Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  To the voices of the many Tall One added his own, crying out in rage as the first charge was turned back. Crying out in frustration at the failure of the famous Comanche wheel that flew in a fury around the earth lodges, hoping to grind down the enemy as it had for so many raiding seasons. Around and around they had circled in a tight red noose of screaming warriors, while the white man knocked horsemen from the backs of their ponies, even spilling many of the animals into the dusty meadow.

  “Isatai lied to us!” shouted Antelope as he reined up beside Tall One at the far edge of the meadow where more and more of the warriors milled about, confused, frightened, and ultimately sucking on their deepest rage. Leaving their ponies and the Comanche wheel behind, more and more warriors chose to sprint forward on foot and fight behind the tai-bos’ wagons and the tall stacks the hide hunters had made of their dried buffalo hides.

  There was a moment when it seemed the gray-eyed war chief was the only one of them still mounted. Alone he charged one of the earth lodges. But his pony too was thrown, shot by the powerful medicine of those big buffalo guns. Their bravest—this war chief—made to crawl for his life, forced to seek cover behind a stack of buffalo hides, slaughtered by the white man.

  As the sun climbed ever higher toward its summer zenith, the battle became a long-distance waiting game. Out in the meadow after they had killed all the tai-bos’ horses and mules, the warriors took to sniping at the windows and doors while Tall One listened to the white men yell to one another, back and forth from one earth lodge to another. Behind that wide stack of hides, the young warrior sat, listening to the sounds those strange words made in his ears, feeling the tug of something uncomfortable in his heart as more and more of the foreign tongue made all the more sense.

  Over and over he wished it did not. Hoping he could shut out what became more and more familiar—shut out what he wished was not a language he remembered. His eyes smarting, Tall One had grown angry with himself for crying. So instead he made himself angry at the tai-bos for yelling loud enough that he could hear them use the words spoken by his father and mother, by his sister.

  It had been so long since he had thought of her—remembering now the curve of her sunburned cheeks, the pretty nose beneath the shade of that bonnet brim as they worked up the weeds in the field.

  Tall One gazed down at the soil where he knelt, the ground gone dry and thirsty. He scooped up a handful, allowing it to run through his fingers as the big bullets sang through the super-heated summer air of that meadow. And he remembered a time he had planted row upon row of seed in ground rich and dark, soil made fertile with the embrace of sun and the blessing of rain, where the old mules dragged the single-shovel plow behind them, turning the soil over in black, steamy curls where little Zeke would trundle behind, struggling beneath the huge shoulder bag filled with seed.

  Zeke. He hadn’t remembered his brother’s name in … many seasons. And now these tai-bos had brought it all welling to the surface again. Try as he might to squeeze them out, their voices still echoed in his ears. Not the hide hunters’ shouts of encouragement to one another. No, what tormented Tall One then were the voices of those who had loved him, the voices of those he had loved.

  Near the end of that terrible, bloody day, he had looked at the sun falling to the west, sensing in the old core of him that this time of the year was well past the season for planting. Instead of crops, here in this meadow all that had been sown was blood and terror and death. What else could the Kwahadi now reap but more blood and terror and death?

  That morning as the sky had lightened in the east, the hundreds of horsemen had been filled with great heart to overrun this place of the tai-bo hide men. But now as that sun sank in despair, the hundreds had found the white hunters awake and not to be clubbed in their sleep, found the enemy’s big guns shooting far and accurately, discovered the white men tenaciously clinging to the shadows of their earth-walled burrows. Every bit of fight had seeped out of the warriors.

  Like translucent milk oozing from the old sow’s teats as one of her piglets came loose, the fight had gone out of these hundreds. Like that milk gone bad, their sun-dance war medicine had gone sour in the mouths of the Kwahadi.

  By sundown Lone Wolf rode away with the Kiowa. No man tried to stop them.

  That next morning Tall One awoke in the gray stillness to see the Shahiyena of Medicine Water and Rock Forehead and the rest mounting up. They said they were going to ride north, raid settlements where there were no tai-bo hide hunters with their far-shooting guns.

