When Slipping Weasel came over to sit with Buffalo Hump for a while Buffalo Hump was skimming the broth from the boiling pot and drinking it.
In the broth as in the shield was the strength of the buffalo people. He gave Slipping Weasel a cup of the broth, but Slipping Weasel, a poor hunter and indifferent fighter, did not like it much.
'It has too many hairs in it,' he told Buffalo Hump, who thought the comment ridiculous.
It was the skull of a buffalo; of course the broth had hairs in it.
'Where is he taking the Buffalo Horse?' he asked. 'Why didn't he bring him here, so we could eat him?' Slipping Weasel was silent for a while, mainly because he didn't know what to answer. He had met a Kiowa medicine man on his ride back, and the Kiowa told him that the news was that Kicking Wolf meant to take the big horse to Mexico and sell him to the Black Vaquero.
Slipping Weasel did not really believe such a tale, since the Black Vaquero hated all Indians, as Kicking Wolf well knew. Buffalo Hump might not believe the story either, but it was the only explanation Slipping Weasel had to offer.
'They say he is taking the horse to Mexico --he wants to sell him to the Black Vaquero,' he said finally.
Buffalo Hump didn't take that information very seriously.
'If he gets there Ahumado will boil him like I am boiling this skull,' he said.
Then Slipping Weasel remembered an even more surprising thing he had heard from Straight Elbow, the old Kiowa. Straight Elbow got his name because he had never been able to bend his right arm, as a consequence of which he could not hunt well.
Straight Elbow had to live on roots and acorns, like a squirrel--he searched constantly for herbs or medicines that might allow him to bend his arm, but he never found the right medicine.
'Old Straight Elbow told me something else,' Slipping Weasel admitted. 'He said Big Horse Scull is following Kicking Wolf. Famous Shoes is with him, and they are both walking.' Buffalo Hump agreed that that was out of the ordinary. Once there had been whites who walked everywhere, but most of the old walking whites were dead.
Now the soldiers and rangers were always mounted. He went on boiling his skull. What he heard seemed like a crazy business--Kicking Wolf and Scull were both doing crazy things. Of course, old Straight Elbow was crazy himself, there might be no truth in what he said.
Buffalo Hump, though, made no comment. He had reached the age where time was beginning to seem short. He wanted to devote all his thought to his own plans, and plans he thought he should make for his people. A few years before, when the shitting sickness struck the P--the cholera--the Comanches had died so fast that he thought the end of the People had come. Then the smallpox came and killed more people, sometimes half the people in a given band. These plagues came from the air; none of the medicine men were wise enough to cure them. He himself had gone on several vigils, but his vigils had had no effect on the plague.
Still, though many died, some lived. The Comanches were not as powerful a tribe as they had been, but there was still no one on the plains who could oppose them.
They could still beat the whites back, slipping between the forts to attack farms and ranches. The white soldiers were not yet bold enough to attack them on the llano, where they lived.
Slow Tree, though boring, was not foolish; he saw what any man of sense could see: that it was the whites, not the People, who were growing more numerous. It would take many years for the young women to bear enough babies to bring the strength of the People back to what it had been before the coming of the plagues.
But the whites had not suffered much from the plagues. For every white that died, three arrived to take his place. The whites came from far places, from lands no Comanche had ever seen. Like ants they worked their way up the rivers, into the Comanche lands. Soon there would be so many that no chief could hope to kill them all in war, or drive them away.
Slow Tree was right about the buffalo, too. Every year there were fewer of them. Each fall the hunters had to range farther, and, even so, they came back with less.
Now there were signs that the bluecoat soldiers meant to come into the field against them. Soon an army might come, not just the few rangers who followed them and tried to take back captives or stolen horses. The rangers were too few to attack them in their camps; but the soldiers were not too few. For now the soldiers were only parading, but someday they would come.
Buffalo Hump saw what Slow Tree saw, but he did not intend to let the whites control him. He had never broken the earth to raise anything, and he did not intend to. It was fine for Kicking Wolf to steal the Buffalo Horse, but that was only a joke, though a bold joke.
What Buffalo Hump wanted was a great raid--a great raid, such as there had been in the past, when warriors went into even the largest towns and stole captives, or burned buildings, or ran off all the horses and livestock that they wanted. Once he himself had raided all the way to the Great Water, coming back with so many horses that they filled the plains like buffalo.
The great raids had scared the Texans so badly that they were eager for councils and treaties --they made the Comanches many promises and gave them small gifts, in hopes that they would not raid all the towns and scare the new white people away.
Buffalo Hump wanted to launch a great raid again; a raid with hundreds of warriors, into Austin and San Antonio. They would kill many Texans, take many captives, and take what booty they wanted. Such a raid would show the Texans that the Comanches were still a people to be feared. Again, they would call for councils and treaties. He himself did not believe in councils or treaties, but old Slow Tree could go. He loved to parley with the whites; he would sit under a tent for weeks, boring the whites with his long speeches.
Meanwhile, on the plains, the young women would be having babies, bringing a new generation of warriors, to replace the ones lost to the plagues.
A great raid would remind the Texans that the Comanches were a people still; they could not be turned into farmers just because the whites wanted their land.
Buffalo Hump wanted to launch such a great raid, and he wanted to do it soon, with all the warriors he could persuade to accompany him, from his band and Slow Tree's and the others. He wanted to make the raid soon, while the north wind was still sharp as a knife--while the snows fell and the sleet cut down. Never before had the Comanches made a raid in the coldest month of the winter.
