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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Author’s Note
Glossary
Part I. True Humans
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part II. Metal Men
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Part III. Nation in the Mist
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
By Mike Blakely from Tom Doherty Associates
Praise
Copyright
For London
Acknowledgments
For helping me get started on research for this work of fiction, I thank two anthropologist-novelist-rancher friends: W. Michael Gear and Kathleen Gear. For her guidance and assistance with final research, I thank my friend and fellow novelist, Lucia St Clair Robson. For loaning me the right book at the right time, I am grateful to Russel Buster.
For sharing his firearms, flints, black powder, and expertise pertaining thereto, I am grateful to my friend and fellow fiction writer, C. F. Eckhardt.
For making the horse a part of my life, I would like to thank my parents, Doc Blakely and Patricia Dawn Blakely. Also, I thank two friends from whom I have bought horses—Mike Siler and Marty Akins—for rare is the friend from whom one can buy a horse and remain a friend. For sharing their horses and horse stories, I thank Jack Hankins, Joe Siler, Mike Siler, Kym Bartholomew, Buddy Reid, Henry Wobbe, Sonny Andersen, and Mary Elizabeth Goldman.
For helping me understand cultures outside of my own, I thank the Comanche people, the Shoshone people, the Gathering of Nations Pow-Wow, and the many other friends and acquaintances who have taken me into their family circles to share their cultures. Special thanks to Floyd, of Taos Pueblo, for loaning me a tall horse and showing me the old trails.
For their guts and faith, I am grateful to my colleagues in New York City: Joe Vallely, Bob Gleason, and Tom Doherty.
Special thanks to the library system of the University of Texas at Austin, my alma mater.
For my own satisfaction and none of their own, as they remain above the necessity for spoken gratitude, I thank three horses I have known: Red Wing, who often kicked, bit, threw me off, fell on me, and otherwise earned my affection. Big John, who set the standard in my mind for cooperation between human and horse. And Red Man, who in learning to trust me taught me that I could still be trusted.
Introduction
If you believe, as I do, that a single horse can change the life of an individual human, then perhaps you may logically conclude and appreciate that the horse as a species can and has brought about sweeping changes in various cultures throughout the course of human endeavor. Perhaps never did the horse so affect a human culture more radically than that of the Comanche people, a nation born of the horse.
Horses came to the land of the Shoshone—in and around present Wyoming—in the 1680s, when this novel begins. Some of the Shoshone people, for reasons both obvious and mysterious, so rapidly adopted the new horse culture that they broke away from their kin and drifted south, seeking more horses and better hunting grounds. These Shoshone searchers became known as Comanches. Within the span of a single generation, as early as 1705, the Comanche nation had become recognized by Europeans and Indians alike as a powerful and independent tribe. The warriors of the new nation became known as the greatest horsemen in history, possessors of the richest hunting grounds on the face of the earth—the buffalo range of the Southern Plains.
Accordingly, my research for this novel began—though I was unaware at the time that such activity would one day pass as a novelist’s research—in the days of my boyhood with the land and the horse. This sometimes involved flying haphazardly off the horse and landing none-too-lightly upon the land. My resulting love and fascination for equus caballus and terra firma would later allow me a certain appreciation for and understanding of the nomadic nations of the plains.
Growing up in Texas, the term Comanche often seemed synonymous with Indian. As a nation, the Comanche people claimed and defended ownership privileges over vast stretches of prairies, woodlands, and mountainscapes ranging through present Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas. As a young Texan, I assumed that the Comanche people must have always ruled the Southern Plains. Imagine my surprise when, as an adult, I discovered the fact that the Comanche nation had not appeared in Texas until after 1700, and did not even exist as a recognized tribe until about that time. The catalyst if not indeed the primary reason for this phenomenal cultural migration seemed clear to me. The horse.
About the time that I began to research the horse-borne genesis of the Comanche nation for this novel, it so happened that horses came back into my personal life after an absence of several years. Like a Shoshone-turned-Comanche, I began to feel the power, beauty, mobility, nobility, and spirit of the horse in my heart and guts and soul. I felt possessed of the gifts of speed, endurance, and strength; I felt in control of things larger than myself; I felt awed by, consumed by, and tenuously linked to the very powers of the earth, the sun, and the sky. My journey into the history and culture of the greatest horsemen the world has ever known coincided with my own return to the ways of horsemanship. Without a horse to straddle, I could not have properly appreciated the Comanche, a proud nation of mounted nomads who by their own standards achieved wealth beyond their wildest dreams for a century and a half.
