Michael Blake - Dances With Wolves

People left the room, but he didn’t look up to see who it was. A few seconds ticked off and then he heard the sergeant whisper coarsely:

“You turned Injin, didn’cha?”

Dances With Wolves lifted his head. The sergeant was bending over him with a leer.

“Didn’cha?”

Dances With Wolves didn’t answer. He let his head fall back into his hand, refusing to look up until the major and lieutenant had appeared again.

This time the lieutenant did the talking.

“What is your name?”

“Dunbar . . . D-u-n-b-a-r . . . John, J.”

“Are these your orders?”

He was holding up a yellowed sheet of paper. Dances With Wolves had to squint to make it out.

“Yes.”

“The name here is Rumbar,” the lieutenant said grimly. “The date is entered in pencil, but the rest is in ink. The signature of the issuing officer is smeared. It’s not legible. What do you have to say about that?”

Dances With Wolves heard the suspicion in the lieutenant’s voice. It began to sink in that these people did not believe him.

“Those are the orders I was given at Fort Hays,” he said flatly.

The lieutenant’s face twisted. He looked dissatisfied.

“Read the journal,” said Dances With Wolves.

“There is no journal,” the young officer replied.

Dances With Wolves watched him carefully, sure he was lying.

But the lieutenant was telling the truth.

A member of the advance party, the first to reach Fort Sedgewick, had found the journal. He was an illiterate private named Sheets and he had slipped the book into his tunic, thinking it would make good toilet paper. Sheets heard now that a certain journal was missing, one that the wild white man said was his. Maybe he ought to turn it in. He might be rewarded. But on second thought, Sheets worried that he might be reprimanded. Or worse. He’d done time in more than one guardhouse for petty theft. So the journal stayed hidden under his uniform coat.

“We want you to tell us the meaning of your appearance,” the lieutenant continued. He sounded like an interrogator now. “If you are who you say you are, why are you out of uniform?”

Dances With Wolves shifted against the supply house wall.

“What is the army doing out here?”

The major and the lieutenant whispered to one another again. And again the lieutenant spoke up.

“We are charged with recovering stolen property, including white captives taken in hostile raiding.”

“There has been no raiding and there are no white captives,” Dances With Wolves lied.

“We will ascertain that for ourselves,” the lieutenant countered.

The officers again fell to whispering, and this time the conversation went on a while before the lieutenant cleared his throat.

“We will give you a chance to prove your loyalty to your country. If you guide us to the hostile camps and serve as interpreter, your conduct will be reevaluated.”

“What conduct?”

“Your treasonable conduct?”

Dances With Wolves smiled.

“You think I’m a traitor?” he said.

The lieutenant’s voice rose angrily.

“Are you willing to cooperate or not?”

“There is nothing for you to do out here. That’s all I have to say.”

“Then we have no choice but to place you under arrest. You can sit here and think your situation over. If you decide to cooperate, tell Sergeant Murphy, and we will have a talk.”

With that, the major and the lieutenant left the supply house. Sergeant Wilcox detailed two men to stand guard at the door, and Dances With Wolves was left alone.

Kicking Bird stalled for as long as he could, but by early afternoon, Ten Bears’s camp had started the long march, heading southwest across the plains.

Stands With A Fist insisted on waiting for her husband and became hysterical when they forced her to go. Kicking Bird’s wives had to get rough with her before she finally composed herself.

But Stands With A Fist wasn’t the only worried Comanche. Everyone was worried. A last-minute council was convened just before they pulled out, and three young men on fast ponies were sent to scout the white man’s fort for Dances With Wolves.

He’d been sitting for three hours, fighting back the pain in his battered face, when Dances With Wolves told the guard he needed to relieve himself.

As he walked toward the bluff, sandwiched between two soldiers, he found himself repulsed by these men and their camp. He didn’t like the way they smelled. The sound of their voices seemed rough to his ears. Even the way they moved seemed crude and ungainly.

He peed over the edge of the bluff, and the two soldiers started him back. He was thinking about escape when a wagon loaded with wood and three soldiers rumbled into camp and skidded to a stop close by.

One of the men in the wagon bed called lightheartedly to a friend who had stayed in camp, and Dances With Wolves saw a tall soldier amble over to the wagon. The men in the bed were smiling at one another as the tall man came near.

He heard one of them say, “Look what we brung ya, Burns.”

The men in the wagon took hold of something and heaved it over the side. The tall man standing below them leaped back frightfully as Two Socks’s body landed at his feet with a thump.

The men in the wagon leaped out. They taunted the tall man as he backed away from the dead wolf.

One of the woodcutters cackled, “He’s a big ‘un, ain’t he, Burns.”

Two of the woodcutters lifted Two Socks off the ground, one taking his head, the other his back feet. Then, accompanied by the laughter of all the soldiers, they started to chase the tall man around the yard.

Dances With Wolves covered the ground so quickly that no one moved until he’d slammed into the soldiers carrying Two Socks. In short, chopping strokes he pounded one of them senseless with his fist.

He sprang after the second man, knocking his feet out from under him as he tried to run. Then his hands were around the man’s throat. His face was turning purple and Dances With Wolves saw his eyes begin to glaze when something struck him in the back of the head and a dark curtain dropped over him again.

It was twilight when he regained consciousness. His head was throbbing so hard that he didn’t notice at first. At first, he only heard a light rattle when he moved. Then he felt the cold metal. His hands were chained together. He moved his feet. They were chained, too.

When the major and lieutenant came back with more questions, he answered them with a killing glare and spat out a long string of Comanche insults. Each time they asked him something, he answered in Comanche. Finally, they tired of this and left him.

Later in the evening, the big sergeant placed a bowl of gruel before him.

Dances With Wolves kicked it over with his manacled feet.

Kicking Bird’s scouts brought the dreadful news in around midnight. They had counted more than sixty heavily armed soldiers at the white man’s fort. They had seen the buckskin horse lying dead on the slope. And just before dark they had seen Dances With Wolves being led to the bluff by the river, his feet and hands in chains. The band went into evasive action immediately. They packed up their things and marched out at night, little groups of a dozen or less, heading in all different directions. They would rendezvous days later in the winter camp.

Ten Bears knew he would never hold them back, so he didn’t try. A force of twenty warriors, Kicking Bird and Stone Calf and Wind In His Hair among them, left within the hour, promising not to engage the enemy unless they could be sure of success.

Major Hatch made his decision late the same night. He didn’t want to be bothered with the thorny problem of a savage, half-Indian white man sitting under his nose. The major was not a visionary thinker, and from the first he’d been baffled and afraid of his exotic prisoner.