Robson, Lucia St. Clair

by Ride the Wind

  “I’ll bring you scalps.”

  “Wonderful.” Star Name turned to Naduah. “Sister, how do you like your scalps, roasted or boiled?”

  “And I’ll hunt for you too, of course. Women!”

  “Wolf Road, how are Takes Down The Lodge and Sunrise and Medicine Woman and Something Good?” asked Naduah.

  “And Black Bird and little Weasel?” added Star Name.

  “Has Pahayuca begun trading with the Texans?” asked Wanderer.

  “One at a time.” Upstream, now Wolf Road, patiently went over all the gossip of the Wasps that he knew. And he knew most of it. When they had wrung every last drop of fresh news from him, Naduah turned to Wanderer.

  “You said we were going south.”

  “We are.”

  “My sense of direction isn’t that bad. We’re headed north and east.”

  He grinned at her. Being away from Iron Shirt’s camp seemed to have restored his good humor.

  “We’ll head north a while, then south. I want to see what the country’s like. I haven’t been up north for a year.” Wanderer was a lone wolf now, searching for his own territory.

  They camped that night on the Salt Fork of the Red River. Broad swells of grassy prairie paralleled it for twelve miles. The clear stream was twenty feet across, with huge cotton woods along the river banks. The women rushed to raise their lodges before the rain that had threatened all day. They could see it as they rode, a rusty gray curtain hanging from the black clouds on the horizon.

  Naduah didn’t take time to lash a platform to keep their gear out of the mud. She leaned the loaded travois against the lodge poles and covered them with old hides. She fell asleep that night listening to the rain patter against the taut leather wall above her head. The next day dawned clear and cool and freshly scrubbed.

  As they rode at the head of the procession, Wanderer continued their discussion of the day before. They did that often, sometimes picking up the end of a conversation that had been dropped a month earlier.

  “Your sense of direction isn’t bad at all, golden one. But traveling on the Staked Plains can be confusing.”

  “I’ve noticed.” They topped a high ridge dividing the waters of the north and middle forks of the Red River, at the eastern edge of the plateau. From that height they could see the valleys of both streams, although the rivers themselves were screened by the heavy growth of trees along them. The Staked Plains were behind them now, rippling and wrinkling and blending into the rolling, high plains to the north. Wanderer pointed to the valleys.

  “Streams are usually parallel. If you’re traveling upstream, follow the ridges, toward the headwaters. You’ll have to branch out when you hit a tributary, but at least you’ll be headed in the approximate direction you want to go. If you’re traveling downstream, that method doesn’t work. Do you know why?”

  “Because going downstream you’ll run into dead ends where the tributaries meet the main stream. You’ll have to descend the ravine, cross, and climb up again. You could use that method if you were willing to ford a lot of tributaries, couldn’t you?”

  “You could. But there are easier ways to orient yourself.”

  “What are they?”

  “The wind. It blows steadily here.”

  “Does it ever stop?”

  Wanderer thought a moment.

  “I don’t remember it stopping. Except just before a really bad norther. Tonight I’ll show you stars that can guide you.” He didn’t bother mentioning that she should notice every feature of the landscape and store the image away in her memory. He knew she already did that.

  As they moved northward, toward the Canadian River, more people joined them. They came in small groups, preceded by their dust clouds. Most of them were displaced Penateka, forced from their homelands by the Texas settlements. But there were Quohadi too, and Kotsoteka, the Buffalo Eaters from the lands to the east. They were men who knew Wanderer and wanted to ride with him.

  Naduah had long since stopped being surprised at how fast news spread among the People as they camped in isolated villages scattered throughout their vast territory. The newcomers fell casually into line with the others. The women were soon chatting like old friends, and the children chasing after each other. The men rode forward to pay their respects to the leader of the band. No one questioned their right to be there. The People were used to coming and going as they pleased.

  Finally the group halted on the flat top of a high hill that towered two hundred feet over the beautiful valley spread below it. The valley sloped gradually upward on the other side, and formed a ridge with outcroppings of rock along its crest. A spring flowed from it and fell in a series of narrow waterfalls to join the creek below.

