Account of the Murder of Isaac Kountz, 1876, Kimble Co., Texas

The hooves of the comanche horses strike even to the roots of the grass, crunching the water hidden there. At the western edge of the yellow fields of the air, the sun pauses in its rush for night. Isaac and Sebastian watch the men come up the ridge. Their sheep drift. They tuck their dingy tails between their legs and skulk into the junipers. No one will come for them.

Isaac and Sebastian climb a stone to see. Isaac's eyes, blue as the prussian army, flash their signals down below. The wind which has blown across the plains all the way from the ice nation dies and the brothers lose their balance in the stillness. The riders have read the signal. Sadly, Sebastian puts his new hat on. They jump down and Isaac looks back in time to see the last of the sheep vanish.

"Sheep are gone," murmurs Isaac.

The comanches are beautiful. Their arms and necks are like stones that lie under the river and their hair shines blue with oil. Their smell rises up as sweet as the skin of horses with the freshness of living organs and the bite of juniper berries. They advance in a constellation, knotted to the sun and the going of the sun, sweeping over the ridge and over the fixed elements of life.

The riders stop in front of them. Down below in the arms of the river Isaac and Sebastian see the house, resourceful and brittle like the castings of caddis fly larvae; but the shape, almost square, suggests a wound on the world, a forecast of something inevitable and painful. They are filled with sadness because they do not think they will walk through that door again. Nostalgia for this ridge, the last ridge, and this last evening of eleven years, overcomes the child Sebastian. The tears run down his face and he does not hang his head to hide them from his brother; the dry air licks them up. Fletched grass quivers in the last light, and the stones soften and turn sweet like the german marzipan Isaac only just remembers, but his eyes look to that single cloud hung like a mask over the mountain across the valley, and he wrinkles his forehead, trying to remember a name of it he never heard. Tomorrow is Christmas.

The first man aligns the rifle with his black fringed eye on one end and Isaac's grass-gold head on the other and joins them with a blast. Sebastian sighs. He kneels slowly, hands, right knee, left knee, to the magnetic earth. A shadow falls across his face. The comanche reaches down from his saddle and takes the hat from his head, and the riders follow the ancient day west, throwing their shadows back.

[Note: This was the last recorded Comanche conflict in Kimble County, Texas.]