"I don't know," Dances With Wolves said.
"Is that what makes them so dangerous?"
"I don't know white people anymore," Dances With Wolves explained, "but I think the answer to your question is yes."
Chapter XXXII
A chord was struck that reverberated up and down the southern plains like the tolling of a great invisible bell, free village on the prairie failed to heed Kicking Bird's call.
The Cheyenne under Wolf Robe, the Arapaho under Young Dog, and the Kiowa under Touch The Clouds and White Bear and hundreds of other proven warriors fired with the prospect of taking up arms against the clearest threat to their existence eagerly answered the summons.
The war party swept north, constantly gaining strength through the addition of roving warriors and, as almost a thousand fighting men approached the hunting grounds white hunters had entered with complete indifference to all but their own ambition, they moved like a deadly wind that sent everything in its path rushing for cover. In sheer size the body of defenders far surpassed what anyone had experienced and presented a front of unity that few could have conceived.
Owing to the necessity of obtaining food for themselves and forage for their ponies, the party did not travel en masse but in several sections. They stayed in touch through the use of runners, who reported the smallest development with an urgency that fully reflected the significance of having more warriors in the field than could be counted.
Even Owl Prophet was caught up in the thrill of a gathering of such historic proportion. With Kicking Bird's call to arms he had sensed an instantaneous change in the atmosphere and, as warriors streamed into Ten Bears' village by the hundreds, he found himself unable to think of anything but driving the whites out of the buffalo country.
Knowing his advice would be solicited, the prophet withdrew to his mysterious lodge while the warriors made frenzied preparations to march north. When all was ready, they converged on Owl Prophet's lodge and were amazed once again at the spirited, unknowable babble that comprised the conversation of the prophet and his owl.
When the now familiar silhouettes fell away, the spent prophet, running with sweat, staggered from his lodge with upraised arms.
"The Mystery has told of the skunks!" he screamed. "They are not to be harmed. If this is done, the whites will be driven out!"
The warriors, euphoric with the promise of success, surged in around the prophet, while he, collapsing into their arms, cried out as if it were his last breath.
"Owl Prophet will ride with you. . die with you!"
The Comanche seer proved as good as his word, riding with Kicking Bird at the head of a large contingent of warriors from Ten Bears' village that also included Wind In His Hair and his Hard Shields.
The one-eyed warrior had been one of the first to volunteer his services, ducking into the special lodge shortly after the crier had begun to trot through the village with Kicking Bird's proposal.
"Wind In His Hair and all the Hard Shields will ride with you," he had declared.
"You make my heart good," Kicking Bird had replied.
Since then the two rivals had barely spoken. But there was no lingering trace of the divisions that separated them. All animosity lay buried deep beneath the common cause that had brought them together at the behest of a man who seemed to have changed his skin.
From the moment they set out, Kicking Bird, resplendent in battle dress, led with the cool, unhesitating hand of a veteran general. It was he who had designed the novel line of march that would bring the various discrete elements of his force together again at the edge of the hunting grounds. It was he who had counseled. secrecy, night rides, small fires, and evasion instead of engagement if white soldiers were encountered. It sages every few hours between himself and the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa. And it was Kicking Bird himself who had declared that the war party would stay out until the country was cleared, no matter how long it took.
Shortly after the great force rendezvoused, on a day when the plains that spread before them were spotted with the shifting shadows of the cloud world, Kicking Bird lifted a hand and a thousand fighting men halted their ponies.
A group of four scouts were flying toward them from the north. The great party watched as the scouts grew larger; each warrior aware that the speed at which the scouts were traveling meant that they bore urgent news. Something had happened.
A Comanche named Blue Turtle leapt from his pony and dashed up to Kicking Bird, gasping for breath.
"On the earth ahead. . the ground is covered with dark bumps. Some are streaked with pink."
"What are these bumps? "
"We didn't go close enough to see them. Maybe they are dead buffalo —”
"Many?" grunted Kicking Bird.
Blue Turtle nodded, then turned his head away as he spoke.
"Yes," he said, "many."
Blue Turtle had averted his eyes because he was not certain he could trust what he had seen. He could not believe what his mind said his eyes had found on the prairie. The scale of it was too enormous, and even as he made his report to Kicking Bird, Blue Turtle still wondered if he might be hallucinating.
An hour and a half later when the army of confederated warriors reached the place Blue Turtle had described, there was no man among them who did not feel as if he were in the throes of dementia. Most of them had seen the work of white hunters before, but this was beyond conception.
Ahead, in a country of unbroken plain, the dead lay in uncountable numbers. As far as the human eye could see, corpses of the revered, indomitable buffalo blanketed the prairie. At first glance it seemed inconceivable that anything but the Mystery could have produced such a startling panorama of death. Yet as soon as Kicking Bird and his feathered warriors began to cross the ocean of slaughter, they knew it was the work of the people they had come to fight. Only white men killed like this.
Birds in numbers that occasionally darkened the sun rose from the carcasses in massive clouds as the warriors passed through, their deafening shrieks obliterating the hoofbeats of a thousand ponies.
Rising from the floor of the prairie were the yips and growls and snaps of four-leggeds as the smaller predators were evicted from one carcass by teeming clans of coyotes and wolves only to arrive at another for a few frantic seconds before being driven off again. The entire animal world, it seemed, had been driven mad by the tragedy of the buffalo.
The stench of decaying flesh quickly became so great that many hardened warriors, men who had endured injury and deprivation, found their hands involuntarily flying toward their faces to shut out an odor that seemed to have become the air itself.
It was only when the corpses began to thin that the body of warriors, weighed down by an invisible, incomprehensible anchor of woe, gradually slowed and stopped. The men fell out to wander the nearby prairie, trying to clear the concussive haze of what they had seen through their eyes. Some sat in numb groups of two or three, and in many of these cells no words were exchanged until the light began to fade. In others, a few low sentences were uttered but it amounted to nothing that could be called conversation.
The majority of warriors sought out little patches of individual space to reflect on the damage inflicted upon their hearts and, in opening themselves to grief, they inadvertently created a spectacle of their own. Fires were kindled and pipes were lit and a wide array of prayers were spoken, beseeching the Mystery to relieve their misery. Everywhere men sat cross-legged, their arms outstretched toward heaven, their innermost thoughts sealed behind pursed lips. Some, for the first and last time in their lives, wobbled, then collapsed in uncontrollable sobs.