They clambered back into the carriage and in a few blocks turned east on a road parallel to the brooding river that hugged the city, following it to the desolate outskirts of town.
The carriage pulled up to a fenced portion of the adjacent waterway's banks and Ten Bears was escorted to a spot where a door had been made in the fence. The director pushed a key into the door and a few steps later Ten Bears was gazing down at four enormous tubes, all of them spewing effluent into the river.
Though the air was heavy with stink, Ten Bears stood mesmerized. At last he looked at the director and lifted an arm over the Potomac River.
'Is this a river of feces, too?”
'No, this river only carries the sewage away.”
'Where does it go?'
'To the ocean.'
'The great water that goes forever?'
“Yes,'
Ten Bears looked downriver. He regarded the gushing tubes once more and sank into thought.
'What will happen when the great waters fill with feces?”
“Oh, no,” the director chuckled. “The ocean cannot be filled.'
Chapter L
Ten Bears was still awake when Kicking Bird came back and they talked about the events of the day over a pipe.
Kicking Bird had been, impressed with the races. Just like Comanches, the white people got very excited when the horses ran, though some were demonstrably sad or angry when wagers were lost. Both men agreed that it was one more sign among many that the whites lacked pride.
'What did you do, Grandfather?”
'I was shown a river,” Ten Bears answered.
'That big river we saw?”
'No, this one runs under the earth. It was made by the hair-mouths. I think one of its streams runs below this place where we are sitting.” Kicking Bird was too stunned to speak.
'Do you know what it carries?” Ten Bears asked.
Kicking Bird moved his head numbly back and forth.
'It carries the white man's excrement.” Kicking Bird's mouth fell open and the blood drained from his face.
Chapter LI
Two days before their scheduled departure, the meeting with the generals at the War Department took place. As the delegation filed out, Ten Bears paused at a balcony while the others down a long line of steps to a convoy of carriages which were to them to an afternoon portrait session at one of the city's leading photographic studios.
His position behind the balcony's stone railing afforded a comprehensive view of the sprawling city, and as Ten Bears filled his eyes with the evidence of white proliferation, he was struck with a question that had been haunting his thoughts.
A high-ranking, crisply groomed colonel had escorted the delegation to the exit, and, seeing Ten Bears standing alone, he sidled over and commented on the grandeur of the view.
Ten Bears responded with an uncomprehending nod, then thought to himself,
The old man caught the attention of one of the interpreters, calling him over with a few flicks of a hand. Out of courtesy Ten Bears asked for a translation of the colonel's remark.
“Yes,” the old man replied. “I have never seen a village of this size.”
He glanced at the colonel, then at the interpreter.
'There is something I do not understand,” he announced.
'Perhaps I can help you,' the colonel offered.
'I have seen the white people feasting in the rooms where they pay money. I see them eat lots of meat. I see this in the pay money rooms. Do the families eat meat in their lodges as well?”
'Yes,' the colonel affirmed. He waved a hand over the city. “Almost every house you see has a room for cooking meat and other foods.”
Ten Bears squinted skeptically at the vast settlement.
'But I see no one hunting. I see no game being brought in. How does the white man make meat?”
'We slaughter it,' the colonel answered matter-of-factly.
'Slaughter it?'
'We kill animals in a big house.”
'Where is this big house?' Ten Bears asked and the colonel pointed north across the city.
'The biggest one is over there,' he said.
'I will go there,' Ten Bears stated.
The colonel and the interpreter looked at one another helplessly.
'But you are to have your portrait made this afternoon,” reasoned the colonel.
'I don't care about that,' Ten Bears grunted, looking in the direction the colonel had indicated. 'I want to see how the white man makes meat.'
Leaving Ten Bears to wait outside with the interpreter the colonel disappeared into the offices of the war Department, where he relayed the visitor's request. After twenty minutes of bureaucratic maneuvering it was decided to grant Ten Bears' wish.
To the colonel's consternation, no one else could be persuaded to go and, within an hour he, the interpreter, and the old Comanche man were breezing through the city streets on a course for the great slaughterhouse that supplied much of Washington's meat.
End-of-day shadows were beginning their march across the landscape when Ten Bears' carriage came to a stop in front of a sprawling maze of stock pens, many of them crowded with the condemned.
Two unhappy-looking men, their clothes lightly spattered with blood, waited for the visitors at the head of a track that cut between the pens and terminated in front of a cluster of massive, dark, almost windowless buildings.
'You Colonel Bascom?' one of the men asked dully.
'Yes, and this is our guest, Ten Bears, and his interpreter, Mr. McIntosh,' the colonel replied.
The man who had spoken made a little nod of acknowledgment and, with his companion, turned up the track leading to the gloomy set of structures.
“He want to see anything in particular?” the dull man asked over his shoulder.
'I don't think so,' Colonel Bascom replied.
'We're doin' hogs right now,' the man offered a remark to which Colonel Bascom did not reply.
Ten Bears had not been able to imagine the white man's place of making meat and was totally unprepared for what he saw as they passed pen after pen. He had never seen so many animals enclosed in one place, nor had he ever encountered such wholesale misery.
Many of the pens held what he recognized as the four-leggeds the whites held in high regard and called