Shadow Riders: The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

  Already the first winter storm had come to blanket the land. The snow had gone nearly as fast as it had come while the weather grew warm enough for the great buffalo hunt to begin.

  But it had been many days now since Quanah Parker had sent out the young scouts to search for the herds. While they could ride quickly across the Staked Plain on their ponies, the village traveled much slower, dragging travois and the old ones along. When buffalo were spotted by the scouts, they were to set large signal fires, the smoke of which would serve as beacons for the village to follow.

  There had been no signal fire for more than twenty days.

  Again Quanah counted the knots he had tied in the long, thin rawhide whang he carried stuffed under his belt. One knot tied each night his people had failed to find signal smoke on the far horizons. Each night he prayed, and morning as well, that the new day would bring discovery of the great herd, for this was most strange—not finding the buffalo moving south toward its winter range.

  “Quanah!”

  Unmoving as he sat in the cold wind, the chief had been watching the young scout riding up on his winded pony for a long time now, having first found the youngster breaking the northern skyline far, far away.

  “You have seen some smoke from the signal fires?” Quanah asked hopefully.

  “No,” and the youngster shook his head as he came to a halt. “No smoke.”

  “You have winded your pony for no reason?”

  “I have seen something from the hill … there,” and he pointed to the northeast, toward the land of the river the white man called the Canadian. “You must come see.”

  “Is this a good thing you want me to see, young one?”

  Again the scout shook his head, as if ashamed, even afraid, to answer. He looked away, unable to confront the chief’s gray eyes. “Come, Quanah. And behold.”

  Even before they reached the top of the ridge, Quanah knew.

  One gently sloping hill after another they had put behind them, but he knew before they reached the top of the last one what the young scout wanted to show him.

  Above, against the clear, winter sky, hung the lazy, big-winged birds. Predators—circling. The blue above was filled with their noisy protests and beating wings.

  At the crest of the ridge, he saw. His pony fought the rawhide surcingle, its nostrils flaring at the overpowering stench. Both ponies attempted to back down the slope, but were held in check by their Comanche riders.

  Littering the small valley that seemed to stretch endlessly below him, Quanah saw the thousands of carcasses.

  So many of them, Grandfather Above! he thought to himself.

  Around every one fluttered the busy vultures, while still more hung like black-winged evil against the sky above them, crying out in complaint, as if worried there would be no meat for them. Quanah knew there would be plenty for all the carrion eaters.

  “Look at them, young one,” Quanah said quietly, covering his mouth and nose with a bandanna and one hand to keep out what he could of the strong stench of this place. “The birds grow so fat on the rotting meat that they can hardly fly.”

  The young one nodded, his reply written in his moist eyes.

  Even upwind as they were, the stench grew overpowering and burned a man’s eyes. Never before had Quanah smelled anything so bad. Nor had he ever seen destruction this extensive. Even the time the strange cloud shaped like a tinkling tin cone had tongued its way out of the clouds above and stuck its thorny finger down among a herd of buffalo already on the run, frightened by claps of thunder.

  He had been sixteen summers.

  The sky had grown black with threat, driving a great wind before it. Quanah and others had been out hunting, practicing with their bows when they heard the thunder of the hooves, recognized the roar of their bellows as the beasts rumbled across the rolling hills of the Staked Plain. They had watched from a bare hilltop much like this one as the storm raced toward them faster than even Peta Nocona’s pony could run, without a rider.

  The wind grew more and more furious with the land, until the boys could no longer stay atop the hill and turned to find shelter among some trees. But upon mounting, Quanah looked back over his shoulder, being the first to see the swirling black funnel sweep its evil finger down out of the clouds to tear along the ground through the herd. It sucked the huge animals up as if they were no more than the small mud figures he crafted as a boy on the banks of the rivers and creeks where the Kwahadi always camped. Spinning, spinning the huge, bellowing beasts up into the sky like some great magic performed by a tribal shaman.

