He had been told of the heavy, unremitting rains, but though the earth was still soggy, he encountered nothing but fair weather. The sun was bright, the breeze stiff, and the wagon's two mules had little difficulty navigating the trackless plain.
The deeper Kicking Bird penetrated his homeland the more he wondered how it could be that the free ways were gone. The country looked the same as it always had-vast, ever-changing, and empty. It was hard to believe that white people were taking over the country and that their soldiers were chasing his friends.
He hit a stream swollen by the recent rains, and instead of trying to cross, he followed it, trusting that the Mystery would lead him to the right place.
He had camped but twice when he happened on the perfect spot, an exquisite glade of high grass and soft soil surrounded by sentinels of cottonwoods whose leaves were tumbling.
As he stood watching the place, Kicking Bird heard a thumping in the air, and with only the strange sound as warning, he felt waves of motion suddenly crash over his head. He ducked reflexively, and a split second later saw the forms of two golden eagles sailing across the glade at low altitude. Simultaneously, they arched into an effortless, elegant climb and landed their big bodies with ease on the uppermost reaches of one of the cottonwoods.
He could not believe they had passed so close to him, and as he watched the eagles get their bearings with quick twists of their heads, Kicking Bird understood that since his parting with Lawrie Tatum, the Mystery had been guiding his progress.
For the rest of the afternoon he constructed a burial scaffold under the vigilant eyes of the eagles. When all was in readiness, Kicking Bird pulled apart the wooden box, lifted out the old man's corpse, and laid it on a blanket.
Ten Bears was quite stiff, so there was little Kicking Bird could do to make him more presentable, but he gave the body a cursory inspection anyway. As his eyes traveled to one of the old man's hands he was surprised to see the white man spectacles. They were held in the fingers and Kicking Bird's first reaction was to give the alien apparatus a tug. A second thought quickly seized him, however, and he relented. The hand and the spectacles seemed perfectly at ease. They were welded together in the same delicate way Kicking Bird had observed on so many occasions when Ten Bears was alive.
He rolled the old man up in the blanket, hoisted him onto the scaffold, tied the body fast to its moorings, and stepped back to see if all was right. Then he tossed a few offerings of tobacco into the air and thought of leaving.
But his body would not move. Kicking Bird stood transfixed, trying to understand what might be happening to him.
The breeze rose. Soon it was whistling through the burial scaffold, and as he listened to the eerie music, Kicking Bird realized the full depth of what he was saying good-bye to. He looked over his shoulder and the white man wagon was suddenly more than just a wagon. It was the life awaiting him, and, to his horror, Kicking Bird understood with crushing finality that he could never live successfully in a world of wagons. He looked again at the scaffold swaying in the wind and the pair of eagles high in the cottonwood and realized that he was saying good- bye to the country that had been his whole life.
Feeling a rising in his stomach, he said to himself,
Wiping his face with his hands, he stumbled back to the wagon and climbed onto the seat. He kept his eyes down as he picked up the team's reins and didn't look up until they were turned around and headed out of the glade.
He drove many miles that night before finally making camp.
Chapter LIX
The remainder of the Comanche and Kiowa hostiles moved as one great body, employing every known tactic to evade the soldiers who were chasing them. Despite being encumbered with a huge horse herd, dismantled homes, and the women, children, and elderly, they had managed to stay out of the enemy's reach for weeks. Every day the warriors risked their lives trying to distract and annoy the soldiers. They backtracked miles up swollen rivers. on dry days they built and set fires far from their true line of march. Parties large and small constantly tried to decoy the soldiers by showing themselves or harassing the enemy with sniper fire. They harnessed artificially weighted travois to their ponies and created miles of false trails.
Audaciously, they struck Bad Hand's horse herd in daylight, and though they captured only a few animals, many broke free in the attack and scattered over the drenched prairie in every direction. They suffered few casualties, but Bad Hand pursued them so relentlessly that only by splitting themselves over and over, until they were fleeing in groups of twos and threes, did the warriors save themselves.
On another occasion, a party led try Dances With Wolves and White Bear boldly doubled back on a group of Bad Hand's scouts and attacked them within earshot of the main column. They killed two Tonkawas and an Osage and would easily have overwhelmed the others had not Bad Hand dispatched a squad of rescuers at the first sound of firing. Dances With Wolves and Blue Turtle were the last to break off the action and escaped only because they were able to jump from one back to another of the five ponies between them.
Actual battle against the soldiers was practically nonexistent because every warrior was consumed with trying to keep people out of harm's way. But the success they had in keeping their friends and families from being killed or captured was so miraculous that each man knew it could not be sustained without intervention from the Mystery.
Owl Prophet had said that if they could reach the Great Hole In The Earth they might yet achieve deliverance from their tormentors. But reaching the Great Hole seemed more implausible with the close of every day. They had tried every strategy and trick but still could not shake Bad Hand and his soldiers. Even if they reached the great caprock barrier, the soldiers were too close now for them to climb over undetected. The soldiers would pursue them onto the Staked Plains and there would be nothing to keep them from following the Comanches straight into the ancient winter sanctuary.
The tenuous stalemate which threatened the hostiles with destruction was finally broken when they were within sight of the caprock. At any other time the weather's lifting would have been greeted with relief but the sudden clearing of the skies finally forced the hostiles' hand. They were hemmed in by Bad Hand's column from the east and Bradley's from the south, and the sunshine washing over the prairie left them with but one alternative. They would have to make a run for the caprock in broad daylight, a maneuver sure to be seen by the soldiers swarming over the country in their rear.
A desperate plan, concocted by the warriors in the predawn, started with a squad of children, including Rabbit, Snake In Hands, and Always Walking, driving the thousand ponies toward the brooding outline of caprock that vaulted skyward from the prairie floor. Close on their heels came the women and elderly dragging the essentials of the village behind them.
Several detachments of warriors tried to create a diversion by opening fire on the waking soldier camp. The main body of warriors daringly positioned themselves between the fleeing village and the soldiers sure to pursue it.
The distraction provided by the snipers bought them little time. White man scouts quickly spied the horse herd and the village behind it, and with only hours to make up, the hair-mouth force started in furious pursuit.
Dances With Wolves, White Bear, Smiles A Lot, Blue Turtle, and their compatriots fought as they retreated, sometimes engaging the soldiers from cover, sometimes throwing themselves in feints against the enemy flanks.
But as the morning wore on it became clear that the soldiers would not be stopped, and, to the dismay of the warriors, they found the ground they were backing over increasingly littered with lodge poles and cooking pots and
