Come Sundown

by Mike Blakely

  Every day provided a different glimpse of nature’s magnificence. Bears lumbered. Coyotes skulked. Wolves prowled. Mountain lions stalked upon herds of fleet antelope. Eagles swooped and snagged fish from the river’s surface. Diving hawks scattered coveys of quail. Owls flew silently along the edges of the night. And then the buffalo would come. The Crossing funneled them here, where they could migrate with ease over the mischievous Canadian. They would pour into this valley for days, converting nutritious grass into fertile dung, then they would disappear for months or even years before returning to graze on the replenished grasses.

  It was ironic that I had to carry whiskey here to preserve this place as a peaceful campground. But I knew from experience that if I did not bring the liquor, and control its consumption, someone else who cared far less for the place or the souls who called it home would bring enough cursed alcohol here to destroy the entire Comanche nation. And so it fell to me—a man who had never even gotten drunk—to supply the Indians with intoxicating drink. Well, if I had to do it, I might as well do it in style.

  Turning Major around to the first of my two mules, I untied my deerskin violin case from the pack saddle, and carefully pulled out the Stradivarius and its bow. I took a few moments to tune by ear, then placed the chinpiece against my jaw. I could control my mount with leg cues, in the Comanche way, so I let the reins remain draped over Major’s neck, and told him to step off the rim, following the well-worn trail into the valley.

  Within seconds, a young warrior guarding the ponies had spotted me, and shouted across the valley. The news traveled quickly by word of mouth through the village, and excited men and women began to step from their lodges and gravitate toward the northern side of the camp. I played an old sailing song I had learned years before, crossing the Atlantic on a square-rigger. The song was called “The Girls Around Cape Horn” and it provided just the jaunty mood I needed to announce my arrival home.

  When I reached the edge of the village, warriors began to hoot their battle cries, and the whole camp came to life. I looked for Hidden Water. She usually liked to greet me when I arrived like this—the center of attention and the bringer of celebration. But as yet I could not find her in the crowd that grew around me. I played and smiled and rode at a jaunty trot, arriving in front of Chief Shaved Head’s lodge, where I would unload the whiskey. I ended “The Girls Around Cape Horn” with a flourish and sprang from Major to receive the Comanche cheer of “Yee-yee-yee-yee-yee-yee-yee!” Shaved Head came out of his lodge to greet me and to see how much whiskey I had brought. He looked as though he had been napping in his tipi.

  By now I expected Hidden Water to be at my side, but she had not arrived. I could sense some unspoken amusement from the crowd, but it was not considered dignified to act concerned over a missing wife, so I carried on with my chores, untying the hitches that held the whiskey kegs on the mules. I asked a few promising young braves to take hold of the kegs as I untied them so they would not drop to the ground and burst.

  Still, Hidden Water had not come to me.

  As I went to unpack the second mule, the old shaman, Burnt Belly, came to my side. Stepping close to me, he said in a low voice, “Do not ask about her. I will tell you in time.”

  I sensed he had done this to save me some kind of embarrassment. I guessed that Hidden Water had done something to shame me, so I determined to act as if I didn’t even notice her absence until Burnt Belly could inform me. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why wasn’t she here? Was she hiding? Had she left? With whom?

  “Aho,” I said, as if Burnt Belly had merely come to greet me. “I have brought you the medicine you wanted, grandfather.” I took a small flask of good store-bought whiskey from my saddlebag and handed it to the old man. He smiled and held the flask aloft for everyone to see.

  “Yee-yee-yee-yee-yee-yee-yee!” sang the crowd.

  “Listen,” I said, raising my hands. “I have brought the white man’s whiskey so that my people will celebrate my return. I will bargain with any man who wishes to have some. Bring your best ponies, and your finest robes to trade. But do not trade everything you have. In three sleeps, Owl Man will come with wagons loaded with all the things you warriors need, and all the things your women want. There will be kettles, knives, axes, and hoop iron for arrow points. There will be cloth and beads and ribbons. Blankets and shirts and coats. There will be gunpowder and salt and tobacco. Sugar and honey. Looking glasses and red ocher to paint your faces. This is the time to be happy. First, we will feast. Then you will all drink!”

