Dances With Wolves

CHAPTER XXVIII

Two days after the wedding, a high council was held. The recent heavy rains, coming late in the season, had renewed the withering grass, and it was decided to delay the winter move in favor of the pony herd. By staying a little longer, the horses would be able to put on a few extra pounds, which might prove crucial in getting through the winter. The band would dally another two weeks in their summer camp.

No one was more pleased with this development than Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist. They were floating carelessly through the first days of their marriage and didn’t want that special rhythm interrupted. Leaving the bed was hard enough. Packing up and marching hundreds of miles in a long, noisy column was, at the moment, unthinkable.

They had decided to try to make her pregnant, and people passing by rarely saw the lodge flap open.

When Dances With Wolves did emerge, he was relentlessly ribbed by his peers. Wind In His Hair was particularly merciless in this teasing. If Dances With Wolves dropped by for a smoke, he would invariably be greeted with some salutation inquiring about the health of his manhood or with mock shock at seeing him out of bed. Wind In His Hair even tried to saddle him with the nickname One Bee, an allusion to his never-ending pollination of a single flower, but fortunately for the new husband, the name didn’t stick.

Dances With Wolves let the kidding slide off his back. Having the woman he wanted made him feel invincible, and nothing could harm him.

What there was of life outside the lodge was deeply satisfying. He went hunting every day, almost always with Wind In His Hair and Stone Calf. The three had become great pals, and it was rare to see one going out without the others.

The talks with Kicking Bird continued. They were fluent now and the subjects unlimited. Dances With Wolves’s appetite for learning far exceeded that of Kicking Bird’s, and the medicine man discoursed widely on everything from tribal history to herbal healing. He was greatly encouraged by the keen interest his pupil showed for spiritualism, and indulged that appetite gladly.

The Comanche religion was simple, based as it was on the natural environment of the animals and elements that surrounded them. The practice of the religion was complex, however. It was rife with ritual and taboo, and covering this subject alone kept the men busy.

His new life was richer than ever, and it showed in the way Dances With Wolves carried himself. Without dramatics he was losing his naïveté but not surrendering his charm. He was becoming more manly without abandoning his spark, and he was settling smoothly into his role as a cog without losing the stamp of his distinct personality.

Kicking Bird, always attuned to the soul of things, was immensely proud of his protege, and one evening, at the end of an after-dinner stroll, he placed a hand on Dances With Wolves’s shoulder and said:

“There are many trails in this life, but the one that matters most, few men are able to walk . . . even Comanche men. It is the trail of a true human being. I think you are on this trail. It is a good thing for me to see. It is good for my heart.”

Dances With Wolves memorized these words as they were said and treasured them always. But he told no one, not even Stands With A Fist. He made them part of his private medicine.

They were only a few days away from the big move when Kicking Bird came by one morning and said he was going to take a ride to a special place. The round trip would take all day and perhaps part of the night, but if Dances With Wolves wanted to go, he would be welcome.

They cut through the heart of the prairie, riding in a southeasterly direction for several hours. The enormity of the space they’d invaded was humbling, and neither man did much talking.

Close to midday, they turned due south, and in an hour’s time, the ponies were standing at the top of a long slope which fell away for a mile until it reached the river.

They could see the color and shape of the water far to the east and west. But in front of them, the river had disappeared.

It was screened by a mammoth forest.

Dances With Wolves blinked several times, as if trying to solve a mirage. From this distance, it was hard to judge exact heights, but he knew that the trees were high. Some of them must be sixty or seventy feet.

The grove extended downriver for the better part of a mile, the hugeness of it contrasting wildly with the flat, empty country on all sides. It was like the fanciful creation of some mysterious spirit.

“Is this place real?” he said, half joking.

Kicking Bird smiled.

“Perhaps not. It is a sacred place to us . . . even to some of our enemies. It is said that from here the game renews itself. The trees shelter every animal the Great Spirit has made. It is said they hatched here when life began and constantly return to the place of their birth. I have not been here for a long time. We will water the horses and have a look.”

As they came closer, the specter of the woods became more powerful, and on starting into the forest, Dances With Wolves felt small. He thought of the Garden of Eden.

But as the trees closed around them, both men sensed that something was wrong.

There was no sound.

“It’s quiet,” Dances With Wolves observed.

