himself, without having to mediate disputes and make decisions for so many warriors.
Worm was old; he was a man of silence. He could speak prophecy and make spells, but mostly he was quiet and alert, a pleasure to travel with. For two days they travelled through the thick brush country, a country where there were many armadillos. Worm was particularly fond of armadillo meat--al, the little scaly animals seemed to amuse him. Sometimes he would catch an armadillo that was half in its hold and would have to tickle its testicles to make it come out. When he cooked an armadillo he carefully preserved the scaly case that had been the beast's defense; soon he had several armadillo shells dangling from his pack.
'Why do you like that meat so much?' Buffalo Hump asked him one night--they were only one camp from the Great Water. He himself had killed a javelina that afternoon and was eating it. In his view pig was tastier by far than armadillo.
Worm rarely answered a direct question directly.
'The armadillo people are from a time before the Comanche,' Worm said. 'They were here when we were not. They are so old that they have learned to grow shells, and yet they are not slow, like turtles.' Worm paused. He was studying the paw of one of the armadillos he had killed.
'If we could learn to grow shells we would be safe in battle,' he said. 'If I eat enough of these armadillos maybe I will grow a shell.' 'You have eaten several and I don't see any shell on you,' Buffalo Hump commented.
Worm was silent. He preferred to think his own thoughts about the armadillo people.
The next day they came to a country where the trees were low and inward bent, from the constant push of the sea wind. The air was so salty Buffalo Hump could lick salt off his lips. The land became swampy, with tall reeds higher than a horse growing in dense thickets; there were inlets of water here and there, with cranes and great storks standing in there. As they grew nearer the sea both the land and the air were alive with birds: geese and ducks in great numbers floated on the inlets or waddled through the grass. There were white gulls that rose and dipped. But the most interesting to Buffalo Hump were the great cranes--they came from far in the north and did not stop in the Comanche country. Once, in Nebraska on the Platte River, he had seen a few of the great cranes, but in the swamps and inlets near the Great Water there were thousands of them.
Worm seemed in awe of the birds. His old eyes widened when the storks flapped into the air, or when the herons sailed down to the water on their wide wings. He turned his head from side to side and listened when the sea gulls spoke; it was as if he were trying to learn their language. Worm had only half an upper lip--the other half had been cut off years before, in battle. When he was excited, he licked his half lip; it was a thing he did, too, when his interest in a woman was high. The women of the tribe joked about it. They could always tell when old Worm needed a woman because he licked his lip. All his wives had died of one illness or another. There was a story about him from the old days that the old women told the young women, to inform them about the vengefulness of men.
Worm had once had a wife who would not open her legs when he wanted her; to teach her obedience Worm had made a great black cactus grow out of her womb, a cactus with thorns so sharp that the woman could never close her legs again, but had to walk with them widespread even when she was only doing chores.
Buffalo Hump had heard the story from Hair On The Lip and did not believe it.
'I have been with this tribe since I was born,' he said. 'I have never seen a woman waddling around with a cactus sticking out of her.' 'Oh no, a bear took that woman--y were just a child then,' Hair On The Lip assured him.
Buffalo Hump still did not believe her, but he did like most of the stories Hair On The Lip told. Many of her stories were about things that happened to humans while they were coupling-- such stories seldom failed to amuse him.
After wading through several inlets, frightening many birds off the water, Buffalo Hump and Worm at last came to the long strip of sand that bordered the Great Water. They rode along the edge of the Great Water for many miles. Buffalo Hump liked to ride on the wet sand, so close to the sea that the waves foamed over the hooves of his horse, as the waves died.
Worm, though, would not come near the Great Water. He kept his horse far back at the edge of the sand, where sand gave way to grass. He tried repeatedly to point out to Buffalo Hump that the Great Water was unsafe to approach, but Buffalo Hump ignored him. He rode where he wanted to ride.
'There are great fish in the water, and snakes as long as the tallest pine tree,' Worm insisted.
'One of those snakes might wrap its tongue around you and pull you under.' Buffalo Hump paid no attention to Worm and his talk. Despite Worm's protest he camped that night on the sandy beach. The air at night was warm and salty. He built a small fire of driftwood and sang as the fire died.
Worm finally came and sat with him; they shared a little of the javelina meat. Worm still worried that the water might somehow engulf them.
'That water is never still,' he told Buffalo Hump suspiciously. 'It is always moving.' Buffalo Hump shrugged. He liked it that the water moved, that the waves came in and went out.
He liked the sound it made, a sound that came from depths he could not see.
'I like the land--it doesn't move,' Worm said. 'This water sighs like a woman who is sad.' There was some truth in that comment, Buffalo Hump thought. The ocean did sigh like a woman, as she sighed in sorrow, or at the slowing of her passion.
'There are great fish in that water with mouths so wide they can swallow buffalo,' Worm worried. Buffalo Hump sang over Worm's droning, his complaints. He sang much of the night, in the warm salt air.
In the gray mist before the dawn Buffalo Hump got on his horse and sat waiting for the sun. On impulse he forced the horse into the water and made him swim until the small waves broke over them. Then he swam back to land. Worm was beside himself when he saw Buffalo Hump in the water. He was worried about the snake as long as a pine tree, but Buffalo Hump had no such worry. He merely wanted to watch the sun rise out of the water. All his life he had watched the sun rise upward out of the prairie; now he wanted to see it come out of the water. When it came, at first it was only a faint glow in the grayness of water and sky.
'We had better move back there in those trees,' Worm said, when Buffalo Hump came out.
'Why?' Buffalo Hump asked.
'They say the sun rides all night on the back of a great fish,' Worm said. 'When it is time for morning the