  Eventually the moon shrank from its former grandeur. The same way the hope that Tall One had once recognized on the face of the gray-eyed war chief faded in those days after the fight at the earth lodges. What man would not feel some despair, having watched so many warriors hurl themselves against the might of the buffalo hunters’ guns, and still call himself a man who cared for his people?

  In those first days of frustration and rage as the war chief reluctantly turned his back on the meadow and led his horsemen away from that place of blood and defeat, there had been much angry talk, for most had yet to sort through the confusion borne of loss of hope.

  Some believed their sin had been to hold Isatai’s sun dance.

  “Other tribes hold their annual sun-gazing dances—but the Comanche have never celebrated in that fashion,” they said.

  “Yes! We must never again follow the ways of the Shahiyena or the Kiowa. We must put our feet only on the path walked by the ancient ones.”

  Once again the gray-eyed war chief and the headmen decided that The People were to avoid the white man just as they had attempted to do for far back in the generations. Only when it proved wise for the young men to attack outlying settlements to reap horses and scalps and plunder would the old men approve of such contact with the tai-bos. Yet those leaders grappled with the new reality that these days every raid brought out the yellow-leg soldiers who crossed and recrossed the Llano Estacado, hunting for the Kwahadi. And instead of the warriors who always disappeared onto the Staked Plain like breathsmoke gone in a winter gale, the Tonkawa trackers and yellow-leg soldiers preferred to attack the villages of the women and children and old ones.

  Already Tall One knew that whenever the soldiers went in search of those villages, they always found what they were looking for.

  36

  Late September 1874

  DAY AFTER ENDLESS day Company C probed deeper, rode longer, yet came up with empty hands. Tides of heat and dust and distant thunderstorms brought one day after the next washing over them, taking each day away in the same order. Summer waned and grew weary, one of the hottest any man on these plains could remember. Steamy nights swirled overhead with a million old stars flecked behind gray rain-heads, and this land once more grew old before its time. These final days of August came up clear and green-skied and hotter than the last, then imperceptibly the sun’s path grew shorter, a man unable to notice until it was too late and autumn was upon him.

  Closing fast with the odor of things dying, turning, changing—never to be the same again.

  Come this cooling of the nights, come this season of the yellow leaf, Jonah was told by the others. That’s what they said the Comanche called autumn.

  All he knew was that soon enough another winter would be closing in, and once more he had all too little to show for the miles crossed since the first green break of spring when he had decided to ride with Lamar Lockhart’s company of poorly paid Texas Rangers.

  From time to time they circled back to re-provision, backtracking east to Camp Supply, using vouchers to draw on the treasury of the great State of Texas. It was there these men caught up on the momentous news following the bloodletting at Adobe Walls. The southern plains were indeed on fire—and from the sounds of it, the government was finally determined to put an end to Indian problems down here once and for all. William Tecumseh Sherman’s War Department had ordered no less than five columns into the field, all to converge on the Staked Plain, home of the
holdouts: the Kwahadi Comanche.

  Trouble was, right in the middle of it all lay the territory assigned Major John B. Jones’s Frontier Battalion of Texas Rangers. And at the heart of that was a piece of ground marked out for patrol by Captain Lamar Lockhart’s company of horsemen. Them, and some of the most skillful nomadic red raiders of the Llano Estacado.

  Back in late August when Company C rode in to Camp Supply, they learned that Colonel John W. Davidson’s four companies of brunettes had already cut the deck. Those buffalo soldiers had forced the issue—scattering some of the fiercer bands, driving others back to their agencies. Seemed the government had demanded a roll to be made of all the peaceful bands on the reservations. Those not answering the roll call were deemed clearly hostile and would be hunted down, then driven back to their agency if possible.

  “If that ain’t possible,” Niles Coffee was explaining what had been told him by friends he knew among Camp Supply’s soldiers, “then the army’s got orders to exterminate ’em.”

  “Praise God!” Deacon Johns wailed. “Them savages are purely onhuman. Separate the wheat from the chaff, sayeth the Lord.”

