Winter Rain

37

Late in the Moon When All Things Ripen 1874

THIS GREAT CREVASSE in the austere tabletop prairie of the Llano Estacado was nothing less than one of the wonders of the Grandfather’s hand. Old men attempted to explain how the canyon had grown so deep, yet remained so fertile, lush with many varieties of trees and plant life, along with the rich grasses that fed their great pony herd.

“Grandfather dragged his fingernail along the face of the ground,” said the old ones. “He carved this place of safety out for The People. Here: away from the eyes of the Tonkawa, away from the guns of the pony soldiers.”

That morning Tall One lay wrapped in the furry warmth of his buffalo robe, listening to the silence in the camp. Above him the smoke hole of Bridge’s lodge showed that sunrise was not long in coming. Here he lay a thousand feet below the surface of the prairie, where already the sun would be warming the earth. But this far down the shadows hung deep, the cold persisted, and a young man’s thoughts turned on autumn.

It was a time he remembered in some visceral way, more than any clear and distinct memories. More some beads of recollections turning on sensations and smells, or the feel of the cool air against his skin as he pushed aside the buffalo robe and pulled on his shirt, breechclout, and leggings. When his moccasins were tied, Tall One glanced at Bridge, saw that the man’s eyes were open, smiling at his adopted son.

With a smile of his own for the aging warrior, Tall One turned and ducked from the lodge as silent as a sliver of night itself.

He drank deep of the morning coolness, sensing its tang deep in his lungs. It was there the memories resided. Not so much his lungs, but deep, deeper still within him where his blood coursed and his heart pounded in anticipation of this autumn morning.

What beauty this place held for those who came here season after season, he thought. Many times before the Kwahadi had traveled to this canyon—what the Comanche called the “Place of the Chinaberry Trees”—a sanctuary of safety from the soldiers, a place of shelter from the battering of winter blizzards. This season the Shahiyena of Stone Calf, the Kiowa of Lone Wolf and Mamanti and Poor Buffalo, had come to join them, off the reservation and away from the many soldier columns rumored to be out and moving this season before the coming of winter. Their camps lay upstream where their herds grazed. This village of the Kwahadi was the last of the five circles.

Above him the narrow walls rose abruptly toward the prairie beyond, where the rose-tinted gold of dawn’s light illuminated a narrow strip of deep azure sky strung raggedly with dispersing clouds, there between the reds and ochers, pinks and buff-creams that striated the canyon in brilliant layers. Here at the bottom lay the lush greens in many hues: stands of cedar and cottonwood, the mesquite and willow that all drank their fill from the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.

The prospect of a day filled with sun excited Tall One. There had been too many long, endless days of rain and mud, of numbing cold and chill winds as they lured the soldiers away, feinted, attacked, then lured the soldiers some more. The thought of having the sun caress his skin made the young man feel more alive than he had in a long time.

Overhead the world must surely be alive already. Down here the day still awaited its awakening. Only the most industrious would be up, he thought, his nostrils pricked with the pungent, earthy fragrance of cedar smoke. In among the deep green and the bright yellows of the changing cottonwood leaves, wisps of gray hung in tattered streamers. The smoke reminded him of breakfast, and that in turn caused his stomach to growl.

The rumble sent from deep within him reminded Tall One of cold autumn mornings like this one, rising in the darkness with the others, quickly pulling on his clothing as he had done, his nose filled with the smells of a mother’s labors over her stove and skillets. Sweet wood smoke and slices of sugar-cured ham. Hominy at the boil and the coffeepot steaming. He had learned to drink coffee early as a child. A good warmth to carry in one’s belly on those days the whole family tramped off to the fields before sunrise, together.

“Bring in the crops,” he said aloud. Startled that he had said it in English.

Autumn—a time he remembered working his young muscles alongside the others from those moments before dawn until every last sliver of light had been pushed from the evening sky, then eating his supper although he was half-asleep. Stumbling off to bed where his weary, joyous muscles sang in praise of a long night’s rest before they would get up and do it all over again. Day after long autumn day, until the crops were in and his father would once more turn the ground in anticipation of winter.

One final turn, the man had taught them. The better to soak up what moisture winter’s snows brought them.

