Lonesome Dove, Volume 2: Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry

"GUN-IN-THE-WATER is with them," Blue Duck said. "Gun-in-the-Water and the other one-Silver Hair McCrae."

Buffalo Hump sat on a deerskin near his campfire. He was under an overhanging rock, which held the heat of the campfire while protecting him from the driving sleet. He was splitting the leg bone of a buffalo. When splitting a bone he was particular and careful-he did not want to lose any of the buttery marrow. Most men were impatient, young men especially. When they attempted the old tasks, they took little care. Blue Duck, his son, rarely split a bone, and when he did, he lost half the marrow. Buffalo Hump had fathered the boy on a Mexican captive named Rosa, a beautiful but troublesome woman who persisted in trying to escape. Buffalo Hump caught her three times and beat her; then his wives beat her even more harshly, but Rosa was stubborn and kept escaping. The winter after the boy was born she escaped again, taking the young baby with her. Buffalo Hump was gone on a raid at the time-when he got back he went after Rosa himself, but a great wind came, blowing snow over the prairie in clouds so thick that even the buffalo turned their backs to it. When he finally found Rosa, under a cutbank on the Washita, she was frozen, but the boy, Blue Duck, was alive, still pulling on her cold teat.