Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  And—of this he was certain without having any idea how he was certain—within a few generations of these hairy men’s arrival in this New World, all the large predators and most of the large prey he had just seen with such joy—the lions, the camels, the mammoth elephants, the giant sloth, and even the horses—would be hunted to extinction here and everywhere in North America.

  For the first time in sixty years, Paha Sapa sees the truth behind the truth of the Wasichu Stone Giants Vision.

  The Fat Takers, in their elimination of the bison, were just finishing a trend that Paha Sapa’s ancestors and their earlier cohorts had begun in earnest 10,000 years ago—wiping out all the large, great species that had evolved here on this continent.

  The elders of the Ikče Wičaśa—turned into bowlegged cowboy imitators now in Paha Sapa’s day—may meet in solemn, play-pretend council and the arthritic old men may spend days in sweat lodges while preening in the old clothes and beads and feathers of their recent ancestors and flattering themselves that in their day they were spiritually superior, their tribes serving as protectors of the natural world, but… in truth… it was they and all those who came before them, their much-revered ancestors and these hairy strangers who may not have been ancestors at all, who wiped out forever these beautiful species of mammoth elephant and camel and lion and shrub ox and cheetah and jaguar and sloth and the giant bison that made today’s grown buffalo look like calves, not to mention the native species of small, hardy horses that had evolved and been wiped out here by man long before the Spanish brought over their European varieties.

  The raven flies very high now, and Paha Sapa’s heart feels very low.

  Beneath them, the sunlit ocean-sea tides of time have flowed in again, surrounding the Black Hills, then slowly ebbed away.

  The raven dives again.

  EVEN FROM A HEIGHT where the horizon begins to curve, Paha Sapa sees that he is descending into some near-future of his own era. He also knows (without knowing how he knows and without having anyone to ask) that it is still Saturday, the fifth of September—although in what year or century or millennium or epoch, he does not know.

  In the Black Hills, the four heads of Mount Rushmore gleam like bald men’s scalps in the sunlight. Farther south there is another, whiter granite gleam, as if another mountaintop has been mutilated, but the raven does not bank that way, and Paha Sapa cannot see where the raven does not look.

  Bear Butte is where it should be, although even from great altitude it is obvious that the majority of pine trees on its lower slopes and ridgelines have been burned away. This does not concern Paha Sapa; prairie fires have swept across Matho Paha in numbers known only to the All, if Mystery chooses to count such things.

  But the wasichu cities and towns are much larger—Rapid City, Belle Fourche, Spearfish, even tiny Keystone in the Hills—and between the sprawling towns sunlight glints off windows on uncounted ranches, outbuildings, warehouses, and homes and new constructions.

  The raven flies north just as it did a few minutes and 11,000 years earlier.

  Paha Sapa sees that the Great Plains have been sliced into geometric parcels even more than in his lifetime. In this not-so-far-away future, at least one of the highways is a broad four lanes, two in each direction with a brown-grass median in between, similar in design to photographs he’s seen in newspapers of such a futuristic highway design in Germany that was first called the Kraftfahrtstraße in 1931 when the first four-lane section was completed between Cologne and Bonn but which Hitler is now—in Paha Sapa’s lifetime just ended—enthusiastically calling the Reichsautobahn, which Paha Sapa translated as something close to “Freeways of the Reich.” The German chancellor is putting his Depression-lashed men to work building more such autobahns all over Germany, and the New York Times has opined that not the least use of such a four-lane-highway system could be to move troops rapidly from border to border.

  This new autobahn, stangely ringing the north part of the Black Hills within the very grooves of the ancient “Race Track” of Lakota lore, is filled with more automobile and truck traffic than Paha Sapa has ever seen or could have imagined. Even New York City in 1933 was not this insane with rushing vehicles. And the automobiles and trucks and indefinable shapes rushing east and west along the four long, curving lanes are painted a full spectrum of bright colors that catch the sunlight.

