Dances With Wolves

CHAPTER XVII

The appearance of three strange young men on ponies was a surprise. Shy and respectful, they carried the appearance of messengers, but Lieutenant Dunbar was very much on his guard. He had not yet learned to tell tribal differences, and to his unpracticed eye they could have been anybody.

With the rifle tipped over his shoulder, he walked a hundred yards behind the supply house to meet them. When one of the young men made the sign of greeting used by the quiet one, Dunbar answered with his usual short bow.

The hand talk was short and simple. They asked him to come with them to the village, and the lieutenant agreed. They stood by as he bridled Cisco, talking in low tones about the little buckskin horse, but Lieutenant Dunbar paid them little mind.

He was anxious to find out what was up and was glad when they left the fort at a gallop.

It was the same woman, and though she was sitting away from them, toward the back of the lodge, the lieutenant’s eyes kept roving in her direction. The deerskin dress was drawn over her knees and he couldn’t tell if she had recovered from the bad leg wound.

Physically she looked fine, but he could read no clues in her expression. It was a shade sullen but mainly blank. His eyes kept going to her because he was sure now that she was the reason for his being summoned to the village. He wished they could get on with it, but his limited experience with the Indians had already taught him to be patient.

So he waited as the medicine man meticulously packed his pipe. The lieutenant glanced again at Stands With A Fist. For a split second her eyes linked with his and he was reminded of how pale they were compared to the deep brown eyes of the others. Then he remembered her saying “Don’t” that day on the prairie. The cherry-colored hair suddenly sprang at him with new meaning, and a tingling started at the base of his neck.

Oh my God, he thought, that woman is white.

Dunbar could tell that Kicking Bird was more than casually aware of the woman in the shadows. When, for the first time, he offered the pipe to his special visitor, he did it with a sidelong glance in her direction.

Lieutenant Dunbar needed help with the smoking, and Kicking Bird politely obliged, positioning his hands on the long, smooth stem and adjusting the angle. The tobacco was as harsh as it smelled, but he found it to be full of aroma. A good smoke. The pipe itself was fascinating. Heavy to pick up, it felt extraordinarily light once he began to smoke, as if it might float away if he eased his grip.

They puffed it back and forth for a few minutes. Then Kicking Bird laid the pipe carefully at his side. He looked squarely at Stands With A Fist and made a little flick of his wrist, motioning her forward.

She hesitated for a moment, then planted a hand on the ground and started to her feet. Lieutenant Dunbar, ever the gentleman, instantly jumped up and, in so doing, ignited a wild ruckus.

It all happened in a violent flash. Dunbar didn’t see the knife until she’d covered half the distance between them. The next thing he knew, Kicking Bird’s forearm slammed into his chest and he was falling backward. As he went down he saw the woman coming in a crouch, punctuating the words she was hissing with wicked stabbing motions.

Kicking Bird was on her just as quickly, twisting the knife away with one hand while he shoved her to the ground with the other. As the lieutenant sat up, Kicking Bird was turning on him. There was a fearsome glare on the medicine man’s face.

Desperate to defuse this awful situation, Dunbar hopped to his feet. He waved his hands back and forth as he said “No” several times. Then he made one of the little bows he used as a greeting when Indians came to Fort Sedgewick. He pointed to the woman on the floor and bowed again.

Kicking Bird understood then. The white man was only trying to be polite. He had meant no harm. He spoke a few words to Stands With A Fist and she came to her feet again. She kept her eyes on the floor, avoiding any contact with the white soldier.

For a moment each member of the trio in the lodge stood motionless.

Lieutenant Dunbar waited and watched as Kicking Bird slowly stroked the side of his nose with a long, dark finger, thinking things over. Then he muttered softly to Stands With A Fist and the woman raised her eyes. They seemed paler than before. And blanker. Now they were staring straight into Dunbar’s.

With signs Kicking Bird asked the lieutenant to resume his seat. They sat as they had before, facing each other. More soft words were directed at Stands With A Fist and she came forward, settling light as a feather a foot or two from Dunbar.

Kicking Bird looked at both of them expectantly. He placed his fingers on his lips, prodding the lieutenant with this sign until Dunbar understood that he was being asked to speak, to say something to the woman sitting next to him.

The lieutenant dipped his head in her direction, waiting until he caught a little slice of her eye.

“Hello,” he said.

She blinked.

“Hello,” he said again.

Stands With A Fist remembered the word. But her white tongue was as rusty as an old hinge. She was afraid of what might come out, and her subconscious was still resisting the very idea of this talk. She made several soundless attempts before it came out.

“Hulo,” she answered, quickly dropping her chin.

Kicking Bird’s delight was such that he uncharacteristically slapped the side of his leg. He reached over and patted the back of Dunbar’s hand, urging him on.

