3
" See this page of paper? It’s blank,” Scull said. “That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it’s harder than fighting Lee. Why, it’s harder than fighting Napoleon. It requires unremitting attention, "
― Larry McMurtry , Comanche Moon (Lonesome Dove, #4)
8
" The buffalo will return," Kicking Wolf said. "They have only gone to the north for a while. The buffalo have always returned."
"You are a fool," Buffalo Hump said. "The buffalo won't return, because they are dead. The whites have killed them. When you go north you will only find their bones."
"The whites have killed many, but not all," Kicking Wolf insisted. "They have only gone to the Missouri River to live. When beaten the whites back we have they will return."
But, as he was speaking, Kicking Wolf suddenly lost heart. He realized that Buffalo Hump was right, and that the words he had just spoken were the words of a fool. The Comanches were not beating the whites, and they were not going to beat them. Only their own band and three or four others were still free Comanches. The bands that were free were the bands that could survive on the least, those who would eat small animals and dig roots from the earth. Already the bluecoat soldiers had come back to Texas and begun to fill up the old forts, places they had abandoned while they fought one another. Even if all the free tribes banded together there would not be enough warriors to defeat the bluecoat soldiers. With the buffalo gone so far north, the white soldiers had only to drive them farther and farther into the llano, until they starved or gave up.
"The whites are not foolish," Buffalo Hump said. "They know that it is easier to kill a buffalo than it is to kill one of us. They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve – then they won't have to fight us. Those who don't want to starve will have to go where the whites want to put them."
The two men sat in silence for a while. Some young men were racing their horses a little farther down the canyon. Kicking Wolf usually took a keen interest in such contests. He wanted to know which horses were fastest. But today he didn't care. He felt too sad.
"The medicine men are deceiving the young warriors when they tell them the buffalo will return," Buffalo Hump said. "If any buffalo come back they will only be ghost buffalo. Their ghosts might return because they remember these lands. But that will not help us. We cannot eat their ghosts. "
― Larry McMurtry , Comanche Moon (Lonesome Dove, #4)
14
" It wasn’t merely damage done by the sun that was causing him to slip suddenly into Greek; it was the Scull dementia, damage from the broken seed. His father, Evanswood Scull, intermittently mad but a brilliant linguist, used to stomp into the nursery, thundering out passages in Latin, Greek, Icelandic, and Old Law French, a language which it was said that he was the only man in America to have a thorough mastery "
― Larry McMurtry , Comanche Moon (Lonesome Dove, #4)