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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 31

  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?”