He pumped his rifle up and down over his head a few times. The braves replied with more shaken fists and obscenities. As the wind strengthened and the rain started, they rode away with their herd. It took about ten minutes for Charles to calm down. In wartime combat, he'd never been free of fear, but it seemed sharper and more personal out here. Probably because of the space. All the empty, lonely, beautiful space.
"Dive, Charlie!" Wooden Foot yelled. "Dive and shoot!"
His feet out of the stirrups, Charles threw himself to the left. For a second, falling between the saddle and the grass as Satan galloped, he was sure he'd break his neck.
He didn't. While his legs locked on belly and loin, he shot his left hand under the piebald's neck and hooked it over. Clinging to the piebald's left side in that way, and protected by the horse's body, he tried to forget the prairie flying by beneath him.
"Shoot!" his teacher bellowed. He pulled himself up far enough to snap off a round above the withers of the racing horse. Wooden Foot yelled his approval. "Again!"
After five shots, his arm gave out and he fell off, remembering at the last moment to relax before he hit. The impact left him gasping, half senseless.
Fen ran circles around him, barking. Boy jigged and clapped for him. Wooden Foot pulled him up, slapping his back to help him breathe. "Good, Charlie. Better'n good. Damn fine. You've got a natural talent for plains craft. A real gift, God's truth."
"You think it's important I know how to shoot from behind my horse?" Charles asked with some skepticism.
Wooden Foot shrugged. "The more you know, the better chance you got to save your hair if some wild Cheyenne wants it. They use that little trick in tiltin'. That's a game on horseback, with padded lances. They try to knock each other off. Somebody musta figured out that it's a lot safer shootin' that way, too. How you feel?"
Satan trotted back, dipped his head, and blubbered out breath. Dust-covered, Charles smiled. "Bumped up a good deal. Otherwise I’m fine." .
"Good. I think we should try it again. I mean, you did fall off —"
That night, Wooden Foot added a pictograph to the winter count. The stick figure represented Charles shooting while hanging on the side of his running horse. Charles felt a rush of pride when the trader showed him the finished picture. For the first time in weeks, he slept without dreams of any kind.
They rode on south, still pupil and teacher.
"This yere says Cheyenne." Wooden Foot drew his right index finger rapidly across his left one several times. "What it really says is striped arrow, but it means Cheyenne 'cause they use striped turkey feathers for fletchin'."
Charles imitated the sign a few times. Wooden Foot then clenched his hand, extending index and little fingers. "Horse."
And the hands with fingertips touching, an inverted V. "Tipi."
And a fist at either temple, index fingers raised. "You can guess this one."
"Buffalo?"
"Good, good. Only a thousand more to learn, give or take a few."
The lessons covered various subjects. Wooden Foot rode his horse down a slight slope, back and forth, a continuous Z pattern.
"If an Indian's too far off to see your face or count your guns, this says you're peaceful."
And, as they watched another wild pony herd stream along the horizon to the southeast:
"Thing you got to do out here, Charlie, is turn your notions upside down. White man's rules and ways, they don't operate. F'rinstance, steal a horse back in Topeka, they'll hang you. Out here, runnin' off ten or twenty head from another bunch of lodges is the very bravest of deeds. If we'd learn to parley on Indian terms 'stead of our own, there might be real peace on the plains."
And, kneeling by some tracks in the steel-colored morning:
"What would you read from this, Charlie?"
He studied the marks, a number of nearly identical sets overlapping and partially obliterating each other. He glanced at Fen, panting from pulling the travois, then at the flat and empty land. "Travois. A whole lot of them, according to those pole tracks. A village."
"Which is what you're s'posed to think. But look back two miles, to where these tracks started. You won't see any dog droppin's. Just horse turds. No dogs, no village. A few braves made these, with stone-weighted poles tied to their waists. In a few blinks of an eye, they can conjure up a village big enough to scare you off. Old fear's a powerful medicine. It can trick you into seein' what you expect to be there, 'stead of what is. Look."
He stood in the stirrups to point, his other hand holding his hat in the keen wind. On a rise to the southeast, so far away the figures were miniature, Charles saw horsemen. Four of them.
"There's your whole village. If you just saw the tracks, you'd ride real wide of it, wouldn't you?"
Charles felt stupid and showed it. Wooden Foot slapped his shoulder, to say it was all part of learning. Then he fired a rifle round over his head. The sound boomed away toward the distant riders, who quickly trotted out of sight. Like the other lessons, it burned into Charles's head with the permanence of a white-hot iron.
Old fear's a powerful medicine. It can trick you into seein' what you expect to be there, 'stead of what is.
Over the fire that night, while adding the incident to the winter count with strokes of black and red, Wooden Foot said in a mild voice, "You forgettin' about her some? The one you lost, I mean?"
"Some." These days he occasionally thought of Willa, too. "I'm grateful to you."
Wooden Foot waved the dainty brush. "All in the job. If I wanted a partner worth the name, I knew I had to pull you out of the glooms. They's just too damn many interestin' things and too many kinds of possible trouble out here for a man to stay sunk in a puddle of grief. Man's got to be alert, to keep his hair."
"I believe you," Charles said. He leaned back on his elbows, warmed by the fire and friendship, feeling a new, if fragile, contentment. He was beginning to feel the same kind of affection for this part of the world that he'd felt for Texas.
About an hour before dawn, a familiar pressure woke him. Too damn much coffee again.
As quietly as he could, he rolled out of his buffalo robe. His breath plumed in the dim light from the embers in the center of the tipi floor. He untied the flap thongs and slipped out the round hole without making a noise.
He heard the horses and mules fretting on their picket line and wondered why. The cold, star-bright night seemed untroubled. One thing sure, if some kind of animal interloper was prowling, Fen would never announce it. He was everything except a watchdog.
Charles walked along the side of a draw, away from the faint glow inside the tipi. He opened his trousers, then his long underwear. Over the stream of water, he heard a voice.
He cut off the water, jerked his clothes back in place, and reached automatically to his hip.
The holstered Colt wasn't there. He slept with it next to his head. He had his Bowie in its belt sheath, though.
He crept back through the draw and saw silhouettes cast by the fire onto the tipi cover. Two people sitting up, a third standing between them with something stubby in his hand.
A gun.
Licking his chapped mouth and furiously blinking sleep away, Charles crept toward the tipi. The intruder, who must have stolen into the tipi right after he left, and not seen him, was speaking to Boy.
"You lie still, you barrel-headed idiot. If you don't, I'll blow this old fool's brainpan to pieces." The shadow man jammed the shadow gun against Wooden Foot's shadow head to demonstrate. "You fucking old geezer, I want some of your trade goods. And whatever money you got."
"Little early in the season for snowbirds, ain't it?" Wooden Foot remarked. Charles suspected he wasn't as calm as he sounded. "I thought fellas like you ate Army food all winter, then lit out in the spring."