  By the time they reached a dry, eroded washout near the base of the long, gentle slope, the rain had commenced. Not a gentle rain falling from the sky, but a violent, painful slashing coming at them from the four directions, flung against them so hard the six could hardly keep their feet. Time and again the young warriors stumbled and fell to the muddy, slimy earth. Time and again their ponies were nearly thrown over as well with the might of that great windstorm.

  In that shallow washout the six huddled like insignificant sowbugs Quanah had found beneath an overturned buffalo chip when he was a curious child. Above them the trees and the brush grew to a deafening roar with the great wind—reverberating with a thunderous pounding that drew ever closer.

  Then the wind had passed, slowly fading in the distance across the great Staked Plain.

  Yet the rains fell, driving like a gray wall behind the great funnel cloud. Then came the rumble of thunder he heard in the ear he had pressed against the floor of the washout. He knew the cloud had been a warning. He hollered into the might of the wind, again and again, screaming so the others would hear his warning. They did not. The wind took his words from his lips and stole away with them.

  Quanah had to struggle on hands and knees to each one of the other five with him—touching them, pointing, unable to say anything for the deafening noise. It was hard enough keeping their eyes open in the swirl of pelting rain as they clawed up the slippery, slimy side of the washout onto the flat prairie.

  The last young warrior to struggle up the side was not so lucky. When the giant wall of churning, foaming, brown water roared down the washout, he clung in desperation to a tree root. His pony was caught in the wall of water, screeching in fright as it tumbled out of sight in a matter of three frantic heartbeats.

  The young warrior clung there to his tree root, the brown monster churning and slashing inches away from his heels, as Quanah and the others made a chain of themselves and pulled their friend to the edge of the prairie.

  They stayed the afternoon in a stand of trees that had been battered by the storm, constantly watching the sky as the dark clouds rumbled farther to the east. Just as the sun dipped out below the black underbellies of the clouds, the rain suddenly tapered off and stopped. And with it, the wind died as mysteriously as if it had not held such powerful dominion over this land for the past few hours.

  “I must see,” he remembered telling the others. “See if I can find where the great black cloud took the buffalo to hide for itself. If we know where it took them, we can go there next time we are hungry and want to hunt. The black cloud wants buffalo for itself. We want the buffalo as well.”

  Back atop that knoll, they scanned the horizons with their farseeing eyes. The herd was gone. Driven off with the wind and lightning and frightening funnel cloud. But directly through the middle of the valley where the herd had been running when Quanah last saw them now lay a wide, deep scar of torn earth. It looked as if some huge creature had raked the ground with a monstrous stick, perhaps its own incredible fingernail.

  “We will follow this track of the cloud monster,” Quanah had told them. And paid no attention to the fear he saw in their faces.

  Miles away, as sunset descended upon the land, they had found the buffalo—those animals that hadn’t made it out of the cloud’s path. For several hundred yards the carcasses were stacked in crazy fashion along the wide-open plain that had been stripped clean of all pla
nt life. Some of the buffalo had eyes sucked from their sockets, most had their tongues lolling from the sides of their huge jaws. In their midst lay a few antelope and deer and wolves and coyotes. All dead.

  “This is a place of great mystery,” one of Quanah’s young friends had said to him, clearly trembling. “We must go.”

  “I do not feel good standing here either,” spoke another. “Let us ride far from here.”

  Quanah had laughed at them, acting like such nervous children. “There is nothing to be afraid of here—”

  Then he saw the wolves—a pack of them loping off to the side of that huge, brown-black ridge built of thousands upon thousands of carcasses and muddy earth scooped right up out of the prairie. Whereas these wolves should have been in among the dead, eating on the bounty of meat that would last for many weeks, this pack of wolves was instead slinking off, tails tucked and glancing guardedly over their shoulders in great fear of this place.

  “Yes,” Quanah had replied. “We must go far and fast from this place. There is great evil here.”

