She still wouldn’t look at him, and while Kicking Bird mumbled something to her, he made up his mind to take the initiative and say hello.
It so happened that they turned their heads, opened their mouths, and said the word at precisely the same time. The two hellos collided in the space between them, and the speakers recoiled awkwardly at their accidental beginning.
Kicking Bird saw a favorable omen in the accident. He saw two people of like mind. Because this was exactly what he hoped for, it struck him as ironic.
The medicine man chuckled to himself. Then he pointed to Lieutenant Dunbar and grunted, as if saying, “Go ahead . . . you first.”
“Hello,” he said pleasantly.
She lifted her head. Her expression was businesslike, but he could see nothing of the hostility that had been there before.
“Hulo,” she replied.
They sat a long time in the arbor that day, most of it spent reviewing the few simple words they had exchanged at their first formal session.
Toward sundown, when all three had wearied of the constant, stumbling repetitions, the English translation for her Indian name suddenly came to Stands With A Fist.
It so excited her that she began immediately to teach it to Lieutenant Dunbar. First she had to get across what she wanted. She pointed to him and said, “Jun,” then pointed to herself and said nothing. In the same motion she held up a finger that said, “Stop. I will show you.”
The pattern had been for him to perform whatever action she asked for, then guess the action’s word in English. She wanted him to stand, but that was impossible in the arbor, so she hustled both men outside, where they would have full freedom of movement.
Lieutenant Dunbar guessed “rise,” “rises,” “gets up,” and “on my feet” before he hit “stands.” “With” was not so hard, “a” had already been covered, and he got “fist” on the first try. After he had it in English, she taught him the Comanche.
From there, in rapid succession, he mastered Wind In His Hair, Ten Bears, and Kicking Bird.
Lieutenant Dunbar was excited. He asked for something to make marks, and using a sliver of charcoal, he wrote the four names in phonetic Comanche on a strip of thin, white bark.
Stands With A Fist kept her reserve throughout. But inwardly she was thrilled. The English words were showering in her head like sparks as thousands of doors, locked up for so long, swung open. She was delirious with the excitement of learning.
Each time the lieutenant ran down the list written on his scrap of bark and each time he came close to pronouncing the names as they should be pronounced, she encouraged him with the suggestion of a smile and said the word “yes.”
For his part, Lieutenant Dunbar did not have to see her little smile to know that the encouragement was heartfelt. He could hear it in the sound of the word and he could see it in the power of her pale brown eyes. To hear him say these words, in English and Comanche, meant something special to her. Her inward thrill was tingling all about them. The lieutenant could feel it.
She was not the same woman, so sad and lost, that he had found on the prairie. That moment was now something left behind. It made him happy to see how far she had come.
Best of all was the little piece of bark he held in his hands. He grasped it firmly, determined not to let it slip away. It was the first section of a map that would guide him into whatever future he had with these people. So many things would be possible from now on.
It was Kicking Bird, however, who was most profoundly affected by this turn of events. To him it was a miracle of the highest order, on a par with attending something all-consuming, like birth or death.
His dream had become reality.
When he heard the lieutenant say his name in Comanche, it was as though an impenetrable wall had suddenly turned to smoke. And they were walking through. They were communicating.
With equal force his view of Stands With A Fist had enlarged. She was no longer a Comanche. In making herself a bridge for their words, she had become something more. Like the lieutenant, he heard it in the sound of her English words and he saw it in the new power of her eyes. Something had been added, something that was missing before, and Kicking Bird knew what it was.
Her long-buried blood was running again, her undiluted white blood.
The impact of these things was more than even Kicking Bird could bear, and like a professor who knows when it is time for his pupils to take a rest, he told Stands With A Fist that this was enough for one day.
A trace of disappointment flashed on her face. Then she dropped her head and nodded submissively.
At that moment, however, a wonderful thought occurred to her. She caught Kicking Bird’s eye and respectfully asked if they might do one more thing.
She wanted to teach the white soldier his name.
It was a good idea, so good that Kicking Bird could not refuse his adopted daughter. He told her to continue.
She remembered the word right away. She could see it, but she couldn’t speak it. And she couldn’t remember how she had done it as a girl. The men waited while she tried to remember.
Then Lieutenant Dunbar unwittingly raised his hand to brush at a gnat that was bothering his ear, and she saw it all again.
She grabbed the lieutenant’s hand as it hung in space and let the fingertips of her other hand rest cautiously on his hip. And before either man could react, she led Dunbar into a creaky but unmistakable memory of a waltz.
After a few seconds she pulled away demurely, leaving Lieutenant Dunbar in a state of shock. He had to struggle to remember the point of the exercise.
A light went off in his head. Then it jumped into his eyes, and like the only boy in class who knows the answer, he smiled at his teacher.
From there it was easy to get the rest.
Lieutenant Dunbar went to one knee and wrote the name at the bottom of his bark grammar book. His eyes lingered on the way it looked in English. It seemed bigger than just a name. The more he looked at it, the more he liked it.
He said it to himself. Dances With Wolves.
The lieutenant came to his feet, bowed shortly in Kicking Bird’s direction, and, as a butler might announce the arrival of a dinner guest, humbly and without fanfare, he said the name once more.
This time he said it in Comanche.
“Dances With Wolves.”
CHAPTER XXII
Dances With Wolves stayed in Kicking Bird’s lodge that night. He was exhausted but, as sometimes happens, was too tired to sleep. The day’s events hopped about in his mind like popcorn in a skillet.
When he finally began the drift into unconsciousness, the lieutenant slipped into the twilight of a dream he
