“Everyone’s packing up in Grandfather’s band. Why don’t you come with us, Sister?”
Naduah thought a moment, then swung up and straddled the limb.
“I couldn’t leave my family, and they wouldn’t leave Pahayuca. And all my friends are with the Wasps. I wouldn’t see you much anyway. You’re always with that pack of prairie dogs, yapping and running around causing trouble. You act like you don’t know me half the time.”
“I have to or the boys will tease me. You know that.”
“I know. But I’m better off where I am.”
“What if someone comes for one us during the year? Soldiers, maybe.” John had climbed into a crotch of the tree and was pitching twigs at leaves, trying to spear them.
“I’ll hide.” Naduah had given it some thought.
“But what if they find you?”
“Then I’ll escape and come back. I can do it. I’ve been learning how to trail and ride and hunt. What about you?”
“I’ll fight them. I’ll kill them.” Cub jumped up so that he was standing in the crotch and stabbing at the tough bark with his knife. “I’ll scalp them. I’ll eat their livers. Nobody’s going to take me away from Grandfather.”
“And what if Old Owl sells you back to them?”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“You might make him mad enough at you one of these days.”
“That’s an act. He’s never really mad at me. If the Rangers come, they’ll have a fight. Suvate, that’s all.”
“How will we know?”
“What?”
“If one of us has been taken back?”
Cub sat down, one brown leg dangling from each side of the tree’s fork. He was obviously thinking.
“We could leave signs to show that we’re still with the People.”
“What kind?”
“Some signal that we could work out. And leave it after we move from each campsite. You know we come across each other’s camping places from time to time.”
“What kind of sign should we leave? What kind of sign would be standing maybe months later?”
Cub looked a little exasperated with her. “I don’t know. We could carve something in a tree.”
“If there are any trees. Or if there aren’t hundreds.”
“Then we’ll make a pact. If anything happens to me, I’ll make Old Owl or my father swear to get word to you. I know they would. And if anything happens to you, you can ask Pahayuca or Sunrise to send word to me. Do you think they’d do it for you?”
“Of course. The People always seem to know what’s happening in the other bands anyway.”
From the direction of the distant camp came the incongruous sound of a turkey gobble.
“That’s Grandfather calling me.” Cub dropped from the tree and answered, a fair imitation. “I have to go. They must be ready to move.”
The children untied their ponies and rode toward the site of Old Owl’s winter camp.
“I’ll miss you, Cub.”
“I’ll miss you too.”
“As bad as you are, at least you’re not dull.”
“Wait’ll you see me next winter. I’ll be much worse.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” He leered at her evilly. Then he braced his hands on his pony’s neck and, gathering his feet under him, stood for a better view. “They’re starting without me!” He opened his legs and dropped back into place, spurring his horse into a gallop before he was even firmly seated. Ahead of them, the camp was in the usual turmoil as everyone beat their pack animals and yelled and dashed for the head of the line of march. Cub tucked his reins into his belt and jumped up to stand on his pony’s back again. He shouted and waved his arms to get his friends’ attention.
“Wait for me, you offal from an Apache dung heap!”
Upstream separated from the group and rode toward him.
“Where’ve you been? I wanted to say good-bye to you.” The two of them rode back toward the gang of boys. Feeling left out, Naduah watched them go. Because he was a boy, Upstream would be able to ride along with the other boys until he tired and turned back. She stopped at the top of the first big ridge and waved at Cub when he turned to look once at her before setting off at a run, whooping. Below her, the long procession wound off through the pale green hills. She sat there for an hour or more until they were all out of sight beyond a far rise. Then she wheeled Wind and headed home to help with her own family’s packing.
CHAPTER 24
Naduah had looked over her shoulder at the old campsite as she rode away, remembering the good times she had had there. But Takes Down was right, as usual. It was time to leave. The camp looked devastated and forlorn. The grass was trampled and cropped by the three thousand horses and mules of the four bands that had wintered there. The cottonwoods along the river had been stripped of their lower branches so the ponies could eat the bark.
