Michael Blake - Dances With Wolves

“Hello,” he said again.

Stands With A Fist remembered the word. But her white tongue was as rusty as an old hinge. She was afraid of what might come out, and her subconscious was still resisting the very idea of this talk. She made several soundless attempts before it came out.

“Hulo,” she answered, quickly dropping her chin.

Kicking Bird’s delight was such that he uncharacteristically slapped the side of his leg. He reached over and patted the back of Dunbar’s hand, urging him on.

“Speak?” the lieutenant asked, mixing his words with the sign Kicking Bird had used. “Speak English?”

Stands With A Fist tapped the side of her temple and nodded, trying to tell him the words were in her head. She placed a pair of fingers against her lips and shook her head, trying to tell him of the trouble with her tongue.

The lieutenant didn’t fully understand. Her expression was still blankly hostile, but there was an ease in her movements now that gave him the feeling she was willing to communicate.

“I am . . .” he started, poking a finger at his tunic. “I am John. I am John.”

Her flat eyes were trained on his mouth.

“I am John.”

Stands With A Fist moved her lips silently, practicing the word. When she finally said it out loud the word rang with perfect clarity. It shocked her. It shocked Lieutenant Dunbar.

She said, “Willie.”

Kicking Bird knew there had been a misfire when he saw the stunned expression on the lieutenant’s face. He watched helplessly as Stands With A Fist went through a series of muddled gyrations. She covered her eyes and rubbed her face. She covered her nose as if she were trying to stifle a smell and shook her head wildly. Finally she placed her hands palm down on the ground and sighed deeply, again forming silent words with her little mouth. At that moment, Kicking Bird’s heart sagged. Perhaps he had asked too much in mounting this experiment.

Lieutenant Dunbar didn’t know what to make of her, either. He thought it possible that the poor girl’s long captivity had made her a lunatic.

But Kicking Bird’s experiment, though terribly difficult, was not too much. And Stands With A Fist was not a lunatic. The white soldier’s words and her memories and the confusion of her tongue were all jumbled together. Sorting through the tangle was like trying to draw with her eyes closed. She was struggling to get hold of it as she stared into space.

Kicking Bird started to say something, but she cut him off sharply with a flurry of Comanche.

Her eyes remained closed a few seconds longer. When they opened again she looked through her tangled hair at Lieutenant Dunbar and he could see that they had softened. With a calm beckoning of her hand she asked him in Comanche to speak again.

Dunbar cleared his throat.

“I am John,” he said, and pronounced the word carefully. “John . . . John.”

Once more her lips worked at the word, and once more she tried to speak it.

“Jun.”

“Yes.” Dunbar nodded ecstatically. “John.”

“Jun,” she said again.

Lieutenant Dunbar tilted his head back. It was a sweet sound to him, the sound of his own name. He had not heard it for months.

Stands With A Fist smiled in spite of herself. Her recent life had been so filled with frowns. It was good to have something, no matter how small, to smile about.

Simultaneously, they glanced at Kicking Bird.

There was no smile on his mouth. But in his eyes, though it was ever faint, was a happy light.

The going was slow that first afternoon in Kicking Bird’s lodge. The time was eaten up by Stands With A Fist’s painstaking attempts to repeat Lieutenant Dunbar’s simple words and phrases. Sometimes it took a dozen or more repetitions, all of them excruciatingly tedious, to pronounce a single one-syllable word. And even then the pronunciation was far from perfect. It was not what would be called talking.

But Kicking Bird was greatly encouraged. Stands With A Fist had told him that she remembered the white words well. She was only having difficulty with her tongue. The medicine man knew that practice would bring the rusty tongue around, and his mind galloped with the happy prospects of the time when conversation between them would be free and full of information.

He felt a twinge of irritation when one of his assistants arrived with the news that he would shortly be needed to oversee final preparations for the dance that evening.

But Kicking Bird smiled as he took the white man’s hand and bid him goodbye with hair-mouth words.

“Hulo, Jun.”

It was tough to figure. The meeting had ended so abruptly. And so far as he knew, it had been going well. Something must have taken priority.

Dunbar stood outside Kicking Bird’s lodge and looked down the wild avenue. People seemed to be congregating in an open space at the end of the street near the tipi that carried the mark of the bear. He wanted to stay, to see what was going to happen.

But the quiet one had already disappeared into the steadily growing crowd. He spotted the woman, so small among the already smallish Indians, walking between two women. She didn’t look back at him, but as the lieutenant’s eyes followed her receding form, he could see the two people in her carriage: white and Indian.

Cisco was coming toward him, and Dunbar was surprised to see that the boy with the constant smile was riding his horse. The youngster pulled up, rolled off, patted Cisco’s neck, and chattered something that Lieutenant Dunbar correctly interpreted as praise for his horse’s virtues.

People were streaming into the clearing now and they were taking little notice of the man in uniform. The lieutenant thought again of staying, but much as he wanted to, he knew that without a formal invitation he would not be welcome. There had been no invitation.

The sun was beginning to sink and his stomach was starting to growl. If he was going to get home before dark and thus avoid a lot of fumbling just to get dinner together, he would have to make quick time. He swung up, turned Cisco around, and started out of the village at an easy canter.

As he passed the last of the lodges he chanced upon a strange assembly. Perhaps a dozen men were gathered behind one of the last lodges. They were all draped in all kinds of finery and their bodies were painted with loud designs. Each man’s head was covered with the head of a buffalo, complete with curly hair and horns. Only the dark eyes and prominent noses were visible beneath the strange helmets.

Dunbar held up a hand as he cantered past. Some of them glanced in his direction, but none of them returned the wave, and the lieutenant rode on.

Two Sock’s visits were no longer limited to late afternoon or early morning. He was likely to pop up anytime now, and when he did, the old wolf made himself at home, roaming the little confines of Lieutenant Dunbar’s world as if he were a camp dog. The distance he once kept had shrunk as his familiarity grew. More often than not he was no more than twenty or thirty feet away as the solitary lieutenant went about his little tasks. When he made journal entries Two Socks would usually stretch out and lie down, his yellow eyes blinking curiously as he watched the lieutenant scratch on the pages.

The ride back had been a lonely one. The untimely end of his meeting with the woman who was two people and the mysterious excitement in the village (of which he was not a part) saddled Dunbar with his old nemesis, the morose feeling of being left out. All his life he’d been hungry to participate, and as with every other human, loneliness was something that constantly had to be handled. In the lieutenant’s case loneliness had become the dominant feature of his life, so it was reassuring to see the tawny form of Two Socks rise up under the awning when he rode in at twilight.