  Having come of age in an America where railroads—the Iron Horse to Limps-a-Lot and the other Natural Free Human Beings a generation earlier than Paha Sapa’s—were invariably the fastest way to travel, Paha Sapa finds it hard to believe that these autobahns will soon bind America together. (Unless, Paha Sapa thinks with a stab of insight, there is soon to be another installment in the Great War not long after his death, with Germany winning this time and occupying the United States.)

  But it’s not Germans who occupy the prairie beneath him, he acknowledges as his raven swoops lower, but cattle.

  Cattle, those stupid, filthy things that evolved in Europe or Asia or somewhere and that are now filling the plains beyond any prairie’s capacity to provide for them. When Paha Sapa was working (badly, he knew, because he never learned to be a good cowboy) for rancher Donovan, he’d smile when he heard Donovan and the other old-timers in the area talking about the “grand old traditions” of ranching in the West. The oldest of those traditions were fifty to seventy-five years old.

  But in this near-future, even if it’s only twenty or thirty or fifty years from this lovely early-September day in 1936 when Paha Sapa has died, he sees that the cattle have continued to do what cattle do: cropping the grass to its roots and overgrazing until the desert is returning to the North American plains; befouling with their excrement every stream and river they can reach while breaking down the streambeds and riverbeds with their odious weight; leaving their trails everywhere in the desertified dust that was once noble grasslands to the point that from the high altitude Paha Sapa’s raven flies, a water tank in a thousand empty acres of disappearing grass now looks like the hub of a wheel with a radius of five miles or more and tan-white spokes of cattle trails.

  And to protect their sacred, stupid cattle, the wasichu ranchers (and their faithful Indian companions) have wiped out the few remaining predators—the last wolves, the last grizzly bears, the last mountain lions—and declared war on such other species as prairie dogs (the overriding myth is that cattle break their legs in the burrow holes) and even the lowly coyote. Paha Sapa imagines that he can see the sunlight glinting off the millions of brass cartridge casings ejected in the killing-on-sight of all these species whose crime was getting in the way of… cattle.

  The air on this fifth day of September in its unnumbered future year is… very warm. It feels like late July or early August to Paha Sapa, embedded as he is in the raven’s exquisitely tuned senses. When they were high, he’d seen that there was no snow at all left on the summits of the Grand Tetons or the Rocky Mountains to the west and southwest, not even in that range that Paha Sapa visited as a boy which the Ute had alliterately named the Never No Summer Range.

  There will be full, hot, snowless summer there now, even deep into autumn.

  Swooping in a circle above the river, Paha Sapa can see that the partitioning of the plains does not stop with the new autobahn circling its four-lane-way north of the Black Hills from Rapid City or by the much busier (and paved!) web of state roads and county roads and fire roads and ranch driveways, or even with all the squares and rectangles and trapezoids of ranch land fenced off with barbed wire—and that is all the land as best he can see—but now the high- and green-grassed plains of his earlier vision and even of his childhood years have been carved into geometric shapes by the relentless overgrazing of the cattle.

  On one side of the barbed-wire fences the raven swoops over, letting the wind carry it, the grass is low and unhealthy and missing its most beautiful varieties of botanic species, but on the other side of the wire, the more heavily grazed side, it is essentially dirt.

&n
bsp; The hoofprints and cattle wallows and trails—bison never followed one another in single file, but stupid cattle invariably do—are bringing back the desert.

  Paha Sapa once heard Doane Robinson talk to a group of physical scientists about the danger of desertification, but the threat seemed far away in the bring-in-more-cattle-and-people 1920s. Now he can see the results. Those parts of the Great Plains of the United States of America that didn’t blow away in the dust storms during the Great Depression have now been overgrazed, overtrod, overpaved, overpopulated, and overheated—for whatever reason the climate feels so warm—to the point that the deserts are returning. When his raven rises, Paha Sapa can see the once-blue river running brown with cattle shit and mud from its cattle- and erosion-collapsed bare banks.

  The voice that is not his son’s but which sounds much like his son’s whispers to him without words.

  In the old days, even in the thousands of years after the ancestors and others before the Ikče Wičaśa had wiped out all of the top predator and grazing species except for the bison, the great prairies of tall grass and short grass that spread from the Mississippi River all the way to the Rocky Mountains stayed healthy due to the interaction of natural forces.

