The crowd parted as Milky Way pushed his way to the fire. The sad-faced warrior, though nearing fifty, was still regarded as a vital man.
'All this talk is right,' he said, chopping the air with a fist. 'Every Comanche might die if we make a big war on these people. Milky Way is not afraid to die. I worry for my children. I do not want them to wander hungry. I do not want them to die of want. Milky Way does not mind killing white soldiers, but I wonder how many.'
For more than an hour men stepped forward to speak what was in their hearts, and each eloquent confession, no matter the course of action it favored, was brimming with anguish.
When it seemed that every man in the lodge had spoken, Dances With Wolves rose.
'I have not much to say for Dances With Wolves. His brothers have spoken for him tonight. Dances With Wolves is not afraid of Comanche enemies. He loves the Comanche and wants them safe.'
He turned his face toward Ten Bears' then hesitated. The old man's head was drooping. His eyes were closed. It looked like he was asleep. Dances With Wolves feared that if he asked a question Ten Bears might not answer, and for a moment longer he hesitated. But all eyes were on him.
'What is in the mind of Ten Bears?'
Ten Bears did not move and the lodge held its breath in the stillness. Slowly, he lifted his head. He placed one weathered hand on the earthen floor and started to push. The arms of those around him came to his aid, steadying his ascent and settling him on his feet before they fell away.
Ten Bears coughed into his hand.
'I have thought a long time. It would be good to wake tomorrow and find that all the whites have gone back into the earth. . or that the sun has burned them up.”
Laughter rolled through the lodge and an ease that had been absent from the start spread over the meeting.
'I do not think they will go away. I do not think Comanches will stop behaving like Comanches, either. Every man here has told what is in his heart. We are not of one mind, and that is neither bad nor good. In the way it has always been, each man will decide what is best for him.'
He stretched a thin arm and wagged his fingers. 'What is best for you, Wind In His Hair?'
'Wind In His Hair will lead a party of strong-hearted warriors to the country of the Kiowas. We will see what can be done to help them. If they want me to fight, I will.'
Ten Bears nodded toward Kicking Bird.
'I, too, will visit the Kiowas. If the whites want to fight I will fight. If they want to parley, my ears will be eager to hear their words.'
The support for Wind In His Hair was loud and clear, yet there were many murmurs of assent for Kicking Bird's position, too.
Ten Bears focused his glassy eyes on Dances With Wolves.
'I go to hunt,' he said firmly. 'There is little food here. A warrior must make meat.'
Ten Bears bobbed his head as if he approved. Then he glanced slowly about until his eyes found Owl Prophet. The medicine man had been silent all night but now he got up. Whatever might be read in a man's face was hidden behind his lidded eyes.
'Only the Mystery knows our fate. The Mystery is not ready to speak. I will stay in camp and listen. If the Mystery says anything, I will tell it.'
Owl Prophet's words, though not conclusive, were an apt end to a council that had produced no answers, only declarations. The men who had been present filed out into the night with little trace of the bounding exuberance or staunch comradeship that signals unity.
Few warriors returned to their homes and families that night with their minds made up. Each was leaning toward one path or another, but it would have been a mistake to interpret their uncertainty as weakness.
The knowledge that their common fate had finally commenced gave them strength. They were no longer frozen in the clutches of what might come to pass. The time had come for each man to decide. By coming in force to the country of their neighbors the whites had issued a clear challenge, and to meet a clear challenge was what every Comanche warrior had been trained to do. What the final outcome might be was, for the moment, not so important as standing up and every warrior in camp was primed for action.
At that moment the Comanches remained confident of their power.
Chapter XIII
Though he had never seen the Medicine Bluff he had been in the vicinity on several occasions and knew it resided somewhere in a string of queer, misshapen hills that rose out of the grassland on the eastern edge of the Kiowa territory. It was said to be the largest of the hills, no more than a mile in length, each end gently sloping upward to resolve in a distinctive hump that marked its center.
He did not doubt that he would find it. As he left camp with his ponies trailing behind, a mantle of confidence unlike any he had experienced before settled over him. Perhaps it was the freedom he felt in taking action. His ears and nose and eyes all seemed keener, and in the many miles he logged every ripple in the landscape stood out and every faint odor on the breeze seemed to speak to his nose. Even the footfalls of each pony, sounds he had always taken for granted, seemed separate and distinct.
When Smiles A Lot reached the region of the strange hills, on the afternoon of his fourth day out, he crossed and recrossed a shallow, winding creek as if guided by forces beyond his understanding, until suddenly he found himself facing a long, wide incline dotted with a few scrub oaks. The land pushed up before him and at its apex a smoothly formed hump stood out against the sky.
The winding creek flowed languidly at the base of the odd hill and he hobbled his ponies in its cover. He drank long and deep from the cool waters of the stream before setting off with a clump of sage, two pieces of flint, and the clothes on his back.
The day was fair and the climb so easy that his breathing was hardly labored by the time he reached the top. No trees of any kind grew at the summit and the ground was as smooth as it had appeared at a distance. Then the earth suddenly gave way as if it had been sheared and when Smiles A Lot peered down the drop-off was straight and steep as any true cliff, falling a hundred and fifty feet to the meandering creek that encircled the bluff. Looking from side to side, he could see that the claw-like marks Owl Prophet had described etched the whole of the formation's rock face.
Heights had never appealed much to Smiles A Lot. In the few times he had sat in the high limbs of a cottonwood, he felt a certain turning in his stomach and an instantaneous weakening of his arms and legs. He felt the same things now. Standing at the edge of the precipice, he felt his stomach climbing into his throat and his knees quivering, But the sensations were fleeting in comparison to the whole of his spirit, which seemed to have been grasped and flung into the ecstatic space ahead.
The horizon stretched before him in limitless glory so dazzling that for a time he was uncertain if he was still standing on the earth. The breeze rushed against his body in busy, little eddies, leaving in its wake a silence so profound that for a moment he imagined himself arrived at the top of the world. Without meditation he spontaneously raised his arms skyward in supplication.
At the same time he closed his eyes and immediately his head began to spin. Fearful that he might reel and fall, he tottered back, settling effortlessly on the ground. There he lay for several minutes, staring straight up. With the earth pressing against him and the sky looming over him, Smiles A Lot, for the first time in his short life, imagined that all he needed to know about existence was to know the place he now occupied, between the earth and sky.
When his rapture subsided, Smiles A Lot roused himself and set to work. He cleared a small patch of ground near the edge of the bluff and plucked a few handfuls of dry grass. Then he struck his flints until one of the sparks ignited the fuel. When tiny flames appeared he lit the tightly bound sage and passed the bundle over himself from head to toe and, satisfied that he was chaste in the eyes of the Mystery sat cross-legged on the ground. Owl Prophet had given him the barest of instructions. To sit and wait was all he had been told. But Smiles A Lot did not