  The warriors rent the air with their wild screams. Chief Shaved Head took charge of the whiskey barrels, having the young warriors line them up on the ground in front of his lodge door. Now it was time for me to go to work. The warriors formed a line, starting with the most decorated men. My friend Kills Something stood fifth in this line. Though older men fell in behind him, he had earned his place as one of the elite, and would someday become a great leader if he survived another few years of raiding and fighting. All of the men in line were considered leaders of their families, and would bargain not just for themselves, but for their brothers, fathers, sons, nephews, and in-laws. The first in line, of course, was Chief Shaved Head.

  Shaved Head’s appearance was unusual among Comanches because he actually shaved one side of his head as instructed in a vision he had received. This produced a distinctive scalp that his enemies forever sought to separate from his skull. That scalp was likely to make a fine trophy someday for some Apache, Pawnee, Mexican, Texan, or American, for Shaved Head did not intend to die with gray hair.

  I placed a large metal cup on top of one of the barrels. This would be the unit of measurement for our bargaining.

  “I will have ten cups,” Shaved Head said, holding up ten fingers.

  My eyes widened in surprise, for though he was chief, his family was rather small, and that was a lot of whiskey for just a few people. I guessed that he was planning on sharing the whiskey with his three wives. “What will you trade?”

  “Ponies.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten cups. Ten ponies.”

  I smiled. Bargaining with Comanches was easy as long as you didn’t get greedy with them. A white man would make a low offer and be prepared to bargain upward. This was shameful in the Comanche culture. The Comanches believed a man should flaunt his wealth. Moreover, he should exhibit his complete confidence in acquiring new wealth. Shaved Head was a proud man. He would not think of making a trifling offer in front of his whole camp.

  I nodded at his bargain. “A pony for each cup is a very good offer, and more than I expected. But you are a great chief who will get more ponies on the next raid.”

  “If I do not, it is because I will die carrying battle to our enemies.”

  “I only need to know which ten ponies to take from your herd.”

  Shaved Head looked away from me as if to dismiss the triviality of the suggestion. “You pick. My nephew holds my herd downstream, where there is good grass. I have over three hundred horses. You may take any ten you like.”

  I offered my hand to seal the deal—a tradition the Comanches had learned from Europeans, and one they understood represented a covenant of personal honor.

  “Wife!” Shaved Head turned toward his wife’s tipi, where she stood at the opening. “Pour the water out of my best canteen—the one you made from the bladder of the buffalo I killed on the last hunt. I will fill it soon with firewater!”

  The warriors sent their war cries skyward and the next man stepped up to make his bargain. Shaved Head would remember how many cups he had bargained for, and would get them later. But before the drinking started, every man would have a chance to make a whiskey deal. Then there would be a feast. Then, and only then, would the headmen bring their vessels around to the kegs to fill them. By this time, I would be camped somewhere down the valley to keep away from the drunken revelry, for a white man—even one considered an adopted member of the tribe—was a tempting target for
a drunken Comanche. Hopefully Hidden Water would be in camp with me, though she still had not shown herself. I was anxious to get my whiskey trading done so Burnt Belly could tell me what had happened with her.

  The next warrior was named Mexican Horse. He stepped forward and said, “Five cups.”

  “What will you trade?”

  “Three buffalo robes, and a lodge pole for your wind flap. There is something wrong with the one that was there, for it has fallen off and no one has put it back.”

  The crowd murmured behind Mexican Horse, and I knew he was trying to embarrass me because my wife had not taken care of my lodge while I was gone. This, too, was the Comanche way. A weakness or shortcoming of any sort was pointed out instead of politely overlooked. Perhaps you think you’ve seen small towns where everyone knows everyone else’s business. You should try living in a Comanche camp. Privacy is as thin as the buffalo-hide walls of the lodges. If you have a problem, you deal with it immediately or suffer the ongoing ridicule of your neighbors.

