Winter Rain

to grow sleek and the dancing to begin once more. The calls would go out from one war chief or another—asking for young men to ride in search of the white men. Come shortgrass time, Tall One would ride with the war parties. And this season Antelope would be at his side.

The air blew racy with the fragrance of winter’s decay, last autumn’s leaves hurling along the ground ahead of the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon this high, barren land given its Spanish name, Llano Estacado. Spring and renewal come to resurrect the land. But for now Tall One thought only of the band’s last search for meat. How the hunters had to go farther, search longer. The Kwahadi were running dangerously low on meat they had dried to last them the winter, forced to venture out on the hunt much earlier this winter than they had in winters come and gone.

It was during one of those hunts last fall that Tall One had gone with the war chief, when he and the older warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they discovered far south of the “dead line,” that place where the tai-bos’ government treaty-talkers declared white buffalo men were not to cross.

The white man’s government and its guarantees seemed to matter little to the white men intent on plunging farther and farther south of the Arkansas River, come now to the last hunting ground promised the southern nations as their own.

“A waste of time, this talking treaty with the white man,” the war chief growled at Tall One that night at their small fire after they had killed the buffalo hunters. There were scalps to dance over, clothing and mirrors, and the guns—those big buffalo guns taken from the dead men.

Tall One asked, “Is it true the old men give away to the white treaty-talkers all that we young men have fought to hold on to?”

He touched the rangy youth with those gray eyes as he said, “Six winters ago, ever since the autumn when the old chiefs of the Kiowa, Cheyenne—and Comanche too—all signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek, the white hunters have been pushing into our buffalo country in greater and greater numbers.”

“These buffalo hunters with the big guns who you and the others speak of more often these days—you are afraid they will slaughter their way through the herds?”

“I fear these white men will soon cross the Canadian River—the river that is the northern boundary of our sacred buffalo ground. And when they do, I fear this coming fight will prove to be the last stand for our people.”

From all that Tall One had learned from Wolf Walking Alone he knew that killing soldiers carried nothing but a curse for the Kwahadi. If they had learned anything since the first white man set foot in this country, the Comanche had learned that the yellow-leg soldiers would strike back with a vengeance—sending even more of their number against the Kwahadi next time.

“No matter,” protested young Antelope. “Because we should strike and strike again. The yellow-legs never find our roaming warriors.” He had made his first, bloody kill that day. And at long last had his first white scalp.

Sadly Tall One could only reply, “My brother, don’t you understand that the white man’s Tonkawa trackers seek out our villages where stay the women and children, the old ones who cannot flee?”

Antelope laughed without mirth. “I am the one with a woman, brother! I am the one with children. Don’t talk to me about the villages where the women and little ones are trapped by the yellow-legs!”

Indeed, rarely were the young warriors punished by the tai-bo soldiers. It was the Kwahadi families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons when they fled quickly enough to escape the soldiers. Losing their lives, falling prey to the Tonkawa scouts and yellow-leg soldiers when they did not run faster than the white man’s bullets.

A person crippled by an empty belly, weakened because there was simply too little food for all to eat—he or she would stand little chance of outrunning the hissing bullets when the tai-bos came.

With a shudder Tall One ducked out of Old Owl Man’s lodge and stood feeling the sting of great cold. A terrible storm had rumbled down the very gut of the plains, rolling in on the hoary, marrow-numbing breath of Winter Man. In its wake on the prairie above, the storm left behind icy snowdrifts, and many children cried out with hungry bellies. Old ones as well wailed in want. As hungry as he might be, Tall One had vowed not to complain with the gnawing pain. The warriors must be brave, the men reminded themselves. It was up to them and them alone to find meat—and thereby exorcise the ghost of starvation from the Kwahadi.

Their last hunt had taken them far, far from this canyon where the village waited. After riding south for many days, the gray-eyed war chief and his hunters found themselves at the southernmost extent of the Llano Estacado. Without sign of buffalo or promise of other game.

“It is as if Winter Man has wiped all before him with his great cleansing, cold breath,” Tall One said quietly to his brother.

“Have the white men killed them all?” asked Antelope with a hiss of hatred in his question.

As those first cold days of searching stretched into many, the hunters had finally come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, then some more frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge—no longer strong enough to march on with the rest of the herd.

“These are what the Great Mystery offers us, to keep our families from starving,” their war chief explained. “These few left to rot by the passing of Winter Man’s storm.”

Antelope snarled, “We get these poor animals, while the white hide hunters leave the carcasses of the rest to rot in the sun!”

With nothing more to hope for, having reached the southern frontier of their hunting grounds, the Kwahadi warriors turned their noses north, limping back to their winter village.

“Where have the rest of the herds gone?” asked some.

“Farther and farther south still,” answered the few.

“To the land of the summer winds?” worried a growing number.

If the buffalo had indeed fled as far to the south as the tribe was beginning to fear, the herds would likely not return until the shortgrass time came to the prairies—not until that shift in the great season of things, when the winds blew soft and the Great Mystery once again compelled the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their annual migrations.

The terrible, cold breath of Winter Man whipped hot tears at his eyes as he remembered, and heard the low keening, the cries from the lodges huddled in this canyon, sheltered from the strongest of the winds.

In the waning days of winter the rains came to soften the hard breast of the land. Spring arrived, with little letup in the rain. It was a time of cold, gray, never-ending days. The ground sucked at a pony’s hooves. Yanked at a man’s moccasins. And still the little ones, the sick and dying, whimpered in their lodges.

The buffalo had yet to return. And the old men prayed over their drums and rattles and notched sticks.

And when despair seemed the darkest, news of a new shaman arrived from another band, a shaman who was said to perform wonderful miracles. He had promised to make war on the white man: those the Comanche did not kill would turn and flee from this land, their hearts gone to water, soiling their pants as they ran.

Tall One prayed this new medicine man would prove the answer to so many doubts.

His name was Isatai.

“The ass of a wolf?” Antelope asked, barely able to keep from laughing out loud. He had to keep a hand over his mouth.

“Some say his name means coyote droppings,” Tall One explained.

Born of a different band of Comanche, nearly the same age as their own gray-eyed war chief, this young shaman was already a rising star among his Penateka people. When two of his major predictions came to pass, news of Isatai spread like prairie fire across the southern plains. A year ago when a fiery comet had burned its first path across the springtime night sky for three days, the medicine man predicted the star would perform five more times, then return no more.

It amazed the Kwahadi to find no comet in the heavens on that sixth night. The fireball in the sky had obeyed Isatai.

Not long afterward the shaman predicted the beginning of a great drought that would parch the southern prairie and especially the Staked Plain.

True to his prediction, the creeks dried up last summer. Normally in abundance, the game wandered far away, gone in search of water. Suspended overhead, the sun seemed like a dull brass button as each new day of