  The rains had turned the hills a vivid green. Cactuses were vibrant flecks of color in the grass—pinks and yellows, white and deep purples and crimson. The yuccas, thriving in the wet autumn, still had stalks of red flowers rising from the centers of their fanned, swordlike leaves. A small white yucca moth fluttered past Naduah. She was probably on her way to lay her eggs and, in the process, pollinate the plants that depended on her for their survival.

  Meadowlarks sang, their yellow breasts bright in the sunlight. The air was sweet with their flutelike warbling. From the deep grass a pale coyote emerged and loped aloofly in front of them, down the hill and into the trees along the creek. Wanderer ignored it all, concentrating his attention on the scene below him.

  At the bottom of the ridge across the valley, men swarmed. A depression about eighty feet square and a few inches deep had been paved with hard-packed adobe mixed with animal blood and ash to harden it and make it water resistant. Walls two and a half feet thick were rising around it.

  For acres in all directions the ground was a grid of wooden brick molds. Each mold was ten inches by eighteen inches and five inches deep. Some were empty and some full of the buff-colored adobe laid out to dry in the sun.

  There was a shout below when someone sighted Wanderer and his band. The Mexican workers scurried for cover, dodging through the latticework of molds and around the piles of gravel and burned grass waiting to be mixed with the clay. Fifteen-foot beams were dropped with a clatter and rolled down the slope. Men who were tramping the gooey mortar with their bare feet left buff-colored tracks to the low walls, where their muddy soles disappeared over its edge.

  Under her stony stare Naduah smiled a little to see them scatter like prairie chickens before her husband and his warriors. Only one man stood his ground. He rode slowly to meet them.

  “It’s Hook Nose,” said Wanderer. “It would be better if you hid, golden one.”

  Naduah drew back among the women and pulled her robe over her head. She felt safer here, away from the settlements, but the man coming toward them was white. She was taking no chances.

  William Bent held his arms up over his head and shook hands with himself. Wanderer locked his forefingers in the sign of peaceful greeting. Then he beckoned his group to follow him. Bent was small and dark, with heavy, slate-gray eyebrows like gathering storm clouds over a hawk’s nose.

  The Cheyenne called him Little White Man, and they considered him one of their own. He had married Owl Woman, the daughter of their chief, Gray Thunder. The Kiowa and Comanche knew him as Hook Nose, but all the Indians knew him. Already the women in Wanderer’s group were gathering their spare buffalo robes and the men were considering which of their ponies and mules they’d be willing to trade. William and his brother, Charles, had operated trading posts for years. And the Indians trusted them as they trusted few white men.

  The People camped for two days near the site of the new trading post. And when they left, their pack animals were loaded with calico, lead, powder, coffee, and trade cloth. Naduah and Star Name both had bright new vermillion paint in the parts of their hair. They had painted the insides of their ears with it, and Naduah had carefully stroked three vertical lines onto her chin. Wanderer was silent, disappointed that there had been none of the new repeat
ing pistols for sale at the post. He had come north to find them, and was now planning his next move. He had no way of knowing that the maker of the wonderful pistols, Samuel Colt, was bankrupt and that no more were being manufactured.

  Naduah heard the cries first. She kicked Wind toward them, crashing down the embankment they were following and into the brush-filled ravine along the shallow creek. A mule bolted up the other side, scattering the split willow lathes that were only half tied onto his back. Wolf Road and Cruelest One took off in hot pursuit.

  “Naduah, come back!” Wanderer would be angry with her. She knew better than to rush into a blind spot like that. There was always the possibility of an ambush at a watering place. But her instincts had taken over. She could no more have resisted that cry than a mother doe could resist the bleat of its terrified fawn. The cries were those of a child.

  She found him crouched against a boulder, babbling in terror and holding his leg. There was a dry whirring sound and the crackle of leaves as a dusty brown and black rattler, six feet long, twined off among the stems of the plum bushes.

