The Son (15 page)

They were also encouraged to steal, though only if the owner of the item were present, and only if the item were returned. Toshaway’s butcher knife was taken from his sheath as he ate lunch, his pistol was stolen from under his robe. The whites knew that an Indian could steal your horse while you were sleeping, even if you’d tied the reins around your wrist, and for a Comanche to say “that man is the best horse thief in our tribe” was nearly the highest compliment that could be paid, a way of saying that a person could walk into the heart of an enemy camp without being seen and, horses being common currency among both whites and Indians, was likely to become rich. The Comanches were just as happy to steal all the horses of a group of Rangers or settlers as they were to actually kill them, knowing that the buffalo wolves, mountain lions, or sparse water would eventually do them in.

A
FTER A FEW
weeks of instruction I was considered ready to go hunting with the bow, and so three other boys and I went down to the canebrakes near the river and sat waiting a long time. There was nothing moving and one of the boys took a section of reed and put it in his mouth, which, when he blew through it, made a sound like a fawn in distress. Within a few moments we heard stamping, then nothing, and then more stamping. Then I saw a doe walking slowly through the tall grass and blowdown. She pricked her ears and looked straight at me and I knew I couldn’t draw the bow without her seeing me. Not to mention arrows wouldn’t cut through the frontal bones, only the ribs.

The ten-year-old made a noise with his mouth that seemed to come from the other side of the thicket. The doe turned her head, but her body was still facing us.

“Now would be a good time to shoot,” he whispered.

“But the chest . . .”

“Shoot her in the neck.”

“Remember to aim low so she ducks into it.”

I drew the bow and began to feel better about everything—the deer still hadn’t moved—but at the sound of the string she crouched and took a leap. By a miracle the arrow went into her, but it only cut muscle. Then she was running at full speed with her flag up.

The youngest one shook his head. “
Yee,
” he said, “
Tiehteti tsa? awinu
.”

“What do you think?” I said.

“
Aitu,
” said the oldest. “Very poor. We will be tracking her all day.”

The others sighed.

We snuck down to the river and looked for turtles to catch, made a few snares, and when the boys decided the doe had calmed down and likely begun to stiffen from her wound, we followed her through featureless tall grass to where she was bedded a half mile away, using four spots of blood and a scuffed patch of moss on a log. She took off running but was hit with three more arrows. We sat awhile longer and when we found her again she was dead.

I said: “That seemed like cheating, using the call to bring her in.”

“So next time get closer and use a lance.”

“Or a knife.”

“Or go after a bear.”

“I was only saying about the fawn call.”

The oldest one waved his hand impatiently. “We were told to bring a deer back, Tiehteti, and they’d be mad if we didn’t get one. And next time you might try to break the neck so we don’t have to track the deer all day.”

“It would also be fine to hit one of the big arteries.”

“You’re rolling your fingers,” said the eight-year-old. He drew an imaginary bow. “You have to pop them away from the string.”

“Like we showed you,” said the oldest.

I didn’t say anything.

“If you roll your string, you will never shoot straight.”

“Toshaway will tell you I’m a good shot with a gun.”

“So go find us a sapling, Mr. Good Shot.”

T
HE BOYS MADE
their own bows and arrows, but the people who made the real weapons were the old men, retired warriors who had become too blind or too slow to go on raids, or maybe their wind had given out, or maybe, unbelievably to us, they had grown tired of killing and wanted to spend their last years making items of an artistic nature.

Osage was preferred for the bows—though ash, mulberry, or hickory could substitute—and dogwood for the arrows. We carried the big
ohapuupi
seeds with us, planting them anywhere they might grow, and as this had been done by the various tribes for hundreds or maybe thousands of years, bois d’arc trees were found all along the plains. Equally important was the
par
u
a,
or dogwood. When we found a grove of them we would prune back the trunks almost to the ground. The next spring each trunk would send out dozens of thin new shoots, which grew very straight and were easy to make into good arrows. The location of these arrow groves was kept track of, and they were harvested carefully, making sure that the trees would survive.

A regular bow—better than any factory could make today—was worth one horse. The upper and lower limbs had to release with even pressure while pulling a specific weight at a specific distance from the grip. A fancy or unusually good bow was worth two or three horses. They were all about a yard in length (short compared to the eastern tribes’, as, unlike them, we fought from horseback) and backed with the spine sinews from a deer or buffalo. If times were bad, the bowyers would turn out bows very quickly; if times were good—if our warriors were not being killed and their equipment not being lost on raids—the bowyers would take their time and their bows would be the stuff of legend.

Arrows were no different. It could take half a day to make one just right: straight, the proper length and stiffness, the feathers all in alignment—though in a single minute of fighting you might need two dozen. The shafts were felt and squeezed and held up to the light and straightened in the teeth. A crooked arrow was no different from a bent rifle barrel. The Comanches expected their bows to reach fifty yards when they were shooting quickly, hundreds of yards if they were taking their time. On a calm day I saw Toshaway kill an antelope at a full furlong, the first shot going over the animal’s back (though falling so quietly it was not noticed) the second falling just short, also in silence, and the third finally telling between the ribs.

The strings were commonly sinew, which when dry shot arrows the fastest but could not be depended on when wet. Some preferred horsehair, which shot slower but was reliable in all conditions, and still others preferred bear gut.

The best feathers for fletching were turkey feathers, but owl or buzzard feathers were also fine. Hawk or eagle feathers were never used as they were damaged by blood. The best shafts were grooved along their length. We used two grooves and the Lipan used four. This prevented the arrow from stanching the wound it had just cut, but it also kept the shaft from warping.

