For ten frustrating minutes he sat alone in the arbor. Then he started for the pony herd. He needed a walk and a ride.
Stands With A Fist went for a ride, too. She crossed the river and meandered down a trail though the breaks, trying to sort her thoughts.
She didn’t have much luck.
Her feelings about Dances With Wolves were in a terrible jumble. Not so long ago she hated the thought of him. For the last several days, she hadn’t thought of anything but him. And there were so many other contradictions.
With a start she realized she had given no thought to her dead husband. He had been the center of her life so recently, and now she had forgotten him. Guilt bore down on her.
She turned her pony about and started back, forcing Dances With Wolves out of her head with a long string of prayers for her dead husband.
She was still out of sight of the village when her pony lifted his head and snorted in the way horses do when they’re afraid.
Something large crashed in the brush behind her, and knowing the sound was too large to be anything but a bear, Stands With A Fist hurried her pony home.
She was recrossing the river when the idle thought hit her.
I wonder if Dances With Wolves has ever seen a bear, she said to herself.
Stands With A Fist stopped herself then. She could not let this happen, this constant thinking of him. It was intolerable.
By the time she reached the opposite bank the woman who was two people had resolved that her role as a translator would from now on be a thing of business, like trading. It would go no further, not even in her mind.
She would stop it.
CHAPTER XXIII
Lieutenant Dunbar’s solo ride carried him along the river, too. But while Stands With A Fist rode south, he went north.
Despite the day’s intense heat, he swung away from the river after a mile or two. He broke into open country with the idea that, surrounded by space, he might start to feel better.
The lieutenant’s spirits were very low.
He ran the picture of her leaving the arbor over and over in his mind, trying to find something in it to hang on to. But there was a finality about their departure, and it gave him that dreadful feeling of having let something wonderful slip from his hand just as he was picking it up.
The lieutenant chastised himself mercilessly for not having gone after her. If he had, they might be talking happily at this moment, the tender issue, whatever it was, settled and behind them.
He’d wanted to tell her something of himself. Now it might never happen. He wanted to be back in the arbor with her. Instead he was stumbling around out here, wandering like a lost soul under a broiling sun.
He’d never been this far north of the camp and was surprised at how radically the country was changing. These were rear hilts rising in front of him, not mere bumps on the grassland. Running out of the hills were deep, jagged canyons.
The heat, coupled with his constant self-criticism, had set his mind to simmering, and feeling suddenly dizzy, he gave Cisco a little squeeze with his knees. A half mile ahead he had spotted the shady mouth of a dark canyon spilling onto the prairie.
The walls on either side climbed a hundred feet or more and the darkness that fell over horse and rider was instantly refreshing. But as they picked their way carefully over the canyon’s rock-strewn floor, the place grew ominous. Its walls were pressing tighter against them. He could feel Cisco’s muscles bunching nervously, and in the absolute quiet of the afternoon he was increasingly aware of the hollow thump in his own heart.
He was struck with the certainty that he had entered something ancient. Perhaps it was evil.
He had begun to think of turning back when the canyon bottom suddenly started to widen. Far ahead, in the space between the canyon walls, he could see a stand of cottonwoods, their tops twinkling in bright sunlight.
After managing a few more twists and turns he and Cisco burst all at once into the large, natural clearing where the cottonwoods stood. Even at the height of summer the place was remarkably green, and though he could see no stream, he knew there must be water here.
The buckskin arched his neck and sniffed the air. He would have to be thirsty, too, and Dunbar gave him his head. Cisco skirted the cottonwoods and walked another hundred yards to the base of a sheer rock wall that marked the canyon’s end. There he stopped.
At his feet, covered with a film of leaves and algae, was a small spring about six feet across. Before the lieutenant could jump off, Cisco’s muzzle had thrust through the surface’s coating and he was drinking in long gulps.
As the lieutenant knelt next to his horse, going to his hands at the edge of the spring, something caught his eye. There was a cleft at the base of the rock wall. It ran back into the cliff and was tall enough at its entrance for a man to walk into without stooping.
Lieutenant Dunbar buried his face next to Cisco’s and drank quickly. He slipped the bridle off his horse’s head, dropped it next to the spring, and walked into the darkness of the cleft.
It was wonderfully cool inside. The soil beneath his feet was soft, and as far as he could see, the place was empty. But as his eyes passed over the floor he knew that man was a fixture here. Charcoal from a thousand fires was scattered over the ground like plucked feathers.
The ceiling began to shrink, and when the lieutenant touched it, the soot of the thousand fires coated his fingertips.
Still feeling light-headed, he sat down, his bottom hitting the ground so heavily that he groaned.
He was facing the way he had come, and the entrance, a hundred yards away, was now a window to the afternoon. Cisco was grazing contentedly on the bunchgrass next to the spring. Behind him the cottonwood leaves were blinking like mirrors. As the coolness closed around him, Lieutenant Dunbar was suddenly overcome with a throbbing, all-encompassing fatigue. Throwing his arms out as a pillow for his head, he lay back on the smooth, sandy earth and stared up at the ceiling.
The roof of solid rock was blackened with smoke, and underneath there were distinct markings. Deep grooves had been cut in the stone, and as he studied them, Dunbar realized they had been made by human hands.
Sleep was pressing in about him, but he was fascinated by the markings. He struggled to make sense of them as a star gazer might strain to connect the outline of Taurus.
The marks immediately above suddenly fell into place. There was a buffalo, crudely drawn but bearing all the essential detail. Even the little tail was standing up.
Next to the buffalo was a hunter. He was holding a stick, a spear in all likelihood. It was pointed at the buffalo.
Sleep was unstoppable now. The idea that the spring might have been tainted occurred to him as his invisibly weighted eyes began to close.
When they were shut he could still see the buffalo and the hunter. The hunter was familiar. He wasn’t an exact duplicate, but there was something of Kicking Bird in his face, something handed down over hundreds of years.
Then the hunter was him.
Then he went out.
The trees were bare of leaves.
Patches of snow lay on the ground.
It was very cold.
A great circle of uncounted common soldiers waited lifelessly, their rifles standing at their sides.
He went from one to another, staring into their frozen blue faces, looking for signs of life. No one acknowledged him.
He found his father among them, the telltale doctor’s bag hanging from one hand like a natural extension of his body. He saw a boyhood chum who had drowned. He saw the man who owned a stable in his old town and who beat the horses when they got out of line. He saw General Grant, still as a sphinx, a soldier’s cap crowning his head. He saw a watery-eyed man with the collar of a priest. He saw a prostitute, her dead face smeared with rouge and powder. He saw his massively bosomed elementary-school teacher. He saw the sweet face of his mother, tears frozen to her cheeks.