There were piles of unrepairable equipment and heaps of bones and decaying carcasses from the latest hunt. Naduah thought she saw a slight movement at the outskirts of the site, a coyote come to see what was left. And the vultures overhead were beginning to circle, like the beginning vortex of a storm. She could picture the ants moving in to scour everything that the crows and mice left. And the grass would grow over it all, and it would be even greener here next year. Or the year after.
They had been traveling for two days now, and were farther north than Pahayuca and the council usually chose to come. But there had been reports of large buffalo herds this way. And as though to verify them, a raven had circled over the old camp four times, dipping his head and cawing. Then he had flown off in this direction. So they were following the same trail that White Robe’s band had taken when they left the winter encampment almost a month before. It was a major north/south route for the People, and easy to follow. The undulating plain was indented in a broad line that snaked across the hills to the horizon, a shallow trough dug by thousands of ponies and travois passing this way year after year.
Once spring arrived in Texas, it wasted no time. It was only early April and already there was heat in the air and a riot of flowers dancing on the hills. The hundreds of miles of rolling green swells were too much temptation for Naduah and Star Name. They had casually steered their ponies off to one side of the procession and ducked down into a ravine. They worked their way forward until they were beyond hailing range. Then they staged a race to take them even farther ahead.
Now they were where they weren’t supposed to be, in front of the scouts who always rode in the vanguard. They were practicing their riding. Star Name had braided a loop into Paint’s mane and hung with her foot hooked through it. She skimmed her fingers through the grass, snatching at pebbles as her pony ran.
Naduah was crouched, gathering her feet and her courage under her. “Feel your pony with your knees, your legs, every part of you.” She remembered Wanderer’s voice as he had taught her for hours under the hot sun. She cleared her mind of everything but the feel of Wind’s powerful muscles rippling under her feet. She swayed, letting the rhythm of her pony’s stride course up through her body until she was moving in perfect time with it. Without thinking, she rose and stood.
“Star Name! Na-bo-ne, look!” And she fell. Star Name rode back laughing as Naduah stood, testing her joints and rubbing her rear end.
“Did you see me stand?”
“Yes. A little more practice and you’ll have it!”
It was then that they noticed a camp far in the distance, and the vultures over it. The sky was black with them, like a roiling thundercloud that looked strangely out of place in the clear blue afternoon sky. Something was wrong. Naduah felt the uneasiness grow in the pit of her stomach. There were usually vultures around the People’s camps, but never this many. Whose camp was it? Not Old Owl’s. Please, not Old Owl’s. Or Wanderer’s.
Wind snorted as the first faint whiffs of death, mingled with the scent of spring flowers, reached her sensitive nostrils. Smoke was
already bounding around in her wide danger circle, her white tail flashing. Dog had caught up with them and sat, whining, under Wind’s feet. Naduah and Star Name stared ahead, neither wanting to guess what the cloud meant. Quietly, they waited for Buffalo Piss and his scouts.
Buffalo Piss glowered at them when he and his men rode up. Even with his smooth, plucked brows, his shaggy, tousled hair, and his big, dark eyes he looked ferocious. The girls moved silently behind the men. Buffalo Piss and Sunrise rode ahead as they approached the village that lay under the swirling black cloud.
“It must be White Robe’s band,” Buffalo Piss muttered to Sunrise. Sunrise shaded his eyes to see better.
“Yes.” Sunrise knew the plains as all of the People did. He knew if a stone had been disturbed and he knew if it had happened accidentally, or with a purpose. He knew the patterns of the birds, and the calls of the animals, at different times of the day and in different seasons. He could find trails where a white man would say none existed. And he knew, without a doubt, that there was something terribly wrong in White Robe’s camp.