“Speak?” the lieutenant asked, mixing his words with the sign Kicking Bird had used. “Speak English?”

Stands With A Fist tapped the side of her temple and nodded, trying to tell him the words were in her head. She placed a pair of fingers against her lips and shook her head, trying to tell him of the trouble with her tongue.

The lieutenant didn’t fully understand. Her expression was still blankly hostile, but there was an ease in her movements now that gave him the feeling she was willing to communicate.

“I am . . .” he started, poking a finger at his tunic. “I am John. I am John.”

Her flat eyes were trained on his mouth.

“I am John.”

Stands With A Fist moved her lips silently, practicing the word. When she finally said it out loud the word rang with perfect clarity. It shocked her. It shocked Lieutenant Dunbar.

She said, “Willie.”

Kicking Bird knew there had been a misfire when he saw the stunned expression on the lieutenant’s face. He watched helplessly as Stands With A Fist went through a series of muddled gyrations. She covered her eyes and rubbed her face. She covered her nose as if she were trying to stifle a smell and shook her head wildly. Finally she placed her hands palm down on the ground and sighed deeply, again forming silent words with her little mouth. At that moment, Kicking Bird’s heart sagged. Perhaps he had asked too much in mounting this experiment.

Lieutenant Dunbar didn’t know what to make of her, either. He thought it possible that the poor girl’s long captivity had made her a lunatic.

But Kicking Bird’s experiment, though terribly difficult, was not too much. And Stands With A Fist was not a lunatic. The white soldier’s words and her memories and the confusion of her tongue were all jumbled together. Sorting through the tangle was like trying to draw with her eyes closed. She was struggling to get hold of it as she stared into space.

Kicking Bird started to say something, but she cut him off sharply with a flurry of Comanche.

Her eyes remained closed a few seconds longer. When they opened again she looked through her tangled hair at Lieutenant Dunbar and he could see that they had softened. With a calm beckoning of her hand she asked him in Comanche to speak again.

Dunbar cleared his throat.

“I am John,” he said, and pronounced the word carefully. “John . . . John.”

Once more her lips worked at the word, and once more she tried to speak it.

“Jun.”

“Yes.” Dunbar nodded ecstatically. “John.”

“Jun,” she said again.

Lieutenant Dunbar tilted his head back. It was a sweet sound to him, the sound of his own name. He had not heard it for months.

Stands With A Fist smiled in spite of herself. Her recent life had been so filled with frowns. It was good to have something, no matter how small, to smile about.

Simultaneously, they glanced at Kicking Bird.

There was no smile on his mouth. But in his eyes, though it was ever faint, was a happy light.

The going was slow that first afternoon in Kicking Bird’s lodge. The time was eaten up by Stands With A Fist’s painstaking attempts to repeat Lieutenant Dunbar’s simple words and phrases. Sometimes it took a dozen or more repetitions, all of them excruciatingly tedious, to pronounce a single one-syllable word. And even then the pronunciation was far from perfect. It was not what would be called talking.

But Kicking Bird was greatly encouraged. Stands With A Fist had told him that she remembered the white words well. She was only having difficulty with her tongue. The medicine man knew that practice would bring the rusty tongue around, and his mind galloped with the happy prospects of the time when conversation between them would be free and full of information.

He felt a twinge of irritation when one of his assistants arrived with the news that he would shortly be needed to oversee final preparations for the dance that evening.

But Kicking Bird smiled as he took the white man’s hand and bid him goodbye with hair-mouth words.

“Hulo, Jun.”

It was tough to figure. The meeting had ended so abruptly. And so far as he knew, it had been going well. Something must have taken priority.

Dunbar stood outside Kicking Bird’s lodge and looked down the wild avenue. People seemed to be congregating in an open space at the end of the street near the tipi that carried the mark of the bear. He wanted to stay, to see what was going to happen.

But the quiet one had already disappeared into the steadily growing crowd. He spotted the woman, so small among the already smallish Indians, walking between two women. She didn’t look back at him, but as the lieutenant’s eyes followed her receding form, he could see the two people in her carriage: white and Indian.

Cisco was coming toward him, and Dunbar was surprised to see that the boy with the constant smile was riding his horse. The youngster pulled up, rolled off, patted Cisco’s neck, and chattered something that Lieutenant Dunbar correctly interpreted as praise for his horse’s virtues.

People were streaming into the clearing now and they were taking little notice of the man in uniform. The lieutenant thought again of staying, but much as he wanted to, he knew that without a formal invitation he would not be welcome. There had been no invitation.

The sun was beginning to sink and his stomach was starting to growl. If he was going to get home before dark and thus avoid a lot of fumbling just to get dinner together, he would have to make quick time. He swung up, turned Cisco around, and started out of the village at an easy canter.

