'Can I have something to eat?'
But there was no answer and when he turned to see why, all he caught was a glimpse of Hunting For Something's backside as she ducked out of the lodge.
Chapter XXIV
Because his mother was a Kiowa, he had visited the Medicine Bluff country often as a boy and knew it almost as well as his own homeland.
Kicking Bird was thinking of his mother as he passed by the great bluff. He could not remember much of her now; but her cheerful nature came to mind, and suddenly he could see her doubled over in laughter at the telling of a funny story.
She had been killed, along with many others, in his eighth summer, when the Pawnee overran the village they were visiting, a site easily visible from the top of the bluff he was passing just then. Much of the village had gone out to cull buffalo from the first big herd of the season, but his mother had stayed behind to care for a dying aunt. The Pawnee killed them all, chopping off their heads, which they stuck in cooking pots.
These they lined up in front of the village, a macabre greeting for the hunters when they returned home. The attack was avenged, just as brutally, two years later, but Kicking Bird remembered that it had done little to assuage his loss.
Strangely, the bitter recollection of his good-natured mother's death spawned a host of other, more pleasant memories. At the top of the bluff above him he had first drawn a girl into his blanket, a girl whom he subsequently lost to a worthless man she later divorced. A stand of oak at the spot where the creek turned just ahead had yielded his first deer. A mile or two to the south he had won a hotly contested horse race, riding against the finest ponies on the plains. And a few miles ahead, eerily near his destination, Kicking Bird had first slain an enemy.
That so much of his own life had been played out in the area he was now passing through had meaning for him personally, but to the Kiowa nation the importance of the great Medicine Bluff and its environs was far greater. It was the beating heart in the body of a country they had dominated through all living memory. For the whites to have taken root in this of all places was practically inconceivable. That he, Kicking Bird, a Comanche warrior, was actually going to call on a white representative living within sight of the shrine-like bluff was so outlandish as to be hard to believe, even when the odd-looking box made of wood that the whites called a 'house' came into view.
It was situated at the top of a rise, and to Kicking Bird's eyes it looked like a very square, very white rock. Surrounding it was a white fence made of stitched-together wood with tips shaped like arrowheads. He could see vegetation growing in a large plot behind the house. Nestled in several neat rows among the green mass he recognized a commodity called corn, which the Comanches sometimes traded for with tribes who lived far to the west.
The house was fronted by a long, shady porch. A group of white men, some of them wearing soldier coats, their faces sunk in the overhang's shadow, stood expectantly, and as he started up the hill, Kicking Bird saw the diminutive figure of Lawrie Tatum raise an arm in greeting.
The gesture, however, did little to reassure Kicking Bird. A group of armed soldiers were hanging around some wagons a few paces from Lawrie Tatum's house, and the presence of so many white men, including those clustered on the porch, had the effect of shrinking the Quaker down to nothing.
At the same time, Kicking Bird's sense of being Comanche expanded, and as they pulled up in front of the bright white box, the distinctiveness of the two races, and the gulf dividing them, seemed too enormous to ever be bridged.
Had he been alone, Kicking Bird would likely have been unable to come this far, and though he could not know their minds at this unprecedented moment, he took courage from the company of strong, wise warriors who surrounded him: Touch The Clouds and Little Mountain and Eagle Head and Pacer of the Kiowa, Sitting In The Saddle and Shield and Big Bow and Gap In The Woods of the Comanche.
In the face of the most perplexing situation they had ever encountered, the confederation of warriors approached the porch as a solemn, single body, and when the little Quaker with the ecstatic smile stuck out his hand, Kicking Bird took it.
Introductions were made all around, and despite not knowing who the hodgepodge of military and civilian hair-mouths were, or what their standing might be, Kicking Bird and his fellow peace-seekers took each white hand that was offered before being ushered off the porch and guided down the hill to an expansive tent that had been pitched in a shady spot to receive them.
Ever astute, Kicking Bird's mind worked furiously as they walked to the meeting place, rapidly sorting the bits of information that were flying into his head, but by the time they had begun to seat themselves in the big soldier tent, he realized it was useless to strain for enlightenment as to what role the strange men he was meeting with would play.
As he lit his pipe and passed it to Touch The Clouds, his deceptively impassive eyes trolled for any flicker of behavior in the whites that might throw light on what sort of men they were. The first thing he noticed, a thing so obvious that it was evident to all, was the configuration of the whites. The man who knew the Indian words was sitting off to one side while the rest placed themselves in two rows: a large grouping in the second row but only two men, a soldier and a civilian, in the first.
Lawrie Tatum was insinuated in the back row of hair-mouths and, seeing him there, Kicking Bird realized at once that the genial Quaker did not possess the power of the two men sitting at the forefront.
A heavy, gray-flecked beard covered the whole of the civilian's face. It circled his lips, accenting the dark, moist cave of his mouth. His skin — what little could be seen of it — had an unhealthy-looking, reddish hue, his eyes were small, and it was impossible to ignore the pitted, corpulent nose that seemed less a part of his countenance than it did an attachment. His belly filled his shirt to bursting, his fingers had the appearance of fatty stubs, and he wheezed audibly with each breath, as if something were stuck in his throat.
The other white man, the soldier, had a smooth, unblemished face. His soldier clothes were as trim as his body and the buttons and bars clinging to his coat gleamed golden even in the murky summer light filling the tent. He had dark, shiny hair that covered his head like a cap, and his light-blue eyes were partially crossed and seemed not to move. Exceedingly thin lips were drawn neatly over hidden teeth, and his nose, in sharp contrast to that of his counterpart, was long and sharp as a fox's.
Taken together, these visual details conveyed a sense of quiet command, but for Kicking Bird and his friends one salient feature of the soldier's appearance outstripped all others combined. Three fingers of his left hand were no longer fingers but uneven stumps which peeked out angrily from the sleeve of his coat.
Even more intriguing was the fact that the ruined fingers made sounds. At irregular times during the talk that afternoon, at the prompt-ing of some hidden cue in the soldier's heart, they were rubbed together to produce an odd, clicking noise. Where this sound came from, whether from skin or mangled joints, one couldn't say. The quirk impressed the Indian delegation for it deepened the mystery of the delicate, cross-eyed soldier, and though he remained Mackenzie to the whites, from that day forward the aboriginal people of the plains knew him as Bad Hand.
When the smoking, which every white man respectfully took part in, was finished, the white civilian whose name was Hatton rose to make a talk, which, owing to the labor of translation, took most of an hour. Hatton explained that he had been sent by the Great Father in Washington to seek peace with Indian people and outlined in general terms what the Kiowa and Comanche could expect from concord with the whites.
He then laid out the key elements of the offer. The initial inducement was a promise of presents by the wagonload. Among the incredible array of items offered was tobacco, clothing, cooking utensils, weapons, mirrors, trade cloth, farming implements, sugar, coffee, building materials, candy,for children, hats for men, combs for women. Hatton told them there was more but that the list of goods that would flow unceasingly from the cornucopia of white civilization was too long to recite.
Washington was also offering to set aside a vast tract of land called a reservation that would constitute a