He recalled how the ground would often-steam, the warm undersoil resurrected into the cool air of a chill autumn morning much like this one. Just the way the belly of a slain buffalo would steam into the frosty air of a winter morning as the men and women set about butchering their kill.

It was then that Tall One remembered with his own seeing the great, incomprehensible litter of rotting carcasses that stretched mile after endless mile across the rolling prairie now far above him. Those great piles of bones and skulls where gathered the carrion eaters always brought a great pain to him—this dying of something without its chance to regenerate. Up there on the buffalo ground, the grasshoppers and locusts and other winged ones had descended from the pale autumn skies to seize dominion over the tall, withered grasses. Fewer of the shaggy beasts now to graze upon that land.

Those white hide men. Come to take without returning something in the great cycle of life.

His first father had been a white man. Yet for a reason he could not name, Tall One sensed that the man in some unspoken way understood that mystical circle of life. If for no other reason than his father always turned the soil, Tall One believed that his first father did indeed understand that he must return something back to the soil for what he had taken from it. So it was the man had turned over the warm, fertile ground, and with it turned under the stalks and roots, the stems and leaves, all of it to nourish once more the dark loam as it lay under the white breast of winter, where it would once more await the call of spring’s awakening.

At the edge of the creek he knelt, bent forward, and leaned far out over the water by supporting himself on his elbows. There he drank of the cold water, then drew back and wiped his mouth. Staring down at his rippling reflection. Something about it—the eyes, maybe the nose. Tall One gathered his long hair in one hand and pulled it behind his neck. Staring, studying that reflection intently. Uncanny, how it made him think of his father.

No, his first father.

Sensing now the teasing recollection, the dim memory of so many people telling a boy how much he favored his pa.

Memories were dim, had for the most part remained very dim over the years—until he really studied his reflection in the smooth surface of that stream. Would now the man have hair touched with the iron of many winters? Or like his second father—Bridge—would his first father have only a touch of gray at the temples?

And how many wrinkles would he have? Would the seams carve themselves deeply into his face, like the faces of the old ones in this camp in the canyon?

What of his hands—those hands that had brought calves and piglets and foals into the world, those hands that had struck out as he corrected his children, hands that had also caressed his sons and daughter with his crude, unsteady love. Would those hands now be gnarled and deformed as he had seen the hands of the old warriors become? Or would they still be strong and sure, unshaken as he took the reins of a team and moved them toward the field in need of planting?

Hands that would remain forever young with the elixir of a young boy’s dream.

Try as he might, even staring down at this wavering reflection in the cold stream, Tall One could not make himself believe this was a true picture of his father. The man would surely be much, much older now. After all, Tall One was himself.

Suddenly a cautious part of him reminded Tall One that it likely did not matter. Something mocked him—saying the man who had been his first father no longer existed. He had not come home from that war he marched off to fight, leaving his family behind. And even if in the realm of slim possibilities that man did survive the war… in the end his first father had simply ceased to exist.

No more did that life on that farm mean anything to him. It was something too remote, too foreign, too long ago to matter anymore. And those dimly focused people from his memories, the people who had shared his long-ago days and nights, the fights and the loving, the laughter and the tears—they too had simply ceased to exist in this new world of the Antelope People. That is, every one of those memory people except his brother, Antelope.

Antelope had always been, and always would be, Tall One’s brother.

It was that single handhold gripping something lasting and eternal that allowed Tall One to feel secure.

Over the seasons of wandering from camp to camp, from stream to stream, hunting and raiding, sleeping and eating in an endless cycle of nomadic wanderings, the boy had eventually grown accustomed to this life of change. Still, coming to accept it was nowhere like feeling secure. The way he had sensed a rock-steady security of day after day, season after season on that farm his family carved out of a valley so far, far away now. Secure in knowing what was expected of him by those he loved. Secure in knowing what to expect out of the turning of the seasons shared with those who loved him.

As much as the boy in him had reveled in the life of these nomads, the young man in him came to yearn every bit as much for something solid and lasting. To count on the rains of spring and the sun in summer, the chill of autumn’s harvest and the season of rest given a farmer come winter’s short days. If only …

It could not be! His life had changed irrevocably. The silly chores of a white man scratching at the earth no longer made any real sense to him. He was a warrior now—

Angrily Tall One plunged his hand into the cold stream; all the way to the muddy bottom he stirred savagely, his fury bringing the once-placid surface to a froth. Doing so, he churned the reflection as quickly as he dispatched all those memories recalled over all those seasons.

