“Sleep,” he said. “I will now sleep like a dead man the whole night through.”
Lieutenant Dunbar woke with alarm in the dark of early morning. His sod hut was trembling. The earth was trembling, too, and the air was filled with a hollow rumbling sound.
He swung out of bed and listened hard. The rumble was coming from somewhere close, just downriver.
Pulling on his pants and boots, the lieutenant slipped outside. The sound was even louder here, filling the prairie night with a great, reverberating echo.
He felt small in its midst.
The sound was not coming toward him, and without knowing precisely why, he ruled out the idea that some freak of nature, an earthquake or a flood, was producing this enormous energy. Something alive was making the sound. Something alive was making the earth tremble, and he had to see.
The light of his lantern seemed tiny as he walked toward the rush of sound somewhere in front of him. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards along the bluff before the feeble light he was holding picked up something. It was dust: a great, billowing wall of it rising into the night.
The lieutenant slowed to a creep as he got closer. All at once he knew that hooves were making the thunderous sound and that the dust was being raised by a movement of beasts so large that he could never have believed what he was seeing with his own eyes.
The buffalo.
One of them swerved out of the dusty cloud. And another. And another. He only glimpsed them as they roared past, but the sight of them was so magnificent that they may as well have been frozen. At that moment they froze forever in Lieutenant Dunbar’s memory.
In that moment, all alone with his lantern, he knew what they meant to the world he lived in. They were what the ocean meant to fishes, what the sky meant to birds, what air meant to a pair of human lungs.
They were the life of the prairie.
And there were thousands of them pouring over the embankment and down to the river, which they crossed with no more care than a train would a puddle. Then up the other side and out onto the grasslands, thundering to a destination known only to them, a torrent of hooves and horns and meat cutting across the landscape with a force beyond all imagining.
Dunbar dropped the lantern where he stood and broke into a run. He stopped for nothing except Cisco’s bridle, not even a shirt. Then he jumped up and kicked his horse into a gallop. He laid his bare chest close on the little buckskin’s neck and gave Cisco his head.
The village was ablaze with firelight as Lieutenant Dunbar raced into the depression where the lodges were pitched and pounded up the camp’s main avenue.
Now he could see the flames of the biggest fire and the crowd gathered around it. He could see the buffalo- headed dancers and he could hear the steady roll of the drums. He could hear deep, rhythmic chanting.
But he was barely aware of the spectacle opening before him, just as he had been barely aware of the ride he’d made, tearing across the prairie at full speed for miles. He wasn’t conscious of the sweat that coated Cisco from head to tail. Only one thing was in his head as he rushed his horse up the avenue . . . the Comanche word for buffalo. He was turning it over and over, trying to remember the exact pronunciation.
Now he was shouting the word. But with all the drumming and chanting, they hadn’t yet heard his approach. As he neared the fire he tried to pull Cisco up, but the horse was high on runaway speed and didn’t answer the bit.
He charged into the very center of the dance, scattering Comanches in every direction. With a supreme effort the lieutenant pulled him up, but as Cisco’s hindquarters brushed against the ground, his head and neck rose straight up. His front legs clawed madly at empty space. Dunbar couldn’t keep his seat. He slid off the sweat-slicked back and crashed to earth with an audible thud.
Before he could move, a half-dozen infuriated warriors pounced on him. One man with a club might have ended everything, but the six men were tangled together and no one could get a clear shot at the lieutenant.
They rolled over the ground in a chaotic ball. Dunbar was screaming “Buffalo” as he fought against the punches and kicks. But no one could understand what he was saying, and some of the blows were now finding their mark.
Then he was dimly aware of a lessening of the weight pressing against him. Someone was shouting above the tumult, and the voice sounded familiar.
Suddenly there was no one on him. He was lying alone on the ground, staring up through half-stunned eyes at a multitude of Indian faces. One of the faces bent closer.
Kicking Bird.
The lieutenant said, “Buffalo.”
His body was heaving as it sucked for air, and his voice had been a whisper.
Kicking Bird’s face leaned closer.
“Buffalo,” the lieutenant gasped.
Kicking Bird grunted and shook his head. He turned his ear to within a whisker of Dunbar’s mouth and the lieutenant said the word once more, struggling with all his might for the right accent.
“Buffalo.”
Kicking Bird’s eyes were back in front of Lieutenant Dunbar’s.
“Buffalo?”
“Yes,” Dunbar said, a wan smile flaring on his face. “Yes . . . buffalo . . . buffalo.”
Exhausted, he closed his eyes for a moment and heard Kicking Bird’s deep voice bellow over the stillness as he shouted the word.
It was answered with a roar of joy from every Comanche throat, and for a split second the lieutenant thought the power of it was carrying him away. Blinking away the glaze on his eyes, he realized that strong Indian arms were bringing him to his feet.
When the erstwhile lieutenant looked up, he was greeted with scores of beaming faces. They were pressing in around him.
CHAPTER XVIII
Everyone went.
The camp by the river was left virtually deserted when the great caravan moved out at dawn.
Flankers were sent in every direction. The bulk of mounted warriors rode at the front. Then came the women and children, some mounted, some not. Those on foot marched alongside ponies dragging travois piled with gear. Some of the very old rode on the drags. The huge pony herd brought up the rear.
There was much to be amazed at. The sheer size of the column, the speed with which it traveled, the incredible racket it made, the marvel of organization that gave everyone a place and a job.
But what Lieutenant Dunbar found most extraordinary of all was his own treatment. Literally overnight he had gone from one who was eyed by the band with suspicion or indifference to a person of genuine standing. The women smiled openly at him now and the warriors went so far as to share their jokes with him. The children, of which there were many, constantly sought out his company and occasionally made themselves a nuisance.
In treating him this way the Comanches revealed an altogether new side of themselves, reversing the stoic, guarded appearance they had presented to him in the past. Now they were an unabashed, thoroughly cheerful
