Robson, Lucia St. Clair

by Ride the Wind

  Night waited at the top of the bluff, and he whickered when he saw them. Naduah ran her hand down the arch of his neck while Wanderer set Weasel on the ground. Naduah’s robe draped over her like a tent, and part of it trailed behind her in a royal train. Weasel let go of it long enough to tug at Wanderer’s leggings, setting the tiny bells there to jingling. Barely coming to the tops of his thighs, she tilted her head way back to look up at him.

  “What did you bring me from the raid to the Big Water?”

  “A nice rattlesnake for a friend.”

  “But I don’t want…” Weasel caught on. “You did not,” she said, aggrieved.

  Wanderer searched inside the pouches slung on Night’s surcingle. He pulled out a length of deep blue velvet ribbon and handed it to her. Next he found a turnip-shaped top, carved of wood and painted bright red above the string’s groove and navy blue below it. The groove itself was white. He had made her a string of twisted sinew for it. She knew immediately what it was, even though it was more sophisticated than the crudely carved ones her friends played with. She smiled up at him.

  “Will you show me how to spin it with the string?” The ones she had seen were spun with a whip, thongs attached to a wooden handle.

  “Maybe Star Name will show you. I have to talk to Naduah.”

  He gave Star Name her presents wrapped in calico. She unwrapped them carefully and smiled her thanks for the mirror and the box of vermillion. Naduah might pretend ignorance of what was between herself and Wanderer, but Star Name was aware of it. She could feel the tension vibrating like hummingbirds’ wings around them. She helped Weasel tuck the robe up and free her hands to clutch her presents to her chest. Together they headed toward the village.

  Wanderer passed the bundle of blanketing to Naduah. She opened it and held up the Mexican bridle, turning it so the silver ornaments glinted in the slanted sunlight. She felt as though there were a cord tightening around her throat and she could barely talk.

  “It’s beautiful.” Wanderer had to lean closer to hear her.

  “I thought of you when I saw it.”

  “Please don’t go,” she whispered.

  “I have to. But I said I’d be back.”

  “How many years will it be this time?” .

  “Only two. Or maybe three.”

  “Forever.”

  “The year will be gone before you’ve had a chance to miss me.”

  “I need you to help me with Wind.”

  “You’re doing a good job with Wind. You only need me to fight off the swarms of men that’ll be around you soon. Will you wait for me?” She nodded, her eyes down. He put his hand lightly on her bright hair, and brushed a lock of it over her shoulder. He rested his fingers there for an instant. Then he turned. He swung effortlessly onto Night’s back, and the pony pranced a little, eager to be free and traveling again.

  “I have to hurry. Spaniard is waiting for me.” He rode off without looking back.

  Naduah sat on a boulder, her shoulder still tingling from the light touch of his fingers. She draped the delicate, intricately tooled bridle across her thighs, and put the blanketing across her back to keep out the wind. Then she crossed her arms on her knee, lowered her head onto them, and sobbed.

  Outside the lodge, thunder grumbled threats of rain. Inside, Wanderer quietly watched his mother. Hawk Woman, direct his father’s youngest wife as she cut out a pair of leggings. Finally, satisfied that they would be done right, she picked up a large tin bucket and started for the door.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “There’s white clay by the river,” she said. “I’m going to dig some to clean your father’s clothes.”

  “It’ll rain soon. Do it later.” He studied her eyes, unnaturally large and bright in her thin face.

  “Then the clay will be too wet.”

  “It’s too wet and heavy even now. Ask Visits Her Relatives or Spotted Pony to do it. That’s why father married them.”

  “They’re both busy. And they don’t bother to find the purest clay.” She disappeared through the doorway.

  She was so stubborn, like a mule at times. With a soft sigh, Wanderer rose and followed her. He would go along with her as though he had nothing better to do. And he would casually help her carry the bucket, leaden with wet clay. Hawk Woman wouldn’t even slow down, much less quit her endless labor. Iron Shirt, Wanderer’s father, had married two other women to help her. But whenever she caught up with her own work, she went off to help a friend or relative.

