Comanche Dawn by Mike Blakely

Author:Mike Blakely
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

35

While Horseback learned from Raccoon-Eyes and Speaks Twice, the others—Shaggy Hump, Whip, and Echo—hunted in the mountains for deer, elk, bear, and lesser game. The hunting was hard near the city of the Metal Men, yet over the mountains, meat abounded. Also, there were signs of Na-vohnuh camps.

“My son,” Shaggy Hump said one evening, as Horseback returned from the square lodge of Raccoon-Eyes, “I have found the trail of a Na-vohnuh band over the mountains. It is only four suns old and shows the tracks of sixteen horses. Echo and Whip wish to go with me to steal the horses.”

“Will you take scalps?” Horseback said.

“I have prayed, and the spirits tell me this band of Na-vohnuh is not for killing, but for providing the horses for us. I wish to kill many Na-vohnuh in days to come, but I do not wish to displease the spirits.”

“The spirits are wise. We are only four warriors. Go. I will stay here with Raccoon-Eyes. He is going to show me how the Metal Men catch the cattle by throwing a snare made from rope.”

The next day, Horseback woke alone in the lodge of the searchers, for the others had left in the night to steal ponies. He rode through a light snow to the square lodge and found Raccoon-Eyes waiting there with three horsemen.

“The riders are dark-skinned,” he said, “but they dress like whites.”

“They are Indio by blood,” Raccoon-Eyes explained, “yet their grandfathers lived among the Metal Men far to the south, and they know the ways of the whites. You will like them. They ride well.”

Horseback looked at them suspiciously. “I will see.”

The Indio riders used the heavy saddles of the Metal Men, and this made Horseback doubt that they could show him anything he did not know about riding. He noticed that each of the riders, including Raccoon-Eyes, had a large coil of rope tied to his saddle. He had studied this kind of rope before, and had even watched a slave making a length of it. It consisted of rawhide strips woven expertly into a strong cord about as big around as a finger. Horseback wanted to trade for such a rope, for it would be good to trail behind a buffalo pony.

To hold his horses and cattle, Raccoon-Eyes’s slaves had made a trap of straight tree trunks that were too big around to serve as lodge poles. Inside this trap he saw six cows. Taking down the lighter poles that closed the trap, the five riders stood their mounts in the opening so the cattle would not escape the trap. Then one of the Indio riders took the coil of rope from his saddle. As if by magic, he formed a noose in the end of the rawhide rope. It reminded Horseback of how his father once tricked him when he was a boy by making things appear from nowhere in his empty hands.

As Horseback tried to catch the rider at this sleight-of-hand trick, the others let one of the cows out of the trap.

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