The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  8.

  “YOUR MONGOL HUN cooked his meat by horse heat,” Inish Scull observed. He was comfortably seated on a large rock at the edge of the Palo Duro, studying the distant Comanche camp through his binoculars. Gus and Call had both wanted to scamper down the slope after the fleeing warrior, but Inish Scull waved them back.

  “Nope, it’s too shadowy yet,” he said. “We’ll not be skating down a cliff this morning after one red killer. He might have a few friends, scattered among those rocks.”

  “I don’t think so, Captain,” Call said. “He was alone when he came at me.”

  “That doesn’t contradict my point,” the Captain said, a little sharply. Woodrow Call, though a more than competent fighting man, had a disputatious nature—not a welcome thing, in Inish Scull’s command.

  “If his friends were hiding in the rocks, then they couldn’t have been with him when he shot the arrow at you, now could they?” Scull said. “Human beings are rarely in two places at once, Mr. Call.”

  Call didn’t reply. Of course human beings couldn’t be in two places at once; but the fleeing boy was well past the rocks in question, and no one had appeared to join him.

  Augustus was puzzled by the remark about horse heat, a form of heat he had never heard of; nor was he exactly clear about the Mongol Huns. The Captain was always talking about faraway places and peoples he had never heard of, Gurkhas and Zulus and Zouaves and the like, frequently launching into a lecture just as Augustus was possessed of a powerful urge to sleep. What he wanted to do at the moment was stretch out on a big rock and let the warm sun bake the chill out of him.

  It was Woodrow Call who liked to hear the Captain discourse on the wars of history, or weaponry, or fighting tactics of any kind. The Captain had even given Call a ragged old book about Napoleon; though the book had one cover off, Call carried it in his saddlebags and read in it a page or two at a time, at night by the campfire.

  “What is horse heat, Captain?” Augustus asked—he did not want to seem indifferent to Inish Scull’s instruction. Indifference might result in Woodrow getting promoted over him, a thing he would find intolerable.

  “Horse heat?” Inish said. “Why, your Mongol would slice off his steak in the morning and stick it under his saddle blanket. Then he’d gallop along all day, with the steak between him and the horse. Your Mongol might ride for fourteen hours at a stretch. By the time he made camp the steak would be cooked enough to suit him—a little horse heat and a lot of friction would do the job.”

  “Fourteen hours under a saddle blanket?” Augustus said. “Why, it would just be horsehairs mostly, by then. I doubt I could stomach horsemeat if it had been under a saddle blanket all day.”

  The Captain raised his binoculars—he had been looking down the canyon, where the sizable Comanche horse herd grazed.

  “Buffalo Hump and his boys are hardly shy of horseflesh, at the moment,” he said. “There must be nearly a thousand horses in that herd. I wonder what would happen if we tried to spook his ponies.”

  “We’d need to find a good trail down off this rim,” Call said, but Captain Scull seemed hardly to hear him. He was imagining a grand charge.

  “These red men are in their winter camp,” he said. “I expect they’re lazy and well fed. There’s buffalo meat drying everywhere. We could come down like the wolf on the fold. It would be a chase you’d never forget.”

  Augustus was annoyed. Just when he wanted to stretch out and enjoy the sunlight, the Captain wanted to run off the Comanche horse herd, a mission that was sure to be perilous.

  “I expect they’d stop feeling lazy pretty quick, if we was to run off their horses,” he said.

  Inish Scull, binoculars to his eyes, suddenly stiffened. He had his glasses fixed on a certain lodge in the Comanche camp.

  “That’s him, gentlemen—I told you. That’s Buffalo Hump. Bible and sword,” the Captain said in an excited tone.

  Call strained his eyes, but could barely see the lodges, across the canyon. Augustus, whose vision was the talk of the rangers, saw people, but they were the size of ants. He had once owned a good brass spyglass, but had lost it in a card game several months before. He had meant to get another, but so far had been prevented by poverty from acquiring that useful tool.

  Inish Scull had not moved—his binoculars were still trained on the same spot.

