Winter Rain

32

Moon of the Long Cold 1874

WINTER STILL HELD the plains in its death grip.

While there hadn’t been any snow of late, the cold had kept the warriors near the village, and the ponies worked harder to find some graze worth the work. High scurrying clouds looking suspiciously like clots of ice crystals shined beneath a dull pewter dish of a sun. Only the deep canyons offered shelter from the brutal, incessant wind that ravaged the prairie above.

Down here they could find more grass for the herd. And more firewood to keep the lodges warm. Still, the children cried with empty bellies.

Antelope was a father already—his son born early last autumn. And now Prairie Night thought she carried her husband’s second child. Tall One knew the young ones always suffered the most.

Time and again he watched the gray-eyed war chief send scouting parties out into the cold, dispatched this way and that, to the south mostly, to look for sign of the great herds. What was left of the once-great herds, that is.

More and more the big shaggy animals hung to the south, away from the banks of the Arkansas River, even south of the Cimarron of late. The buffalo hunters with their big guns riding out of the white man’s settlements in Kan-saw had seen to that. Those hairy-faced hunters would now have to push farther and farther south still if they were to continue their slaughter of the humped masses. And by pushing across the Canadian, the hide men would march right into the heart of the Kwahadi hunting ground.

Tall One could not wait for the air to warm and the grass to raise its green head on the prairie, for the ponies to grow sleek and the dancing to begin once more. The calls would go out from one war chief or another—asking for young men to ride in search of the white men. Come shortgrass time, Tall One would ride with the war parties. And this season Antelope would be at his side.

The air blew racy with the fragrance of winter’s decay, last autumn’s leaves hurling along the ground ahead of the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon this high, barren land given its Spanish name, Llano Estacado. Spring and renewal come to resurrect the land. But for now Tall One thought only of the band’s last search for meat. How the hunters had to go farther, search longer. The Kwahadi were running dangerously low on meat they had dried to last them the winter, forced to venture out on the hunt much earlier this winter than they had in winters come and gone.

It was during one of those hunts last fall that Tall One had gone with the war chief, when he and the older warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they discovered far south of the “dead line,” that place where the tai-bos’ government treaty-talkers declared white buffalo men were not to cross.

The white man’s government and its guarantees seemed to matter little to the white men intent on plunging farther and farther south of the Arkansas River, come now to the last hunting ground promised the southern nations as their own.

“A waste of time, this talking treaty with the white man,” the war chief growled at Tall One that night at their small fire after they had killed the buffalo hunters. There were scalps to dance over, clothing and mirrors, and the guns—those big buffalo guns taken from the dead men.

Tall One asked, “Is it true the old men give away to the white treaty-talkers all that we young men have fought to hold on to?”

He touched the rangy youth with those gray eyes as he said, “Six winters ago, ever since the autumn when the old chiefs of the Kiowa, Cheyenne—and Comanche too—all signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek, the white hunters have been pushing into our buffalo country in greater and greater numbers.”

“These buffalo hunters with the big guns who you and the others speak of more often these days—you are afraid they will slaughter their way through the herds?”

“I fear these white men will soon cross the Canadian River—the river that is the northern boundary of our sacred buffalo ground. And when they do, I fear this coming fight will prove to be the last stand for our people.”

From all that Tall One had learned from Wolf Walking Alone he knew that killing soldiers carried nothing but a curse for the Kwahadi. If they had learned anything since the first white man set foot in this country, the Comanche had learned that the yellow-leg soldiers would strike back with a vengeance—sending even more of their number against the Kwahadi next time.

“No matter,” protested young Antelope. “Because we should strike and strike again. The yellow-legs never find our roaming warriors.” He had made his first, bloody kill that day. And at long last had his first white scalp.

Sadly Tall One could only reply, “My brother, don’t you understand that the white man’s Tonkawa trackers seek out our villages where stay the women and children, the old ones who cannot flee?”

Antelope laughed without mirth. “I am the one with a woman, brother! I am the one with children. Don’t talk to me about the villages where the women and little ones are trapped by the yellow-legs!”

