It was that injunction that caused Idahi to leave and seek out Blue Duck, the outcast, the man not welcome in the lodges of the Comanches--Blue Duck continued to kill whites wherever he met them. He also hated Kiowas because they had denied him a woman he wanted--he killed Kiowas when he could, and also Kickapoos and Wichitas.

Idahi had known Blue Duck when the latter was still with his people; they had ridden together and practiced shooting guns. They both thought it was foolish to try and kill people or game with bows and arrows, since it was so much easier to kill them with bullets. The two had been friends, which is why Idahi decided to seek him out when Paha-yuca made his decision.

Fortunately Blue Duck was at the camp on the Red River when Idahi rode up--the camp was a violent place, where strangers were not welcome. Everyone stopped what they were doing when they saw a horseman approaching; they all picked up their guns, but Blue Duck recognized Idahi and immediately rode out to escort him into camp, a signal to all the renegades that Idahi enjoyed his protection.

"All the people are going on reservations now," Idahi said, when Blue Duck greeted him.

"I do not want to live that way. I thought I would come and fight with you." Blue Duck was glad to see Idahi--no other Comanches had ever come to join his band. He remembered Idahi's love of guns and immediately presented him with a fine shotgun he had taken from a traveller he killed in Arkansas. Idahi was so delighted with his present that he immediately began to shoot off the shotgun, a disturbance hardly noticed in the camp of Blue Duck, where a lot of loud activity was going on. At the edge of the Red River, where the bad sand was supposed to be, two renegades were dragging a white woman through the water. They seemed to be trying to drown her. One man was on horseback--he was dragging the woman through the mud on the end of a rope. The other man followed on foot. Now and then he would jump on the woman, who was screaming and choking in fear.

Idahi saw to his astonishment that there was a half-grown bear in the camp, tethered by a chain to a willow tree. The bear made a lunge and caught a dog who had been unwary enough to approach it. The bear immediately killed the dog, which seemed to annoy Blue Duck. He immediately grabbed a big club and beat the bear off the corpse of the dog--Blue Duck took the dog's tail and slung the dead dog in the direction of a number of dirty women who were sitting around a big cook pot. Two half-naked prisoners, both skinny old men, lay securely tied not far from the women. Both had been severely beaten and one had had the soles of his feet sliced off, a torment the Comanches sometimes inflicted on their captives. Usually a captive who had the soles of his feet sliced off was made to run over rocks for a while, or cactus, on his bloody feet; but the old man Idahi saw looked too weak to run very far. The two prisoners stared at Idahi hopefully; perhaps they thought he might rescue them, but of course Idahi had no intention of interfering with Blue Duck's captives.

The dog the bear had killed was the only fat dog in the camp, which was no doubt why Blue Duck took it away from the bear and gave it to the women to cook.

"A fat dog is too good to waste on a bear," Blue Duck said. "You and me will eat that dog ourselves." "What does the bear eat?" Idahi asked.

Personally he thought it was bad luck to keep a bear in camp; he had been shocked when Blue Duck casually picked up the club and beat the young bear until blood came out of its nose.

He had been raised to believe that bears were to be respected; their power was as great as the power of the buffalo. Seeing Blue Duck beat the bear as casually as most men would beat a dog, or a recalcitrant horse, gave Idahi a moment of doubt--if Blue Duck had forgotten the need to respect the power of the bear, then he might have been foolish to come to Blue Duck's camp.

Though Idahi had left the Comanches he had only done so a few days ago; he had not forgotten or discarded any of the important ways or teachings of his people. But Blue Duck had been a renegade for years. Perhaps the old teachings no longer mattered to him. It was a thought that made Idahi uneasy.

A little later, while the dog was cooking, Blue Duck dragged the old man whose soles had been sliced off over to where the bear was. He wanted the bear to eat the old man, who was so terrified to be at the mercy of a bear that he could not even scream. He lay as if paralyzed, with his lips trembling and his eyes wide open. But the bear had no interest in the old man, a fact which annoyed Blue Duck. He picked up the club and beat the bear some more; but, though the bear whimpered and whined, he would not touch the skinny old captive.

The second beating of the bear was too much for Idahi. He took his new shotgun and walked away, beside the Red River, pretending he wanted to hunt geese; he was a new guest and did not want to complain, but he knew it was wrong for Blue Duck to beat the bear. Behind him, he heard screams. The two renegades who had been playing at drowning the woman had brought her back to camp and were tormenting her with hot sticks.

Idahi walked away until the sounds of the camp grew faint. The thought of finding Blue Duck had excited him so much that he had ridden all the way to the Arkansas River and then back to the Red. But what he found, now that he was in Blue Duck's camp, troubled him. He didn't know if he wanted to stay, even though Blue Duck had already given him a fine shotgun and would certainly expect him to stay. But Blue Duck's treatment of the bear discouraged him.

Idahi knew that Blue Duck had formed a company of raiders, but he had thought that most of them would be Kiowa or men of other tribes who had joined Blue Duck in order to keep killing the whites in the old way. But the men in the camp were mostly white men; some were mixed blood, and all of them, he knew, would kill him without a qualm if they could do it without Blue Duck knowing. They didn't like it that Blue Duck had ridden out especially to escort him in, and the longhaired half-breed Ermoke liked him least of all.

Idahi felt Ermoke's angry eyes following him as he walked around the camp. Even the women of the camp, all of them filthy and most of them thin from hunger, looked at him hostilely, as if he were only one more man who had come to abuse them.

It was not what Idahi had expected; but, on the other hand, he had not expected his own chief, Paha-yuca, to agree to take his people onto a reservation. He knew he could not live on a reservation and be subject to the rules of a white man. He did not want to wait like a beggar by his lodge for whites to give him one of their skinny beeves. He had left his three wives behind, in order to join Blue Duck--aletter he missed his women, and yet he had no intention of bringing them to such a filthy camp, where the men had no respect for anything, not even a bear.

The longer Idahi walked the more troubled and confused he became. He did not know what to do.

He was a hunter and a warrior; he wanted to hunt on the prairies and fight his enemies until he was old, or until some warrior vanquished him. There was no shame in defeat at the hands of a good fighter--Idahi knew that in many of the battles he had fought, but for a lucky move at the right moment, he would have been killed. He did not fear the risks of a warrior's life; he respected the dangers such a life entailed. But Idahi wanted to remain a warrior and a hunter; he did not want to become a mere bandit. He wanted to steal from his enemies, the Texans, but he did not intend to steal from the people who had always been .his people. The men in the camp of Blue Duck had no such qualms, he knew. They would steal from anyone. If they saw a Comanche riding a fine horse, or carrying a fine gun, or married to a pretty plump woman, they would, if they could, kill the Comanche and take the horse, the gun, or the woman.