  “That young brave you chased is talking to Buffalo Hump—I expect it’s his son. The young wolf’s bold, like the old wolf. We put some bullets in him, though. He’s leaking considerable blood.”

  “Not enough bullets, I guess,” Call said. “He made it back to camp.”

  “Yes, and the rascal had a good look at the troop,” Scull said. “He knows our numbers—in fact, he reduced our numbers, the damned scamp. He has a Mexican look—the son of a captive, I expect. Here, gentlemen, I’ll share my glass. It’s not every day you get to watch Buffalo Hump at breakfast.”

  It’s not every day I’d want to, Call thought, but he eagerly took the binoculars. It took him a moment to focus them, but when he did he saw the great hump man, Buffalo Hump, a figure of nightmare across the southern plains for longer than he and Augustus had been rangers. Call’s last good look at the man had come twelve years earlier, during an encounter in the trans-Pecos. Now, there he stood. A young wife had spread a buffalo robe for him, but Buffalo Hump declined to sit. He was looking around, scanning the rims of the canyon. As Call watched, Buffalo Hump looked right at him—or at least at the large rock where they all sat.

  “He’s looking for us, Captain,” Call said. “He just looked right at me.”

  “Let me look,” Augustus said. “He almost got me once, the devil. Let me look.”

  Call handed Gus the binoculars—when Augustus trained them on Buffalo Hump, the man was still standing, his head raised, looking in their direction.

  “He’s older, but he ain’t dead, Woodrow,” Gus said.

  When he handed the binoculars back to Captain Scull he felt his stomach quivering—an old fear unsteadied his mind, and even his hand. His first glimpse of Buffalo Hump, which had occurred in a lightning flash many years before, was the most frightening moment in all his time as a fighting man on the Texas frontier. He had only escaped the hump man that night because of darkness, and because he had run as he had never run, before or since, in his life. Even so, he bore a long scar on one hip, from where Buffalo Hump’s lance had struck him.

  “Did you see, Woodrow?” he said. “He still carries a big lance, like the one he stuck in me.”

  “Why, you’re right, sir,” Inish Scull said, studying Buffalo Hump through his binoculars again. “He does have a lance in his hand. He’s devoted to the old weapons, I suppose.”

  “Why not?” Call said. “He come near to wiping out our whole troop the first time we fought him, and he didn’t have nothing but a bow and a knife and that lance.”

  “It’s practice, you see,” Scull said. “The man’s probably practiced with those weapons every day of his life since the age of four.”

  Call had fought the Comanches as hard as any ranger, and yet, when he had looked down at them through Captain Scull’s glass, saw the women scraping hides and the young men racing their ponies, he felt the same contradictory itch of admiration he had felt the first time he fought against Buffalo Hump. They were deadly, merciless killers, but they were also the last free Indians on the southern plains. When the last of them had been killed, or their freedom taken from them, their power broken, the plains around him would be a different place. It would be a safer place, of course, but a flavor would have been taken out of it—the flavor of wildness. Of course, it would be a blessing for the settlers, but the settlers weren’t the whole story—not quite.

  Inish Scull had lowered his binoculars—he had stopped watching the Indians and was staring into space.

  “It’s the quality of the opponent that makes soldiering a thing worth doing,” he said. “It ain’t the cause you fight for—the cause is only a cause
. Those torturing fiends down there are the best opponents I’ve ever faced. I mean to kill them to the last man, if I can—but once it’s done I’ll miss ’em.”

  He sighed, and stood up.

  “When we finish this fight I expect it will be time to go whip the damn Southern renegades—there’ll be some mettle tested in that conflict, let me assure you.”

  “Renegades, sir,” Call said, a good deal puzzled by the remark. “I thought the Comanches were about the last renegades.”

  Inish Scull smiled and waved a hand.

  “I don’t mean these poor savages,” he said. “I mean the Southern fops who are even now threatening to secede from the Union. There’ll be blood spilled from Baltimore to Galveston before that conflict’s settled, I’ll wager. It’s the Southern boys I called ‘renegades’—and they are renegades, by God. I’d like to ride south on my good horse, Hector, and kill every rebel fop between Charleston and Mobile.”