  From that day until this, he had never seen anything like that great destruction. Yet there was no mystery here. No black funnel cloud had dipped out of the lowering heavens to sweep up the thousands of buffalo as if they were children’s toys made only of mud.

  Quanah knew what had caused this great obscene blight on the prairie.

  “White hunters,” he told the young scout now as their ponies fought their bits and struggled to be gone from that place.

  “The white man would waste so much?”

  Quanah nodded. “For only the hides and a few tongues—they do this to our brother, the buffalo.”

  “They should be made to pay, Quanah,” the young one vowed, smashing a fist against his palm.

  “One day—the white hide hunters will pay,” he vowed. “Pay for taking the food from the mouths of our women and children!”

  Quanah led the scout from the hill, his heart as cold and filled with hate as his belly was empty.

  By the time another six days of journey had passed, the women and children were growing desperately hungry. Scraps of something to eat were scraped from the bottom of parfleche bags the women used to store their jerked meat and pemmican. There was plenty of sun to warm the ache of the cold from their bones each morning as they slowly plodded around to the south in a wide arc that took them those six days to complete.

  Then one morning an outrider spotted a signal fire. Then a second column and a third. Almost due east from the marching village, toward the land where the sun was born every morning. The young camp guards rode out and returned with word that afternoon—the advance scouts had located a small herd. Nothing as big as what they were expecting to find, but enough to provide meat and hides for the coming snows of winter, bone scrapers to flesh those great furry hides, along with sinew to repair old clothing and fat to mix with charcoal to smear beneath the eyes of the hunters, protecting them from sudden blindness when they went out in the coming season of snow. There was enough, so there was much rejoicing among the village when word of the discovery traveled from lips to lips.

  Again Quanah reminded ten of his best hunters on the fastest ponies that they had been chosen to kill buffalo for the old ones and those who could not hunt for themselves. His people would always take care of one another, and he would see to their needs before caring for the needs of his own family.

  In the fading winter light of that day, Quanah ordered the column to halt and make camp, for in the morning the hunters would mount up and make meat for them all.

  Before dawn they were ready. These young horsemen, having tied up the tails of their favored buffalo runner as they did with a war pony before going into battle. Most wore little bundles of personal medicine tied behind an ear or around their necks, perhaps over one shoulder, under one arm or the other. Powerful stuff to make the young warrior shoot straight and keep him from harm among the slashing hooves of the herd they would soon put on the run. Dust or ashes or a sprinkling of puffball spores were scattered over the buffalo ponies—to give them wind and courage among the huge beasts, to give them swift hooves to carry their riders into then out of danger at the slightest tap of the brown knees that climbed atop those ponies now and followed Quanah and his camp police away from the village.

  Slowly marching to the east, where the white man had named the river Canadian, Quanah followed the buffalo scouts.

  Farther still to the east, beyond the horizon, lay the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation. And only a long day’s ride to the north lay the land of the white man and his smoking wagons and the yellowleg soldier camps and the land of the hide hunters.

  When the herd was sighted, Quanah halted the great assembly of riders and divided them into two groups under capable leaders. One he sent to the north side of the herd, the other to the south, both coming in from downwind as quietly as their ponies could move, without disturbing the great beasts until the two groups formed a great, sweeping arc behind the feeders.

  With a wave of Quanah’s white blanket, the four hundred horsemen broke into a furious gallop from the outskirts of the herd.

  In surprise, the animals tore their heads from the prairie where they had been grazing while meandering along to the south. The half-blind, poor-sighted beasts sniffed the air, hearing the pounding pony hooves and the excited yelps of the young hunters and hammering of the few guns—then lurched into the rocking-chair gait so typical of the huge animal.

  A sudden, frightening, snorting stampede that filled the valley.

