Dances With Wolves

CHAPTER XIII

Smiles A Lot was not a reliable boy.

No one would have characterized him as a troublemaker, but Smiles A Lot disliked work, and unlike most Indian boys, the idea of shouldering responsibility left him cold.

He was a dreamer, and as a dreamer often does, Smiles A Lot had learned that one of the better stratagems for avoiding the boredom of work was to keep to himself.

It followed, then, that the shiftless boy spent as much time as possible with the band’s large pony herd. He drew the assignment regularly, in part because he was always ready to go and in part because he had, at the age of twelve, become an expert with horses.

Smiles A Lot could predict to within hours the foaling time for mares. He had a knack for controlling unruly stallions. And when it came to doctoring, he knew as much or more about tending to equine ailments as any grown man in the band. The horses just seemed to fare better when he was around.

All of this was second nature to Smiles A Lot . . . second nature and secondary. What he liked most about being with the horses was that they grazed away from camp, sometimes as far as a mile, and this placed Smiles A Lot far away, too; away from the omnipotent eyes of his father, away from the potential chore of minding his little brothers and sisters, and away from the never-ending work of maintaining camp.

Usually there were other boys and girls lolling around the herd, but unless something special came up, Smiles A Lot rarely joined their games and socializing.

He much preferred climbing onto the back of some calm gelding, stretching out along the horse’s spine, and dreaming, sometimes for hours, as the ever-changing sky drifted by.

He’d been dreaming like this most of the afternoon, happy to be away from the village, which was still reeling from the tragic return of the party that had gone against the Utes. Smiles A Lot knew that, though he had little interest in fighting, sooner or later he would have to take up the warpath, and already he’d made a mental note to watch out for parties going against the Utes.

For the last hour he’d been enjoying the uncommon luxury of being alone with the herd. The other children had been called back for one reason or another, but no one had come for Smiles A Lot, and this made him the happiest of dreamers. With luck, he wouldn’t have to go back until dark, and sunset was still several hours off.

He was smack in the middle of the big herd, daydreaming about being the owner of a herd all his own, one that would be like a great assembly of warriors whom no one would dare to challenge, when he picked up a movement on the ground.

It was a large, yellow gopher snake. Somehow he’d managed to get himself lost in the midst of all these shifting hooves and was slithering along at a desperate clip, looking for a way out.

Smiles A Lot was fond of snakes, and this one was surely big enough and old enough to be a grandfather. A grandfather in trouble. He spilled off his horsey couch with the idea of catching the old fellow and carrying him away from this dangerous place.

The big snake was not easy to run down. He was moving very fast, and Smiles A Lot kept getting hemmed in by the tightly bunched ponies. The boy was constantly ducking under necks and bellies, and it was only through the dogged determination of a Good Samaritan that he was able to keep the yellow body twisting along the ground in sight.

It ended well. Near the edge of the herd the big snake finally found a hole to crawl into, and the only thing Smiles A Lot caught was a last glimpse of the tail as it disappeared underground.

Then, while he was standing over the hole, several of the horses whinnied and Smiles A Lot saw their ears go up. He saw all the heads around him suddenly arch in the same direction.

They’d seen something coming.

A shiver ran through the boy, and the buoyancy of being alone turned against him in a single stroke. He was afraid, but he moved forward stealthily, staying low amongst the ponies, hoping to see before being seen.

When he could see empty patches of prairie opening in front of him, Smiles A Lot dropped down and duck-walked alongside the horses’ legs. They hadn’t panicked and that made him feel a little less scared. But they were still watching with as much curiosity as ever, and the boy was careful not to make a sound.

He stopped when the horse flashed by, twenty or thirty yards away. He couldn’t get a good look because his view was blocked, but he was sure he’d seen legs, too.

Slowly he rose up and peeked over a pony’s back. Every hair on Smiles A Lot’s head tingled. A racket went off in his head like buzzing bees. The boy’s mouth froze, and so did his eyes. He didn’t blink. He’d never seen one before, but he knew exactly what he was looking at.