  Captain Scull cased his binoculars and looked at the two of them with a mean grin. “Of course, all rebels ain’t fops, gentlemen. There’s mettle on both sides, plenty of it. That’s why it will be a terrible war, when it comes.”

  “Maybe it won’t come, Captain,” Augustus said, with a glance at Call. He was uneasily aware that the Captain was a Yankee, whereas he and Call were Southern. If such a war did come, the Captain and the two of them might find themselves on different sides.

  “It will come within five years,” Inish Scull said confidently. He stood up, walked to the very edge of the cliff, and spat a great arc of tobacco juice into the canyon.

  “It’ll be brother against brother, and father against son, when that war comes, gentlemen,” he said. He turned and was about to walk to his horse when Augustus saw a movement, at the far south end of the canyon. It was just some moving dots, but there had been no dots there a few minutes earlier, when they had been looking at the Comanche horse herd.

  “Captain, look,” he said. “I think there’s more Indians coming.”

  Inish Scull took out his binoculars and scanned the southern distance with some impatience.

  “Damn it, every time I make a sensible plan, something happens to thwart me,” he said. “There are more Indians coming. If we tried to spook the horse herd now, we’d be heading right into them.”

  Call looked where the others were looking but could only see a faint, wavy motion.

  “Mr. Call, go rouse the men—we better skedaddle,” Scull said. “It’s old Slow Tree and he’s got his whole band with him. We’re but twelve men, and Buffalo Hump knows it. Even if he’s not in much of a fighting mood, some of the young men are bound to be excited by an advantage like that.”

  Call knew that was true. It was well enough to look forward to the day when the Comanche would be a broken people, no longer dangerous—but that day was not in sight, and speculation along those lines was premature, in his view. There were now four or five hundred Comanche warriors right below them, a force strong enough to overrun any army the U.S. government could put in the field. Call could now see a line of Indians, moving up from the south. They were still the size of ants, but he knew they would sting a lot worse than ants, if it came to a fight.

  “Go, Mr. Call—go,” Captain Scull said. “Wake up the nappers and get everyone mounted. We’re a tempting morsel, sitting up here on the top of this hole. At least we better make ourselves a morsel in motion.”

  When Augustus looked to the south again he saw that the lead warriors had scared up a little pocket of buffalo that had been grazing in a small side canyon. There were only four buffalo, running for their lives, with a wave of warriors in pursuit.

  “Those buffalo would have done better to stay hid,” he remarked. “They’ll soon be harvested now.”

  Inish Scull seemed uninterested in the buffalo.

  “I met old Slow Tree once, at a big parley on the Trinity,” he said, his binoculars still pointed south. “Quite the diplomat, he is. He’ll talk and promise peace, but it’s just diplomacy, Mr. McCrae. It won’t help the next settler he encounters, out on the baldies somewhere.”

  He paused and spat.

  “I’ll take Buffalo Hump over your diplomatic Indians,” he said. “Buffalo Hump don’t parley—don’t believe in it. He knows the white man’s promises are worth no more than Slow Tree’s. They’re worth nothing, and he knows it. He scorns our parleying and peace-piping and the lot. I admire him for it, though I’d kill him in a second if I could get him in range.”

  Augustus was watching the buffalo chase. Only once, long ago, had he had the opportunity to watch Indians run buffalo. That time it had been two tired Indians and one tired buffalo—in their desperation to bring down the meat they had chased the buffalo right through a ranger encampment, to the astonishment of the rangers, who roused themselves from cards and singsongs just in time to shoot the animal. The tired Comanches, badly disappointed, made it into the brush before the disorganized rangers could think to shoot them.

  This time there were four buffalo and at least twenty young Indians in pursuit. Soon the buffalo fanned out, each with four or five Comanches at tail and side. None of the Comanches had guns. Augustus saw one buffalo absorb six arrows without slackening its pace. Another was lanced and almost managed to turn under the horse of the young brave who lanced it, but the brave avoided the charge and returned to strike the buffalo twice more.

  Soon, prickling with arrows, the buffalo began to stumble. Two fell, but two ran on.