He would not allow himself to miss the life he had lived back then. For he never would live it again—

Turning at the distant sound, Tall One felt the sense of being out of place. If not he, then some thing.

A sound sullying the stillness of this morning. Low, rumbling, rolling downstream between the high canyon walls. Perhaps a warrior’s gun. Hunting—

The next crack in the pristine morning raised the hair on his neck. Another gunshot. And a third.

Then as Tall One rose on the muddy bank of the stream, there came a flurry of gunfire from upstream where the Kiowa and Cheyenne had camped. The medicine of those old Kiowa shamans had guaranteed this would be a sanctuary for them all—safe from attack by the pony soldiers.

Behind him the Kwahadi camp came to life. Men sprang from their lodges, pulling on clothing. Women began to drag sleepy children from the lodges, everyone clutching something important beneath an arm as they scurried downstream like a covey of frightened quail, away from the shooting. Into the noise and confusion Tall One raced, dodging little ones and old ones with big, frightened eyes, hurling himself around lodges and favored war ponies. Bridge stood outside the lodge, buckling on a belt shiny with cartridges.

“Your weapons—inside!”

Tall One plunged past him, finding the interior in disarray. He was alone. The rest of the family already gone in those first moments of gunfire up-canyon. From the dewcloth liner the young man tore free his medicine bag, which he draped over his left shoulder, then pulled down the wolf-skin quiver that rattled, heavy with arrows, and his short cherry wood bow. He dived through the doorway as Bridge turned to him.

“Take this, Tall One!” he ordered, shoving an old pistol into the young warrior’s hand.

“It is loaded?”

“Yes,” the old warrior said.

“I … I never shot this before—”

“It does not matter. You will learn how to shoot it well before the sun rises to midsky,” he replied sternly, his eyes narrowing on the youth. “Fight well this day, Tall One. And remember: you are Kwahadi!”

Bridge whirled, setting off.

Tall One called out. “Four Spirits Woman? She and the children?”

Bridge turned, his face grim in determination. “I have sent them on downstream with the others. Into the rocks to hide.”

In the distance rose the brass-throated eruption of a soldier bugle echoing off the blood-red walls of this canyon.

Bridge stared for a moment as the sound echoed from the canyon walls. “They will be safe, Tall One. Be strong this day—we Kwahadi must not fall!”

He watched his second father wheel and disappear, melding into the confusion as people and ponies swept past him.

“Bridge, let me fight beside you!” he shouted. But it was too late. Already the man was gone too far, and the noise too great for Bridge to hear him.

The Comanche village was cleaving itself asunder: women and children, along with the old ones, all headed downstream while the warriors rushed upstream toward the sound of the gunfire becoming more general now. As the women wailed and keened their mourning and death songs, men raised their voices in anger, rage, fury—in the terrible mocking of death.

Where was Antelope?

He feared fighting alone, perhaps even dying alone. Not having his brother by his side when they finally clashed with the soldiers. Grudgingly he admitted that his brother might be more Comanche than he was. Might be more Kwahadi than Tall One ever would be.

It had always helped to have Antelope beside him as they rode with the others, caught up in the swirl of things before he had time to think, to feel, to fear. To doubt.

He dared not allow himself any doubt—

Crying out with his own war cry, Tall One dived into the rush and blur with the others as they hurried, most on foot, some on horseback, to the sound of the fight upstream. Sharp cracks of the Indian weapons punctuated the low booming of the soldier rifles in a two-note symphony reverberating down the twisting path of the Prairie Dog Town Fork. The simple act of crying out, letting his lungs roar against what residue of fear he might still hide in his heart, helped Tall One once more shed the last paralyzing hold that fear itself had on him. It had always been easier to hurl himself in with the others, let them sweep him along, let them do the leading so that he did not have to think. Only follow.

As he joined them, Tall One was struck with a singular thought: that none of the men, young warriors or old, had painted themselves or taken any time to put on their hair ornaments. He fretted, creating an ever-tightening knot in his belly that this absence of ritual, this forfeiture of the tribe’s spiritual power, would spell disaster for them this day. Yet he calmed himself, reminded that all they had to do was what they had done so many, many times before: just cover the retreat of their families with their own lives until it came time they too could escape downstream.

