Robson, Lucia St. Clair

by Ride the Wind

  Naduah shivered as she stood up. Less than an hour after she had thought she would never be cold again, she was shivering. Her robe and dress had black holes in them, and the wind seemed to blow through to her bones. She heard Wind’s shrill neigh, and went to her lodge. It was crowded inside with two horses and the pronghorn and Dog, and all the animals were frightened. Crouched against the packs at the far wall was a large, buff-colored coyote, who stared at Smoke as though trying to mesmerize her. Now that the danger was over he was interested in his stomach. Smoke had backed the length of her tether and tugged at it desperately. Dog cowered in the bedding, whining softly.

  When he saw Naduah, the coyote got up and stretched slowly and regally. He strolled across the tent, brushing against her as he left. She let him go, just as anyone else would. Coyotes were sacred. Not as sacred as wolves, perhaps, but brothers to the People anyway. No one would desecrate them by eating them.

  Naduah stroked the trembling pronghorn, the thick brittle winter coat coming out in tufts under her hand. Smoke only weighed a hundred pounds, but perhaps a dog travois could be hitched to her. Wind would have to suffer the humiliation of serving as a pack animal too. Too many horses had perished to allow any of those left to go unused. She lifted her grandmother’s medicine pouch down from its peg and collected rags and a bag of bear fat to take with her. Then she untied Smoke and Dog, and they trotted behind her as she ran toward Pahayuca’s lodge.

  Medicine Woman lay on a pile of robes, and only Something Good was with her, crooning softly as she glided around putting things into packs and sorting through the jumble in the tent. Outside, Blocks The Sun and Silver Rain were converting a travois into a stretcher. They lashed several crosspieces to the two long, scissor-shaped poles, then laid a thick pile of the softest robes on top. They covered the robes with an old hide to keep the snow off. Then they tied a curved willow lathe across the center to arch over Medicine Woman’s body and hold her in place, no matter how rough the traveling might be.

  Naduah mixed crumbled dried tree fungus with the warm bear grease. The fungus deadened pain and was used for burns and toothaches. Medicine Woman’s hair had been singed off close to her head and gave off an acrid odor. She was naked under the fur robe. Naduah knelt beside her and gently rubbed the grease mixture over her face and neck and ears, covering the blisters and peeling skin that was blackened in places.

  “Is the pain bad, Grandmother?” Medicine Woman’s eyelids fluttered and opened, but the eyes were glazed and unseeing.

  “Yes, little one. You must have my pouch.”

  “Yes, Kaku.”

  “Good. You know what to use. The fungus seems to be helping.”

  “I had a good teacher.” Naduah’s tears fell onto the fur. She wanted to tell Medicine Woman that she would be all right. But she couldn’t. Medicine Woman had never lied to her, even when the truth was painful. Naduah’s grandmother reached out a thin, blue-veined hand and groped with it until she touched her granddaughter’s cheek.

  “Don’t cry for me, little one. I’ve seen the world. Sight is only one way of seeing. There are others. I can still see in my memory. And you can describe things to me.”

  Naduah couldn’t answer, and she busied herself with the tiny bags and bundles of leaves in the medicine pouch. She sat back on her heels, studying the contents and deciding what herbs to use. She could ask her grandmother, but she felt as though this should be her responsibility, that she shouldn’t bother Medicine Woman and make her speak unnecessarily. The crushed leaves of the mimosa were good for pain and inflamed eyes. And there was the yarrow that she had discovered. She put water on the fire to boil the yarrow, and began grinding the mimosa leaves in the small stone mortar and pestle that was in the pouch.

  “Little one.”

  “Yes, Something Good.” In her preoccupation, Naduah had almost forgotten her friend was there.

  “Hurry. Pahayuca and the council have decided where we will travel. Lance is riding through now with instructions. We have to leave soon. The snow is falling heavily.”

  Naduah raised her head and concentrated. Above the moans and cries of grief and the clatter of lodge poles falling, she could hear Lance’s singsong chant.