As he passed the last of the lodges he chanced upon a strange assembly. Perhaps a dozen men were gathered behind one of the last lodges. They were all draped in all kinds of finery and their bodies were painted with loud designs. Each man’s head was covered with the head of a buffalo, complete with curly hair and horns. Only the dark eyes and prominent noses were visible beneath the strange helmets.

Dunbar held up a hand as he cantered past. Some of them glanced in his direction, but none of them returned the wave, and the lieutenant rode on.

Two Sock’s visits were no longer limited to late afternoon or early morning. He was likely to pop up anytime now, and when he did, the old wolf made himself at home, roaming the little confines of Lieutenant Dunbar’s world as if he were a camp dog. The distance he once kept had shrunk as his familiarity grew. More often than not he was no more than twenty or thirty feet away as the solitary lieutenant went about his little tasks. When he made journal entries Two Socks would usually stretch out and lie down, his yellow eyes blinking curiously as he watched the lieutenant scratch on the pages.

The ride back had been a lonely one. The untimely end of his meeting with the woman who was two people and the mysterious excitement in the village (of which he was not a part) saddled Dunbar with his old nemesis, the morose feeling of being left out. All his life he’d been hungry to participate, and as with every other human, loneliness was something that constantly had to be handled. In the lieutenant’s case loneliness had become the dominant feature of his life, so it was reassuring to see the tawny form of Two Socks rise up under the awning when he rode in at twilight.

The wolf trotted out into the yard and sat down to watch as the lieutenant slipped off Cisco’s back.

Dunbar noticed immediately that something else was under the awning. It was a large prairie chicken, lying dead on the ground, and when he stooped to examine it, he found the bird fresh-killed. The blood on its neck was still sticky. But aside from the punctures about its throat, the guinea fowl was undisturbed. Hardly a feather was out of place. It was a puzzle for which there was only one solution, and the lieutenant looked pointedly at Two Socks.

“Is this yours?” he said out loud.

The wold raised his eyes and blinked as Lieutenant Dunbar studied the bird a moment longer.

“Well, then”—he shrugged—”I guess it’s ours.”

Two Socks stood by, his narrow eyes following Dunbar as the bird was plucked, gutted, and roasted over the open fire. While it was on the spit he trailed the lieutenant to the corral and waited patiently as Cisco’s grain ration was doled out. Then back to the fire to await the feast.

It was a good bird, tender and full of meat. The lieutenant ate slowly, carving off the plump flesh a strip at a time and tossing a piece out to Two Socks every now and then. When he’d eaten his fill he lobbed the carcass into the yard and the old wolf carried it off into the night.

Lieutenant Dunbar sat in one of the camp chairs and smoked, letting the nighttime sounds entertain him. He thought it amazing how far he had come in such a short time. Not so long ago these same sounds had kept him on edge. They’d stolen his sleep. Now they were so familiar as to be comforting.

He thought back over the day and decided it had been a very good one. As the fire burned down with his second cigarette he realized how unique it was for him to be dealing singly and directly with the Indians. He allowed himself a pat on the back, thinking that he had done a credible job thus far as a representative of the United States of America. And without any guidelines, to boot.

Suddenly he thought of the Great War. It was possible that he was no longer a representative of the United States. Perhaps the war was over. The Confederate States of America . . . He couldn’t imagine such a thing. But it could be. He’d been without any information for a long time now.

These musings brought him to his own career, and he admitted inwardly that he’d been thinking less and less about the army. That he was in the midst of a great adventure had much to do with these omissions, but as he sat by the dwindling fire and listened to the yip of coyotes down by the river, it crossed his mind that he might have stumbled on to a better life. In this life he wanted for very little. Cisco and Two Socks weren’t human, but their unwavering loyalty was satisfying in ways that human relationships had never been. He was happy with them.

And of course there were the Indians. They held a distinct pull for him. At the least they made for excellent neighbors, well-mannered, open, and sharing. Though he was much too white for aboriginal ways, he felt more than comfortable with them. Maybe that was why he’d been drawn from the start. The lieutenant had never been much of a learner. He’d always been a doer, sometimes to a fault. But he sensed that this facet of his personality was shifting.

Yes, he thought, that’s it. There is something to learn from them. They know things. If the army never comes, I don’t suppose the loss would be so great.

Dunbar felt suddenly lazy. Yawning, he flipped the butt of his smoke into the embers glowing at his feet and stretched his arms high over his head.

“Sleep,” he said. “I will now sleep like a dead man the whole night through.”

Lieutenant Dunbar woke with alarm in the dark of early morning. His sod hut was trembling. The earth was trembling, too, and the air was filled with a hollow rumbling sound.