  Ponies swept in and out of the fringe of that throbbing herd as one after another of the animals went down, chins into the ground, tumbling rump over horns, never to rise while the hunters rode on, firing one arrow after another, hundreds upon hundreds of them fired into the thundering herd. Arrows whispered from the horn and Osage orange bows, arrows driven up to the feather fletching, some fired with such might they drove right on through the buffalo, shafts that were trampled under the hooves of those falling, stumbling, cascading buffalo.

  A time or two Quanah watched as a rider spilled, urging his pony too close to bull or cow—perhaps getting a dull horn driven up and into the belly of the pony with a shower of red and a tumbling waterfall of intestine as the rider picked himself off the cold, hard prairie and ran for cover, ran to escape the on-rushing beasts mindlessly lurching ever southward. One rider did not make it in time, his own belly opened up by a slashing hoof.

  Others, riders too young to hunt, rushed forward now to drag the wounded, bleeding warrior from the scene, where he could be tended to by one of the shamans who laid his skeletal, veiny hand over the great, gaping, crimson flap of skin that had exposed the internal organs, and began shaking his rattle in time with his prayer chant.

  When the first of the hunters had turned about to claim their kill, there was a profusion of carcasses more than a mile long. The young men turned their ponies over to family members then went about the business of searching for particular markings on the arrows. When a beast was found to have a warrior’s arrow in it, the hunter called out. The women and men too old to hunt came running, their butcher knives glinting in the cold, winter sun of the Staked Plain. Time for work had come.

  The children reveled in the glory of it, hungry as they were. Slices of liver sprinkled with gall from the tiny, yellow bladder were passed out to be sucked juicily by the little ones. Long strips of gut were gobbled and gummed by the old, toothless ones. With blood up to their elbows, splashed on their knees, the women dove into the carcasses time and again, pulling meat and organs from the white, fleecy carcasses.

  Like a rich offering made to a royal king, one of Quanah’s wives brought him a long bone she had skinned out and cracked to expose the rich, yellowish marrow. As he watched the butchering and listened to the happy voices, Quanah scraped the marrow free with a finger and sucked the rich, greasy buffalo butter with delight.

  By twilight beneath the cold winter sky, the celebration had rolled into f
ull swing. Over every merry fire roasted hump-ribs or thick roasts speared on a sharpened stick. The men played drums and sang their songs of thanksgiving, the women trilled with happy voices. The children laughed and ran and cried out with the warmth of full bellies. Quanah could ask nothing more for his people than this—that they be allowed to roam the buffalo land, allowed to find enough buffalo to feed themselves for time beyond his grandchildren’s grandchildren.

  Food, clothing, shelter, weapons … what more could his people want? Quanah asked himself.

  So it was the following morning before the sun found its way out of the east that the Kwahadi chief had awakened himself and left in the freezing predawn darkness, carrying a selected green hide in his lap as he rode to the crest of the highest hill for miles around, smelling the pungent air of winter’s cleansing hand upon the land.

  Reverently he laid the green, heavy hide on the browned, autumn-dried grass and unrolled it. Atop he laid a little tobacco stolen in raids among the settlements, a bit of powder and a lead ball from his pistol. In the end he slowly drew the edge of his knife along his left palm, opening up a tiny laceration that beaded with blood then began to ooze more freely. Quanah squeezed and squeezed his wrist, milking the hand until the blood would drop, bit by bit, until he had a crude circle made around the articles of thanksgiving on the green hide.

  “These we offer to you, Grandfather Above!” he cried out into the pinking sky far to the east of him where the white man was said to number like the stars.

  “May you accept all this, and the blood of a Kwahadi warrior in thanks for your gift of the buffalo to my people. We will always return the blessings you have given us with gifts of our own for your kindness to The People.”

  The harsh wind came up, tussling his long braids and worrying the fringe of leggings and shirt.

  Although the wind was clean, Quanah nonetheless suddenly smelled the killing field they had run across a week ago. It was as if the power of the wind spirits now commanded him to scour the land clean of the white man.