Dances With Wolves

were squalid even in their conception.

By any standard, it was not a fit place to live.

Whiskey bottles, dropped as they were drained, lay in profusion around the awful huts. There was a multitude of other useless items, a broken cup, a half-repaired belt, the shattered stock of a rifle, all left where they were dropped.

A brace of wild turkeys, tied together at the feet but otherwise untouched, were discovered on the ground between two huts.

Behind the buildings, they found a wide pit, filled to overflowing with the putrid torsos of slaughtered deer, skinless, legless, and headless.

The buzzing of flies was so loud that Dances With Wolves had to shout to be heard.

“We wait for these men?”

Kicking Bird didn’t want to shout. He sidled his pony next to Dances With Wolves.

“They have been gone a week, maybe more. We will water the horses and go home.”

three

For the first hour of the return trip, neither man uttered a word. Kicking Bird stared ahead sorrowfully while Dances With Wolves watched the ground, shamed for the white race to which he belonged and thinking hard about the dream he’d had in the ancient canyon.

He’d told no one about it, but now he felt he had to. Now it didn’t seem so much a dream after all. It might be a vision.

When they stopped to give the horses a blow, he told Kicking Bird of the dream that was still fresh in his mind, sparing none of the details.

The medicine man listened to Dances With Wolves’s long recounting without interruption. When it was finished he stared somberly at his feet.

“All of us were dead?”

“Everyone that was present,” Dances With Wolves said, “but I didn’t see everyone. I didn’t see you.”

“Ten Bears should hear the dream,” Kicking Bird said.

They jumped back on the horses and made quick time across the prairie, arriving back in camp shortly after sunset.

four

The two men made their report on the desecration of the sacred grove, a deed that could only have been the work of a large, white hunting party. The dead animals in the forest were undoubtedly a sideline. The hunters were probably after buffalo and would be decimating them on a much bigger scale.

Ten Bears nodded a few times as the report was made. But he asked no questions.

Then Dances With Wolves recited his grisly dream a second time.

The old man still said nothing, his expression inscrutable as ever. When Dances With Wolves had finished, he made no comment. Instead, he picked up his pipe and said, “Let us have a smoke on this.”

Dances With Wolves had the notion that Ten Bears was thinking all of it through, but as they passed the pipe around, he became impatient, anxious to get something off his chest.

At last he said, “I would speak some more.”

The old man nodded.

“When Kicking Bird and I first began to talk,” Dances With Wolves started, “a question was asked of me for which I had no answer. Kicking Bird would ask, ‘How many white people are coming?’ and I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ That is true. I do not know how many will come. But I can tell you this. I believe there will be a lot.

“The white people are many, more than any of us could ever count. If they want to make war on you, they will do it with thousands of hair-mouth soldiers. The soldiers will have big war guns that can shoot into a camp like ours and destroy everything in it.

“It makes me afraid. I’m even afraid of my dream, because I know it could come true. I cannot say what must be done. But I come from the white race and I know them. I know them now in ways I did not know them before. I’m afraid for all the Comanches.”

Ten Bears had been nodding through the speech, but Dances With Wolves couldn’t tell how the old man was taking it.

The headman tottered to his feet and took a few steps across the lodge, stopping next to his bed. He reached into the rigging above it, pulled down a melon-sized bundle, and retraced his steps to the fire.

He sat down with a grunt.

“I think you are right,” he said to Dances With Wolves. “It is hard to know what to do. I’m an old man of many winters, and even I’m unsure of what to do when it comes to the question of the white people and their hair-mouth soldiers. But let me show you something.”

His gnarled fingers tugged at the bundle’s rawhide drawstring, and in a moment it was undone. He pushed down the sides of the sack, gradually revealing a hunk of rusted metal about the size of a man’s head.

Kicking Bird had never seen the object before and had no idea what it could be.

Dances With Wolves hadn’t seen it either. But he knew what it was. He had seen a drawing of something similar in a text on military history. It was the helmet of a Spanish conquistador.

“These people were the first to come into our country. They came on horses . . . we didn’t have horses then . . . and shot at us with big thunder guns that we had never seen. They were looking for shiny metal and we were afraid of them. This was in the time of my grandfather’s grandfather.

“Eventually, we drove these people out.”

The old man sucked long and hard on his pipe, taking several puffs.

“Then the Mexicans began to come. We had to make war on them and we have been successful. They fear us greatly and do not come here.

“In my own time, white people began to come. The Texans. They have been like all the other people who find something to want in our country. They take it without asking. They get angry when they see us sitting in our own country, and when we do not do as they want, they try to kill us. They kill women and children as if they were warriors.

“When I was a young man, I fought the Texans. We killed many of them and stole some of their women and children. One of these children is Dances With Wolves’s wife.

“After a time, there was talk of peace. We met the Texans and made agreements with them. These agreements always get broken. As soon as the white people wanted something new from us, the words on the paper were no more. It has always been like that.

“I got tired of this and many years ago, I brought the people of our band out here, far away from the whites. We have lived in peace here for a long time.

“But this is the last of our country. We have no place else to go. When I think of white people coming into our country now, it is as I said. It is hard to know what to do.

“I have always been a peaceful man, happy to be in my own country and wanting nothing from the white people. Nothing at all. But I think you are right. I think they will keep on coming.

“When I think of that, I look at this bundle, knowing what’s inside, and I’m certain we will fight to keep our country and all that it contains. Our country is all that we have. It is all that we want.

“We will fight to keep it.

“But I do not think we will have to fight this winter, and after all that you have told me, I think the time to go is now.

“Tomorrow morning, we will strike the village and go to the winter camp.”

CHAPTER XXIX