Philipp Meyer - The Son

THE HUNTING THAT spring was the worst anyone could remember. Toshaway had grown up with herds of buffalo blackening the prairie for weeks, but none of the younger Indians had seen anything like it. There had been a drought in parts of the plains, but mostly it was because of the eastern tribes, whose numbers were growing by the month in the Territories. They all took liberties in our hunting grounds and we spent as much time killing them as we did the whites. It was considered a good way to break in the youth without having to ride too far.

When the yucca were done blooming Toshaway and I and a few dozen others rode out to patrol for buffalo or trespassing Indians. After a few days we came on a small herd moving west, toward New Mexico and the drier part of the plains, which meant something was disturbing them. The scouts rode east while the rest of us killed buffalo and then it came back that a group of Tonks had been seen. Some of the fort Indians were treated with caution, but the Tonkawa had a great taste for firewater and it was not considered much to kill one. A decade later they would be wiped out completely.

N uukaru, who had been coaching me on the skinning, put his knife into his sheath and was into his saddle in three long steps. I had misplaced my bow and by the time I got mounted the entire party was riding to haul hell out of its shuck.

The prairie is not as flat as it looks, it is more like the swells of an ocean, there are peaks and troughs, and, being in less of a hurry to kill a Tonk, it wasn’t long till I lost sight of the others. It was a nice day, the grass going down and standing up in waves, in all directions, the sky very clear and blue with a few clouds lingering. The sun was nice on my back. The idea of running down a Tonk could not have seemed less appealing. I was not allowed to carry a firearm and even with both feet on the ground I was only average with the bow; unless the target was standing still, directly in front of me, shooting from a moving horse was impossible.

The horse knew something was wrong and he kept trying to catch the others. He had a good smooth lope so I held him there. I made a note of the sun and it occurred to me that I might just turn southeast, toward the Llano breaks; I could hunt easily enough with the bow and it was maybe a two-week ride to the frontier if I wasn’t caught. There were patches of small red flowers, puha natsu . I thought about the English name but I didn’t know it. I thought about my father. Then I gave the horse his head and we were running.

A few minutes later I could hear shots and hollering and then there were riders and horses. Toshaway and Pizon and a few others were standing around a man on the ground. He was lying in a patch of blanketflower with several arrows sticking out of him. He had lost enough blood to paint a house and it was bright in the greenery around him.

“Tiehteti-taibo, very nice of you to come.”

The Comanches were breathing easy and their sweat was dry and their horses were off grazing. Except for N uukaru, who was holding his lance in case the Tonk got his sap back, not one of them had a weapon in hand. They might have been judging the quality of a deer or elk they’d brought down. As for the Tonkawa, he was chanting and wheezing, his torso smeared and his chin dripping with blood as if he had been feeding on human bodies.

Toshaway and Pizon had a word and then Pizon took an old single-shot pistol from his sash and handed it over butt-first. It was a.69 caliber, a cannon as handguns went.

“Go ahead, Tiehteti.”

Pizon added: “If it were him, he would be slicing off your breast and eating it in front of you.”

The man looked up and recognized me, then stared out over the prairie. His chanting got more insistent and there was no point lingering so I squeezed the trigger. The gun snapped into my wrist and the man leaned farther against the rock. His music stopped and his legs began to twitch like a dog in sleep.

He was a good-looking brave with long beautiful hair and Pizon took the entire scalp beneath the ears. The ball must have loosened something because when Pizon ripped off his hair, the man’s head fell open as if it were hinged at the bottom, his face going forward and the back of his head going the other direction. No one had ever seen a pistol ball do that. It was good medicine.

The others got distracted but I continued to stare, the man’s face looking down at his own chest, all his secrets open to the wind.

“You’re acting very strange, Tiehteti-taibo.”

“ Haa, ” I said. “ Tsaa man usukar u .”

N UUKARU AND I were sent to retrieve the dead man’s weapons and anything else he had dropped and there was something about him lying there with the blanketflowers all around stained with blood and I rode after N uukaru as quickly as I could. After an hour we found the Tonk’s rifle. It was a fire-new Springfield musket and N uukaru couldn’t believe it — the Tonks were poor and their equipment was usually poor as well. “This thing must have come from the whites,” he said. “And his horse also.”

I didn’t care. I was bored looking for the man’s valuables — I doubted he owned much and didn’t intend on spending the rest of the day looking for a filthy war bag. I wondered if I was the only one who knew how many rifles and horses the whites had.

The rest of the group was out of sight; it was waist-high grass in every direction, then sky. My horse was eating flowers; bluebonnets were hanging from his mouth. I wondered if they would let me keep the Tonk’s scalp.

ONE OF THE Tonks had gotten away, but as he was afoot in unfamiliar territory, and being a reservation Indian probably only a few notches above a white man, he was almost certain to die eventually, so we didn’t bother chasing him. Not to mention that with the confusion of the fight over, he would easily spot us before we spotted him, making it likely he would be able to shoot at least one of us. Unlike the whites, whose noble leaders were willing to sacrifice any number of followers to kill a single Indian, the Comanches did not believe in trading any of their own for the enemy. It was another unfortunate character trait, as far as fighting the Anglos was concerned.

So instead of following the lone Tonk, we prepared for a celebration, taking their scalps and horses and brand-new rifles, whose newness, though no one said it, was another sign of a storm coming. N uukaru found the Tonk’s war bag, which contained dozens of paper cartridges, another luxury from the whites.

“Look at this shit,” he said.

No one paid any attention. We made our way back to the buffalo we’d killed, having a big feast of the liver and bile and then building a fire of mesquite and buffalo chips and roasting the meat and marrow. The Tonk’s scalp belonged to Pizon. My shooting him was just a formality.

THE NEXT MORNING the wind had shifted and there was a faint rotten smell. I could barely pick it up and of course things were always dying on the prairie, but the other Comanches thought it noteworthy, and after we packed the buffalo’s meat back into their skins and tied the bundles onto the spare horses, we began to ride. A few hours later we came to a small canyon, the grass tall and a creek running down the middle, and as we rode into it the smell became worse, and then the horses refused to go farther.

There was no sound except the wind and the running of the stream and the flapping of tent skins. There were several hundred tipis, with thousands of black vultures tottering among them, as if they had decided to give up their wild ways and become civilized.

I leaned over and retched and someone behind me did the same. It was decided that I would go in alone and make an inspection while the others stayed back.