  My trading career with this village would have been over had I let Mexican Horse get away with embarrassing me, so I met him head-on. “If you have something to say about my lodge, say it plainly,” I insisted. “I have been away getting the trade goods the elders wanted, and I haven’t been lying around camp looking up at my neighbors’ wind flaps. Tell me what you mean by offering me a lodge pole.”

  This surprised Mexican Horse a little, but he wasn’t about to back down now. “The pole for your wind flap lies on the ground because your wife has left your lodge. She went south with a warrior from the Nokonis.”

  This was a hell of a way to learn that my so-called wife had run off with another man, but I knew better than to let any show of emotion cross my face. “The concerns of this camp are more important than any woman who runs away from it,” I announced. “First I will make the deals the elders have asked me to make for the whiskey. Then I will handle my own problems. I have no use for your lodge pole. What else do you have to offer?”

  “A pony and a mule,” Mexican Horse said. “You can ride the pony to the Nokonis and bring your wife back on the mule.”

  The people of the village burst into laughter.

  “If I do not bring her back, that mule will be loaded with robes and other valuable things that are worth more than the woman. Right now I do not care if she stays with the Nokonis, as long as the man who took her pays me well for her.”

  Mexican Horse started to say something else, but Kills Something spoke up from behind him: “Enough about that woman.” This was a remarkable thing for him to say, for Hidden Water was Kills Something’s sister. “First we feast and drink. Then I will go with Plenty Man to deal with that runaway woman and see that he gets her back, or gets what he wants in trade for her.”

  This settled the matter for the time being, and the whiskey trading went on. As I made my deals, the women began to return to their lodges and their cook fires to prepare food for the feast.

  I knew from previous experience how many cups of whiskey each barrel contained. Allowing a few cups for spillage, I sold all the liquor within a couple of hours, bartering the last cups one at a time to young warriors who had no families and just wanted to swap a hide or something for a cup of the intoxicating brew. I remembered what each man owed me. My memory has always been perfect. Besides, the Comanches were habitually honest in trade deals, and no man would attempt to cheat me. I would collect my earnings in a day or two, when the ill effects of the firewater had worn off.

  By the time the whiskey was all traded, the good smells of food filled the air. Buffalo tongue and hump meat roasted on sticks suspended above the coals. Delicacies such as boiled calf stomach and broiled liver graced almost every fire. Women threw buffalo bones in the embers, then cracked them open with rocks to scrape out the melted marrow. The wives who had traded for iron skillets fried strips of venison in bear fat.

  “You will come and eat at my lodge,” Kills Something said. “My wife makes plenty of food.”

  “Gracias,” I said. I walked with Kills Something to his lodge and his wife handed me a piece of rawhide to use as a plate. On this she heaped a thick stew made of buffalo meat, seasoned with wild onion, salt, peppers, and some herbs she had collected. Kills Something gave me a spoon fashioned from the horn of a buffalo. Before we ate, he offered a morsel of the food to the sky, then buried it in a small hole he gouged in the ground with a digging stick. Now that he had made offerings of thanks to Father Sun and Mother Earth, we could dig in.

  I hadn’t eaten much on my long ride from William’s new fort, so I devoured the plate of stew and asked for more. I ate until I thought I would burst. With my hunger satisfied, all I could think of was my empty lodge and my missing wife. I felt guilty for some reason, though it was she who had run off. Certainly some of it must have been my fault. I had failed her as a husband somehow.

  Perhaps my guilt stemmed from the fact that I knew I never should have taken Hidden Water as a wife in the first place. Kills Something had talked me into it. He had wanted us to be brothers-in-law so that he could assure a safe source of trade goods once he became chief. It was a marriage of commerce, not love. I admit that I had been attracted to Hidden Water from the moment I saw her. Few men would not. But did I ever love her? I had tried, but at best I could only hope that I would someday learn to love her. Now that hope was gone, and I was filled with a sense of failure that I dared not express to any of my Comanche friends. Comanches did not accept failure.

