Black Hills

by Simmons, Dan

  Then Paha Sapa sees something that makes him scream into the high, thin, cold air of the sky where he and the Six Grandfathers float as insubstantially and as impotently as clouds.

  Even before they kill the last of the millions of buffalo, the four Wasichu Stone Giants are chasing the people on the Plains and in the Black Hills and even those living far to the east and farther to the west: chasing and catching Paha Sapa’s Natural Free Human Beings and the Crow and the Cheyenne and the Blackfoot and the Shoshoni and the Ute and the Arapaho and the Pawnee and the Oto and Osage and Ojibwa, chasing the few pitiful remnants of the Mandan, sweeping up the Gros Ventre and Plains Cree and the Kutenai and the Hidatsa. All run. All are swept up. None escape.

  Some of these little fleeing forms the four Wasichu Stone Giants tuck away in the stone pockets of their stone clothing, but others they throw far away, flinging the tiny, screaming, flapping human figures over the curve of the earth and out of sight forever. And some they eat. Chewing. Chewing.

  —Grandfathers! Stop this! Please stop this!

  The voice Paha Sapa hears next is softer than the one or ones he’s heard before: low, musical, subdued, a combination of birdsong and water flowing around rocks in a stream.

  —Stop it? We cannot. You, our people, have failed to do so. Nor would it be proper to stop them. They are the Fat Takers. They have always been the Fat Takers. Do we stop the rattlesnake from striking its prey? Do we stop the scorpion from stinging the sleeping gopher? Do we stop the eagle from swooping down on the mouse? Do we stop the wolf or coyote from pouncing on the prairie dog?

  The words rattle in Paha Sapa’s aching skull: sinteĥaĥla, itignila, anúnkasan, hitunkala, šung’ manitu tanka, šung’ mahetu, pispía…

  What do these mere animals have to do with the slaughter and extinction of the Natural Free Human Beings he is watching below? What does the nature of a scorpion or wolf or eagle or rattlesnake have to do with the murder and capture of men by men?

  On the wide prairies, the bison are dead, killed, eaten, removed. The lodges and villages of the Natural Free Human Beings and all their red enemies and allies and distant cousins are empty. The four Wasichu Stone Giants, fattened by their killing and chewing and taking of so much fat, are striding back across emptied grasslands to the ravaged Black Hills.

  Paha Sapa leans so far over the edge of the giant palm and giant fingers holding him above miles of nothing that he almost falls. Instead, he finds his courage.

  —Grandfathers, Powers of the World, Tunkašila of the Four Directions and of the Earth and Sky, Oldest Children of the Great Spirit, please hear my prayer! Do not let this vision become true, Grandfathers! Do not make me return to Limps-a-Lot and my band with this as my Vision! I beseech you, O Grandfathers!

  Miles beneath him, the Wasichu Stone Giants have returned to the Paha Sapa, are lying down amid the shattered trees and tumbled rocks and burrowed mountaintops and are pulling the soil and stone over their gray granite bodies the way old men, after a feast, pull buffalo robes up over their shanks and distended bellies and old-men’s shoulders.

  Paha Sapa feels himself hurtling down—not falling, but hurtling lower still in the palm of the Grandfather bathed in the white light—but now the Grandfathers speak as one and their voices are very difficult to understand, so mixed are they with the wind and thunder rumble and rushing-stream sounds.

  —Behold, this was your nation, Black Hills. Your ancestors sang it into existence. Your generation shall lose it forever if you do not act. The Fat Takers are what they do, this the Natural Free Human Beings and all Our Children have known since they first saw the first Fat Taker paddling west in the day of your grandfather’s grandfather. Lose the buffalo, lose your lodges, lose this world with all your songs and sacrifices, and you lose us and all the other spirits and deep, dangerous forces and names to whom your little voices have cried for ten thousand summers and more. Allow the Fat Takers to take all this away from you, and you lose Mystery forever. Even God cannot exist when all his worshippers are gone and all the secret chants forgotten, Paha Sapa, our son. A people who have no power are not a people. They are only food for beasts and other men.