  The Wasps moved out in the teeth of the blizzard, with lines tied between each horse and walker to keep them all together. Pahayuca used the wind as a reference point, keeping it always on his right cheek as he headed slightly southeast, away from the precipitous river bluff, now invisible in the swirling clouds of white. The band followed the council’s decision without question. They all knew that to stay where they were, snowed in miles from forage or game, would mean death for them all. Their only chance was to keep moving.

  In good times the average family had at least five pack animals, five riding ponies, and two buffalo or war ponies. Now there weren’t enough for everyone to ride, and many walked, taking turns on a friend’s or relative’s horse when they became exhausted. The children and the sick and hurt rode on travois like Medicine Woman’s, spattered with the dark gray mud of mixed snow and soot. Behind them the abandoned wreckage was soon lost in the snow. The whitened lodge poles and tattered covers looked like the chewed bones of a mangled animal, left for the vultures to pick clean. Hanging from the highest pole still standing was a pouch with a piece of painted bark inside, a message for the missing hunters.

  Naduah’s fingers were red and stinging where they poked out of the wrapping of blanket strips. Her face was numb, and there was frost peeling from it. She could hardly feel her feet at all, except for the steady, throbbing pain. In front of her, Takes Down was an indistinct form, fading in and out of sight on Rabbit Ears. A dark form loomed through the white curtain and a figure trudged toward her, headed back the way they had come.

  “Tahkobe Ano. Broken Cup.” The woman stopped and looked up at Naduah. “Have you seen my daughter? Her name is Broken Cup. She must have wandered off.” The wind whipped the words around the young woman’s head before splintering them and sending them flying. She was shouting, but Naduah could barely hear her. Turning, the woman wandered off again.

  “Stop, Gray Cloud. Broken Cup is dead. You know that. I saw you bury her. Come back!” She screamed, knowing that the woman couldn’t hear her and wouldn’t turn back if she could hear. Knowing that she herself couldn’t break from the line to go after her. The small figure vanished in the swirling snow as though swallowed in an ocean of foam. Grimly Naduah checked the stiffened hide rope that stretched from her pommel to her mother’s. It would be easy to lose sight of the entire village in seconds.

  The patched and blackened lodge was crowded. Star Name and Black Bird and Upstream had moved in to let a homeless family use their tent. Something Good had also loaned out her lodge, and she and little Weasel were staying with them. Weasel wailed as Medicine Woman rocked her futilely in her arms.

  It was February, the Month The Babies Cry For Food, and spring was more than a month away. Winter had set in with a vengeance after the first blizzard, and they still camped alone. Game was too scarce to combine the bands in their usual winter encampment. The ponies were skeletal, their long, shabby coats rough and matted with dirt and burs. Their hipbones jutted from the hide stretched tightly over them, and their bellies were swollen and lumpy with sticks and bark. Like their owners’, their eyes were listless from hunger.

  For weeks the Wasps had grubbed for roots, chipping at the frozen ground. They’d eaten lizards and mice, snakes and rats and the bark from trees. The week before they’d feasted on a turtle that Star Name had found. Takes Down had thrown it on its back alive, onto the fire. They had all sat around watching it intently as it kicked its legs feebly, its head craning from side to side on its scrawny, wrinkled neck as the flames curled around the shell. When it had cooked, Takes Down raked it out and broke the bottom carapace open, releasing a thick, pungent steam. They gathered around to eat from the bowl of its shell, dipping through the broth and scooping the soft meat out with horn spoons. The children were
allowed to eat first, but they handed their spoons over without taking much.

  “Daughter, eat more. You’ve only had a mouthful, and you need strength.”

  “It’s all right, Mother. I don’t want any more.” Naduah knew how many still had to be fed.

  Now she could taste the oily meat in her memory and wished there had been more. Most of their meals were gruel made of mesquite meal laboriously ground from the beans, or a thin soup of pemmican mixed with water and a little parched corn from the precious supply. Naduah kept a close watch on the food dwindling in the rawhide boxes, most of which sat empty under the bed. She counted, over and over, the number of people to be fed and mentally measured out the daily amounts for each.

