by Sitting Bull
As they headed home, Light Hair complained that their time alone had been too short, but Sitting Bull reached over to pat her on the thigh. “We have all the time in the world, winter after winter, stretching out ahead of us until we are both too old to remember this time.”
Chapter 12
Little Missouri River
1856
IT WAS JUNE, THE TIME THE LAKOTA called the moon of the chokecherries, and Sitting Bull was coming to the end of a long preparation. He had wanted for as long as he could remember to become wichasa wakan, a holy man, like his father and his uncle Four Horns. But this was not a thing one willed. It took long preparation, intensive study with one who already was wichasa wakan, and dedication. He had prepared, studying with his father and his uncle and with Black Moon, and he was ready.
But there was one final step to be taken. One could not become a holy man without having danced the sun dance, and this too took preparation. In the fall of 1855, he had told Black Moon that he wanted to dance at the next sun dance, and the holy man had nodded. “It is time,” he agreed. So once more Sitting Bull had begun to prepare himself for an ordeal that was a centerpiece of the Lakota religion.
Sitting Bull had undergone his vision quest, which was personal, but the sun dance was larger than any one warrior. It was tribal, in a way doing for the whole people what the vision quest accomplished for the individual. Only courageous warriors danced, and even some of them were not equal to the excruciating ordeal—especially if they chose one of the four most difficult dances of the six forms. Sitting Bull, as was his wont, intended to dance the most challenging of all.
When they camped on the Little Missouri in early June, the preparation began in earnest. This was a special time, a time when things were not as they usually were. As a heyoka, Sitting Bull was used to things being strange. After all, the heyoka sometimes did things backwards, crying when they were happy, laughing when they were sad. And to be heyoka, you were already marked as someone special. Only one who had had a vision of the thunderbird could become heyoka, and this Sitting Bull had done.
Now he was ready for the most demanding challenge he had yet faced. The sun dance was complicated, and the rules were rigid. As the most important and sacred ritual in Lakota religion, it was the most narrowly circumscribed and carefully observed. No one dared to change anything, or deviate in any way from the prescribed rules.
The first four days of the sun dance were given over to general celebration. Even though dancers might be dancing for personal reasons—
in fulfillment of a vow, in a request for something only the gods could deliver, perhaps in thanks for a favor granted or supplication for a life spared—the celebration was general. More than any other single aspect of Lakota life, even the buffalo hunt, it united all the people in one single undertaking. After the four days of celebration, those designated for the dance were separated from the rest of the people for more instruction. They stayed in a sacred lodge with the shamans who had been instructing them. One holy man had overall responsibility for the entire dance and the twelve days of ritual, and in 1856, the honor fell to Black Moon.
When the dancers had been given their last-minute instructions, once more isolated themselves for a vision, and purified themselves in the sweat lodge, they were ready.
A hunter was dispatched to look for the centerpiece, a forked cottonwood tree that would represent an enemy at first and then, for a period of four days, would be the very center of the Lakota universe. The tree had to conform to precise specifications. Once it was found it was marked, and only chaste women were allowed to participate in its felling. It was a special honor to be chosen as the one to deliver the last few blows of the ax, the ones that actually brought the cottonwood down.
Then part of the bark was peeled back, baring the wood to a point just below the fork. Some of the branches were stripped and the fallen tree was carried to the center of the dance lodge, which was not like other lodges. The warriors who carried it used sticks, because only shamans were allowed to touch so sacred a thing. The tree was painted four different colors—red, blue, green, and yellow—representing each of the four winds—west, north, east, and south. Medicine bundles containing tobacco, an arrow for successful hunting, and other items of significance were attached, and the pole was tipped into a hole already prepared for it and raised upright.
