The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles

Wichita tribe, whose numbers had fallen and fallen and now they lived in one valley in their red-grass huts and grew corn and beans and ate the white man’s food when they could get it. The Coman- che and Kiowa had reduced the Wichita to a fearful client people.
    As they came up West Cache Creek into the mountains Elizabeth saw their beehive grass houses, with thready trails of smoke rising from haystack crowns. There were people there but they scattered so quickly they were like mourning doves surprised at their feeding and they vaulted into the brush and the tangled black trees.
    They traveled up West Cache Creek. This led them to a wide prairie that lifted in elevation mile by mile into the heart of the Wichita mountains. As they went on higher and higher the travelers were surrounded on both sides by rocky peaks. On one mountain a pair of enormous stones stood by themselves staring down at trav- elers. The descending song of the canyon wren spilled down the granite slopes. Then they came to the forests of post oak and Span- ish oak in between the peaks. They came upon a wide stony hole of water and despite the chill the children plunged in like otters.
    This was where they would spend the winter or not, as the spirit moved.
    They halted in a valley of tall post oaks and Elizabeth walked among the shading trees of a true forest searching for campfire wood. Pools of water ran one into the next like beads on a string. Nervous killdeer darted around the edges of these pools, and they found the heart-shaped tracks of antelope.
    Lottie kicked around in the travois blankets and went over one side and fell on her two hands. She got up again and was narrowly missed by a young boy galloping past heedless of anything but catch- ing up to the other boys. Elizabeth shouted to her granddaughter but Lottie’s two hands were taken by older girls and they went off with the other children among the clutter and flying poles and the men sifting quietly away from the women’s work to rest in the sun and smoke beside West Cache Creek.
    The children chased a pet antelope fawn and brought it back to the woman who had adopted it. Then they lost interest and found the dog with spotted puppies who had been allowed to ride in a tra- vois and was grateful. Lottie picked up a writhing puppy and gave it a Comanche name. Tuaahtaki, cricket.
    Two young men went up a nearby peak to keep watch. Elizabeth,
    too, had begun to fear the soldiers. The Comanche often killed their captives when they were attacked. Elizabeth did not know if she could save both Lottie and herself if this were to happen. She helped unroll the tipi cover from its pole and decided she would die trying. She saw herself smashing the digging stick over a man’s nose. She made herself stop thinking this by humming a vagrant melody that she recalled, a ballad about drowning Scotsmen, and then straight- ened up and admired the bony, subdued horse that Lottie and two other children were riding about camp.
    Camp life surged around Elizabeth. A heavy older woman stood and sang in a loud, quavering voice with an expression of great hap- piness. A baby had just been born. Two men shouted at one another in anger and the civil chief stepped between them and separated them. He sent the younger man away from camp with a herd of fifteen horses; a young and handsome man with copper bracelets up his arms. The young man galloped away behind the horses, pouting and flashing his bracelets. Another group rode off to the northwest with loud flourishes and shouts; they were going to visit the Co- manchero traders out of San Idlefonso.
    The tipis rose one after another like mushrooms. Fires crack- led, the men ran the horses to water in the shallows of West Cache Creek, and so they lived life as it had been given to them for thou- sands of years, both here and in another creation, in the legend time and perhaps even before that, when God so made the world and set the stars in the heavens and the waters