He thought of Lucia, then cruelly, hating himself, to avoid a longer cruelty, forced the thought of her from his mind. He had thought of her too much, remembered her too much, had not forgotten her, could not forget her. He must not-must not-think of her. There had been nothing between them, he reminded himself harshly, only a cup of black coffee and a kiss, a single swift meaningless kiss, which the girl had unhesitantly repudiated.
Chance put back his head and stared up at the gray sky yielding to dusk with the slow turning of the earth.
The mild fall of 1890 had retreated, almost in a night. Now the knife of winter was cold in the air. Still there had not yet been snow.
Chance lowered his eyes to the jagged terrain, sharp, jumbled, twisted, without water, most of it chalky, the grayish white of limestone, here and there reddish clays, volcanic dust, sand left by streams that hadn’t flowed in thousands of years.
Nothing much could live here for very long, he said to himself.
In some of the draws an alkaline dust lay, smoking to the fetlocks of the horses. When it rained here, and it must sometime, Chance told himself, it must be like a hundred white rivers running loose, water white as bones running down the maze of arroyos in the limestone ridges.
The arroyos.
The ridges.
The rocks, the natural cover.
It would take an army to fight the Hunkpapa out of this country.
But how long could they stay here?
How long would the meat they had brought in with them last, and the dogs?
Old Bear had said this afternoon that in the sky there was snow.
They didn’t want to kill the horses.
When they came out of the Bad Lands they wanted to be on horseback.
Chance leaned back against a limestone boulder, the dust of which covered the back of the blanket he had wrapped about his shoulders.
The tobacco was too dry perhaps, smoked too hot, but Chance did not object.
Something in the dust caught his eye, a few feet from him. He sat there smoking looking at it for a while.
He got up, went to the object, picked it up and returned to the boulder to sit down.
It was about the size of his hand, and an odd shape. Not exactly a rock.
Chance, curious, set aside the stone pipe and, because the sky was now pretty dark, fumbled in his pocket for the penny box of wooden matches he kept there. He had about seven or eight left, seven to be exact, as he had counted them before lighting his pipe.
He lit one of the matches and looked at the object.
It was the fragment of a jaw, a fossil, with one tooth protruding like a knife. It had belonged to some kind of big cat, probably like a puma.
He dropped it into the dust beside him.
He picked up the pipe again, leaned back once more against the boulder and resumed smoking.
Once this country had been younger, if not gentler. Once it had been green; it had had water, trees, grass; once in this place the large soft-footed cat had followed the delicate antelope; once here long ago, before the eyes of man were here to see, there had trembled in this place the stirring of seeds, the opening of flowers, the lifting of the leaves of trees to the sun and the rain, and here too had occurred the inevitable rhythms of flight and feeding; here had been enacted, as a matter of course, the swift, remorseless rituals of the prey and his predator; here in this place had occurred innumerable events, patient, abrupt, sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful, concealed, unwitnessed remote events, the traces of some of which, in virtue of the exchange of chemicals, were recalled in a fortuitous scattering of whitish stones, some of which more clearly than others remembered the shape of teeth, the curve of a shard of skull, the form of bones.
And now among the bones of this dead country had come the Hunkpapa, and Chance among them.
He glanced down at the fragment of the jaw lying near him in the dust.
The carnivore is dead, he thought.
And then he thought of Grawson, and the weapons of men, and smiled to himself, thinking that a new king had arisen to occupy the throne of the tooth, and wondered if this advent of the predator, seeking him or another, might not be as axiomatic in nature as water, flesh and salt, the flower and the claw. No, said Chance. It cannot be. Men are more. Men must be more. Here in man nature has made something that is more. Grawson is wrong. He is not innocent as the tiger and the cobra are innocent, condemned by their hunger and instinct to kill, sentenced by nature to inflict for no reason they understand tragedy on the uncomprehending and guiltless. Grawson is wrong. What he does is unjust. It is not beyond justice or apart from justice like the strike of the shark, the multiplication of the bacillus.
But Chance wondered, in his heart, if the predator who stalked him in the name of the laws of man, the name of justice, was indeed responsible, or if he were, like the stars and the protozoa, moved by forces beyond their reflection or control, forces that might be inherent in their nature and those of their environment, forces germinated by the systems in which they formed their part.
No, said Chance, this is too simple for man. Man is more.
There are the bones, the flesh, the vessels, the tissues, the organs, the exchange of gases, the processes of circulation and oxidation, but there is too the knowing, the recognition, the reflection, the being able to be other than one has been. Man is more. He must be more. I will have it, thought Chance, that man is more. That, thought Chance, until I know that it is false, or until I have evidence that it is false, I will believe.
Grawson is wrong.
I can face him, thought Chance, as a man who is in the right can face a man who is in the wrong. I can face him. I can say, I have weapons, and I resist you.
Chance smiled, and glanced down again at the fragment of jaw that lay near him.
In the end the hunter and the hunted lie down in the same dust, and it does not seem to matter. Yet, to Chance it did matter, and though it might never be recorded, even in the traces of bones, though it might vanish completely from the annals of time, he thought it well that the hunted might, once, turn and face the predator. No one would know; the story would be lost; but it would have been done, and it was worth doing.
I will resist him, thought Chance. I have run enough. I am tired of running. Now I will fight.
“Medicine Gun,” said Old Bear.
Chance started.
“Ride with me,” said the old man.
Not speaking, Chance put out the pipe and got to his feet, folding the blanket and laying it over a shoulder.
Old Bear led the way to the horses, and Chance and the old Indian unpicketed their animals and mounted.
Chance looked at the small, huddled camp of Old Bear. In the dusk, against the chalky limestone, he could see blankets propped on sticks and the openings of small dugouts covered with brush. Here and there, dark against the cliffs, stood a tepee, brought from Grand River. Few of the families present had such a luxury. Horses, closely picketed, shifted in the near darkness. The dim glow of the tiny cooking fires touched the darkness with an incongruous flicker. Wrapped in blankets, the families of the band were bunched together, waiting around the little fires, for the meat to cook and for the soldiers, sooner or later, to come for them.
Chance left the reins loose on his animal, and it followed Old Bear’s down an arroyo leading vaguely northeast.
As he rode he wondered, the thought aimlessly crossing his mind, where Drum and his braves were. He had seen them fade from the band shortly after leaving the camp on the Grand River. They had left to find revenge for their murdered chief, to fight, to kill, to scalp, to mutilate. Then somewhere between Standing Rock and the Bad Lands, they must inevitably have died, falling under the guns of soldiers, or ranchers or homesteaders. They must be dead. They were days overdue.