  The six columns of light with the shadowy forms in them are flying low now. In a few seconds, Paha Sapa knows, they will set him down on the torn rocky top of the sacred mountain. Already the sun has set and time has slowed and the stars have faded and clouds are rolling in again.

  —What can I do to help the Natural Free Human Beings from suffering this prophecy come true, Grandfathers? Please tell me!

  It is the stream-and-small-birds voice that answers.

  —This is not a prophecy, Black Hills. It is a fact. But you will be in a position to act. Of all Our Children who are now Fat to the Fat Takers, only you will be able to act.

  —How, Grandfathers? When? How? Why me? Tell me how… Grandfathers!

  But the great, warm hand has set his nagi back into his body, which lies faceup in the Vision Pit. The six forms in the six columns of light become shooting stars again and retrace their bright, flashing paths back up into the skies.

  —Grandfathers!

  The voice from the sky is only a whisper of wind.

  —Paha Sapa, toksha ake čante ista wacinyanktin ktelo.

  We shall see you again with the eyes of our hearts.

  PAHA SAPA WAKES. It is a cold, wet, rainy sunrise. He is shaking so hard that even when he finds his robe to wrap around his nakedness, his body continues to tremble for half an hour or more.

  Clutching the sacred pipe on its strap to his chest, Paha Sapa manages to stumble down the mountainside. Worm has somehow slipped his stake tether and hobbles but has stayed near White Crane. Paha Sapa is so weak that he knows that if the rabbit traps are empty, he may not survive.

  There is a wriggling rabbit in one trap and the leg of a rabbit in another. Paha Sapa chants his song of thanks, kills the living rabbit, and takes the leg of the other.

  His flint and steel are in the sweat lodge where he left them, along with some twigs still dry under a stack of robes. With shaking hands, he manages to get his lodge fire burning again. The winds and storm have blown away the leaves and some of the willow branches and blown off a robe, opening part of the little lodge to the sky and rain, but Paha Sapa ignores this as he huddles over the sparks, then breathes the tiny embers into flame. When he is certain that the fire will go…

  —Thank you, Grandfathers! Thank you, Wakan Tanka.

  … Paha Sapa skins and guts the rabbit, peels the hide off the leg, builds a crude spit with the fallen twigs, and begins to eat before the rabbit is fully cooked.

  A DAY AND A NIGHT and a morning later, Paha Sapa is almost back to his village. He was in such a hurry to leave that his packing was careless; he left some robes behind at the sweat lodge site. He has not a moment to spare. He must tell Limps-a-Lot and Angry Badger and Loud Voice Hawk and all the other elders of his village this terrible news, share this terrible vision…. Perhaps the warriors and holy men will see the nightmare of the Wasichu Stone Giants rising out of the Black Hills as something not nearly so terrible as Paha Sapa imagines. Perhaps there are symbols and portents and signs in the dream that no boy of eleven summers could possibly understand.

  Paha Sapa has never felt so young and useless. He wants to cry. Instead, deep into the morning of the second day heading north toward Slim Buttes, with the narrow river to his left now swollen into a torrent half a mile across (but he does not have to cross this to reach Slim Buttes and the village), Paha Sapa hugs the disassembled and blanket-wrapped still-red-feathered Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa to his shivering chest and falls asleep while riding Worm.

  HE WAKES TO HORSE SCREAMS hours or minutes or seconds later when the first arrow strikes White Crane.

  Jerking upright on Worm, Paha Sapa looks over his shoulder, realizing at once how careless he has been. During his ride south to the Hills, he watched the horizons and hid himself constantly, despite the heavy rains. Now, with the clouds hi
gher and occasional sunlight dappling the prairie, he has ridden on without looking back or around once, pregnant with need to get back home, arrogant in his carelessness.

  Less than sixty yards behind him, eight Crows—all men, painted for war, screaming their war cries, heeling their war ponies on at top speed—are rushing at him. They are to the east as well as south. Paha Sapa has no direction to run except northwest, toward the absolute barrier of the flooded valley with its quarter-mile-wide raging waters.

