Free The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles Page B

In the next second the jaguar had launched himself into the air and twisted upright and snatched a duck out of the clattering mass and fell, fell, with his long body writhing and sent up plumes of red water as he struck the surface.
    He came up with the drake in his mouth and swam to the bank, his banded tail floating behind him. He heaved up on the bank streaming water and shook himself, a windmill of spray. His ro- settes shivered in waves down his body as he shook himself, and the duck wings flapped wildly in his mouth.
    He dropped the duck and called out, Hough! Hough! Then he turned and looked up at her with his golden eyes. The stripes ran off his face like water.
    Elizabeth was at the edge of starvation and near a fatal exhaus- tion, and in her weightless daze she felt he was speaking to her. A creature at the far edge of his range, or beyond it, solitary and lost but somehow surviving. A vision. She had been granted a vision.

    Chapter 7 ‌
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    co l d f r o n t c a m e down upon them from the north, great layers of chilled air revolving one over another. It tore
    leaves loose and tipped over a drying rack and the dogs seized upon the meat and bolted away with it in the wind. Tipis flattened against their poles on the north sides and the horses were unsettled and milled and shouldered into one another. It took all the men and boys to hold the herd and keep them from drifting back south over the river before the punishing wind.
    Elizabeth helped chase the dogs away with her stick and to set up the racks again and secure them. Now she was permitted to sleep inside the tipi. She listened to the light rain that came with the cold and fell asleep for a while. She woke up again and lay sleepless in the smell of woodsmoke and wet fur. She was visited by a pure and constant rage she could do nothing about. Lottie had another name now, and Elizabeth forced herself to accept this and to remember it. Siikadeah. Her name was now Siikadeah. When they broke camp the next morning to continue on to the north they left dry circles in the grass where the tipis had been.
    That day they ferried their travois loads across the wide flat sur-
    faces of the Red River in boats made of skins stretched over wil- low frames, like tubs, wallowing and unstable, boats like bowls that tended to spin in circles when paddled. In places it was so shal- low the women waded alongside. The boats were loaded with the women’s possessions and on top of a pile of these rode Lottie and two other children. Lottie threw pecans into the water, laughing and chattering in small phrases of Comanche. Pakumah kept a firm hold of Lottie’s ragged dress and the girl screamed in irritation and Pakumah let her scream. Lottie threw Pakumah’s digging stick into the water and Pakumah only laughed. The men swam the horses over in a pawing, blowing mass. Then they were on the far bank and in Indian Territory.

    th e y c a m e up Deep Red Creek with its vermilion sands, and then they cut to the west and came upon the timbered loops of Blue Buffalo Creek, searching for West Cache Creek, which would lead them into the Wichita Mountains. They had been joined by more and more traveling bands of Comanche and Kiowa until they num- bered in the hundreds, walking through the cool November plain of yellow grass. Ahead in the mountains they would find plentiful wa- ter and timber for the winter, and elk, and antelope, and nut trees. They were happy and lighthearted. Susan Durgan’s scalp waved in a terrible, playful way from a man’s shield. There were many other scalps in various colors of hair from nameless dead people now bur- ied or left to the scavengers far to the south from Mexico to Okla- homa.
    The Wichitas began as a distant blue like a bank of clouds. Then they rose higher day by day. This was their winter camping place, these red granite mountains rising up alone in the great plains, foothills of nothing. A place of deities and shadows, sacred to the diminishing