  Inish Scull, by now, was as absorbed in the chase as Augustus.

  “What grand sport!” Inish Scull exclaimed. “I wish Hector and I were down there. Big Horse Scull and the Buffalo Horse could show them what for, I reckon!”

  Augustus didn’t say anything, but he agreed. He and Woodrow had run buffalo a few times; even Woodrow got caught up in the sport of it. Even though they might need the meat, there was always a letdown when the buffalo fell and the skinning and butchering had to begin.

  The third buffalo, prickly with arrows, finally fell, but the fourth ran on, although the whole force of Comanches was now after it, the braves crowding one another in order to aim their arrows.

  “Look at it—why, you’d think the beast was immortal,” Inish Scull said. “There must be thirty arrows in it.”

  The buffalo, though, was not immortal. Finally it stopped, swung its head at its pursuers, and dropped to its knees. It bellowed a frothy bellow that echoed off the canyon walls. Then it rolled on its side and lay still—the young Comanches milled around it, excited from the chase.

  Augustus watched for a moment. The Indian women were already skinning the first of the buffalo to fall.

  “That’s that—let’s be off, sir—else they’ll be skinning us next,” Captain Scull said.

  Augustus mounted, but turned his horse to watch the scene for another moment. He hadn’t done the chasing or made the kill, but, for some reason, he felt the same letdown as if he had. The Comanche braves had stopped milling. They simply sat on their horses, looking down at the fallen beast. Though he could barely see the fallen animal—it was just a dot on the canyon floor—in his mind’s eye he saw it clearly. He was reminded of an old bull buffalo he and Call and Bigfoot Wallace, the famous scout, had struggled to kill years before on the Mexican plain. They had shot the beast more than twenty times, chased it until one of their horses died, and had finally had to dispatch it with their bowie knives, a process that bloodied Augustus from shoulder to calf.

  The Comanche boy who had dealt the fourth buffalo the final lance hit was probably just as bloody—that buffalo, too, must have poured blood from a number of wounds before it rolled its eyes up in death.

  Looking down on the scene from high above, Augustus, though he couldn’t say why, felt a mood of sadness take him. He knew he ought to be going, but he could not stop looking at the scene far below. A line of Indian women were moving out from the camp, ready to help cut up the meat.

  Inish Scull paused a moment. He saw that his you
ng ranger had been affected by the chase they had just observed, and its inevitable ending.

  “Post coitum omne animal triste,” he said, leaning over to put a hand, for a moment, on the young man’s shoulder. “That’s Aristotle.”

  “What, sir?” Augustus asked. “I expect that’s Latin, but what does it mean?”

  “ ‘After copulation every animal is sad,’ ” the Captain said. “It’s true, too—though who can say why? The seed flies, and the seeder feels blue.”

  “Why is it?” Augustus asked. He knew, from his own memories, that the Captain had stated a truth. Much as he liked poking, there was that moment, afterward, when something made his spirits dip, for a time.

  “I don’t know why and I guess Aristotle didn’t either, because he didn’t say,” Scull observed. “But it’s not only rutting that can bring on that little gloom. Killing can do it too—especially if you’re killing something sizable, like a buffalo, or a man. Something that has a solid claim to life.”

  He was silent for a moment, a little square cut chaw of tobacco in his hand.

  “I grant that it’s a curious thing,” he said. “The acts ain’t much alike, and yet the gloom’s alike. First excitement, then sadness. Those red boys killed their game, and they needed to kill it, too. A buffalo is to them what a store would be to us. They have to kill the buffalo to live. And they have killed it. But now they’re sad, and they don’t know why.”

  Well, I don’t know why neither, Augustus thought. I wish that old man who talked about it to begin with had said why.

  In a moment they turned back toward camp. Augustus fell in behind the big horse. When they came over the first little rise they saw the camp boys, rushing around like ants, packing up.

  9.

  “WHERE IS HIS SCALP? I don’t see it,” Buffalo Hump said, when Blue Duck walked up to him, dripping blood. “I thought you were going to bring me the scalp of Gun-in-the-Water?”