Also attached to it were thick thongs which would be used in the dance. For the form Sitting Bull had chosen, four pairs of parallel incisions had to be made, two each in his chest and back, and wooden skewers inserted under the flaps of skin and muscle. Thongs were then attached to the skewers. Another part of the sacrifice in Sitting Bull’s chosen form was the offering of pieces of flesh. To make this offering, an awl was used to raise small bits of flesh, which were then severed with a sharp knife. Men could offer anywhere from twenty to two hundred pieces, and Sitting Bull chose one hundred to be taken from his arms.
As the incisions were made and the pieces of flesh sliced away, the blood that continually seeped from the ritual wounds was wiped away with sweet grass. When he was finally prepared, the next step was to hang suspended from the thongs, which were weighted on the other end by buffalo skulls. As he dangled there, staring at the sun through the open roof of the lodge, he continued to bleed.
Again and again, he cried out in supplication to the unseen. “Give good health to my people. Bring the buffalo to feed my people.” Endless variations on the same theme, a prayer uttered over and over. Hanging there suspended, the skewers tearing at the muscle, he heard words from his past, saw things that he had forgotten.
He remembered the time the yellowhammer had awakened him from a careless nap to find a grizzly bear standing over him. He remembered how he had frozen, lying there as if dead, his eyes open, staring up at the huge bear, its claws dangling over him. Even now he could smell the stink of the bear and feel the drip of saliva from its gaping jaws. His memory of the bear’s breathing beat like a drum in his ears, mingling with the drums from the ceremonial musicians, a steady pulse that seemed to reach back in time beyond him, beyond Jumping Bull, beyond his grandfather—reaching back all the way to the time when the first Lakota stood alone on a hilltop looking out over the sacred land of the Paha Sapa.
It was a rhythm older than life, more insistent than a beating heart. He felt his own heart hammer against his chest. The sun seemed to grow larger and larger, as if it were descending on the lodge, threatening to incinerate him. The whole sky turned brilliant yellow, then white as the blue was swallowed by the expanding sun. He felt the trickle of blood over his chest and back, smelled the sweetness of it mingling with the salty sourness of the sweat that soaked his hair and ran into the cuts, stinging like a thousand bees.
He was a boy again, chasing the buffalo for the first time. The pounding drums, the beating of his blood, became the thunder of a thousand hooves. He could see the calf he had killed on his first hunt, watched as it turned, saw it look at him, and saw the sun reflected in the calf’s eye. This time it was the eye that grew large, and then the sun within it, and once more whiteness swallowed the world, leaving him in a blank, empty space where there was nothing but his pain to fill it.
He spun then like a top … or perhaps it was the world spinning around him. His feet, legs, and abdomen seemed to have disappeared, his body ending at the incisions in his chest. There was only the sun and the pain until, as if by a miracle, just when he thought he could stand it no longer, his feet touched the ground and he felt arms surround him. He breathed in and out, each deep inhalation sending stabs of pain though his chest and back. Slowly his vision returned. He was lowered to the sage leaves in the shade, and for a while he could rest, until it was time to be suspended once more. Closing his eyes, he felt a serenity wash over him. Away from the searing heat for a few moments, he was able to see clearly, to think clearly, to consider what he had seen in his visions. They were wakan and he would talk them over with Black Moon or Four Horns, with someone
who would help him to understand what they meant.
Then it was time to resume. Once more he was suspended, and once more the sun became his universe. This time, the whiteness contained a point of color, far off across the universe, and he stared at it, watching it grow slowly larger, as if something were moving slowly, deliberately toward him from the other side of the world.
He beckoned to it, crying out, begging it to approach him, but before it reached him, it winked out, like a closing eye, and the whiteness was total once more. He had a vision of a buffalo, the largest buffalo anyone had ever seen, and the animal spoke to him, calling him by his first name. “Jumping Badger,” it said. “Jumping Badger.”
He wanted to ask the buffalo questions, remembering the visitation of the medicine buffalo to his father. He wanted to know, he wanted to understand, he wanted to ask a thousand questions, but the buffalo simply repeated his name over and over again, then turned and walked into the sun, its great shadow swirling like water in a pool, surrounding it, then swallowing it up and shrinking away to the size of bead and then vanishing altogether.