It was a white man. A white soldier man with blood on his face.

And he had somebody. He had that strange one, that Stands With A Fist woman.

The white soldier’s horse started into a trot as he passed. They were headed straight for the village. It was too late to run ahead and raise the alarm. Smiles A Lot shrank back into the herd and started to work his way back to the center. He would get into trouble for this. What could he possibly do?

The boy couldn’t think clearly; everything was tumbling in his head, like seeds in a rattle. If he’d been a little steadier, he would have known from the look on his face that the white soldier could not be on a hostile mission. Nothing in his bearing said so. But the only words banging around in Smiles A Lot’s brain were “White soldier, white soldier.”

Suddenly he thought, Maybe there are more. Maybe there is an army of hair mouths out on the prairie. Maybe they’re close by.

Thinking only of atoning for his carelessness, Smiles A Lot pulled off the willow bridle he kept around his neck, slipped it onto the face of a strong-looking pony, and led it as quietly as he could out of the herd.

Then he jumped up and whipped the pony into a run, racing away in the opposite direction of the village, anxiously squinting at the horizon for any sign of white soldiers.

Lieutenant Dunbar’s adrenaline was running. That pony herd . . . At first he’d thought the prairie was moving. Never had he seen horses in such numbers. Six, maybe seven hundred of them. It was so awe-inspiring he’d been tempted to stop and watch. But of course he couldn’t.

There was a woman in his arms.

She’d held up fairly well. Her breathing was regular and she hadn’t bled much. She’d been very quiet, too, but tiny as she was, the woman was breaking his back. He’d carried her for more than an hour, and now that he was close, the lieutenant wanted more than ever to get there. His fate would be decided shortly, and that kept his adrenaline running, but more than anything, he thought of the monstrous ache between his shoulder blades. It was killing him.

The land up ahead was dropping away, and as he drew closer, he could see pieces of the stream cutting across the prairie, then the tips of something; and then, as he reached the brow of the slope, the encampment rose into view before his eyes, rising as the moon had done the night before.

Unconsciously, the lieutenant squeezed the reins. He had to stop now. He was gazing on a sight for all time.

There were fifty or sixty conical, hide-covered houses pitched along the stream. They looked warm and peaceful in the late afternoon sun, but the shadows they cast also made them look larger than life, like ancient, still-living monuments.

He could see people working around the houses. He could hear some of their voices as they walked along the tamped-down avenues between lodges. He heard laughter, and somehow that surprised him. There were more people up and down the stream. Some of them were in the water.

Lieutenant Dunbar sat on Cisco, holding the woman he had found, his senses crushed by the power of the ageless tableau spread out before him, spread out like the unraveling of a living canvas. A primal, completely untouched civilization.

And he was there.

It was beyond the reach of his imagination, and at the same time he knew that this was why he’d come, this was at the core of his urge to be posted on the frontier. This, without his knowing it before, was what he had yearned to see.

These fast-moving moments on the brow of the slope would never come again in his mortal life. For these fleeting moments he became part of something so large that he ceased to be a lieutenant or a man or even a body of working parts. For these moments he was a spirit, hovering in the timeless, empty space of the universe. For these precious few seconds he knew the feeling of eternity.

The woman coughed. She stirred against his chest and Dunbar tenderly patted the back of her head.

He made a short kissing sound with his lips, and Cisco started down the slope. They’d only gone a few feet when he saw a woman and two children come out of the breaks along the river.

And they saw him.

The woman screamed as she let go of the water she was hauling, scooped up her children, and broke for the village, crying, “White soldier white soldier,” at the top of her lungs. Scores of Indian dogs went off like firecrackers, women shrieked for their children, and stampeded around the lodges, neighing wildly. It was full-scale pandemonium.

The entire band thought it was under attack.

As he drew closer to the village Lieutenant Dunbar could see men running everywhere. Those who had gotten hold of weapons were going for their horses with a whooping that reminded him of game birds in a panic. The village in upheaval was just as otherworldly as the village in repose. It was like a great nest of hornet people into which a stick had been poked.