Pahayuca and Medicine Woman and more of the men caught up with them. Their faces were expressionless, but their muscles were tensed as they all advanced toward the lodges. The smell reached them when they were still over half a mile away. The men drew together in a quick council to decide what to do.
“Stay here, little one.” Medicine Woman searched through the saddle bags for her medicine pouch. Slinging it over her shoulder, she tied a piece of cloth around her mouth and nose.
“I want to go with you. I can help.”
“No. It could be a trap. There must have been an attack, but maybe some of the wounded are still alive.”
With her arm across her face to keep out as much of the foul air as possible, Naduah rode back to the waiting women and children. Many of the young ones stood on their ponies to see better, but the women threw their robes over their heads and keened, as much in horror as in sorrow. Dogs howled in answer. The hair at the base of Dog’s tail stood up in a ridge, and she milled stiff-legged among Wind’s legs.
The steady, hollow thud of Gets To Be An Old Man’s small hand drum and the unearthly wailing of the women joined in a dirge that followed Pahayuca, Buffalo Piss, and their warriors as they rode slowly, weapons ready, toward the camp. When they entered the outskirts, there was a roar as hundreds of turkey vultures rose, a living pall lifted by an unseen hand. Those that refused to leave their feeding hissed and grunted and flapped their enormous wings, snatching mouthfuls as they sidled away from the riders. Their red skulls looked like bloody death’s-heads, and their curved yellow beaks gaped in threat. Crows wheeled and darted, cawing angrily. The men coughed and gagged as the dense stench burned its way into their noses and mouths, coating the backs of their throats.
Decaying corpses lay sprawled among the silent lodges. There were war ponies, dead at their tethers outside their master’s tents. And there were humans. Hundreds of them. Aside from a bundle of arrows that fanned out where they had fallen from a dropped quiver, there were no signs of war. There had been no looting, no burning, no fighting, and no scalping. Just death. Riding at the end of the procession that wound among the lodges, Medicine Woman felt the hairs on the back of her neck tingle, as though ants were crawling there.
A tiny baby, covered with wriggling white worms, lay at his dead mother’s breast. Tears streamed down Medicine Woman’s cheeks, and she silently sang for them. She was unaware of the whimpering that came from her own throat. Warriors, old people, children, a young couple entwined as though making love, all dead. Their faces were unrecognizable, obliterated by time, scavengers, and the elements.
Howling and snarling, a pack of dogs, crazed by fear, careened from behind the biggest lodge, that of White Robe. The leader, a huge yellow cur with his skin laddered over his ribs and saliva flying from his mouth, leaped at Pahayuca. The others attacked, trying to rip the men’s legs or disembowel their horses. The men beat at them with their lances and bows and quirts, or fired into their open mouths.
Choking, the dogs stumbled off, pawing at the shafts as they tried to pull them out. Some were pinned to the ground, the arrows driven all the way through them. When the leader went down crying, the others tucked tail and ran, scattering out onto the plain. They fled toward the falling sun as though trying to throw themselves off the edge of the dying world.
At the head of the line, Pahayuca began to chant in his deep, resonant voice. It was picked up by those behind him and swelled over the cawing and flapping of the birds. A requiem for the dead. Desperately, Medicine Woman searched for an explanation. The spirits were never this vindictive. They might take vengeance on an individual or a family, but not on an entire band. The universe didn’t work that way. Could they all have died from tainted meat? Not likely. Her mind was numbing with the horror of it when she heard something. It was the first human sound in that graveyard of the unburied dead.
Shouting, she turned and headed toward it, threading her way among the bodies, the overturned drying racks, and the tumbled equipment. The men followed her. An old woman was raving, crawling among the corpses, poking them and rolling them over. Medicine Woman rode slowly toward her.
“Mother, what has happened here?”
The woman gave a small cry and turned toward Medicine Woman. Her sightless eyes crawled with maggots and she babbled on, wound tightly in a cocoon of madness. Her face was rotten, covered with sores oozing blood and pus. She began to laugh, cackling hysterically and clawing at the cankers, rupturing more of them.