  “Trouble is,” Lamar Lockhart cautioned, “all those warrior bands that didn’t answer the roll at Fort Sill, or over at Anadarko and up at Darlington—they’ve all gone off and scurried west toward the headwaters of the Red River, the Brazos—who the hell knows how far they’ll scatter now.”

  “The Kwahadi … they’re scattering?” Jonah asked anxiously.

  “Chances are that’s what they’re doing—and why we haven’t found a sign one of all that bunch that went and hit the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls,” Coffee answered.

  “You think we’ll find any Comanche?” Jonah inquired, his cheeks growing hot in angry frustration. “Or we gonna keep riding back and forth till we’re old men?”

  Lockhart turned to Hook. “You took an oath when you joined up, Jonah Hook.”

  “I don’t give a goddamn about Texas!”

  “No,” Lockhart replied all too quietly as the company of men moved close. “Maybe you don’t. But the rest of these men do. So I want you to think of one thing before you decide on booking in and giving up on this company’s duty. Think about the fact that of all these men here—I don’t know a one of them who positively knows they have a member of their family among the Comanche.”

  Jonah’s eyes moved slowly across the more than two dozen men standing quietly nearby, every last one of them watching him with intense interest. “I don’t understand what you mean, Cap’n.”

  “Jonah—it’s as simple as this: these men ride out with me into the unknown every morning for less than a dollar a day, hoping to find the scattered hostile villages, praying they’ll find white captives in those villages we do run onto. But not a one of these brave men has kin among the Kwahadi. But you do, Jonah Hook. By damned, you do.”

  He felt the sting of the words slap him with the force of a flat hand across his jaw.

  Lockhart stepped closer, his eyes gone as black as gun bores. “Jonah, I don’t know a bunch of men you could ride with who could pray any harder than this outfit has that it will be them that finds your boys for you.”

  The colicky harshness, the utter truth of the captain’s words made Hook tremble inwardly. “I … I’m sorry, Cap’n Lockhart.” He snorted back some of his unrequited anger. “I’m riding with you. Riding with all of you.”

  “Give us time, Jonah,” Niles Coffee said, “time and a little luck—we’ll find ’em for you. By God—we’re bound to find ’em.”

  That night, their last at Camp Supply for some time to come, Jonah lay awake for the longest time as the rest of them snored. Unable to sleep, he could not tear his mind loose from what war machinery the soldiers told Coffee was already in motion. If by some kind of luck his two boys were still alive and still with the hostile Kwahadi of Quanah Parker out there on the Staked Plain, there now existed the very real possibility that they would soon be in the very path of that hungry war machine.

  Two small boys …

  But he had stopped, forcing himself to remember they were no longer little. Grown to young men already. Old enough to be … soldiers themselves.

  How he had prayed for sleep to come soothe him as his fevered mind dwelt on nothing else but those five columns that would converge on the Llano Estacado to effect the final cleanup of the southern plains before winter set in. Major William R. Price was said to be marching east along the Canadian River out of Fort Union in New Mexico with eight companies of the Eighth Cavalry to effect a junction with Colonel Nelson Miles.

  Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell, leading four troops of the Ninth U.S. Negro Cavalry and two troops from the Tenth, along with two companies of the Eleventh Infantry and thirty scouts, was moving northwest across the Brazos from Fort Griffin, Texas.

  Lieutenant Colonel John W. “Black Jack” Davidson was leading six troops of his Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry, three companies of the Eleventh Infantry, and forty-four scouts west from Fort Sill.

  On south of the austere caprock of the Staked Plain, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie was probing north out of Fort Concho at the head of his column comprising the largest prong of the attack: eight companies of his battle-tough Fourth Cavalry, four more of the famous buffalo soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry, one company from the Eleventh Infantry, in addition to some thirty scouts.

  Then there was Colonel Nelson A. Miles himself, who was marching southwest at the van of eight troops of the Sixth Cavalry, four companies of the colonel’s own Fifth Infantry, along with one Parrot ten-pounder and two Gat-ling guns.

