Michael Blake - Dances With Wolves

Gradually he began to come out of it. The first thing he felt was the revolver in his hand. It was extraordinarily heavy. He let it drop.

Then he sank slowly to his knees and rolled back on his buttocks. He sat for a long time, drained as he had never been before, weak as a new-born puppy.

For a time he thought he might never move again, but at last he got to his feet and wobbled to the hut. It was only with a supreme effort that he managed to roll a cigarette. But he was too weak to smoke it, and the lieutenant fell asleep after two or three puffs.

The second escape had a different wrinkle or two, but in general, things went the way they had before.

About two miles out the five Comanches settled their horses into an easy lope. There were riders to the rear and on either side, so Cisco took the only route left to him.

He went forward.

The men had just begun to exchange a few words when the buckskin leaped as if he’d been stung on the rump, and shot ahead. The man holding the lead line was pulled straight over the head of his pony. For a few fleeting seconds Wind In His Hair had a chance for the lead line bouncing along the ground behind Cisco, but he was an instant too late. It slipped through his fingers.

After that all that remained was the chase. It was not so merry for the Comanches. The man who had been pulled off had no chance at all, and the remaining four pursuers had no luck.

One man lost his horse when it stepped into a prairie dog hole and snapped a foreleg. Cisco was quick as a cat that afternoon, and two more riders were thrown trying to make their ponies imitate his lightning zigs and zags.

That left only Wind In His Hair. He kept pace for several hundred yards, but when his own horse finally began to play out, they still had closed no ground, and he decided it wasn’t worth running his favorite pony to death for something he couldn’t catch.

While the pony caught his breath, Wind In His Hair watched the buckskin long enough to see that he was heading in the general direction of the fort, and his frustration was tempered with the notion that perhaps Kicking Bird was right. It might be a magic horse, something belonging to a magic person.

He met the others on his way back. It was obvious that Wind In His Hair had failed, and no one inquired as to the details.

No one said a word.

They made the long ride home in silence.

Wind In His Hair and the men returned to find their village in mourning.

The party that had been out so long against the Utes had come home at last.

And the news was not good.

They’d stolen only six horses, not enough to cover their own losses. They were empty-handed after all that time on the trail.

With them were four badly injured men, of which only one would survive. But the real tragedy was counted in the six men who had been killed, six very fine warriors. And worse yet, there were only four blanket-shrouded corpses on the travois.

They had not been able to recover two of the dead, and sadly, the names of these men would never be spoken again.

One of them was Stands With A Fist’s husband.

Because she was in the once-a-month lodge, word had to be passed from outside by two of her husband’s friends.

She seemed to take the news impassively at first, sitting still as a statue on the floor of the lodge, her hands entwined on her lap, her head bowed slightly. She sat like that most of the afternoon, letting grief eat its way slowly through her heart while the other women went about their business.

They watched her, however, partly because they all knew how close Stands With A Fist and her husband had been. But she was a white woman, and that more than anything else, was cause for watching. None of them knew how a white mind would work in this kind of crisis. So they watched with a mixture of caring and curiosity.

It was well they did.

Stands With A Fist was so deeply devastated that she didn’t make a peep all afternoon. She didn’t shed a single tear. She just sat. All the while her mind was running dangerously fast. She thought of her loss, of her husband, and finally of herself.

She played back the events of her life with him, all of it appearing in fractured but vivid detail. Over and over, one particular time came back to her . . . the one and only time she had cried.

It was on a night not long after the death of their second child. She had held out, trying everything she knew to keep from caving in to the misery. She was still holding out when the tears came. She tried to stop them by burying her face in the sleeping robe. They had already had the talk about another wife, and he had already said the words, “You are plenty.” But it was not enough to stem the grief of the second baby’s passing, grief she knew he shared, and she had buried her wet face in the robe. But she could not stop, and the tears led to sobbing.

When it was over she lifted her head and found him sitting quietly at the edge of the fire, poking at it aimlessly, his unfocused eyes looking through the flames.

When their eyes met she said, “I am nothing.”

He made no reply at first. But he looked straight into her soul with an expression so peaceful that she could not resist its calming effect. Then she had seen the faintest of smiles steal across his mouth as he said the words again.

“You are plenty.”

She remembered it so well: his deliberate rise from the fire, his little motion that said, “Move over,” his easy slide under the robe, his arms gathering her in so softly.

And she remembered the unconsciousness of the love they made, so free of movement and words and energy. It was like being borne aloft to float endlessly in some unseen, heavenly stream. It was their longest night. When they would reach the edge of sleep they would somehow begin again. And again. And again. Two people of one flesh.

Even the coming of the sun did not stop them. For the first and only times in their lives, neither left the lodge that morning.

When sleep finally did find them, it was simultaneous, and Stands With A Fist remembered drifting off with the feeling that the burden of being two people was suddenly so light that it ceased to matter. She remembered feeling no longer Indian or white. She felt herself as a single being, one person, undivided.

Stands With A Fist blinked herself back to the present of the once-a-month lodge.

She was no longer a wife, a Comanche, or even a woman. She was nothing now. What was she waiting for?

A hide scraper was lying on the hard-packed floor only a few feet away. She saw her hand around it. She saw it plunge deep into her breast, all the way to the hilt.

Stands With A Fist waited for the moment when everyone’s attention was elsewhere. She rocked back and forth a few times, then lurched forward, covering the few feet across the floor on all fours.

Her hand went to it cleanly, and in a flash, the blade was in front of her face. She lifted it higher, screamed, and drove down with both hands, as if clasping some dear object to her heart.

In the middle of the split second it took the scraper to complete its flight, the first woman arrived. Though she missed the hands that held the knife there was enough of a collision to deflect its downward flight. The blade traveled sideways leaving a tiny track on the bodice of Stands With A Fist’s dress as it passed over the left breast, ripped through the doeskin sleeve, and plowed into the fleshy part of her arm just above the elbow.

She fought like a demon, and the women had a tough time prying the scraper out of her hand. Once it was free, all the fight went out of the little white woman. She collapsed into the sisterly arms of her friends, and like the flood that comes when a stubborn valve is tripped, she began to sob convulsively.