Indeed, rarely were the young warriors punished by the tai-bo soldiers. It was the Kwahadi families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons when they fled quickly enough to escape the soldiers. Losing their lives, falling prey to the Tonkawa scouts and yellow-leg soldiers when they did not run faster than the white man’s bullets.

A person crippled by an empty belly, weakened because there was simply too little food for all to eat—he or she would stand little chance of outrunning the hissing bullets when the tai-bos came.

With a shudder Tall One ducked out of Old Owl Man’s lodge and stood feeling the sting of great cold. A terrible storm had rumbled down the very gut of the plains, rolling in on the hoary, marrow-numbing breath of Winter Man. In its wake on the prairie above, the storm left behind icy snowdrifts, and many children cried out with hungry bellies. Old ones as well wailed in want. As hungry as he might be, Tall One had vowed not to complain with the gnawing pain. The warriors must be brave, the men reminded themselves. It was up to them and them alone to find meat—and thereby exorcise the ghost of starvation from the Kwahadi.

Their last hunt had taken them far, far from this canyon where the village waited. After riding south for many days, the gray-eyed war chief and his hunters found themselves at the southernmost extent of the Llano Estacado. Without sign of buffalo or promise of other game.

“It is as if Winter Man has wiped all before him with his great cleansing, cold breath,” Tall One said quietly to his brother.

“Have the white men killed them all?” asked Antelope with a hiss of hatred in his question.

As those first cold days of searching stretched into many, the hunters had finally come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, then some more frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge—no longer strong enough to march on with the rest of the herd.

“These are what the Great Mystery offers us, to keep our families from starving,” their war chief explained. “These few left to rot by the passing of Winter Man’s storm.”

Antelope snarled, “We get these poor animals, while the white hide hunters leave the carcasses of the rest to rot in the sun!”

With nothing more to hope for, having reached the southern frontier of their hunting grounds, the Kwahadi warriors turned their noses north, limping back to their winter village.

“Where have the rest of the herds gone?” asked some.

“Farther and farther south still,” answered the few.

“To the land of the summer winds?” worried a growing number.

If the buffalo had indeed fled as far to the south as the tribe was beginning to fear, the herds would likely not return until the shortgrass time came to the prairies—not until that shift in the great season of things, when the winds blew soft and the Great Mystery once again compelled the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their annual migrations.

The terrible, cold breath of Winter Man whipped hot tears at his eyes as he remembered, and heard the low keening, the cries from the lodges huddled in this canyon, sheltered from the strongest of the winds.

In the waning days of winter the rains came to soften the hard breast of the land. Spring arrived, with little letup in the rain. It was a time of cold, gray, never-ending days. The ground sucked at a pony’s hooves. Yanked at a man’s moccasins. And still the little ones, the sick and dying, whimpered in their lodges.

The buffalo had yet to return. And the old men prayed over their drums and rattles and notched sticks.

And when despair seemed the darkest, news of a new shaman arrived from another band, a shaman who was said to perform wonderful miracles. He had promised to make war on the white man: those the Comanche did not kill would turn and flee from this land, their hearts gone to water, soiling their pants as they ran.

Tall One prayed this new medicine man would prove the answer to so many doubts.

His name was Isatai.

“The ass of a wolf?” Antelope asked, barely able to keep from laughing out loud. He had to keep a hand over his mouth.

“Some say his name means coyote droppings,” Tall One explained.

Born of a different band of Comanche, nearly the same age as their own gray-eyed war chief, this young shaman was already a rising star among his Penateka people. When two of his major predictions came to pass, news of Isatai spread like prairie fire across the southern plains. A year ago when a fiery comet had burned its first path across the springtime night sky for three days, the medicine man predicted the star would perform five more times, then return no more.

It amazed the Kwahadi to find no comet in the heavens on that sixth night. The fireball in the sky had obeyed Isatai.

Not long afterward the shaman predicted the beginning of a great drought that would parch the southern prairie and especially the Staked Plain.

True to his prediction, the creeks dried up last summer. Normally in abundance, the game wandered far away, gone in search of water. Suspended overhead, the sun seemed like a dull brass button as each new day of torture seeped into the next with no relief from the blistering heat. Isatai told his people to persevere, that winter would bring rain—but that respite would not last: they would suffer another time of great dryness.