The blades of hunting arrows were fixed vertically, as the ribs of game animals are vertical to the earth. The blades of war arrows were fixed parallel to the earth, the same as human ribs. Hunting points were made without barbs and tied tightly to the shaft so they could be pulled from an animal and reused. War arrows had barbs and the blades were tied loosely, so that if the arrow was pulled, the head would remain lodged in the enemy’s body. If you were shot with a war arrow, it had to be pushed through the other side to be removed. By then all the white people knew that, though they did not know that we used different arrows for hunting.

All the plains tribes used arrows with three feathers, though some of the eastern bands used only two, which we looked down on, as they were not accurate. Of course the eastern Indians did not care much, as they lived on a weekly meat allowance from the white man and were drunk most of the time anyway, wishing they had died with their ancestors.

O
CCASIONALLY, THROUGHOUT THE
fall and winter, I would see the German girl who’d been taken captive with me. Most families had at least one slave or captive, often a young Mexican boy or girl, as Mexico was where they did most of their raiding and horse stealing—the Comanches’ toll on that country was on another scale, entire villages wiped out in a single night—Texans had nothing to complain about.

Of course there were numerous white captives as well, from settlements near Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio; there was a boy who had been snatched in far East Texas; there were captives from other tribes. But as I was considered to have a great future, I avoided talking to them.

The only one I broke this rule for was the German girl, whose name was
Suhi?ohapit
u
,
Yellow Hair Between the Legs, but who was mostly referred to as Yellow Hair. Whatever she had been to her family, to the Comanches she was invisible, a nonperson. She spent all her time scraping skins, hauling wood and water, digging
tutupip
u
,
everything I had done my first six months. But for her, there would be no end.

In spring, I ran into her in one of the pastures, looking after the horses. She looked well fed, though her muscles were ropy for a white woman and she didn’t have much fat. She appeared to have grown water shy. I could smell her from a good distance and her back was dotted with
mohto?a
as if she had not bathed in months.

“It’s you,” she said in English. “The chosen one.”

I could tell she was sulking.

“I see they’re treating you well.”

It threw me off to hear English. I told her—in Comanche—that she might consider washing herself. Which was not fair, but I was mad at her for saying I ought to be read out as some kind of deserter.

“Why should I?” she said. “I hoped it would make them stop touching me, but it hasn’t.”

“They aren’t supposed to do that anymore. They could get in big trouble.”

“Well, they are.”

“Well, they’re not supposed to.”

“That’s very useful of you to say.”

“Is it like before?”

“It’s one or two in particular,” she said. “Though why that makes a difference I don’t know.”

“How are the horses?” I said. “That one with the sore foot, I could get some wet rawhide.”

“Do you think about what we are?” she said. “Me, if I speak to them, they pretend not to hear me. They’ve given me a new name, because of this.” She pointed between her legs. “That’s all I am.”

I didn’t say anything.

“The only thing that makes me happy is the thought that if I die I’ll cost them money, because they’ll get fewer hides finished.” She looked at me. “And you, Tiehteti”—she used my Indian name—“can you see yourself?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You’re too young. They were smart when they got you.”

This annoyed me as well. “You know I can help you if you just ask,” I said, though I was not sure what I meant by that.

“Then kill me. Or take me out of here. I don’t care which one.”

She went back to scraping her hide. I looked around for Ekanaki, the red-eared pinto Toshaway had given me. The sun was getting low and it was cold and there was horseshit everywhere.

“I need to fetch my pony,” I said.

“That’s what I thought.”

I would have been happy to never speak another word to her in my life.

“Tiehteti,” she called after me, “if I know it’s you I won’t fight back.” She pointed to the side of her neck, where you’d put a knife in. “I promise. I just can’t bring myself to do it.”

Chapter Eleven

J.A. McCullough

T
he house had been dead a long time; she was the last of its children. She willed herself to get up. The chandeliers hung quietly above her, indifferent to her suffering.
Get up,
she thought. But nothing happened.

D
URING HER CHILDHOOD
it been a gay, chattering place, not a moment of silence or privacy; the idea that she might one day be lying alone, the house silent as a graveyard . . . When she came home from school there was always someone talking in the great room or on the gallery or she would wander around and there would be the Colonel, a cluster of his friends talking and drinking or shooting clay pigeons. There were serious-looking young men who came to take notes, ancient plainsmen living out their last days in rented rooms, and there were others who, like the Colonel, were millionaires.

There were reporters and politicians and Indians who came in great bunches, six or eight to a car. The Colonel was different around the Indians; he did not hold court as he did among the whites but rather sat and nodded and listened. She did not like to see it. The Indians did not dress the way they should have—they might as well have been grangers or Mexicans—and they smelled strongly and did not pay her any attention. She would find them stalking around the house and her father thought they stole. But the Colonel did not seem to mind, and the Indians got along fine with the waddies; many mornings she came into the great room to discover a dozen old men asleep among their former enemies, spilled beer and whiskey, a beef quarter half-eaten in the fireplace.

It was the Colonel’s house, there was no mistaking it, though he mostly slept in a jacal down the hill. Her father complained about the noise and grandstanding and endless strangers and houseguests, about the food bills and the size of the domestic staff. The Colonel did not care for him, either; he found her father’s interest in cattle quite taxing. “We have not made a dime off the dumb brutes in twenty years” or “That man can’t take a shit without asking the county agent.”

The Colonel was in favor of oil, in favor of Jonas going to Princeton, and as for Clint and Paul, they would make damn fine hands. But you, he would say, tapping her on the shoulder, you are going to do something. She had not known how fragile that all was. Now, looking across the dim room from her place on the floor, she saw the house as it would soon be: a haven for bats and owls, for mice and coyotes, the deer leaving footprints in the dust. The roof would give way and brush would begin to grow inside the house until there was nothing left but stone walls in a desert.