I am tempted here to list the written sources I drew upon in researching thi
s novel, but find it sufficient to say that I read every book in the University of Texas library system that involved the Comanche, the Shoshone, or any number of other Plains Indian nations. I read every book I could find on the Spanish presence in New Mexico and Texas around the turn of the eighteenth century. I simply read every available source that in any way pertained to the subject of this novel, and this is in addition to interviewing anthropologists and Indian peoples and putting many miles of travel behind me in geographical research. I have judged for myself what seemed to me more accurate and likely and have used such gleanings from my research to structure a framework for this novel. The rest of the story, I believe, was given to me by the spirits.
—Mike Blakely
Author’s Note
In writing this novel, I used a precious few words of the Comanche/Shoshone language to lend color, feeling, and flavor. I do not profess an understanding of the language. Spelling posed a problem in translating, as the language includes certain vowel and consonant sounds not employed in English. Therefore, I have used only words that allow a reasonable phonetic spelling.
Even the Comanches’ name for themselves created a problem in the writing of this book. In my research, I found this term spelled variously as Numa, Nuhmuhnuh, Nemeni, Nimenem, Numinu, Nimma, and Nermernuh. However, I have heard the word spoken by contemporary Comanche and Shoshone people, and to my ear it sounds as if it might be most accurately spelled Noomah, accented on the first syllable, with the oo sound spoken as in the English word book.
Though I strive in this novel to accurately render a few Comanche/Shoshone words in English, my spelling choices are my own and should not be considered authoritative. My apologies to linguists who know more than I do about these matters. I am but a simple novelist.
Glossary
aho—hello
ahpoo—father
anah—ouch!
ekakuma—bay horse
esikuma—horse
hah—yes
ha-i’i—oh, my!
kiyu—horseback
kubetu—hard
kwitapuh—excrement
Na-vohnuh—Apache peoples
ohtookuma—sorrel horse
oo-bia—oh!
pinakwoo—behind
pogamoggan—war club
pookai—hush
puha—power, “medicine”
puhakut—shaman, medicine man, medicine woman
puku—horse
sohoobi—cottonwood
soohoo—willow
tecamaca—balsam poplar
toohooya—horse
tosa naboo—paint horse
tsah—good
PART I
True Humans
1
On the day of his birth, a horse ran through his village. It made a sacred circle around the lodge at the edge of camp where his mother labored to give him life. This was not just any horse, but the very first ever seen by the Burnt Meat People of the True Humans. Among other nations, the True Humans were known as Grass Lodge People or Snake People. In seasons to come, they would be called Shoshone.
It happened near the end of the Moon of Hunger, during the Time When Babies Cry for Food, in the year called 1687 by the Metal Men whom, at the time, the True Humans did not yet know to exist. Wounded Bear had just walked up to the birthing lodge at the edge of camp. He had come to inquire about the child, as was the custom for grandfathers. This was the first child for his daughter, River Woman, and she gasped with pain inside the lodge, though her pride would not allow her to cry out.
“When will it be over?” Wounded Bear asked, raising his voice loud enough to be heard inside the birthing lodge.
“Pookai!” his wife growled from within. “Hush, old man! Our daughter will finish it when the spirits get ready!” She was an old midwife who possessed strong medicine, for though no child had been born alive to the Burnt Meat People through three winters, neither had any mother died in childbirth. This woman, Wounded Bear’s wife, was named Broken Bones.
Wounded Bear shivered, clasping the edges of the woolly buffalo robe tight at his chest. He looked again at the sky, praying to the spirit who came to him in dreams and visions—the humpbacked bear who survived all wounds.
As he chanted his prayers in a low song, he noticed how the white clouds hanging still in the sky seemed to match the patches of snow on the ground, as if the patches of snow were merely clouds reflected in a still summer pool. Wounded Bear was old, and his eyes no longer saw with the keen flint edges of a young warrior, yet he could make out the red dirt between the patches of white snow. Some of the red dirt had blown onto the snow, and to Wounded Bear it looked as though the snow had been sprayed with blood bursting from the nostrils of an elk wounded in the lungs with an arrow. The elk was a beast very hard to kill with arrows, and that was why elk medicine was good. Almost as good as bear medicine, he thought.
