Philipp Meyer - The Son

Everyone took this as a sign that our bad luck had ended, and the Creator-of-All-Things had forgiven us. By the time the first Spring Beauties appeared we had replenished our stores of meat and hides and begun to look forward to the summer, when the weather would be warm, though this also meant that the women in the band were put to double work preparing all the hides, so that they would be ready by the time the Comanchero traders arrived.

IN MAY IT was time to go raiding again. A third of the band had been killed the previous year, most of its horse wealth lost, and if this summer’s raids were not successful, it was not clear how much longer we would survive. Toshaway would go again, though Escuté, who still could not quite draw his bow, was ordered to stay in camp, and I would be sent in his place. N uukaru was also going but, unlike the other young braves, he was quiet about the deeds he would commit.

“Don’t look so down in the mouth,” said Escuté. “You can bring back a beautiful Mexican girl and listen to me fuck her.”

N uukaru shook his head.

“Let me guess. You have a bad feeling.”

“Stop,” he said, indicating me.

Escuté looked over: “This one always has a bad feeling. Don’t listen to him.”

“I had it about the last one, too.”

“Ah, the great puha tenahp u . I had almost forgotten.”

“Things are changing,” he said. “Whether or not we admit it. The Penateka…”

“Fuck the fucking Penateka. They were the white man’s tai?i and they got what was coming to them.”

“They were four times our size.”

“And they were the white man’s bitch and got all his diseases.”

“Ah, of course. The ones who make the greatest-ever raid on the whites were also his bitch.”

“Ten winters ago.”

“They had horse herds as thick as buffalo.”

“N uukaru, we had one bad year, and you are a gloomy cocksucker, and you might ask to stay behind because if you continue to talk like that, instead of singing the woho hubiya, someone will shut your mouth with a tomahawk.”

“If we have another raid like last year,” said N uukaru, “there will be no one left to shut my mouth at all.”

“Ignore him, Tiehteti. This is what gets people killed.” He shook his head. “You will bring back a thousand horses and a hundred scalps and fifty Mexican slaves. That is what you will do. Talking about it is a waste of time.”

“All right,” said N uukaru.

“My arm hurts so bad I can’t sleep but you don’t hear me whining like a child. Kill some Mexicans, die a hero, I don’t give a fuck, but this talking is pointless, you might as well cut your own throat, and the throats of your people while you’re at it.”

“WE ARE PLANNING to avoid the whites,” said Toshaway, “but…”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I told him.

“Good.” He looked out across the village, noticeably smaller than it had been the previous year. “I wish you had been born twenty years ago, Tiehteti, because those were real days. The buffalo wolves used to follow us on our raids because they knew they’d get something to eat.” He scratched his chin. “But perhaps those times will return.”

WE DESCENDED FROM the plains and the land became mesas and canyonlands again, there were trees, mostly cottonwoods and oaks, the grass was tall and the blanketflowers were thick, patches of color going on for miles.

Toshaway had relatives along the San Saba headwaters and while looking for them we found a freshly raided Comanche camp, around seventy bodies, all scalped. There were a few warriors, but mostly it was women and children and old men. Toshaway had found his relatives. They were a splinter band of the Kotsoteka. Many of the women and girls had been treated the same as my mother and sister, cut up in the same way as well. We spent the day burying them.

“Their men must still be out,” said Pizon.

There were boot prints everywhere, boots made in Austin or San Antonio or somewhere in the east. There was a strange litter of musket balls on the ground and the hoofprints of shod horses. The tipis, weapons, and camp equipment had all been thrown into a fire and burned. I was dauncy with shame, but the other Comanches kept their faces hard, and the only thing said was that a few years earlier, the nearest white settlements has been hundreds of miles away, and it was a bad sign that they had found this camp.

“How many whites are there?” said Toshaway. “Do you know?”

“They say about twenty million.”

He grunted and looked at me.

“Come on.”

“It’s a fact.”

“Okay, Tiehteti.”

We rode in a wide circle around the camp, taking a break from digging. It could not have been a Ranger squad because twelve men could not kill seventy-three Comanches, even women and children. Toshaway guessed three hundred riders, but there were so many tracks on top of each other, as they had spent at least a day raping and sacking the village, it was hard to be certain.

I thought about my father’s tracks, he had a strange duck-footed walk and his left foot stuck out more than his right, and for a tall heavy man he had very small feet. I decided not to look.

At the top of a hill we found ruts as if a pair of wagons had been parked. The grass was burned down to the dirt.

“Strange,” said Toshaway.

“Those were cannons,” I said. “That’s why the grass is burned.”

“Those are very heavy, no?”

“A mountain howitzer can be pulled behind a horse. The army used them against the Mexicans all the time.”

The hill was maybe a furlong from the village and I knew the musket balls littering the ground must have been canister. A mountain howitzer loaded with canister was like two hundred rifles firing at once, or as my father used to say, like the hand of the Lord Himself.

“Tiehteti, it is very strange. For instance, how did they get into position without being noticed? And why would they have brought cannons all this way unless they were sure that Indians would be here? That is what I find strange.” He shook his head. “Someone was leading them.”

“They put the guns in place in the dark.”

“Of course in the dark. But still. They knew Indians were here.” He stood looking down at the ruins of the camp.

“Unfortunately most of the men seem to have fallen into their cooking fires and I could not tell if my cousin was among them. Though I did recognize his wife and two daughters.”

By then the other men were washing the ash and gore off in the river. Before we left, we hacked a flat place into a cottonwood and carved a note in hieroglyphics, telling what had happened, and how many we had buried, in case there were other members of the band who had not yet returned.

THE NEXT NIGHT we saw campfires in the distance, fires as only the whites made them, twice as large as they needed to be, nearly two dozen in all. It could only be the army, as there were not that many Rangers in the entire state of Texas.

There was discussion about whether to steal their horses but we decided to keep going. It would be safer to get them from the Mexicans, and instead of sleeping we rode all night to put distance between us and the soldiers. We crossed the Pecos without seeing anyone else, though there were recent tracks of shod horses, a small party of travelers. There was a debate about following them but the army was still close and it was again decided to wait. Climbing out of the Pecos Valley, the land became flat and dry. Long patches of caliche, clumps of oaks, mesquites, and huisache, the occasional cedar. We didn’t relax until we’d reached the Davis Mountains, where there was another debate about using the standard route past the old Presidio del Norte, which was well watered and had good grass and involved the least climbing, or going farther east into the mountains, where it was steeper and less watered but also less traveled. The younger men — who needed scalps — were annoyed we hadn’t taken on either the army or the travelers whose tracks we’d crossed, so it was decided to go past Presidio.