The rocks, the natural cover.
It would take an army to fight the Hunkpapa out of this country.
But how long could they stay here?
How long would the meat they had brought in with them last, and the dogs?
Old Bear had said this afternoon that in the sky there was snow.
They didn’t want to kill the horses.
When they came out of the Bad Lands they wanted to be on horseback.
Chance leaned back against a limestone boulder, the dust of which covered the back of the blanket he had wrapped about his shoulders.
The tobacco was too dry perhaps, smoked too hot, but Chance did not object.
Something in the dust caught his eye, a few feet from him. He sat there smoking looking at it for a while.
He got up, went to the object, picked it up and returned to the boulder to sit down.
It was about the size of his hand, and an odd shape. Not exactly a rock.
Chance, curious, set aside the stone pipe and, because the sky was now pretty dark, fumbled in his pocket for the penny box of wooden matches he kept there. He had about seven or eight left, seven to be exact, as he had counted them before lighting his pipe.
He lit one of the matches and looked at the object.
It was the fragment of a jaw, a fossil, with one tooth protruding like a knife. It had belonged to some kind of big cat, probably like a puma.
He dropped it into the dust beside him.
He picked up the pipe again, leaned back once more against the boulder and resumed smoking.
Once this country had been younger, if not gentler. Once it had been green; it had had water, trees, grass; once in this place the large soft-footed cat had followed the delicate antelope; once here long ago, before the eyes of man were here to see, there had trembled in this place the stirring of seeds, the opening of flowers, the lifting of the leaves of trees to the sun and the rain, and here too had occurred the inevitable rhythms of flight and feeding; here had been enacted, as a matter of course, the swift, remorseless rituals of the prey and his predator; here in this place had occurred innumerable events, patient, abrupt, sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful, concealed, unwitnessed remote events, the traces of some of which, in virtue of the exchange of chemicals, were recalled in a fortuitous scattering of whitish stones, some of which more clearly than others remembered the shape of teeth, the curve of a shard of skull, the form of bones.
And now among the bones of this dead country had come the Hunkpapa, and Chance among them.
He glanced down at the fragment of the jaw lying near him in the dust.
The carnivore is dead, he thought.
And then he thought of Grawson, and the weapons of men, and smiled to himself, thinking that a new king had arisen to occupy the throne of the tooth, and wondered if this advent of the predator, seeking him or another, might not be as axiomatic in nature as water, flesh and salt, the flower and the claw. No, said Chance. It cannot be. Men are more. Men must be more. Here in man nature has made something that is more. Grawson is wrong. He is not innocent as the tiger and the cobra are innocent, condemned by their hunger and instinct to kill, sentenced by nature to inflict for no reason they understand tragedy on the uncomprehending and guiltless. Grawson is wrong. What he does is unjust. It is not beyond justice or apart from justice like the strike of the shark, the multiplication of the bacillus.
But Chance wondered, in his heart, if the predator who stalked him in the name of the laws of man, the name of justice, was indeed responsible, or if he were, like the stars and the protozoa, moved by forces beyond their reflection or control, forces that might be inherent in their nature and those of their environment, forces germinated by the systems in which they formed their part.
No, said Chance, this is too simple for man. Man is more.
There are the bones, the flesh, the vessels, the tissues, the organs, the exchange of gases, the processes of circulation and oxidation, but there is too the knowing, the recognition, the reflection, the being able to be other than one has been. Man is more. He must be more. I will have it, thought Chance, that man is more. That, thought Chance, until I know that it is false, or until I have evidence that it is false, I will believe.
Grawson is wrong.
I can face him, thought Chance, as a man who is in the right can face a man who is in the wrong. I can face him. I can say, I have weapons, and I resist you.
Chance smiled, and glanced down again at the fragment of jaw that lay near him.
In the end the hunter and the hunted lie down in the same dust, and it does not seem to matter. Yet, to Chance it did matter, and though it might never be recorded, even in the traces of bones, though it might vanish completely from the annals of time, he thought it well that the hunted might, once, turn and face the predator. No one would know; the story would be lost; but it would have been done, and it was worth doing.
I will resist him, thought Chance. I have run enough. I am tired of running. Now I will fight.
“Medicine Gun,” said Old Bear.
Chance started.
“Ride with me,” said the old man.
Not speaking, Chance put out the pipe and got to his feet, folding the blanket and laying it over a shoulder.
Old Bear led the way to the horses, and Chance and the old Indian unpicketed their animals and mounted.
Chance looked at the small, huddled camp of Old Bear. In the dusk, against the chalky limestone, he could see blankets propped on sticks and the openings of small dugouts covered with brush. Here and there, dark against the cliffs, stood a tepee, brought from Grand River. Few of the families present had such a luxury. Horses, closely picketed, shifted in the near darkness. The dim glow of the tiny cooking fires touched the darkness with an incongruous flicker. Wrapped in blankets, the families of the band were bunched together, waiting around the little fires, for the meat to cook and for the soldiers, sooner or later, to come for them.
Chance left the reins loose on his animal, and it followed Old Bear’s down an arroyo leading vaguely northeast.
As he rode he wondered, the thought aimlessly crossing his mind, where Drum and his braves were. He had seen them fade from the band shortly after leaving the camp on the Grand River. They had left to find revenge for their murdered chief, to fight, to kill, to scalp, to mutilate. Then somewhere between Standing Rock and the Bad Lands, they must inevitably have died, falling under the guns of soldiers, or ranchers or homesteaders. They must be dead. They were days overdue.
Chance wondered where Old Bear was leading him, and why. For a long time they rode.
Chance’s mind seemed to drift as had the smoke of the pipe.
In spite of himself, he found himself thinking again of Lucia Turner, of the softness of her hair, the gentleness of her eye’s, of the delicacy of a wrist, of the sudden, unexpected smile, so shy and quick, then the sudden looking down, her laughing.
He was pleased to know that on this night, Christmas Eve, far from the cold, the hunger and the danger of the Bad Lands, she would be warm and safe, and happy, inside the thick walls of the soddy. The range would be hot and there would be coffee, maybe even a tiny evergreen in one corner decorated with ribbon and strings of popped corn; with its clip-on candles on the branches and a pail of water standing ready. He smiled to himself. He wondered what she would cook. Turkey, of course, if it were available. With dressing, and corn, and sliced apples, and biscuits and butter. He imagined her preparing the meal, setting the table, somehow for him. He imagined how she might look, wearing perhaps something dark, a dark blue, with a white collar, the dress protected by the white apron. Perhaps she might even wear yellow. He recalled having seen a few yards of yellow cloth in the soddy, and supposed she had intended to make something from it. Perhaps for spring, perhaps for her return to Saint Louis. Perhaps she had already left Standing Rock, perhaps already she had returned to the brick houses, the paved streets, the gas lamps of Saint Louis, a city. He wondered if, in the soddy, or in the comforts of distant, civilized Missouri, she would ever think of him, as he did of her, and then, angry, telling himself he was a fool, he put the thought of her from his mind.
At last Old Bear and Chance, emerging from a limestone draw, urged their mounts up a small white ridge, and surmounting this ridge, which lay at the edge of the Bad Lands, looked out across the prairie, which like a frosted ocean washed against the rocks of the Hunkpapa’s retreat.
Chance looked from the Bad Lands to the prairies beyond.
Old Bear, not lifting his finger above his head, nor looking up, pointed to the sky.
“There will soon be snow,” he said.
Chance nodded.
“There will be no food,” he said. “There is not enough shelter. The people will die.”
Chance said nothing.