  Iron Shirt seemed oblivious to the fact that his first and favorite wife was ill, and had been weakening for over a year. Or perhaps he chose to ignore it, thinking that if he refused to recognize her illness it would leave. Iron Shirt was a shrewd judge of character, a master at manipulating men, yet he couldn’t see that the mother of his only son was in pain and dying. Nor would he listen when Wanderer tried to tell him.

  Hawk Woman never complained, never indicated that she was being consumed by some slow inner fire. She denied it when Wanderer questioned her. He dreaded returning to his father’s band after each trip he took. He feared that she might have died while he was gone. And when he was home, he spent as much time as possible with her, knowing her days were limited. He reminisced with her about his childhood, told her of his adventures, joked with her as he had when he was young, and helped her as much as he could.

  Now he towered over her as they walked through the village. She seemed to be shrinking with time, and he wondered how much of that could be explained by the fact that he had grown taller.

  “Wanderer!” One of Iron Shirt’s friends ran after them, dodging around an empty drying rack.

  “Yes.” Wanderer and his mother stopped in the middle of the street. All around them women and girls pulled strips of drying meat off the racks and covered equipment to protect it from the rain that was coming.

  “My son has just returned from his vision quest. He wants you to help him paint his shield.”

  “Why doesn’t he ask Iron Shirt or one of the medicine men? They’re the ones who should do it.” Painting sacred symbols on a young man’s first shield was a very holy task, one usually reserved for the oldest and most respected warriors.

  “He wants you. He says the wolf spoke to him, promised to help him. And no one has more powerful wolf medicine than you.”

  Wanderer stood a moment, thinking. Iron Shirt boasted about his son’s powerful medicine and the fact that more and more men, even the older ones, were seeking his advice these days. But tension was growing between them. The young cub would someday challenge the leader of the pack, and they both knew it.

  “I will help your son,” said Wanderer. “I’ll come to his lodge tonight. Tell him to cut cedar and sage for the fire.”

  “My heart is glad. I will have a pony and other presents for you.” The man beamed at him, turned, and strode off to give his son the good news.

  “The young men all admire you, my son. They tell stories about you when you’re gone. They await your return each time you leave. A warrior with your reputation shouldn’t be seen helping a woman with her chores.”

  Wanderer smiled down at his mother. “A warrior with my reputation can do anything he pleases.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Tears glittered in Cub’s eyes. In his right hand he held a sharp rock. In his left he brandished a hefty chunk of firewood, a club to defend himself.

  “No! I won’t go. Grandfather, help me.” But Old Owl sat hunched and sobbing in front of his lodge door. His robe was pulled entirely over his head in deep mourning. Cub had the desolate feeling that he was already dead and being grieved. The men of the band were gathering outside their lodges, muttering angrily. Women collected in their doorways, watching and crying.

  David Faulkenberry sat back on his heels in the dust. He ran a hand through his thick, gray-streaked hair and squinted at the child in perplexity. Getting down on his level and reasoning with him obviously wasn’t the answer. He stood, t
owering over the boy, who was big for his age. Cub took a better grip on his weapons and glared at him. He’d be a lot to handle, and taking him by force might set the braves off. The woman who thought she was John’s mother was wailing in a lodge nearby. His aunt and his mother’s friends were comforting her by howling even louder.

  The women were getting on David’s nerves. This was turning out to be harder than he had figured. Then a slender warrior shouldered his way through the men and stood behind Cub.

  “Who’s that?” David muttered from the comer of his mouth. Jim Shaw, the Delaware scout, answered, looking straight ahead and signing as he talked. He knew it was dangerous to hold conversations in a language the Comanche didn’t understand. They were quick to expect treachery from Texans. He signed Faulkenberry’s question and the answer Arrow Point gave.

  “Bear Cub’s father. He will tell the boy to go with us.”

  Arrow Point leaned down with tears in his own hard eyes, and spoke softly in his son’s ear. Jim couldn’t hear but could guess what he was saying. Arrow Point would tell Cub to go with the men and escape at the first opportunity. Shaw neglected to tell the white man that. There was no sense complicating things even more.

