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.
In the night Buffalo Hump, though weak from lack of food, began to sing a little, though his voice was cracked. Again, he was remembering scraps of things. The wind came up. He was glad he had a good blanket to put over his shoulders. A little dust began to blow, reminding him of his grandmother and her lamentations, her wailings, her prophecies of the end of the Comanche time.
It was then that he remembered his grandmother's prophecy about his own end, a thing he had not thought of in years. She had said that he would only die when his great hump was pierced, and had suggested in her prophecy that this would happen when a dark woman came, riding a white mule and holding aloft a sword. At the time his grandmother made the prophecy Buffalo Hump thought she was just a crazy old woman. Half the old men and old women of the tribe spent their time making strange prophecies. No one paid their mutterings much mind.
But then, a few years later, on a plain west of the Rio Pecos, he had seen a dark woman on a white mule, holding aloft a great sword. Buffalo Hump might have tried to kill her, then and there, except that, with her, there had been a naked white woman with a rotting body, singing a high war song and carrying a great snake: a witch, undoubtedly, and a powerful one.
All his men had run away at the sight of the naked witch whose body was rotting; even Kicking Wolf had run away. Buffalo Hump had not run, but he did remember his grandmother's prophecy about his hump being pierced. The sight of the witch was so horrible that Buffalo Hump retreated, but he retreated slowly, backing his horse step by step, so that his hump would not be exposed to the dark woman with the sword.
All that had happened so many years before that Buffalo Hump had almost forgotten it. The dark woman with the sword was the servant of a powerful witch--it puzzled him that the witch had made no effort to pierce his hump and kill him.
But then the years began to pass. He fought the Texans and the Mexicans, he stole many captives, he made his first great raid to the sea and then his second; the buffalo were still on the plains and there were hunts to pursue. Buffalo Hump had much to do, trying to drive the white people back so the plains would be free of their smell. The sickness came; it became difficult to find enough good warriors to make war. As the years passed, the memory of the dark woman and the rotting witch faded; his grandmother died and her prophecies were lost, with the many prophecies of the old women of the tribe. He had even forgotten the prophecy about his hump being pierced, but now he remembered it.
He remembered how careful he had been not to turn his back on Slow Tree, for fear that Slow Tree would stick him with a lance behind and succeed in killing him.
Though his grandmother had been right about the wars and pestilences, about the whites, and about the departure of the buffalo, it seemed now that she had just been talking nonsense about the dark woman on the white mule. He was dying all right, in a circle of black rocks near the Lake of Horses, but his hump was as it had always been, a thing woven into his muscles, a hunk of gristle that had always been there to slow him when he drew a bow or mounted a horse. He had lived with it and now he would die with it; neither the rotting witch nor Slow Tree would come to pierce it.
Between the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon Buffalo Hump dozed. When he woke he saw a form walking near the ring of black rocks, a white bird which rose when he moved.
