This vast army of his life swam before his eyes as if it would never end. There were guns, big, brass-colored cannons on wheels.
Someone was coming up to the waiting circle of soldiers.
It was Ten Bears. He walked smoothly in the brittle cold, a single blanket draped over his bony shoulders. Looking like a tourist, he came face-to-face with one of the cannons. A coppery hand snaked out of the blanket, wanting to feel the barrel.
The big gun discharged and Ten Bears was gone in a cloud of smoke. The upper half of his body was somersaulting slowly in the dead winter sky. Like water from a hose, blood was pouring out of the place where his waist had been. His face was blank. His braids were floating lazily away from his ears.
Other guns went off, and like Ten Bears, the lodges of his village took flight. They gyrated through space like heavy paper cones, and when they came back to earth, the tipis stuck into the iron-hard ground on their tips.
The army was faceless now. Like a herd of joyous bathers hustling to the seashore on a hot day, it swept down on the people who had been left uncovered beneath the lodges.
Babies and small children were flung aside first. They flew high into the air. The branches of the bare trees stabbed through their little bodies, and there the children squirmed, their blood running down the tree trunks as the army continued its work.
They opened the men and women as if they were Christmas presents: shooting into their heads and lifting off the skull tops; slitting bellies with bayonets, then parting the skin with impatient hands; severing limbs and shaking them out.
There was money inside every Indian. Silver poured from their limbs. Greenbacks spewed from their bellies. Gold sat in their skulls like candy in jars.
The great army was drawing away in wagons piled high with riches. Some of the soldiers were running next to the wagons, scooping the overflow off the ground.
Fighting broke out in the ranks of the army, and long after they had disappeared, the sound of their battling flashed on and off like lightning behind the mountains.
One soldier was left behind, walking sad and dazed through the field of corpses.
It was himself.
The hearts of the dismembered people were still beating, drumming out in unison a cadence that sounded like music.
He slipped a hand under his tunic and watched it rise and fall with the beat of his own heart. He saw his breath freezing in front of his face. Soon he would be frozen, too.
He lay down among the corpses, and as he stretched out, a long, mournful sigh escaped his lips. Instead of fading, the sigh gained strength. It circled over the slaughtering ground, rushing faster and faster past his ears, moaning a message he could not understand.
Lieutenant Dunbar was cold to the bone.
It was dark.
Wind was whistling through the cleft.
He jumped straight up, cracked his head against the ceiling of solid rock, and sank back to his knees. Blinking through the sting of the blow, he could see a silvery light shining through the cleft’s entrance. Moonlight.
Panicked, Dunbar scrambled off in an apelike stoop, one hand held overhead to gauge the ceiling. When he could stand unimpeded he ran for the mouth of the cleft and didn’t slow until he was standing in the brilliant moonlight of the clearing.
Cisco was gone.
The lieutenant whistled high and shrill.
Nothing.
He walked farther into the clearing and whistled again. He heard something move in the cottonwoods. Then he heard a low nicker, and Cisco’s buckskin hide flashed like amber in the moonlight as he came out of the trees.
Dunbar was going for the bridle he left at the spring when a movement flickered in the air. He looked back in time to glimpse the tawny form of a great horned owl as it swooped past Cisco’s head and went into a steep climb, finally vanishing in the branches of the tallest cottonwood.
The owl’s flight was disturbingly eerie, and it must have had the same effect on Cisco, for when he reached him the little horse was trembling with fright.
They backtracked out of the canyon, and when they were on the open prairie again it was with the kind of relief a swimmer feels on coming to the surface after a long, deep dive.
Lieutenant Dunbar shifted his weight slightly forward and Cisco was off, carrying him over the silvery grasslands at an easy gallop.
He rode invigorated, thrilled to be awake and alive and putting distance between himself and the strange, unsettling dream. It didn’t matter where the dream had come from and it didn’t matter what it meant. The images were too fresh and too profound to rehash now. He spurned the hallucination in favor of other thoughts as he listened to the gentle pounding of Cisco’s hooves.
A feeling of power was coming over him, increasing with each passing mile. He could feel it in the effortless movement of Cisco’s canter and he could feel it in the oneness of himself: oneness with his horse and the prairie and the prospect of returning whole to the village that was now his home. In the back of his mind he knew there would be a reckoning with Stands With A Fist and that the grotesque dream would have to be assimilated somewhere down the line of his future.
For the moment, however, these things were small. They didn’t threaten him in the least, for he was charged with the notion that his life as a human being was suddenly a blank and that the slate of his history had been wiped clean. The future was as open as the day he was born, and it sent his spirits soaring. He was the only man on earth, a king without subjects, rambling across the limitless territory of his life.
He was glad they were Comanches and not Kiowas, for he remembered their nickname now, heard or read somewhere in the dead past.
The Lords of the Plains, that’s what they were called. And he was one of them.
In a fit of reverie he dropped the reins and crossed his arms, laying each hand flat against the breastplate that covered his chest.
“I’m Dances With Wolves,” he cried out loud, “I’m Dances With Wolves.”
Kicking Bird, Wind In His Hair, and several other men were sitting around the fire when he rode in that night.
The medicine man had been worried enough to send out a small party to scout the four directions for the white soldier. But there was no general alarm. It was done quietly. They had come back with nothing to report, and Kicking Bird put the matter out of his mind. When it came to matters beyond his sphere of influence, he always trusted to the wisdom of the Great Spirit.
He’d been more disturbed by what he saw in the face and manner of Stands With A Fist than he had been with the disappearance of Dances With Wolves. At the mention of his name he’d perceived a vague discomfort in her, as though she had something to hide.
But this, too, he decided, was beyond his control. If something important had happened between them, it would be revealed at the proper time.
He was relieved to see the buckskin horse and its rider coming up to the firelight.
The lieutenant slid off Cisco’s back and greeted the men around the fire in Comanche. They returned the salutation and waited to see if he was going to say anything significant about his disappearance.