The men who had reached their horses were swarming into a force that would momentarily race out to meet him, perhaps to kill him. He had not expected to create such a stir, nor had he expected these people to be so primitive. But there was something else that weighed on him as he moved close to the village, something that blotted out all else For the first time in his life Lieutenant Dunbar knew what it felt like to be an invader. It was a feeling he didn’t like, and it had a lot to do with the action he took next. The last thing he wanted was to be regarded as an intruder, and when he reached the bare ground of a clearing at the mouth of the village, when he was close enough to see through the curtain of dust that had been raised by the clamor and into the eyes of the people inside, he squeezed the reins once more and came to a stop.

Then he dismounted, taking the woman into his arms, and walked a pace or two in front of his horse. There he stood still, his eyes closed holding the wounded girl like some strange traveler bearing a strange gift.

The lieutenant listened hard as the village, in stages that lasted only a few seconds each, grew oddly quiet. The dusty curtain began to settle, and Dunbar perceived with his ears that the mass of humanity that had raised such a fearful howling only moments before was now creeping toward him. In the eerie quiet he could hear the occasional clank of some item of gear, the rustling of footsteps, the snort of a horse as it pawed and jostled impatiently.

He opened his eyes to see that the whole band had gathered at the village entrance, warriors and young men in front, women and children behind them. It was a dream of wild people, clothed in skins and colored fabric, a whole separate race of humans watching him breathlessly not a hundred yards away.

The girl was heavy in his arms, and when Dunbar shifted his stance, a buzz rose and died in the crowd. But no one moved forward to meet him.

A group of older men, apparently men of importance, went into a huddle as their people stood by, whispering amongst themselves in guttural tones so foreign to the lieutenant’s ear that they hardly seemed to be talking.

He let his attention wander during this lull, and when he glanced on a knot of about ten horsemen, the lieutenant’s eyes fell on a familiar face. It was the same man, the warrior who had barked at him so ferociously on the day of the raid at Fort Sedgewick. Wind In His Hair was staring back with such intensity that Dunbar almost turned around to see if someone was standing at his back.

His arms were so leaden that he wasn’t sure if he could move them anymore, but with the warrior’s glare still fixed on him, Dunbar lifted the woman a little higher, as if to say, “Here . . . please take her.”

Thrown by this sudden, unexpected gesture, the warrior hesitated, his eyes darting about the crowd, obviously wondering if this silent exchange had been noticed by anyone else. When he looked back, the lieutenant’s eyes were still on his and the gesture had not been withdrawn.

With an inward sigh of relief Lieutenant Dunbar saw Wind In His Hair leap off the pony and start across the clearing, a stone war club swinging loosely in his hand. He was coming over, and if the warrior had any fear at all, it was well masked, for his face was ungiving and uncaring, set, it seemed, on doling out a punishment.

The assembly fell silent as the space between the immobile Lieutenant Dunbar and the fast-striding Wind In His Hair shrank steadily to nothing. It was too late to stop whatever was going to happen. Everyone stood still and watched.

In the face of what was closing on him, Lieutenant Dunbar could not have been braver. He stood his ground unblinking, and though there was no pain in his face, he wore no fear there either.

When Wind In His Hair was within a few feet and slowing his pace, the lieutenant said in a clear, strong voice:

“She’s hurt.”

He shifted his load a little as the warrior stared into the woman’s face, and Dunbar could see that he recognized her. In fact, Wind In His Hair’s shock was so plain that, for a moment, the awful idea that she might have died flashed through his head. The lieutenant looked down at her, too.

And as he did, she was torn from his arms. In one strong, sure motion she’d been ripped from his grasp, and before Dunbar knew it, the warrior was walking back toward the village, hauling Stands With A Fist roughly along, like a dog would a pup. As he went he called something out that prompted a collective exclamation of surprise from the Comanches. They rushed forward to meet him.

The lieutenant stood motionless in front of his horse, and as the village swirled around Wind In His Hair, he felt the spirit run out of him. These were not his people. He would never know them. He might as well have been a thousand miles away. He wanted to be small, small enough to crawl into the smallest, darkest hole.

