Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

"If you would turn him loose I wouldn't have to kill him," Idahi said.

"It's my bear and I ain't turning him loose," Blue Duck said. "Kill him if you want to." Idahi decided that his life was probably over. He got up and began to sing a song about some of the things he had done in his life. He made a song about the bear that he had seen kill an elk.

While he sang the camp grew quiet.

Idahi thought it might be his last song, so he did not hurry. He sang about Paha-yuca, and the people who would no longer be free.

Then he walked over to his horse, took his rifle, and went to the willow tree where the bear was chained. The bear looked up as he approached; it still had blood on its nose from the beating Blue Duck had given it. Idahi was still singing. The bear was such a sad bear that he didn't think it would mind losing its life. He stepped very close to the bear, so he would not have to shoot it a second time. The bear did not move away from him; it merely waited.

Idahi shot the bear dead with one shot placed just above its ear. Then, still singing, he took the chain off it, so that it would not have, in death, the humiliations it had had to endure in its life.

Idahi expected then that Blue Duck would kill him, or order Ermoke or some of the other renegades to kill him, but instead Blue Duck merely ordered the camp women to skin the bear and cut up the meat. Idahi went on singing until he was well out of camp. He didn't know why Blue Duck had let him go, but he went on singing as loudly as he could. He made a song about some of the hunts he had been on in his life. If the renegades were going to follow him he wanted them to know exactly where he was: he didn't want them to think he was a coward who would slink away.

That night he thought he heard a ghost bear, far away on the prairie, howling in answer to his song.

Though Ermoke knew it was dangerous to question Blue Duck, he was so angry at what he had seen Idahi do that he went to him anyway, to complain about his lax behaviour with the Comanche from the south. One of the rules of the band was that there could be no visitors; those who came either stayed or were killed. Blue Duck had made the rule himself, and now had broken it, and broken it flagrantly.

Within the space of a single day a man had ridden in, surveyed the camp, and ridden out.

That Idahi had killed the bear also bothered Ermoke. No one liked the bear, a coward whose spirit Blue Duck had broken long ago. When they tried to use it to make sport with captives the bear only whimpered and turned its back.

Once they had even convinced a terrified white woman that they were going to force the bear to mate with her, but of course the bear did not mate with her or even scratch her. Besides, even though it was a skinny bear, it had to be fed from time to time. The bear was only a source of discontent. Sometimes, just to flaunt his authority, Blue Duck would feed the bear choice cuts of venison or buffalo that the men in camp would have liked to eat themselves. It galled them to see a bear eating meat while they had to subsist on mush or fish.

What infuriated Ermoke was that the Comanche, Idahi, had been in the camp long enough to count and identify every man in it. Besides, he knew exactly where the camp was; if he cared to sell his knowledge to the white law, the white law would make him rich. It was to prevent that very thing from happening that Blue Duck had made the rule regarding visitors.

Ermoke marched up to Blue Duck in a fury, which was the safest way to approach him in the event of a dispute. Blue Duck showed the timid no mercy, but he was sometimes indulgent of angry men.

"Why did you let the Comanche go?" Ermoke asked. "Now he can tell the white men where we are and how many of us there are." "Idahi does not like white men," Blue Duck said.

"People are not supposed to come and go from our camp," Ermoke insisted. "You said so yourself. If people can come and go someone will betray us and we will all be dead." "You should go help those women skin that bear--I don't think they know how to skin bears," Blue Duck said. It was an insult and he knew it.

If Ermoke helped the women do their work he would soon be laughed out of camp. He thought the insult would make Ermoke mad enough that he would kill one or two of the filthy, cowardly white men--they were men who would betray anyone if they could do so profitably. There were always too many people in the camp. Men drifted in, hoping for quick riches, and were too lazy to leave. There was never enough food in the camp, or enough women. Several times Blue Duck had killed some of the white men himself; he would merely prop a rifle across his knees and start shooting. Sometimes the men would sit, stupefied and stunned, like buffalo in a herd, while he shot such victims as caught his eye.

"I wish I could follow that man and kill him," Ermoke said. "I don't like it that he knows where our camp is." Blue Duck looked at Ermoke in surprise. He saw that the man was angry, so angry that he didn't care what he did.

Usually when Ermoke was angry he took his anger out on captive women. He was very lustful.

But the one woman captive in the camp had already been abused so badly that she offered no sport--s now Ermoke had decided to be angry at Idahi. Blue Duck thought Ermoke was a fool. Idahi was a Comanche warrior, Ermoke just a renegade. If the two men fought, Idahi would not be the one who lost his scalp.

But Blue Duck had another reason for letting Idahi leave the camp without challenge, a reason he did not intend to share with Ermoke.

He had asked Idahi to help him kill Buffalo Hump. Of course, Idahi had refused, but Idahi was a gossip. Soon all the Comanches would know that Blue Duck intended to kill Buffalo Hump. Blue Duck knew that when a chief was old and had lost his power he could expect little help from the young warriors. Old chiefs were just old men--they could expect no protection as they waited to die.

Blue Duck wanted Idahi to spread the ^w that he intended to kill his father--t was why he had let Idahi go. The nice thing was that Idahi had even given him back the shotgun. He had lost nothing from Idahi's visit except the bear, and the bear had become more trouble than it was worth.

Ermoke still faced him, still hot.

"If you want to kill somebody, go kill that other old man," Blue Duck said. "I'm tired of looking at him--g club him out. But don't bother my friend Idahi. If you bother him I'll club you out." Ermoke didn't like what he was told--he didn't like it that a Comanche was allowed to come and go, just because he was a Comanche. There was little food in the camp. Tomorrow he meant to take a few of the better warriors and try to find game. He thought he might follow the Comanche while he was at it.

He didn't know. He was angry, but not angry enough to start a fight with Blue Duck, not then.

To relieve his anger he got a club and beat the old white man until he had broken most of his ribs. Several of the renegades watched the beating, idly. One of them, a short whiskey trader with a bent leg named Monkey John, began to upbraid the women for doing such a crude job of skinning the bear. They had got the skin off but it was cut in several places. The bear lay on its back, a naked pile of meat. When Monkey John got tired of yelling at the cowering women he took his knife and cut off the bear's paws, meaning to extract all the claws. Some of the half-breeds put great store in bear claws--Monkey John meant to use them as money and gamble with them.

In the night the old man who had been so severely beaten coughed up blood and died. One of the half-breeds dragged him into the river, but the river was shallow. The old man didn't float far. He grounded on a mud bank, a few hundred yards from camp. In the morning the mud bank was thick with carrion birds.