The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles Page B

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    ot ti e b e ca m e re d - c h e e k e d and feverish. Elizabeth knew the men would not abide a sick or crying captive child,
    and the days after they were taken she carried Lottie in her arms. She made a sling of her shawl and wrapped the ends around both of them. She carried the three-year-old from the first great rise in the land until they came to a large encampment, where the men were greeted with shouts and singing. Women and girls danced alongside the men with their heraldic scalps, the confused and frightened sto- len horses. A great bonfire burned and in its light the horsemen rode around the camp to the songs and the cheering. They held up the things they had taken from the houses they had raided, they waved blankets and quilts, and a Kiowa warrior turned a hand mirror back and forth so that it flashed in the firelight.
    Two old women came to them and seized Elizabeth by the arm and led her away into the dark and violent night. They shoved her and Lottie into a small stand of live oak. Mary and her two chil- dren and little Millie, eighteen months, were hidden by the elder women in some other place. They stayed there all night, watching the stars, as the celebration fires flared up and the singing went on
    and on. The elder women sat between them and the firelit village of tipis. They watched from their old eyes, black with blue casts in them, old in their knowledge of the nature of men and raiding. They sat hooded in their blankets. Elizabeth held Lottie until the girl fell forward in sleep. Then she found herself waking up faint and hungry in a gray light.
    That next day they went on. A light rain fell for two days, and it was cold. At some point they stopped and the traveling band of two hundred Comanche and Kiowa split up. The captives were divided between them. Elizabeth saw a young Kiowa woman sweep Millie up in her arms and stroke her hair and smile. The young woman pressed her cheek to the little girl with tears in her eyes. Elizabeth thought she would probably never see Millie again, and she was right.
    The rain dropped thin as mist on the trees in the draws and painted their trunks dark as some unrefined ore, dark as slag coal. Elizabeth pulled her shawl over her head and over Lottie’s head when the two groups parted and she was shoved ahead with the Comanche. She could not see Mary or Jube or Cherry or Millie as they went away northwest with the Kiowa.
    She walked on with the Comanche and their long, easy march of hundreds of horses and travois. The ends of the travois poles bore down to make deep wavering tracks in the wet earth and the heads of children with hair in stiff spikes stuck up out of bundles and blan- kets on the travois, jiggling like dolls. All along the trail were things that had been taken from houses on Elm Creek and then thrown away; a tobacco cutter soon abandoned because of its long, awkward handle, curling irons, a shoehorn, a flatiron, a pair of women’s high- laced shoes, a tintype of Jeremiah Durgan in its velvet frame and starred, cracked glass, all scattered in the grass. They don’t want any of it, thought Elizabeth. They stole it and then they threw it away. All those things mean nothing to them.
    Elizabeth found enough to eat as they went. She caught a painted terrapin and pried its shell apart. Inside there was meat and autumn fat. At the noon rest she boiled it inside its own shell and fed Lottie
    first and then herself. She took up the bitter buffalo gourds and dug out their flesh and made drinking cups of them.
    When they first came into camp Elizabeth was claimed as a slave by a skinny woman with a drawn and hostile face and elabo- rate tattoos around her mouth, who quickly taught her the Coman- che words for water, wood, bring it . Elizabeth endured the woman’s blows without a sound. The skinny woman was the wife of one of the men who had raped and beaten Elizabeth, and he had a thun- derbird painted on his tipi, an audacious claim to great power. His