Dances With Wolves

CHAPTER XXIII

Lieutenant Dunbar’s solo ride carried him along the river, too. But while Stands With A Fist rode south, he went north.

Despite the day’s intense heat, he swung away from the river after a mile or two. He broke into open country with the idea that, surrounded by space, he might start to feel better.

The lieutenant’s spirits were very low.

He ran the picture of her leaving the arbor over and over in his mind, trying to find something in it to hang on to. But there was a finality about their departure, and it gave him that dreadful feeling of having let something wonderful slip from his hand just as he was picking it up.

The lieutenant chastised himself mercilessly for not having gone after her. If he had, they might be talking happily at this moment, the tender issue, whatever it was, settled and behind them.

He’d wanted to tell her something of himself. Now it might never happen. He wanted to be back in the arbor with her. Instead he was stumbling around out here, wandering like a lost soul under a broiling sun.

He’d never been this far north of the camp and was surprised at how radically the country was changing. These were rear hilts rising in front of him, not mere bumps on the grassland. Running out of the hills were deep, jagged canyons.

The heat, coupled with his constant self-criticism, had set his mind to simmering, and feeling suddenly dizzy, he gave Cisco a little squeeze with his knees. A half mile ahead he had spotted the shady mouth of a dark canyon spilling onto the prairie.

The walls on either side climbed a hundred feet or more and the darkness that fell over horse and rider was instantly refreshing. But as they picked their way carefully over the canyon’s rock-strewn floor, the place grew ominous. Its walls were pressing tighter against them. He could feel Cisco’s muscles bunching nervously, and in the absolute quiet of the afternoon he was increasingly aware of the hollow thump in his own heart.

He was struck with the certainty that he had entered something ancient. Perhaps it was evil.

He had begun to think of turning back when the canyon bottom suddenly started to widen. Far ahead, in the space between the canyon walls, he could see a stand of cottonwoods, their tops twinkling in bright sunlight.

After managing a few more twists and turns he and Cisco burst all at once into the large, natural clearing where the cottonwoods stood. Even at the height of summer the place was remarkably green, and though he could see no stream, he knew there must be water here.

The buckskin arched his neck and sniffed the air. He would have to be thirsty, too, and Dunbar gave him his head. Cisco skirted the cottonwoods and walked another hundred yards to the base of a sheer rock wall that marked the canyon’s end. There he stopped.

At his feet, covered with a film of leaves and algae, was a small spring about six feet across. Before the lieutenant could jump off, Cisco’s muzzle had thrust through the surface’s coating and he was drinking in long gulps.

As the lieutenant knelt next to his horse, going to his hands at the edge of the spring, something caught his eye. There was a cleft at the base of the rock wall. It ran back into the cliff and was tall enough at its entrance for a man to walk into without stooping.

Lieutenant Dunbar buried his face next to Cisco’s and drank quickly. He slipped the bridle off his horse’s head, dropped it next to the spring, and walked into the darkness of the cleft.

It was wonderfully cool inside. The soil beneath his feet was soft, and as far as he could see, the place was empty. But as his eyes passed over the floor he knew that man was a fixture here. Charcoal from a thousand fires was scattered over the ground like plucked feathers.

The ceiling began to shrink, and when the lieutenant touched it, the soot of the thousand fires coated his fingertips.

Still feeling light-headed, he sat down, his bottom hitting the ground so heavily that he groaned.

He was facing the way he had come, and the entrance, a hundred yards away, was now a window to the afternoon. Cisco was grazing contentedly on the bunchgrass next to the spring. Behind him the cottonwood leaves were blinking like mirrors. As the coolness closed around him, Lieutenant Dunbar was suddenly overcome with a throbbing, all-encompassing fatigue. Throwing his arms out as a pillow for his head, he lay back on the smooth, sandy earth and stared up at the ceiling.

The roof of solid rock was blackened with smoke, and underneath there were distinct markings. Deep grooves had been cut in the stone, and as he studied them, Dunbar realized they had been made by human hands.