Kicking Bird didn’t reply. He was listening and watching with the single-mindedness of a cat.

The silence was suffocating as they pressed deeper into the woods, and Dances With Wolves realized with a shiver that only one thing could make this vacuum of sound. He was smelling its aroma. The taste of it was on the tip of his tongue.

Death was in the air.

Kicking Bird pulled up suddenly. The path had widened, and as Dances With Wolves looked over his mentor’s shoulder, he was staggered by the beauty of what he saw.

There was open ground ahead of them. The trees were spaced at intervals, allowing enough room between to house all the lodges and people and horses of Ten Bears’s camp. Sunlight poured onto the forest’s floor in great, warming splotches.

He could envision a fantastic utopia, peopled with a holy race leading tranquil lives in concert with all living things.

The hand of man could make nothing to rival the scope and beauty of this open-air cathedral.

The hand of man, however, could destroy it. The proof was already here.

The place had been horribly desecrated.

Trees of all sizes lay where they had been felled, some of them lying one over the other, like toothpicks scattered upon a tabletop. Most of them had not been shorn of their branches, and he could not imagine for what purpose they had been cut.

They started their ponies forward, and as they did, Dances With Wolves was aware of an eerie buzzing sound.

At first, thinking that bees or wasps were swarming, he scanned the branches overhead, trying to locate the insects’ nest.

But as they moved toward the center of the cathedral, he realized the noise was not coming from above. It was coming from below. And it was being made by the wing beats of uncounted thousands of feasting flies.

Everywhere he looked the ground held bodies, or pieces of bodies. There were small animals, badgers and skunks and squirrels. Most of these were intact. Some were missing their tails. They lay rotting where they had been shot, for no apparent reason other than target practice.

The primary objects of the genocide were deer that sprawled all around him. A few of the bodies were whole, minus only the prime cuts. Most were mutilated.

Dull, dead eyes stared up at him from the exquisite heads that had been chopped off raggedly at the neck. Some of them sat singly on the floor of the forest. Others had been tossed together haphazardly in piles as big as half a dozen.

In one spot, the severed heads had been arranged nose to nose, as if they were having a conversation. It was supposed to be humorous.

The legs were even more grotesque. They, too, had been chopped clear of the bodies they once transported. Slow to decay, they looked bright and beautiful, as if they were still in good working order.

But it was sad: the delicate, cloven hooves and the graceful, fur-coated legs . . . leading to nowhere. The limbs were stacked in little bunches, like firewood, and if he had bothered, the count would have exceeded one hundred.

The men were tired from the long ride, but neither made any move to get off his horse. They continued to ride.

A low spot in the great clearing revealed four decrepit shanties sitting side by side, four ugly sores festering on the forest floor.

The men who had cut down so many trees had apparently seen their ambition as builders run out. But even if they had applied themselves, the result would likely have been the same. The dwellings they’d managed to put up were squalid even in their conception.

By any standard, it was not a fit place to live.

Whiskey bottles, dropped as they were drained, lay in profusion around the awful huts. There was a multitude of other useless items, a broken cup, a half-repaired belt, the shattered stock of a rifle, all left where they were dropped.

A brace of wild turkeys, tied together at the feet but otherwise untouched, were discovered on the ground between two huts.

Behind the buildings, they found a wide pit, filled to overflowing with the putrid torsos of slaughtered deer, skinless, legless, and headless.

The buzzing of flies was so loud that Dances With Wolves had to shout to be heard.

“We wait for these men?”

Kicking Bird didn’t want to shout. He sidled his pony next to Dances With Wolves.

“They have been gone a week, maybe more. We will water the horses and go home.”

For the first hour of the return trip, neither man uttered a word. Kicking Bird stared ahead sorrowfully while Dances With Wolves watched the ground, shamed for the white race to which he belonged and thinking hard about the dream he’d had in the ancient canyon.

He’d told no one about it, but now he felt he had to. Now it didn’t seem so much a dream after all. It might be a vision.

When they stopped to give the horses a blow, he told Kicking Bird of the dream that was still fresh in his mind, sparing none of the details.

The medicine man listened to Dances With Wolves’s long recounting without interruption. When it was finished he stared somberly at his feet.

“All of us were dead?”