  But even Arrow Point had a difficult time convincing Cub. The child spat out a flood of chopped, explosive Comanche. Shaw chuckled a little as he translated it.

  “Bear Cub says he has a pony and friends and a family here. He likes the taste of raw liver and he likes to hunt. He will be a herder on the next raid. When he grows up, he will kill Texans. And he’ll start with you if you don’t leave him alone.” Shaw grinned, his handsome face mocking. “Do you think his white family will want him?”

  It was a good question, but there was no turning back now. It had taken David Faulkenberry six years to locate the boy, tracking down elusive reports from soldiers and hunters, trappers and traders. If it weren’t for his robin’s egg blue eyes Bear Cub would have looked like any other urchin in the village. His blond hair had been darkened with grease. This would not be a simple matter of exchanging the goods and horses David had brought and taking the boy with him.

  “What do we do now?” David asked. He was glad he had brought Shaw along. The man deserved his reputation, even if he was arrogant.

  “We wait. John Parker will be delivered to us.”

  “If they want to keep him so much, why are they letting me have him at all?” Shaw answered with a shrug. They weren’t letting the white man have the child. They were only loaning him, or rather renting him, until the boy escaped. Old Owl was putting on quite an act, though. He was a foxy old man. Shaw was impressed.

  But it wasn’t an act. Under the stifling robe Old Owl was genuinely grieving, sobbing uncontrollably. He mourned the loss of his beloved grandnephew, and more. There was a sense of loss that he couldn’t define. The lost honor at San Antonio and Plum Creek. The loss of his own youth. The loss of the past, and a feeling of impending doom. He could size people up well, and he knew that Cub wasn’t likely to escape from this white man. From some other maybe, but not this one.

  He saw the stubbornness in Faulkenberry’s face. Old Owl had stayed a leader of his band for thirty years because he could read faces. If he hadn’t agreed to sell the boy, this one would have come back with soldiers. And there was no avoiding them. They would have hounded his people across the plains. They never gave up, the white man. Burn them out and they built again, in the same place. They didn’t know when they were unsuited for a country. They stayed and changed the country to suit them.

  They were like the warrior ants that held on, their pinchers grasping their enemies, even after their lumpy heads had been torn from their bodies. They were like ants in many ways, the white eyes. They were everywhere and into everything. One year there were none, and the next their nests were spreading. Soon they’d be moving into the People’s lodges and making treaties giving them rights to the honey supply.

  The white men were changing the very patterns of life. Old Owl knew, somewhere in his gut, that the People could no longer depend on their world to function as it had since before their ancestors could remember. White men disturbed the order of things, sent it off onto strange paths, until it might never find the main trail again.

  There in the dark under the robe, Old Owl came to a fork in his own life’s road. If the boy came back, he would rejoice, and do whatever he had to do to keep him. If he didn’t, there was no longer any reason for Old Owl to avoid the white men. He knew he and all the People’s warriors could no more turn them back than they could turn back a flood, or the wind.

  He would start down their path and learn all he could about them. He didn’t have many years left to him anyway, and as much as he disliked them, they interested him. As would any new species of animal that intruded into his world.

  Maybe, in the end, he would find that Old Man Coyote had been playing a practical joke and would resolve it, as he usually did. But Old Owl doubted it. Old Owl was sure of only one thing. Bear Cub, Wee-lah, was one of the People. He would never be a white man again. It gave him a grim sort of satisfaction.

  “God damn it to hell and the four quarters!” David felt the cactus spine drive into his foot like a hornet’s sting. He swore again under his breath, determined that the boy wouldn’t see him rattled. He had been stupid to take his boots off when he pulled his blankets over him for the night, but his feet hurt. They were swollen from weeks in the saddle hunting little John.

  He stubbed his toe and swore again, but he didn’t slow down. He could see the small shadow flitting ahead of him, running straight for the horses. Cub had already slashed the tether and was leaping for his spotted pony’s back when David lunged and caught him by one foot. They both rolled, kicking and struggling, under the horse’s fidgety hooves. It took all David’s strength to hold the boy. Jim Shaw came running to help.