  A second arrow hits White Crane in the neck and Three Buffalo Woman’s beautiful mare goes down. Paha Sapa cuts the connecting strap a second before he is pulled down with the mare. Loud, terrible cracks and Paha Sapa realizes that two of the Crows have rifles. A small geyser of Worm’s warm blood leaps from the gelding’s straining shoulder and splashes Paha Sapa in the face.

  He has no weapon with him other than his knife. The war lance and everything else went down with White Crane. Paha Sapa glances back again—the Crows have not spared even a man to plunder the dead horse’s packs. All eight come on, screaming, their mouths black and wide, their eyes and teeth a terrible white.

  They have him cut off now, three of the Crow warriors wheeling around to the northwest of him. He must wheel left toward the water. He does.

  An arrow strikes between his calf and Worm’s leaping rib cage, burying itself in the horse rather than the boy. A rifle bullet nicks his ear. Paha Sapa can hear a terrible whistling over Worm’s labored panting as the good horse continues galloping hard even with bullet holes in his lungs.

  Paha Sapa rides full speed into the advancing waters. The Crows scream more loudly, their cries as terrible as the chewing noises the stone giants made.

  Two more shots and Worm’s legs fold under him. Paha Sapa goes flying over the dying horse’s head—it is just like the Greasy Grass, where he counted coup on Long Hair, only here he, Paha Sapa, will die!—and then the boy clutches the segments of the sacred pipe and strikes the water and swims toward the tangle of cottonwood branches and uprooted willows swirling in the current ahead of him.

  The Crows ride their slathered ponies into the water until the current tugs at the horses, whirling them around, up to the thighs of the riders, but there they stop, still screaming and shouting, and take careful aim and fire bullets and arrows at Paha Sapa.

  But Paha Sapa is being hurled downstream now faster than any bullet can fly. He holds the red-wrapped Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa high, trying to keep it dry, even as his own head goes under the cold, muddy water and he splutters and gasps.

  Something to his right, upstream behind him, it can’t be a Crow… they wouldn’t dare to…

  Paha Sapa turns to look, still holding the pieces of the sacred pipe and feathers high, just as the onrushing cottonwood log strikes him in the head.

  HE WAKES. Not drowned. It is hours later—either sunset or the next dawn—and he is lying mostly buried in mud at the western edge of the rushing and now half-mile-wide river. He has not even made it across to the other side. The Crows have him now if they still want him.

  One of Paha Sapa’s eyes is either gone or swollen shut. Several teeth are missing. A bullet has gone through his upper arm.

  But these are nothing. The Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa is gone.

  Paha Sapa manages to get to his knees. He flails in the thin light, splashes water, somehow manages to get to his feet, wades, is knocked down, dives, dives again, barely manages to crawl out of the current, almost drowned.

  It is gone. The Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa handed down in his band from generation to generation, the most sacred item the tribe has, the heart of their mystery and their defense against the dark powers of the earth and sky, the pipe entrusted to him by Limps-a-Lot. Gone.

  Paha Sapa is naked except for his breechclout, even his moccasins torn from his feet. He is covered with mud and horse’s blood and his own blood. His one eye does not see well.

  —I still have to report the Vision to Limps-a-Lot and the elders. I still must tell them, then take my lifelong punishment for losing the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa.

  Hurting everywhere, Paha Sapa crawls out of the water and mud, pulls himself forward up the muddy bank by grasping grasses, reaches the top, and staggers to his feet.

  Three Crows are standing just a few paces away. Paha Sapa cannot run. These are not the same Crows—they are older, larger, and they wear wasichu soldier shirts open over their tattood chests.

  Behind the three Crows are about sixty mounted men, black against the sunrise, but obviously cavalry. One of the wasichus shouts something in the same ugly syllables that Paha Sapa hears from Long Hair’s ghost at night.

  The closest Crow, an old man with a scar running from his forehead across his nose and down his cheek, takes three steps forward, raises his repeating rifle, and brings the wood-and-metal stock down hard against Paha Sapa’s forehead.

  15

  George Armstrong Custer

  Of all people on this good Earth, my darling, you know that my reputation as America’s “Greatest Living Indian Fighter” is exaggerated. Under my orders and following my lead, thousands upon thousands of Rebels were killed, but it’s not been my honor to kill many Indians.

