Long ago the Kwahadi themselves had roamed far to the north, where a few buffalo hunters were only beginning to shoot their way into the endless herds here and there beyond the banks of the Arkansas. Comanche war parties had wandered far to the east, where the tai-bos had driven the tribes from their native eastern lands, and clear to the south, where the pony soldiers and the Tehanno Rangers fought and struggled against the Mexicans. Just about everywhere now, tai-bo settlers wanted to grow their crops and raise their spotted buffalo.
On ground the Comanche had ruled for generations, making war and driving out the Caddo and Tonkawa. This was a land the speedy Kwahadi ponies ruled, they and their red-skinned war lords of the fourteen-foot buffalo lance.
Tall One had seen the older boys practice with those graceful, deadly lances, more a weapon for warfare than a tool for hunting nowadays. Riding in at a full gallop with the lance level with the undulating prairie, the young horsemen practiced spearing a burlap sack filled with grass and brush, rocks weighing down its bottom to give it the heft of a full-grown white man sitting saddle-high on a scaffold of mesquite branches. Each of them was taught to drive that grooved lance through the enemy’s chest, to use it as a huge lever as they picked up their victim and unhorsed him, leaving the enemy to lie writhing on the plain.
Oh, how he wanted to go to war.
“You are unhappy the pony soldiers did not attack us last winter?”
Tall One whirled with a start, surprised to find the pale-eyed war chief behind him, his voice fracturing the dawn silence of this broken country east of their village, where he had gone to take refuge with his thoughts. Here the dogs did not bark, the ponies did not snuffle or whinny. Here he had believed he would be alone.
“Yes.” Then he thought better of his answer. “No. I … just—”
“You want a chance at the tai-bo’s soldiers, just as an Kwahadi warrior docs,” the pale-eyed one replied. “Me too. Sometimes I want so badly that we ride them down and get this war finished once and for all time, Tall One. To wipe this land clean, return it to what it once was for ourselves and the buffalo. To drive the white-tongues out forever.”
He recognized that distant fire burning behind the pale eyes. Tall One grumbled, “The Kiowa messengers say the soldiers slaughtered the camp of Black Kettle’s Shahiyena camped on the Washita River.”
The war chief nodded. “Then those soldiers turned around and fled when the Kiowa and Arapaho camped downstream rose up and hurried to meet the attack.”
Tall One smiled at that. “How I would love to have been there to see the look on those soldier faces when they saw the warriors rushing to chew them up.”
A smile crinkled the corners of those pale eyes. “Still, even though those soldiers fled, they came back the following moon, to harry the Kiowa of Lone Wolf and Satanta. Almost hanged both chiefs from a tree.”
His throat constricted uncontrollably. “A terrible death, this hanging—for the soul cannot come out the mouth.”
He put a hand on Tall One’s shoulder. “You are learning well, my friend. And one day soon these will be more than mere words—they will be the feelings in your heart.”
Tall One felt stung, challenging the war chief. “I feel it in my heart now!”
“Easy, Tall One. No one questions that you are Kwahadi already. All I mean is that the more you learn with every day, with every turn of the season, the more you become one of the Antelope People.”
“You are my family now. The only … only family I can remember having.”
“When we brought you here, you became part of a larger family still, Tall One,” he said, gazing to the east as the red globe finally cleared the edge of the earth. “There are other bands of The People. Root-Eaters, Buffalo Followers, and Honey-Eaters. Others you belong to as well.”
“More than anything, I want to belong to the same people you do,” he said, yearning for the comfort of having his place.
The pale-eyed one looked down into the young man’s face with a kind smile. “Perhaps you have touched more truth than you know. Perhaps, in a way, you and I do belong to the same people. Yes.”
“Your mother?”
“You know of her?” He grinned. “Yes, of course you do. The others have told you, of course.” Then he turned away as a cloud of something dark passed over his face, gazing up at the cloudless spring sky above them as he spoke sadly. “Winter before last, I learned that my mother was dead.
“We knew she had been captured by the Rangers, knew they returned her to the white-tongues, the Pah-kuhs, the ones she lived with before my father captured her to live with the Kwahadi.
“The tai-bo who told me at the Medicine Lodge council with the peace-talkers—he said she died of a broken heart.”
Tall One’s eyes wandered to that cloudless spring sky above them too. He could more than imagine how it must feel to be so lonely for your people, filled with so much yearning that your heart seemed as empty as that cloudless sky overhead. How the woman must have mourned, yearning to be returned to the people she loved. There were times when Tall One had imagined he knew just how great such grief was.
But that was before he had come to this life with the Antelope People.
The war chief gazed down at Tall One. “Tell me, my friend—if the white-tongues come for you, will your heart be glad to go back to what you had before?”
The words stabbed him with panic. “No—”
“Or will you find your heart truly broken when they take you back, find yourself missing the rain and wind in your face, the smell of many fires on your skin, the feel of a pony’s muscles at the chase beneath your thighs? Will you long for the feel of this freedom no other man knows?”
“Yes. Yes!” he repeated eagerly. “I would remember. But—I am not going anywhere—”
He interrupted the boy by gently placing his fingertips on the youth’s lips. “I wanted to know. For my own heart. For, you see, Tall One—the soldiers did roam across this country all winter long.”
Tall One tugged the war chief’s hand from his mouth. “I know that as well as any. Our skill in hiding kept us far from the wandering soldier columns all through the winter, even after the camp of Kiowa-Apache and Honey-Eaters was attacked and driven from their lodges, forced to abandon everything they owned.”
“The soldiers are coming, Tall One. I want you to know that. Come a day soon, their Tonkawa eyes will find our village and the soldiers will attack. Come that day, what side will you be on?”
“The People!” Tall One answered strongly.
“Will you fight—and die alongside Antelope warriors—die to protect our women and children?”
“I will! I will!”
“There is nothing in your heart—no remembrance of your time among the white-tongues, nothing that will change what your heart feels now?”
“Nothing.” And then Tall One gazed steadily up into the pale eyes. “If the white-tongues take me by force, then—like your mother—I too will die of a broken heart. Knowing that I have been ripped from my true people, Quanah Pah-kuh. Unlike you, I alone will know that great pain your mother knew. Like her, I too will die of a broken heart.”