  Sunrise went out on foot again and again, because the ponies weren’t strong enough to carry a hunting party. He almost always came back empty-handed. He rarely spoke these days, despair gnawing at him as much as hunger. Something Good brought some food from Pahayuca’s household, but there wasn’t much there either. He fed everyone who came to his door hungry, and sent food to those who had none. And no matter how many times Naduah counted and measured, she always came up with the same answer. There wouldn’t be enough.

  She sat with her arms around Smoke, who nuzzled her hand. The doe was looking for the wisps of dry grass that Naduah searched the cold, wind-scoured plain to find. The pronghorn’s thinness made her eyes seem even bigger and softer under their fringe of heavy black lashes. The lodge was empty except for the two of them and Dog and Medicine Woman, who slept. The women were out searching for food. Sunrise, in desperation, had gone with some of the men to raid the Texas settlements for horses so they could hunt again.

  The bells on Smoke’s collar jingled merrily in the chill stillness of the tent as she tried to push Naduah into playing with her. She butted her friend with the tiny buds of horns on the top of her head, and danced a little on her delicate, elfin hooves.

  Naduah made one last calculation of the food supply, more to postpone what she had to do than through any hope of avoiding it. Tears spilled from her eyes, blurring her sight, and she gulped back sobs as she groped in the bag where she kept her skinning knife. With the knife in one hand and her other on Smoke’s back, she led her out of the lodge and away from the village. Dog trotted a little ahead of them, and the doe frisked. She was looking forward to one of their runs out on the open plain. Naduah’s family would have meat tonight, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat any of it.

  CHAPTER 27

  The border into Oklahoma Territory wasn’t inviting especially in November. The Red River was lined with dry sand hills thirty feet tall and covered with a sparse growth of brittle weeds. A month earlier, Terrible Snows, his women, and their few ponies had waded over the sand hills and splashed through the shallow, muddy river. They had been wandering from band to band for almost a year, moving gradually farther and farther north.

  With each move Terrible Snows thought vaguely to improve his fortunes, either by finding new medicine or by buying more from yet another medicine man. He wandered with the belief that things would be better somewhere else. But they never were. The fall hunts had been scant everywhere, but his hunting had been even worse.

  North of the Red River they had caught up with Tabbe Nanica, Sun Name, and his band of Yamparika, Root Eaters. A Little Less and Mountain and Rachel put up the lodge on the muddy hem of the village as usual, their tent smaller and shabbier than the rest. The smell of rotting animal carcasses left outside the village and the dung from the horse pasture was stronger here. But at least the ponies were closer and Rachel didn’t have to walk as far to tend them. And the children left her alone. By now they avoided her as one who was touched by spirits. No one questioned Terrible Snows’ right to be there. The People were free to live with whatever band they chose, and to leave it when they wanted.

  The plain rose and fell in graceful swells that the lodges rode like small ships. But the ground was cold and dry and brown, as though crusted over. And the icy winter northers howled across the wastes with nothing to stop them east of the Rocky Mountains, hundreds of miles away. Many of the lodges had brush windbreaks around them, but there was no brush left when Terrible Snows arrived.

  Now Rachel and Terrible Snows and A Little Less were in Sun Name’s lodge. It had finally happened. New Mexican traders, Comancheros, were in camp. And they were bargaining for the white slave. Rachel’s eyes flicked from the two mestizos to the meal they were eating, her body’s hunger vying with her mind’s hope.

  “Cuánto cuesta la mujer, jefe?” José Piedad Tafoya swallowed the last piece of buffalo steak speared on the point of his long knife and wiped his hands on his vest. The grease added to several years of dirt that had dyed his clothes the color of old coffee grounds. Across from him, Chino used his lank black hair as a napkin. The flames carved his face into that of a cadaver. His ferocious, slanted black eyes and hawk’s nose made him look like a bird of prey. Chino was restless. He was too new at this, or not suited for it. He wasn’t used to even asking for something, much less paying for it.

  José watched Sun Name through narrowed eyes. How much could the chief ask for the woman? She wasn’t worth much, that was plain. He wasn’t even sure if he could get her back to Santa Fe alive. And Anglos didn’t pay much for carcasses. They paid handsomely for stock on the hoof, though, even if it was as bad off as this one was. When ransoming captives, one dwelt on the sentimental value of the merchandise.

