Read "Lonesome Dove, Volume 2: Comanche Moon" by Larry McMurtry online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
WHEN KICKING WOLF HEARD that four rangers were walking across the llano with only one horse and a mule, he didn't know what to make of the news. A lot of strange news had come lately, some of it distressing and some of it merely puzzling. He had not left the camp in two weeks because one of his legs had a bad cramp in it. Of course now and then a man's leg would cramp, but never in his life had he experienced so debilitating a cramp as the one which afflicted his right leg. Sometimes even when he was moving his bowels a cramp would seize him, playing havoc with even that simple operation.
Kicking Wolf thought it was his old wife, Broken Foot, who was sending the cramp into his leg. The fact was, Broken Foot had been angry with him for several months-he didn't know why. When he asked her she smiled and denied that she was angry, but Kicking Wolf didn't believe her denials. Even though he was aging, Kicking Wolf was still a good hunter; he owned more horses than anyone in the tribe and supplied Broken Foot with everything she needed. Their lodge was the warmest in the camp. Kicking Wolf knew, though, that having many reasons to be content didn't necessarily mean that a person was content, particularly not if the person in question was a woman. Broken Foot, despite her denials, was angry with him-either she had put a bad herb in his food, causing his leg to cramp, or else she had conspired with a medicine man and had had the medicine man work a bad spell. Broken Foot was not much younger than he was, and had grown very fat in her old age. Kicking Wolf gave up trying to get her to stop being angry with him and concentrated on avoiding her. But it was hard to avoid a woman as large as Broken Foot in a tent at night, which was why, as the weather grew warmer, Kicking Wolf started spending more and more nights outside, by himself. It didn't stop the cramps but at least he didn't have Broken Foot there gloating while he tried to get the painful cramps to leave his leg.