  It boggled Jonah’s mind to think that those five columns made for more than three thousand soldiers converging on the ancient buffalo ground of the Kiowa and Comanche. The war those hostiles had started with the white man would soon be over, every man was saying. Only a matter of weeks now. Then he thought of a bitch in heat, and all the town dogs yammering around her, tails up and whipping with great excitement. That female finally left with nowhere to run—only to turn and snap back at the frenzied pack.

  Sure enough, the army was going to go out and give those red heathens a bellyful of war. Whip the lords of the southern plains back to their reservations. That, or wipe them off the earth.

  At sunrise the next morning, Lockhart turned their noses west again for another swing across the North Fork of the Red River. With this second summer of horrid drought, no man could say he relished the thought of more miles and saddle galls, riding all day through the stifling dust and searing heat to find nothing more than a parched pucker of ground where they had expected to find a water hole to slake the thirst of their animals. No water, and only stunted, sun-parched grass to offer those lathered horses.

  With a vengeance summer had gripped the plains in its dry and lifeless paw, refusing to release the land. Until the second week of September, when the skies clouded, frothed, then boiled over, drenching the thirsty killing ground.

  But with the rains came a whole new set of problems. Now the horses had trouble pulling each hoof out of the thick red gumbo that sucked at man and beast alike. Day and night the thunder rolled, rattling like dice bones in a horn cup. Storms that gave the men little relief, and no time for any of them to dry out. They slept wet and cold, if they slept at all. They rode soaked to the skin, shivering clear to the marrow, teeth chattering as the first winds of autumn hissed out of the west with a wiry whine, hurrying before them those whispered hints of winter.

  Somewhere beneath this same low sky, he repeatedly told himself, his two boys slept and ate. And rode, prisoners of the Kwahadi. Just out of reach. Somewhere out there in all this tangle of creeks and streams and river systems, this land haunted by the holdout Comanche. He had to remind himself that they walked beneath this same sky. Under this same unforgiving sky.

  Jonah grew thinner still. Hard for a man to keep his appetite about him when there was little in the way of cooked food to eat. Few fires allowed, by order of Captain Lockhart. So ins
tead Jonah fed himself on his renewed hopes. Those, and his fervent prayers.

  Beneath that unforgiving sky, filled horizon to horizon with slate-colored sheets of bone-numbing rain, Jonah Hook prayed for his boys harder than he had in the six years since he last left Fort Laramie behind him.

  Prayed he would find them both before the army cornered Quanah Parker.

  This season of the year the air freshened, cooled quickly, after the sun went down. It felt good on Tall One’s face as he and the others loped toward the east, driving their great pony herd before them. They hoped to lure away the yellow-legs who rode with Three-Finger Kinzie, draw the pony soldiers away from the village as it marched to the north.

  “The tracks of our herd will serve as the bait,” explained the gray-eyed war chief. “Kinzie cannot resist the chance to follow so wide a trail.”

  In the past five days the soldiers had drawn ever closer to the village that hurried to the canyon where they would join Lone Wolf’s Kiowa in safety until Kinzie passed on by. But they needed meat to feed their people. Of late too many days had passed without time taken to hunt. And if they were to wait out the soldiers at the bottom of the dark canyon, then the Kwahadi desperately needed meat. Reluctantly the war chief had allowed a small band of hunters to go in search of the buffalo said to be just south of the canyon.

  He hoped this wide, scoured trail of the pony herd would be enough to draw the army scouts from discovering the trail of their meat hunters. Drawing so close to the canyon where his people would hide, the war chief had come up with what all the Kwahadi prayed would be a successful diversion.

  Many of the warriors had even tied bundles of lodgepoles to some of the herd ponies, the better to scratch the ground in shallow furrows, to fool the Tonkawa trackers into thinking this was indeed the trail of a great village fleeing to the east, back to the reservation.

  Surely, the lure of so fresh a trail could not be denied by the pony soldiers and their scouts.