Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

"I wish we could just shoot her, Pea," Jake said. "If I had known she was going to bite herself and carry on like that I would have shot her to begin with." "I wouldn't want to shoot no woman, not me," Pea Eye said. He wished the sun would come out--af violent skirmishes his head was apt to throb for hours; it was throbbing at the time. He had a notion that if the sun would just come out his head might get a little better. His horse had a hard trot, which made his head pound the worse.

Jake Spoon, who was delicate and prone to vomits at the sight of dead people, couldn't tolerate the woman's shrieks. He plugged his ears with some cotton ticking he kept in his saddlebags for just such a purpose. Then he loped ahead, so he wouldn't have to see the blood from the woman's torn wrists dripping off her horse's shoulders.

"What's wrong with that boy?" Goodnight asked, when he saw the tufts of cotton sticking out of Jake Spoon's ears.

"Why, I don't know, Charlie," Augustus said. "Maybe he's just tired of listening to all this idle conversation."

Idahi had ridden all the way from the Big Wichita to the Arkansas River, looking for Blue Duck and his band of renegades; he wanted to join the band and become a renegade himself, mainly so he could go on killing white people and stealing their guns. Idahi would kill anybody, Indian or white, if they had guns that he wanted to shoot. He didn't consider himself a harsh or a particularly bloodthirsty man--it was merely that killing people was usually the easiest way to get their guns.

To his annoyance Idahi missed Blue Duck as he was travelling toward the Arkansas.

Several people had told him Blue Duck was camped on the Arkansas, when in fact he was camped on a sandy bend of the Red River, well east, where the river curved into the forests.

"Quicksand," Blue Duck informed him, when Idahi finally found his camp and asked why he was camping on the Red River. "There's bad sand along this stretch of the river. If the law tries to come at us from the south they'll bog their horses. We can shoot them or let them drown.

Five or six laws from Texas have drowned already." "If they drown, do you get their guns?" Idahi asked. He was from the Comanche band of Paha-yuca, whom Blue Duck had known long ago, when he was still welcome among the Comanche people. But Paha-yuca had agreed to take his people onto a reservation the whites had promised him.

Paha-yuca was old; what had made him agree to go onto the reservation was the news that the big war between the whites might soon end. The white soldiers were said to have reached an agreement to stop killing one another. At least that was the rumour, though there had been other such rumours in the last few years and they had not been accurate. But it was Paha-yuca's opinion that once the white soldiers stopped killing one another they would start killing Comanches again. The bluecoat soldiers would return to the empty forts stretching westward along the rivers. Many bluecoats would come, and this time they would come onto the llano and press the fight until there were no more free Comanches left to kill.

Paha-yuca was not a coward, nor was he a fool. Idahi knew that he was probably right in his assessment, right when he said that the People would no longer be able to live in the old ways. If they wanted to live at all they would have to compromise and live as the whites wanted them to. Also, they would have to stop killing whites--they could no longer just kill and scalp and rob and rape whenever they came across a few whites.

It was that injunction that caused Idahi to leave and seek out Blue Duck, the outcast, the man not welcome in the lodges of the Comanches--Blue Duck continued to kill whites wherever he met them. He also hated Kiowas because they had denied him a woman he wanted--he killed Kiowas when he could, and also Kickapoos and Wichitas.

Idahi had known Blue Duck when the latter was still with his people; they had ridden together and practiced shooting guns. They both thought it was foolish to try and kill people or game with bows and arrows, since it was so much easier to kill them with bullets. The two had been friends, which is why Idahi decided to seek him out when Paha-yuca made his decision.

Fortunately Blue Duck was at the camp on the Red River when Idahi rode up--the camp was a violent place, where strangers were not welcome. Everyone stopped what they were doing when they saw a horseman approaching; they all picked up their guns, but Blue Duck recognized Idahi and immediately rode out to escort him into camp, a signal to all the renegades that Idahi enjoyed his protection.

"All the people are going on reservations now," Idahi said, when Blue Duck greeted him.

"I do not want to live that way. I thought I would come and fight with you." Blue Duck was glad to see Idahi--no other Comanches had ever come to join his band. He remembered Idahi's love of guns and immediately presented him with a fine shotgun he had taken from a traveller he killed in Arkansas. Idahi was so delighted with his present that he immediately began to shoot off the shotgun, a disturbance hardly noticed in the camp of Blue Duck, where a lot of loud activity was going on. At the edge of the Red River, where the bad sand was supposed to be, two renegades were dragging a white woman through the water. They seemed to be trying to drown her. One man was on horseback--he was dragging the woman through the mud on the end of a rope. The other man followed on foot. Now and then he would jump on the woman, who was screaming and choking in fear.

Idahi saw to his astonishment that there was a half-grown bear in the camp, tethered by a chain to a willow tree. The bear made a lunge and caught a dog who had been unwary enough to approach it. The bear immediately killed the dog, which seemed to annoy Blue Duck. He immediately grabbed a big club and beat the bear off the corpse of the dog--Blue Duck took the dog's tail and slung the dead dog in the direction of a number of dirty women who were sitting around a big cook pot. Two half-naked prisoners, both skinny old men, lay securely tied not far from the women. Both had been severely beaten and one had had the soles of his feet sliced off, a torment the Comanches sometimes inflicted on their captives. Usually a captive who had the soles of his feet sliced off was made to run over rocks for a while, or cactus, on his bloody feet; but the old man Idahi saw looked too weak to run very far. The two prisoners stared at Idahi hopefully; perhaps they thought he might rescue them, but of course Idahi had no intention of interfering with Blue Duck's captives.

The dog the bear had killed was the only fat dog in the camp, which was no doubt why Blue Duck took it away from the bear and gave it to the women to cook.

"A fat dog is too good to waste on a bear," Blue Duck said. "You and me will eat that dog ourselves." "What does the bear eat?" Idahi asked.

Personally he thought it was bad luck to keep a bear in camp; he had been shocked when Blue Duck casually picked up the club and beat the young bear until blood came out of its nose.

He had been raised to believe that bears were to be respected; their power was as great as the power of the buffalo. Seeing Blue Duck beat the bear as casually as most men would beat a dog, or a recalcitrant horse, gave Idahi a moment of doubt--if Blue Duck had forgotten the need to respect the power of the bear, then he might have been foolish to come to Blue Duck's camp.

Though Idahi had left the Comanches he had only done so a few days ago; he had not forgotten or discarded any of the important ways or teachings of his people. But Blue Duck had been a renegade for years. Perhaps the old teachings no longer mattered to him. It was a thought that made Idahi uneasy.

A little later, while the dog was cooking, Blue Duck dragged the old man whose soles had been sliced off over to where the bear was. He wanted the bear to eat the old man, who was so terrified to be at the mercy of a bear that he could not even scream. He lay as if paralyzed, with his lips trembling and his eyes wide open. But the bear had no interest in the old man, a fact which annoyed Blue Duck. He picked up the club and beat the bear some more; but, though the bear whimpered and whined, he would not touch the skinny old captive.