  “Wanderer, the fire horn.” She didn’t need to explain. He quickly gathered twigs and dry leaves and pulled the horn’s strap over his head. He yanked out the hardwood stopper and the moist rotten wood that lined the inside. He shook the live coal onto the twigs and fed it sprigs of dry moss, blowing gently to fan it into a blaze. Then he held one of his arrow heads in the flames, feeding the fire until the metal glowed a deep, translucent orange-red.

  While he was doing it, Naduah ran after the boy, who bolted when he saw the men. She and Star Name and Deep Water darted through the bushes like children chasing a rabbit. They knew they had to stop him as soon as possible. The more he ran, the faster the venom would reach his heart.

  Deep Water tackled him and sent him sprawling. He pinioned the child’s arms while Star Name threw herself across his thin, heaving midsection. Naduah knelt on his unhurt leg to hold it and grasped his other ankle firmly in her left hand. With her knife she made small incisions over the punctures. She sucked blood from the cuts and spat it until Wanderer arrived with her medicine bag and the heated arrowhead. The boy had been jibbering in Spanish, but when he saw the metal, pulsing with intense heat, he screamed.

  Wanderer ignored him and knelt beside Naduah. He quickly bored the point of the arrow into the holes left by the snake’s fangs. Rows of teeth marks fringed the fang punctures. Already the skin was discoloring and swelling. The heat seared the flesh, cauterizing it and drying up the poison. The boy fainted. Naduah sprinkled pulverized tobacco over the raw, ugly wound and bound a prickly pear pad over it.

  She mounted Wind, and Wanderer gently lifted the child and sat him in front of her. She held him in the circle of her arms until he regained consciousness. When she felt him begin to stir, she murmured to him, trying to soothe him with the little Spanish she knew. Spanish was the language of trade, and most of the People knew some.

  “Está bien, niñito. No te haremos daño. We won’t hurt you.”

  “Dejeme. Dejeme. No me maten,” the child sobbed it over and over, begging them to leave him, not to kill him.

  “He must belong to the Mexicans who’re building the trader’s lodge,” said Wanderer.

  “What will we do with him?”

  “Keep him. You’ll need help when the child is born. This one can work for you.”

  “Will you adopt him?”

  “No. We will have a son of our own soon.” Wanderer had no doubts about that. “Adopting this one will make life complicated when our son grows up.”

  The boy looked about ten years old. An unruly pile of wiry black hair obscured big round eyes that stared wildly around him. He wore faded brown cotton pants, many sizes too large and tied around his narrow waist with a frayed cord. His shirt had been patched and repatched with scraps of different colors. Each patch had been appliqued from the inside, the edges of the holes neatly turned under, until the shirt looked like an intricate piece of artwork. Someone cared about him.

  Wanderer tied him onto one of the extra mules, and the band resumed its travels, still to the north and now westwardly.

  “Where are we going?” asked Naduah.

  “To the Cimarron River to collect salt. It’s only a few days’ ride. There’s a plain covered with salt. It looks like snow that has melted and refrozen into ice. It glitters in the sun. As long as we’re this far north we might as well get some.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll go to Medicine Bluff.”

  “To the east of here?” Naduah had heard of it, but had never seen it.

  “Yes. I want to pray to the spirits for a son.”

  “Medicine Woman once told me why you were named Wanderer. I never realized how right she was.”

  “Would you rather stay in one place?” He looked over at her. “Are you unhappy?”

  “Of course not.”

  Unhappy? She spent her days in the company of Wanderer and her closest friends. She watched the awesome, immense landscape change subtly daily and from day to day. She watched the sun shine in shifting patterns alternating with the shadows of the huge, billowing clouds overhead. She saw the wind approach from far off, riding on rippling waves through the grass. She felt it arrive, cool on her cheeks and hair.

  Even Wind and Night were behaving like colts in spring. Night would kick out and whinny. He swerved to bump into Wind, who butted him back. Naduah laid her hand on her own stomach and felt the small bulge there. No. She wasn’t unhappy.

  Naduah stood with her feet spread, one on each side of the shallow hole in the birth lodge. She grasped the stake to brace herself, giving herself leverage to push. She contracted her muscles and helped the child toward the light. The pains were close together now. Tawia Petih, Wears Out Moccasins, squatted next to her, her large, square hands held between Naduah’s legs to ease the baby into the furlined depression. Star Name wiped the sweat from her sister’s brow with a rag dipped in cool water. The tent was fragrant with the sage burned to purify it.

