Duck do not bother you--they are very rude.' Idahi did not respond to the remark. He was remembering a feast his people had once had, when they had managed to stampede a herd of buffalo off a cliff into the Palo Duro.
There had been meat enough for the whole band to feast for a week--one or two of the neighboring bands had come too.
Famous Shoes did not have much food either; he did not like prairie dog meat, which was the easiest meat to obtain on the dry llano. He would have liked to take a little horsemeat from the Comanche warrior's dead horse, but he knew that it would not be a polite thing to do.
The lone Comanche who had decided to die sang his final song so faintly that before Famous Shoes had taken many steps he could no longer hear him singing.
Kicking Wolf was the last person in the tribe to have a conversation with Buffalo Hump, and the conversation, as usual, had been about horses.
Both of Buffalo Hump's wives were now dead; of the two, Heavy Leg had lived the longer, though Lark was much the younger woman. Lark had foolishly let a deer kick her--though the deer was down and dying, it still managed to kick Lark so badly in the ribs that she began to spit blood.
Within two days she was dead. Heavy Leg had not been foolish in regard to dying deer, but, in the winter, she had died anyway, leaving Buffalo Hump with no one to tend his lodge.
Of course, Buffalo Hump possessed many horses. He could easily have bought himself another wife, but he didn't. The young women still tittered about the old chief's hump. Some of them wondered what it would be like to couple with such a man, but none of them found out because Buffalo Hump ignored them.
Although his lodge soon grew tattered and poorly kept, and he had to prepare his own meals, he did not send for a new wife, or seek one. He spent most of his days sitting on his favorite pinnacle of rock, watching the hawks and eagles soar high above the canyon. He had no visitors. Many of the young people of the tribe had forgotten that he had ever been a chief. Only when there was singing and a few of the old warriors sang about the thousand- warrior raid was Buffalo Hump recalled.
Buffalo Hump himself kept apart from the singing, which, itself, had become a rare thing. Singing was most likely to happen when there was a feast; since there was less and less to feast on, there were fewer and fewer feasts.
Kicking Wolf, of course, was still an active horse thief. He seldom fired a gun at a Texan, and seldom was fired at, preferring, as always, to work at night and depend on stealth.
The reason Kicking Wolf sought out Buffalo Hump was because he wanted his opinion on the horse herd. Peta, the war chief, thought there could never be too many horses, the result being that almost two thousand grazed on the grasslands near the camp.
Kicking Wolf's view was different. He thought there could be too many horses. He wanted to divide the horse herd and give some of the horses to the other bands that were still free. He even favored driving some of the horses away alt, letting them go wild, and he thought his arguments were sound. Having so many horses together made it easier for the bluecoat soldiers to find them. There was not enough grass in the canyon itself to graze so many horses, and their presence kept the buffalo from coming back.
Kicking Wolf was a firm believer in the return of the buffalo. There had been too many buffalo simply to vanish. They had gone north, he believed, because they did not like the smell of the whites, or the smell of their cattle, either. But the buffalo were not gone from the earth; they had merely gone north. Someday they would return to the southern plains--they would, at least, if the People were patient and respectful and did not graze out the plains with too many horses.
When Kicking Wolf found Buffalo Hump he had just climbed down from his rock. It was a hard climb, almost beyond Buffalo Hump's strength. He was sitting in a patch of shade, resting, when Kicking Wolf approached.
'Why do you climb that rock?' Kicking Wolf asked. 'Haven't you climbed it enough in your life?' Buffalo Hump didn't answer--he found the question annoying. It was none of Kicking Wolf's business how many times he climbed the rock. In the last year or two he had not only grown indifferent to company, he had begun to find it irritating. Everyone who came to see him asked questions that were either stupid or impertinent.
Better to see no one than to see fools.
For himself, the one sad thing about climbing the rock was that he could no longer really see the hawks and eagles. He knew they were there; sometimes he could almost feel their flight, but he could not see them as he had seen them when he was a younger man. Now his eyes would water when he tried to look hard at a flying bird or even a running deer. Sometimes he would think he saw a jackrabbit, sitting for a moment, but when he came closer the jackrabbit would become a rock or a clump of grass. The plains became a blur now, when he tried to look across them to some distant point. Often his ears were of more use than his eyes--he could tell what animals were near by listening. He could hear an armadillo scratching, hear the slow walk of a possum. [ it not for his skill at snaring small game, he would have had a hard time finding food.
He did not mention his problems to Kicking Wolf--z always, Kicking Wolf had only one thing on his mind, which was horses. He immediately started talking about the horse herd--it was too big, it needed to be divided, it would lead the soldiers to them, it would keep the buffalo from returning. Buffalo Hump had heard it all before. The only part he felt like responding to was the nonsense about the buffalo. It annoyed him that an experienced warrior such as Kicking Wolf, a horse Comanche all his life, could be so foolish as to think that the size of the horse herd had anything to do with the disappearance of the buffalo. What were a thousand horses, or two thousand, to the millions of buffalo that had once roamed the prairies?
'The buffalo won't come back,' he said angrily.
Kicking Wolf was startled by the anger in Buffalo Hump's voice--the old chief had seemed half asleep, his eyes staring vacantly across the prairie. But his voice, when he spoke, was the voice of the fighter, the man whose cold eyes had made even brave warriors want to run.
'The buffalo will return,' Kicking Wolf said. 'They have only gone to the north for a while.
The buffalo have always returned.' 'You are a fool,' Buffalo Hump said.
'The buffalo won't return, because they are dead.
The whites have killed them. When you go north you will only find their bones.' 'The whites have killed many, but not all,' Kicking Wolf insisted. 'They have only gone to the Missouri River to live. When we have beaten the whites back they will return.' But, as he was speaking, Kicking Wolf suddenly lost heart. He realized that Buffalo Hump was right, and that the ^ws he had just spoken .were the ^ws of a fool. The Comanches were not beating