Two or three small children took turns sobbing in the camp below, where the lodges were strung out along the steaming springs. As babies, lashed tight in their cradle boards, they had been trained by their mothers not to cry, as their mothers would place a palm over their mouths when they wept. But now they were starving and had only their tears to swallow, and not even their mothers could make them stop crying. All the meat in the camp was gone, and the mothers had no milk to give. No buffalo had strayed into these harsh hills of home for two winters, and few deer, elk, or antelope had been killed. The pemmican and dried meat had been used up. Only a few small caches of pine nuts and roots remained.
The Burnt Meat People had been eating what rabbits they could club or catch in snares. They had been eating rats and gophers that ventured early from their winter burrows, roasting them whole over coals. No one was speaking anymore of the taboos against eating the flesh of birds, and even dogs were being killed, though the families pretended not to know their neighbors were eating dog meat, for this too was forbidden. It was going to be hard to move the camp in the spring with fewer dogs to harness to the pole drags.
Wounded Bear pushed his own hunger out of his thoughts and thanked the spirit of the humpbacked bear for guiding him through his life of danger, trouble, and starvation. As always, he repeated the prayer that he might die in battle, though he was too old and his sight too poor now to follow the war trail. He did not pray for a grandson. He did not even pray that River Woman’s child would live. He only asked that his daughter would survive her long ordeal of childbirth, for he loved his daughter very much. If the baby lived, how would she feed it, anyway?
It was at this moment that sunlight burst between two clouds, illuminating the village of tattered hide lodges. And it was at this same moment that the sound came—like the language of sunlight—the sound of hooves pounding the red dirt and clattering across the rock-strewn ground. They made noises like no other hooves the old man had ever heard, grinding like an avalanche of scree and thumping against the frozen red soil like the horns of rams in battle.
Wounded Bear’s prayer-song caught in his throat as he squinted at the camp, his heart suddenly driving the cold from his limbs. A shape emerged—large and dark, weaving among the lodges.
Buffalo! No, the neck was too long—like an elk’s—but the color was near that of a buffalo. Buffalo-elk! The animals sometimes mated that way, so he had always heard. Thus the True Humans had been created through the mating of Coyote with a puhakut, a medicine woman like Broken Bones.
The beast came on. Yes, buffalo-elk!
No! The tail was too long and shaggy, and the neck was shaggy, too … like no buffalo … like no elk … like nothing Wounded Bear had ever seen!
He longed for his bow as the beast came on toward him, and he thought he saw the feathered end of an arrow shaft already sticking out behind the ribs. Now his daughter, River Woman, screamed with pain inside the birthing lodge.
“Yes!” Broken Bones shouted. “Now it is time! Old man! What is that running out there?”
“I cannot say!” Wounded Bear admitted.
The creature dodged so near the birthing lodge that Wounded Bear felt red sand sprinkle his face, but he held his ground at the entrance.
“What is it? I must know.”
“I do not know what it is!”
“Have your eyes gone completely blind, old fool?”
The creature ran headlong toward the high red bluffs that shielded the camp from winter winds and contained it as if in the palm of a great cupped hand. River Woman screamed again, in an agony of pain and fatigue, and the strange animal searched helplessly for escape along the curve of bluffs, passing behind the birthing lodge.
“What is that beast?” the midwife demanded. “The baby is coming out now! I must know!”
Wounded Bear watched the animal try a bluff and fail. “It is…” he said, squinting. “It is…”
A pack of dogs streamed from the camp, nosing the trail of the strange creature.
“Is it a buffalo? It does not sound like a buffalo. Old man? Are you out there?”
River Woman screamed again, but this time with a deliberate tone of determination. The beast was turning away from the bluffs, completing its circle around the birthing lodge, rumbling back down toward the village. It bit one of the dogs in its path on the back of the neck and tossed the yelping animal aside.
“I must know what animal that is! The baby is almost out!”
“It is a big dog!” Wounded Bear blurted. “It is the biggest dog I have ever seen! I believe it is a shadow-dog!”
Another camp mongrel attacked the flank of the strange creature, which kicked and screamed, and the screaming turned into the shrill cry of a baby inside the birthing lodge.
Wounded Bear realized that he was out of breath, though he had only been standing there, watching. The strange beast was running back down through the camp, followed by the dogs, fading from his dim view. He could just make out the images of warriors drawing bows and heaving lances.
Broken Bones stuck her head out between the buffalo hide of the lodge and the bear skin covering the entrance hole. Eyes glared from her wrinkled and toothless face, and cropped gray hair sprouted like dried grass from her scalp. “Where is it?”