“It is a glorious life,” the pale-eyed war chief explained to a large circle of young boys, each of them naked but for his breechclout, painted according to his youthful imagination, and gripping his juvenile spears and bow, war club and crude iron knife. Each one hungrier than the next to be a full-fledged Kwahadi warrior.
“There are only our people out here,” he taught them. “The rest are enemies we must be rid of. Grow strong, my young friends,” the war chief instructed them, striding over to Tall One. “There will come a time when each of you is called to make war on our enemies.”
“Especially the white man!” young Antelope interrupted eagerly.
Tall One glanced at his younger brother. “How can we prove we are ready to go with a war party?”
The pale-eyed one laughed easily, joyfully, not in a way that made fun of the young, eager boys. “You will know—just as the rest of us will know. There will be no doubt in our minds, no doubt in your heart—when you are ready to ride and defend our land.”
“Who of us will be ready first?” asked Coal Bear, Tall One’s best friend.
A full-blood Kwahadi, he was more than a winter older than Tall One, yet stood nearly a head shorter. Most of the older boys seemed squat compared to the white boy, built squarely and closer to the earth than either of the two brothers. Their Comanche legs seemed to bow naturally at a young age as well—a trait that made them ready to ride the wild-eyed cayuse ponies early in life.
“I will be ready first,” Tall One said, though he was not sure he really believed it. Although Coal Bear was shorter, he was older and native to this land, and because of it, wiser in living among these rocks and sand buttes, the watercourses far-flung like the shallow tracks of the gobblers he dimly recalled roosting in the trees back … somewhere … somewhere in his memory.
Coal Bear laughed. “One day you will be ready. And one day, I am sure, you will be a powerful warrior. Perhaps even as powerful as I will be. But for now, you are still a white-tongue—wanting to be a Kwahadi!”
Tall One dived for his friend, catching Coal Bear around the neck and driving him to the dirt where they grappled, punching and kicking, laughing all the while. It was the one thing that drove the white boy into a rage—this being called a white-tongue by the others, but especially by his best friend. And Coal Bear knew it. Soon they released one another and sat gasping for breath, smiling, choking for air as they laughed in spasms.
“One day he will beat you good, Coal Bear,” said Antelope. “My brother will beat you good.”
“He knows it, Antelope,” Tall One said. “That is why he pokes his fun at me now, while he still can.”
“Yes—one day you will take many scalps from the white-tongues,” Coal Bear admitted. “One day when you are no longer a white-tongue yourself.”
Tall One was finding it hard to wait for that day. His skin had become all the darker these last two years spent next to naked in the sun, year round, except the coldest days of winter. Now winter was approaching once again. They would soon be seeking out the deep canyons, as they had in autumns of old, there to sit out the onslaught of cold weather that would batter the Staked Plain. Tall One yearned almost as much for the coming winter—a time of sitting around the lodge fires, listening to the old men tell stories of the beginning of the earth, tales of the coming of the First Person, the very first Comanche and how he needed a woman to sleep with and have his babies and cook his meals. A woman was very important then, as now.
As well the old ones taught Tall One and Antelope about their religion. At first Tall One had been afraid, remembering what his mother and father told him about Indians and how savage they were—utterly, hopelessly godless. As time passed, he had grown confused as the old men began to speak of their spirits in a reverential way. The way they held and handled their pipe, cut their tobacco, and handled their medicine objects—all of it was just the way the dark-coated circuit preacher would hold his communion goblet or pass out the broken bread or say his long ranting prayers, eyes uplifted to the top of the tent that passed for a church back in … back where he had come from in that other lifetime.
While the Comanche had no pantheon of gods, no religious order to things, they nonetheless lived closest to the earth about them. Here, in this land, they revered the buttes and rocks, the summer breeze and the winter’s wind, the springs and creeks and rivers, along with the sky overhead that filled with lazy clouds, or with nothing more than endless blue. Easily and without fuss, they saw them selves as only part of the greatness in a world where everything, from rock and leaf to animal, had a spirit.
“Man is born evil,” his mother had taught him, drumming it into the minds and hearts of her three children. “He is evil and is saved only by the grace of God. Man will always be evil, and there is nothing we can do about it.”
