The Son by Philipp Meyer Page A

said.
    The next morning we rode past sandstone mesas with figures scratched into the rock: shamans, men in combat, lances and shields and tipis.
    “You know they’re going to separate us,” Martin said.
    I looked at him.
    “These guys are from two different bands.”
    “How would you even know?” I said.
    “The one who owns you is Kotsoteka,” he said. “The one who owns me is Yamparika.”
    “The one who owns me is Toshaway.”
    “That’s his name. He’s from the Kotsoteka band. The one who owns me is Urwat. They’ve been saying that Urwat has a long way to go, but the guy who owns you is not that far from home.”
    “They don’t own us,” I said.
    “You’re right. Why they might have that impression is completely beyond me.”
    We continued to ride.
    “What about the Penatekas?”
    “The Penatekas are sick right now, or something else bad is happening to them. I can’t tell except that none of these are Penatekas.”
     
    D ESPITE T OSHAWAY’S PROMISE , we made another cold camp that night. In the morning we climbed out of the big canyon and onto the plains. There was no timber, no trail, no lines of brush to mark a stream, it was nothing but grass and sky and my stomach felt wobbly just looking at it. I knew where we were: the Llano Estacado. A blank space on the map.
    After riding an hour nothing had changed and I was dizzy again. We might have gone ten inches or ten miles and by the end of the day I thought something had come loose in my head. My brother fell asleep and rolled all the way under his horse and the Indians stopped, beat him, and tied him back on.
    We made camp at a stream cut so deep into the plain you could not see it until you were on top of it. It was our first fire and because there were no trees to reflect the light, it could not be seen from any distance. A pair of antelopes were thrown on, skin and all, and Toshaway brought us a pile of steaming half-cooked venison. My brother didn’t have the energy to eat. I chewed the meat into small pieces and fed it to him.
    Then I climbed out of the streambed to have a look. The stars came down to the earth on all sides and the Comanches had pickets looking for other campfires. They ignored me. I went back to our pallet.
    A catamount screamed at us for nearly an hour, and wolf calls were echoing from one side of the plain to the other. My brother began to cry out in his sleep; I started to shake him, then stopped. There wasn’t any dream he could be having that would be as bad as waking up.
     
    T HE NEXT MORNING they didn’t bother to tie us. There was nowhere to go.
    My brother, despite having eaten real food and slept six hours, was not any better. Meanwhile the Indians were laughing and cutting capers, riding their horses backward or standing up, calling back and forth with jokes. I fell asleep and woke up in the grass. We stopped and I was tied on again, slapped a few times but not beaten. Toshaway came over and gave me a long drink of water, then chewed up some tobacco and rubbed the juice into my eyes. Still I spent the rest of the day not knowing if I was asleep or awake. I had the feeling that somewhere ahead of us was the edge of the earth and if we reached it we would never stop falling.
    That afternoon a small herd of buffalo were spotted and run down and after a discussion my brother and I were taken off our horses and led to one of the calves. It was cut open and its innards pulled out. Toshaway cut into the stomach and offered me a handful of curdled milk but I did not want any part of it. Another Indian forced my brother’s head into the stomach but he shut his eyes and mouth. I was given the same treatment. I tried to swallow the milk but instead I aired my paunch.
    This was done two or three times, with my brother not swallowing at all, me trying and throwing up, until the Indians gave up trying and scooped out all the curdled milk for themselves. When the stomach was empty the liver was cut out. My brother refused to