Sleep was pressing in about him, but he was fascinated by the markings. He struggled to make sense of them as a star gazer might strain to connect the outline of Taurus.

The marks immediately above suddenly fell into place. There was a buffalo, crudely drawn but bearing all the essential detail. Even the little tail was standing up.

Next to the buffalo was a hunter. He was holding a stick, a spear in all likelihood. It was pointed at the buffalo.

Sleep was unstoppable now. The idea that the spring might have been tainted occurred to him as his invisibly weighted eyes began to close.

When they were shut he could still see the buffalo and the hunter. The hunter was familiar. He wasn’t an exact duplicate, but there was something of Kicking Bird in his face, something handed down over hundreds of years.

Then the hunter was him.

Then he went out.

The trees were bare of leaves.

Patches of snow lay on the ground.

It was very cold.

A great circle of uncounted common soldiers waited lifelessly, their rifles standing at their sides.

He went from one to another, staring into their frozen blue faces, looking for signs of life. No one acknowledged him.

He found his father among them, the telltale doctor’s bag hanging from one hand like a natural extension of his body. He saw a boyhood chum who had drowned. He saw the man who owned a stable in his old town and who beat the horses when they got out of line. He saw General Grant, still as a sphinx, a soldier’s cap crowning his head. He saw a watery-eyed man with the collar of a priest. He saw a prostitute, her dead face smeared with rouge and powder. He saw his massively bosomed elementary-school teacher. He saw the sweet face of his mother, tears frozen to her cheeks.

This vast army of his life swam before his eyes as if it would never end. There were guns, big, brass-colored cannons on wheels.

Someone was coming up to the waiting circle of soldiers.

It was Ten Bears. He walked smoothly in the brittle cold, a single blanket draped over his bony shoulders. Looking like a tourist, he came face-to-face with one of the cannons. A coppery hand snaked out of the blanket, wanting to feel the barrel.

The big gun discharged and Ten Bears was gone in a cloud of smoke. The upper half of his body was somersaulting slowly in the dead winter sky. Like water from a hose, blood was pouring out of the place where his waist had been. His face was blank. His braids were floating lazily away from his ears.

Other guns went off, and like Ten Bears, the lodges of his village took flight. They gyrated through space like heavy paper cones, and when they came back to earth, the tipis stuck into the iron-hard ground on their tips.

The army was faceless now. Like a herd of joyous bathers hustling to the seashore on a hot day, it swept down on the people who had been left uncovered beneath the lodges.

Babies and small children were flung aside first. They flew high into the air. The branches of the bare trees stabbed through their little bodies, and there the children squirmed, their blood running down the tree trunks as the army continued its work.

They opened the men and women as if they were Christmas presents: shooting into their heads and lifting off the skull tops; slitting bellies with bayonets, then parting the skin with impatient hands; severing limbs and shaking them out.

There was money inside every Indian. Silver poured from their limbs. Greenbacks spewed from their bellies. Gold sat in their skulls like candy in jars.

The great army was drawing away in wagons piled high with riches. Some of the soldiers were running next to the wagons, scooping the overflow off the ground.

Fighting broke out in the ranks of the army, and long after they had disappeared, the sound of their battling flashed on and off like lightning behind the mountains.

One soldier was left behind, walking sad and dazed through the field of corpses.

It was himself.

The hearts of the dismembered people were still beating, drumming out in unison a cadence that sounded like music.

He slipped a hand under his tunic and watched it rise and fall with the beat of his own heart. He saw his breath freezing in front of his face. Soon he would be frozen, too.

He lay down among the corpses, and as he stretched out, a long, mournful sigh escaped his lips. Instead of fading, the sigh gained strength. It circled over the slaughtering ground, rushing faster and faster past his ears, moaning a message he could not understand.

Lieutenant Dunbar was cold to the bone.

It was dark.

Wind was whistling through the cleft.

He jumped straight up, cracked his head against the ceiling of solid rock, and sank back to his knees. Blinking through the sting of the blow, he could see a silvery light shining through the cleft’s entrance. Moonlight.

