hump himself had been young. Naduah had been with the People so long that she had forgotten that she was a captive--now her son led the Antelope Comanches and kept his people far from the whites and their councils.
When Buffalo Hump asked about Quanah, Kicking Wolf did not answer immediately. The subject seemed to annoy him.
'I took him four good horses but he didn't want them,' he said, finally.
'Did you try to fool him?' Buffalo Hump asked. 'I remember that you used to try and trade me bad horses. You only wanted to trade the horses there was something wrong with. Maybe Quanah is too smart for you. Maybe he knew those horses had something wrong with them.' Kicking Wolf immediately rose and prepared to leave.
'There was nothing wrong with the horses I took him, or with the horses I traded you, either,' he said. 'Someday Quanah will wish he had horses as good as those I took him.' Then he walked away, to the embarrassment of Heavy Leg and Lark, who had been preparing to offer him some of the coon--t was the polite thing to do. When Buffalo Hump visited Kicking Wolf he always politely ate a little of what Kicking Wolf's wives had prepared. He was a good guest--he did not simply get up and leave just as the meal was ready. Lark and Heavy Leg were afraid they might have done something to offend their guest. Perhaps he was forbidden to eat coon? They didn't know what to think, but they were fearful. If they had erred, Buffalo Hump would surely beat them--since his sickness he was often in a bad temper and beat them for the smallest errors in the management of the lodge. They knew that the beatings mainly came about because Buffalo Hump was old and ill, but they were severe beatings anyway, so severe that it behooved them to be as careful as possible.
This time, though, Buffalo Hump merely ate his food; he said nothing to his wives. It amused him that Kicking Wolf was annoyed with Quanah, the young war chief of the Antelopes, just because he was a good judge of horseflesh. It only impressed Buffalo Hump more, that Quanah had refused to trade with Kicking Wolf. Living where he lived, on the llano, where the distances to be travelled were great and the forage sparse, a war chief could not afford to make mistakes about horses. If a horse's feet were poor it might imperil the success of a hunt, and the P's survival depended on the hunt.
Of course, Kicking Wolf was notorious--and had been throughout his whole career as a thief--for attempting to trade off horses that looked like fine horses but that had one hard-to-detect flaw. Perhaps a given horse was deficient in endurance, or had no wind, or had hooves that were prone to splitting. Kicking Wolf was skilled at glossing over flaws that only a man with an experienced eye could see. There was a way of knowing that some men had and some men didn't. Kicking Wolf could watch a horse graze for a few minutes and know whether he was watching a good horse. But fewer and fewer could do that. Buffalo Hump had never been an exact appraiser of