Again the salt trickled into his wounds and the skewers tore at his flesh, and once more he was lowered to the ground for a rest.
When he was hauled into the air again, the music was faster, the drums beating louder, and he counted the drumbeats one by one, then two by two, then three by three as the rhythm changed, the drummers adding accents, grouping their beats in clusters. It seemed to him then that his heart echoed the drumming, skipping beats where there was silence, pounding harder where the drummers struck the skin covers of their instruments with extra force. Smoke seemed to well up out of the earth now, surrounding him in its foggy pall.
Where there had been nothing but the infinite expanse of white, as if he walked on the surface of the sun itself, tiny as a bug, alone, now there was a world of gray. Shapes appeared in the misty distance like shadows.
The fog rippled and swirled, tantalizing him as it seemed about to dissipate, revealing the things that moved in its deepest heart, then rushing toward him in great banks, like fog off the river in cold weather, taking the secrets away and leaving him empty, a great, yearning void in his mind, a place where he sensed something was missing, something Wakantanka wanted him to know, but would not tell him—something he had to discover for himself.
He tilted his head back, stretching until he thought his spine would snap like a brittle stick, and opened his mouth. He felt a great rush go out of him, thought that he had screamed, but he heard nothing.
Then the fog began to twist like a great funnel, swirling, turning darker and darker, until it became a tornado. Far off in the distance he heard an incessant roar that became a howl, then seemed to whistle. It came toward him, then backed off, as if it were alive, and uncertain of him. He could hear the drums only distantly now, the great roaring coming back like sudden thunder.
His lips were dry, his throat parched. He rubbed the tip of his tongue against the dry skin, tasting the salt caked on his chin. He watched the swirling darkness now and once more it was full of shadows, things that moved, that shimmered as if they were made of water, changing shape likes trees on the horizon in summer heat. He reached out as if to touch them, but the movement of his arm sent knifelike pain through his chest and back, and he howled in agony as his arm fell limply to his side. He was spinning now, or thought he was, twirling like the dark apparitions before him, but no matter how fast he whirled, the shimmering black thing was always in front of him, as if the universe itself were spinning, and he with it.
For a moment it was silent. Even the drums in the lodge seemed to have quieted. Then a whisper, like wind far off, hissing as if through brittle leaves, and he heard a flute, the drums began again, the flute soaring above them, its solitary wail echoing in his ears as if he and it were in some dark cave full of swirling murk. The whisper grew louder again, like the howling of a tornado, it rose in pitch, coming closer and closer, but nothing he saw seemed to change. It was as if something he could not see was bearing down on him, faster and faster, coming closer, and he wanted to see, tried to force his eyes to show him this thing that would not be seen. And then a voice, deep and resonant, called him by name as the buffalo had. But this time he was called Sitting Bull. He felt the world trembling with the power of the great voice.
He cried out again, his own voice frail and tiny beside the deep thunder of the thing he could not see. Again and again he called out, until his throat grew raw, and finally the thunder spoke to him again, “Wakantanka will give you what you ask for. Wakantanka will grant your wish.”
He tried again to raise his arm, to reach out to the heart of the darkness that surrounded him, but he could not. He cried out again, but the thunder had gone. His own voice died away, tiny, feeble, like the sound of a pebble falling off a cliff. Silence surrounded him. He felt a fire in his chest as one of the skewers in his flesh tore free.
The added weight ripped the other skewer in his chest loose, and he felt a snap as his weight shifted and he tilted forward. The strain of his weight was too much for the skewers in his back and they ripped free too. As he fell, it seemed to him that he would never land, as if he were falling through a tunnel with no bottom, where there was no light. He was spinning faster and faster, his head and feet twirling like the seed of a maple tree spiraling in the wind. His world went black.
