Michael Blake - Dances With Wolves

They shared three or four hours each day, without touching and without talking about themselves. On the surface a careful formality was observed. They laughed at things together and they commented on ordinary phenomena like the weather. But feelings about themselves lay concealed at all times. Stands With A Fist was being careful with her feelings, and Dances With Wolves respected that.

A profound change took place two weeks after the party went out.

Late one afternoon, after a long scout under a brutal sun, Dances With Wolves returned to Kicking Bird’s lodge, found no one there, and, thinking the family gone to the river, headed down to the water.

Kicking Bird’s wives were there, scrubbing their children. Stands With A Fist was not around. He hung about long enough to get splashed by the kids and climbed back up the path to the village.

The sun was still brutal, and when he saw the arbor, the thought of its shade pulled him over.

He was halfway inside before he realized she was there. The regular session had already been held, and both of them were embarrassed.

Dances With Wolves sat down at a modest distance from her and said hello.

“It . . . it is hot,” she answered, as if making an excuse for her presence.

“Yes,” he agreed, “Very hot.”

Though he didn’t have to, he swiped at his forehead. It was a silly way of making sure she could see he was here for the same reason.

But as he made the fake gesture, Dances With Wolves checked himself. A sudden urge had come over him, an urge to tell her how he felt.

He just started to talk. He told her he was confused. He told her how good it felt to be here. He told her about the lodge and how good it was to have it. He took the breastplate in both hands and told her how he thought of it, that to him it was something great. He lifted it to his cheek and said, “I love this.”

Then he said, “But I’m white . . . and I’m a soldier. Is it good for me to be here or is it a foolish thing? Am I foolish?”

He could see complete attention in her eyes.

“Is no . . . I don’t know,” she answered.

There was a little silence. He could see she was waiting.

“I don’t know where to go,” he said quietly. “I don’t know where to be.”

She turned her head slowly and stared out the doorway.

“I know,” she said.

She was still lost in thought, staring out at the afternoon, when he said, “I want to be here.”

She turned back to him. Her face looked huge. The sinking sun had given it a soft glow. Her eyes, wide with feeling, had the same glow.

“Yes,” she said, understanding exactly how he felt.

She dropped her head. When she looked back up, Dances With Wolves felt swallowed, just as he had felt out on the prairie with Timmons for the first time. Her eyes were the eyes of a soulful person, filled with a beauty few men could know. They were eternal.

Dances With Wolves fell in love when he saw this.

Stands With A Fist had already fallen in love. It happened at the time he began to speak, not all at once but in slow stages until at last she could not deny it. She saw herself in him. She saw that they could be one.

They talked a little more and fell silent. For a few minutes they stared at the afternoon, each knowing what the other was feeling but not daring to speak.

The spell was broken when one of Kicking Bird’s little boys happened by, looked inside, and asked what they were doing.

Stands With A Fist smiled at his innocent intrusion and told him in Comanche, “It is hot. We are sitting in the shade.”

This made so much sense to the little boy that he came in and flopped onto Dances With Wolves’s lap. They wrestled playfully for a few moments, but the roughhousing didn’t last long.

The little boy suddenly sat up and told Stands With A Fist he was hungry.

“All right,” she said in Comanche, and took him by the hand.

She looked at Dances With Wolves

“Eat?”

“Yes, I’m hungry.”

They crawled out of the arbor’s doorway and started for Kicking Bird’s lodge to get a cooking fire going.

His first order of business the next morning was to visit Stone Calf. He dropped by the warrior’s lodge early and was immediately invited to sit down and have breakfast. After they’d eaten the two men went outside to talk while Stone Calf worked on forming the willow for a new batch of arrows. Except for Stands With A Fist, it was the most sophisticated conversation he’d had with anyone.

Stone Calf was impressed that this Dances With Wolves, so new among them, was talking in Comanche already. And talking well.

The older warrior could also tell that Dances With Wolves wanted something, and when the discussion suddenly shifted to Stands With A Fist, he knew that this must be it.

Dances With Wolves tried to put it as casually as he could, but Stone Calf was too much the old fox not to see that the question was important to his visitor.

“Is Stands With A Fist married?”

“Yes,” Stone Calf replied.

The revelation hit Dances With Wolves like the worst kind of news.

He was silent.

“Where is her husband?” he finally asked. “I do not see him.”

“He is dead.”

This was a possibility he had never considered.

“When did he die?”

Stone Calf looked up from his work.

“It is impolite to talk of the dead,” he said. “But you are new so I will tell you. It was around the time of the cherry moon, in spring. She was grieving on the day you found her and brought her back.”

Dances With Wolves didn’t ask any more questions, but Stone Calf volunteered a few more facts. He mentioned the relatively high standing of the dead man and the absence of children in his marriage to Stands With A Fist.

Needing to digest what he had heard, Dances With Wolves thanked his informant and walked off.

Stone Calf wondered idly if there might be something going on between these people, and deciding it was none of his business, he went back to his work.

Dances With Wolves did the one thing he could count on to clear his head. He found Cisco in the pony herd and rode out of the village. He knew she would be waiting for him in Kicking Bird’s lodge, but his mind was spinning wildly with what he’d been told and he couldn’t think of facing her now.

He went downriver and, after a mile or two, decided to go all the way to Fort Sedgewick. He hadn’t been there for almost two weeks and felt an impulse to go now as if in some strange way the place might be able to tell him something.

Even from a distance he could see that late summer storms had finished the awning. It had been torn away from most of the staves. The canvas itself was badly shredded. What was left was flapping in the breeze like the ragged mainsail of a ghost ship.

Two Socks was waiting near the bluff and he threw the old fellow the slab of jerked meat he’d brought along for nibbling. He wasn’t hungry.

Field mice scattered as he peeked into the rotted supply house. They’d destroyed the only thing he’d left behind, a burlap sack filled with moldy hardtack.

In the sod hut that had been his home he lay down on the little bunk for a few minutes and stared at the crumbling walls.

He took his father’s broken pocket watch off its peg, intending to slip it into his trouser pocket. But he looked at it for a few seconds and put it back.

His father had been dead six years. Or was it seven? His mother had been dead even longer. He could recall the details of his life with them, but the people . . . the people seemed like they’d been gone a hundred years.