Just cover the retreat with their own lives.

“Tall One!”

Far ahead one of them stood against the rest, waving Tall One on as the others rushed by him. The warrior’s face flushed with excitement. Eyes lit with the flame of passion.

“Antelope!”

“Come, brother—we have tai-bos to kill! At long last—we have tai-bos to kill!”

When together they reached a bend in the canyon where their progress slowed, then ground to a halt, they found Lone Wolf’s Kiowa stalled among the rocks, taking cover behind the trees on the outer perimeter of their village, firing back at not-so-distant targets. Here and there a white face swam through the gun smoke and wispy trails of abandoned fires. Still, most of the faces of those making this attack were dark. Many times they had been told to expect that the first wave they might encounter in an attack on their village would be the Seminole and Tonkawa trackers. This day these were dressed in the same dark-blue shirts as the yellow-legs themselves, their hair tied up provocatively for battle. It was disturbing to see that many of those dark faces had been mockingly painted … while the Kwahadi had no time for their medicine toilet.

“Look!” Antelope shouted in his ear, nudging him sharply and pointing to their left.

Against the far side of the canyon wall snaked a dark column of more soldiers, leading their horses, winding their way down the thousand-foot descent from the prairie above. As fast as they could inch along the narrow footpath, the yellow-legs were coming to augment the Indian scouts who pressed the point of the attack.

Abruptly it seemed the Kiowa were up and moving, coming back toward the Kwahadi now. More noise crashed ahead of them in echoing reverberations as Lone Wolf’s warriors fell back first at a walk, then one by one broke into a run past the Comanche who had just arrived on the battle line.

Then he saw them clearly—the Tonkawa trackers and soldiers draped in blue, down here in the cool, dark shadows, their horses snorting wispy streamers of gauze into the autumn air, horses’ legs like throbbing pistons hammering the streambanks as they charged among the rocks and trees the Kiowa were abandoning helter-skelter.

“Come, Tall One!”

Antelope hollered at him a second time, tugging on his elbow. Around them the rest of the Kwahadi and Kiowa were backtracking now like bits of ghostly flotsam adrift on the mist and canyon shadow—stopping hurriedly to turn and fire from behind a boulder, next time stopping behind a wide cottonwood, wheeling off again to reload quickly on the run before they would wheel and fire another shot at the pursuing soldiers and their Indian trackers.

Tall One found the pistol in hand, his arm outstretched without thinking, yanking back the hammer with the other hand before he squeezed the trigger—pointing the muzzle at one of the Tonkawa riding down on him. The tracker’s horse skidded stiff-legged to a halt, twisting its head savagely to the side, heaving its rider off in a tumultuous shudder, pitching the tracker into the brush as it went down in a heap, legs flaying.

Its unearthly cry sent shivers up from the base of Tall One’s spine.

A bullet’s snarl cut the air beside his ear angrily. He felt it pass so close, it smelled of brimstone and death. Suddenly the cold air hissed through the icy furrow along his neck where the bullet had creased him. Some of his long hair stung the open wound, matted in the first beading ooze of that raw tissue.

As quickly as he saw the puff of smoke from the enemy’s weapon, Tall One whirled on his heel and sprinted off, his heart singing. He could not claim killing one of the enemy trackers—but there was little doubt he had spilled the rider and killed the Tonkawa’s horse.

To put an enemy afoot was a great coup!

But just as his heart began to soar with his brave feat, Tall One’s heart sank. Beneath his feet he felt the ground tremble. Around him the air reverberated with the thunder of hooves. Hundreds of hooves rising to a great, raucous crescendo as they charged ever on down the canyon, following the throaty call of those bugles.

While he had unhorsed one—there remained more than he and the rest could ever knock from their saddles.

Glancing over his shoulder as he ran, heedless of the brush he stumbled over, tripping only to pick himself back up and rush off again, Tall One sprinted along with the last of them, the warriors heading for the rocks against the side of the canyon where the women and children had gone to climb upward toward the prairie, toward the sun, to safety.

Where the thundering of those yellow-leg horses would not find them.

Where no man might know of Tall One’s doubts.