  Bison, unlike cattle, stampeded and wandered great distances in a way that spread the grass seeds of the now-missing healthy tall grasses. Their hooves, so unlike cattle hooves, actually helped plant the seeds. The buffalo grazed the grass in a way that did not chew down to the roots and kill the plants as cattle do, and they never grazed in one place for a long period of time. Their manure enriched the grasses that gave cover and a home to a thousand species no longer present.

  The grasslands needed fire to replenish themselves. Lightning provided that replenishment, with no men—Indian or Fat Takers—to stop those fires, but even after the Natural Free Human Beings spread across the plains, they had the habit of annually lighting prairie fires themselves.

  So did the Assiniboin and the River Crow, the Northern Arapaho and the Shoshone, the Blackfoot and Bloods and Plains Cree. So did the old, lost tribes whom first the Sioux and then the Fat Takers’ diseases had rubbed out—the Mandan and Hidatsa and Santee and Ponca and Oto and Arikara.

  These peoples had burned the prairie regularly for their own reasons, sometimes for reasons lost to time, sometimes to flush game—and sometimes just for the fun of seeing the flame and destruction—but the fires had always helped to keep the varied prairie grasses and flowers and plants healthy and renewed.

  All that is gone now, especially in this not-so-far future the raven is showing him.

  All the thousands of interacting species here have now come down to two—man and his cattle. The Fat Takers and their fat, stupid meat beasts, both constantly bred for more fatness.

  Oh, birds still migrate over and past this new world where the grasses no longer grow, but even the species of birds are disappearing faster than human beings can note their passing. The destruction of the wet places, the driving out of all variety among the grasses and four-legged beings of the prairie, and the draining and grazing and paving over of the birds’ mating places… yes, there are still species of birds to be found, but they tend to be of the thieving, scavenging, garbage-begging, back-alley species like magpies. They are the equivalent of the few remaining wild animals: scruffy coyotes eking out an existence on the edge of men’s and cattle’s dusty world, their sad countenances suggesting they know that the deserts are inexorably approaching.

  His raven turns south and climbs for the sky again, and Paha Sapa hopes that it will not descend again. He welcomes death.

  Let the time tides flow in and out as they always have; why must he—Paha Sapa—have to see the ravages of what men have done and will continue doing to the world and themselves?

  He senses rather than sees that the time tides have, again and again, turned bloodred on both rims of the horizon as other Great Wars have raged. Perhaps men love their cattle so much, he thinks glumly, because men so much love slaughter in great numbers.

  The raven has reached the icy upper air and it pauses there, hanging motionless on some unseen thermal. The stars are coming out in the darkened sky of day again, and the horizon has again bent itself like a warrior’s bow.

  Paha Sapa, the cynic and unbeliever for so much of the last part of his now-departed life, manages the sincerest prayer he has ever prayed.

  Please, O Wakan Tanka—my mediating Grandfathers—the All, the Mystery none of us will ever understand—O please, God, show me no more. I have died; please let me be dead. For my part in what you have shown me, I am heartily sorry. But punish me with no more Visions. My life has been saddened and stunted with Visions. Let me die and be dead, O Lord God of My Fathers.

  Merciless, the raven swoops downward once again.

  FOR A FEW MOMENTS there are no sounds or images, no motion or sensation, only knowledge.

  His granddaughter, Mademoiselle Flora Daelen de Plachette, soon to become Mrs. Maurice Dunkleblum Ochs when her fiancée finishes up the closing-out of her grandfather’s business in Brussels and joins her in America, is pregnant.

  This seventeen-year-old beauty who could have been his darling Rain’s twin, Flora is pregnant with Paha Sapa’s (and the absent Monsieur Vanden Daelen Adler’s) great-grandson, who shall be named Robert. The happy couple will have four more children, all of whom will survive childbirth and childhood, but it is Robert’s soul whom Paha Sapa touched with his vision-forward ability when he took his granddaughter’s hand the second before his stroke. And it is Robert’s future that bore him forward into time as surely as these ebbing, flowing ocean tides of time below him now.