Panicked, Dunbar scrambled off in an apelike stoop, one hand held overhead to gauge the ceiling. When he could stand unimpeded he ran for the mouth of the cleft and didn’t slow until he was standing in the brilliant moonlight of the clearing.

Cisco was gone.

The lieutenant whistled high and shrill.

Nothing.

He walked farther into the clearing and whistled again. He heard something move in the cottonwoods. Then he heard a low nicker, and Cisco’s buckskin hide flashed like amber in the moonlight as he came out of the trees.

Dunbar was going for the bridle he left at the spring when a movement flickered in the air. He looked back in time to glimpse the tawny form of a great horned owl as it swooped past Cisco’s head and went into a steep climb, finally vanishing in the branches of the tallest cottonwood.

The owl’s flight was disturbingly eerie, and it must have had the same effect on Cisco, for when he reached him the little horse was trembling with fright.

They backtracked out of the canyon, and when they were on the open prairie again it was with the kind of relief a swimmer feels on coming to the surface after a long, deep dive.

Lieutenant Dunbar shifted his weight slightly forward and Cisco was off, carrying him over the silvery grasslands at an easy gallop.

He rode invigorated, thrilled to be awake and alive and putting distance between himself and the strange, unsettling dream. It didn’t matter where the dream had come from and it didn’t matter what it meant. The images were too fresh and too profound to rehash now. He spurned the hallucination in favor of other thoughts as he listened to the gentle pounding of Cisco’s hooves.

A feeling of power was coming over him, increasing with each passing mile. He could feel it in the effortless movement of Cisco’s canter and he could feel it in the oneness of himself: oneness with his horse and the prairie and the prospect of returning whole to the village that was now his home. In the back of his mind he knew there would be a reckoning with Stands With A Fist and that the grotesque dream would have to be assimilated somewhere down the line of his future.

For the moment, however, these things were small. They didn’t threaten him in the least, for he was charged with the notion that his life as a human being was suddenly a blank and that the slate of his history had been wiped clean. The future was as open as the day he was born, and it sent his spirits soaring. He was the only man on earth, a king without subjects, rambling across the limitless territory of his life.

He was glad they were Comanches and not Kiowas, for he remembered their nickname now, heard or read somewhere in the dead past.

The Lords of the Plains, that’s what they were called. And he was one of them.

In a fit of reverie he dropped the reins and crossed his arms, laying each hand flat against the breastplate that covered his chest.

“I’m Dances With Wolves,” he cried out loud, “I’m Dances With Wolves.”

Kicking Bird, Wind In His Hair, and several other men were sitting around the fire when he rode in that night.

The medicine man had been worried enough to send out a small party to scout the four directions for the white soldier. But there was no general alarm. It was done quietly. They had come back with nothing to report, and Kicking Bird put the matter out of his mind. When it came to matters beyond his sphere of influence, he always trusted to the wisdom of the Great Spirit.

He’d been more disturbed by what he saw in the face and manner of Stands With A Fist than he had been with the disappearance of Dances With Wolves. At the mention of his name he’d perceived a vague discomfort in her, as though she had something to hide.

But this, too, he decided, was beyond his control. If something important had happened between them, it would be revealed at the proper time.

He was relieved to see the buckskin horse and its rider coming up to the firelight.

The lieutenant slid off Cisco’s back and greeted the men around the fire in Comanche. They returned the salutation and waited to see if he was going to say anything significant about his disappearance.

Dunbar stood before them like an uninvited guest, twisting Cisco’s reins in his hands as he looked them over. Everyone could see his mind was working on something.

After a few seconds his gaze fell squarely on Kicking Bird, and the medicine man thought he had never seen the lieutenant looking so calm and assured.

Dunbar smiled then. It was a small smile, full of confidence.

In perfect Comanche he said, “I’m Dances With Wolves.”

Then he turned away from the fire and led Cisco down to the river for a long drink.