He was quite dead. One side of his head was bloody, crushed by my blow. I turned away, and looked out over the prairie.
“You want his hair?” Davy asked. “He’s yours.” “No,” I said. “It’s a barbaric custom.” “This here is a barbaric land. You get yourself a few scalps and the Injuns will respect you more.” “Take it if you wish.” “No. By rights it’s yours.” Kemble carefully broke the dead warrior’s arrows, then his bow. His knife he tossed to me and that I kept. “Trade it for something,” Kemble said. “It’s worth a good beaver pelt.” “I thought I shot one,” I said. “He came in right over there.” “They’re like prairie dogs,” Talley commented. “If you don’t kill them right dead, they’re gone into some hole.” We walked over to where I’d seen the Indian, and suddenly Talley pointed. “Hit him, all right. See yonder?” There was a spot of blood, very red, splashed upon a leaf. Just beyond we found two more.
We followed no farther for the trail of blood vanished into thick brush, and he might be lying down there, waiting for us.
“Lung shot, I’d say,” Kemble said. “You nailed him proper.” He looked at me. “For a pilgrim, you sure take hold. That’s as good shootin’ as a man can do.” “I didn’t want to kill him,” I said.
Then I paused. That was not quite true, because I certainly had not wanted him to kill me, and it was one or the other.
“If you’d not shot him, he’d have thought you a coward or a poor warrior. He’d despise you for it. You better think this through because there ain’t no two ways about it. You got to be ready to shoot to kill or you better go back home.” He was right, of course, and had not men always fought? We walked back to the fire where coffee was on. Bob Sandy came in. He had gone stalking and found nothing.
“They pulled out,” he said regretfully.
“They’re no fools. The Otoe probably figured with a tenderfoot on watch it would be easy.” He grinned at me. “You fooled ’em, you surely did.” “I was fortunate,” I said, “and scared.” “You bet you was,” Sandy said, “an’ you better stay scared. Time comes you stop bein’ scared, you better go back east, because you won’t last long after.” We sat around the fire and ate, and looking around at their faces, I thought of Homer and the Greeks camped on the shore waiting to advance on Troy.
These were men of the same kind, men of action, fighting men, no better and no worse than those.
CHAPTER 4
Nothing anyone can say can tell you how it was upon that land of grass. Horizon to horizon, upon every side, it stretched to infinity, and overhead the enormous vault of the sky.
We plodded westward, and the land unrolled before us. More and more, as we moved away from the settlements, there was wild game, the buffalo in increasing numbers, and antelope often in herds of sixty or seventy.
At streams where we stopped for water, we often found the tracks of bear, occasionally of lion.
Wolves and the small prairie wolf called the coyote lurked in the vicinity of the buffalo, watching for a chance to pick off a calf or one too old to put up much of a fight.
We rode warily, for there was no security even upon the open plains, because such openness was only seeming and not a reality. My boyhood became important, for then my eye had developed a quickness that became useful once more, and I was swift to perceive any unexpected and unnatural motion. My attention soon became adjusted to wind movements in the grass so that I would quickly note any other. Yet I looked for other things as well, for the scholar in me would not yield.
For some time, being a student of history, I had been excited by the influence of climate upon history, and especially upon the movements of peoples. The sudden appearance of the Huns or the Goths in Europe, for example, and the earlier migrations of Celtic peoples… what occasioned these moves? Was it the pressure of other tribes, increasing in numbers? Or was it drought?
Or the ever-present movement toward the sun?
Several times we saw the tracks of unshod ponies, and from their direction and purposeful movement, it was easy to see they were not wild ponies, but ridden by Indians. During this time, I began to see that in the Ferguson rifle I possessed a kind of insurance the others did not have.
Also I was having second thoughts about my clothing. I must have something more fitting for travel, but instead of discarding the clothes I wore, I must keep them for use on ceremonial occasions. The American Indian, I recalled, was ever a man of dignity, with a love of formality, and it behooved me to approach him in a like manner.
The Otoe was gone, departed with his friends whom he had invited to the raid. I was still astonished at the suddenness of it, and the equally abrupt end. I had expected more.
Since the beginning of time, men have been moving into empty spaces, and we in America were no different than those others, the Goths, the Mongols, the Indo-Aryans. We were but the last of the great migrations, and I wondered as I rode … how much choice did we really have? Plants move rapidly into areas for which they are best adapted, and human migrations seem to follow the same principles.
For three days we rode westward, and we left behind the long grasses. Not yet had we reached the shortgrass country that lay still farther west. The tall bluestem we had seen on previous days now disappeared except in the bottoms along the creeks. Judging by the grass, the climate was hotter, and much drier … wheatgrass, little bluestem and occasionally patches of buffalo grass and blue grama.
This land must have seen few Indians until the arrival of the horse, for the distances were great and water was increasingly scarce.
We rode to the Platte for water. The riverbed was wide and sandy, the river itself was shallow, and the water somewhat brackish. We drank, then rode back from the river and camped in a small cluster of trees on rising ground with a good field of fire in all directions.
While the others made camp and Sandy went with Heath to graze the horses, I cut out my hunting jacket and a pair of leggings. The buckskin was not properly prepared, nearly impossible to do while on the march. At home there had been a smooth log over which to throw the skin when scraping away the fat and membrane. On the trail I had to make do as best I could with what offered. Nor could I soak the hide in water and wood ashes for three days or so. I did put the hide to soak each time we made camp, and then scraped the hair loose as best I could. We had kept the brains of the antelope and these had been dried. Now I stewed them with some fat and rubbed the mixture into the hide. When that was completed, I stretched the hide and then rolled it carefully to keep for a couple of days longer before I finished it with scraping and smoking.
This was done by Indian women in the villages, but I must do it myself or go without, and I wished to save what clothing I had for those special occasions. The life of the Indian, whether man or woman, was never easy. To subsist in wild country called for much work, and for the squaws at least it was an unceasing task.
Degory Kemble rode into camp just as the sun had set, bringing with him the best cuts of meat from a buffalo calf.
When he was squatted by the fire, gnawing on a bone, he glanced up. “I saw something yonder,” he said, “that shapes up for trouble.” We waited, looking at him. He chewed for a moment, then said, “Moccasin tracks… boots among ’em. Maybe three white men, Spanish men, I’d say.” “What’s that to us?” Heath asked.
“They don’t look kindly on folks coming into theirthe neighborhood,” Talley explained.
“Bonaparte sort of took Louisiana from the Spanish, then sold it to us. The Spanish have a settlement or two down yonder and they throw anybody into prison who comes into theirthe country.” He swept a hand in a wide arc.
“They claim most of this here, an’ nobody ever did decide rightly where the boundary was. I heard of some French soldiers in Colorado … hunting gold. The Spanish set the Utes on them.” “Then we had best be careful,” I suggested.
“Do you think they’ve seen us?” “Doubt it,” Kemble commented, “but there’s a big party, maybe forty in all. One of them might have hunted far enough east to see us.” We ate in silence, for there was much to think about.