Conquering Horse Read Online Free PDF Page A

will ask Leaf to elope with me. We will fly across the prairies and visit my uncle Red Hail. He will protect us. Then after a time we will come back and her father and mother will forgive us.”
    Leaf’s tepee stood under a single towering cottonwood at the open end of the camp circle. The fire in it had sunk to embers and he could barely make it out. Her father Owl Above was one of those who always went to bed early. Some months before, a raiding party of Pawnees had stolen all his horses and killed his son Burnt Thigh. Owl Above had been downcast ever since. His youngest wife had even left him because he had neither work nor food for her.
    No Name stopped. He fumbled under his white buffalo robe for his flute. He placed his fingers over the four holes on top and his thumb over the hole on the underside and blew gently into the flat mouthpiece. A soft whooo trembled on the wind. Leaf would know what he meant. “I am here,” his flute said. “I am ready for you.” He blew again, gently. “It is cold. Come. I have something to tell you. Come quickly.”
    He waited in the dark. The north wind threshed through the cottonwood leaves above him. Then the wind fell slowly away. The fires in the tepees dimmed. People still out doing late chores,old women securing ponies, warriors heading for the council lodge, brushed past him. He stood outside her lodge, rooted, patient as a tree.
    A mare whinnied behind his father Redbird’s lodge. Far across the prairies where the night herder had hobbled his father’s many horses a stallion answered with a great shrilling. A falling star streaked in a wide arc across the skies.
    Stepping closer, No Name blew his flute again, this time very softly. “Come,” his flute said, “I have something to tell you.”
    He waited. In the lull the smells of the camp wafted by him: meat drying behind Leaf’s tepee, a buffalo hide curing on a rack, a pipe spuming kinnikinick, sweetgrass and sage burning in the council lodge where someone was being initiated into a warrior society.
    He moved up until he stood beside the door flap of her tepee. “I hear you,” his flute said, “my ears are as keen as a robin’s and I hear you breathing. You are there. Come. The rustling tree whispers above.”
    He waited. A dog howled at the far end, setting off a long series of answering yowls from dogs all over the village. Moon Dreamer had taken to beating his medicine drum, slowly, t-thum, t-thum, still exorcising in a high chant over Grandfather Wondering Man. Nearby another nightwalker blew love notes on a flute.
    A hand touched his elbow. It was Leaf. Her wide smile flashed up at him in the dark. She stood in the slanting door, her feet still inside the tepee, her thighs and body outside. Her head came up to his chin. In a loving manner he threw his white robe around her. They nestled together inside the fur.
    “I have come to you,” he said.
    “Have you?”
    He stroked her arms from the shoulder down to the wrist. He had slim eloquent fingers and he caressed her again and again. Her snowy doeskin dress made soft ruffling noises under his fingertips. She slipped an arm around his middle. The musk smell of the robe enclosed them.
    “There are many moccasin tracks before your door,” he said.
    She smiled up at him. Her face was like a gently smiling brown moon. Her slanting eyes glinted like a pair of willow leaves.
    “I have seen a young girl who looks so beautiful to me,” he said, “I feel sick when I think about her.”
    She slipped her other arm around him. “Tomorrow you will sing about me and call out my name for the others to laugh at me. And I will feel ashamed and will hide.”
    “Have I called your name before?”
    She rested her head against his chest. She said, “A maiden does not talk to her lover until he has married her.”
    He groaned over her. The perfume of coneflowers rose from her hair. There was also in her braids the smell of a tepee fire. “I am without a wife,” he said.