At last he said, “I would speak some more.”
The old man nodded.
“When Kicking Bird and I first began to talk,” Dances With Wolves started, “a question was asked of me for which I had no answer. Kicking Bird would ask, ‘How many white people are coming?’ and I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ That is true. I do not know how many will come. But I can tell you this. I believe there will be a lot.
“The white people are many, more than any of us could ever count. If they want to make war on you, they will do it with thousands of hair-mouth soldiers. The soldiers will have big war guns that can shoot into a camp like ours and destroy everything in it.
“It makes me afraid. I’m even afraid of my dream, because I know it could come true. I cannot say what must be done. But I come from the white race and I know them. I know them now in ways I did not know them before. I’m afraid for all the Comanches.”
Ten Bears had been nodding through the speech, but Dances With Wolves couldn’t tell how the old man was taking it.
The headman tottered to his feet and took a few steps across the lodge, stopping next to his bed. He reached into the rigging above it, pulled down a melon-sized bundle, and retraced his steps to the fire.
He sat down with a grunt.
“I think you are right,” he said to Dances With Wolves. “It is hard to know what to do. I’m an old man of many winters, and even I’m unsure of what to do when it comes to the question of the white people and their hair-mouth soldiers. But let me show you something.”
His gnarled fingers tugged at the bundle’s rawhide drawstring, and in a moment it was undone. He pushed down the sides of the sack, gradually revealing a hunk of rusted metal about the size of a man’s head.
Kicking Bird had never seen the object before and had no idea what it could be.
Dances With Wolves hadn’t seen it either. But he knew what it was. He had seen a drawing of something similar in a text on military history. It was the helmet of a Spanish conquistador.
“These people were the first to come into our country. They came on horses . . . we didn’t have horses then . . . and shot at us with big thunder guns that we had never seen. They were looking for shiny metal and we were afraid of them. This was in the time of my grandfather’s grandfather.
“Eventually, we drove these people out.”
The old man sucked long and hard on his pipe, taking several puffs.
“Then the Mexicans began to come. We had to make war on them and we have been successful. They fear us greatly and do not come here.
“In my own time, white people began to come. The Texans. They have been like all the other people who find something to want in our country. They take it without asking. They get angry when they see us sitting in our own country, and when we do not do as they want, they try to kill us. They kill women and children as if they were warriors.
“When I was a young man, I fought the Texans. We killed many of them and stole some of their women and children. One of these children is Dances With Wolves’s wife.
“After a time, there was talk of peace. We met the Texans and made agreements with them. These agreements always get broken. As soon as the white people wanted something new from us, the words on the paper were no more. It has always been like that.
“I got tired of this and many years ago, I brought the people of our band out here, far away from the whites. We have lived in peace here for a long time.
“But this is the last of our country. We have no place else to go. When I think of white people coming into our country now, it is as I said. It is hard to know what to do.
“I have always been a peaceful man, happy to be in my own country and wanting nothing from the white people. Nothing at all. But I think you are right. I think they will keep on coming.
“When I think of that, I look at this bundle, knowing what’s inside, and I’m certain we will fight to keep our country and all that it contains. Our country is all that we have. It is all that we want.
“We will fight to keep it.
“But I do not think we will have to fight this winter, and after all that you have told me, I think the time to go is now.
“Tomorrow morning, we will strike the village and go to the winter camp.”
CHAPTER XXIX
As he fell asleep that night, Dances With Wolves realized that something had begun to gnaw at the back of his mind. When he woke the next morning, it was still there, and though he knew it had something to do with the presence of white hunters a half-day’s ride from camp and with his dream and with Ten Bears’s talk, he could not put his finger on it.
An hour after dawn, when the camp was being dismantled, he started thinking about how relieved he was to be going. The winter camp would be even more remote a place than this. Stands With A Fist thought she was pregnant and he was looking forward to the protection a faraway camp would give his new family.
No one would be able to reach them there. They would be anonymous. He himself would no longer exist, except in the eyes of his adopted people.
Then it hit him, hit him hard enough to set his heart into a sudden, crazy fluttering.
He did exist.
And he had stupidly left the proof behind. The full record of Lieutenant John J. Dunbar was written down for everyone to see. It was lying on the bunk in the sod hut, secure between the pages of his journal.
Since they had little to do, Stands With A Fist had gone off to help some of the other families. It would take a while to find her in the confusion of the move, and he didn’t want to lose time with explanations. Every minute of the journal’s existence was now a threat.
He ran for the pony herd, unable to think of anything but retrieving the telltale record.
He and Cisco were just coming into camp when he ran into Kicking Bird.
The medicine man balked at what Dances With Wolves told him. They wanted to be under way by noon and would not be able to wait if the long round trip to the white soldier’s fort took longer than expected.
But Dances With Wolves was adamant, and reluctantly, Kicking Bird told him to go ahead. Their trail would be easy enough to follow if he was delayed, but the medicine man urged him to make haste. He didn’t like this kind of last-minute surprise.
The little buckskin was happy to be racing across the prairie. During the last few days, the air had turned crisp, and this morning the breeze was up. Cisco loved having the wind in his face, and they breezed over the miles to the fort.
The last familiar rise loomed ahead of them, and Dances With Wolves flattened down on his horse’s back, asking him to take the last half mile at a full run.
They blew over the rise and shot down the slope to the old post.
Dances With Wolves saw everything in one stupendous flash.
Fort Sedgewick was alive with soldiers.
They covered another hundred yards before he could pull Cisco up. The buckskin pitched and whirled madly, and Dances With Wolves was hard-pressed to calm him. He was struggling himself, trying to comprehend the unreal sight of a bustling army camp.
A score of canvas tents had been thrown up around the old supply house and the sod hut. Two Hotchkiss cannons, mounted on caissons, were parked next to his old quarters. The tumbledown corral was jammed with horses. And the whole place was seething with men in uniform. They were walking and talking and working.
A wagon was sitting fifty yards in front of him, and in its bed, staring at him with startled faces, were four common soldiers.
The outlines of their faces were not clear enough for him to see that they were boys.