  Unlike the Rebs, the Indians are a sly and elusive enemy. The warriors fight at a time and place of their choosing, almost never in a stand-up battle but with feints and usually from a distance (except for their rushing in to count coup or to scalp fallen whites), and then they flee, often running to hide behind the skirts of their women and the rattles of their babies in villages. So the only time the cavalry usually can surprise and bring the warriors to fight is when we attack one of their villages, especially early, just after dawn. So it was at my Battle at the Washita River.

  Those warriors, mostly Cheyenne, that bloody year of 1868 had been coming up out of the Indian Territory and out of Texican country farther south to raid in Kansas. That November, General Sheridan had showed me the butcher’s bill just since August—110 white people killed, 13 women raped, more than a thousand head of cattle stolen, and countless settlers’ cabins burned and looted. The Kansans were taking this rape, theft, and slaughter personally.

  The Indians’ violence flowed, as you know I believe, directly from the peace treaties we signed with Red Cloud and the others that year at Fort Laramie: treaties in which Sherman gave the tribes everything they’d ever demanded and more, including the army’s agreement to abandon our entire string of forts along the Bozeman Trail and then, on top of that, acknowledging Sioux ownership of the Black Hills, despite the fact that the Sioux were recent invaders there themselves and also in spite of the additional fact that white men—miners—were already following my surveying trail into those hills and building their own cities there. But Indians, like any worthwhile enemy, see concession as weakness, so it was little surprise that mere weeks after their chiefs signed these agreements, their braves were slaughtering settlers all over Kansas, then retreating to safe havens such as the Fort Cobb Agency on the Washita River in northern Texas country, where they took our beef, wintered over, and waited for good weather before riding off to slaughter more settlers.

  You remember Phil Sheridan, of course, my dear. (And I remember you dancing with him at Fort Leavenworth when the general came out to take over Hancock’s command.) General Sheridan was as helpful to my career as he was a bad dancer with you. He plucked me out of Monroe, where I was dying from boredom (except for the wonderful days and nights with you, my love), and on November 12, Sheridan and I were leading a mixed force of infantry and cavalry deep into Indian country.

  The hostiles, with our help at such agencies disguised as forts as Fort Cobb, had short supply lines, but the cavalry always suffered from unacceptably long lines of supply, often all the way back to Leavenworth. Thus we built the Camp Supply depot on the North Canadian River near the Oklahoma panhandle. The hostiles were so used to their sanctuary there south of the Arkansas River that they’d grown smug and careless; this time, with Camp Supply as
our logistics base, we were going to take them by surprise in the winter. (The old mountain man Jim Bridger argued that such a winter campaign couldn’t be done—that cavalry would founder in drifts in a day and be dead in three days—but Sheridan and I knew better than that.)

  I’ve told you, Libbie, about Phil Sheridan’s unusual, almost nonsoldierly habit of using swear words (which I forswore forever on that same day in 1862 when I gave up drinking forever after you had seen me drunk in Monroe, just after I began courting you)—well, anyway, Phil’s delusion that he was the first cavalry commander in the West to consider attacking the Indians in the dead of winter (many before him had done so) mixed with his swearing made for a fascinating briefing before my officers and men and I set out in a serious snowstorm to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

  The snow helped our Osage scouts (who were eager to settle old scores with their enemy the Cheyenne), and on November 26 we crossed the trail of a band of Indians returning to their village in the Oklahoma country from what obviously had been a raid into Kansas. We immediately left the wagon train behind and followed that trail south for a day and a night.

  I pushed the men hard, as you know I tend to do when on the real warpath, stopping only once for coffee and hardtack in the short, freezing day and longer, freezing night. It was the only stop my men saw from 4 a.m. to late into the next day. My 720 men followed me through the night, the only sound the crack of ice atop the snow as their horses’ hooves broke through the crust. Finally one of the Osage guides called me forward to the crest of a hill, and I was surprised to see a river valley stretching away below us. I could see vague shapes moving about a half mile away, but I assumed they were buffalo.

  “No,” grunted the Osage. “Heap Indians. Ponies.”

  I whispered the query to the old Osage—why did he think they were Indian ponies? In the dim starlight, they could have been anything.