He swung out of bed and listened hard. The rumble was coming from somewhere close, just downriver.

Pulling on his pants and boots, the lieutenant slipped outside. The sound was even louder here, filling the prairie night with a great, reverberating echo.

He felt small in its midst.

The sound was not coming toward him, and without knowing precisely why, he ruled out the idea that some freak of nature, an earthquake or a flood, was producing this enormous energy. Something alive was making the sound. Something alive was making the earth tremble, and he had to see.

The light of his lantern seemed tiny as he walked toward the rush of sound somewhere in front of him. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards along the bluff before the feeble light he was holding picked up something. It was dust: a great, billowing wall of it rising into the night.

The lieutenant slowed to a creep as he got closer. All at once he knew that hooves were making the thunderous sound and that the dust was being raised by a movement of beasts so large that he could never have believed what he was seeing with his own eyes.

The buffalo.

One of them swerved out of the dusty cloud. And another. And another. He only glimpsed them as they roared past, but the sight of them was so magnificent that they may as well have been frozen. At that moment they froze forever in Lieutenant Dunbar’s memory.

In that moment, all alone with his lantern, he knew what they meant to the world he lived in. They were what the ocean meant to fishes, what the sky meant to birds, what air meant to a pair of human lungs.

They were the life of the prairie.

And there were thousands of them pouring over the embankment and down to the river, which they crossed with no more care than a train would a puddle. Then up the other side and out onto the grasslands, thundering to a destination known only to them, a torrent of hooves and horns and meat cutting across the landscape with a force beyond all imagining.

Dunbar dropped the lantern where he stood and broke into a run. He stopped for nothing except Cisco’s bridle, not even a shirt. Then he jumped up and kicked his horse into a gallop. He laid his bare chest close on the little buckskin’s neck and gave Cisco his head.

The village was ablaze with firelight as Lieutenant Dunbar raced into the depression where the lodges were pitched and pounded up the camp’s main avenue.

Now he could see the flames of the biggest fire and the crowd gathered around it. He could see the buffalo-headed dancers and he could hear the steady roll of the drums. He could hear deep, rhythmic chanting.

But he was barely aware of the spectacle opening before him, just as he had been barely aware of the ride he’d made, tearing across the prairie at full speed for miles. He wasn’t conscious of the sweat that coated Cisco from head to tail. Only one thing was in his head as he rushed his horse up the avenue . . . the Comanche word for buffalo. He was turning it over and over, trying to remember the exact pronunciation.

Now he was shouting the word. But with all the drumming and chanting, they hadn’t yet heard his approach. As he neared the fire he tried to pull Cisco up, but the horse was high on runaway speed and didn’t answer the bit.

He charged into the very center of the dance, scattering Comanches in every direction. With a supreme effort the lieutenant pulled him up, but as Cisco’s hindquarters brushed against the ground, his head and neck rose straight up. His front legs clawed madly at empty space. Dunbar couldn’t keep his seat. He slid off the sweat-slicked back and crashed to earth with an audible thud.

Before he could move, a half-dozen infuriated warriors pounced on him. One man with a club might have ended everything, but the six men were tangled together and no one could get a clear shot at the lieutenant.

They rolled over the ground in a chaotic ball. Dunbar was screaming “Buffalo” as he fought against the punches and kicks. But no one could understand what he was saying, and some of the blows were now finding their mark.

Then he was dimly aware of a lessening of the weight pressing against him. Someone was shouting above the tumult, and the voice sounded familiar.

Suddenly there was no one on him. He was lying alone on the ground, staring up through half-stunned eyes at a multitude of Indian faces. One of the faces bent closer.

Kicking Bird.

The lieutenant said, “Buffalo.”

His body was heaving as it sucked for air, and his voice had been a whisper.

Kicking Bird’s face leaned closer.

“Buffalo,” the lieutenant gasped.

Kicking Bird grunted and shook his head. He turned his ear to within a whisker of Dunbar’s mouth and the lieutenant said the word once more, struggling with all his might for the right accent.

“Buffalo.”

Kicking Bird’s eyes were back in front of Lieutenant Dunbar’s.

“Buffalo?”

“Yes,” Dunbar said, a wan smile flaring on his face. “Yes . . . buffalo . . . buffalo.”

Exhausted, he closed his eyes for a moment and heard Kicking Bird’s deep voice bellow over the stillness as he shouted the word.

It was answered with a roar of joy from every Comanche throat, and for a split second the lieutenant thought the power of it was carrying him away. Blinking away the glaze on his eyes, he realized that strong Indian arms were bringing him to his feet.

When the erstwhile lieutenant looked up, he was greeted with scores of beaming faces. They were pressing in around him.