In the winter of 1898, a young man from the Bureau of American Ethnology traveled to Fort Sill in Indian Territory. His assignment was to record the words of the Comanche war chiefs who had lived through the years before the reservations. He was 27 years old. He carried a notebook and a mandate to preserve what the old men remembered.
One of those men was listed on the agency rolls as Cavosai. He was 61 years old, small and wiry, blind in his left eye from an old scar. The agent who interviewed him noted that Cavosai would only speak of certain things in the daylight, with the door open, and never after the sun began to set.
Cavosai had not used his saddle in 12 years. When asked why he kept it, he said it was so he would not forget the shape of a horse under him. He agreed to speak only because the agency doctor had told him his remaining eye was failing. He decided he would rather be the second-to-last man to know the truth than the last.
He began with a story from his youth. In the summer of 1864, when he was 13, a young man returned to camp with a strange report. He had found tracks on the Llano Estacado, the flat country west of the Caprock. The tracks were barefoot, long-strided, and ran in a dead straight line north. They did not curve around rises in the ground. They did not stop at rough terrain. After a quarter mile, the tracks simply stopped, as if the walker had lifted off the earth.
The young man laughed when he told the story. Cavosai’s uncle did not. He stood, walked around the fire, and sat back down. He told the young man never to follow those tracks again. If he saw them, he was to go the other way. He warned him not to step in the prints, not to measure his stride against them, and never to speak of what made them after dark. When the young man asked why, the uncle said only that the thing was walking, and if you told it you had seen it, it would know where to walk.
The uncle called it the one that goes. In English, the closest translation is the long walker.
Cavosai told of a warrior named Maroqua, a known joker who rode out with two other men to hunt bison. On the seventh day, two returned. Maroqua did not. The men said he had woken in the night claiming to hear his dead brother calling him from the west. He walked out into the dark. The others shouted his name. He answered from three different directions, always with the same laughing voice, saying he was here and they should come see.
They did not go. At sunrise, they found his footprints going west in a straight line. About 200 yards out, they found his moccasins set neatly side by side, pointing back the way he had come. There were no tracks past the moccasins. The old men listened to the story in silence. Cavosai’s uncle told them not to speak Maroqua’s name for one year, not to sing about him, not to draw his picture. He said the thing was out there wearing his voice, and if they called the name, they would call the thing.
A trader named Ilonso Bamante came up from the Pecos country in the fall of 1867. He was a fair trader who came with pack mules loaded with iron tools and coffee. That October, he arrived pale and thin, his hand shaking. He told the camp that three nights earlier he had woken to find his mules pulled tight against their line, staring west. At the edge of his firelight stood a tall man, over six and a half feet, naked, hairless, the color of the dirt behind him.
The trader asked who he was in three languages. The figure did not answer until he spoke in English. Then it answered in the voice of Ilonso’s dead father, calling him by name and telling him to come away from the fire. The trader fired his pistol into the dirt at the figure’s feet. It did not move. He fired again. The figure turned like a stick planted in the ground, feet unmoving, and walked west. The tracks stopped 40 paces from the fire.
The trader rode east without stopping for water. He never traveled the Llano alone again.
In the fall of 1872, Cavosai rode west with a small party that included his younger brother, a cheerful young man known for playing the flute badly. On the third night, Cavosai woke to hear his brother talking quietly in his sleep. He was saying he was not hungry. The older warrior in the party pulled Cavosai aside the next morning and said they were going home. He explained that when a young man sits up in his sleep and tells the dark he is not hungry, it means the dark has just asked him if he is.
Three weeks later, the brother rode out alone in the late morning to gather a loose horse. They found the horse grazing the next day. They never found the brother. They searched for 11 days. On the twelfth day, Cavosai’s uncle stopped his horse and said they were going home. He warned that if they found the young man now, he would not be himself. He told Cavosai to let him be gone and remember him as he was.
Cavosai said the rule on the Llano in the fall was simple. No man rides out alone. The rule is stronger at night, but it is always there. His brother rode out alone in the middle of a bright day. He did not think he was breaking a rule. The rule does not care what you think.
In the late summer of 1874, during the Red River War, a party of six Texas Rangers crossed the Caprock hunting for the band. Cavosai’s uncle advised against fighting them. He said to let them come west and see what the country did. The band pulled back and let the rangers follow their smoke and tracks for 40 miles onto the flat.
On the third night, Cavosai’s uncle led the band east, riding all night to the edge of the Caprock. Two days later, a cousin rode back out to check the ranger camp. He found the horses still hobbled, the saddles on the ground, the rifles, the blankets, the coffee in the pot, and six hats. There were no bodies. There was no blood. There were no tracks leading away, except one set of barefoot prints, long-strided and straight, going west.
Cavosai told one final story from his own life. In the year after the war ended, he was riding with a small group of men who had refused to come to the reservation. There were five of them, four men and a boy of 18. They made a cold camp on the open flat. Cavosai took the second watch.
In the middle of the night, he heard a flute. It was his brother’s flute, playing the little tune his brother had made up, a tune no one else on earth knew. The flute came closer, not by growing louder, but by the space between him and it folding up. Then he heard his brother’s voice say, come and see.
Cavosai stood up. He was tired. He was done. He thought if it was his brother, he would get him back. If it was not, the thing could have him. He was one inch from stepping off the cliff. Then he bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood and said out loud, my brother is dead.
The flute stopped mid-note. From the flat, in a voice that was not his brother’s, came a single word. Yes.
He stood there until sunrise. He rode east with the others and gave himself up at the agency. He never went west of the Caprock again. The boy of 18 who was with them never spoke more than a few words for the rest of his life. He died of pneumonia in 1882 at age 25. His mother said at his burial that he had died long before that, and his body was only catching up.
Cavosai died in the summer of 1902. The agency doctor listed the cause as old age.
The man who recorded his story kept those notes for himself. He did not turn them in to the bureau. On the train ride east, he woke in the dark to hear his own dead mother’s voice call his name and ask him to come and see. He bit his cheek and said his mother was dead. There was no answer.
Twenty years later, in 1918, he was in a hotel in Amarillo, Texas, on the edge of the Llano. He woke in the night to hear a flute outside the window. It was not a tune he knew. He understood that the flute was making up tunes, trying to find the one that would make him get up. He did not get up. He said out loud that there was nobody out there. The flute stopped, and from the flat over the wind, he heard one word. Yes.
He took the first train east the next morning. He has not been west of the Mississippi River since. He said that a piece of the country came with him, and that it is patient, and that the tune it is trying to learn is his.
He closed his account with a warning. The roads, the fences, and the towns are all on top of the country. What walks is under it, and what walks was there first. If you are ever somewhere flat and empty, and you feel that you are being watched by something that has been watching you for longer than you know, do not answer. Whatever voice it borrows, whatever tune it plays, do not answer. Bite the inside of your cheek and walk away. And do not, on any night for the rest of your life, go alone onto the Llano.