Dances With Wolves

absolute quiet of the afternoon he was increasingly aware of the hollow thump in his own heart.

He was struck with the certainty that he had entered something ancient. Perhaps it was evil.

He had begun to think of turning back when the canyon bottom suddenly started to widen. Far ahead, in the space between the canyon walls, he could see a stand of cottonwoods, their tops twinkling in bright sunlight.

After managing a few more twists and turns he and Cisco burst all at once into the large, natural clearing where the cottonwoods stood. Even at the height of summer the place was remarkably green, and though he could see no stream, he knew there must be water here.

The buckskin arched his neck and sniffed the air. He would have to be thirsty, too, and Dunbar gave him his head. Cisco skirted the cottonwoods and walked another hundred yards to the base of a sheer rock wall that marked the canyon’s end. There he stopped.

At his feet, covered with a film of leaves and algae, was a small spring about six feet across. Before the lieutenant could jump off, Cisco’s muzzle had thrust through the surface’s coating and he was drinking in long gulps.

As the lieutenant knelt next to his horse, going to his hands at the edge of the spring, something caught his eye. There was a cleft at the base of the rock wall. It ran back into the cliff and was tall enough at its entrance for a man to walk into without stooping.

Lieutenant Dunbar buried his face next to Cisco’s and drank quickly. He slipped the bridle off his horse’s head, dropped it next to the spring, and walked into the darkness of the cleft.

It was wonderfully cool inside. The soil beneath his feet was soft, and as far as he could see, the place was empty. But as his eyes passed over the floor he knew that man was a fixture here. Charcoal from a thousand fires was scattered over the ground like plucked feathers.

The ceiling began to shrink, and when the lieutenant touched it, the soot of the thousand fires coated his fingertips.

Still feeling light-headed, he sat down, his bottom hitting the ground so heavily that he groaned.

He was facing the way he had come, and the entrance, a hundred yards away, was now a window to the afternoon. Cisco was grazing contentedly on the bunchgrass next to the spring. Behind him the cottonwood leaves were blinking like mirrors. As the coolness closed around him, Lieutenant Dunbar was suddenly overcome with a throbbing, all-encompassing fatigue. Throwing his arms out as a pillow for his head, he lay back on the smooth, sandy earth and stared up at the ceiling.

The roof of solid rock was blackened with smoke, and underneath there were distinct markings. Deep grooves had been cut in the stone, and as he studied them, Dunbar realized they had been made by human hands.

Sleep was pressing in about him, but he was fascinated by the markings. He struggled to make sense of them as a star gazer might strain to connect the outline of Taurus.

The marks immediately above suddenly fell into place. There was a buffalo, crudely drawn but bearing all the essential detail. Even the little tail was standing up.

Next to the buffalo was a hunter. He was holding a stick, a spear in all likelihood. It was pointed at the buffalo.

Sleep was unstoppable now. The idea that the spring might have been tainted occurred to him as his invisibly weighted eyes began to close.

When they were shut he could still see the buffalo and the hunter. The hunter was familiar. He wasn’t an exact duplicate, but there was something of Kicking Bird in his face, something handed down over hundreds of years.

Then the hunter was him.

Then he went out.

two

The trees were bare of leaves.

Patches of snow lay on the ground.

It was very cold.

A great circle of uncounted common soldiers waited lifelessly, their rifles standing at their sides.

He went from one to another, staring into their frozen blue faces, looking for signs of life. No one acknowledged him.

He found his father among them, the telltale doctor’s bag hanging from one hand like a natural extension of his body. He saw a boyhood chum who had drowned. He saw the man who owned a stable in his old town and who beat the horses when they got out of line. He saw General Grant, still as a sphinx, a soldier’s cap crowning his head. He saw a watery-eyed man with the collar of a priest. He saw a prostitute, her dead face smeared with rouge and powder. He saw his massively bosomed elementary-school teacher. He saw the sweet face of his mother, tears frozen to her cheeks.

This vast army of his life swam before his eyes as if it would never end. There were guns, big, brass-colored cannons on wheels.

Someone was coming up to the waiting circle of soldiers.

It was Ten Bears. He walked smoothly in the brittle cold, a single blanket draped over his bony shoulders. Looking like a tourist, he came face-to-face with one of the cannons. A coppery hand snaked out of the blanket, wanting to feel the barrel.

The big gun discharged and Ten Bears was gone in a cloud of smoke. The upper half of his body was somersaulting slowly in the dead winter sky. Like water from a hose, blood was pouring out of the place where his waist had been. His face was blank. His braids were floating lazily away from his ears.

Other guns went off, and like Ten Bears, the lodges of his village took flight. They gyrated through space like heavy paper cones, and when they came back to earth, the tipis stuck into the iron-hard ground on their tips.

The army was faceless now. Like a herd of joyous bathers hustling to the seashore on a hot day, it swept down on the people who had been left uncovered beneath the lodges.

Babies and small children were flung aside first. They flew high into the air. The branches of the bare trees stabbed through their little bodies, and there the children squirmed, their blood running down the tree trunks as the army continued its work.

They opened the men and women as if they were Christmas presents: shooting into their heads and lifting off the skull tops; slitting bellies with bayonets, then parting the skin with impatient hands; severing limbs and shaking them out.

There was money inside every Indian. Silver poured from their limbs. Greenbacks spewed from their bellies. Gold sat in their skulls like candy in jars.

The great army was drawing away in wagons piled high with riches. Some of the soldiers were running next to the wagons, scooping the overflow off the ground.

Fighting broke out in the ranks of the army, and long after they had disappeared, the sound of their battling flashed on and off like lightning behind the mountains.

One soldier was left behind, walking sad and dazed through the field of corpses.

It was himself.

The hearts of the dismembered people were still beating, drumming out in unison a cadence that sounded like music.

He slipped a hand under his tunic and watched it rise and fall with the beat of his own heart. He saw his breath freezing in front of his face. Soon he would be frozen, too.

He lay down among the corpses, and as he stretched out, a long, mournful sigh escaped his lips. Instead of fading, the sigh gained strength. It circled over the slaughtering ground, rushing faster and faster past his ears, moaning a message he could not understand.

three

Lieutenant Dunbar was cold to the bone.

It was dark.