What had he expected of these people? He must have thought they would run out and throw their arms around him, speak his language, have him to supper, share his jokes, without so much as a how-do-you. How lonely he must be. How pitiful he was to entertain any expectations at all, grasping at these outlandish straws, hoping hopes that were so far-flung that he could not be honest with himself. He had managed to fool himself about everything, fool himself into thinking he was something when he was nothing.

These terrible thoughts were going off in his head like a storm of incoherent sparks, and where he stood now, in front of this primeval village, mattered not at all. Lieutenant Dunbar was swaying under the crush of a morbid personal crisis. Like so much chalk wiped from a board with one swipe, his heart and his hope had deserted him all at once. Somewhere deep inside, a switch had been thrown and Lieutenant Dunbar’s light had gone out.

Oblivious to all but the hollowness he felt, the unhappy lieutenant swung onto Cisco, reined him around, and started back the way he had come at a brisk walk. This happened with so little fanfare that the already occupied Comanches didn’t realize he was going until he had covered some distance.

Two teenage braves started after him but were held back by the cool-headed men of Ten Bears’s inner circle. They were wise enough to know that a good deed had been done, that the white soldier had brought back one of their own, and that nothing was to be gained by chasing after him.

The ride back was the longest and most agonizing of Lieutenant Dunbar’s life. For several miles he rode in a daze, his mind churning away with thousands of negative thoughts. He resisted the temptation to cry in the way one resists vomiting, but self-pity bore in on him relentlessly, in wave after wave, and at last he broke down.

He slumped forward, letting his shoulders bunch up at first, and his tears fell without a sound. But when he began to sniffle, the floodgates swung wide. His face twisted grotesquely and he began to moan with the abandon of a hysteric. In the midst of these first convulsions he gave Cisco his head, and as the miles piled up unrecorded, he let his heart bleed free, sobbing as piteously as an inconsolable child.

He never saw the fort. When Cisco stopped, the lieutenant looked up and saw that they had halted in front of his quarters. The strength had been wrung from him, and for a few seconds it was all he could do to sit comatose on his horse’s back. When he finally lifted his head again, he saw Two Socks, stationed at his usual place on the bluff across the river. The sight of the wolf, sitting so patiently, like a royal hunting dog, his face so sweetly inquisitive, brought a new lump of sorrow into Dunbar’s throat. But all of his tears had been spent.

He tumbled off Cisco, slipped the bit out of his mouth, and lurched through the door. Dropping the bridle on the floor, he flopped onto his bunk, pulled a blanket over his head, and rolled into a ball.

Exhausted as he was, the lieutenant could not sleep. For some reason he kept thinking of Two Socks, waiting out there so patiently. With a superhuman effort he dragged himself off the bed, staggered into the twilight, and squinted across the river.

The old wolf was still sitting in his place, so the lieutenant sleep-walked his way to the supply house and carved a big hunk of bacon off the slab. He carried the meat out to the bluff and, with Two Socks watching intently, dropped it on the grassy ground near the top of the bluff.

Then, thinking of sleep with every step, he threw some hay for Cisco and retreated to his quarters. Like a soldier hitting the dirt, he pitched onto the pallet, pulled up the blanket, and covered his eyes.

A woman’s face came to him, a face out of the past that he knew well. There was a shy smile on her lips and her eyes shone with a light that can only come from the heart. In times of trouble he had always called upon the face, and it had come to comfort him. There was much more behind the face, a long story with an unhappy ending, but Lieutenant Dunbar didn’t get into that. The face and the wonderful look it wore were all he wanted to remember, and he clung to it tenaciously. He used it like a drug. It was the most powerful painkiller he knew. He didn’t think of her often, but he carried the face around with him, using it only when he was close to scraping bottom.

He lay unmoving on the bed, like an opium smoker, and eventually the image he held in his mind began to take effect. He was already snoring by the time Venus appeared, leading a long parade of stars across the endless prairie sky.