Tall One sensed the warming joy that it brought him to remember his brother’s white name: so long unthought, so long unspoken.
“Zeke,” he murmured it quietly, the sound sent into the wind in his face.
Far to his right his younger brother stalked through the brush, tracking deer into the wind. These last few years with the Kwahadi they had become proficient in riding the short-backed ponies, slipping to the side to hook a hand in a loop of rawhide lashed to the mane, one foot hung over a bony rump. Now they both handled the short sinew-backed bows as well as any Comanche boys their age. And Tall One could not remember the last time he had experienced any trouble in following the Comanche tongue. After all this time, both he and Antelope were proficient in their adopted language.
Long, long ago had they ceased speaking in English. There for a while, in private, stolen moments only, had they conversed in their birth tongue. Yet as the days grew into moons and the moons turned into seasons, then one winter after another drove this warrior band into the shelter of the deep canyons, the two brothers had spoken less and less of that birth tongue to one another.
No more did he find himself even thinking in that foreign language of a bygone time. It had been so long now, in fact, that Tall One genuinely surprised himself by remembering his brother’s name.
“Ezekiel,” he said unconsciously.
Antelope shushed him sternly from afar, pointing into the brush, making a hook of his right-hand fingers, setting the hand beside his head to show he was in range of their prey.
Thinking the name in English, more so saying something in that old tongue, immediately washed over him with some of the old longings he had buried in those ancient days when he first came to live with those people. They were mostly impressions. Nothing really remained clear enough to remember anymore.
True, what wispy memories there were flooded up to the surface from time to time, from season to season when certain smells reminded him of a life lived long, long ago. The feel of a blanket laid against his cheek in a certain way, the manner in which firelight fell on his brother’s face, casting shadows and flickering highlights, made his heart leap for an instant in unconscious recognition of someone important from that dim past, knowing he should remember a man who had the same nose, the same curve of the lips or the same solid, square chin—much of the same features as he and Zeke shared.
Antelope stopped suddenly and threw up his bow, releasing the arrow in a fluid movement. Out of the brush bounded a doe, the shaft deep behind a foreleg. She took a fourth and fifth bounce, then crumpled, thrashing briefly, then lay still, only her side heaving.
They both hurried to the doe, where Tall One knelt and dragged his iron knife across the soft underside of her neck. As the ground beneath the deep wound grew dark and moist, Antelope stuffed his bow away in the quiver and brought out his own knife. With it he opened the animal’s belly, then bloodied himself to his elbows gutting her.
When he was done, Antelope rose, red nearly to the shoulders, standing there between the deer and the gut pile. What he had to say surprised Tall One—for his young brother talked not of hunting, nor of the dinner on such fresh and tender meat they would have this night.
Antelope looked squarely at his brother. “I am going to marry.”
Caught by surprise, he could only ask, “Prairie Night is the one?”
The young brother nodded.
He was a little afraid for his brother, so young he was to become a man so soon. “Can’t you wait?”
“I could,” he replied with a shrug. “After all, there are so many other ones every bit as pretty and firm and willing.”
“Then wait.” He tried smiling at his little brother, who had so serious a look on his face.
“I cannot, brother. Prairie Night … her father says we must marry.”
“Let me go talk with him, tell him you have only been flirting with his daughter. Explain that you are not ready.”
He wagged his head. “That will do no good. Not now. He knows I am ready.”
“How can he know this? Look at you! You cannot marry Prairie Night. And her father cannot make you!”
“His daughter is big with child,” Antelope explained, some sadness, some loss of innocence around every word. “My child.”
“You are sure it … this is your child?”
“She hasn’t been with another,” Antelope sighed. “Everyone in camp knows that.”
Tall One put a hand on his short brother’s shoulder, wanting to embrace him—remembering that such a thing was a white man’s custom. Like the touching of hands. They two, they were no longer white men. They were Comanche hunters. Kwahadi warriors.
Instead of hugging his young brother to tell him of his feelings, to tell him of all that made his heart brim over, Tall One said, “Then you must become a man and marry Prairie Night.”
“Yes,” Antelope nodded with resignation. “I will marry to become a man in the eyes of our village. And one day, one day very soon, I will take a white scalp. Then—only then—can I become a man in my own eyes.”
29
MORE THAN THREE years had passed since the U.S. Army had crushed the resistance of Apache chief Cochise down in Arizona Territory. It had been some time since the Navaho and Zuni and the other quiet tribes had been all stirred up by the Apache.
But that hadn’t stopped Colonel Jubilee Usher and his army from loading their Murphy prairie wagons and making their frequent forays down into northern Sonora.
From time to time the Mexican officials were willing to part with gold and guns, bullets and whores, if only Usher’s
Jubilee thought of himself as a royal cat: sustained by the royal and the wealthy to keep their domains free of troublesome mice.
Over the past three years the Apache had become more a threat to the Sonorans than they had ever been before, thanks to the efficiency of the U.S. Army and its crushing defeat of Cochise. The Chiricahua and Mescalero, even some White Mountain renegades, all had bolted from Arizona Territory, fleeing south across the border into the mountains of northern Sonora. It was down there that those American Apaches preyed on the tiny Mexican settlements, forcing the provincial governors to offer rich bounties for Apache scalps.
How quickly Usher had learned the way of the scalp hunter: the Sonoran officials would pay handsomely for any black scalp. It was that simple. Be it Apache warrior, woman, or child—be it Mexican peon, woman, or child, the ruins of those sundered villages made to appear the work of the Apache in turn renewing the call for some action to be taken against the marauding savages.
The gold and specie the Mexican officials paid for those burlap sacks Usher’s army stuffed with stiffened, grisly, red-hued trophies had been more than enough revenue for Jubilee to keep his small army together. In fact, the Danite leader had discovered just how easy it was to recruit more volunteers in Arizona Territory: a few breeds and Mexicans, to be sure—but mostly those who had been drawn to Usher’s band of zealots were men in need of steady work with a gun.
Jubilee kept them up to their elbows in steady work. And blood. And scalps.
When he grew weary of the hunt and the carnage, Usher ordered his army back to one of the larger provincial towns to present his bags to the local officials: Cibuta, or Magdalena, Cananea, and Turicachi. There the debt was always paid promptly, and without fail, from local treasuries. Those officials knew they were sure to be reimbursed from the provincial capital of Hermosillo. It had not always been so.
One failure to pay the promised bounty, seasons ago—and the Mexican officials came to realize just how great a mistake it would be to loose Usher’s carnivorous brigands on the countryside.
Furious that he had been refused his money, Jubilee released his hounds of war. They had pillaged, raped, and killed, burning to the ground a small village of farmers and shepherds just the way Usher’s army rode through Indian camps dotting the scrub in the distant foothills and mountains. When the government sent its soldiers against the invading army of Jubilee Usher, his gunmen turned the Mexicans around, then made slow work of the
