Kicking Wolf remembered, as he watched the black man hobble the brown mule, that once, only a few miles from where they were, he had stolen the Buffalo Horse, right from under Big Horse Scull's very nose. He had stolen him and taken him to Mexico, a venture that had cost Three Birds his life and led to his own derangement, his time of seeing two where there was one.
It had been a great thing, the stealing of the Buffalo Horse, a great horse whose fate had been to be eaten in Mexico by many small dark people. Some of the old men still sang about Big Horse Scull and the Buffalo Horse--he sang about it too, when there were great feasts and dancing, a thing that had not been common since the buffalo went to the north, where they would not have to smell the whites.
Remembering his great feat made Kicking Wolf want to sing--the urge to sing rose in him and mixed in his breast with the sadness that came in him because he realized that the time of good fighting was over. There would be a little more killing, probably; Quanah and the Antelopes might make a little more war, but only a little more. The time of good fighting was ended; what was left for the Comanches was to smile at the white men and pretend they didn't hate them.
Kicking Wolf did not want to smile at the white man. He wanted to die somewhere on the llano, alone, in a spirit place, as Buffalo Hump had tried to do. Not only that, he did not want to steal the puny brown mule, either. Why would a man who had once stolen the Buffalo Horse want to steal a skinny brown mule? It would be an insult to himself, to do such a thing.
So he waited until the moon rose and turned to go back to the gully and the horses, only to discover that Dancing Rabbit, the foolish boy, had disobeyed and followed him.
'What are you doing? I told you to watch the horses,' Kicking Wolf said. 'If those Texans were not so tired they would steal our horses.' 'I only came because I wanted to watch you steal the horse,' Dancing Rabbit said. 'I just want to see how you do it.' 'It is not even a horse!' Kicking Wolf said. He grew so angry that he almost forgot to whisper--but then he remembered the Texans and led the foolish boy farther away, to reprimand him.
'It is only a mule,' he pointed out, once it was safe to talk. 'It was near here that I stole the Buffalo Horse. I am not going to steal a mule.
'You steal it, if you want it so badly,' he told the boy.
Dancing Rabbit knew he had not skill enough to steal the mule. Besides, he didn't want the mule--he merely wanted to watch as Kicking Wolf stole it.
'Just show me how you approach it,' he pleaded.
'Just show me how, in case I see some Texans with a fine horse I could steal.' 'I stole the Buffalo Horse,' Kicking Wolf said, several more times, but, in the end, he gave in and did what Dancing Rabbit wanted.
He sat with the young warrior most of the night, watching the moon arch over the still prairies. He saw Famous Shoes come back and lay down to rest. He watched as the Texans--exhausted, all of them--fell asleep. Even Gun In The Water, whose habit was to stand guard outside of camp, did not stand guard that night.
'When will you do it?' Dancing Rabbit asked him several times. 'It will be light soon.' He was worried that Kicking Wolf wouldn't do it; but then he looked again and Kicking Wolf was gone. The old man had been sitting quietly, a few feet away, but now he was gone.
Then, to his astonishment, he saw Kicking Wolf standing by the mule, stroking its neck. The black man who had tethered the mule was sleeping only a few yards away, but the mule was calm and so was Kicking Wolf. The old man stood by the mule for a few minutes, as if talking quietly to it, and then he disappeared again. He had been by the mule, but now he wasn't. Dancing Rabbit had no idea where the old man had gone. Hastily he made his way back to the gully where the horses were, only to find, when he reached it, that Kicking Wolf was there and had already mounted his horse.
'We had better go,' Kicking Wolf said.
'The Kickapoo will see my track first thing in the morning. I don't think they will follow us, but I don't know. Gun In The Water might chase us on the mule.' 'I didn't see you move,' Dancing Rabbit said, when they were riding together. 'You were with me and then you were with the mule. I didn't see you move.' Kicking Wolf smiled. It had been pleasant to do his old trick again, to walk without making a sound, to go up to a horse, or, in this case, a mule, to touch it and make it his while the owner slept nearby. It was a skill he had that no other Comanche had ever equalled. Though he had had to travel a long way across the llano in dry weather, it was good to know that he still had his old gift. It made up a little for Broken Foot and the cramps in his leg and the sadness of knowing that the old ways were gone.
'I don't move,' he said, to the credulous young man who could still not quite believe what he had seen. 'When the time is right I am just there, by the horse.' 'But I saw you--y were with me and then you were by the horse. I know you moved,' Dancing Rabbit said.
'It isn't moving--it is something else,' Kicking Wolf said.
Dancing Rabbit pestered him all the way home, wanting to know how Kicking Wolf did what he did when he approached a horse; but Kicking Wolf didn't tell him, because he couldn't. It was a way--his way--and that was all.
When Famous Shoes saw Kicking Wolf standing by the mule he thought at first that it was just another of his dreams. Since seeing the white owl come out of the earth he had had many dreams that were not good. In some of them Comanches were killing his children. In another Ahumado had him, and, in a third, a great flood came while he was on the llano. He tried to outrun the water but the flood swept over him and carried him down to where there was a great fish shaped like Jaguar.
Compared to those nightmares, seeing Kicking Wolf standing by the brown mule was not so bad. Then, waking, he thought he saw Kicking Wolf walking in the white moonlight--it might have been Kicking Wolf or it might have been his ghost.
In the morning, when he had almost forgotten his dream, Famous Shoes walked over to where the brown mule grazed and saw at once that no dream had occurred: Kicking Wolf had been there. On the ground, plain to see, was the footprint that he had seen so many times when he and Big Horse Scull had followed the Comanche horse thieves into Mexico. What he had seen in the moonlight was not a ghost but a man. Kicking Wolf had come for the mule and then left it.
Famous Shoes found it surprising that the old Comanche would follow them all the way into the llano after one mule, but it was not surprising that he had left the mule once he saw how skinny it was. Kicking Wolf was a man who had always been choosy about horseflesh. He only took the best horses, and Deets's brown mule could not even be said to be a horse.
