Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

"I see the Buffalo Horse up there," Last Horse remarked. The whole rim of the canyon was bright now, with the sunny dawn.

"If he had stepped on you, you would not need to borrow anybody's horse, because you would be dead," he added. "That horse has big feet." "I see him standing up there," Slipping Weasel said, looking up at the Buffalo Horse. He would have liked a closer look at the great horse--all the Comanches would have liked a closer look. But there was no way to get one without having to fight Big Horse Scull.

"I have heard that the Buffalo Horse can fly," Last Horse said. "They say his wings are larger than the wings of many buzzards put together. If he flies down here while we are talking I am going to run away." "If he flies down here I will shoot him," Slipping Weasel said. He too had heard the rumour that the Buffalo Horse could fly. He watched the horse closely; he too meant to run if the Buffalo Horse suddenly spread his wings and flew down at them.

Blue Duck didn't bother replying to such foolishness. If the Buffalo Horse could fly, Scull would long ago have flown above the Comanche people and killed them all. His father had once told him that there were vision women who could teach a man to fly, but no one had introduced him to such a vision woman. Buffalo Hump admitted that he himself might not be able to fly, because of the weight of his hump, but he thought that other men might be able to, if they could find the right old woman to teach them.

Blue Duck walked on away from the two men --he decided not to bother with their horses. The two vexed him so, that he might forget and kill them if he stayed around them; then he would be driven from the camp before he was ready to go.

When Blue Duck walked away, Slipping Weasel saw that most of his back was covered with fresh blood. The sight made him feel a little guilty. Blue Duck might have a worse wound than he and Last Horse supposed. What if he were to die before he reached camp? Men could die very suddenly, once they lost too much blood.

One minute they might be walking and the next minute they might be dead.

Part Mexican or not, Blue Duck .was the son of Buffalo Hump, and Buffalo Hump was their great chief. Though he didn't seem to be particularly fond of Blue Duck, there was no telling what Buffalo Hump might do if his own son dropped dead from a wound received fighting the white men. It would come out, of course, that he and Last Horse had failed to lend him a horse, although he was bleeding a lot. It would not please Buffalo Hump; there was no telling what he might do.

With that in mind Slipping Weasel trotted after Blue Duck--the deer down the valley could wait a few minutes, before they were killed.

"You had better take my horse," he said.

"You have too much blood coming out of you--I don't think you should be walking." Blue Duck ignored him. He was close to the camp now. Why should he take a horse when he had already done the walking?

Besides, now that he was close to camp and no longer had to fear that Gun In The Water or Silver Hair McCrae would slide down the canyon wall and ambush him, he was in no great hurry to get home. He would soon have to admit to his father that he had lost a horse, and his father would not be pleased.

"Your Mongol Hun cooked his meat by horse heat," Inish Scull observed. He was comfortably seated on a large rock at the edge of the Palo Duro, studying the distant Comanche camp through his binoculars. Gus and Call had both wanted to scamper down the slope after the fleeing warrior, but Inish Scull waved them back.

"Nope, it's too shadowy yet," he said.

"We'll not be skating down a cliff this morning after one red killer. He might have a few friends, scattered among those rocks." "I don't think so, Captain," Call said.

"He was alone when he came at me." "That doesn't contradict my point," the Captain said, a little sharply. Woodrow Call, though a more than competent fighting man, had a disputatious nature--not a welcome thing, in Inish Scull's command.

"If his friends were hiding in the rocks, then they couldn't have been with him when he shot the arrow at you, now could they?" Scull said. "Human beings are rarely in two places at once, Mr.

Call." Call didn't reply. Of course human beings couldn't be in two places at once; but the fleeing boy was well past the rocks in question, and no one had appeared to join him.

Augustus was puzzled by the remark about horse heat, a form of heat he had never heard of; nor was he exactly clear about the Mongol Huns.

The Captain was always talking about faraway places and peoples he had never heard of, Gurkhas and Zulus and Zouaves and the like, frequently launching into a lecture just as Augustus was possessed of a powerful urge to sleep. What he wanted to do at the moment was stretch out on a big rock and let the warm sun bake the chill out of him.

It was Woodrow Call who liked to hear the Captain discourse on the wars of history, or weaponry, or fighting tactics of any kind.

The Captain had even given Call a ragged old book about Napoleon; though the book had one cover off, Call carried it in his saddlebags and read in it a page or two at a time, at night by the campfire.

"What is horse heat, Captain?" Augustus asked--he did not want to seem indifferent to Inish Scull's instruction.

Indifference might result in Woodrow getting promoted over him, a thing he would find intolerable.

"Horse heat?" Inish said. "Why, your Mongol would slice off his steak in the morning and stick it under his saddle blanket. Then he'd gallop along all day, with the steak between him and the horse. Your Mongol might ride for fourteen hours at a stretch. By the time he made camp the steak would be cooked enough to suit him--a little horse heat and a lot of friction would do the job." "Fourteen hours under a saddle blanket?" Augustus said. "Why, it would just be horsehairs mostly, by then. I doubt I could stomach horsemeat if it had been under a saddle blanket all day." The Captain raised his binoculars--he had been looking down the canyon, where the sizable Comanche horse herd grazed.

"Buffalo Hump and his boys are hardly shy of horseflesh, at the moment," he said. "There must be nearly a thousand horses in that herd. I wonder what would happen if we tried to spook his ponies." "We'd need to find a good trail down off this rim," Call said, but Captain Scull seemed hardly to hear him. He was imagining a grand charge.

"These red men are in their winter camp," he said. "I expect they're lazy and well fed.

There's buffalo meat drying everywhere. We could come down like the wolf on the fold. It would be a chase you'd never forget." Augustus was annoyed. Just when he wanted to stretch out and enjoy the sunlight, the Captain wanted to run off the Comanche horse herd, a mission that was sure to be perilous.

"I expect they'd stop feeling lazy pretty quick, if we was to run off their horses," he said.

Inish Scull, binoculars to his eyes, suddenly stiffened. He had his glasses fixed on a certain lodge in the Comanche camp.

"That's him, gentlemen--I told you. That's Buffalo Hump. Bible and sword," the Captain said in an excited tone.

Call strained his eyes, but could barely see the lodges, across the canyon. Augustus, whose vision was the talk of the rangers, saw people, but they were the size of ants. He had once owned a good brass spyglass, but had lost it in a card game several months before. He had meant to get another, but so far had been prevented by poverty from acquiring that useful tool.

Inish Scull had not moved--his binoculars were still trained on the same spot.

"That young brave you chased is talking to Buffalo Hump--I expect it's his son.

The young wolf's bold, like the old wolf. We put some bullets in him, though. He's leaking considerable blood." "Not enough bullets, I guess," Call said.