From time to time he came upon scattered small gatherings of buffalo, their winter hair rough and matted. He was tempted to shoot one just for the hell of it, but Daddy Mike had taught him long ago to kill only for meat, not for pleasure. If he shot one of these shaggy animals he would have to leave most of the carcass to spoil. Mike would say that was wasteful of Nature’s gifts, and not pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

Despite his edgy feeling of aloneness and vulnerability, he found pleasure in traversing the rolling plains after breaking out of the cross timbers and its scrub-oak country. They were different in many ways, both in terrain and in vegetation, from the Colorado River region of his upbringing. It was not entirely new to him. He had seen the area before, going and coming back from following the Brazos reserve Indians on their reluctant march to new and less desirable country north of the Red.

It required no stretch of his imagination to understand why they so hated leaving after having set down roots near the Clear Fork of the Brazos on land pledged to be theirs forever. Forever had proven to be painfully short. Though most had no cultural inclination toward being farmers, many had put forth an honest effort to learn, to break out fields and plant crops the way the white agents showed them. Then they had been hurried away under military escort, obliged to leave most of their livestock for the whites who moved in behind them.

Yet Rusty understood the other side of the argument. Warfare was an integral part of Indian life—at least for the horseback Indians who roamed the plains. Warrior status was coveted by every ambitious young male. Only through war and the hunt could he prove himself worthy of being regarded a man. A life without war would be idle and pointless, too dreary to contemplate. Sometimes war was fought against nearby tribes. More often the targets were American settlers and Mexicans, whoever came handy.

To these people of European extraction and vastly different culture, it was intolerable to live in constant fear of potentially hostile neighbors. Most could recall violent deaths of kin and acquaintances at Indian hands. In many a home, chilling family stories were told and retold about depredations against forebears in the Alleghenies, the Mohawk and Ohio Valleys, the Southeast, or down in Mexico. A rumor of Indians could panic a community or arouse it to arms.

Coming into the region that had been the reservation before removal, Rusty saw a few new cabins. Some structures built by or for the Indians were occupied. Settlers had not wasted time moving into the vacuum after the former residents were dispossessed. He knew there had been political string-pulling well ahead of the removal and that hunger for land had been at least as potent a motive as fear in breaking up the Brazos reserve.