The Holy Road

Chapter IV

Their lodge could usually be found at a modest distance from the main village, apart but not separate. The people inside conducted their lives as full Comanches and were accepted as such. They wept at funerals, swallowed at weddings, shared the same danger, the same laughter, and the same timeless pattern of everyday life as if they were descended of generations of wild, free people.

An unknowing eye could not have seen the difference between the family in the set-apart lodge from any others. But the difference ran deep. The family of Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist and their young children, Snake In Hands, Always Walking, and Stays Quiet, were Comanche in every aspect but their blood. Their blood was as distinct from that which flowed through Comanche veins as the color of earth is from sky. They were seeds blown from another world which had worked into Indian soil and germinated, drawing sustenance season after season until they had achieved a strength and harmony that made them as natural to the landscape as the blades of grass that covered the plains. Yet they were eternally different, and perhaps they lived a little apart in subtle acknowledgment of the gap that could never be bridged.

It could also be said that the extra steps it took to reach the lodge of Dances With Wolves were the only traces of that gap. The two white people, and then their children, were fully accepted, and after so many years no one thought of them as white.

If anything, the uniqueness of the family was a point of pride, a pride that had not diminished over ten winters. Dances With Wolves had long ago taken the warrior's road, dedicating himself to the principles and skills demanded of Comanche manhood. There had been about him none of the self-centeredness that curses youth, and the idea of service beyond self was one he embraced smoothly and steadfastly. He was a great killer of buffalo and the meat he made always found the fires of the poor and aged and infirm before it reached his own.

People raised eyebrows at the breadth of freedom he gave his wife, but none could deny that the match was made to last and that the couple's good citizenship was unassailable. If Dances With Wolves occasionally carried water, or helped in the striking of the lodge, or stayed with his children while his wife visited her friends, that was their business, not anyone else's.

If the little girl, Always Walking, wanted to follow her father around the camp instead of staying home with her mother, that was all right. And if the oldest one, the boy Snake In Hands, wanted to help his mother tan a hide, that was all right too. Even if Dances With Wolves carried the infant girl, Stays Quiet, around in a sling, no one condemned it. Of course they might tease him, as they often did with little jibes like “You're a good mother to that child,” but there was no malice in it. People expected the Dances With Wolves family to be different and found no fault with their eccentricities. They would always be a little odd in their customs and there was nothing wrong with that.

In truth, people would have overlooked far greater eccentricities in Dances With Wolves and his family for a reason that overrode every other. As a warrior Dances With Wolves was unexcelled, having demonstrated on many occasions a strength and dependability that put him on a level with Wind In His Hair.

It was seen as fitting by all that three summers ago, under sponsorship of the great Wind In His Hair himself, Dances With Wolves had been inducted into the elite circle of Hard Shields.

The new inductee's mettle was proven that season in a dawn attack by a large party of Utes who hit the village hoping for plunder and scalps. While the village took flight, Dances With Wolves, Wind In His Hair, and five other Hard Shields stood their ground, outnumbered two or three to one. To be a Hard Shield meant to fight to the last breath, and that morning the seven Comanches fought the enemy with extraordinary tenacity, repelling wave after wave of Ute charges, even after each of the defenders had been wounded. Not one of them withdrew, and once the main body of the village had safely removed itself from the fighting, many warriors came back to turn the tide, driving the Utes off.

When the battle was over, six Ute warriors lay dead on the ground. One Comanche, a genial, heavy-set Hard Shield named Woman's Heart, lay among the dead, his brains half out of his head. The rest of the village and its people were unscathed.

From that day on, people regarded Dances With Wolves as one of their most powerful protectors, and he lived up to the perception. He was always among the first to get a weapon in his hands and among the last to put it down. His loyalty to the band was unquestioned, and when the red-haired scalp arrived in camp, no one questioned his feelings because Dances With Wolves had been part of the raid in which it was taken. In fact, he was with Wind In His Hair when the woman had picked up the two-shooting rifle and fired it. He had seen Wind In His Hair leap through the smoke of the blast and club the woman to the floor. He had seen him bend over her body and slice the hair away from her head with a knife. Dances With Wolves returned as a warrior who was already part of the scalp's history.

He had suffered the same privations as his friends on the deep drive into Mexico, where they had been chased relentlessly by huge numbers of Mexican soldiers. He had crossed the great muddy river at full flood and nearly been swept away. He had stumbled toward home with nothing in his belly, and he had seen his strong-hearted pony lie down on the trail and die. He had crept with his brothers to the isolated white man's house on the edge of Comanche country in hope of finding something, anything, to eat. He had been fired on and he had returned the fire. He had helped storm the house and he had helped kill all those inside. He had ridden off on a stolen horse and he had seen by morning that they were being pursued. He had, like the others, made a desperate run for his life, scrambling up the great caprock cliffs and onto the staked plains. And then, like his fellow warriors, he had walked those parched plains for almost a week before finally trudging into the village, deep in the night of a waning moon.

For Dances With Wolves, the scalp in Wind In His Hair's lodge was but one memory counted among many from the long, disastrous raid into Mexico. He sat under it often, as he visited Wind In His Hair frequently. Everyone knew that the two were as brothers.

Like all Comanches, Dances With Wolves was uneasy about the shrinking space between Indian and white, more so perhaps because he had more to lose. But, in itself, the scalp meant nothing to him. The person it terrified was his wife.