The rains had come as predicted. The Comanche bands praised the power of Isatai. And all but the most hardened cynics believed when they were told that the shaman had vomited up a wagonload of cartridges right before the eyes of his most faithful believers.

“Our prayers are answered!” cheered Antelope. “A man to lead us in wiping out the white man.”

“I too want to see the bullets—then I will believe,” Tall One said. “Without question, then I will believe in Isatai.”

But the messengers exclaimed that Isatai had swallowed the bullets again.

“So there is nothing left for us to use killing the yellow-leg soldiers?” demanded Antelope.

Sheepishly the messengers replied, “The whole wagonload is gone.”

Tall One shivered again as the wind knifed through the canyon, its striated red walls rising eight hundred feet above the creekbed where his people camped. Very soon, when winter at last released its tight hold on these prairies, the gray-eyed chief would send pipe bearers among all the bands of Comanche still roaming the Llano Estacado. Others would carry his message on to the Cheyenne and Kiowa reservations. If the chiefs took up the gray-eyed chief’s pipe and smoked it, they vowed to join the Kwahadi in war.

If, however, the chiefs decided not to touch that offer of the pipe, then they would be told to step out of the way. War was coming with the spring winds.

The mere thought of it made Tall One’s blood run hot. Like Antelope, he too hungered for this chance to prove himself against the tai-bos. To prove once and for all that he was no longer white. That he had become a Comanche.

War.

“Ricos and whiskey. Ricos and guns,” grumbled June Callicott, one of the Rangers with Company C, as they loosened cinches and pulled saddles, blankets too, from their weary horses the evening of that late spring day. He constantly chewed his cud like a glassy-eyed cow, his teeth the size and color of pin-oak acorns beneath an unkempt mustache that bent like a small black horseshoe over his mouth.

“Ricos and their blood money,” piped up Deacon Elijah Johns. “Scum-bellied fornicators. Satan’s blasphemers we need to put in the ground.”

“You said you spent time among the comancheros?” asked Captain Lamar Lockhart, stepping over to the brush where Jonah Hook dropped his saddle and blanket.

“For a long time I had reason to believe my boys was sold off to traders headed for Mexico.”

Most of the company had quietly turned to listen in. With his Indian partner, the new man had ridden with the Rangers for the better part of two months now—a long time without opening up and pouring out all that much of himself.

Lockhart nodded. “Cattle and horses, Mr. Hook. The ricos will buy furniture and clothing and mirrors and even family Bibles—”

“Satan’s handiwork, they are!” Johns snapped. “Good and kind Jesus—help these sinners see the error of their ways!”

The company captain pulled off his hat, the print of his hatband lying across his forehead like a wide scar as he pressed ahead. “Those traders will take anything the Comanches bring them what they got off the settlers they murdered. Anything worth stealing, that is. Only what the ricos’ comancheros will pay for in whiskey and in guns.”

“A bad combination, that one,” June Callicott added, his face as hard as a war shield, his cheeks flaring red as if he sweated chinaberry juice. “Whiskey and guns.”

For as long as there had been this ground called Texas, there had been Comanches and whiskey and guns. A deadly mix for those who wanted nothing more than to bring the fruitful hand of civilized man to these plains. Come here with a wagon and a milk cow and a family, come here to raise crops and cattle and a passel of children.

As far back as the Texas Revolution there had been Rangers—first organized in 1835 as local committees of safety and correspondence, right in the midst of their war with Mexico. Silas M. Parker was empowered to engage the services of three companies of Rangers whose business would be to range and guard the frontiers between the Brazos and Trinity rivers. From then on, in one incarnation or another, the Ranger existed on that high, wild prairie where he was first given birth to meet the outlaws of three races: American desperado, Mexican bandit, and Indian warrior. Down through the years the function these few men served might have changed in detail, but never did the Ranger cease standing as a bulwark between the lawless, savage elements and the coming of civilization.

No matter what other description might be given of him, the Ranger was a fighting man.