Medicine Woman screamed. And screamed again. She couldn’t stop screaming. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. No nightmare. No ghost story. No battlefield of scalped and mutilated corpses had ever been this terrifying. Medicine Woman’s terror spread to the men. They all pounded out of the silent village and scattered onto the plain like the dogs they had driven off. The rest of the band galloped after them, strewing possessions and abandoning horses in their blind flight. They ran for miles until exhaustion forced them to stop. And as they retreated they looked back again and again over their shoulders, as though expecting the spectre of death to be pursuing them.
The People had a new enemy. One they had no weapons or medicine against. One they were totally powerless to combat. Smallpox had settled on the plains.
At twilight of the next day, the band finally camped. And it was an almost silent camp. Even the dogs slept where they had fallen, their legs still quivering with the fatigue of trying to keep up with the horses. From the outskirts of the village, Gets To Be An Old Man’s medicine songs went on for hours as he lay on his back, chanting to the darkening sky. Small groups of people gathered around their cooking fires, and whispered about the village of death. Even the mourning was subdued, as though people were afraid to grieve, afraid to call attention to themselves lest they bring down the same plague that had struck White Robe’s band.
Many lay in restless sleep, although it was still early. Some whimpered and cried out, haunted in dreams by what they had seen or been told. They had ridden hard all night and day after fleeing the dead village. Naduah had drooped and nodded as Wind paced steadily through the dark, picking her way over the rough ground by instinct and the light of the full moon. Something Good had ridden nearby. Her daughter, little Weasel, slept serenely in the cradle board dangling from the saddle horn. With the morning light the older boys and some of the men went to hunt stray ponies, but many of them were never found.
Naduah sat with her arms around Star Name as she sobbed quietly, asking “Why? Why?” over and over. Naduah knew why. She had seen the graves that littered the trail to Texas. She had marched behind caskets and watched them lowered into graves. She knew it was a white man’s disease. And she felt responsible for it. She knew its name and she knew what it did. But she didn’t know how it spread or what its cure was.
The People knew more about how it spread than she did. They believed that sickness was caused by the breath of
an unknown enemy. And smallpox was transmitted by inhaling an airborne virus from its victims. By fleeing the contaminated village and camping in an isolated spot, they had reduced their chances of contracting the disease. They would have been spared if Deep Water had not picked up his cousin’s beaded pouch.
Deep Water would probably have passed his cousin’s body if he hadn’t recognized him by his painted leggings and the silver disks he always wore in his hair. The disks had belonged to his father before him, and Otter was rarely without them. Deep Water had leaned down and scooped up the pouch with the black horsehair tassel as it lay where it had fallen, a few inches from Otter’s fingers. He knew that Otter always carried it with him to hold his awl and glue and extra sinews and rawhide for patching his weapons and clothing.
Deep Water had raised his lance in brief salute. He sent a prayer after Otter, to help him along the sad, twisting path to eternity, the path of men who aren’t killed in battle. He put the long strap of the pouch over his shoulder, then turned his pony and rode after the other men. At least he would have something to remember his cousin.
Several days later smallpox entered the lodge of Deep Water, Name Giver, Owl, She Laughs, and She Blushes. Medicine Woman came back from their tent looking drawn.
“They all have fires inside them. Their skin almost burns the hand. Gets To Be An Old Man is with them now.”
“Maybe it’s the shaking sickness, Mother. The same one you had,” said Sunrise.
“Maybe. They have chills and their heads and backs hurt them, just as mine did. But I don’t think it’s the same one. I’m afraid of this sickness. I think it’s one we’ve never seen before.”
“What’s Gets To Be An Old Man going to do?” Takes Down spoke up from her sewing.
“He’ll try to quench the fires in them. He says they should take a steam bath arid then bathe immediately in cold water. They should go to the mountains where the springs are the coldest.”
Robson, Lucia St. Clair Page 28