Chapter 13
Missouri River Valley
1856
THE TRICKLE OF WHITES into Indian territory that began in the 1840s was now threatening to become a flood. The Hunkpapas stayed as far to the north as they could, trying to limit their contact with the white settlers. Keeping to themselves, they wanted only to live as they had always lived. But that was becoming harder and harder to do.
The buffalo herds were thinning because the white hunters were slaughtering them for their skins, leaving the carcasses to rot in the sun. The Lakota depended on the herds, deriving most of their sustenance from the great beasts. The meat was their main source of food, the hides were used for making the walls of their tipis and for robes, the horns were used in ceremonial headdresses—even the bones found use.
More and more often, especially to the south, hunting parties would ride for days and days without finding a herd. As often as not, they would ride into a valley only to find it covered with bones, picked clean by scavengers, the huge rib cages empty of everything but the weeds growing up through them.
Worse than finding the bones was stumbling on a recent kill, the meat rotting in the sun, filling a valley with its stink. The putrescent carcasses gleamed in the sun under a skin of writhing maggots. Buzzards hopped from carcass to carcass, their great wings fanning the air, ugly naked heads bobbing as they tore at the rotting meat with beak and talon. Interrupted, the huge birds would squawk and beat the air to chase off intruders.
Because they were the furthest north of the Lakota groups, the Hunkpapa were the most insulated from the white incursions. They heard about them from the Oglala, whose hunting grounds were directly in the path of the white settlers. But wiser heads among the Hunkpapas were concerned about other intruders. The United States Army had been building forts all across Lakota land. There had been a great council at one of the forts in 1851. Many of the Lakota chiefs had been present and some had even touched pen to treaty paper, but no Hunkpapa had signed. Still, to those chiefs who thought about it, the presence of the white soldiers could only mean trouble.
The white soldier chiefs and the commissioners had said the forts were necessary, because the army was there to protect the white settlers from the Indians, and the Indians from the white settlers. But no one among the Lakota could remember a time in the five winters since the treaty paper was signed at Fort Laramie that the soldiers had punished a white man for anything. There were plenty of times when Indians had been punished for things they had not done. It seemed that the treaty worked only one way, and the Hunkpapas were glad they had not signed. Many among them were beginni
ng to think that, whether they had signed or not, they had been compromised by the treaty.
News traveled slowly among the plains Indians. A band of hunters from the Brule would come across a band from the Miniconjou and they would exchange information. When the Miniconjou hunters encountered an Oglala war party, they would pass on what they had learned from the Brule, and learn something new from the Oglala. So word traveled, but slowly, like water seeping through sand. If the news was important, someone would ride from one village to another to pass along the information. It was only at the great summer gatherings for the sun dance that most of the Lakota were in one place. And even then, some bands did not make an appearance.
The council of the Hunkpapas, led by the chiefs Four Horns and Bear’s Rib, wanted nothing to do with the white men, settlers or soldiers. They wanted only to be left alone. But some of the Hunkpapas knew that was not to be, Sitting Bull among them. He hoped he was wrong. It was better to ignore the whites whenever possible, saving your worries for the Crows and the Ankara and the Pawnee. The white men claimed they were only interested in a safe route to the great ocean to the west, and as long as they just passed through, it might be possible to get along peacefully.
Even that slim hope didn’t last long. It was only the year before that a white officer named Grattan had attacked a peaceful village and killed many people in an argument over an emaciated cow. Everyone knew that the cow was worthless, but that didn’t seem to matter to Grattan, and when a Brule chief named Conquering Bear had refused to surrender a Miniconjou warrior for the theft of the cow, Grattan had attacked the camp. He didn’t seem to understand that Conquering Bear had no authority to surrender a man who did not want to be surrendered. Not only was the warrior a member of a different band, but no Lakota chief had that kind of authority, even over warriors in his own band. Lakota warriors made up their own minds, went where they wanted to go and did what they wanted to do.