had not had since he was very young. Surrounded by stars, he was floating through the cold, silent void of space, a weightless little boy alone in a world of silver and black.
But he was not afraid. He was snug and warm and under the covers of a four-poster bed, and to drift like a single seed in all the universe, even if for eternity, was not a hardship. It was a joy.
That was how he fell asleep on his first night in the Comanches’ ancestral summer camp.
In the months that followed, Lieutenant Dunbar would fall asleep many times in Ten Bears’s camp.
He returned to Fort Sedgewick often, but the visits were prompted primarily by guilt, not desire. Even while he was there he knew he was maintaining the thinnest of appearances. Yet he felt compelled to do so.
He knew there was no logical reason to stay on. Certain now that the army had abandoned the post and him along with it, he thought of returning to Fort Hays. He had already done his duty. In fact, his devotion to the post and the U.S. Army had been exemplary. He could leave with his head held high.
What held him was the pull of another world, a world he had just begun to explore. He didn’t know exactly when it happened, but it came to him that his dream of being posted on the frontier, a dream that he had concocted to serve the small boundaries of military service, had pointed from the beginning to the limitless adventure in which he was now engaged. Countries and armies and races paled beside it. He had discovered a great thirst and he could no more turn it down than a dying man could refuse water.
He wanted to see what would happen, and because of that, he gave up his idea of returning to the army. But he did not fully give up the idea of the army returning to him. Sooner or later it had to.
So on his visits to the fort he would putter about with trivialities: repairing an occasional tear in the awning, sweeping cobwebs from the corners of the sod hut, making journal entries.
He forced these jobs on himself as a far fetched way of staying in touch with his old life. Deeply involved as he was with the Comanches, he could not find it in himself to jettison everything, and the hollow motions he went through made it possible to hang on to the shreds of his past.
By visiting the fort on a semiregular basis, he preserved discipline where there was no longer a need, and in doing so he also preserved the idea of Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, U.S.A.
The journal entries no longer carried depictions of his days. Most of them were nothing more than an estimate of the date, a short comment on the weather or his health, and a signature. Even had he wanted, it would have been too large a job to essay the new life he was living. Besides, it was a personal thing.
Invariably he would walk down the bluff to the river, usually with Two Socks in tow. The wolf had been his first real contact, and the lieutenant was always glad to see him. Their silent time together was something he cherished.
He would pause for a few minutes at the stream’s edge, watching the water flow. If the light was right, he could see himself with mirrorlike clarity. His hair had grown past his shoulders. The constant beating of sun and wind had darkened his face. He would turn from side to side, like a man of fashion, admiring the breastplate that he now wore like a uniform. With the exception of Cisco, nothing he could call his own exceeded its value.
Sometimes the vision on the water would make him tingle with confusion. He looked so much like one of them now. When that happened he would balance awkwardly on one foot and lift the other high enough for the water to send back a picture of the pants with the yellow stripes and the tall, black riding boots.
Occasionally he would consider discarding them for leggings and moccasins, but the reflection always told him that they belonged. In some way they were a part of the discipline, too. He would wear the pants and boots until they disintegrated. Then he would see.
On certain days, when he felt more Indian than white, he would trudge back over the bluff, and the fort would appear as an ancient place, a ghostly relic of a past so far gone that it was difficult to believe he was ever connected to it.
As time passed, going to Fort Sedgewick became a chore. His visits were fewer and farther between. But he continued making the ride to his old haunt.
Ten Bears’s village became the center of his life, but for all the ease with which he settled into it, Lieutenant Dunbar moved as a man apart. His skin and accent and pants and boots marked him as a visitor from another world, and like Stands With A Fist, he quickly became a man who was two people.
His integration into Comanche life was constantly tempered with the vestiges of the world he had left behind, and when Dunbar tried to think of his true place in life, his gaze would suddenly become faraway. A fog, blank and inconclusive, would fill his mind, as if all his normal processes had been suspended. After a few seconds the fog would lift and he would go about his business, not knowing quite what had hit him.
Thankfully, these spells subsided as time went on.
The first six weeks of his time in Ten Bears’s camp revolved around one particular place: the little brush arbor behind Kicking Bird’s lodge.
It was here, in daily morning and afternoon sessions lasting several hours each, that Lieutenant Dunbar first conversed freely with the medicine man.
Stands With A Fist made steady progress toward fluency, and by the end of the first week the three of them were having long-running talks. The lieutenant had thought all along that Kicking Bird was a good person, but when Stands With A Fist began to translate large blocks of his thoughts into English, Dunbar discovered he was dealing with an intelligence that was superior by any standard he knew.
In the beginning there were mostly questions and answers. Lieutenant Dunbar told the story of how he came to be at Fort Sedgewick and of his unexplained isolation. Interesting as the story was, it frustrated Kicking Bird. Dances With Wolves knew almost nothing. He did not even know the army’s mission, much less its specific plans. Of military things there was nothing to learn. He had been a simple soldier.
The white race was a different matter.
“Why are the whites coming into our country?” Kicking Bird would ask.
And Dunbar would reply, “I don’t think they want to come into the country, I think they only want to pass through.”
Kicking Bird would counter, “The Texans are already in our country, chopping down the trees and tearing up the earth. They are killing the buffalo and leaving them in the grass. This is happening now. There are too many of these people already. How many more will be coming?”
Here the lieutenant would twist his mouth and say, “I don’t know.”
“I have heard it said,” the medicine man would continue, “that the whites only want peace in the country. Why do they always come with hair-mouth soldiers? Why do these hair-mouth Texas Rangers come after us when all we want is to be left alone? I have been told of talks the white chiefs have had with my brothers. I have been told these talks are peaceful and that promises are made. But I am told that the promises are always broken. If white chiefs come to see us, how shall we know their true minds? Should we take their presents? Should we sign their papers to show that there will be peace between us? When I was a boy many Comanches went to a house of law in Texas for a big meeting with white chiefs and they were shot dead.”
The lieutenant would try to provide reasoned answers to Kicking Bird’s questions, but they were weak theories at best, and when pressed, he would inevitably end by saying, “I don’t know actually.”
He was being careful, for he could see the deep concern behind Kicking Bird’s queries and could not bring himself to tell what he really thought. If the whites ever came out here in real force, the Indian people, no matter how hard they fought, would be hopelessly overmatched. They would be defeated by armaments alone.
At the same time he could not tell Kicking Bird to disregard his concerns. He needed to be concerned. The lieutenant simply could not tell him the truth. Nor could he tell the medicine man lies. It was a standoff, and finding himself cornered, Dunbar hid behind a wall of ignorance, hoping for the arrival of new, more palatable subjects.
But each day, like a stain that refuses to be washed out, one overriding question always remained.
“How many more are coming?”