  “Now I know why they call the Comanche Snakes.” David was breathing hard when they hauled Cub to his feet. David couldn’t understand the abuse John showered on him, but he knew it must be imaginative. John was certainly that. David was at a loss to know how the boy had gotten the line off his wrists without disturbing the other end, tied to David’s own. He was like a little snake, wriggling out of anything.

  Faulkenberry and Shaw rode across the cold, flat Oklahoma plain toward Fort Gibson. A norther blew against the men’s left sides, trying to shoulder them off the pale, narrow ruts of the trail. The sky was heavy and gray and immense. It hung so low it seemed as though it would smother them. As far as David could see, the prairie lay cold and brown and lifeless. Dead to the horizon.

  Dead to the horizon and beyond. One rode for days, expecting some change. And it never came. It was a place that bred loneliness like slums bred cholera. Let the Indians have it. David rode sunk as deeply in his own thoughts as he was in the heavy buffalo coat one of the captains at the fort had loaned him. He had a piece of wool blanketing wrapped around his head and face, and strips wound around the palms of his hands. His red, chapped fingers were bare to grip the stiff reins. It’s the wind. It never quits. It’s like a child whining and tugging at you day after day, year after year. No wonder the women go crazy here. He’d be glad to get back to the hills and trees of east Texas.

  Behind the two men, glaring from under his long, filthy tangled hair like a rat cornered in a haystack, rode John Parker. He was trussed as tightly as a bale of cotton on a gulf coast wharf, and David and Jim kept carefully out of spitting range. If Comanche boys had the same sort of contests white boys did, Bear Cub must be a champion.

  David almost grinned at the thought of Lucy Parker Usery’s new husband being presented with Wee-lah Parker. Leaving him with them would be like dropping a hornet’s nest into the middle of a Sunday school picnic. David thought perhaps he should take John to Elder James Parker first. If anyone could handle him, he could. It would be more charitable for Lucy, if not for the boy. James Parker didn’t believe in sparing the rod and spoiling the child.

  Li
ttle James Pratt Plummer had been ransomed too, and was waiting for them at the fort. He would go home with his cousin. Jamie was younger and easier to handle. Luther and his second wife could take him back. Elizabeth Kellogg had been returned relatively unharmed just six months after her capture. And Rachel Plummer had died three years ago. Poor woman. David shook his head slightly at the memory of her.

  Now only little Cynthia Ann was left of those stolen at Fort Parker over six years ago. Six years ago. Was it possible? She wasn’t little Cynthia Ann anymore. He wondered briefly what she must be like now. And how much she must be suffering. Perhaps John could tell them something, if he could ever be persuaded to speak a Christian tongue. And in time he could be. Children were adaptable. He’d forget all that Comanche barbarism soon enough.

  “So how did little John Parker get along with his Uncle James?” Abram Anglin lay back against the riverbank, drew his bony knees up to trap his body’s warmth, and pulled his wool shirt tighter around him.

  “You remember when that grizzly got into Old Man Lunn’s cabin and rearranged the furniture and decorated the walls with the larder?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, just imagine how it would have looked if two bears had been in there, and you have the picture.” David chuckled at the thought of it. “James figured to take the damages out of the boy’s hide, but he must have grown several extra layers of it while he was with the Indians. He didn’t even miss the little bit the willow switch took.”

  “He’ll give those Pre-destrian, whattayacallit Baptists a run for their money. Think I’ll drop in on Elder James next time I’m Anderson County way and see the show. By the way, Faulk, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why’d you go after them boys? They ain’t yours.”

  “I don’t know, Abram. Seems like I had to. To tie up the loose ends, if you know what I mean. It’s like when you’re driving a pack train and a load comes loose and pieces are flapping in the wind. You’ve just got to stop the whole train and see to it. I can understand James Parker’s obsession with it. He won’t rest until they’re all accounted for. And the only one left is Cindy Ann.”