Michael Blake - Dances With Wolves

The wolf trotted out into the yard and sat down to watch as the lieutenant slipped off Cisco’s back.

Dunbar noticed immediately that something else was under the awning. It was a large prairie chicken, lying dead on the ground, and when he stooped to examine it, he found the bird fresh-killed. The blood on its neck was still sticky. But aside from the punctures about its throat, the guinea fowl was undisturbed. Hardly a feather was out of place. It was a puzzle for which there was only one solution, and the lieutenant looked pointedly at Two Socks.

“Is this yours?” he said out loud.

The wold raised his eyes and blinked as Lieutenant Dunbar studied the bird a moment longer.

“Well, then”—he shrugged—”I guess it’s ours.”

Two Socks stood by, his narrow eyes following Dunbar as the bird was plucked, gutted, and roasted over the open fire. While it was on the spit he trailed the lieutenant to the corral and waited patiently as Cisco’s grain ration was doled out. Then back to the fire to await the feast.

It was a good bird, tender and full of meat. The lieutenant ate slowly, carving off the plump flesh a strip at a time and tossing a piece out to Two Socks every now and then. When he’d eaten his fill he lobbed the carcass into the yard and the old wolf carried it off into the night.

Lieutenant Dunbar sat in one of the camp chairs and smoked, letting the nighttime sounds entertain him. He thought it amazing how far he had come in such a short time. Not so long ago these same sounds had kept him on edge. They’d stolen his sleep. Now they were so familiar as to be comforting.

He thought back over the day and decided it had been a very good one. As the fire burned down with his second cigarette he realized how unique it was for him to be dealing singly and directly with the Indians. He allowed himself a pat on the back, thinking that he had done a credible job thus far as a representative of the United States of America. And without any guidelines, to boot.

Suddenly he thought of the Great War. It was possible that he was no longer a representative of the United States. Perhaps the war was over. The Confederate States of America . . . He couldn’t imagine such a thing. But it could be. He’d been without any information for a long time now.

These musings brought him to his own career, and he admitted inwardly that he’d been thinking less and less about the army. That he was in the midst of a great adventure had much to do with these omissions, but as he sat by the dwindling fire and listened to the yip of coyotes down by the river, it crossed his mind that he might have stumbled on to a better life. In this life he wanted for very little. Cisco and Two Socks weren’t human, but their unwavering loyalty was satisfying in ways that human relationships had never been. He was happy with them.

And of course there were the Indians. They held a distinct pull for him. At the least they made for excellent neighbors, well-mannered, open, and sharing. Though he was much too white for aboriginal ways, he felt more than comfortable with them. Maybe that was why he’d been drawn from the start. The lieutenant had never been much of a learner. He’d always been a doer, sometimes to a fault. But he sensed that this facet of his personality was shifting.

Yes, he thought, that’s it. There is something to learn from them. They know things. If the army never comes, I don’t suppose the loss would be so great.

Dunbar felt suddenly lazy. Yawning, he flipped the butt of his smoke into the embers glowing at his feet and stretched his arms high over his head.

“Sleep,” he said. “I will now sleep like a dead man the whole night through.”

Lieutenant Dunbar woke with alarm in the dark of early morning. His sod hut was trembling. The earth was trembling, too, and the air was filled with a hollow rumbling sound.

He swung out of bed and listened hard. The rumble was coming from somewhere close, just downriver.

Pulling on his pants and boots, the lieutenant slipped outside. The sound was even louder here, filling the prairie night with a great, reverberating echo.

He felt small in its midst.

The sound was not coming toward him, and without knowing precisely why, he ruled out the idea that some freak of nature, an earthquake or a flood, was producing this enormous energy. Something alive was making the sound. Something alive was making the earth tremble, and he had to see.

The light of his lantern seemed tiny as he walked toward the rush of sound somewhere in front of him. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards along the bluff before the feeble light he was holding picked up something. It was dust: a great, billowing wall of it rising into the night.

The lieutenant slowed to a creep as he got closer. All at once he knew that hooves were making the thunderous sound and that the dust was being raised by a movement of beasts so large that he could never have believed what he was seeing with his own eyes.

The buffalo.

One of them swerved out of the dusty cloud. And another. And another. He only glimpsed them as they roared past, but the sight of them was so magnificent that they may as well have been frozen. At that moment they froze forever in Lieutenant Dunbar’s memory.

In that moment, all alone with his lantern, he knew what they meant to the world he lived in. They were what the ocean meant to fishes, what the sky meant to birds, what air meant to a pair of human lungs.

They were the life of the prairie.

And there were thousands of them pouring over the embankment and down to the river, which they crossed with no more care than a train would a puddle. Then up the other side and out onto the grasslands, thundering to a destination known only to them, a torrent of hooves and horns and meat cutting across the landscape with a force beyond all imagining.

Dunbar dropped the lantern where he stood and broke into a run. He stopped for nothing except Cisco’s bridle, not even a shirt. Then he jumped up and kicked his horse into a gallop. He laid his bare chest close on the little buckskin’s neck and gave Cisco his head.

The village was ablaze with firelight as Lieutenant Dunbar raced into the depression where the lodges were pitched and pounded up the camp’s main avenue.

Now he could see the flames of the biggest fire and the crowd gathered around it. He could see the buffalo-headed dancers and he could hear the steady roll of the drums. He could hear deep, rhythmic chanting.

But he was barely aware of the spectacle opening before him, just as he had been barely aware of the ride he’d made, tearing across the prairie at full speed for miles. He wasn’t conscious of the sweat that coated Cisco from head to tail. Only one thing was in his head as he rushed his horse up the avenue . . . the Comanche word for buffalo. He was turning it over and over, trying to remember the exact pronunciation.

Now he was shouting the word. But with all the drumming and chanting, they hadn’t yet heard his approach. As he neared the fire he tried to pull Cisco up, but the horse was high on runaway speed and didn’t answer the bit.

He charged into the very center of the dance, scattering Comanches in every direction. With a supreme effort the lieutenant pulled him up, but as Cisco’s hindquarters brushed against the ground, his head and neck rose straight up. His front legs clawed madly at empty space. Dunbar couldn’t keep his seat. He slid off the sweat-slicked back and crashed to earth with an audible thud.

Before he could move, a half-dozen infuriated warriors pounced on him. One man with a club might have ended everything, but the six men were tangled together and no one could get a clear shot at the lieutenant.