It took a lot of doing in the years after the revolution, but the few eventually subdued many of the tribes—formerly warlike—such as the Tonkawa and Caddo. The Rangers began pushing back their wilder cousins like the Kiowa and Comanche just before Texas went from being a republic to joining the Union itself, when Texans disbanded their Rangers, believing that it was now the duty of the federal government to protect them.

After more than a half-dozen years of waiting for the troops to come make a stand against the renewed raids of the wild tribes, Texans figured they had endured enough. In the late fifties the Rangers flourished once more. Again they issued the call, and young men rode in to answer the clarion. Again they sent out the companies to construct their modest outposts strung like distant beads on a strand of spiderweb, all the way from the Brazos on the north clear down to the Rio Grande flowing against the border of Mexico itself. Small bands of a dozen or more were scattered to live among the far-flung pioneer families tenaciously dug in like hermit bugs out there in that brutal, beautiful country. The Rangers were ready to ride out at a moment’s notice—to track down and punish any and all who cast a shadow of lawlessness and savagery across the whole of west Texas.

Years later when the South ripped itself away from the Union, the call went out for men to join the likes of John Bell Hood. Fighting men answered that resounding trumpet, leaving gaping holes in the fabric of Texas’s frontier defense. Quickly sensing the change, the wild tribes brought out their drums once more and danced over the scalps. Again the red tide savagely pushed against the scattered white settlers, reversing all the good the Rangers had accomplished.

When the men of Texas returned home after Appomattox, they found they had been defeated on two fronts. Not only had the Yankees whipped them in those four bloody years of war back east, but while they were gone, off to save the Confederacy, the savage horsemen of the southern plains had risen up to reclaim their buffalo ground. While some of the sons of the South continued to cry out that they would never surrender, a few even fleeing across the Rio Grande to continue their war, most accepted their defeat and rode home to put family and life back together once more.

And wound up staring right into the blood-flecked eye of another war.

How could a man think of plowing and planting when there were warriors roaming about, ready to undo everything a man might accomplish?

The Rangers offered a private $1.25 per day for pay, rations, clothing, and the services of his own mount. To sign on, each of them had to be ready with a trail-worthy horse, saddle, bridle, and blanket, along with a hundred rounds of powder and ball. Officers—the captain and his lieutenants, in addition to the sergeant of each company—were paid a pittance more. For most the pay did not really matter.

No more were these men mere green recruits. While most were young, very few weren’t proficient with a gun—most had been proven in battle.

To Hook it seemed that most of the men who rode with Company C were hard-wintered and humped in the loin. Seemed too that they could stare eyeball to eyeball with death itself, ride for days in the saddle and gallop straight-up into daunting odds.

So it was that Jonah found comfort in this irregular company of men. Nothing like Sterling Price’s Missouri Confederates. Further still from the galvanized U.S. Volunteers he had joined to fight Indians in Dakota Territory after the Great War. Probably as far from the Army of the West as any civilians could be, the Rangers still weren’t anything like militia. No matter, their captain stood them to a grueling inspection each morning. While Company C did not dress in uniform, their captain nonetheless did expect the men to wear clothing that was clean and functional, demanding that the men keep their horses fit and their weapons in fighting trim.

“We may not be military,” Lamar Lockhart had reminded them before they rode out from Jacksboro. “We may be nothing more than irregulars—but we have no need of looking like bobtails, do we?”

Irregulars indeed: a Ranger furnished all his own needs and arms. Never did these men ride beneath any flag, nor with a surgeon along. And all matters of rank came about through a man’s ability to lead and inspire his own company of staunch individualists—not through some political appointment or timely graduation from the U.S. Military Academy.

It did not take long for Jonah to come to admire the saddle-hardened men in this crude bunch he rode with, marching northwest from Fort Richardson toward the Staked Plain of the Penateka and Kwahadi Comanche.

No—not for pay, nor for glory did this company of Rangers ride into the breach.

For most of these it might be but the memory of a loved one killed, scalped, and savagely mutilated that spurred them to join. Mothers and fathers, perhaps a sister or brother. Blood kin captured and enslaved, outraged or butchered.

This was something that Jonah Hook understood right down to the very core of him.

These were men who rode into Comanche country with a score to settle.