  Naduah missed Medicine Woman often, but never more than now. She tried to imagine her grandmother’s low voice soothing her as the baby moved toward birth. And she regretted that there was no grandfather waiting outside to ask the sex of his grandchild. They had not seen Iron Shirt since they had left his village in the fall, six months ago. It was Wanderer who stood outside, pacing back and forth, as he had been all night, waiting for word. Deep Water and Sore-Backed Horse waited with him.

  “Here comes the head.” Wears Out Moccasins was a big, solid woman who had followed them when they set out on their own. “Every band needs a medicine woman,” she had said. “And besides, my son, the great war leader, wants me to stay home and help his wife with the children. I like children, but I’ve raised my own. I want to travel, to raid. I’ve been an obedient daughter, wife, and mother for fifty-five years. Now I want to try something different.”

  Naduah doubted that Wears Out Moccasins had ever been obedient, but she let that pass. It did no good to argue with her. And she was a welcome addition to the band. She was a powerful shaman. Her name meant Wears Out Moccasins And Throws Them Away. And she didn’t wear her moccasins out by being an obedient wife and mother. She went raiding often with the men. Her horse herd was as big as any man’s among them. But she didn’t have Medicine Woman’s soft voice or gentle laugh. Her hands were large and rough. Her manner was rough too. She had a way of reducing people to the size of children when she was angry with them. Her son had probably been glad to see her go. Her daughter-in-law was undoubtedly happy about it.

  “Here he comes,” she said.

  “Is he a boy?” Naduah craned to see.

  “He’s not far enough out to tell yet. But he will be. Wanderer asked me to make medicine to be sure.” Perhaps the People had so much faith in Wears Out Moccasins’ medicine because she did.

  The baby cleared the torn tunnel and dropped into her hands. She lowered him slowly into the silky rabbit and ermi
ne furs. Her hands were more than gentle enough as she bit the cord through and tied it.

  “It’s a boy, Sister!” said Star Name. Wears Out Moccasins lumbered to the doorway.

  “E-hait-sma, your close friend,” she called out. There was a whoop outside and the sound of feet running. Lance could already be heard chanting the news, and the drums had started, picking it up.

  Wears Out Moccasins cradled the squalling child in her huge arms and laid a big hand along Naduah’s wet cheek. It was a brief touch, not lingering long enough to be accused of affection. Star Name tucked the coiled, bloody umbilical cord into the small beaded bag to hang in a hackberry tree. Wears Out Moccasins carried the baby to the nearby stream to wash him. Naduah could hear his cries rise to a shriek when the cold water hit him. She walked stiffly to the pile of thick robes and sat wearily, leaning propped against the willow-withe back support. Star Name handed her a rag dampened with warm water, and she washed off the drying blood and placental fluid.

  When Wears Out Moccasins returned, she rubbed the baby with bear fat and started to give him to his mother. He screwed his tiny face up and began to wail again. Wears Out Moccasins held his nose tightly closed been her thick fingers. His face turned pink, then red, then purple as he tried to cry and breathe at the same time. When he gave up the crying and chose to breathe instead, she let his nose go. He immediately began to cry. She repeated the process once, then again, until Naduah feared she would kill the child. When Wears Out Moccasins let go of his nose the third time, the baby was silent. She handed him to his mother.

  “Now he’s cured of crying.”

  “I was afraid he wouldn’t survive the lesson.”

  “It seems that way. That’s why mother’s can’t be trusted to teach their own babies.”

  Naduah looked down at his fuzzy black head while he nuzzled her breast. Star Name burned more sage and cleaned up the lodge. She carried out the hide of bloody water that had been heated for the birth. Women began arriving to admire the baby. Wears Out Moccasins boiled roots and onions and roasted bread on flat stones next to the fire. Naduah couldn’t eat meat during the time of childbirth, and she nibbled on dried plums as her son nursed. Then she rocked him to sleep, crooning to him as he lay nestled in her arms.