For his part, Lieutenant Dunbar did not have to see her little smile to know that the encouragement was heartfelt. He could hear it in the sound of the word and he could see it in the power of her pale brown eyes. To hear him say these words, in English and Comanche, meant something special to her. Her inward thrill was tingling all about them. The lieutenant could feel it.
She was not the same woman, so sad and lost, that he had found on the prairie. That moment was now something left behind. It made him happy to see how far she had come.
Best of all was the little piece of bark he held in his hands. He grasped it firmly, determined not to let it slip away. It was the first section of a map that would guide him into whatever future he had with these people. So many things would be possible from now on.
It was Kicking Bird, however, who was most profoundly affected by this turn of events. To him it was a miracle of the highest order, on a par with attending something all-consuming, like birth or death.
His dream had become reality.
When he heard the lieutenant say his name in Comanche, it was as though an impenetrable wall had suddenly turned to smoke. And they were walking through. They were communicating.
With equal force his view of Stands With A Fist had enlarged. She was no longer a Comanche. In making herself a bridge for their words, she had become something more. Like the lieutenant, he heard it in the sound of her English words and he saw it in the new power of her eyes. Something had been added, something that was missing before, and Kicking Bird knew what it was.
Her long-buried blood was running again, her undiluted white blood.
The impact of these things was more than even Kicking Bird could bear, and like a professor who knows when it is time for his pupils to take a rest, he told Stands With A Fist that this was enough for one day.
A trace of disappointment flashed on her face. Then she dropped her head and nodded submissively.
At that moment, however, a wonderful thought occurred to her. She caught Kicking Bird’s eye and respectfully asked if they might do one more thing.
She wanted to teach the white soldier his name.
It was a good idea, so good that Kicking Bird could not refuse his adopted daughter. He told her to continue.
She remembered the word right away. She could see it, but she couldn’t speak it. And she couldn’t remember how she had done it as a girl. The men waited while she tried to remember.
Then Lieutenant Dunbar unwittingly raised his hand to brush at a gnat that was bothering his ear, and she saw it all again.
She grabbed the lieutenant’s hand as it hung in space and let the fingertips of her other hand rest cautiously on his hip. And before either man could react, she led Dunbar into a creaky but unmistakable memory of a waltz.
After a few seconds she pulled away demurely, leaving Lieutenant Dunbar in a state of shock. He had to struggle to remember the point of the exercise.
A light went off in his head. Then it jumped into his eyes, and like the only boy in class who knows the answer, he smiled at his teacher.
From there it was easy to get the rest.
Lieutenant Dunbar went to one knee and wrote the name at the bottom of his bark grammar book. His eyes lingered on the way it looked in English. It seemed bigger than just a name. The more he looked at it, the more he liked it.
He said it to himself. Dances With Wolves.
The lieutenant came to his feet, bowed shortly in Kicking Bird’s direction, and, as a butler might announce the arrival of a dinner guest, humbly and without fanfare, he said the name once more.
This time he said it in Comanche.
“Dances With Wolves.”
CHAPTER XXII
Dances With Wolves stayed in Kicking Bird’s lodge that night. He was exhausted but, as sometimes happens, was too tired to sleep. The day’s events hopped about in his mind like popcorn in a skillet.
When he finally began the drift into unconsciousness, the lieutenant slipped into the twilight of a dream he had not had since he was very young. Surrounded by stars, he was floating through the cold, silent void of space, a weightless little boy alone in a world of silver and black.
But he was not afraid. He was snug and warm and under the covers of a four-poster bed, and to drift like a single seed in all the universe, even if for eternity, was not a hardship. It was a joy.
That was how he fell asleep on his first night in the Comanches’ ancestral summer camp.
In the months that followed, Lieutenant Dunbar would fall asleep many times in Ten Bears’s camp.
He returned to Fort Sedgewick often, but the visits were prompted primarily by guilt, not desire. Even while he was there he knew he was maintaining the thinnest of appearances. Yet he felt compelled to do so.
He knew there was no logical reason to stay on. Certain now that the army had abandoned the post and him along with it, he thought of returning to Fort Hays. He had already done his duty. In fact, his devotion to the post and the U.S. Army had been exemplary. He could leave with his head held high.
What held him was the pull of another world, a world he had just begun to explore. He didn’t know exactly when it happened, but it came to him that his dream of being posted on the frontier, a dream that he had concocted to serve the small boundaries of military service, had pointed from the beginning to the limitless adventure in which he was now engaged. Countries and armies and races paled beside it. He had discovered a great thirst and he could no more turn it down than a dying man could refuse water.
He wanted to see what would happen, and because of that, he gave up his idea of returning to the army. But he did not fully give up the idea of the army returning to him. Sooner or later it had to.
So on his visits to the fort he would putter about with trivialities: repairing an occasional tear in the awning, sweeping cobwebs from the corners of the sod hut, making journal entries.
He forced these jobs on himself as a far fetched way of staying in touch with his old life. Deeply involved as he was with the Comanches, he could not find it in himself to jettison everything, and the hollow motions he went through made it possible to hang on to the shreds of his past.
By visiting the fort on a semiregular basis, he preserved discipline where there was no longer a need, and in doing so he also preserved the idea of Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, U.S.A.
The journal entries no longer carried depictions of his days. Most of them were nothing more than an estimate of the date, a short comment on the weather or his health, and a signature. Even had he wanted, it would have been too large a job to essay the new life he was living. Besides, it was a personal thing.
Invariably he would walk down the bluff to the river, usually with Two Socks in tow. The wolf had been his first real contact, and the lieutenant was always glad to see him. Their silent time together was something he cherished.
He would pause for a few minutes at the stream’s edge, watching the water flow. If the light was right, he could see himself with mirrorlike clarity. His hair had grown past his shoulders. The constant beating of sun and wind had darkened his face. He would turn from side to side, like a man of fashion, admiring the breastplate that he now wore like a uniform. With the exception of Cisco, nothing he could call his own exceeded its value.
Sometimes the vision on the water would make him tingle with confusion. He looked so much like one of them now. When that happened he would balance awkwardly on one foot and lift the other high enough for the water to send back a picture of the pants with the yellow stripes and the tall, black riding boots.