“Everyone that was present,” Dances With Wolves said, “but I didn’t see everyone. I didn’t see you.”

“Ten Bears should hear the dream,” Kicking Bird said.

They jumped back on the horses and made quick time across the prairie, arriving back in camp shortly after sunset.

The two men made their report on the desecration of the sacred grove, a deed that could only have been the work of a large, white hunting party. The dead animals in the forest were undoubtedly a sideline. The hunters were probably after buffalo and would be decimating them on a much bigger scale.

Ten Bears nodded a few times as the report was made. But he asked no questions.

Then Dances With Wolves recited his grisly dream a second time.

The old man still said nothing, his expression inscrutable as ever. When Dances With Wolves had finished, he made no comment. Instead, he picked up his pipe and said, “Let us have a smoke on this.”

Dances With Wolves had the notion that Ten Bears was thinking all of it through, but as they passed the pipe around, he became impatient, anxious to get something off his chest.

At last he said, “I would speak some more.”

The old man nodded.

“When Kicking Bird and I first began to talk,” Dances With Wolves started, “a question was asked of me for which I had no answer. Kicking Bird would ask, ‘How many white people are coming?’ and I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ That is true. I do not know how many will come. But I can tell you this. I believe there will be a lot.

“The white people are many, more than any of us could ever count. If they want to make war on you, they will do it with thousands of hair-mouth soldiers. The soldiers will have big war guns that can shoot into a camp like ours and destroy everything in it.

“It makes me afraid. I’m even afraid of my dream, because I know it could come true. I cannot say what must be done. But I come from the white race and I know them. I know them now in ways I did not know them before. I’m afraid for all the Comanches.”

Ten Bears had been nodding through the speech, but Dances With Wolves couldn’t tell how the old man was taking it.

The headman tottered to his feet and took a few steps across the lodge, stopping next to his bed. He reached into the rigging above it, pulled down a melon-sized bundle, and retraced his steps to the fire.

He sat down with a grunt.

“I think you are right,” he said to Dances With Wolves. “It is hard to know what to do. I’m an old man of many winters, and even I’m unsure of what to do when it comes to the question of the white people and their hair-mouth soldiers. But let me show you something.”

His gnarled fingers tugged at the bundle’s rawhide drawstring, and in a moment it was undone. He pushed down the sides of the sack, gradually revealing a hunk of rusted metal about the size of a man’s head.

Kicking Bird had never seen the object before and had no idea what it could be.

Dances With Wolves hadn’t seen it either. But he knew what it was. He had seen a drawing of something similar in a text on military history. It was the helmet of a Spanish conquistador.

“These people were the first to come into our country. They came on horses . . . we didn’t have horses then . . . and shot at us with big thunder guns that we had never seen. They were looking for shiny metal and we were afraid of them. This was in the time of my grandfather’s grandfather.

“Eventually, we drove these people out.”

The old man sucked long and hard on his pipe, taking several puffs.

“Then the Mexicans began to come. We had to make war on them and we have been successful. They fear us greatly and do not come here.

“In my own time, white people began to come. The Texans. They have been like all the other people who find something to want in our country. They take it without asking. They get angry when they see us sitting in our own country, and when we do not do as they want, they try to kill us. They kill women and children as if they were warriors.

“When I was a young man, I fought the Texans. We killed many of them and stole some of their women and children. One of these children is Dances With Wolves’s wife.

“After a time, there was talk of peace. We met the Texans and made agreements with them. These agreements always get broken. As soon as the white people wanted something new from us, the words on the paper were no more. It has always been like that.

“I got tired of this and many years ago, I brought the people of our band out here, far away from the whites. We have lived in peace here for a long time.

“But this is the last of our country. We have no place else to go. When I think of white people coming into our country now, it is as I said. It is hard to know what to do.

“I have always been a peaceful man, happy to be in my own country and wanting nothing from the white people. Nothing at all. But I think you are right. I think they will keep on coming.

“When I think of that, I look at this bundle, knowing what’s inside, and I’m certain we will fight to keep our country and all that it contains. Our country is all that we have. It is all that we want.

“We will fight to keep it.

“But I do not think we will have to fight this winter, and after all that you have told me, I think the time to go is now.

“Tomorrow morning, we will strike the village and go to the winter camp.”