“Who of us will be ready first?” asked Coal Bear, Tall One’s best friend.
A full-blood Kwahadi, he was more than a winter older than Tall One, yet stood nearly a head shorter. Most of the older boys seemed squat compared to the white boy, built squarely and closer to the earth than either of the two brothers. Their Comanche legs seemed to bow naturally at a young age as well—a trait that made them ready to ride the wild-eyed cayuse ponies early in life.
“I will be ready first,” Tall One said, though he was not sure he really believed it. Although Coal Bear was shorter, he was older and native to this land, and because of it, wiser in living among these rocks and sand buttes, the watercourses far-flung like the shallow tracks of the gobblers he dimly recalled roosting in the trees back … somewhere … somewhere in his memory.
Coal Bear laughed. “One day you will be ready. And one day, I am sure, you will be a powerful warrior. Perhaps even as powerful as I will be. But for now, you are still a white-tongue—wanting to be a Kwahadi!”
Tall One dived for his friend, catching Coal Bear around the neck and driving him to the dirt where they grappled, punching and kicking, laughing all the while. It was the one thing that drove the white boy into a rage— this being called a white-tongue by the others, but especially by his best friend. And Coal Bear knew it. Soon they released one another and sat gasping for breath, smiling, choking for air as they laughed in spasms.
“One day he will beat you good, Coal Bear,” said Antelope. “My brother will beat you good.”
“He knows it, Antelope,” Tall One said. “That is why he pokes his fun at me now, while he still can.”
“Yes—one day you will take many scalps from the white-tongues,” Coal Bear admitted. “One day when you are no longer a white-tongue yourself.”
Tall One was finding it hard to wait for that day. His skin had become all the darker these last two years spent next to naked in the sun, year round, except the coldest days of winter. Now winter was approaching once again. They would soon be seeking out the deep canyons, as they had in autumns of old, there to sit out the onslaught of cold weather that would batter the Staked Plain. Tall One yearned almost as much for the coming winter—a time of sitting around the lodge fires, listening to the old men tell stories of the beginning of the earth, tales of the coming of the First Person, the very first Comanche and how he needed a woman to sleep with and have his babies and cook his meals. A woman was very important then, as now.
As well the old ones taught Tall One and Antelope about their religion. At first Tall One had been afraid, remembering what his mother and father told him about Indians and how savage they were—utterly, hopelessly godless. As time passed, he had grown confused as the old men began to speak of their spirits in a reverential way. The way they held and handled their pipe, cut their tobacco, and handled their medicine objects—all of it was just the way the dark-coated circuit preacher would hold his communion goblet or pass out the broken bread or say his long ranting prayers, eyes uplifted to the top of the tent that passed for a church back in … back where he had come from in that other lifetime.
While the Comanche had no pantheon of gods, no religious order to things, they nonetheless lived closest to the earth about them. Here, in this land, they revered the buttes and rocks, the summer breeze and the winter’s wind, the springs and creeks and rivers, along with the sky overhead that filled with lazy clouds, or with nothing more than endless blue. Easily and without fuss, they saw them selves as only part of the greatness in a world where everything, from rock and leaf to animal, had a spirit.
“Man is born evil,” his mother had taught him, drumming it into the minds and hearts of her three children. “He is evil and is saved only by the grace of God. Man will always be evil, and there is nothing we can do about it.”
“But we try to be good,” he had told her, sitting at her knee before the fireplace, the light flickering on the pages of the family Bible.
She always shook her head at him, smiling in that way of hers that softened her hard-bitten theology. “Try as we might, only the Lord Jesus Himself can make our way to heaven for us. For man was created to be evil—and evil he will stay until the day he dies and goes to dwell in heaven with the Almighty.”
As much as he had feared these people when he had come here to become part of their life, frightened to his core when he was dropped from the back of a warrior pony, Tall One now feared all the more going back to what was before. It did not fit, like the clothes he had shed long ago, not only because he had outgrown them, but because he had quickly worn them out.
“Let’s go down to the creek and watch the girls bathing,” suggested Coal Bear.
The younger boys bobbed their heads eagerly, especially Antelope. It was a routine that Tall One enjoyed, almost every day in camp sneaking down to peek through the willows and rushes at the young girls bathing and washing their hair as they stood or sat in the creek. The boys stared goggle-eyed at those different bodies beginning to show the growth of pubic hair, beginning to soften with the curves of rounded rumps and widening hips, the swell of those budding breasts.
“And we will pick out a wife for you, Coal Bear,” Tall One said.
Coal Bear swung an arm up on Tall One’s shoulder, then draped his other arm around the neck of Antelope. “My two little white-tongues, when are you going to realize that soon enough there will come a time for marrying just one. But for right now—all these pretty girls belong to us!”
The lot of them laughed as they strode from the lodge circle, heading downstream, where they would cross and double back toward the pool where the girls bathed.
It had been a long, long time since Tall One had thought of his sister. She would be as old as many of the girls he spied on. If she had lived. If she hadn’t been killed by the white men who came and stole them away from … from the land where his family once lived. He could not remember her face any longer. Her name came even harder.
Yet Tall One said a small prayer for her as he followed Coal Bear and the others. A prayer that the rest of his family would in the end find the peace and happiness, the contentment, he had with these people and this land, with a new family.
He still had a grip on the knife, and somehow found the Mormon’s pistol, wrenching it from the dead man’s fingers. The gun was gummy with gore.
It did not take long for things to grow as quiet as a graveyard in the desert night around him—except for the irregular wind that would gust from time to time to remind him that his ears still worked, heaving first from that direction, then circling around to blow from another. Below the wind keening through the sagebrush Jonah heard the nearby snuffling of the horses as they returned to grazing on the scant grass. He had cocked the dead man’s pistol some time back, though he constantly ran a thumb back and forth over the hammer pad to assure himself he was ready when the rest came out of what darkness the night had left it.
How many, he could not be sure of—but likely the rest had taken care of Two Sleep. After that war cry and the explosions of white-hot light that rocked the night, Jonah couldn’t be sure who was still alive. Except for the pain here and there on his body. The pain reminded him he wasn’t dead and gone to heaven, not yet. One thing for certain: it was still too damned dark here to figure he’d landed himself in hell.
Yet it was growing lighter, almost imperceptibly and as cheerless as a hangover slapping a drunk’s face. But day was coming nonetheless in the relentless crawl of the earth beneath the skies. Gray had begun to seep sluglike out of the east when he realized the horses were no longer just grazing—they were moving. Then footsteps, unsure and advancing quietly, inched toward him out of the murky dawn light.
He tried to lie as quietly as possible, turning only his head slowly to follow the soft crunch of the footsteps. Jonah felt more than heard the movement on the earth as the feet circled around him many yards out. He tracked the sound with the barrel of the dead man’s pistol, knowing he would have to pray for one more loaded cylinder when the Mormon he was hearing came out of the dark.
“Hook?”
Calling to him like this, he could not be sure they didn’t know his name.
“Hook? Where you?”
Jonah thought he saw the movement of something dark off to his left and leveled the pistol in that direction.
“C’mere and get me!” he whispered harshly.
Ready to fire at the first shift in the dark shadow as it rose from the sagebrush, Jonah felt the breeze stiffen,