  I knew what I had to do. I must follow Hidden Water. I would speak to her. If she wanted to stay with her new lover, I would have to exact some kind of payment from him, or challenge him to battle. If she wanted to come back with me, I would take her, but I doubted I could do this without fighting the warrior she had run away with. If she did come back to Shaved Head’s village, I would be expected to thrash her soundly with a stick in front of the entire village to punish her for her disrespect. Some warriors might even insist that I cut off the end of her nose. None of this appealed to me.

  Kills Something must have known what was on my mind. “My sister brings shame to our village,” he said. “I wanted to go after her when she left, but Shaved Head and Burnt Belly agreed that you should be the one to go.”

  “It is my problem.”

  “She is my sister. I will go with you. Sleep this night, then we will go.”

  I nodded, then rose and walked away. The feasting was about over. The drinking would soon start. I didn’t like watching an Indian camp in the throes of drunkeness, for fights would break out and blood would spill. Some men would abuse their women. The usual Comanche dignity would transmogrify into something bizarre and ugly. And this was my fault, for I had brought the whiskey. Yet the elders had asked for it, and had I not brought it, some other whiskey trader would have brought four times the amount of alcohol, and totally impoverished the village.

  I avoided my empty lodge and went to catch a fresh horse, leaving Major to rest and graze in the valley. I rode downstream, out of earshot of the drunken debauchery that was about to erupt in camp. I would roll myself in a buffalo robe and catch a few hours of long-overdue sleep. I welcomed the prospect. It was better than worrying about my runaway wife.

  Eight

  I woke to the crisp winter smells of fresh air and forest mulch. I heard wind whispering through bare branches. For January, the morning felt warm. I opened my eyes. The valley seemed peaceful. Then I remembered Hidden Water and wished I could go back to sleep.

  I rose, gathered my weapons, and rolled my robe. When I arrived at the village, I found a boy tending my herd of horses near the camp. This herd did not include all the ponies I had acquired in trade for whiskey, for I had yet to choose them. I reasoned that Kills Something had told this boy to gather my ponies so that I could pick the ones I wanted to ride southward. I also found a large pile of well-tanned buffalo hides stacked near my lodge, in addition to a few other things I had traded for, including a new pair of mocassi
ns, a deerskin shirt, and the raw hide of an elk that was good for patching things.

  Kills Something was waiting at my lodge, his pony staked beside him. He rose to his feet when he saw me. “Tsuh?” he said. The word meant “yes,” but here he was asking me if I was ready.

  “I must move these hides and other things into my lodge before we leave.”

  “I will tell my wife and her sisters to do it. Catch your horse.”

  “I need to eat.”

  “I have food for two days packed in a bag.”

  I sighed, and looked around the beautiful valley. I kicked off my old, worn mocassins and tried on the new ones I had traded for a cup of whiskey. They fit perfectly. I took off the soiled deerskin shirt I had been wearing for days and days, and put on the new, soft, golden one with remarkably long fringes on the sleeves. This had cost me two cups of whiskey. I took my war bridle and went to choose a horse from my herd. I also picked a couple of extra mounts so I would be assured a fresh horse every day on the trip.

  In less than two hours after my waking, I was mounted and crossing the Canadian River to begin my search for my runaway wife. I had my brother-in-law and friend, Kills Something, by my side and I knew he would ride through hell with me before he would desert me. Now that I was riding, moving, and taking action, the task did not seem so ominous.

  Worry is the greatest natural waste of time known to humankind. If a problem can be solved by taking action, then there is no need to worry. If a problem cannot be solved, then all the worry in the world will not help. Perhaps you know this from your own life, your own experiences. Think back to the things that have worried you in the past. Did the worry help? No. Did you take action and solve the problem? Good. Did you find the problem hopelessly unsolvable? That’s too bad, but your worrying did not accomplish anything.