  As though reading his mind, Rachel tried to run her fingers through her hair. She couldn’t penetrate the tangle as far as her ears. In the smothering heat of the leader’s lodge, she shivered inside her thin dress. She constantly stroked her face and smoothed her torn clothes, picking at imaginary lint. Her eyes would focus briefly, then empty. She seemed to dart into reality, look around, then run back to her cozy den of madness.

  In the past year and a half, she had learned enough Comanche to get along. Commands mostly. But now the men were speaking in handtalk and pidgin Spanish. Somewhere in her battered mind, she knew something important was happening. In her lucid moments she stared at the men’s faces intently, as though trying to read meaning in their expressions that she couldn’t get from their words. Her lips moved in silent soliloquy pleading with them to help her.

  Sun Name was not one to be rushed. Because José was young, he forgave him the breach of courtesy. Discussing business before establishing the proper atmosphere with small talk was like bathing with your clothes on: it just wasn’t as effective. Sun Name would settle things in his own time. He took his pipe out, and A Little Less pulled Rachel roughly out into the night, harsh with the crystal edges of frost.

  In broken Spanish and Comanche and graceful, flickering handtalk, the bartering progressed. It wound its slow way through the the night, meandering and doubling back on itself like the slippery trail of a snail. Sun Name did most of the talking, since negotiations could hardly be trusted to Terrible Snows. The People didn’t distinguish gender in their pronouns, so his pidgin Spanish translated something as follows.

  “Terrible Snows loves the white-eyes woman very much. He won’t want to sell him. You have to pay plenty blankets, coffee, guns, arrowheads, and horses. Maybe ten horses. Maybe twelve. Terrible Snows be plenty brokenhearted if white-eyes woman leaves.”

  “Jefe, Terrible Snows loves only his stomach and his dice game.” José knew it was going to be a hard winter, and Terrible Snows didn’t look like he could even feed his slave. “She’ll die soon. We’ll take her off your hands.” He thought of the tiny stock of goods, maybe twenty dollars worth, packed on their worn-out burros. Guns and horses indeed. “We’ll pay you a sack of coffee, a sack of sugar, three blankets, and a keg of whiskey.” The whiskey was José‘s ace, though it wasn’t always successful with the Comanche. If he could pull this trade off, it would set him up, give him the profit he needed to expand his inventory.

  “Ho-say.” Sun Name laughed and slapped José on the back. “Often have we
traded together. We will trade for many seasons to come. I love you as my brother. I love you because you make jokes all the time. But this is serious talk. The white-eyes slave works hard. Without him Terrible Snows’ kind old mother will be sad. Maybe die from so much work to do alone. Everyone loves the white-eyes woman as his own. The men enjoy him often. We could not part with him for less than eight horses. Good ones. Not the broken-down ones you sell to the Kiowa. And the blankets and the sugar and the coffee and the guns. And do you have any of those red beads? The big ones? We don’t want your stupid water, though.”

  “All right. One horse and the coffee and the sugar and the blankets.” Chino would have to walk back to Santa Fe.

  “As long as we’re joking, did I tell you about the time Dog Foot got drunk on stupid water?”

  The pipe was lost in Sun Name’s huge brown hand as he passed it to José. The hand reminded José of a bear’s paw, with its long, dirty nails and short, stubby fingers. The leader’s eyes twinkled with the joy of driving a bargain. José took a deep drag on the pipe and settled back for a long story and a longer evening. A cold wind whistled outside and he had no better place to go. He had no place to go at all, in fact.

  From here they would head back to Texas and the Valley of Tears. Then they would go south and west, threading their way through Palo Duro canyon to the Palo Duro River’s headwaters. They would water at Trujillo and cross the Puerto de los Rivajeños, the gap in the cap rock called the Door of the Plains. From there they had only to journey up the Valley of the Taos to Santa Fe. With the shape their burros were in and the miserable weather, it would probably take them at least two weeks to make the trip.