Free The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles Page A

split, her shoes held together by thongs. She prayed aloud. Eaten Alive had hit her with his quirt for praying aloud, so she had learned to say nothing in English and to puzzle out Comanche words. She prayed that Lottie would get well as she lifted smooth gray deadwood onto the travois. She said sycamore and driftwood and taibo and esakonip and haamee .
    She walked on up a sandy rise to a stone bluff that stood a hun-
    dred feet or more above the river. Above the bottomlands every- thing changed. Now there was only dense thickets and short trees. She went on, pressing through the rigid branches. They all seemed to be made of thousands of strands of twisted, coarse wire. She tied the little mare to a limb and went to the top of the bluff.
    It was good to be up high. The level horizon all around her had begun to give her a lost feeling of stalking earnestly and without end toward a vanishing horizon. It was good to look out over the flood- plain of the Red and the curve of the river and the wind turning the water’s surface into a weaving of light. No smoke anywhere, on any
    quadrant of the horizon, except for the big camp upstream where the tipis’ pale cones rose out of the high trees, where the campfires were lit and children ran shouting in play and the men were bring- ing in the wet horses through the blue evening air.
    Elizabeth went along the bluff and before long she came to a mound of stone blocks. They were squared. They bore chisel marks. She reached down to touch them. They were of weathered sand- stone, worn down by heat and rain until they lay in heaps and were shoved aside by ancient post oaks grim as trolls.
    She walked among them looking for some sign or symbol. On one was a Spanish cross with bulbous terminals on each arm. Be- yond the remains of the Spanish fort was a ruined cabin built of upright logs that leaned in all directions. The stone chimney was blanketed by greenbrier and passionflower, gray and dry and noisy, seedpods shaking in the wind.
    Grapevines tangled over the leaning wheels of a wagon. The Spanish had come and built something of stone and after them, people of her own kind, and neither could hold this place against the arid country or the Comanche and the Kiowa, so here their ef- forts lay in ruins. Inside the fallen walls she saw disintegrating cloth caught beneath several logs and within that the long bone of a leg or arm. It did not frighten her. She was too tired and had come to think of this as her end as well. Elizabeth thought, I could well die in this country. I could die in the next five minutes.
    Weighty clouds built up in the northwest now, lit from behind by the sunset light, and their topmost towers glowed with an in- ternal light. She pushed aside the planks of the wagon. The place had long ago been scavenged, the wagon’s metal tires gone to make fleshing knives or beaten into arrowheads.
    She sat on the stone blocks awhile to rest. She was being worn down, faded and weathered like schist, suspended between two lan- guages so that words came to her out of an unstable white space where nothing seemed to hold meaning. She was not sure of the meaning of anything.
    From downstream came a low and powerful sound. A deep
    coughing roar. She raised her head, and across the river in the last of the November light a jaguar slipped out of the intricate netting of greenbrier vines and cane. He stopped to smell a limb of deadwood as if a message had been left there for him. Then he lifted his heavy head with its mouth open, panting. His beautiful rosettes were an extravagant adornment in the monotonous colors of the Red River and the white beaches and black trees, gray drifts of winter grass. He called out, singular and lonely, far north of his common range. He walked out of the trees and made a swift passage like a great spot- ted fish through the grass to the edge of the river in a slow moving tide of spots and when he reached the bank a covey of black ducks rattled up off the water.