  Born in 1937, Robert Adler Ochs will become both scientist and writer; his popularized science books and TV series will be enjoyed by millions of people. His specialty shall be physics, but as was true of his grandfather from America, the first Robert, this Robert will become an expert in other sciences such as geology and the environment and meteorology of Mars and of other planets. Robert Adler Ochs will be a guest in Mission Control in Houston in July of 1969 when men first walk on the moon, sitting with other scientists all acting like children released from school on a snow day.

  Of Robert Ochs’s three children, his middle child—Constance (who will publish under her married name, C. H. O. Greene)—will most continue her father’s tradition of excellence in science and writing. Born in 1972, Constance Helene Ochs Greene will be a major researcher well into the middle of the 21st Century and beyond. Her trio of specialties—her broad interests so rare in the continued age of specialization in the sciences—will be climate change, genetics, and ethnology. Her book The World We Made, the New World We Can Make will sell more than twenty million download copies worldwide.

  But in a changed world.

  And that actual change in the real world is the goal behind Constance Greene’s three bestselling books and behind the more than two hundred papers she will publish in scientific journals during her lifetime. Her special interest… no, her passion, her dream, her mission, her goal, her reason for being… will be Pleistocene megafauna rewilding of the Great Plains of North America.

  Even when she someday will be an honored and elder scientist leading an international effort that will see rewilding projects in more than thirty nations, it is always the Great Plains of North America that will continue to command the majority of her love and attention.

  And there are enough details to command the attention of ten thousand Connies—ten thousand Constance Helene Ochs Greenes.

  As the overgrazed and overburdened and variety-starved prairies are finally dying for good in the 21st Century, the ranches failing even after countless subsidies from the government and after a thousand attempts at “diversification” of what constitutes “ranching,” the deserts returning to where they have not been for hundreds of thousands of years, the small and midsized towns emptying out, the human population disappearing, the last dregs of economy in the region vanishing just as quickly, Dr.
Constance Helene Ochs Greene will spend most of her long life being part of a solution that offers a new birth not only to many species of animal and plant life, but to entire groups of people as well.

  Perhaps it is Connie Greene’s voice that Paha Sapa hears during this final descent of his nagi- carrying raven. Or perhaps it is again the soft voice of the oldest and wisest of the Six Grandfathers. Or perhaps it is Limps-a-Lot’s wise whisper or the soft voice of his most darling Rain.

  More likely, it is all of their voices that Paha Sapa will hear next.

  THE RAVEN SWOOPS LOW over the Black Hills. Borglum’s four Wasichu Stone Heads are there in place, looking slightly grayer with time. Either they have not turned into striding stone giants or the day of their striding and Taking of Fat has passed.

  Even while the raven circles on high thermals, Paha Sapa can see that some eight miles to the west and south of Mount Rushmore there is another mountain turned to sculpture. This one is larger and newer, the granite more brightly white.

  The voices of those he has loved and worshipped and will love in the future whisper in his ear.

  This is Crazy Horse and his horse. Unlike Rushmore, where the heads are just part of the great rock mass, this entire mountain has been sculpted. The scale of blasting and sculpting is larger in every way.

  After so many years in the mines and on mountaintops of making as precise measurements and estimates of measurements as humanly possible, especially of sculpted or soon-to-be-sculpted rock, Paha Sapa cannot help but make such estimates now.

  The three presidents’ heads that Paha Sapa worked on were each about sixty feet high. Crazy Horse’s head in this new, giant sculpture looks to be almost ninety feet high.

  But where the four presidents on Mount Rushmore were designed to be only heads with the occasional hint of shoulder—say the jacket lapels on Washington and the roughed-out knuckles of Lincoln holding a lapel (not yet started when Paha Sapa left forever)—here the entire upper body and both arms of Crazy Horse have been released from the mountain by explosives and then sculpted and bumpered down to smooth, white stone. And beneath Crazy Horse is his horse, the animal’s stylized, artistically maned head pulled down and turning back in dynamic motion, as if powerfully reined in, the horse’s left leg raised and bent and finely finished from its muscled chest to its fragile shank and hovering hoof.