The three of them were born in the same winter moon. Grew and fought and played together. Learned to hunt buffalo by running them over cliffs and trapping them in box canyons. Learned to run across country faster than others could believe. Their people were wanderers. They followed the buffalo in their migrations.
From when they awoke until they slept they were free. No one told them. No one ordered them. They listened to the warriors around the fires at night. They watched their uncles and fathers and grandfathers make bows and arrows. They followed the men in raiding parties and they killed and scalped and tortured with the best of them. The world was plain and mountain, sky and water, wind and sun, and the people lived as they had always lived, moving on the earth and in the spirit world.
The boys picked out an antelope at dawn. Not a weak one, not a young one, but a big one with a lot of meat on it. Through the morning they shadowed the herd, edging at them imperceptibly so that they moved toward the mountains without being aware. Then they broke out a small group and started running them one way then another, each time moving the little group of animals closer to the rocky heap of hills. Through the long afternoon they dogged the antelope until it sprang into the rocks and they followed it, forcing the tiring animal higher and higher - and then it eluded them. Disappeared. The boys cursed and spat and lay spread eagled and laughing with exhaustion among the high rocks along the mountain ridge. Then one boy, then another then the other all froze, their eyes riveted on a movement far away on the plain, and they did not recognize what they saw. They watched and waited and still they did not know what they saw. Men, sitting on animals - animals not like buffalo, not like antelope - perhaps like a deer but not like a deer and some of the animals had packs on their backs.
Then the strangers saw them and a few of them broke away and ran at the boys in the rocks and their horses rode them down and they captured one, killed one and one escaped to fly through the rocks and hide like a winded antelope. And the horse back people moved on, the captured boy slung over the back of a mule.
The boy who escaped returned to his people. At first they did not believe him.
``It was a dream,'' they said.
But an elder thought differently, ``Such a thing could be,'' he said, and war parties were formed and they quartered the plains and mountains in search of the strange ones and the captured boy.