Comanche Dawn: A Novel - Softcover

Blakely, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812548337 ISBN 13: 9780812548334

Publisher: Forge Books, 1999

Synopsis

In Comanche Dawn Mike Blakely does for the Comanche nation what Ruth Bebe Hills did for the Sioux in Hanta Yo. This landmark novel is the first time the story has been told from the point of view of the Comanches themselves. We witness the rise of one of the most powerful mounted nations in history through the eyes of a young warrior named Horseback.

Born on the very day that the first horse comes to his people, Horseback matures into a leader of unquestionable courage and vision. He assumes powerful medicine granted to him by spirits encountered on a grueling vision quest, and he takes Teal, the most beautiful young woman of his tribe, as his wife and lifelong love. Guided by forces more powerful and dangerous then even he can control or explain, Horseback will face death time and time again with only his medicine and Teal to stand beside him.

Failure will mean destruction not only for himself, but for his people. Success will mean unimaginable wealth for his new nation. Ancient enemies will seek to destroy him. Strange newcomers with pale skin and treacherous ways will attempt to enslave him. Even his own inner spirit powers threaten always to consume him, should he fail to respect them. Only the bravest of True Humans dare to follow Horseback on his great adventure down a trail that can lead only to glory or annihilation.

About this title

About the Author

A native of Texas, Mike Blakely grew up working on the family ranch. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force and holds a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the former president of Western Writers of America and has taught fiction writing at numerous workshops nationwide. He is a winner of the Spur Award for Best Western Novel. Also a singer/songwriter, Blakely tours all over the U.S. and in Europe with his band and records his original songs on his own independent record label. He currently lives on his horse ranch near Marble Falls, Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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?”
“It ran back among the lodges,“ Wounded Bear answered. He smelled a faint whiff of snowberry tea from the lodge. The baby was still crying, and the old man heard his daughter, River Woman, cooing at it like a dove.
“Are you sure it was a dog? I never heard a dog scream like that. I never heard a dog run on hooves.”
“It was a very strange dog. A big one. As big as an elk!”
The puhakutscowled. “When the moment came, you told me it was a big dog. I hope River Woman’s baby does not suffer from some spirit you have offended!”
“It was a big dog, old woman! Do not speak like a witch! The spirits sent it from the Land of Shadows. It was a shadow-dog! Now, tell me about my grandchild!”
The midwife ducked inside. Her voice sounded kinder from within: “You have a close friend, old man.”
Wounded Bear smiled. He began to pace along on stiff legs, weaving his way among the patches of snow, holding to the red dirt where footing was surer for an old warrior. He stalked through the camp, quiet now, after the passage of the strange beast he had named the shadow-dog.
Suddenly his old eyes caught the shape of a track in the snow, and he stooped over it to look at it closer and to feel its edges. Wounded Bear began to worry. What if Broken Bones was right? What if he had made a mistake and offended some spirit? This was like no dog track, no hoofprint, nothing he had ever seen. There was a track of a real dog beside it, which made him wonder why he had ever called the creature a big dog, or a shadow-dog, or any kind of dog. He straightened over the track and strode anxiously down through the village.
Below camp he heard the gushing of the spring called Never Freezes and saw a gathering of warriors and women. Pushing his way among them, he made out the large shape of the strange beast on the ground, still struggling against death, its legs groping helplessly for ground over which to run, its head lunging skyward in a vain attempt to rise. The arrows of several warri...

Edition details

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0812548337
• ISBN 13: 9780812548334
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576